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1. Chuck versus the Best Friend (now two weeks back, because I am that far behind) was possibly the best-constructed episode of TV I’ve seen in years. Just … perfect use of each character, A and B plots perfectly intertwined with C plot weaving in and out at just the right time providing just the right contrasts. Repetition with a difference, friendship and the ways in which friends are and aren’t family, are and aren’t lovers. Plus beautiful Chuck/Sarah bittersweetness at the end, completely earned.
2. Krystal Chang remarks, in reference to Lolita, that “the traditional motivations for a road trip are numerous but repetitive: The road trip as rite-of-passage, as a fugitive run, as a search for the ‘real’ land; to rebel, to discover, to escape…but never to reach a destination.” Now I really want to read an analysis of incest in SPN fic, or, hell, an analysis of the canonical sexual relations of the boys, compared to sexual abuse in Lolita (“the landscape and the language are drawn out through a stunning, archetypical example of the road trip genre, with all the traditional tropes: the descriptions of small towns, deserts, and highways; the running, the searching and the tragic end”) and sexual rebellion in Thelma and Louise. “Although the road trip is American by virtue of space, it is ultimately self-defeating by virtue of geography; it is by nature a temporary state of affairs. The hoped-for discovery is simply nothingness.”
3. Inexplicable gifts from the universe: I washed my iPod. Like, a full laundry cycle washed it. It stopped working for a while, but now it works again. I bow before you, Tiny One.
4. Via Naomi Novik: download full novels, in DRM-free PDF format, by Novik, Harry Turtledove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robin Hobb, and T.A. Pratt (never heard of Pratt, but given the company kept here I am going to try the book). Great use of back catalog. Now if I could only figure out what kind of PDF reader I should use on my iPhone. (Also downloaded the free Kindle app for the iPhone and bought the new Stephen King short story. I’ve read that the Kindle format books are a loss leader for Amazon—they pay the publishers more than the cover price—which makes the existence of the iPhone app somewhat hard to explain. But I am out of room, physically, so if I can get cheap enough Kindle editions I will go ahead and commit to tethering. It’s psychologically easier to do it through the iPhone; I accepted tethering of music and video with my iPod long ago.)
2. Krystal Chang remarks, in reference to Lolita, that “the traditional motivations for a road trip are numerous but repetitive: The road trip as rite-of-passage, as a fugitive run, as a search for the ‘real’ land; to rebel, to discover, to escape…but never to reach a destination.” Now I really want to read an analysis of incest in SPN fic, or, hell, an analysis of the canonical sexual relations of the boys, compared to sexual abuse in Lolita (“the landscape and the language are drawn out through a stunning, archetypical example of the road trip genre, with all the traditional tropes: the descriptions of small towns, deserts, and highways; the running, the searching and the tragic end”) and sexual rebellion in Thelma and Louise. “Although the road trip is American by virtue of space, it is ultimately self-defeating by virtue of geography; it is by nature a temporary state of affairs. The hoped-for discovery is simply nothingness.”
3. Inexplicable gifts from the universe: I washed my iPod. Like, a full laundry cycle washed it. It stopped working for a while, but now it works again. I bow before you, Tiny One.
4. Via Naomi Novik: download full novels, in DRM-free PDF format, by Novik, Harry Turtledove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robin Hobb, and T.A. Pratt (never heard of Pratt, but given the company kept here I am going to try the book). Great use of back catalog. Now if I could only figure out what kind of PDF reader I should use on my iPhone. (Also downloaded the free Kindle app for the iPhone and bought the new Stephen King short story. I’ve read that the Kindle format books are a loss leader for Amazon—they pay the publishers more than the cover price—which makes the existence of the iPhone app somewhat hard to explain. But I am out of room, physically, so if I can get cheap enough Kindle editions I will go ahead and commit to tethering. It’s psychologically easier to do it through the iPhone; I accepted tethering of music and video with my iPod long ago.)
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The Kindle iPhone app appears to be more designed to keep the Kindle attractive to iPhone users (by allowing syncing) than to build up a big Kindle-on-iPhone-only audience.
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spectaclehunt could replace any other; what matters is the anticipation, the expectancy of desire. They see America but do not possess it; the land remains elusive and therefore still desirable. As long as they remain in motion, there is the possibility of a happy ending forHumbertSam and Dean, or at least a delay of the inevitable.Wow, you could practically do a find and replace in many parts, though I'm not quite prepared to substitute "Kripke" for "Nabokov" here. And there's maybe something to say here about the show being shot in & around Vancouver -- the Winchesters' road trip is already a simulation of an open road that keeps them perpetually circling around their point of departure.
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The open road is the same thing as the dead end--which makes me think about obsessive24's video (http://obsessive24.net/videos/obsessive24_walls.zip) Climbing up the Walls. Firefly is a kind of road trip; Heroes deliberately sets itself up as a moving tour of America; and then there's SPN.
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Dude, how weird. I was just teaching today about Robert Johnson and the role/fantasy/mythos of the blues in American culture; I specifically linked the combined romance and ambivalence of bluesmen's depictions of their itinerant lifestyle with SPN -- I'm showing the episode "Crossroads Blues" next week. There was also stuff about On the Road in there, too, and the whole romance of the road. :D I'll see if I can write up something coherent, if you're interested.
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Email me at amalthia at gmail.com and I'll send you what I do have. The LRF versions I have are the best formatted. But I sent the PRC files to someone else who did the conversions to LRF for me and he's rather good at it. But I did convert the PRC to html recently as a test. :)
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I use Adobe Acrobat to convert the files to html if necessary it's just I'm really hoping ebooks become more popular but I don't see how that'll happen if they keep publishing them in a limited format like PDF. Not everyone knows how to convert documents from PDF to HTML let alone how to clean up the html coding.
not saying PDF is evil or bad it's really good for what it's meant to do which is retain the formatting of documents for print however...for a medium that shifts as much as ebooks PDF isn't ideal.
Um...sorry for soapboxing here. :( This is something that bugged me a few weeks ago when the Patriot Witch was shared for free as a promotion for the trilogy and yet the ebook was in PDF and I had to spend an hour or two to convert it to read on my ebook device.
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