Cimorene

1. In the middle of the hall he saw a handsome nobleman with greying hair seated upon a bed. His head was covered by a cap of sable – black as mulberry, with a purple peak – and his robe was of the same material. He was leaning on his elbow before a very large fire of dry logs, blazing brightly between four columns. Four hundred men could easily sit around that fire, and each would have a comfortable spot. A tall, thick, broad, brass chimney was supported by those strong columns.

   
   –Perceval, The Story of the Grail, Chrétien de Troyes, 1182-1190 C.E.




2. Kay strode to the centre of the hall without his mantle, holding in his right hand a staff; he had a cap of fine cloth over his blond hair, which had been plaited into a braid – there was no more handsome knight in the world, but his beauty and prowess were spoiled by his evil tongue. His cloak was of a colourful and expensive silken material; he wore an embroidered belt whose buckle and links were all of gold – I recall it well, for the story bears witness to it.

   
   –Perceval, The Story of the Grail, Chrétien de Troyes, 1182-1190 C.E.




3. Dinner was as incongruous as everything else. Detestable soup in a splendid old silver tureen that was nearly as dark in hue as Robinson Crusoe's thumb; a perfect salmon, perfectly cooked, on a chipped kitchen dish; such cut glass as is not easy to find nowadays; sherry that, as Flurry subsequently remarked, would burn the shell off an egg; and a bottle of port, draped in immemorial cobwebs, wan with age, and probably priceless.

   
   –Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., Edith Somerville and Violet Martin writing as E.Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross (1898)




4. [H]e observed that Mr Wyse had a soft crinkly shirt with a low collar, and velveteen dress clothes: this pretty costume caused him to look rather like a conjurer.

   
   –Mapp and Lucia, E.F. Benson (1931)




5. His clean-shaven face, with abundant grey hair brushed back from his forehead, was that of an actor who has seen his best days, but who has given command performances at Windsor. He wore a brown velveteen coat, a Byronic collar and a tie strictured with a cameo-ring: he wore brown knickerbockers and stockings to match, he wore neat golfing shoes. He looked as if he might be going to play golf, but somehow it didn't seem likely [...].

   
   –Mapp and Lucia, E.F. Benson (1931)




6. The ship was, or had been, a three-masted barque; two of her masts were gone, and her bows stood high out of the water on the reef that forms one of the shark-like jaws of the bay. The long strand was crowded with black groups of people, from the bank of heavy shingle that had been hurled over on to the road, down to the slope where the waves pitched themselves and climbed and fought and tore the gravel back with them, as though they had dug their fingers in. The people were nearly all men, dressed solemnly and hideously in their Sunday clothes; most of them had come straight from Mass without any dinner, true to that Irish instinct that places its fun before its food. That the wreck was regarded as a spree of the largest kind was sufficiently obvious. Our car pulled up at a public-house that stood askew between the road and the shingle; it was humming with those whom Irish publicans are pleased to call "Bonâ feeds," and sundry of the same class were clustered round the door. Under the wall on the lee-side was seated a bagpiper, droning out "The Irish Washerwoman" with nodding head and tapping heel, and a young man was cutting a few steps of a jig for the delectation of a group of girls.

   
   –Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., Edith Somerville and Violet Martin writing as E.Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross (1898)




7. On the other side of the water sat a very well designed, very strong, and very splendid castle. There is no reason for me to lie about it: the castle sat upon a cliff and was so well fortified that no finer fortress was ever beheld by eye of mortal man; and upon a bare rock was set a great hall entirely of dark marble. There were a good five hundred open windows in the great hall, and a hundred of them were filled with ladies and damsels gazing out into the meadows and flowering orchards in front of them. Most of the damsels were wearing clothes of samite, and most had donned tunics of many hues and silken robes with golden threads. The maidens stood thus at the windows, and those outside could see them from the waist up, with their lustrous hair and elegant bodies.

   
   –Perceval, The Story of the Grail, Chrétien de Troyes, 1182-1190 C.E.

1. Benson, E.F. Miss Mapp. 1922. The second Mapp & Lucia novel. ( More character analysis of the differences and similarities between Mapp's and Lucia's brands of awful )



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.

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, ( Read more... )
   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!!

1. Bennet, Arnold. The Grand Babylon Hotel. 1902. 19%. This is a thriller that was made into two different silent films, neither of which I have seen. The titular hotel was apparently based on the Savoy, and the action is about a mysterious disappearance (kidnapping?) which hasn't happened yet. It was very popular in its day, when originally published as a serial.



2. Chrétien de Troyes. Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes. 2004. (Kibler and Carroll, trans.) (Original date of publication... lol... 1181.) 16%. The poems of Chrétien de Troyes are the first real fictional incarnation of Arthurian romance. I am a big fan of the prose style of William Morris's "Medieval romances", proto-fantasy novels which I am given to understand get their style largely from medieval romances. Having run out of them and failed to really find anything similar among his contemporaries in early fantasy writers, I decided to check out the medieval romances themselves. I intend to read Robert de Boron's Merlin, some of the Lais of Marie de France and perhaps some of the widely available excerpts of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, also known as the prose Vulgate (though my most recent research indicates that people are recommended not to read it because it's boring, and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur is generally regarded as a good and much more exciting summary of it. I DNFed Malory as a teenager, but I suppose I might give it another try instead.) Also Perzival, if I can find a translation - I haven't yet.



3. Benson, E.F. Queen Lucia. 1920. 44%. The first of the Mapp and Lucia novels, about middle class social climbing ladies and their desire to rule over the society of their little coastal towns in 1920s England. This one is all about Lucia, and Mapp is introduced in a different novel and in a different town, before they are brought together in another book. So far, this is pretty entertaining comedy of manners, and the setting seems familiar from all the mysteries I've read over the years.



4. Wells, Martha. All Systems Red. 2017. 23%. Rereading the first Murderbot book. I haven't got that far yet. It's lovely to read.

This is crossposted from Tumblr here for reasons of being able to find it later. Note: some images NSFW. Further note: ~3000 words, very image-heavy; they're not all loading for me rn, so maybe the Tumblr version is a better bet. I've been writing this in my head for two years and I finally told myself I can't make any new sideblogs until I post it, so here it is.

(This entire paragraph is going to be a digression, but I just can't go by without talkiing about my favourite Arthur legend literature - I love that Saberhagen incorporates it into his Dracula novels, but I'm not too keen on the way he actually handles it there; on the other hand I adore Merlin's Bones. And I really like the incorporation of the legend, as completely and utterly silly as it is - cosmic Quiz Bowl LOL - into The Dark Is Rising. I really hate The Mists of Avalon, which is actually my mom's favourite because it's all feminist~. I mean, I'm a big fan of feminist myself, but I just can't stand anything MZB's ever written. I've never read The Once and Future King because I didn't get around to it, or Le Morte d'Arthur partially because it was boring but also because my parents told me that whatsisface wrote it while in prison for the rape of a teenaged girl, and I refused to read any more after that. But my favourite literary treatment is one I got from the Science Fiction Book Club in high school, and it was a reprint of something from the 50s or 60s I think, not by anybody particularly famous or anything, and I honestly can't remember who it was by or what it was called. Hopefully I'll be able to find it some time when I visit my parents. Failing that... cleolinda's King Arthur in 15 Minutes.)