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Book Notes & Letters
7/4/08 16:04My copy of Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy arrived in the mail today. It's rare I buy a book, much less an academic text, without friends' recommendation or at least a flip-through in the store, but this one got me by the back-cover blurb alone (I signed up for Wesleyan University Press' email letter at Readercon two years ago; they send me quarterly blurbs).
My comment to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rusalka (quoth she: "Ooh, I think I need to read that after you're done") was "Oh no. If I start reading this now I'll never get ANYTHING done today!" So tempting, and much more fun than fixing the toilet. Prepare for a review in a day or two.
Also requested the volume of Townsend Warner and Ackland's letters based on Rush's earlier review.
We'll see what else comes of that, if anything, though I can already tell that reading it, I'll miss my letter writing. Not the hand-cramp--or more often now the right-hand thumb that sometimes makes holding a pen difficult for an hour--but the five years or so I must've sunk into pages-long emails in the late 90's, conversations without spoken words that stretched out for years with the only real interruption sleeping.
Some lizards store fat in their tails. In the same way, thoughts and what I meant to say about them, what I did say, what they replied, stayed in my head and added new layers over the core of what was already always there. There's always bits of those conversations in my head, now, whether I think about them or not. It's like remembering an old comfortable house, or a dead friend: after a while, you don't remember actual phrases so much as the tenor of the whole, and take comfort in it--but when you do miss it, you miss it deep, almost in mourning, without always knowing when, how, or why you'll think of it.
My comment to
rusalka (quoth she: "Ooh, I think I need to read that after you're done") was "Oh no. If I start reading this now I'll never get ANYTHING done today!" So tempting, and much more fun than fixing the toilet. Prepare for a review in a day or two.Also requested the volume of Townsend Warner and Ackland's letters based on Rush's earlier review.
We'll see what else comes of that, if anything, though I can already tell that reading it, I'll miss my letter writing. Not the hand-cramp--or more often now the right-hand thumb that sometimes makes holding a pen difficult for an hour--but the five years or so I must've sunk into pages-long emails in the late 90's, conversations without spoken words that stretched out for years with the only real interruption sleeping.
Some lizards store fat in their tails. In the same way, thoughts and what I meant to say about them, what I did say, what they replied, stayed in my head and added new layers over the core of what was already always there. There's always bits of those conversations in my head, now, whether I think about them or not. It's like remembering an old comfortable house, or a dead friend: after a while, you don't remember actual phrases so much as the tenor of the whole, and take comfort in it--but when you do miss it, you miss it deep, almost in mourning, without always knowing when, how, or why you'll think of it.