Associative readings
1 February 2006 08:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerOn the subject of classical slash, I giggled like Hades while reading today's Questionable Content. I think I see a couple plot bunnies huddling in that last panel.
Speaking of reading, Loretta Chase's Mr. Impossible is indeed wonderfully impossible, while the Odyssey remains impossibly wonderful. Regarding which, I'm amused at how many readers are puzzled by Penelope's not recognizing Odysseus, even after her suitors are dead. The late-night conversation between queen and beggar is readily explained: like minds speaking in code while watched by informers. But given this meeting of minds, why does she deny him for so long? Or so whine many commentators -- most of them, I note, male. It seems clear to me that while she knew Odysseus the king had returned, she didn't know yet whether he was still her husband -- thus, specifically, the bed test. But maybe I read too many romance novels.
No, what puzzles me is why Odysseus and Penelope both habitually fall asleep during a crisis. They're almost as bad as Jehane in "The Haystack in the Floods."
In other odysseys, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is actually pretty good, even if the resolutions are a bit pat. And yes, it's a fantasy -- jeans that perfectly fit you and your friends, short and amazon and curvy and slim, and make each of you look good, that's definitely magic. The sexual politics are a bit unnerving, though: three of the fifteen-year-old girls (plus a little sister) all get involved in one way or another with a boy three to five years older. The fourth girl's crush is on a boy her age, at least, but that goes nowhere because of all the crap in her life. I want to pick apart how the book uses varied epigraphs and shifting POV to frame a story.
OTOH, the frames of Jo Chant's The High Kings are more straightforward, but tightly woven: historical reportage and conjecture, introducing snippets of life at the "historical" Arthur's court, where bards tell tales of Britain's legendary past. Not quite as many-layered as Ovid, and more regular, but just as deft. She makes it almost convincing.
Though speaking of unconvincing, someone "reconstructed" the famous lost Shakespeare play, "Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter." As a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. More or less. With production pictures.
---L.
Speaking of reading, Loretta Chase's Mr. Impossible is indeed wonderfully impossible, while the Odyssey remains impossibly wonderful. Regarding which, I'm amused at how many readers are puzzled by Penelope's not recognizing Odysseus, even after her suitors are dead. The late-night conversation between queen and beggar is readily explained: like minds speaking in code while watched by informers. But given this meeting of minds, why does she deny him for so long? Or so whine many commentators -- most of them, I note, male. It seems clear to me that while she knew Odysseus the king had returned, she didn't know yet whether he was still her husband -- thus, specifically, the bed test. But maybe I read too many romance novels.
No, what puzzles me is why Odysseus and Penelope both habitually fall asleep during a crisis. They're almost as bad as Jehane in "The Haystack in the Floods."
In other odysseys, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is actually pretty good, even if the resolutions are a bit pat. And yes, it's a fantasy -- jeans that perfectly fit you and your friends, short and amazon and curvy and slim, and make each of you look good, that's definitely magic. The sexual politics are a bit unnerving, though: three of the fifteen-year-old girls (plus a little sister) all get involved in one way or another with a boy three to five years older. The fourth girl's crush is on a boy her age, at least, but that goes nowhere because of all the crap in her life. I want to pick apart how the book uses varied epigraphs and shifting POV to frame a story.
OTOH, the frames of Jo Chant's The High Kings are more straightforward, but tightly woven: historical reportage and conjecture, introducing snippets of life at the "historical" Arthur's court, where bards tell tales of Britain's legendary past. Not quite as many-layered as Ovid, and more regular, but just as deft. She makes it almost convincing.
Though speaking of unconvincing, someone "reconstructed" the famous lost Shakespeare play, "Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter." As a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. More or less. With production pictures.
---L.
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Date: 1 February 2006 04:15 pm (UTC)OR she was pissed off at him about the nymphs/time spent away, and was stringing him along.
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Date: 1 February 2006 06:59 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 1 February 2006 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 February 2006 06:57 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 1 February 2006 08:41 pm (UTC)Then again, that explains why he had to resort to the whole Persephone thing.
Mind you, if Persephone had been allowed some vague sense of empowerment in her life, perhaps she would have been able to do the 'Because of a few lousy pomegranite seeds? Here, let me give you them back', as she sticks a finger down her throat.
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Date: 1 February 2006 09:08 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 1 February 2006 11:32 pm (UTC)Apparently Persephone had cults devoted to her. Which may explain why by the time we were handed our Edith Hamilton's in high school, she had been changed into a rather passive, cypher-like shell of a woman.
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Date: 2 February 2006 12:11 am (UTC)---L.
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Date: 2 February 2006 04:16 am (UTC)---L.
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Date: 2 February 2006 07:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2 February 2006 02:25 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 2 February 2006 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 3 February 2006 02:21 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 3 February 2006 03:31 pm (UTC)THUNDERBIRD FALLS is out in May. :)
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Date: 3 February 2006 03:49 pm (UTC)---L.