DeCarabas > Recent Status Updates

Canto 10: "This prince surpasses Nature's laws, for, having fashioned him, she broke the mould"/"natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa." Is this the origin of the phrase broke the mould? ...Web searching says maybe. This was during a long list of English troops and banners by region, like the Catalogue of Ships; I'm curious why England gets that regional focus with an Italian intended audience.

"They came to speak of dangerous things. Religion. Politics, local and foreign. Marriage.." What is religion in the Masquerade? Just the hygiene codes they call a philosophy? There's a local cult they suppress; if they offered an alternative god(s), it should have come up by now as part of their soft power. But if ALL religion is suppressed, it's odd talk about it is only as dangerous as politics or marriage.

Canto 9: In this epic fantastical poem about knights of Charlemagne, the gun was a surprise

I knew this was supposed to be a famously influential poem, but I'm reading Canto 5 where the maid meets her lover on a balcony while dressed up as her mistress, not realizing until too late that she's being tricked into framing her mistress as unfaithful and heyyyy waitaminute, I know this story! (Though Much Ado switches up which character returns from the supposed grave.) Famously influential poem is influential.

WHY does this author feel the need to undermine what ought to be the most impactful moments in the book with attempts at humor, every single time. "I sit on the floor opposite his body. I put my hand on the airlock wall. That feels too melodramatic, so I pull it back." What are we doing here.

Usually I have a good memory for fantasy settings but I wound up having to go back and skim the first book for a refresher, Martha Wells does NOT make it easy to just jump back in here. So many proper nouns, so little context - nearly a quarter of the way through this book focused on an Arike prince leading a rebellion, and I could not have told you one single thing about who the Arike are.

This has turned out to pair well with Project Hail Mary actually - scientist forced to spend presumably the remainder of his life doing deep space/sea exploration together with a fascinating stranger he encountered in said isolated sea/space environment, author has put a lot of thought into how his ship could work and you WILL hear about it in mathematical detail - but I'm enjoying this one's tone way, way more.

"This [worrying over mentioning Maxim's past] was the hypersensitive behavior of a neurotic, not the normal happy self I knew myself to be." Fascinating self-image from the most anxious narrator I've ever read. The 'normal happy self' meaning the version of herself she fantasizes about? Like the happy wedding ceremony she imagined in detail before she insisted to Maxim that of course she didn't expect a ceremony?

Quote from Machen, on trying to capture a feeling inspired by Roman ruins: "I transliterated it, clumsily enough, in the story of 'The Great God Pan,' which, as a friendly critic once said, 'does at least make one believe in the devil, if it does nothing else.' Here, of course, was my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams in fire and works in clay." That fits.

Act 3 would read like a Greek drama through style alone even if Helen wasn't here, kudos to the translator, each act of Faust 2 has such wildly different language. I feel like I need more annotations and/or to read German to appreciate all the style choices - the Emperor's court had much more convoluted phrasing than any other act so far, was that just being very formal or was it riffing off anything in particular?

Fun timing, starting the Sculptor's narrative with all these detailed descriptions of her sculpting process right after I finished that Rodin book. I'm getting into this book much more as I go on and it gets more openly cosmic horror.

The Emperor accidentally recreating the Bal des Ardents by dressing up like Pan in a costume made of pitch and catching himself on fire - what was Goethe getting at with that reference? The German court is just like the French (derogatory)?

On Walpurgisnacht Mephistopheles calls himself Squire Voland, and it took me a ridiculously long time to convince a search engine to tell me what Goethe was referencing with that name (instead of pages and pages of results telling me Master and Margarita was referencing Goethe). Finally figured out to only search for results in German. Comes from vâlant, middle high german word for, predictably, devil.

"The gratification of reading as an end in itself seems to be a corroboration of the artist's unease with interpreters who not only read their work but convert it into conceptual propositions (...) For it cannot be that what we get out of art or dreaming is a consequence of our interpreting it; it seems rather to be a result of having assimilated something that has no conceptual name."

I checked this out because one of the birds from my falconry class has a cameo in it, but the author's descriptions are so dramatic that I have a hard time taking this seriously. It is informative though! In between very romanticized descriptions. "In birds of prey, the eyes weigh more than the brain" - cool! "They look past my face, past my soul, as impassive and hungry as fire." - what.

