![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateI'm beginning to feel a bit more human again, despite still thinking odd thoughts (as one does, while sick) and dreaming distressing dreams; the one I recall most involved trying to climb up the outside of a strange sandstone brick skyscraper built on an extremely steep hill in search of cell phone reception to call ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grauwulf, as we'd crossed paths and I'd mistakenly gone off to a rather boring SCA event without him because he'd gone out to get coffee. In the end, the rationales of the dream (and there were many) are completely unimportant, and what remains besides a long string of "because"s is my vivid mental image of crawling up through a steep maze of square-cross-sectioned ribs of giant red-block sandstone with my phone open in one hand because the hill was too steep to climb, and waking up damp and feverish in the dark as I came to a passage where I'd have to be crawling inside a honeycombed block of the building and sense reasserted itself to the extent of asking me what I thought I was doing, and how I was planning on getting down without getting myself killed. And then I drank some tea, and went back to sleep, to dream in great detail about attempting to transport a variety of old pictures, art supplies, and a book shelf up a small winding trail at an old girlscout camp on a rickety dolly of the casters & 4 bits of plywood sort.
This sort of thing tends to throw one's mental processes askew, particularly when not tempered by a great deal of Real life to outweigh it. And my phone had not been turned on since Sunday evening; there will be no reality to intrude here. Well, besides the mail, and my mother occasionally coming by to ask things like whether I want anything from the grocery store...
Instead, I began by signing up for twitter (which I have not been using, particularly, and have been contemplating whether I wish to be merely trivial, or trivial and poetic) in what appears to be becoming a tradition of joining new internet phenomena at the beginning of each year, and then when the computer got to be too much for me (something about the lighting, I think) I went on to read the Elizabeth Bear book that came to me as a holiday present. I'm fairly certain that I haven't read anything else by her, and I had gotten the impression that she's considered one of those novel and innovative writers. Perhaps it was just the particular subject matter (the book is Blood and Iron which is an arthurian expansion/fae trapped by human iron-magic/all things repeat in cycles/ballads sort of plot) but I felt as if I'd read about three quarters of it already. It wasn't bad, and perhaps my reaction is as much my odd current state of mind as anything else, but it was strange.
And this from someone who wants to punch people when they say "There are no new ideas." In this age of iPods and cell phones, how can you possibly say that? There aren't a lot of *really* new ideas, and the less context something has, the less likely other people are to find it attractive or interesting, and so a great deal of refuge gets taken in new and interesting combinations of older traditions, new angles, new names within the traditional frameworks. And that is fine, and not a problem, but I don't often come across things that read as so completely familiar to me, but where I can't pin down, "Oh, it reminds me of this." It's as if the author managed a smooth composite of fifteen or twenty other works that I've read bits and pieces of or cousins to, which is, I suppose, not inappropriate, given her premise of faerie as a legend-based construct. I'm trying to decide whether to track down the sequels or not; at present my only particular curiosity is whether my strong suspicion that there is something decidedly odd about the king's horse has anything to do with the author's interpretation of her plot.
Meanwhile, my tea has grown cold, and I should attend to things such as dinner, and the fact that everything but the pillows and a few bits of recently mended clothing have leapt from my couch and are now scattered about the floor.
grauwulf, as we'd crossed paths and I'd mistakenly gone off to a rather boring SCA event without him because he'd gone out to get coffee. In the end, the rationales of the dream (and there were many) are completely unimportant, and what remains besides a long string of "because"s is my vivid mental image of crawling up through a steep maze of square-cross-sectioned ribs of giant red-block sandstone with my phone open in one hand because the hill was too steep to climb, and waking up damp and feverish in the dark as I came to a passage where I'd have to be crawling inside a honeycombed block of the building and sense reasserted itself to the extent of asking me what I thought I was doing, and how I was planning on getting down without getting myself killed. And then I drank some tea, and went back to sleep, to dream in great detail about attempting to transport a variety of old pictures, art supplies, and a book shelf up a small winding trail at an old girlscout camp on a rickety dolly of the casters & 4 bits of plywood sort. This sort of thing tends to throw one's mental processes askew, particularly when not tempered by a great deal of Real life to outweigh it. And my phone had not been turned on since Sunday evening; there will be no reality to intrude here. Well, besides the mail, and my mother occasionally coming by to ask things like whether I want anything from the grocery store...
Instead, I began by signing up for twitter (which I have not been using, particularly, and have been contemplating whether I wish to be merely trivial, or trivial and poetic) in what appears to be becoming a tradition of joining new internet phenomena at the beginning of each year, and then when the computer got to be too much for me (something about the lighting, I think) I went on to read the Elizabeth Bear book that came to me as a holiday present. I'm fairly certain that I haven't read anything else by her, and I had gotten the impression that she's considered one of those novel and innovative writers. Perhaps it was just the particular subject matter (the book is Blood and Iron which is an arthurian expansion/fae trapped by human iron-magic/all things repeat in cycles/ballads sort of plot) but I felt as if I'd read about three quarters of it already. It wasn't bad, and perhaps my reaction is as much my odd current state of mind as anything else, but it was strange.
And this from someone who wants to punch people when they say "There are no new ideas." In this age of iPods and cell phones, how can you possibly say that? There aren't a lot of *really* new ideas, and the less context something has, the less likely other people are to find it attractive or interesting, and so a great deal of refuge gets taken in new and interesting combinations of older traditions, new angles, new names within the traditional frameworks. And that is fine, and not a problem, but I don't often come across things that read as so completely familiar to me, but where I can't pin down, "Oh, it reminds me of this." It's as if the author managed a smooth composite of fifteen or twenty other works that I've read bits and pieces of or cousins to, which is, I suppose, not inappropriate, given her premise of faerie as a legend-based construct. I'm trying to decide whether to track down the sequels or not; at present my only particular curiosity is whether my strong suspicion that there is something decidedly odd about the king's horse has anything to do with the author's interpretation of her plot.
Meanwhile, my tea has grown cold, and I should attend to things such as dinner, and the fact that everything but the pillows and a few bits of recently mended clothing have leapt from my couch and are now scattered about the floor.