Well. Unless I post again this evening (probable but not definite), this is my last post until after Terracon. Unless I freeze to death down there or we've huuuugely miscalculated food, run out, and I get eaten by a mob of starving UniSFAns, I'll resurface on Monday evening, or possibly Tuesday, depending how tired I am.

I'll note that I'm waaay stressed about Terracon at this point. I've never been involved in organising it before, and I've got the food and the quiz night to worry about... Can we all say "Argh!" in concert? Thank you.

Of course, if food or quiz night go wrong, I shall blame Coman and Stephie respectively.

Things to remember -

- Clothing. My warmest.

- The four kilogrammes of chocolate I bought last night. There's a story about that.

- The frightening quantity of meat which I'm buying tonight.

- My cameras. (One digital, one SLR.)

- My juice supply.

- Printouts: Quiz night questions, Picard's Illumination for my dramatic reading of The Worst Fanfic Ever, possibly a checklist of things that must be done before we get there.

- To get milk and bread with Oliver on the way down.

- To have fun, since I too paid to go on this camp, and have definitely put enough effort into organising the damn thing to have earned the right to have a good time.

Should have lots of pictures, by the end - including a lot of scenery shots, since the area's so pretty - very few of which I'm likely to get around to putting up on my image diary page, because I'm slack, but what the hell. I'm taking my camera's charger, and I have a total of 96MB of card space, so if I also delete bad shots as I go... I'm so not going to run out, basically, since there's only so many pictures I can end up wanting to take.

Finished reading The Infinitive of Go, by John Brunner, today. I can't decide whether I loved it or it annoyed the hell out of me; on the one hand, it has an interesting concept, and an interesting exposition, but on the other hand, I guessed every plot point well ahead of the characters, and it was kind of irksome waiting for them to work it out.

And the ending is highly frustrating. Yet cool. But frustrating. It will be my Librarian's Recommendation next week - not this week, since it's currently on my desk. And I do not encourage people to borrow UniSFA's books from my bedroom.

So, for all those people who read this and aren't coming to Terracon: Nyer. Although most of you have the excuse of being in different countries and/or not being UniSFAns and all, you suck anyway.

For those people who read this and ARE coming to Terracon: See you there.

The story:

So I went to Dewson's, and stood in front of the rack of chocolate, and picked out sixteen family-size blocks, ignoring the people who gave me odd looks as I did so.

Went to the checkout.

Woman next to me: "Wow... You must be hungry?"

Me: "Would you believe I had a really intensely unhappy love affair?"

Woman: "Ah..." *uncertain laugh* "Really?"

Me (relenting): "No, it's for a camp."

Idle chatter ensues, until:

Woman: "So how many kids are you taking?... Are they kids?"

Me: "No, uni students."

Woman: *wide-eyed* "Oh..."

They fear us.

Second-Stage Literary Criticism

I'm enjoying The Once and Future King immensely, on so many levels - including levels it's not supposed to have, like my delighted amusement at its anti-communist, pro-feudalism propaganda in chapters XIII and XIV.

Tom and I had the most literate childish argument I've been involved in in a while; it started out reasonably intellectual, but once I had devolved to ineffectual lines of non-argument and he to intellectual cheese moves, it was far less grown-up than it began. Tom is, nonetheless, the UberCool for being the most interesting person I know to argue with. (Argue, note, in the sense of "debate" rather than "flame".)

For the record, I'm now arguing that this book has to be set in an alternate universe, simply because there was no post-Norman Conquest king named Uther Pendragon, dammit, and that statement I CAN back up.

* ponders * I think. Note to self, check the line of monarchs after 1066. But I'm fairly confident. And besides, that'll count as pre-reading, since I'm doing English history over that period next semester. Yay. Way to combine projects, Rae!

First-Stage Literary Criticism

So I made a start on my reading list last night, and am partway into The Once and Future King. So far it's not what I expected, in both good ways in bad.

Good - the potential dryness of historical[1] fiction is broken up with delightful touches of AA Milne -

"But about these boys," said Sir Grummore. "How many of them are there, do you know?"

"Two," said Sir Ector, "counting them both, that is."

- and Lewis Carroll.

"It's quite a good brachet," said King Pellinore, "only it pants so, and gets wound round things, and goes the opposite way. What with that and the visor, what, I sometimes don't know which way to turn."

"Why don't you let her loose?" asked the Wart. "She could follow the Beast just as well like that."

"She goes away then, you see, and I don't see her soemtimes for a week.

"Gets a bit lonely without her," added the King, "following the Beast about, and never knowing where one is. Makes a bit of company, you know."

Alas, the King Pellinore scene is too long to quote in its entirety, but it's delightfully Carroll.

Now, the bad: It's too self-consciously historical. It's intrusive, and I like my fiction to suspend reality for a while.

"Couldn't send them to Eton, I suppose?" inquired Sir Grummore cautiously."Long way and all that, we know."

