Following a vague recommendation from someone-or-other, I completely forget who, I've spent chunks of the last few weeks scientifically investigating the works of Tamora Pierce. Pierce is a writer of young adult fantasy, and I was interested in her because she does some quite deliberate things with feminist themes and strong women negotiating medieval, male-dominated societies. It's been a slightly ambivalent reading experience. She's easy to read, and I find myself mentally classing her stories with the Anne McCaffrey Dragonsinger ones in terms of their tendency towards wish-fulfilment and cute-creature-hugging; I also worry a little about a potentially slightly facile feminism. Nonetheless I'm left overall with a strong sense that her Tortall series is a worthwhile project that does something necessary in terms of role models for teenage girls.

The first Tortall series follows Alanna, who wants to train as a knight but has to disguise herself as a boy to do so. The disguised-as-a-boy bit is not treated realistically at all: young Alan should have been discovered posthaste and probably raped. But the urgency of the girl's need to fulfil a role not prescribed for her by her society is very apparent, and you end up rooting for her throughout. It's clearly an early work; the book's writing is a bit halting at times (she definitely gets better over time) and the magic/fighting combination is a little too idealised. The subsequent series which focuses on Keladry, the first girl to actually train openly as a knight, is stronger, more straightforwardly mundane and far more realistic as well as better written.

Good Things: solid detail in fighting, war, tactics (I am so an SCA geek); training is hard work, particularly for girls trying to overcome the strength deficit compared to boys. Prejudice against girls fighting. Page hazing rituals. Social awareness: the feudal system's privilege is neatly deconstructed in Keladry's story. Good teaching. Realistic teen romance! ye gods, how rare is it for teens in y.a. books to (a) play around with sex (b) sensibly (c) in a valid emotional context and (d) with a shifting series of partners, crushes and relationships. Death to the One Troo Love! JK Rowling's bloody saccharine Epilogue, take that!
Bad Things: clunky writing at times, narrative hiccups, falters and rushes. Slightly Shakespearian gender-swapping unrealisms. Too much cutesy power, too many cutesy people, not quite enough grey between heroes and villains. Bloody magically-enhanced animal deus ex machinas, although I can completely see these appealing to the teen girl demographic.

In completely another area of the young-girl-protagonist spectrum, Cathrynne M. Valente has posted the final chapter of her wonderful fairy tale, the one with September and the leopard and the wyverary A-through-L. And the soap golem. Baumish. Nesbitesque. Thurberoid. Other good things, including unexpected and off-beat and occasionally very cruel. Definitely well worth a read, particularly now that the whole thing's up.

My Masters student, who has a pleasingly demented streak which has not in any way prevented her submitting a slightly kick-butt dissertation on women in fairy tale (Basile, Perrault and Disney, my work here is done), just popped into my office in order to leave me the following offering:



You add water and it turns into a prince. Apparently. (If you have the duck version, apparently it turns into a princess. The logic here escapes me, although I'm somewhat charmed by the idea of "The Frog Duck to Prince Princess" advertised on the label).

My annoying day full of meetings and annoyance just improved immeasurably. Am off, chortling, to turn frogs into princes and (apparently) watch it grow 600%. For some reason I find this slightly dodgy. In other news, apparently I'm five.

I have déjà vu. There's a half-grown fluffy ginger tom with a white shirt front who's been wandering into our kitchen of a night and spraying, very slightly, somewhere I can't actually find. In the last couple of days he's become bolder, or possibly desperate, and wanders in while I'm cooking to dive head first into our cats' food bowls with every evidence of starvation, or to stand at the doorway making plaintive meeping noises. He's actually a very sweet and affectionate creature, and will headbutt my ankles and purr if I give him half a chance. This is pretty much the same extremely successful tactical plan followed by Ounce, although I don't think Ginger is a stray, he's very emphatically glossy, fluffy and beautiful. Nonetheless I am losing the will to chase him from the kitchen, which I suspect is a Bad Sign. We really don't need another cat.

In other news: pitch-perfect fairy tale by Catherynn M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making. Shades of Thackeray, Baum, Nesbit, all the good stuff. Matter-of-fact, off-beat, delectable. Look out for the soap golem and the flying leopard.

