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Dec. 8th, 2009 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyShort recommendations time!
Book-wise, I just finished Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner (those were both![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zingerella-recs that she thought I'd like, as opposed to the times when she gives me books that she thinks it'll be funny to hear me rant about). I couldn't put either of them down. They're swashbuckling fantasy, with no actual magic, and no glossing over of the ugly class and gender dynamics of period settings, which made me quite a happy girl.
I preferred Privilege, as it had an engaging female lead who did stuff, and a host of secondary female characters who also did stuff, and talked to each other about things other than a man. And it skirted the other big problem in writing strong female characters, particularly in genre fiction, wherein "strong" is defined as "kicking ass" without having to resort to vagaries such as character development. Katherine kicks a substantial amount of ass, don't get me wrong, but the less ass-kicking characters, from the traditionally girlie Artemesia to the brilliant-but-dumpy Flavia, are just as interesting and well-developed.
Also, it has hot boys making out. Well, hot boys in one book and hot middle-aged men in the other book. And beautifully witty dialogue.
On the non-fiction end, I'm almost finished reading The Authoritarians, available for free online. It's an accessible study of the authoritarian personality, both that of followers and leaders. I don't think it's covering any new ground and I'm not entirely sure I buy Altemeyer's methodology or conclusions, but it's definitely an interesting read, and it very much describes some of the more puzzling things about the Right (or, in the case of people I more frequently encounter, what I'd term the "reflexively Right").
The last movie I saw was Alien Apocalypse, courtesy of PopeJohn. It has Bruce Campbell fighting giant termites, so if you like that kind of thing (I do) you should check it out. Also it's shot in Bulgaria, and most of the actors don't speak English, so the dialogue is horribly and hilariously dubbed in.
I've acquired a bunch of new music lately, most notably LAL's 10-year anniversary CD, Tom Waits' Glitter and Doom (thanks tooutcastspice), and a very weird CD by Tim Buckley (thanks to culpster). I also discovered a great new band called Sunday Driver, a steampunk band with Indian classical influences. They have three free songs that you can download on their site, and I liked those so much that I bought the album (see, it works), which is hopefully in the mail.
Oh! TV. Well, I finished Deadwood and am now bereft, in the way I was when Oz and Six Feet Under ended. As in "what am I going to like as much now?" I suppose when Mad Men starts up again I'll have something, but really, Deadwood is a fucking masterpiece and why would they ever cancel something so great? And don't tell me to get into The Wire; I watched the first season and found it too triggering.
Book-wise, I just finished Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner (those were both
zingerella-recs that she thought I'd like, as opposed to the times when she gives me books that she thinks it'll be funny to hear me rant about). I couldn't put either of them down. They're swashbuckling fantasy, with no actual magic, and no glossing over of the ugly class and gender dynamics of period settings, which made me quite a happy girl.I preferred Privilege, as it had an engaging female lead who did stuff, and a host of secondary female characters who also did stuff, and talked to each other about things other than a man. And it skirted the other big problem in writing strong female characters, particularly in genre fiction, wherein "strong" is defined as "kicking ass" without having to resort to vagaries such as character development. Katherine kicks a substantial amount of ass, don't get me wrong, but the less ass-kicking characters, from the traditionally girlie Artemesia to the brilliant-but-dumpy Flavia, are just as interesting and well-developed.
Also, it has hot boys making out. Well, hot boys in one book and hot middle-aged men in the other book. And beautifully witty dialogue.
On the non-fiction end, I'm almost finished reading The Authoritarians, available for free online. It's an accessible study of the authoritarian personality, both that of followers and leaders. I don't think it's covering any new ground and I'm not entirely sure I buy Altemeyer's methodology or conclusions, but it's definitely an interesting read, and it very much describes some of the more puzzling things about the Right (or, in the case of people I more frequently encounter, what I'd term the "reflexively Right").
The last movie I saw was Alien Apocalypse, courtesy of PopeJohn. It has Bruce Campbell fighting giant termites, so if you like that kind of thing (I do) you should check it out. Also it's shot in Bulgaria, and most of the actors don't speak English, so the dialogue is horribly and hilariously dubbed in.
