Reading and (not) writing

[heliopausa]

Writing:  not at all.  :(

Reading:  Looking about for something undemanding, I picked up the no-magic-here fantasy Mistress Masham's Repose, by T H White, which, with its wildly Wicked Guardians harks  back to nineteenth-century satires of Gothic literature and also is in the line which later produced in The Hundred and One Dalmations, and Joan Aiken's Dido Twite (etc) books.  It's not exactly a "children's book" - it's more like one of those clever fairy-tales told to amuse sophisticated Louis XIV court circles, peppered with Bloomsbury/Cambridge-y injokes, very arch, mildly satirical, mildly upper-class liberal in tone - some good side-shots at colonialism and at bossy do-goodery.)  Overall - clever, well-written, nice central conceit.

It jarred, though, when White carried on with the suave, delicately humorous "we all know these things" tone when making reference to a seventeenth-century treason trial (with all that implies :( ).

Oh, for goodness' sake! How large is "too large", Dreamwidth?

This entry truncated, in mounting frustration with this shoddy  (DW) site.  The rest of it is on LJ.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

...Dreamwidth has a larger entry character limit than LJ last I heard. I'm confused.

[heliopausa]

Me, too. :(

[transposable_element]

I'm sorry you're not writing and are unhappy about it. Sometimes a fallow period is good, but it sounds like this isn't that. Is there something specific you want to be working on?

I have an old copy of Mistress Masham's Repose that I haven't looked at in ages. I remember liking it but I know that when I read it (at maybe age 12?) much of it must have gone over my head. I look at a lot of books that Filia is reading now and think "heh, that's going to read completely differently to her in a few years!" But in the case of MMR, I would probably still miss a great deal of the specific humor and satire, as I don't really have the right kind of education. Time to dust it off, perhaps!

It's hard to predict how one will react to jokes about ghastly things. Sometimes if they're remote enough in time they don't bother me as much as they perhaps ought to, and of course the target of the joke makes a difference. (I've seen a lot of discussion recently about "punching up" vs. "punching down," that is, whether the joke is aimed at the victim(s) or the perpetrator of a an act of cruelty.)

[heliopausa]

It wasn't precisely a joke - more that I was put off by White's tone of delighted, ghoulish zest when recalling various tortures. This included the case of Edmund Peachum, which was completely new to me; I found the whole process appalling - I hadn't realised how despicable Francis Bacon was till I read (prompted by the mention in MMR) his notes on the case.

Thanks for the sympathies about writing; one entire story seems to have turned to chalk in my hands. :(