Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

My reaction on reading Lieutenant Hornblower for the first time since a teenager:

There’s got to be a ton of Hornblower/Bush fic out there … right? *quickly checks AO3* 567 is close enough to a ton — faith in humanity confirmed.

---L.

Subject quote from Opening poem to Stalky & Co., Rudyard Kipling.

I’ve been reading a lot of long erotic fiction this summer,* most of them coming-of-age stories. This is a haphazard list of some I’ve most enjoyed, or at least enjoyed enough to point to people, even with caveats and/or content warnings. Most have a teenage male** protagonist who is, or starts out as, a high-school or university student -- some extend through or beyond college, and a couple start with young adults.

* Continuing tense deliberate, as it’s only this weekend that the weather has finally broken and we’re no longer looking at high temperatures pushing 100F and mountains hazed with wildfire smoke. IOW, we have been stuck in the longest-ass summer ever.
** I’ve not had much luck stumbling across female-centered equivalents that are well-written. I am probably looking in the wrong places. Any assist here welcome.

The final relationship configurations (FR) and content warnings (CW) often contain spoilers. Any story described as having a teenage protagonist can usually be assumed to include underage sex (never with anyone younger than 14), even though I don't tag that as a CW. I especially enjoyed the five marked > .

> Model Student, aroslav/Devon Layne (6 volumes) -- Talented, depressive art student grows into an artist and into a group marriage. The sex is hot and never repetitive, and the core relationship is balanced with all parties involved with each other (the larger polycule isn't--some core members also have outside girlfriends).
FR: open FFFM/F quint
CW: dom/sub, with the sub recovering from abuse by her previous masters; depression; art school

> Opus One, Ryan Sylander (1 volume) — Three first-year conservatory students grow into their musical talents and into their relationship. The inspired musical choices aren’t essential for appreciating the story, but it gains layers if you are familiar with them. I admire the author’s restraint when it comes to relationship choices.
FR: open MFF triad
CW: grieving

> Bec: Life in the Maze, BarBar (4 volumes) -- Preteen/teenage artist comes into her own while trying to sort out which of her problems are caused by an inherited neurological condition, other mental health issues, or having been body-checked into the back wall by sudden adolescence. Bec herself is strong and funny and vulnerable and could carry the story even if it wasn’t pulling its weight. No sex in this one, though there are sexual situations.
FR: n/a
CW: violence; bullying; mental-health issues; creepy-ass hallucinations; descriptions of past abuse and attempted present abuse

> Runaway Train, Jay Cantrell (1 volume) -- Former pro baseball player (who blew out his shoulder in the minors) reconnects with a woman he knew as a kid during an autograph session before her stadium concert, and sparks fly. The music industry threads seem to resolve a little easily, but the relationship ups and downs and sideways jukes of two adults with significant histories behind them is hot and sweet and entertaining.
FR: exclusive MF
CW: violence; past alcohol and drug abuse

> Blizzard, Redsilver (1 volume) -- Maritime architectural draftsman is rewarded for helping a faerie with three college-student girlfriends. I love how the characters methodically work through how the magic spell works, how to live with it, and how to break it -- I strongly suspect the author is influenced by Diana Wynne Jones.
FR: exclusive MFFF quad ("Team Girlfriend!")
CW: magical mind control

Rewind, Don Lockwood (1 volume incomplete, but it stops shortly after the end of a major episode, so it’s not a completely sudden-crash ending) -- A middle-aged New England burnout is reincarnated as his 14-year-old self for a do-over, and this time he actually asks girls out. Oh, and starts that band he used to dream about.
FR: serial monogamy
CW: none

Home for Horny Monsters, Anabelle Hawthorne (4 volumes, still in progress) -- Sensitive, traumatized webmaster inherits a sanctuary for mythical beings that’s been targeted by a local coven. Sex and adventures and growings up ensue.
FR: harem of sexy monsters
CW: sex magic; demonic control

An Ordinary Teenage Sex Life, bluedragon (6 volumes plus many side-stories, am reading v1) -- California teenager has lots of sex while growing up.
FR: unknown because I haven’t finished, but plot flags suggest an eventual open MF as part of a polycule
CW: sibling incest; wretched opening chapter (which honestly you should just skip)

An All-American Teenage Sex Life, Max Geyser (2 volumes, still in progress) -- Midwestern teenage jock has lots of sex while growing up.
FR: sleeping around between between bouts of serial monogamy
CW: major character death

A Well-Lived Life, Michael Louks (10 volumes plus sequel series, on pause mid-v4) -- Midwestern teenage nerd has lots of sex while growing up. This may have the most acute psychological insight of any on this list, aside from Bec. (On pause because the protagonist was making the same mistake yet again and I wanted something fluffier just then.)
FR: again, haven’t finished, but so far it’s been lots of sleeping around without formal polyamory
CW: sibling incest; major character death

