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Leisurely Saturday mornings...
The good thing about being up early-ish on a Saturday morning with nowhere to go until early afternoon is that I get to spend a quiet morning with my cats, who were beginning to feel quite neglected, I think. I spend so much time at work and at my other activities that I'm home really only in the evenings now, and since they don't sleep with me anymore since I moved here, they don't get much cuddle time with me.
So this morning I sat in an armchair and let them drape themselves over me while listening to The Beatles Anthology Vol. I, and we spent a very nice hour or so just cuddling. Right now I have three cats snoozing on the table next to me as I type, purring and contented. I wish sometimes that my life was just that easy: perfect happiness just because someone spent an hour petting me. :)
Poor George seems to have turned into Pukey McPukesalot. I'm going to keep an eye on him for a few days to see if he really can't keep anything down, or if it's just something fleeting.
Gretzky seems to be getting along a bit, too. She's having trouble jumping up to high places like the table or counters without assistance, and she climbs onto the windowsill using her back claws and makes the most horrible fingernails-on-chalkboard sound when she does. I've put the recycling box there to help her up, but she seems to forget what it's for occasionally.
I had a fun conversation with a stranger in the metro on Thursday. After I recovered from the trauma of reading "The Sparrow" I went back to the book I'd been reading before: "She" by H. Rider Haggard. He's the one who wrote "King Solomon's Mines" and the Allan Quarterman books. So I'm getting out of the metro at Guy-Concordia station, nose buried in this book, when a voice startles me out of my concentration.
"Ah! Rider Haggard! She-who-must-be-obeyed!"
I looked up to see what I can only describe as a geek boy dressed in a startling canary-yellow t-shirt. He was a bit scruffy around the edges and reading a fantasy novel whose title I didn't quite catch because he was waving his book around a little too emphatically.
"Indeed." I replied.
He went on to attempt a clumsy flirtation by quoting a doggerel about Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, who apparently were friends. It fell a little flat because he couldn't remember most of it. However, he redeemed himself by adding that Kipling was the only Nobel prize winner for literature who'd had his work adapted into a Disney movie.
"It's hard to imagine Hemmingway being made into a Disney movie," I conceded.
He grinned at me and gestured expansively. "Disney's 'The Old Man and the Sea' —ON ICE!" he cried.
There were helpless giggles for a while. Then we were outside and heading in opposite directions. We shook hands, he told me his name was Danny, and I told him my name, and we went our separate ways, both pleased at the random encounter, I think.
Books are a universal language. You just have to find the right dialect. :)
So this morning I sat in an armchair and let them drape themselves over me while listening to The Beatles Anthology Vol. I, and we spent a very nice hour or so just cuddling. Right now I have three cats snoozing on the table next to me as I type, purring and contented. I wish sometimes that my life was just that easy: perfect happiness just because someone spent an hour petting me. :)
Poor George seems to have turned into Pukey McPukesalot. I'm going to keep an eye on him for a few days to see if he really can't keep anything down, or if it's just something fleeting.
Gretzky seems to be getting along a bit, too. She's having trouble jumping up to high places like the table or counters without assistance, and she climbs onto the windowsill using her back claws and makes the most horrible fingernails-on-chalkboard sound when she does. I've put the recycling box there to help her up, but she seems to forget what it's for occasionally.
I had a fun conversation with a stranger in the metro on Thursday. After I recovered from the trauma of reading "The Sparrow" I went back to the book I'd been reading before: "She" by H. Rider Haggard. He's the one who wrote "King Solomon's Mines" and the Allan Quarterman books. So I'm getting out of the metro at Guy-Concordia station, nose buried in this book, when a voice startles me out of my concentration.
"Ah! Rider Haggard! She-who-must-be-obeyed!"
I looked up to see what I can only describe as a geek boy dressed in a startling canary-yellow t-shirt. He was a bit scruffy around the edges and reading a fantasy novel whose title I didn't quite catch because he was waving his book around a little too emphatically.
"Indeed." I replied.
He went on to attempt a clumsy flirtation by quoting a doggerel about Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, who apparently were friends. It fell a little flat because he couldn't remember most of it. However, he redeemed himself by adding that Kipling was the only Nobel prize winner for literature who'd had his work adapted into a Disney movie.
"It's hard to imagine Hemmingway being made into a Disney movie," I conceded.
He grinned at me and gestured expansively. "Disney's 'The Old Man and the Sea' —ON ICE!" he cried.
There were helpless giggles for a while. Then we were outside and heading in opposite directions. We shook hands, he told me his name was Danny, and I told him my name, and we went our separate ways, both pleased at the random encounter, I think.
Books are a universal language. You just have to find the right dialect. :)
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Ok. Whatever.
Nice story :)
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I thought it was a nice story too. :)
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Or the portrayal of two women as such stark diametric opposites. Two archetypes that are so often used and to such effect in works like She that many people rarely allow themselves to see one woman comfortably embodying the two?
I dunno.
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As a modern reader, I read it and thought "Wow, what complete and total arrogance combined with ignorance." It was an interesting read, though, in the sense that it does give one a fairly good idea of how people (well, the British, anyway) viewed the world and its inhabitants at the time.
I'm not sure which two women you mean as start diametric opposites. There are three women in the book, only one of whom is white (that being She), and I found them surprisingly more nuanced than I expected for a work of this nature. I'm not saying that they were incredibly subtle portrayals, but just that She was portrayed as being mostly evil but with a side to her that wasn't completely bad (she went mad over the course of millenia). Then there was Ustane, who for all that she was a "noble savage" (a stereotype that's always gotten on my nerves) was also reasonably complex in her motivations. The third woman, Amenartas, is long dead before the narrative starts, but she too gets a reasonably thorough treatment, to the point where I wasn't sure if her story or the story of She was the right one, and likely the truth lands somewhere in-between and maybe a bit to the left.
So, yes, I agree with you that the book is a giant stereotype and that having a white woman be the queen of a tribe in deepest darkest Africa is offensive, but it's a bit like taking offense at an eighteenth-century novel because the heroine feels her life is over when she's not married by the time she's tweny-eight, or something. It's all about historical context.