Guilt meme, from resolute

[selenak]

CULINARY GUILT: Chocolate. As with most of the population. How can you resist chocolate? Or, in another understanding of the phrase "culinary guilt": I always feel slightly guilty about the fact I can't cook when most of my cousins and friends can...

LITERARY GUILT: Still haven't read Tolstoi. Neither War and Peace nor Anna Karenina nor the Kreutzer Sonata, all three of which I really want to read. Damm it. Also, if you mean guilty pleasures: the Star of the Guardians novels by Margaret Weis. Which is a shameless/clever/use word of choice thing using the basic Star Wars: A New Hope set-up (young hero, mentor gets killed, quippy mercenary, Dark Lord who used to be one of the good guys before he turned, noble lady imprisoned) and spins it in a different direction, making the dark lord and the lady of an age and giving them an intense love/hate relationship, and has Weis' usual religious hang-up and very questionable politics (instead of an Evil Empire, we have an Evil Atheistic Republic where previously there used to be a Not Ideal But God-fearing Monarchy, and our young hero is the destined king and brings back the monarchy, don't you know). Also, she sucks at translating Latin. ("...et cum spirito tuo" doesn't mean "and may his spirit be with you" but "and may (the lord) be with your spirit", woman! After Vatican II gave us mass in our native languages, you have no excuse for not knowing that, if you're using part of a formula that belongs to the responses of the community during Catholic mass) And? I still love those books and cry my heart out over Derek Sagan (that would be the Vader equivalent) and the Lady Maigrey (that would be Leia, if Leia weren't his daughter but his age and if he had this telepathic bond with her and they had betrayed and rescued each other a couple of times and...) every time.

A/V GUILT: Currently? I'm trying to get into The Prisoner and it just doesn't work. I expected to fall for it, given that I like my British tv classics and my surrealism, and several people whose judgment I very much respect are fans, but after three episodes, I'm still just going "well, so?" and "neat use of Portmairion".

MUSICAL GUILT: I have been known to visit Andrew Llyod Webber musicals repeatedly. And to buy the cds for same. And not just the three classics he made with Tim Rice, so...

CELEBRITY GUILT: Here I have to stretch, but... after watching The Queen, I thought: if these were fictional characters instead of real ones, I would so 'ship Elizabeth II/Tony Blair...

Comments

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

Oh, Star of the Guardians, how I love thee! Except for the fourth book in the trilogy and even that has its moments! Oh yes, there are a lot of problems, but it's one of those books that just skips straight over the brain and goes for the heart. Or maybe the Star Wars gland, I'm not sure.

I liked that this was her teenage Mary Sue fic, and she dug it up 30 years later and put in all the good stuff. But the teenage love is still there, buckets full of it.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, there are a lot of problems, but it's one of those books that just skips straight over the brain and goes for the heart.

Isn't it just? In theory, I should be so appalled, but in practice I just love it. OMG Maigrey in her silver armour on that moon...

Fourth Book: what I did appreciate, aside from the Sagan part of it, was that she didn't kill of Astarte or made her unsympathetic, which is an all too common easy way out (see the way Frank Herbert wrote Irulan in Dune Messiah - the tv version did a better job of it - or what Alias did with Lauren Reed).

[kathyh]

I'm trying to get into The Prisoner and it just doesn't work.

Doesn't work for me either. J loves it but it leaves me absolutely cold. It just feels to me like a mind-game with no heart or humanity in it.

if these were fictional characters instead of real ones, I would so 'ship Elizabeth II/Tony Blair...

Given the age gap it could be like Elizabeth I/Essex 400 years on. Rash young man keen on military adventures with dour rival waiting in the wings...*g*.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

It just feels to me like a mind-game with no heart or humanity in it.

That, and, well, after two examples you wonder whether there are ever going to be female characters who either aren't traitorous or are at least supreme in their treachery instead of being someone else's tool....

Given the age gap it could be like Elizabeth I/Essex 400 years on. Rash young man keen on military adventures with dour rival waiting in the wings...*g*.

LOL. Well, true, though I was thinking more Victoria/Lord Melbourne with gender, position and age reversed - rising young star falls for dignified remnant of previous age and does not want to give him/her up in the face of adversity...

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

WHich three episodes? If it's the usual first three on the DVDs (Arrival, Chimes of Big Ben, A B & C) then I wouldn't bother if you aren't enthused already.

whether there are ever going to be female characters who either aren't traitorous or are at least supreme in their treachery

Supreme in their treachery - there's Dance of the Dead which has a very scary female Number Two. There are at least two other episodes which I'm not mentioning unless you're willing for me to give away huge single-ep twists.

But the general tendency of the show is towards misogyny by both genre convention and Patrick McGoohan's rather odd attitudes to women and sex. If you've watched The Chimes of Big Ben, the scene of him with his arm around Nadia had to be shot from behind with his real life daughter as Nadia because he felt that as a married man he shouldn't be that close to a female actor.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was (were?) those three.

If you've watched The Chimes of Big Ben, the scene of him with his arm around Nadia had to be shot from behind with his real life daughter as Nadia because he felt that as a married man he shouldn't be that close to a female actor.

*cleans glasses in Gilesian manner*

Good lord. And speaking of Giles, at least I got to see what Roger Wyndham-Pryce was up to in his younger days.*g*

Female No.2, hm, sounds promising. Well, maybe it'll come to me at a later point...