Stupid Boy, G Younger (9 volumes, last volume in progress) -- Midwestern teenage jock/model/actor has lots of sex while growing up. The story and the protagonist are frankly ridiculous, as in total soap-operatic, but the writing itself is anything but histrionic and the result is wildly entertaining.
FR: a fuckton of sleeping around punctuated by attempts at serial monogamy and formal polyamory
CW: soap-operatic plot; dubcon incidents

Spitfire and Messerschmitt (ch1-42, ch43-end), Gina Marie Wylie (1 volume) -- Texas teenage jock is set up with a spitfire jock girlfriend by his sister, and things expand from there. This was a reread of a deep influence (I find traces of it in most of my erotica) spurred by finding out that it had finally, after over a decade, been completed -- the new material has very wonky pacing, though. (Note that the second link above has all the chapters, but the early ones have been badly bowdlerized, as in passages snipped out without editing any transitions.)
FR: open MFF triad > exclusive MF
CW: sibling incest; violence; major character death

The Outsider & A Flawed Diamond, Jay Cantrell (2 volumes) -- California teenage/young-adult jock recovers, after being exonerated, from spending 18 months in maximum security, with the help of new friends and girlfriends. There’s a six-year time-skip between volumes. The first one and half volumes are excellent, but the second half of aFD can be summed up with “too much baseball, not enough girlfriend.” I actually read all the baseball games, which puts this above just about any writer but Mitsuru Adachi, but they turned out to be mostly skippable.
FR: exclusive MF (characters attempt a few permutations of open clusters and triads that all fail due to character trauma and the protagonist’s preference for monogamy)
CW: attempted rape; prison life; professional baseball

---L.

Subject quote from a review of The Village, Robert Ebert.

Visions and revisions which another will reverse:

Disney princesses as Marvel heroines. SOLD. (via)

Adding selfies to Western art. (via)

Placebo's awesome cover of "Running Up That Hill." Though now I want a cover with an explicitly trans reading. (via) (link fixed)

Join Aikin speculates at length on how Jane Austen might have revised Northanger Abbey if she hadn't shelved the project because of her final illness -- starting with much insightful commentary on Austen's art and methods. (via?)

---L.

Subject quote from "Running Up That Hill," Kate Bush.

So about that Tales of Ise fic I got for Yuletide, Cold Autumn Wind: it's based on this part of chapter 82, in which a strayed hunter ends up at the bank of the River of Heaven (aka the Milky Way) and has to find lodgings. Pretty darn close to the tone of the source, and since it's an original Tale, it doesn't require knowledge of the canon (though recognizing the Tanabata bits would be helpful). It even has original poetry, because Narihira. Not to mention because Ise. (I suspect, given the classical Japanese, I know who wrote this -- but it would be fun to be proven wrong.)

As for myself, I wrote a single fic, which I very strongly suspect will be obvious to anyone who actually stumbles across the fandom. Feel free to guess at me if you do. (I tried to write two treats, but one turned out to be overly ambitious given the time I had, while the other just sucked -- I might finish on the former at leisure.)

I have only just begun to scrape the Yuletide archive, but here's my first batch of recs:

Caffeine and Unpaid Overtime - A retelling of Rosemary Sutcliff's Frontier Wolf as a modern-day AU set in a hospital in northern England, with Alex and Hilary as doctors-in-training in over their heads. Very good and very tasty.

Grace and Sally - Lovely, lovely story about a girl and her plesiosaur, and about growing up. The fandom is a 4-panel webcomic linked in the notes, so you have no excuse not to read this.

A Crack in the Wall - A Hadestown / Greek myth fic, in which Hades run an underground mining camp where Persephone is in charge of the speakeasy. Or to put it another way, it has Eurydice breaking Persephone out of the underworld.

There are not one but TWO fix-fics for Marie de France's "Eliduc," taking a third option on the ending -- the same in both cases, and both using further involvement of the canonical magical lesbian weasels. (Yes, "Eliduc" has magical lesbian weasels -- as if you needed any more reason to read it.) Of Woodland Bowers and Cloven Fruit retells the story in the original style, and is possibly more charming for it, while Amaranth aims for a more modern style that digs into the psychologies involved. Both are excellent.

---L.

If, on account of the political situation,
There are quite a number of homes without roofs, and men
Lying about in the countryside neither drunk nor asleep,
If all sailings have been cancelled until further notice,
If it's unwise to say much in letters, and if,
Under the subnormal temperatures prevailing,
The two sexes are at present the weak and the strong,
That is not at all unusual for this time of year.
If that were all we should know how to manage. Flood, fire,
The desiccation of grasslands, restraint of princes,
Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal grief,
These after all are our familiar tribulations,
And we have been through them all before, many, many times.

—For the Time Being, "Advent," part II, lines 1-13

Every so often I find myself needing to return to Auden for solace.

