This should worry me more.

[dira]

Five Emotions Invented by the Internet

The third one is ... very familiar. Yes.

Speaking of which, I should go write something instead of refreshing all my tabs 600 more times and then giving up and going to bed, shouldn't I?

Oh, also: come and tell me which Mary Renault book to read next, I am halfway through The Persian Boy, and I suspect Funeral Games would just make me sad.


P. S. I have finally seen Lawrence of Arabia for the first time except I think I ... missed some things, due to not having the attention span for a four-hour movie when my laptop is right next to me. Also I was kind of confused, because I had already seen Ralph Fiennes and Alexander Siddig in Lawrence After Arabia, so I was all like, Yes! Lawrence and Prince Feisal! THEY ARE BOYFRIENDS! And that was not it at all. *g*

Anyway, the upshot is that I think I need to see Lawrence of Arabia again sometime, with more fangirls and fewer available distractions.

Comments

[everbright]

Lawrence has so much fic-ish potential, but it gets bogged down by all this..reality. Like, if you read the front piece of the book, you feel really disappointed that he lost half the manuscript on a train and had to recreate from scratch. Or if you think of about how miserable and neurotic being a gay man in turn of the century Europe made him.

It's really, really cool in theory (and probably the movie, too), and then all your fanish pleasure is harshed, bad. I want to watch the movie with a group of fan-girls too, and try to concentrate on all the cool stuff he did do!

[dira]

Yeah, I keep wavering about whether I even want to read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The movie version(s) are so much friendlier for fic purposes! :)

[norah]

OH GOD I KNOW THAT ONE. I HAD IT TODAY.

[dira]

I KIND OF LIVE THERE. IT WORRIES ME.

[parhelion]

You're right; Funeral Games is quite the downer. I was so glad that Jo Graham recently wrote Stealing Fire, which is in part fan fiction to fix Funeral Games although Stealing Fire has many other merits as well.

My two favorite Renaults are The Praise Singer and The Mask of Apollo. The first book is about the life of a truly homely bard and contains lots of interesting discussion about physical beauty, some of which I agreed with and some of which I didn't. IMO, TPS may be her smoothest read if lacking some of the usual slash; there's a very interesting hetaera character as ample compensation. TMOA stars an Athenian actor who hangs around Plato's academy, and the book contains all sorts of interesting speculations about how that profession worked in classical Greece as well as one of her most charming relationships. It does has some slightly dry stretches about politics and one of the doofiest subjects of a crush ever, though. Still, if you've enjoyed Renault I would unhesitatingly recommend either book.

Your mileage may vary, of course

[parhelion]

(Oh, and I forgot to mention that Melissa Scott wrote an AU fantasy novel, now out of print, called A Choice of Destinies, in which Alexander ended up going west rather than east. Her Alexander is again recognizably Renault's, and I'm pretty sure the book was also intended to "fix" Funeral Games. Reworking Renault to do something about that unavoidable ending seems to be a big fannish temptation for other female pro writers, something like tweaking Sherlock Holmes is for everyone.)

[dira]

That is the second comment I've gotten endorsing those two Renault books! Clearly they are next.

Unless I go buy one of these used copies of A Choice of Destinies for 38 cents on Amazon, because oh man, Alexander in Rome! ♥ And I will have to try Jo Graham's book as well! WHO CARES HOW LONG MY TO BE READ LIST GETS?! :D

[mlyn]

feochadn is a big T.E. Lawrence expert, so if you want to yak about LoA she'll be your huckleberry. :D

Those internet emotions…HAHAHAOH GOD.

[dira]

I feel like I need someone to sit me down and explain what the hell happened in LoA, which, er, possibly shows how distracted I was? Because I don't think it's known as a WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED? movie, but my attempts to form a coherent internal monologue for Lawrence were not notably successful. I am not ready to write fic of him, is I guess what I am saying. :)

[mlyn]

No, I don't think you're alone. There's a lot of military actiony history there, so covering it all in a movie can't be easy. I know for a fact that Sherif Ali is a composite character, for one. I couldn't tell you exactly what happens, and I've seen it a few times. The prospect of writing fic for the fandom (whenever I see the fandom in Yuletide) fills me with dread, because it is so big and emotional and Repressed post-Edwardian Society. I think it was astolat who wrote an awesome fic a few years back where I thought the narrative voice was perfect, but astolat and perfection are kind of redundant.

[dira]

See, and, like. I was pretty willing to let all the military action just sort of wash over me. "Okay, now another battle ... somewhere! For ... some important strategic purpose! Sure!" But dear God, WHAT IS LAWRENCE THINKING, all the times where he's like "No, I can't do this I can't do this--I AM THE GOD OF DOING THIS I WILL DO IT HARDER THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN DONE BEFORE." And so on. *g*

[mlyn]

Yeah, I can't help you there. :D

[dira]

Well, as long as it's not just me. :)

[polarisnorth]

Fffffffff, Lawrence of Arabia. I'm so conflicted about this movie. It's one of those movies that I really loved but I'm not sure I could ever sit through a rewatch of, even for the Epic Gay. Which reminds me, I need to read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and that new Lawrence biography that's out.

[dira]

I liked it, even aside from the Epic Gay, on a level of Oh Lawrence, How Are You Such a Ginormous Woobie, but that was also the level on which I didn't really understand it--possibly, I admit, because I was not paying the strictest attention, but what the hell is going on in his mind? I do not get it. *g*

[polarisnorth]

I'm not sure you're supposed to understand him? There are books devoted to trying to understand him, and he lied like a rug in his autobiography. There's a book about the movie itself that my professor recommended to me; it's called Lawrence of Arabia: A Film's Anthropology, by Steven Caton. I don't know if you'd be interested, but there it is.

[dira]

Yeah, that's one of the hypotheses I arrived at after the movie had ended and I was sitting there going "Wait, what?" But it's not very satisfying! *g*