[redstarrobot.livejournal.com]

That story's a bit of a myth; great fun for fans to repeat, but I'm not sure it's true. IIRC, there are other eps in Priz where he's touching women, and movies from a couple years earlier where he's got kissing scenes. I think it's just a nice, salacious bit of gossip, which combines nicely with some residual anti-Catholic sentiments that float about.

[redstarrobot.livejournal.com]

That, and, well, after two examples you wonder whether there are ever going to be female characters who either aren't traitorous or are at least supreme in their treachery instead of being someone else's tool....

There aren't any characters who aren't traitorous or tools. Not one. Everyone, absolutely everyone, is a pawn and without moral high ground; the man who thinks that doesn't apply to him, most of all. It's an incredibly bleak view of humanity.

(But if it helps, yes, there is one Servalan-type character later on.) :)

[sionnain.livejournal.com]

I share this Andrew Lloyd Weber thing with you. I mean, I would rather boil in oil than sit through Cats again (WTF was wrong with TS Eliot? Did he go crazy in the Wasteland and come out muttering about cats?) but I still love Phantom and Evita and singing along with the scores.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

(WTF was wrong with TS Eliot? Did he go crazy in the Wasteland and come out muttering about cats?)

HE WAS MUTTERING ABOUT GRANT MORRISON'S CAT MUFFINS, AND THEN DECIDED TO PURSUE AUTHORIAL SELF-INSERTION. . .omg, that sounds dirty.

What I mean to say is, he was a strange man.

I have never seen anything by ALW, except the movie of Evita, during which I literally fell asleep. In the theater. On the other hand, my high school band once played a medley from "Jesus Christ: Superstar" so i know all the main tunes, but only with madeup words that we inserted to remember the songs.

Umm, yeah, what else. Tolstoi. One of the few world authors I actually have read most of the major works. I like "War & Peace," especially the way old Liev obviously started the book with a huge mancrush on Napoleon, and, by the end, was trying to deny it. The book gets much stodgier and more self-important by the end, but the first third or so -- the battle scene at Austerlitz is amazing virtuoso writing. A lot of his characters are Mary Sue/Gary Stus (either in the way-too-perfect or the self-insert way) and they are usually the ones you want to smack. He writes great self-centered assholes who don't think that they are (Vronsky is my no-good literary boyfriend) and I'm not entirely sure this is intentional. The Kreutzer Sonata is. . .very very strange. It's actually the first thing I read by him and it put me off him for a long time. Yet somehow I ended up reading those two other enormous books anyway.

Finally, I can never think of AK without thinking about Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient: "Madox keeps talking about Anna Karenina. I think it's his idea of a man-to-man chat."

[sionnain.livejournal.com]

The book I like that everyone hates is Crime and Punishment. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to kill someone during the middle bits, ugh, and sometimes I wanted to smack Roskolnikov with a brick, but I still really liked it. I used to read the end, when I was sad. I'm not sure why, though. Maybe it was like, "At least I don't have to wait seven years for my lover to get out of a Siberian prison."

...

I probably missed the point of that.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

I can't finish anything by Dostoevsky. That might be my literary guilt.

[sionnain.livejournal.com]

I hate Thomas Hardy. A lot. I don't know that I feel guilty about it at all, but I'm just saying. That I hate him. A WHOLE LOT.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

Hardy = great poet, crappy novelist. I have nonetheless, read most of his novels, voluntarily, and was just thinking I should read Jude the Obscure. I can't explain it.

[midnightsjane.livejournal.com]

When I was trying, and failing, to get into James Joyce's Ulysses, a friend of mine (who owns a bookstore) said that the only book more tedious than Ulysses was Jude the Obscure. I lost any desire to read it right then!

[selenak.livejournal.com]

You know, it will never stop to crack me up that the program for

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You know, it will never stop to crack me up that the program for <i<Cats</i> lists Eliot's cv like this: "<i>Wasteland</i> blablaaha...nobel prize for literature blabablaha... posthumous Tony for "Cats"...."

[selenak.livejournal.com]

You know, it will never stop to crack me up that the program for Cats lists Eliot's cv like this: "Wasteland blablaaha...nobel prize for literature blabablaha... posthumous Tony for "Cats"...."

[callmesandy.livejournal.com]

I read Anna Karenina and I swear, I've had that copy of War and Peace and been on page 145 for the last, uh, ten years. If I ever pick it up again, I should start from the beginning. And I liked Anna Karenina (which I can't spell apparently) so I feel like I should be able to read it!

I managed to read a number of classics when I was in college, studying in Beijing, since they had all the Penguin Classics editions and I was starved for reading in English, not mandarin. Oddly, most of them were translations: the Tolstoy books and Madame Bovary and the like. I read all of Middlemarch, though, then. Which was only worth it for the last twenty pages, iirc.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

I am awed by you studying in Bejing!

[callmesandy.livejournal.com]

It was six months studying at Beijing Normal University as part of the third year of studying mandarin - I'm very glad I went but it was very tough when I was a wee 20 year old. I went back three years ago and it was fantastic and incredibly changed after 11 years.

And peking duck is still freaking delicious.

[titania-le-fey.livejournal.com]

I loved reading the Kreutzer Sonata.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

*feels even more guilty for not having read it yet*

[titania-le-fey.livejournal.com]

It is a very strange book and very short. Don't feel so guilty. I didn't read it either until I had to for class.