Sometimes, he also managed honesty.

---L.

I gotta say, Takeshi Kaneshiro can smirk himself a damn fine Zhuge Liang.

(The ways Red Cliff played with, both using and not-using-with-nods, material from Romance of the Three Kingdoms was also fun. Pity the desire for a climactic personal confrontations crossed with the constraints of history resulted in an ending that made no sense.)

---L.

The Big Picture covers the annual round-up of Icelandic horses, with plenty of spare, beautiful Icelandic landscape behind them.

Let me rephrase that. YOU WANT TO CLICK THROUGH ALREADY.

Got it? Good.

Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving (via). "Packing all of your belongings into a U-Haul and then transporting them across several states is nearly as stressful and futile as trying to run away from lava in swim fins." Humor writing at its finest.

What Israeli airport security is like for those with privilege (via). Show of hands from those who believe someone Arabic gets the brisk efficiency. Anyone? ... Didn't think so.

A recording of Auden reading "The Shield of Achilles" (via).

---L.

I was going to continue International Honor Your Influences Week with Howard Pyle (as the author of Pepper & Salt and The Wonder Clock), but my observances were cut off by having my computer stolen. In its place, I offer some short shameful confessions:

I've written my first fanfic, as a sestina, of a novel my wife hasn't finished writing.

Chobits is rilly addictive, despite CLAMP's blatant manipulation and long flowing hair fetish.

I'm intimidated enough by the story I'm working on now that I'm afraid of psyching myself into writing it badly.*

All my old email (and address book) was lost through bad backups.

ETA: Not only is there 17th century tentacle porn, there's 17th century poetry about wearing underwear on one's head. (not a confession)

* ETA2: Since confessing this, today something unexpected happened and suddenly I'm improvising story instead of setting things up. It opens the scope out even more, but I'm feeling a lot better about it now. When in doubt, steal from Aristophanes.

---L.

I hereby declare this International Honor Your Influences Week. To kick things off, an appreciation of The Space Child's Mother Goose, which I recently mentioned a couple times. All quotes for purposes of squeeing over critical discussion.

More so than Tom Lehrer (whom I met later), the rhythms of Frederick Winsor are engraved in my marrow bones. I was raised on this stuff, and pieces of it tumble out when I'm not looking -- I rarely twiddle in forms he didn't use. Every few years, as an object lesson for the new crop of graduate students, my father would post outside his office "The Theory That Jack Built" ("This is the flaw / That lay in the theory that Jack built.") My mother's favorite was

    Little Jack Horner
    Sits in the corner
Extracting cube roots to infinity,
    An assignment for boys
    That will minimize noise
And produce a more peaceful vicinity.

Over the years, I've come to see her point. Though my favorite is

    Rock and Roll
    With self-control,
My Cybernetic Baby;
    The Laws of Mede
    And Persian need
That infants heed them--maybe.

    Foundations shake,
    Computers break
And Science goes Be-bop,
    But Baby's joy
    Is still the toy
With foolish ears flop.

As for what's so good about this book -- the loopy parodies of nursery rhymes¹? The jaundiced opinions of modern technology²? The footnotes in verse³, sometimes less than helpful? -- supplemented by a glossary (called "The Answers") that often helps even less⁴? The philosophic fillips⁵? All of those and more.

What impresses me most now, leafing through my battered copy, is Winsor's craft. His verse (as good light verse must be) is spot-on, swift and deft and deadly sharp⁶. There's a reason many were originally published in The Atlantic. For all this and more, I honor it.

Footnotes:

1. Little Miss Muffet / Sits on her tuffet / In a nonchalant sort of way. / With her force field around her / The spider, the bounder, / Is not in the picture today.

2. The Hydrogen Dog and the Cobalt Cat / Side by side in the armory sat. / Nobody thought about fusion or fission, / Everyone spoke of their peacetime mission, / Till somebody came and opened the door, / And there they were, in a neutron fog, / The Codrogen Cat and the Hybalt Dog; / They mushroomed up with a terrible roar -- / And Nobody Never was there -- Nomore.

3. The Pseudo-Anapest / Moves awkwardly at best; / His feet are long, uneven, and retractile. / Who hunts the beast in rhythm / Should take his meter withm / And still may only bag a Ptero-Dactyl.

4. Cymric is defined as Brythonic. Gee, thanks.

5. Russell and Whitehead and Hegel and Kant! / Maybe I shall and maybe I shan't. / Maybe I shan't and maybe I shall. / Kant Russell Whitehead, Hegel et al.

6. Hey diddle diddle / Distribute the middle / The Premise controls the Conclusion / This Disjunctive affirms / That the Diet of Worms / Is Borbetomagic confusion.

(The Answers helpfully points out that Borbetomagus was the Roman town that became Worms.)

---L.