Easy to be worth more than a thousand of mine.

[lady_schrapnell]

Such a great cover - it tickles me every time I look at it. The manly, manly jaw and sharp pointy object so undercut by the stance and wrist limpness... (But is the pose This dagger will be used to pick my nose if necessary - it's my compensation or the more obvious Mention my flaming campness and I'll give you a free lobotomy?

Very interesting read, too - I was babbling to steepholm last night about a few of its oddities, including the fact that Regina, who has 'never had a mother or father' but was owned by a nasty old woman who sent her out begging in the streets of Vinconium, speaks with the perfect, rather formal language Rosemary Sutcliff uses for People from the Past.



This is the more obvious type of happiness - my second completed (all except getting Younger Daughter to choose buttons and then sewing them on) Mrs Darcy cardigan. I'm thrilled to have it off the needles, sewn up and blocked, in large part because I kept making idiotic mistakes which made me sure I need a keeper. There were attempts to get pictures of her wearing it, but she claimed they were all horrible and they were on her camera so I couldn't just ignore her.

Silly, horribly immature pleasure provided by a thread on Ravlery about a new yarn (wrote 'yearn' first time!) called Fannie's Fingering. It *is* a US company, rather than a British or Australian one, and fingering *is* a weight of yarn, but still... Yes - this remains book-related - Fanny Burney - Fanny Price - Fanny Hi... never mind.

Comments

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Where do you get these great userpics? That's wonderful.

Yes, yes, and yes again - I certainly wasn't criticizing Sutcliff's usual dialogue - as you say, whatever you do with dialogue is going to have problems. Oh, but since you opened yourself up for it, and might possibly have escaped my ranting about this before, I'm going to share with you the line from I, Coriander (1660s, supposedly) that caused steepholm and me incredulity, rage and hilarity, in about equal measure: the evil stepmother says 'She be faking it'.

Anyway, it was just this case, with this poor character who'd hardly be able to speak, in all likelihood, let alone speak perfectly. But in general, it is a double problem in the Really, Really Past. This came up in another form with the audiobook version of Kevin Crossley-Holland's Gatty's Tale, which is set in about 1200 - the narrator did the accents for the Welsh, Italians, French and all, and it did cause us a bit of -- discussion. (The 'accents' weren't the author's doing, though he does distinguish for class, which is interesting again!)

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

bogbean made it. I'm sure she wouldn't mind you using it.

That's lovely, like the mad old crone in Blackadder:
BA: Is this the house of the wise woman?
MOC: Arrr...that it be...
BA: "Yes it is", not "that it be"...I'm not a tourist, you know.

I have always wanted to make a film of Margery Kempe. In Middle English. There are (sort of) precedents -- I'm thinking of Jarman's Sebastiane rather than The Passion of the Christ. I think distant distant past is easier, in some ways, though, esp. largely pre-literate past: you can come up with your own idiom (my preference here would be for a neutralish modern-sounding one in which "She's faking it" would be fine, as long as the mores were otherwise right) because there has to be suspension of disbelief anyway, unless you fancy writing in Visigothic or Sanskrit. When you get into periods for which there are texts available for comparison purposes the possibility for disaster increases exponentially. My personal black beastie is pastiche Austen, which is just not as damn easy as you think it is, people.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

My personal black beastie is pastiche Austen,
which is just not as damn easy as you think it is, people.

WORD.