And, finally, annoying admin this week has driven me back into the arms of The Middleman's hyper-linguistic frivolity. Goofy Middleman Exclamations Du Jour: "Dagnabbit!" "Well, gosh!" "Scout's Honour!" "Swell!" "Shoot!" "Well, dagdiggity!" "Jeepers!" "Regoshdarneddiculous!" "Not a gosh-darned chance in heck!" and, memorably, "that was some darn fine cow-squirt!" Bonus points for the Jolly Fats Wehawkin Temp Agency. I feel much better now.

ooooh! Neil Gaiman not only won the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book (about which, yay!), he just announced that Neil Jordan is writing and directing a live-action film version. This makes me very, very happy: Jordan's Company of Wolves is a haunting, haunted and truly amazing cinematic adaptation of Angela Carter's postmodern fairy tale, and one of my favourite films. (Freudian imagery, Gothic forests, fearsome werewolf transformations, embedded narrative, self-conscious invocation of the oral voice, and Terence Stamp as the Devil in a Rolls Royce). He does atmosphere, period feel and complicated subtext with focused virtuosity. I'd be even happier if Neil Gaiman was scripting it himself, but I expect good things.

Still working my butt off, but yesterday was an 11-hour day instead of Monday's 13, so perhaps things are looking up. Also, small but measurable improvement in the hobbling. We may yet survive this, troops! she says, charging down the Balaklava valley...

Hah! in the last week I have vanquished my personal techno-jinx sufficiently to (a) persuade my DVD burner to burn DVDs after a year of software tantrum (by fiddling with the settings, particularly a perfectly obvious CD/DVD selection tab I'd never noticed before), and (b) persuade my headset to register actual sound in both directions (by fiddling with the settings, including a whole bunch of arcane and labyrinthine defaults which were persuading the system to put its nose in the air and refuse to recognise the existence of the microphone). I feel empowered, she says, shaking her tiny fist at the techno-cosmic wossnames. Of course the vainglorious parading of this sort of success infallibly means that I'll arrive home this evening to discover that every electronic gadget in the house has been stolen by Jawas, but hey, I will have my moment of triumph.

I am still turning into a lizard, fortunately not of the itchy variety. Currently I have a sort of reddish, leathery slash across my neck, as though I'd tried extremely inexpertly to saw through my jugular with a very blunt spoon¹. I'm not sure if this is heat rash, stress rash, some sort of plague or pox, an allergy or simple bodily cussedness, but bored now. Today the techno-jinx, tomorrow my own stupid body.

¹This is, for no adequately defined reason, giving me Angela Carter flashbacks. Her Bluebeard re-telling, "The Bloody Chamber", has the heroine wearing "a choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat", which I think must be almost exactly the inverse, metaphorically speaking, of what's afflicting me.

Today's subject line courtesy of more than usually surrealist spam. It only works as an acrostic if the formatting hasn't scrambled it, which it had, but I'm also amused by the random disconnect between the nature of the product and the choice of words.

I am currently locked in an epic battle with my contact lenses, or more accurately an advancing wave of contact lenses, bayonets fixed, all different. I wish to place on record here my jealousy of those of you who have (a) perfect vision, or (b) the ability to wear contact lenses all day without feeling the need to claw your own eyes out, screaming and scratching and convinced they are packing bayonets, after the four-hour mark. In the last seven or eight years my eyes have apparently developed interesting bumps inside the eyelids, and a tendency to under-produce tears, which means they tolerate lenses for a few hours before becoming bored, wriggly and fractious. (Great, my eyes are four-year-olds). This also means that in the last two weeks I've cycled through three different brands of trial lens, some of which are only mildly uncomfortable while others are screamingly annoying. My eyes really don't like wearing toric lenses, it seems, which is a bugger as the toric lenses correct the astigmatism and are necessary to prevent eye-strain headaches. It all seems tragically doomed.

I am somewhat amazed at the strength of my own disinclination to give up the whole thing as a bad job and embrace my inner Sarah Palin. It seems that I don't actually construct my ideal self as bespectacled. I'm actually wishing I had both the money and the courage to have the eye surgery. Sigh.

