Books! Movies! And Only One More Final!

[osprey_archer]

We tried studying in the library last night.

Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. Way too many distractions—Veni kept seeing people she knew, Dorothea had her iPod, and I found this book called Glorious Eccentrics which has these mini-biographies of female artists and writers.

This is a book with real joie de vivre. You can just hear the author (Mary Ann Cawes) sitting at her typewriter (it’s a typewriter kind of book) ululating with joy whenever she scrawled a new marvelous fact into one of the stories—the biographies really do read like stories, because of the madcap style and because the women chosen are just so—well, eccentric.

One of them, Judith Gautier, once struck up a correspondence entirely in Egyptian hieroglyphs. How cool would it be to write letters in hieroglyphs—never mind I don’t know Egyptian or hieroglyphs—how unbelievably cool would that be?

***

In other news, I now have a Netflix account. It is very exciting.

I have ordered Casablanca and Wonderfalls and I Was a Male War Bride (it has Cary Grant. Anything with Cary Grant is worth it just for the Cary Grant). Also Sense and Sensibility. And Echanted. And To Be Or Not to Be, which was directed by Ernst Lubitsch, who is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

Oh, and! A classic Soviet children’s propaganda movie called Old Khottabych about a genie who gets let out his magic lamp and offers a little Soviet boy gold, except the boy doesn’t want it, and then he introduces the genie to the awesomeness that is the USSR, land of peace! prosperity! and ice cream!

This is a great investment.

Comments

[silksieve.livejournal.com]

mmmmmm Cary Grant!

You got the 1995 Sense and Sensibility, I hope! Because it is so vastly superior to the new tv series :).

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Oh yes--1995 with Emma Thompson. I've heard its very good.

Cary Grant *sighs*. He's pretty in his pictures, but get him on screen and moving and *talking* and he's like a demigod.

[visualthinker11.livejournal.com]

ah, i'm glad you're getting wonderfalls! TELL ME HOW YOU LIKE IT, pretty please. ; )

and good luck with the studying!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Never fear. There will probably be entire reaction posts, where I go "I can't BELIEVE that X went over Niagara falls in a barrel on a dare from Z! And then the toaster ate a sock and started talking about CANNIBALISM! I am SCARRED!"

Because television moves me to capital letters and exclamation points.

I will have to look over your Wonderfalls icons and find an appropriate one. Another way to avoid studying for linguistics! YES!

[visualthinker11.livejournal.com]

those were the best fake plot points i have ever read. no, really. i think i need to write a wonderfalls fanfic now, just so those things can happen...sock-eating toasters, the new threat to americans everywhere.
but, yes, i'm looking forward to the reaction posts. ; )

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Did you ever read The Plant that Ate Dirty Socks?

It was about a plant that ate dirty socks. (There was also a plant that ate clean socks.) They were very active for plants--I remember the boy who owned one of the plants put it on a skateboard so he could move it and it rolled itself right out of the house...

Um. That was a tangent. But if you end up writing that fic you should totally dedicate it to me. :p

[visualthinker11.livejournal.com]

it was a good tangent. i totally have not read this book, but it sounds fascinating. was it a good plant or an evil one (the latter a la little shop of horrors, of course)?

oh, of course i will. heh.
(OR you can watch wonderfalls and we can co-author the wonderfullness. and then we won't need the dedication at all!)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

As far as I can recall it was a good plant, just sort of rambunctious.

I have just received Wonderfalls from Netflix. But I should warn you, I take a loooong time to watch even short things (especially because I'm watching this with friends) and I also have other fics that need tending, so it will be three weeks at least.

[visualthinker11.livejournal.com]

ok, well, have fun watching it, as long as it takes. and obviously let me know when you do watch!