darkanddreary

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Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

troisoiseaux

Read a couple of books that unexpectedly ended up pairing well, tone/vibes-wise: The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, a novel loosely based on a real-life 17th century Danish witch trial, from the perspective of one of the accused women's omniscient wax doll/poppet, and I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid, in which a young woman's road trip with her boyfriend to meet his parents for the first time (and probably last, given her doubts about the relationship) gets weird. I probably wouldn't actually have considered these similar if not for the accident of reading them back-to-back, but there's an aspect of a Greek chorus in both— in The Wax Child, a number of passages are packed-together snippets of conversations (e.g., women trading jokes and complaints over communal work like carding wool or gutting fish); in I'm Thinking of . . ., the first person POV narrative is interspersed with oblique, anonymous community gossip about a shocking local tragedy— and they're both just kind of... narratively unsettling? The Wax Child has the unhooked-from-time-ness of a story told more or less chronologically from the POV of a character who, basically, Sees All; Reid's novel takes a frog-in-boiling-water approach, the narrative peeling back layer by layer until it hits ( spoilers )

In War and Peace, since separating from his wife, Pierre has had an existential crisis and joined the Freemasons, because sure, why not. I had vaguely remembered his induction into the Masonic rites as a dramatic scene but this time it mostly struck me as unexpectedly funny, what with Pierre being the embodiment of tomorrow I'm going to lock in and turn my entire life around! it will definitely work this time!

Half an hour later, the Rhetor returned to inform the seeker of the seven virtues, corresponding to the seven steps of Solomon's temple, which every Freemason should cultivate in himself. These virtues were: 1. Discretion, the keeping of the secrets of the Order. 2. Obedience to those of higher ranks in the Order. 3. Morality. 4. Love of mankind. 5. Courage. 6. Generosity. 7. The love of death.

. . . But five of the other virtues {besides "love of death"} which Pierre recalled, counting them on his fingers, he felt already in his soul: courage, generosity, morality, love of mankind, and especially obedience—which did not even seem to him a virtue, but a joy. (He now felt so glad to be free from his own lawlessness and to submit his will to those who knew the indubitable truth.) He forgot what the seventh virtue was and could not recall it.

(Also funny, at least to me: the guy explaining the concept of hieroglyphs while Pierre stands there blindfolded thinking yes, I know what hieroglyphs are, and how "{a}s he was being led up to some object he noticed a hesitation and uncertainty among his conductors. He heard those around him disputing in whispers and one of them insisting that he should be led along a certain carpet.")

Current Music: My Body's Made of Crushed Little Stars - Mitski

troisoiseaux

Read Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I was not expecting to start with the fall of Troy?? (Only briefly mentioned as a sort of city, state, country, continent, Planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy approach to setting the scene of Arthur's Britain, but I did find myself momentarily baffled about whether I'd opened the correct e-book.) Interesting to finally read the poem after having seen/read various retellings/adaptations of it— for one thing, it turns out the answer to why would Gawain jump straight to "chop this guy's head off" when presented with the challenge of "whatever blow you deal now, I'll return in one year's time"? is because the challenge was, in fact, set up that way. (Of course, even with the Green Knight kneeling and helpfully baring his neck and making unsubtle comments like I'll tell you where to find me in a year's time afterwards... if I can! If not, you're off the hook!, he could have not done that, but I guess it's a load-bearing detail of Arthuriana that absolutely no one can see a trap when they're about to walk into one or else no one would have weird adventures.) For another: ohhhhh, okay, the OT3 reading is not a stretch of the imagination at all. It also spent more time describing food, clothing, armor, horses' gear, castle architecture, and other luxuries than I would have expected - on the other hand, it also spent quite a lot of time on how to disembowel a deer?? - and each stanza ended with an ABABA rhyme scheme, although I guess in this case, we are not meant to pronounce Gawain as Gar-win—

'What is here, all is your own, to have in your rule
and sway.'
'Gramercy!' quoth Gawain,
'May Christ you this repay!'
As men that to meet were fain
they both embraced that day.

Later, it also rhymes Gawain with retain, so I guess the pronunciation is supposed to be "Ga-wayne," which is frankly how I always assumed it was pronounced, until The Green Knight (2021)...?

In War and Peace, Dolokhov (of the "just fought a duel over sleeping with Pierre's wife" incident) has fallen in love with - and proposed to - Sonya, the poor Rostov cousin/ward who is in love with Nikolai but (spoiler!) he ends up jilting her for Princess Mary, and Sonya ends up never marrying and moves in with them to care for their children. ANYWAY. We are not there yet; Dolokhov has proposed to Sonya, Sonya refused out of love for Nikolai, and Dolokhov proceeded to take his revenge by needling Nikolai into gambling himself into financial ruin, because Nikolai has the backbone of a chocolate eclair as well as one (1) singular brain cell just bouncing around thinking about how much he loves Emperor Alexander.

Current Music: I Cried, I Wept - Kingfishr

bookscorpion in

everykindofcraft

I decided to bring my electric spinning wheel home after keeping it at my partner's house, in an effort to stop myself from refreshing the same four websites all the time. It has worked out great and I am making a dent in my stash! It's a very small wheel, an EEW Nano, so I put it on my lap desk on an old pillowcase to catch fibre fuzz, and also because I can fold the pillow case around it and put it aside easily.

I finished three small batches of yarn, pictures under the cut:

( Read more... )