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.