unshared interests

[truepenny]

It's sort of an interesting meme. And I'm still bleary and not-all-there.

There's a definite category of Stuff To Do With Truepenny's Dissertation: early modern english, ghosts in shakespeare, lucius annaeus seneca, shakespeare in performance.

Seneca's unshared because I've given his full name, which partly, yes, is me showing off, but partly is because if you do a search on "Seneca" in the MLA bibliography, you get a large number of articles about Native Americans, and I didn't want to mislead anybody.

Early Modern English used to be a shared interest, but the other person must have disappeared or something.

Also in the same cluster of Academic Truepenny would be early modern women writers. Which is a legit interest of mine, though unrelated to my dissertation. What would be my second academic article, if I could ever be bothered to finish it, is about Lady Mary Wroth.

Then we have the mystery section: emma lathen, golden age detective fiction. It pains me that I am the only person interested in Emma Lathen, whereas I could be the 104th person to list Sue Grafton as an interest. "Golden Age Detective Fiction" is clearly just me being swank.

As is talpidae, which is the fancy word for "moles." Again, as with Seneca, I was trying to be clear about which kind of moles I meant.

laurel winter is unshared because wiscon chooses to call her "Laurie Winter," which is not the name she publishes under. I am pig-headed and refuse to change.

And then ocular albinism must just be too recherché. Again, me being specific to avoid confusion. I'm not albino, and I don't want to lay claim to a condition I don't have. It's a thing.

Comments

[taelle.livejournal.com]

I like Emma Lathen; I just keep my interests list extremely brief (otherwise I guess I'd be the only person interested in Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. And so on)

BTW, why the interest in moles?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

BTW, why the interest in moles?

Shared aversion to sunlight. Plus I identified with the Mole in The Wind and the Willows from a very early age.

And the more I find out about them, the cooler I think they are.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I like Emma Lathen too. I just haven't added authors to my interests list, because there would be So Damned Many of them. And Lathen's not per se on the top tier of people I'm wild to discuss, though every few years I happily binge through the complete works all over again.

Mer

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I'd ever have anything to say about her/them, but they're the only series mystery author, in that particular formulaic Agatha Christie vein, who STARTED writing after WWII and whom I can stand. A Place for Murder, for some bizarre reason, is one of the most reliable staples of my comfort reading.

Sarah Caudwell doesn't count in that category because she was doing something very different.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Really? I'm exceedingly fond of Amanda Cross, although I found her last one, with the fat detective, rather below her usual standard. And I enjoy the Dick Francis formula -- Hot Money is comfort reading for me.

When did PD James start writing? And I've recently picked up some recently written mysteries with Sir John Fielding and a rare book dealer as detectives, respectively, which I thought were pretty good.

Mer

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The one Amanda Cross I've read (and I can't for the life of me remember the title) I did not care for. P. D. James-wise, I do like Shroud for a Nightingale, but I didn't care for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, and her later books have just been too damn long to bother with.

Hot Money used to be my token Dick Francis novel, until I decided I really didn't need to read it ever again. The problem with Francis is a combination of the formulaic, the cardboard, and the sadistic. When I got to the point where I could say, Oh look--the scene where the cardboard hero will undergo intense physical agony and still solve the crime, I decided it was time to quit with the Francis.

Robert Parker's sexual politics creep me the fuck out.

I've seen the Fielding books, but since I hate eighteenth century literature, the fact that they're written in pseudo-eighteenth-century prose was a definite turn-off.

Oh, wait, another honorable exception: Ross Macdonald. Also v. v. formulaic, but I have moods where Freudian noir is exactly what I want.

And I read Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series, but that's because I'll read anything she's written, including her Star Trek, Star Wars, and Beauty and the Beast novels.

Largely, I'm hampered in my modern mystery reading by the fact that I loathe and abominate cosies, and it seems like 99.9% of the mysteries that aren't serial-killer stories or otherwise incredibly squicky (Minette Walters squicks me beyond belief) are cosies of one stripe or another. I hate plucky, perky amateur detectives.

I'm far more picky about my mystery reading than I am about my sf&f reading. I have no idea why.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Ah, I like long.

Have you read James' one SF novel, The Children of Men? I think its brilliant.

And I don't mind cozy, indeed I rather like it, so long as its not coy and fake. I want realistic characters and settings, not santized Disneyfied ones, but so long as they're real to someone, if they're cozy to me that's actually a plus.

I don't care for McDonald, if he's the one I'm thinking of. A Green Day for Color Blindness, etc., or is that a different McDonald?

I've never read Parker, or Walters, and i didn't know Hambly did mysteries. I'll have to check them out.

The problem with Francis is a combination of the formulaic, the cardboard, and the sadistic.

I don't mind the formula. I think cardboard is more a problem with the later books -- in earlier ones I'd say many of the characters were roughly but vividly sketched in. And I can see what you mean by the sadistic, but lumped it in with the formula.