Today's September Retro Kiddielit entry, as promised to pumeza, is Eleanor Farjeon. I've always loved Farjeon's sweet, wistful and slightly oddball writing, in particular her two novel-length fairy tales, The Glass Slipper, which is a sort of innocent pantomime Cinderella, and The Silver Curlew, an utterly charming version of "Rumplestiltskin" with a spoiled-brat king who I adore. But the classic Farjeon stories are found in her Martin Pippin collections, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (available here) and Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field. These are Scheherazade-style excuses for tale-telling, frame tales in which the eccentric wandering minstrel Martin tells stories to an audience of girls or children. The frame scenarios are lovely, if a bit syrupy at times, but the stories themselves are wonderful. Farjeon has a very strong sense of English folklore and landscape; her tales are full of English place-names, plants, scenery, people and children's games. They have an incredibly strong folkloric backbone, with the correct and satisfying use of repetition, pattern, symbol and timelessness, but they're never obvious. The mood and tone of the tales are often slightly dark, and the narrative lateral and eccentric, apt to twist in directions you don't expect without ever losing its folkloric character. Apple Orchard is all love stories, befitting the milkmaids to whom they're told, and often surprisingly sexy; Daisy Field, with its audience of children, has more varied themes. My favourites include the Gothic darkness and symbols of "Open Wilkins" and the beautifully deconstructed courtly love scenario of "Proud Rosalind". My grandparents had copies of both Martin Pippin books, and the stories have always fascinated me, not least because I grew up with and into them; they were memorable and satisfying when I was a child, but they've offered more depth and interest with each reading as I became more able to access their considerable sophistication.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was a secret agent of some sort (extremely high heels were involved), in a very fast car with a nifty ability to drive along the underside of elevated freeways, thereby avoiding traffic. Later I was a medieval bride arriving at my potential husband's thatched cottage home, only to be utterly rejected by his mother, who stole my silver and sapphire ring before turning me out the house while said potential husband stood feebly by and let it happen.

In the Department of The Malice Of Inanimate Objects, my alarm clock hates me. Despite being set for 7am, it woke me up this morning at 1am, 2am and 5am, at which point I muzzily turned it off and trusted to luck that I'd wake up sometime before lunch. Investigation when slightly more awake reveals that the minute hand is apparently dragging the alarm hand around with it on a more or less random basis. Things To Do This Evening: buy new alarm clock. Oh, and go back to the gym. The gentle protrusion of my stomach is beginning to depress me.

Today's random linkery, in the Department Of Severely Postmodern Fairy Tales (an important and vociferous department in my personal Kafka-esque bureaucracy): An Old-Fashioned Unicorn's Guide To Courtship. Sarah Rees Brennan is perhaps better known to anyone who reads this blog as sarahtales - she writes very funny HP fanfic and an even more amusing blog, and has just landed a contract for her original Y.A. fantasy series. This story is witty, irreverent and thoughtful; in my professional fairy-tale opinion, Tanith Lee juveniles and Patricia C. Wrede also ran. Also: "the Rapunzel category"? Absolutely true!

In keeping with this theme, favourite kiddie fairy-tales! I was going to rhapsodise about James Thurber's Thirteen Clocks, but that's probably cheating: if you lot don't share my undying devotion to the book after lounging around on this blog for more than about three seconds, there's no hope for you. Instead, A. A. Milne! No, not Winnie-the-Pooh. (My love for Winnie-the-Pooh didn't actually survive Dorothy Parker's response to The House At Pooh Corner¹). Did you know that A. A. Milne wrote a satirical children's fairy tale called Once On A Time?² This is particularly important in my memories because I read it precisely once, when I was about 11 and found it at a school friend's house (her parents were Rich, TM, and she had beautiful toys and books); thereafter I couldn't find it again, until about four years ago when it turned up in one of my second-hand haunts. It thus has the particular appeal of the long-term unattainable. It features the foolish and unnecessary war between the neighbouring kingdoms of Euralia and Barodia; also, the desperately well-meaning Princess Hyacinth, serving girls called Wiggs and Woggs, a prince with a rabbit's head, and the beautiful, fascinating, thoroughly evil and scheming Countess Belvane. The characters are all bona fide eccentrics, and the political message surprisingly biting. It's also a bit Princess-Brideish in that the narrator continually references the historical accounts of one Roger Scurvilegs, mostly to disagree with them violently. Another in my favourite category of "off-the-wall", I would say.

¹ "Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up!"

² Good lord. I'm a bit shaken to discover that putting "a.a. milne once on a time" into Google gives a hit for a scholarly article entitled "Twelve short tandem repeat loci Y chromosome haplotypes" in the top three. They ain't making fairy-tale lit like they used to, is all I can say. Or, presumably, short tandem repeat loci Y chromosome haplotypes.

Today's dose of Daily Voice tabloid surrealism:
HE JUMPED FROM EVIL TAXI - PIG.
I can't work out if I misread it driving past, or if the headline writers are actually on high-quality mind-altering substances. Also, I'm vaguely associating it in my mind with a headline a few months back, in which a pig stole someone's wallet, or something. This sounds like the pig's courtroom defense. I did it because he was clearly evil, yer honour, he was in an evil taxi!

