Elaby's LiveJournal - 57 Academics

I was going to post about something. What was it? Oh yes! I had a cool dream the other night. And I was going to post about Amber. They are mostly unrelated.

( The dream wasn't quite as cool as if it featured Amberites, but it was pretty cool. )

Okay, Amber. I finished re-reading the first five books today (Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, if you haven't heard me squee about them before) and the last line, the last paragraph, gives me waves of goosebumps every time I read it. I love this series so hard.

( Babbling, mostly about Deirdre, actually )

Been rereading the second half of the Amber series, since I reread the first half somewhat recently and then caitirin read it, and she's planning to read the second half sometime as well.

( Amber ranting/babbling. Er, spoilers. )

Love this icon. Never get to use it.

When are things NOT Corwin's fault? Only once or twice, I think...

Anyway,
I had this very strange dream that I was hanging around with a group of
people, who were apparently my extended family, at a summer home they
had. It was at a beach town. The people I can remember were a bunch of
little miscellaneous kids, one boy who was about 9, and a girl who was
17 or so with whom I was hanging out. I must have been younger than
her, though. The kids wanted to go out and go sliding (on the grass
O.o;;) but I was staying inside, sulking, because Benedict (of Amber)
was the patriarch of our family and he wouldn't give me my set of
Trumps, even though I was of age. I think it was traditional to give
them to me at the end of my stay there, but I wanted them now. This was
because I wanted to talk to Puck with them.

Puck was friends
with some of my older relatives, like the 17 year old girl, who had
their Trumps already. He popped in to see us, and he told me that he
wished I had my Trumps so he could contact me whenever he wanted. He
looked pretty human, not like any other Puck I've seen, and he had sort
of Dios-like
hair that was blue. I really wanted him to like me, so I wanted my damn
Trumps. Anyway, I was complaining about this to the younger boy, and he
said that Benedict had a laptop that had all sorts of information that
could help me on it. He took it out of Benedict's desk, and it looked
kind of like a large triangular prism-shaped calculator. I said that
I'd better not fool with it, and he kept pressing the on and off
button, which I think was the only thing he knew how to work. I told
him to put it back, and he said he didn't know where it went (even
though he just took it out). I was annoyed, and said that if he left it
out, Benedict would know someone was fooling around with it, and he
said I wouldn't tell on him because I was in love with him. And when I
said I wasn't, he started crying. e_e So in order to make him stop, I
had to tell him that I liked girls. Then he was happy and all "I have a
secret!"-like. Silly boys.

Weirdness plus ^_^

Found it. And found that the version in my text is DIFFERENT! Gasp!

Corwin version, as I will forever remember it... also known as the version I found online after getting the hints from Amber:

"Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?"

Text version:

"Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely lotering;"

Corwin version:

"For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song."

Text version:

"For sideways she would lean, and sing
A fairy's song."

Corwin version:

"She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild eyes
With kisses four."

Text version:

"She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gaz'd and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes--
So kiss'd to sleep."

So
anyway. I want to put this in my paper... but it's already long enough
and doesn't exactly follow my thesis as straightly as I'd like, because
I diverge about how DAMN COOL it is to go look up all the old meanings
of the words and what they might possibly mean in context... so I don't
think I should add more about a differing version ^^;;

Amber is STILL feckin' awesome for alluding to this.

Tiiiiiired O_o

I was reading Amber (again) and there was this part... where Corwin meets a woman in this desolate place where there are lakes. And she's first described as having wild eyes, and she says, "You must be hungry, Knight at arms." She gave him food and wanted him to wile pleasureably away the hours that remain (end of the world's coming, don't you know, you can see it coming over those mountains) and when he says no, she doesn't seem to mind. And Corwin responds, "I must confess that I fully expected you to invite me to a private party which would result in me alone and palely loitering on the cold side of some hill sometime hense were I to accept."

*quotes* "Then I closed her eyes with kisses four, so as not to break the charm, and I went and mounted Star ((that's his horse)). The sedge was not withered, but he was right about the no birds. Hell of a way to run a railroad, though."

At this point, elaby goes "... O_o Who's 'he'?"

So.

La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats
(1795--1821)

( Read more... )

Damn. Amber is SO COOL. As if they didn't have enough neat things already. Random Keats allusions.

Why is it, when it comes to works of fiction, I always go after the
characters who would eat me for breakfast? Or, more appropriately in
this case, who would let his dogs eat me for breakfast.

I'm going to dissert on a minor character in the Amber series now. Feel free to ignore this ^_^

I
like Julian. The first time you see him described (ingeniously, by the
way... the characters in this series are all drawn on the Trumps of a
set of tarot cards, and the main character has no memory at the
beginning... so he goes through the cards when he first comes upon
them, and presto, you have a perfectly unique and awesome way to
catalogue each person's looks and general personality. It's brilliant.
Wish I'd thought of it. The amnesia thing is absolutely genius in
itself to introduce the immensely complex storyline.)