What bothered me was a growing sense of irritation with his philosophy, or rather, with the philosophy that a lot of characters with drastically different backgrounds nonetheless inexplicably seemed to have in common. As one character's worldview, it was fine. But 26 different people?

Parents largely if not entirely get off the hook for children's problems, even when their shortcomings are severe and recognized.

Too much emotional talk is unheroic or a sign of neurosis.

Wandering through the world with virtually no friends, relatives, or obligations is normal, and the people who do it nonethless have no trouble getting close when the opportunity arises.

Sex should be non-verbal, non-tool-using, and "natural". Sadism of the consensual type is the mark of the villain, as is masochism, pornography, and generally any sort of sexual variation.

I daresay there are more, but they all sort of blend together to me in a sort of snobbishness of the Noble Physical, which exalts bodily instinct and courage in its heartiest forms, and regards all other human drives as to some extent twisted repressions or substitutes for same. I enjoyed the Francis books very much, but Hot Money is the only one I reread any more.

Mer

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Long doesn't bother me normally; again, I've got criteria for mysteries that (a.) don't apply to the rest of my reading and (b.) don't actually make any sense.

The M(a)cDonald you're thinking of is John D., whom I have not read. Ross Macdonald is the one who wrote The Drowning Pool--direct descendant of Raymond Chandler.

I've never read a cosy that didn't feel coy and fake. Perhaps I'm just reading the wrong people.

Re: Francis, I wasn't saying what I meant well enough. What you describe as philosophy is what I meant by "cardboard"--meaning that all those heroes were really the same guy. And you described EXACTLY what annoys me about it/him/them. The only one of Francis's protagonists who I felt FIT that philosophy was Ian in Hot Money, which is why it's the one I liked. (And I didn't stop liking it--it was just one of the ones, when I was drastically purging my collection, that I realized I didn't need to read again.) And Hot Money is also where the parent-children relationships seemed, again, to fit the characters.

Oh, another exception: Ellis Peters. I only have one Brother Cadfael, but that's because I started reading them at roughly the same time I had to crack down on my book-buying. But they're on the list for that mythical day when I have enough money not to have to worry about how many books I buy per month.

Hambly has a series set in 1830s New Orleans. The first and best is A Free Man of Color; I recommend that one unreservedly (even my mother liked it!). The others should be pursued at one's own discretion, I think.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Ah, now I didn't like Peters, if they're the books I'm thinking of. I hate medieval mysteries, though I would be extremely hard put to it to tell you why. I think its because I feel like the characters' concepts, sense of self, assumptions, vocabulary, etc. would all be so extremely different from ours that anything like an accurate internal POV would be unintelligible. So they always strike me as coy and fake, no matter how well done. I don't say its fair, but there it is.

I liked Willis' Domesday Book, but the only internal POV we get there is the future insertion people.

Mer

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Sometimes that bothers me, and sometimes it doesn't, and I can't explain the difference. First-person is always bad in historicals--I was looking at a mystery set in Marian England recently, and put it back after reading the first paragraph and discovering that the first-person narrator sounded exactly like Mr. Joe 20th-Century. And I hate, hate, hate historicals with historical figures as the detectives. Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde ... they seem to me so incredibly demeaning to these real people, and so stupid, that I just can't even hardly look at them. (The exception, as to many things, is Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost, but that is an exercise in trying to capture Restoration modes of thought and speech. Well, and also The Name of the Rose.)

I think, really, I read the Cadfaels as fantasy, not as history, and then it's all good, because cod-medieval fantasy characters have twentieth-century subjectivities anyway. :)

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

YES! I'd cut a line to that effect from my last comment, in fact. :)

Leave Shakespeare and Beau Brummell alone. They had concerns of their own enough. I keep trying to read the Brummells and Austens, because I am a Regency freak, but gah!

It especially bothers me when people pick writers and people with extant correspondance and then make no effort at all to sound like them. You could at least *try*.

I wasn't a big fan of An Instance of the Fingerpost, but not for that reason. It just didn't live up to the hype for me.

Mer

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Beau Brummell? BEAU BRUMMELL?

I'd missed those. Or repressed them. Or something.

But you're right. The worst thing about that kind of historical is that, to make these people detectives, you have to rewrite their characters, and in that case what's the point of claiming that they're "real" people? Edgar Allan Poe is a case in point, even leaving writing style aside; it is perfectly clear that the man was fucked up six ways from Sunday, the last person in the world capable of detecting anything.

Harrumph.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Beau Brummell, I kid you not. And not even when he was broke and disgraced and living at Calais, which would almost make sense since he was clearly a man in need of both money and a new hobby at that point.

It's when he's in London. And even more sketchily detailed than the average Regency Romance. Not to mention having him do decidedly out of character things on a regular basis. As you say, what's the point?

Mer

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh dear.

