reading and related

[asakiyume]

The healing angel and I finished reading Hamlet aloud to each other today--we'd been working on it ever since I finished reading The Raven Tower and since I found out she never read it in high school. What a ripping good yarn, right? And so many good bits I'd forgotten, and over-the-top bits, and everything.

healing angel at the end: Wait, is Hamlet nominating Fortinbras to be the new king of Denmark?

me: Yup.

healing angel: What's wrong with Horatio?! How about a nice scholarly king... who's afraid of ghosts?

Other things that stuck out at me this time around: Shakespeare getting a dig in at classism by having the gravediggers observe that the only reason Ophelia is getting a Christian burial is because she's a noblewoman:
--Will you ha' the truth an't? If this had not been a
gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o' Christian burial.

--Why, there thou say'st! And the more pity that great folk
should have count'nance in this world to drown or hang themselves
more than their even-Christian.

That, and Gertrude describing Hamlet as fat and out of breath in the fight with Laertes!

And speaking of breathless, the short story "John Simnel's First Goshawk," by Tegan Moore, knocked the wind right out of me with its beauty of language and theme and the controlled, powerful, graceful way it unfolded.

This is how you break a hawk: wait him out ... If the falconer sleeps, he simply begins the excruciating wait again the next day. If the hawk sleeps, however, then the bird has lost forever ...

And this is how you break a boy: tell him he is king ... You must crown him and put him at the front of an army. If you fail, there is always another handsome hazel-eyed boy somewhere in the world. Anyone might do.

And

If escaped, or even freed, is something tamed and trained in this way ever its own sovereign?

I have a draft of my Inconvenient God sequel, but it's still in isolation while I decide how contagious it is and if radical surgery or chemotherapy will be necessary. As I said to Wakanomori, it's exactly the story you could expect from someone who spent six months working in a jail and the rest of the time editing papers on how the Chinese government incentivizes local officials to enact the policies it wants to carry out ... while living in T*rump's America.

Comments

[asakiyume]

That doesn't make me not want to read it, you understand. LOL--phew.

"One of the evils of a system of oppression is that it may damage people in ways that cannot always be undone." --yeah, I feel like that's relevant for my story too, but I also fear I may be claiming things for the story that it doesn't deliver, that I'm so far gone in my own catharsis that I'm not realizing how little of it is accessible to anyone else.

[sovay]

LOL--phew.

Seriously, I look forward.

--yeah, I feel like that's relevant for my story too, but I also fear I may be claiming things for the story that it doesn't deliver, that I'm so far gone in my own catharsis that I'm not realizing how little of it is accessible to anyone else.

It is always true that you the writer will know exactly what went into the story and no one else will unless it is spelled out or you tell them extra-diegetically, but you would really have to disappear up your own self-involvement for it not to come through the text, and I don't really see that happening. Even if it does the ninety percent iceberg thing, the ten percent may really connect.

[asakiyume]

We'll see. That's why it's still in quarantine. That, and I keep on reading other people's brilliant writing and then having to turn on the Mother voice that says, Now now, different writing can all be good in its own way while meanwhile having doubts.

But Tiny Witt doesn't have me that hard. I'm pragmatic--I just want to make sure it's as good as I can make it.

[sovay]

That, and I keep on reading other people's brilliant writing and then having to turn on the Mother voice that says, Now now, different writing can all be good in its own way while meanwhile having doubts.

There's also the thing where it's impossible to know what will resonate with different readers, so you may feel you've been totally obscure and other people may just not care.

But Tiny Witt doesn't have me that hard. I'm pragmatic--I just want to make sure it's as good as I can make it.

Good!