I survived the weekend's SCA event, barely - it was successful, fun, completely mind-blowingly exhausting, and I'm ambivalent but generally relieved that I don't get to do it again for a minimum of two years, owing to self-imposed exile on grounds of ingrowing volunteerism and sanity retention. I spent most of yesterday unable to form sentences and more or less horizontal, watching cute kiddie movies. Fortunately, owing to my considerable finessing of this so-called "career" lark, I actually get to define the above as "work". I have the pages of notes to prove it, too. (Sentences not actually necessary for note-taking, fortunately). The score:

Enchanted. Surprisingly enjoyable; I'm sufficiently steeped in Disney and the gosh-darned musical format to derive considerable pleasure from a scientific dissassemblage and snarky parody of the more saccharine, stylised, unrealistic and twee aspects of same. Also, I have no problem with James Marsden sending himself up with enthusiasm for ninety minutes, he's very watchable. Also, bonus completely unrealistic, ironic, large-scale music and dance numbers in public places; they make me happy in the same way that Improv Everywhere does. I'm a girl of simple pleasures, really. In addition to the really complicated and pretentious academic ones.

Happily N'Ever After. During the course of this film I ate an entire tube full of candy-coated chocolate eggs that khoi_boi's nice wife incautiously left in our kitchen on Friday night. (She does this random Easter Bunny thing at this time of year, she always seems to have a stash of chocolate eggs somewhere about her person). The resulting sugar haze was barely sufficient to prevent me from the appropriate Vogon-poetic-auto-cannibalism. It's a dreadful little film, full of plastic people, plot kludges and a pale, struggling germ of self-consciousness fatally choked by stupidity. Bright spots: Hell's Angel witches on sort of speederbike things. Also, the heroine, while deeply irritating, looked very like tsukikoneko, which kept causing me momentary flashes of affection despite the character's irritation value. I am inclined to think, though, that I could have stuck with the analysis of the film I gave in the comments here, way before I'd actually seen it, and saved myself some toothache.

Shrek the Third. Nope. Still necrophilia. I didn't remember much about the film, hence the re-watch, but it turns out that was because my kindly subconscious had cloaked the whole thing in a merciful haze. I'm just grateful I didn't have time to rewatch Hoodwinked. Possibly this evening, when my tissues have restored somewhat and I'll be able to wash the taste out of my mouth with fine food at Africa Café.

This movie-watching is causing me intellectual irritation, like too much fabric softener in the undergarments. There's an underlying principle about contemporary fairy-tale film towards which I'm groping as I update this final chapter, but so far it's eluding me. It occurred to me that you lot are an intelligent bunch of people, you might spot any flaws in my reasoning here, since my brain is apparently rotted by too much cooking, insufficient sleep, and the incipient thumping of Sid the Sinus Headache. However, if this is not your cup of tea, feel free to magnificently refrain from clicking on the cut. ( Fairy-tale burblings lurk within! )

Shrek the Third: a loose collection of gags, some amusing, kicked into a semblance of zombie movement by a weak, wandering and featureless plot. This is an "animated" film, a corpse temporarily brought to pseudo-life by dodgy voodoo: deriving pleasure from it feels necrophiliac. Also, perhaps I've been over-exposed to medieval romance, but it seemed to me a tragic and gratuitous waste of a potential Arthur/hidden heir story. Roll on Ratatouille.

Bizarrely enough, I rather liked Justin Timberlake. Someone kill me now.

BoingBoing recently linked to the work of the amazing Shary Boyle, a Canadian artist who does beautiful, delicate porcelain sculpture which wantonly subverts its own pretty-pretty nature with some truly bizarre themes. The one above is a version of the Beast from Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête, who has always made my fluffy fairy-tale analyst's¹ heart go pit-a-pat, but there are some far more disturbing images there. Like this one:



In other news, today I not only achieved CV-updatage, I also found my Walter Benjamin reading, in exactly the pile it was supposed to occupy, near the top, in a position I have searched five or six times over the last week. Clearly the Alien Conspiracy is still at work. The nice Telkom man came and tinkered with the phone, but it's still going hiss spit.

Now I shall go forth and play the dreaded jo's roleplaying game, which has not met for lo these many moons. What were we doing? Something about ships, and balloons, and pirates... Oh, and offering khoi_boi's character violence.

¹ Or, in fact, my pervy eroticism-analyst's heart. Serious physical presence, that Beast.