I'd just assumed they were set in Calais--that would, as you said, make at least a half-assed sort of sense.

Right. I shall be purchasing a ten-foot pole to avoid those with.

How far back is "historical"?

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

There are a couple of books by George Baxt, The Dorothy Parker Murder Case, The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case, (and possibly others) that mix Roaring Twenties atmosphere with famous names and, incidentally, murder detection. These are entertaining on their own slightly farcical terms, and between that and the post-WWI setting, the characters seem less tainted by the usage than intentionally parodied. Would such a thing be less or more acceptable to your feelings about historical fiction?

I'd put the dividing line -- between a society I understand intuitively (most of the time) and one I don't -- right there, after WWI had shaken up so many things. Whether this works for detective methodology may be another matter.

Re: How far back is "historical"?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, actually, the closer we are in time to the historical personages being so abused, the more offensive I find it. There are special exceptions for the Elizabethan, Jacobean, Caroline, and Interregnum periods, because those are my area of specialization, but by and large the twentieth-century stuff is more offensive to me than the nineteenth. With another special exception for the Beau Brummell mysteries stakebait mentioned, because those are just travestistical. (What is the proper adjectival form of "travesty" anyway?)

I also don't like stories that use real historical people because they're so often blatantly Mary Sue-ish, as the R.H.P. likes the hero/heroine despite being notoriously snobbish or standoffish or what-have-you. Regency Buck is an example, with Beau Brummell again, but Nicholas Meyer's Sherlock Holmes pastiches are also prime offenders (aside from the fact that his version of Sigmund Freud is completely unrecognizable to me), and Laurie King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice even commits it with historical fictional people, with Mycroft being all sweet and cuddly to whatsername, when the canonical evidence is perfectly explicit that Mycroft is even more misogynistic and misanthropic than Sherlock.

The exception to all this, of course, is George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman books.

[vass]

Good! I borrowed A Free Man of Color from the library only a week ago, and hadn't started it yet. I'm glad it comes recommended.

[vass]

How about Reginald Hill? The earlier ones published under his own name, the ones which are detective story and not spy thriller? I have a deep and abiding love for Pictures of Perfection.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Never heard of him.

(I know I come across looking tremendously well-read, but I'm really not.)

[vass]

He writes good detective stories and bad thrillers. Or at least, I don't know if they're bad thrillers, because I don't like the genre enough to tell. But the thrillers are all Freemasony and shadowy government organisations and so on, and he's started to mix those in with his detective novels.

His detecive novels are, or were, good. As modern detective novels go not too gorey, and stocked with real people, not with cheap psychology. They're set in Yorkshire. Actually, there's the Joe Sixsmith ones about a private detective, and the Dalziel and Pascoe ones in a mid-Yorkshire CID. The latter are the best ones.

Some ones I'd throw at anyone who can't duck fast enough include Pictures of Perfection, Bones and Silence, and Deadheads. PoP makes me giggle every time I spot the Jane Austen references, every character in BaS is a character from a Mystery Play, and Deadheads is full of roses.

[abbandono.livejournal.com]

Sad to say, I've never read any Emma Lathen, although I did tear through a lot of Golden Age stuff when I took a Detective Fiction and Film Noir class, and I developed an abiding fondness for it. She'll have to go on the reading list.

Also, as soon as I saw "shakespeare in performance", I immediately chided myself for not including it in my own interests. One would think that after taking three Shakespeare classes in college (of which two were specifically "In Performance"), participating in numerous performances myself, and generally being an aficionado of interesting performances of his work, I might have thought to put that on my list.

Anyway, owing to these quasi-shared interests and your fondness for Sarah Caudwell (of whom I am an obsessive completist...would that she had written more novels so I wouldn't have to content myself with short stories and acrostic puzzles), and moreover your being a friend of a friend (heres_luck), you're going on my friends list.

Three cheers for specificity,

abbandono

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Hi! Welcome!

Sarah Caudwell's the best. I only stumbled across her earlier this year, and only just succeeded in acquiring all four of her novels, so I haven't started the obsessive search for the smaller stuff (although no doubt I will come to it). I'm vaguely contemplating a post about why The Sibyl in her Grave is rather different from the other three, but it hasn't coalesced yet.

hello

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

I'm vaguely contemplating a post about why The Sibyl in her Grave is rather different from the other three, but it hasn't coalesced yet.

That would be interesting to read. I caught Caudwell from about the second book on and was entranced for numerous reasons starting with the style. (And the sly gender-reversal. And the narrator so sly I didn't even notice there wasn't a gender assigned.)

Came to your journel via yonmei, and I hope you won't take it amiss if I put you on my friends list also. It looks like enjoyable stuff to read of a morning (or afternoon).

Re: hello

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Nope, don't mind a bit.

Hello, and welcome aboard!

I probably will do that Caudwell post sooner or later, if only because it gives me the excuse to quote great chunks of her prose. :)