Reading this week

[cimorene]

Finished:

1. Benson, E.F. Miss Mapp. 1922. The second Mapp & Lucia novel. The title character of the first book, Queen Lucia, was the Gracious Condescending Lady with pretensions to culture who lives in several actual Elizabethan cottages that she has renovated and combined to make a mansion and then swaps out genuine architectural features to make it look more Olde Timey. The limited omniscient narration mostly focused on the eyes of the gay-ish man who acts as her best friend, so while her viewpoint is presented clearly, and well understood, the window character has a certain amount of resentment and cynicism which makes her easier to suffer. In contrast, Miss Mapp is the antihero narrator of her own novel, again in a limited third-person omniscient way. And she seeks to dominate the 'society' of her village in a different fashion. Lucia is about needing everybody to obey and admire and look up to her to maintain her BNF ego, scheming to make sure nobody else gets any admiration or attention and lying so as to avoid the appearance of any fault or weakness, however slight. (This is why she's so bang-on for the despised individual I mentioned the other day.) Miss Mapp, on the other hand, is filled with resentment and bitterness and envy and venom, and is just an incredibly mean person. The facade of fake sweetness, in her case, does not go as far as an attempt to create an impression of gracious condescension in everything that she does; she wants to be the most respected and important member of her society, not to be looked up to in awe. So she is not at all above petty stingers, as long as they are said with a polite manner. The fact that the person she reminds me of was kind of scary and one whom I avoided assiduously highlights the way in which Miss Mapp is 'worse' than Lucia - she's more genuinely nasty. But I actually found her more fun to read about, possibly because all the events were fiction and I didn't have to deal with her! But also possibly because the book contains a long series of delicious embarrassments and frustrations that make her seethe with rage, and it's satisfying because she's the only one being awful and nasty in the situation and the people who have 'won' are typically pretty good-natured; her resentment is generally unjust or downright offensive, but she's the only one who suffers for it. Also, I really liked her her "rival", Godiva, who seemed like a stronger and more likeable figure than the corresponding character, Daisy, in Queen Lucia.



2. Chrétien de Troyes. Cligés. I've already mentioned how weirdly like a fixit fanfic this one is, and that actually is quite an interesting fact about it, but it also makes it pretty weird to read, and at times a bit irritating. The end was so incredibly abrupt, though, that was a whole other source of humor.



3. Chrétien de Troyes. The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot). This is the third Arthurian romance in the collection, and it's even more fascinating than the previous one. I know from the introductions in this book that this is the only fictional portrayal of marital infidelity by Chrétien, who is otherwise EXTREMELY disapproving of it (as the entire plot of Cligés was written to express). And we know that this one, as is stated explicitly at the beginning, was written on the express orders of his patroness, Marie de Champagne. Apparently she actually dictated the subject matter - the courtly love between Lancelot and Guinevere - and even to an extent the plot. According to the introduction and footnotes, there's some scholarly debate about whether this is a faithful carrying out of her wishes or actually contains an entire layer of satirical snark to express the author's actual distaste for the morality of his characters. And I think the latter is actually what's happening, which is really interesting to notice as you're reading along. But it is pretty subtle!



4. Wells, Martha. Artificial Condition. Now that I've read the next couple installments about Murderbot after this one, I still like ART especially much. The sequence where Murderbot visits the disused mine to investigate the disaster on Milu was great, too.



5. Wells, Martha. Rogue Protocol. My favorite part of this one was the fantastic fight scenes with the combat bots and just how fun they were to read. That's quite funny, because I often just skip fight scenes entirely, even in print. I'm interested to see what the visual design for Miki is going to look like.



6. Wells, Martha. Exit Strategy. The images of the hotels and the new scenes with Gurathin and Pin-Lee in this book were really great. The hotel hacks and the whole description of using the maintenance system and the transportation pods against the GrayCris representatives were so memorable that I actually sort of remembered that part even though I'd managed to forget most of the intervening context and details in the couple of years since I first read it.



7. Wells, Martha. "Compulsory" and "Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory". I read these too. Nice little bits of context.

In progress:

1. Wells, Martha. Network Effect. I was pretty sure I had read this before, but as I started reading it today... I don't think I have actually? Only two chapters in so far. Time may tell.



2. Benson, EF. Lucia in London. This one has provided some more brilliant character portraits and inspired me to look up Oxford bags, which I had read about plenty before. I knew that "Oxford bags" were trousers worn at Oxford, and that they were baggy/loose/slouchy, and that this was both trendy/youthful and potentially scandalous (depending on the context). But the following passages from this book inspired me to go looking for further visual evidence:
   
   

   There was a new suit which he had not worn yet, rather daring, for the trousers, dark fawn, were distinctly of Oxford cut, and he felt quite boyish as he looked at them. He had ordered them in a moment of reckless sartorial courage[... .]
   [...]
   (Were Oxford trousers meant to turn up at the bottom? He thought not: and how small these voluminous folds made your feet look.)
   [...]
   The odious Piggy, it is true, burst into a squeal of laughter and cried, “Oh, Mr. Georgie, I see you’ve gone into long frocks[.]"

