![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Had a really lovely time last weekend visiting ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
synn for what is likely to be the last time before she moves (from 8 hours away to 2, hurrah!). We wandered through some thoroughly enjoyable local artist galleries, had all sorts of good food, and made ourselves a Neapolitan belated birthday cake: chocolate cake layer, strawberry cake layer, white cake layer, all with slightly different batters, and butter icing with strawberries, finished with a silver metallic spray and purple piping with black sugar pearls at the tip of each peak. By "we," I mean I served as assistant to synn and her ever-growing baking expertise. *cough* While darting back and forth to my laptop to make the AMTDI poem.
( pix and links: cake, art, etc. )
One night we tried to watch Plan B, a low-budget Spanish movie about a young man who tries to get his ex-girlfriend back by seducing her new boyfriend, who BTW looks like the lovechild of Gael Garcia Bernal and the dark-haired coworker on Chuck. ( The logic of that was not clear… )
We ended up fast-forwarding through a lot of it and then watching Eyes Wide Open (Einayim Petukhoth), ( an Israeli film about a Hasidic butcher in Jerusalem who falls for the new hired help… ) The younger actor in many moments reminded me of Tom Hardy.
.
On the plane I read a short story collection by Roger Zelazny,* The Last Defender of Camelot. One of the novellas in it, "He Who Shapes," which was very good, would appeal to Inception fans, I think: a psychologist who shapes people's dreams for therapeutic purposes gets caught up in the mind of another prospective dream-shaper and struggles against falling into limbo.
Another novella, "For a Breath I Tarry," which may be my favorite, started out awfully like Wall-E, then shifted into something more like Faust, then veered into Bicentennial Man, and ended up somewhere cyber-Biblical. The last few lines were beautifully poetic.
Not to judge the stories only by comparing them to other works. Intertextuality, whether it's intended by the author or happens because the story has influenced subsequent works, enriches my reading experience, and can help in pitching things to other media fans. :)
*Also fascinating to follow some of the conversations that have been going on on LJ/DW surrounding NPR's "100 best" SF/fantasy books list, which,like so many authoritative "best of" lists that don't quite define whether "best" means "most literary" or "most influential" or "most popular" or "most enjoyable" (unlikely) or something else ETA: after making plain that it is a popularity contest /ETA, consists mainly of white American and British men, Zelazny among them. Working through ![[personal profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eruthros's crowd-sourced alternative list promises to expand my SF reading horizons.
.
Finished my John/Radek fic, too, so keep an eye out for that. I hope there are still people around who are interested in SGA rare pairs (and hot hot kink!).
synn for what is likely to be the last time before she moves (from 8 hours away to 2, hurrah!). We wandered through some thoroughly enjoyable local artist galleries, had all sorts of good food, and made ourselves a Neapolitan belated birthday cake: chocolate cake layer, strawberry cake layer, white cake layer, all with slightly different batters, and butter icing with strawberries, finished with a silver metallic spray and purple piping with black sugar pearls at the tip of each peak. By "we," I mean I served as assistant to synn and her ever-growing baking expertise. *cough* While darting back and forth to my laptop to make the AMTDI poem.( pix and links: cake, art, etc. )
One night we tried to watch Plan B, a low-budget Spanish movie about a young man who tries to get his ex-girlfriend back by seducing her new boyfriend, who BTW looks like the lovechild of Gael Garcia Bernal and the dark-haired coworker on Chuck. ( The logic of that was not clear… )
We ended up fast-forwarding through a lot of it and then watching Eyes Wide Open (Einayim Petukhoth), ( an Israeli film about a Hasidic butcher in Jerusalem who falls for the new hired help… ) The younger actor in many moments reminded me of Tom Hardy.
.
On the plane I read a short story collection by Roger Zelazny,* The Last Defender of Camelot. One of the novellas in it, "He Who Shapes," which was very good, would appeal to Inception fans, I think: a psychologist who shapes people's dreams for therapeutic purposes gets caught up in the mind of another prospective dream-shaper and struggles against falling into limbo.
Another novella, "For a Breath I Tarry," which may be my favorite, started out awfully like Wall-E, then shifted into something more like Faust, then veered into Bicentennial Man, and ended up somewhere cyber-Biblical. The last few lines were beautifully poetic.
Not to judge the stories only by comparing them to other works. Intertextuality, whether it's intended by the author or happens because the story has influenced subsequent works, enriches my reading experience, and can help in pitching things to other media fans. :)
*Also fascinating to follow some of the conversations that have been going on on LJ/DW surrounding NPR's "100 best" SF/fantasy books list, which,
eruthros's crowd-sourced alternative list promises to expand my SF reading horizons..
Finished my John/Radek fic, too, so keep an eye out for that. I hope there are still people around who are interested in SGA rare pairs (and hot hot kink!).