The previous few chapters (Captivity, Escape, Portsmouth) must have hit so very very differently if you know English history better than I do and recognized that this minor 'fictional' character was a real historical person remembered for having done an assassination. I learned a thing!

This book doesn't use quotation marks or any equivalent, which mostly works, a dreamy/introspective effect, but I keep misreading what's happening when it switches narrators with no indication. I asked if I could record her, said Sigrid while relating her past encounter with Damaris - wait, no, just kidding, half a paragraph later I realize that was really Jake in the present asking to record Sigrid.

When the Dracula Daily guy announced this book for another epistolary readalong, from the description I couldn't really see why he picked this one but I was up for finding out. A month in, I still don't see it.

"Mrs. Linton sat down by the fire, flushed and gloomy. The spirit which served her was growing intractable: she could neither lay nor control it. He stood on the hearth with folded arms, brooding on his evil thoughts," followed by another of Catherine's fits with "the muscles of her neck and arms standing out preternaturally" - fascinated by the way Nelly describes them like something out of a witch trial.

"About the middle of the night, I was wakened from my first nap" - ooh, biphasic sleep referenced.

Marius agrees to regular visits between Cosette and Valjean, proceeds to make these visits as uncomfortable as possible in a passive aggressive attempt to try to get Valjean to stop visiting without having to actually come out and say that, and then this line: "Let us say, however, that the reader would do wrong were he to blame Marius." Okay. I'm gonna though.

The final chapter was beautiful, five stars for the last chapter. The rest is... probably necessary to set up that last chapter.

A used bookstore just opened up downtown! It's been years since the old one closed! I was excited! ...I'm reading this book now because their fantasy section was pretty much just this and the ASOIAF series. To be fair this is a small town, but. Now missing this small town's very good former used bookstore intensely.

The bit about Eponine trying to lead Marius to his death, "She died with the tragic joy of jealous hearts who drag the beloved being into their own death, and who say: 'No one shall have him!'" - IMMEDIATELY followed with the chapter where Valjean discovers Cosette's in love with Marius and plunges into despair about it, mirroring Eponine, when ultimately he'll save Marius from the death she tried to lead him to. !!!

The final chapter is on plants in space, and from it I've learned very little about plants in space, a bit more about how humans react to the absence of plants, and a lot about the author's personal experience of zero gravity. The whole book's been like that. This pop science book really really wanted to be a botanist's memoir. The memoir parts were fun to read though!

This is pop science, it's mostly trivia not in-depth explanations and that's fine, it's 200 pages and half of that is photos, but I still feel like taking a red pen to this like it's an essay. You have not proved your point!! You just tossed out a cool claim and fully did not provide any evidence for it!! You can't just say the modular construction of the Crystal Palace was based on plants and not explain how!!

It would be real easy to read the part Odysseus narrates as a cannibalism story. Odysseus, famous liar, says his crew was eaten (by the Cyclops). They were eaten (by giants). They were eaten (by Scylla). He looked at his crew and saw them as pigs. They were trapped starving on an island with animals they knew they must not eat. They were punished by the gods for killing and eating something forbidden, says Odysseus.

The golden fleece is red, "like to a cloud that blushes red (ἐρεύθεται) with the fiery beams of the rising sun." In Thalaba the Destroyer (written in English around 1800), gold hair means red hair, with footnotes that make it clear the poet thinks that's the usual meaning of gold hair. Prose Edda, gold is red. Starting to suspect the current gold = yellow is an outlier.

Repeatedly quotes a Tigrinya proverb as "ኵሉ ይሓልፍ ፍቕሪ ትቕጽል—kullu yihalif, fiqri yiterif—everything passes, love remains," except I'm looking at the Tigrinya trying to figure out how the alphabet works and realized that last word is not yiterif. Wordplay? Proverb's yiterif, ይተርፍ, "remains," has been changed to ትቕጽል, per google pronounced tǝq̲ǝṣǝl and translated as "continues." This story is one continuous paragraph.

The Death Bride, a story about an ominous supernatural stranger who appears at Camilla's masquerade and refuses to unmask when everyone else has, "You alone keep on your mask" - was the King in Yellow referencing this story??? I'm grasping at straws, I can find no record of Robert Chambers having read Fantasmagoriana or Tales of the Dead and the extra guest is a common trope, but Camilla's not a super common name!