   
   
   And, in short, it turns out that while some Oxford bags were merely baggy trousers, in general they were basically like palazzo pants of the 1920s-30s! There's a lot of variation under this term, with some looking more or less like some standard 1970s trousers (apart from the waist), and others more like divided skirts.



3. Boron, Robert de. Merlin and the Grail: The Trilogy of Arthurian Romances: Joseph of Arimathea - Merlin - Perceval. (Bryant, trans.) 2001. Original date of publication: 1199. I read one page of Joseph of Arimathea and, perceiving that it was going to all take place immediately after the death of Jesus, skipped to Merlin. I'm sure it's very interesting to see the 1st century CE through the eyes of French poets of the 12th century, but I might have to be in a different sort of mood than the mood for reading Arthurian romance. After the Chrétien de Troyes I've read, I was pleasantly surprised by how riveted I was by the beginning of Merlin. Annnnnnd also unpleasantly surprised by just how much more shockingly loathesome the misogyny of the medieval society and morality was, because the whole beginning is all about how some demons scheme to get a woman pregnant by a demon father so that they can have an agent on earth to improve their prospects after some prophets saved a bunch of souls from them (evidently during the events of Joseph of Arimathea), and they do this by causing a lot of suffering and this involves judicial murder, ie tricking Merlin's mother's sister into becoming a Loose Woman so that she will be sentenced to death (she is buried alive), and then tricking Merlin's mother into forgetting to say her prayers one night which apparently was all that was required for a demon to impregnate her in her sleep without her noticing?!. This legally dooms Merlin's mother to death since she's not married. Becoming pregnant out of wedlock, according to this narrative, was a capital offense in this society even for an independently wealthy woman! Which like, I absolutely do not buy that, but okay. However, Merlin's mother's reaction to hardship was to actually become super religious, and she's so devoted to praying that with the assistance of a sympathetic priest who comes to believe her, she lives until Merlin's birth, and since he can already talk in complete sentences like an adult at the age of 18 months, he then saves her life by wowing everybody with his knowledge. See, this Merlin is born knowing everything about the past in the universe genetically, because demons know everything that has already happened (I recognize this bit of medieval cosmology, but also lol), so he just like, inherits that from his father. But because of his mother's piety, God just also gives him equal knowledge of everything that will happen in the future, so he's literally omniscient from birth. That would probably be enough of a superpower to account for his supposed feats, tbh, but there are tantalizing passages later about him shapeshifting. But my favorite surprise-lol moment in this book so far has been this:
   
   

   "[G]o in search of a land called Northumberland, a land covered in great forests, a place strange even to its own inhabitants, for there are parts where no man has ever been."




4. Chrétien de Troyes. The Knight with the Lion (Yvain). The amazing premise is that there exists a magical forest where there's a magical spring (to be reached only after you find the house of a specific guy who is a really good host, and he gives you dinner and you stay the night, and then he gives you directions there the next day), and next to the spring is a stone bowl carved out of emerald with rubies for feet, and a dipper, and if you pour a dipper of the water onto the stone, immediately a huge storm with so much lightning you can't see straight will rise up out of nowhere, destroying a bunch of trees in the forest. And then as soon as you do this a knight on horseback will gallop up and attack you in revenge for having destroyed his forest. So this happens to Calogrenant, and the knight defeats him soundly and then knocks him off his horse and takes it and just leaves. So because Calogrenant is his first cousin, to avenge his shame Yvain decides to go do exactly the same thing. He does, but he defeats the knight, and then pursues him through the gates of a castle and unhesitatingly kills him! Okay!!

Comments

[stranger]

It seems the Arthurian romances were not without their own tropes, as befits an early concatenation of fanfics... Would you call it a fusion with Xtianity, or just glossing (some of) the magic bits with devout prayer, to suit 12th century mores?

[cimorene]

There's definitely magic in here that doesn't fit the dominant orthodoxy of xtianity, but I don't know if it's reasonable to assume that any of it would have seemed unchristian to the audience if the time. As I understand it, it was generally just accepted that magic was real, so the Christian trappings probably just made most people like, "seems legit". Also I guess, from the introductions and footnotes and essays I've read, that there is little survival of the oral folklore that no doubt formed the basis of the legends from before Chrétien and Robert. This means that scholars aren't entirely certain how much of these early tales comes from the folklore, and how much was invented. I do intend to read the Mabinogion, but it, for example, is now argued by some to derive partly from Chrétien as opposed to an earlier wider supposition that they both derived from the same lost source.

[lotesse]

yay for the particular way that old literary stuff is often batshit. The best part of Arthuriana imo (better than the misogyny anyway)

[cimorene]

I think it's my favorite part too. You never know when a new one will pop out.