Whoops, temporary brain eatage

[yakalskovich]

I reviewed a book for pay today, and got pulled in for a bit. Do we need another re-telling of Romeo and Juliet, with magic, in a gothy steampunk circus atmosphere? Well, perhaps we don't, just as we don't need fish and cabbage soup with Mediterranean elements and a dash of Tandoori spice, but it seems just as unexpectedly delicious. I'm getting the entire book on paper, too, in addition to the payment...

Anyway, the lady who wrote the book (on LJ as wakingeyes) has designed a tarot deck as well, and she had an idea. Well, apart from the black-and-white steampunk circus aesthetics I was practically expecting, she assigns animals to the suits -- cats for wands, rabbits for cups, ravens for swords and dogs for pentacles. Her Fool is Alice, about to follow the White Rabbit down the hole. I quite like the whole concept -- pity it's not fully published in print.

Don't know what to make of it or do with it yet, but it all seems intriguing.

Comments

[paceisthetrick]

Yeah the reviews I saw all sing its praise. :)

[yakalskovich]

Which made me distrustful, actually. But I had some first chapters to read, and was all MOAR MOAR MOAR!! when they suddenly ended.

I loved the detail with the scarf she ascribes to her readers in the odd sort of second-person narration she starts the book with. It is slightly cold, it smells of hot sugar, and we have a scarf, standing among the other spectators.

And then, the story starts...

[paceisthetrick]

There are some reviewers I listen to. As I listen to you if you say give it a go. I wouldn't trust the random reader but the Times and the Post tend to be spot on.

Now I really wanna read it!


(OT: Owl, the kitten who last week found shredding paper riveting, has now decided that whichever pen I am using - THAT is one she must have! And, right now please.)

[yakalskovich]

Read it then!

[[Offtopic: Awwwww! Mephisto has started training as witchy shoulder cat, suddenly deciding the human is to be trusted for cuddles and touching after all, after three and half years of living here...]]

[paceisthetrick]

I always wanted an "other" (or familiar or whatever they call them)!

I definitely think Owl is my other. She simply refuses to leave me in peace. As soon as I walk in the door, she is on her back presenting me with a belly to scratch. If I am typing -- oh, she must be typing with me, for however could I manage without her assistance?

Last week, she took great pleasure in tearing all of my notes to shreds -- for the litter box, she explained, darting off with the remains of a check in her jaws. Now if I attempt to write, she busies herself batting my pen to see if I am truly focused.

[yakalskovich]

She sounds cute but stressful.

[paceisthetrick]

Actually she is so loving (all of the other feral cats hiss, claw, or flee), I feel nothing but happy around her. I would reprimand her for the havoc she wreaks but she is just so adorable about it.

Now when it comes to shredding the sofa arm, I give her a lethal expression and she lingers for a second -- paws stilled -- before dropping back to say, "oh, right".

[yakalskovich]

Does she say 'Oh, right' when she is being reprimanded by way of going 'Ack ack ack ack ack' the way Lucifer does?

[paceisthetrick]

No, it's much more of an expression. The "why are you so uptight about these things? Do you not comprehend that furniture is designed for the purpose of sharpening one's claws? Why else would it be so low to the ground and placed tantalizingly in front of me?" look.

Btw, GREAT article on how animals mourn in this week's TIME magazine. You must read it.

[yakalskovich]

Do you have a link?

[paceisthetrick]

Oh, I forgot. It's only the US one. :)

http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20120220,00.html

[yakalskovich]

Do you know if they put the whole article online after the next issue is out in print?

[paceisthetrick]

Ah, very good question. I read it standing in line at the grocery store (hard copy).

The research was done initially on chimps. Then they began to look at cats and dogs. I will find the name of the scientist who worked with chimps in the wild and send it to you.

[yakalskovich]

Yay for things on paper!

[paceisthetrick]

Thank you! I am glad to know I am not the last hold-out on the planet.

(Srsly, is there anything wrong with the PRINTED page??? I mean, other than ecological reasons....)

[yakalskovich]

I will get the book this entry is about PRINTED ON PAPER TO CARRY IN MY BACKPACK!! And no Amazon in the world can delete a paper book I bought and have in my shelves from my Kindle, which I don't have and don't want exactly for that reason.

[paceisthetrick]

I guess I think of my books as "furniture". We moved a ton when I was growing up and while we rarely took much with us, we ALWAYS took the books! LOLOLOL

To this day, I think nothing of hauling 6000 books to a new location (this was downsized after my husband's death -- I sent 3000 US History books to the Renvall Institute and another 500 to Nova Scotia, mostly novels, to found a local library in his memory. It cost me more in shipping than I could afford, but it was a symbolic act).

I look at the hundreds of books I had to read for my dissertation and it reminds me of what I accomplished. I didn't do anything with it -- LOL -- but I learned so much in that period. And it was the happiest period of my life. Looking at those shelves brings back those memories.

You can't replace that.