I've acquired a bunch of new music lately, most notably LAL's 10-year anniversary CD, Tom Waits' Glitter and Doom (thanks to
outcastspice), and a very weird CD by Tim Buckley (thanks to culpster). I also discovered a great new band called Sunday Driver, a steampunk band with Indian classical influences. They have three free songs that you can download on their site, and I liked those so much that I bought the album (see, it works), which is hopefully in the mail.Oh! TV. Well, I finished Deadwood and am now bereft, in the way I was when Oz and Six Feet Under ended. As in "what am I going to like as much now?" I suppose when Mad Men starts up again I'll have something, but really, Deadwood is a fucking masterpiece and why would they ever cancel something so great? And don't tell me to get into The Wire; I watched the first season and found it too triggering.
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Date: 2009-12-09 12:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 02:02 am (UTC)I bought it for a buck when I was fourteen. It scared the shit out of me. I can actually sing along with it too. It's on Zappa's label which is why it's the craziest thing he ever put out.
This Mortal Coil covered track 5.
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Date: 2009-12-09 11:10 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2009-12-09 12:53 am (UTC)SOLD
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Date: 2009-12-09 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 01:20 am (UTC)(And if you can't, here's the script. But it's less lulzy without the dubbed English.)
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Date: 2009-12-09 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 01:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 01:08 am (UTC)However, his various scales seem to measure authoritarianism and right-wing politics as if they were one and the same. While I do think that there are more right-wing authoritarians than left-wing authoritarians (particularly if we look at actual politics and economics rather than rhetoric; China, for example, being far more capitalist than communist), it seems to be that authoritarianism needs to be defined distinctly in economic, political, and social terms. (It's quite possible to have a country with left-wing economic policies and homophobic social policy, even while homophobia is more common on the political right.)
I suspect I would score far higher on his authoritarian scales than I did were they not so based on attitudes towards immigrants, queers, the poor, and so on.
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Date: 2009-12-09 01:26 am (UTC)2. were they not so based on attitudes towards immigrants, queers, the poor, and so on
Aren't you first saying that measures of authoritarianism should be based on economy, politics and social morals/realities and then saying they are too much based on precisely these things?
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Date: 2009-12-09 01:31 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2009-12-09 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 11:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 07:59 am (UTC)Thank you for book recs. Have you read the Phillip Pullman Ruby in the Smoke books? Still haven't seen Deadwood.
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Date: 2009-12-09 11:08 am (UTC)I haven't read Ruby in the Smoke; I read his other series and liked them except for the ending.
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Date: 2009-12-09 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 07:24 pm (UTC)I liked "Breaking Bad" quite a bit on the vidioting front.
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Date: 2009-12-09 09:39 pm (UTC)The Ruby in the Smoke series are really good. I agree about the Northern Lights trilogy. The first one was incredible, then the last one sort of didn't work somehow. I think making it all tie up with religions and science all being different stories from parallel universes all made sense but was too contrived for it to flow well. I liked the trumpet creatures though.
The Ruby in the Smoke one are different. They are like Victorian melodramas but a pretty feminist children's version. The last one I read started to go into socialism and workers' rights, but I need to reread it and get into them again.
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Date: 2009-12-12 03:56 pm (UTC)what triggered you about the wire? i mean, i found a huge amount of sadness throughout the series but i found the same thing about six feet under for different reasons... i'm a sap what can i say
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Date: 2009-12-12 04:14 pm (UTC)With The Wire—I do like my TV depressing and gritty, so you'd think I'd be into it, right? But their depictions of drug dealer culture were so accurate, and so close to things that I'd actually experienced, that I found it incredibly difficult to watch. It wasn't necessarily the human tragedy element of it, but the dialogue of the dealers and addicts and the running around with pagers and pay phones just reminded me of things and people I didn't want to be reminded of.
Whereas I don't know any funeral directors. :)
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Date: 2009-12-14 01:17 am (UTC)