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You wonder whether you have raised a child right…

SOmetimes, if you are lucky, they let you know that you have done at least SOMETHING right. Sent to me by my beloved first born, a young woman i could not be prouder of…and this is just one of uncountable reasons why. That she would send me something like this, to state this, this is something she agrees with fundamentally, that she groks…well, of course i am proud!

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve“.

via DATE A GIRL WHO READS by Rosemarie Urquico  (In… – The Healthy Warrior.

Anne McCaffrey, Gone Between.

Anne McCaffrey.

Image via Wikipedia

Anne McCaffrey was a woman who gave my imagination wings, with the first fantasy I ever read – The White Dragon.
She had no idea what a gift I had been given. So much so, my bio (you know, the ones for social etc websites and networks) includes the phrase ‘the rest is subject to change without notice’, – and that is shamelessly borrowed from her.

Thank you, Anne. I rode Pegasus, and sang amongst the stars, talked to dragons, and stretched out to other minds with my own. Thank you.

Anne McCaffrey wasnt just the inventor of Pern, the world where a whole society is based on dragon-riding. She was also an incredibly influential author who helped transform the way science fiction and fantasy authors wrote about women, and the way all of us thought about bodies and selfhood. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award, as well as a Grand Master of science fiction.

via R.I.P. Anne McCaffrey, Creator of Pern and The Ship Who Sang.

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Early present for me…

NeilGaiman the Cat enjoying a  fellow authors work

NeilGaiman the cat enjoying a fellow author's work - Image by LilithSativa via Flickr

Neil Gaiman interviewing Terry Pratchett about his latest Discworld novel – but it isn’t Xmas yet! Hey, i will take the gift of video goodness anyway – yay!

Terry Pratchett on Snuff – Boing Boing.

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Shakespearean Farce…

This. Very much this.

None of which would matter very much were there not something repellent at the heart of the theory, and that something is the toad, snobbery—the engine that drives the Oxfordian case against the son of the Stratford glover John Shakespeare.

via New Film ‘Anonymous’ Doubts Shakespeare – The Daily Beast.

Short story by Ursula K. Le Guin via Lightspeed Mag

I had forgotten how POWERFUL Le Guin’s writing is. Before I knew it, I was walking, breathless and frightened, wondering about flies…

The Island of the Immortals by Ursula K. Le Guin | Lightspeed Magazine.

A 7-year-old girl responds to DC Comics’ sexed-up reboot of Starfire

I’ll tell you what I think. The comic authors may have no real women friends. Or they think their readers don’t. And they have little respect for women – even if they have convinced themselves otherwise. Why? Read the article. I agree with a wise kid:)

Fantasy author Michele Lee has the most eloquent response so far to DC Comics’ “sexed up” version of Starfire, the voluptuous alien member of the Teen Titans. Instead of ranting about the changes herself, Lee asked her seven-year-old daughter what she thought. The results are thought-provoking.

via A 7-year-old girl responds to DC Comics’ sexed-up reboot of Starfire.

 

 

V.F. Portrait: Joan Didion

Christopher Hitchens on the amazing books of Joan Didion – one on the death of her husband, and one on the death of their daughter, following sol closely after. Lyrical grief.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain. This endurance need not necessarily be one’s own: indeed, the experience of watching over a sibling or mate in extremis can be even more acute. But nothing, according to the experts, compares to the clutching, choking nightmare that engulfs the one who is slowly bereft of a child.

It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoléon Bonaparte said that.

What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripides said that.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

I said that.

via V.F. Portrait: Joan Didion | Culture | Vanity Fair.

other worlds, other selves…

a new book arrived from amazon, so curled up about 430pm thinking i will just pop into it. the attenbury emeralds, latest in a very long series i can probably recite all of by besotted heart. jill paton-walsh, wonderful, WONDERFUL, writer, carrying on from dorothy sayers, also magic writer.

and you know, i just finished the novel. too good to stop. so have lost nearly 3 hours. some deep thoughts about it, specific and general.

in general, one leaves beloved characters arrested in the moment of the last chapter. they do not age, or alter as we do, in our minds, they remain frozen, suspended, as insects in amber, in our mind’s eye. so when we resume our relationship with them, in further writings, it is a shock to discover that, just as in our own perceptions, our life, our world, friends, relatives, and other people have moved on – deaths and births, loss and healing, the gamut of human experience has occurred. we start on further journeys with them, and if the writing is good, very good, we immerse ourselves on those lives, separate but aware of the immersion, and are saddened again by the ending of the relationship. “the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, nor all they piety and wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

forgive me if the quotation is wrong, i am dazed a bit still, and my appalling habit of quotations, learnt long before i loved peter and harriet so well, has not quite left me. anyway, i have partaken again of griefs and emotions not my own, but recognisable from my experience. their journey, not mine, but enough of human journeys, of aging loved ones, of growing selves, of mortality, and the reflected strength and joy of one’s children, hits me.

and i am scared now, that one day, i must potentially lose my friends of the page. i do not think i could bear it if the author decided to betray me that way, with the death of one of them – well both, for they could not surely outlive each other well. i have wept over the loss of many a beloved character, but these two have rescued me in darker times, and their loss would wound me oddly. oh hell, what of bunter, or even hope? i cannot even bear to lose my dear dowager. ahh, the risk one faces in investing in characters that one feels close to, even akin to. . and i am not ashamed to admit that, like many, i envy harriet – and peter – what they found. but i am glad i got to know it through them:) and perhaps it is because i can see so much akin, in mind and way, to who harriet is, how her trials formed her, and to thus feel sympathy, empathy, understanding on a deep level, of their journeys, and what it could mean to have that love, that life, that place. many women are in love with peter, but i feel such joy in both of them, as people, that i would feel frankly odd being so. i prefer to yearn for a like to him, in the same way i can feel like to her.

after all, in caring, what is real, and what is imaginary? one loves, one cares, one loses, and the grief can be tangible, as if i had known them deeply through only correspondence.

i have not even touched on the deep confusion when one reemerges form immersion back into one’s on world, from cold and fog to sudden remnder of australian summer…and the self.

Jane Austen’s Fight Club

Thanks to Boing Boing – brilliant new twist on the Jane Austen type of variation we see a lot nowadays – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for example. Especially cool because it was made for fun by a bunch of very cool women:)

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Oh, i loved this…

ayn rand mockery