It was not really Eton that he mentioned, for the College of Blessed Mary was not founded until 1440, but it was a place of the same sort. Also they were drinking Metheglyn, not Port, but by mentioning the modern wine it is easier to give you the feel.

Now, since I'm reading this in Modern English and it's set about a thousand years before that language came about, I can handle a certain measure of conceptual translation as well. The way in which the knights are written, all harrumph-y and such, is delightfully evocative, even if it draws on modern imagery - but you don't have to be so damn conscious about it. The port I was able to live with, barely; Eton references go beyond the pale. A couple of other lines are fairly borderline.

What really irritates me, though, is the one that recurs, and that's the fact that every second chapter we have a reference to "Indians". Now, whether he means Indians from India or Native Americans, it's really annoyingly anachronistic.

Then we have lines like this, during the haymaking:

When the wagon was loaded, it was drawn to Sir Ector's rick and pitched to him. It came up easily because it had been loaded systematically - not like modern hay - and Sir Ector...

Now, I ask you, was that necessary?

The approach to Merlyn's miracles and so on - the long list of things in his house was going to be irritatingly dull after a point no matter what, but really, Encyclopaedia Britannica? It's a stylistic choice, I think, one I disagree with.

[1] - The historical accuracy of Arthurian legend, including all the magic stuff, and Merlyn smoking tobacco and such notwithstanding.

Holiday Reading List

This is more or less so I can mock myself at the end of the holidays for all the items on this list I haven't read by then.

- The Once and Future King

- Anna Karenina

- The Archaeology of Weapons

- the chapter on Syntax in my Linguistics book

- some overview material on medieval England

- more on fascism!

The last three, of course, are pre-reading for my units next semester. As I keep trying to explain to people, it's not that I'm a devoted student, it's more that I'm slack but want good marks, so I compensate for my slackness by doing less work for a longer period of time. And since the end-point of the semester is very, very fixed, I have to mess with the start point.

Fortunately I have a good head start on my Fascism unit, since I did so much about Fascism last semester.

The Once and Future King I've just always meant to read, and was reminded of this by a conversation with Vegeta. Anna Karenina likewise, except Penguin reminded me, though unfortunately that one I'll have to get out of the library; and The Archaeology of Weapons is a book I own but never finished reading.

Four days to Terracon. I'm really looking forward to it - ought to be a lot of good clean fun, as well as (based on the last few days) generating levels of dodginess unheard of in recent years.

Midnight: Much Weird Beauty: dry lightning, perfect moments, and the armour of accessories

As I drove home tonight, my eye was caught now and then by flashes of purple light to the west. Somewhere over the ocean there was sheet lightning, flickering with the kind of spectacular perfection that only comes to moments of sheer, raw power. Or something. As I turned a corner, ahead of me was a single strike that will forever be preserved in my memory: dead ahead, a nebula of purple fire, with a clear, intense sheet of lightning behind it that covered half the sky.

I have The Highwayman running through my head at the moment, because I saw too the moon coasting on clouds that didn't quite obscure it, which always makes me think of that line. The moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas...

It all leaves me in a rather contemplative mood, thinking of beauty, and awe, and nature, and my place in it. And also of the armour of accessories, because I was thinking about that before the lightning caught my imagination.

People who know me in person would probably be quick to say I'm not a particularly stylish dresser. I no longer wear clothes which offend the eyes of the masses, but I don't put a lot of time or attention into selecting my clothes in the morning very often, and I loathe clothes shopping, so my wardrobe is fairly limited. However, I do accessorise a little. I have a range of necklaces, because they're the only jewellery I really like wearing; rings irritate me, bracelets get annoying too after a while, and I am entirely unpierced.

So, necklaces. I only have one that I can think of that I bought myself, though; one of my favourites was a gift from my mother, one from my uncle, two others from my sister, several more from my girlfriend and several from past girlfriends. I never actually wear the one I bought myself, I just think it's cool so I continue to own it.

Each of the others was given to me by someone, and usually for a reason, Therefore each one has significance to me, and if I'm wearing a necklace (usually I am), and if so which one, actually says a lot about my emotional state that day. I'm not going to explain the system because that would give away far too much about my personality, but there is one.

What adds to the significance of it being necklaces I wear is the fact that I have certain associations with my neck. I won't go into why, but I have a lot of defensiveness about it; I tend to squirm if people touch it and I'm not in an open, fully-trustful sort of mood, and if I'm feeling edgy or vulnerable my inclination is to cover it. This is why I wear scarves some days when it's not really that cold.

And now I have a new garment, a black studded thing that goes around the neck, under one's collar, in a sort of v that works well with collared shirts. I like it, because it's vaguely badass, and has studs, which adds to its value; tonight I was feeling kind of raw and edgy, but I wore the studded under-collar thing, and that was armour sufficient to make me whole and able to be social.

Wherein it is seen that I make manifest my deepest emotional conflicts in purely superficial things, and this works. It also says a lot about me; either I'm deep in truly superficial ways, or I'm superficial in very deep ways. I haven't worked out which.