Momentary
break in dissertation... I never knew I liked Hostess cupcakes. I do.
Mm. *scrapes frosting out of middle and eats chocolate cake*

Anyway.
Julian. Yeah, the first thing you hear about him is that he's got long
black hair and blue eyes, one of the few nine brothers with long hair,
and he also has this really shibby armor (he would SO kill me for
calling his armor shibby... *laughs*) that looks like white porcelain,
lacquered, I think with scales... and the first thing Corwin (main
character) remembers about him is that (1) he HATES him, and (2) he
once beat him in his favorite game, causing Julian to throw a glass of
wine at him, "shattering a near legendary control." Paraphrasing, of
course. Yeah, that bought me right there.

And I like the name Julian. And near-legendary controls always get me. So. Julian.

He
also has dogs. Yell hounds. Which scare me. They're big and fearsome
and they can tear a car to itty bitty pieces... or the would have if
Random didn't keep shooting them. He also has a HUGE horse called
Morgenstern. Which is not a Shakespeare reference that I know of, but
it makes me think of one... so I like it. Julian guards and generally
inhabits the Forest of Arden, which IS a Shakespeare reference, but I'm
pretty sure he got it from somewhere, too. And Arden is... is... I
wanna live there. It's a forest. It's huge. It's pretty. It's got
Julian.

I'm very coherent tonight, aren't I?

I wanted
this to be coherent, too. Because Julian deserves that. He's very
complex. Damn, they're ALL complex. Because... okay. One of the
brothers is called Caine, and he isn't very nice either, but when
Corwin comes back after a long long long time and then some more time,
he finds out that Julian and Caine had been palling around together.
Which surprises him, since he didn't think Julian HAD friends. And I
think Julian was only friends with Caine to the extent that Julian can
BE friends with someone... which, luckily, was probably about the
extent which Caine could be friends with someone.

Then Caine
dies. Slit throat. And Corwin is framed. The only reason he can find to
justify why it's not Julian (his main guess... since they hate each
other) is that he was friends... "friends"... with Caine. And Corwin,
having spent hundreds of years on our Earth, has been softened up and
would like to think that no one is such a miserable sop as to feign
friendship with someone and then kill them. Which is what Fiona (one of
the sisters) proposes... of course, that's Fiona. Who has good reason
to be pointing fingers elsewhere *cough*

But the main point of
my dissertation was Julian's reaction to all this, to the meeting that
was called after Caine died and things were discussed and another
brother was brought back by means of the aforementioned Trumps, which
you can transport people through, and subsequently yerked by one of the
pullers-through. Once the group of them decided that it must be one of
their own who was behind everything, Julian said something to the
effect of wanting to be the interrogator if they found out who it was -
and wanting to, afterwards, be allowed to slit their throat.

They
proceed to argue about it for a while, and then they agree not to kill
whoever is behind everything if they turn themselves in, but to exile
them. Julian will only agree to this if whoever did it wasn't
personally responsible for Caine's death. They humor him.

My own
little take on this might be slightly in error. I lean towards the
opinion that this first comment, about the interrogating and
throat-slitting, was an outburst... and Julian doesn't like those.
Corwin mentions, quite often, that Julian dislikes showing strong
emotion. So, in order to make up for that - and, probably more
importantly, because he saw the opportunity to do something that would
make himself look better - he started the bit about having to add
conditions to the no-kill-only-exile agreement. The entire family is
very conniving, self-interested, totally mistrustful of one another.
Well, almost totally.

But that's Julian, in my head. And
there's going to be more speculation as I read these books this second
time. I like this character, and all of them, because they are
unashamed (at least, in the way they are written... neither they nor
the author make any excuses for them) of their bad qualities. Julian IS
a prick. It's very obvious. But he's not JUST a prick, and that's why I
like him... that's what makes these books so damn good.

Going to leave you with a couple quotes ^_^

First, a conversation between Corwin and Julian that made me laugh:

Corwin: "Your words are ill-considered."
Julian:
"Not so. I considered every one of them. We spend so much time lying to
one another that I decided it might be amusing to say what I really
felt. Just to see whether anyone noticed."

And... something that made me think of the way RC, Bethany, and I write... ^_^

Bill,
a human on Earth, to Corwin: "I've a peculiar feeling I may never see
you again. It is as if I were one of those minor characters in a
melodrama who gets shuffled offstage without ever learning how things
turn out."
Corwin: "I can appreciate the feeling. My own role sometimes makes me want to strangle the author."

Classic.