[paceisthetrick]

Of course the other explanation is that I am capable of breaking every piece of equipment I get my hands on. I am extraordinarily patient with animals; equipment I want to mangle if it doesn't cooperate. :D

[yakalskovich]

I have rarely thrown away any books. One or two, I found so bad I made sure nobody else would ever read them, but the rest, I keep around. My bookshelves, however, are a bit of a black hole at the moment, as I didn't sort and shelve them all by myself when I moved, so I don't know with blind lightning fast precision where which book is, any more, which makes me feel -- odd, actually.

[paceisthetrick]

See and I have no maid, so I have to dust them all myself. :)

Wanna hear something hysterically funny? When we were re-painting everything and I was moving shelves and books here and there, I would keep losing volumes. So I would say, "Goddammit! Where is the third volume of Chekhov?"

And my daughter would say, "What color is it?"

I thought she was joking at first (she doesn't read Russian) but time after time she would produce the book I was looking for! Finally I had to ask.

"HOW DO YOU KNOW THE COLORS OF THE BOOKS???"


Ready?





She said:





"Well, the kittens kept knocking them off the shelves all the time and I kept picking them up and I just started to remember what they looked like."


roflmao

[yakalskovich]

Don't laugh -- I find my books mostly by the colour of their spines, after knowing where they ought to be with a general vague migratory-bird magnetic sense.

That hipsterish fad of sorting books by colour isn't quite as silly as it sounds.

[paceisthetrick]

srsly?

That's really









unusual.



But when I would say the Chekhov tome was olive brown with royal blue letters -- she would produce it.

And Biely was off-white with brown letters.

And Mayakovskii was red with gold letters.

And Tolstoy (Voina i Mir) was two short, fat off-white volumes with black letters.

I just thought it hilarious.

[yakalskovich]

No, it's not that unusual. Or perhaps it is. But then, numbers for me are dots on a meandering line. One to ten go straight up, eleven to twenty then go to the right, 21 goes a step down and further to the right, from 30 onward everything goes straight up. It's easy for me to remember numbers (phone numbers, prices, the like) because I know where the number was; it does not help at all when trying to do maths, which I therefore rarely attempt if I can help it.

Colour-sorted bookshelves exist, too -- see here.

[paceisthetrick]

That is The.Best description of numbers I have ever heard. Math used to be meaningless to me until I discovered the joy of the word problem. Suddenly things made sense and I no longer failed every test!

I have never understood people who can memorize equations...

Here's a funny story about a Russian who contradicts the paradigm: my professor, Igor Vaysman, was on leave and I needed something I was certain he had. His best friend let me into his office to find it but we couldn't produce the coveted article. I emailed him, confessing what we had done, and he said (and I quote from memory): "It is in a unmarked leather binding -- blue, green or maroon."


I looked at Michael and said, yeah that really narrows it down.

ALL of the tomes in his office were in unmarked leather binding -- blue, green, or maroon.

[yakalskovich]

Then he told you the precise truth, so what is the problem?

**evil grin**

I always sucked at maths. Hard. Then one day, immediately before the holidays, the teacher gave us a logical riddle: A monk walks up from a monastery in the valley to a hermitage on a mountain, meandering and collecting herbs and taking breaks and so on. He left after morning prayers, and arrives at the hermitage in time for the evening prayer. He then stays the night, and leaves the next morning to go back down by the same path, collecting more herbs and praying by the wayside and so on, and arrives at the monastery in time for the evening prayer. Question: at any time during the second day when he went down, would he have been at precisely the same place at precisely the same time as the day before?

The maths geek in my class just stared like dead carp. I thought a bit, and then gave an answer, with a very simple reason as to why I was right. Now it was the maths teacher's turn to stare like a dead carp.

[paceisthetrick]

LOL

The best professors I ever had were the ones who could make really boring topics fascinating precisely as your teacher did. If I am doing an income tax return, I want the guy to be a wild Zappa fan who names his adopted daughter Moon Unit and has bequeathed a future stream of income to her that will cover her costs to the annual Lollapalooza fests. :D

Honestly, there is no reason for math or science to be boring.

BTW, what do you know of paleontology? My new character is a paleontologist and I need some research for him. :(

Of course, the only thing I am doing with him right now is composing love letters to his novelist-wannabe in Suffolk, but being able to drop the occassional ref to whatever it is that he is doing in Alaska would be a plus. :D

[paceisthetrick]

OT: Owl and her twin sister, Pig (Pigwidgeon -- she's a witch!) are thundering across the upstairs floor and sound like stampeding wildebeest. I had to phone the neighbors to assure them it was kittens playing and not a 10 earthquake in NW Austin.

[yakalskovich]

Alaska. Mammoths. I think that's where they survived longest, with traces of the last mammoths on some island only ten thousand years ago, or was it 10,000 BC?

[paceisthetrick]

I don't see him as the dinosaur type. I see him as more a "earth was once almost completelty covered by water" or ancient ecosystems personality.

I mean, of course he has to teach dinosaurs to make ends meet, but he'd be out of place in Jurassic Park.

[yakalskovich]

Mammoth <> dinosaur

Say sorry.-

[paceisthetrick]

My point is that I hate authors who give you this amazing, intense personality and then say, "Oh, he's a lecturer in Paleontology."

And I'm trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together but it doesn't work. :(