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gogmagogI should not be allowed to go to the library. No, really. Today I checked out a massive indie comic (like 600 pages) called Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson. It was really good, but I totally spent like the last four hours reading it. (Also, though it didn't have a particularly unhappy ending it didn't have a particularly happy ending; it was very realistic, as in "eh, that's life," all about friends inevitably drifting out of touch and all that, but now I'm kinda gloomy and existential.)
Anyway, while I was at the 'brary I also picked up Jill Thompson's Death: At Death's Door, which is basically manga Sandman (it retells the Season of Mists volume from Death's POV). Thompson is best known for the Li'l Endless that showed up in one of the Sandman chapters (I think it was Abel's story in Brief Lives). Overall I liked it - especially Dream as an uptight bishonen; Delirium, Desire and Despair as a magical girl ghost capturing team (with Del dressed as a Japanese schoolgirl!); and Edgar Allan Poe with a crush on Despair. At times it gets kinda overly wacky, but the Endless are flexible enough as characters that it mostly worked.
Also, I officially hate Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Now, not that there aren't many reasons to hate him, but I'm specifically irked by his recent musical The Woman in White. It is, of course, based on the Victorian "sensation" novel (which was, in fact, the first of the sensation novels) by Wilkie Collins, which is quite possibly my favorite Victorian novel EVAR. Anyway, it's only showing in London and New York, but I saw the soundtrack at the library and picked it up. It includes the libretto, which gives a good idea of the characterization and events of the musical.
And it makes me want to strangle Webber (and not just because the music sucks, 'cause it kinda does). Seriously, did the guy even READ the novel? Marian Halcombe is, in my opinion, the best heroine in Victorian fiction, and he RUINED HER.
A quick summary of the plot: Walter Hartright is employed as a drawing teacher by a Mr Fairlie for his daughter, Laura, and her maternal half-sister, Marian Halcombe. Walter immediately falls in love with Laura, and while there are points where you get faint hints that Marian might have feelings for Walter as well, she is completely supportive of their relationship until Laura's father engages her to Sir Percival Glyde, a smarmy baronet. (And even then she's still sympathetic to Walter.) Laura marries Glyde, who with his friend Count Fosco conspire to drive her insane and imprison her asylum while the titular woman in white, Anne Catherick (who knows a dirty secret of Glyde's) dies in her place. This way they get her money without having to kill her, and it's up to Walter and (mostly) Marian to unpuzzle the plot and stop them. It's kinda complicated but pretty suspenseful.
However, the heroine is oddly enough not the love interest, Laura, but her sister Marian. Now of course I knew that Webber would pretty her up a bit - the libretto called her "vivacious but not conventionally attractive," which is a far cry from the namby-pamby Walter's wonderful description of her from the book:
I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural space, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays...The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window - and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!
Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted - never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression - bright, frank, and intelligent - appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete.
Now, I wasn't expecting Webber to put a mustache on his Marian, so I was completely ready to accept the physical makeover. But he's given her a lobotomy as well - he completely changed her personality.
Book Marian is my favorite Victorian heroine because, well, she IS a heroine - she takes action, she's very much a go-getter, and if traditional feminine roles get in her way she mostly just ignores them. Now, I'm not trying to say she's an anachronistic Victorian proto-Buffy, but she's the only one in the novel with any guts and is constantly having to prop poor Walter up, and (for example) she will cheerfully shimmy out onto the roof in the middle of the night to spy on Glyde and Fosco when she's suspicious of them, and does so quite capably. And I didn't read far enough to see if Webber kept that scene in, but I doubt it, because he turns her into a mealymouthed whiny petty pining wimp - basically, into another Laura Fairlie. Which completely destroys everything that made the character so likable - for Christ's sake, Collins had numerous single guys writing letters to him asking to know the identity of the original for Marian, and if so if she'd marry them! (And this is in spite of being described as having a mustache!) And it ends, as in the book, with Walter and Laura getting together, but instead of Marian quite happily choosing to stay with her beloved sister and her close friend, it ends with her being all mopey and "oh noes my man is taken," and all through the early part of the play Marian's all "omg i'm pining why doesn't he notice me instead of my sister" which PISSES ME OFF AUGH.
...er, anyway, I think my rant has gotten quite long enough for today, and I have to make supper, so I'll leave it at that. >_<
Edit: ZOMG BLEACH SOUL SOCIETY DATING SIM WTF
Anyway, while I was at the 'brary I also picked up Jill Thompson's Death: At Death's Door, which is basically manga Sandman (it retells the Season of Mists volume from Death's POV). Thompson is best known for the Li'l Endless that showed up in one of the Sandman chapters (I think it was Abel's story in Brief Lives). Overall I liked it - especially Dream as an uptight bishonen; Delirium, Desire and Despair as a magical girl ghost capturing team (with Del dressed as a Japanese schoolgirl!); and Edgar Allan Poe with a crush on Despair. At times it gets kinda overly wacky, but the Endless are flexible enough as characters that it mostly worked.
Also, I officially hate Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Now, not that there aren't many reasons to hate him, but I'm specifically irked by his recent musical The Woman in White. It is, of course, based on the Victorian "sensation" novel (which was, in fact, the first of the sensation novels) by Wilkie Collins, which is quite possibly my favorite Victorian novel EVAR. Anyway, it's only showing in London and New York, but I saw the soundtrack at the library and picked it up. It includes the libretto, which gives a good idea of the characterization and events of the musical.
And it makes me want to strangle Webber (and not just because the music sucks, 'cause it kinda does). Seriously, did the guy even READ the novel? Marian Halcombe is, in my opinion, the best heroine in Victorian fiction, and he RUINED HER.
A quick summary of the plot: Walter Hartright is employed as a drawing teacher by a Mr Fairlie for his daughter, Laura, and her maternal half-sister, Marian Halcombe. Walter immediately falls in love with Laura, and while there are points where you get faint hints that Marian might have feelings for Walter as well, she is completely supportive of their relationship until Laura's father engages her to Sir Percival Glyde, a smarmy baronet. (And even then she's still sympathetic to Walter.) Laura marries Glyde, who with his friend Count Fosco conspire to drive her insane and imprison her asylum while the titular woman in white, Anne Catherick (who knows a dirty secret of Glyde's) dies in her place. This way they get her money without having to kill her, and it's up to Walter and (mostly) Marian to unpuzzle the plot and stop them. It's kinda complicated but pretty suspenseful.
However, the heroine is oddly enough not the love interest, Laura, but her sister Marian. Now of course I knew that Webber would pretty her up a bit - the libretto called her "vivacious but not conventionally attractive," which is a far cry from the namby-pamby Walter's wonderful description of her from the book:
I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural space, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays...The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window - and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!
Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted - never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression - bright, frank, and intelligent - appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete.
Now, I wasn't expecting Webber to put a mustache on his Marian, so I was completely ready to accept the physical makeover. But he's given her a lobotomy as well - he completely changed her personality.
Book Marian is my favorite Victorian heroine because, well, she IS a heroine - she takes action, she's very much a go-getter, and if traditional feminine roles get in her way she mostly just ignores them. Now, I'm not trying to say she's an anachronistic Victorian proto-Buffy, but she's the only one in the novel with any guts and is constantly having to prop poor Walter up, and (for example) she will cheerfully shimmy out onto the roof in the middle of the night to spy on Glyde and Fosco when she's suspicious of them, and does so quite capably. And I didn't read far enough to see if Webber kept that scene in, but I doubt it, because he turns her into a mealymouthed whiny petty pining wimp - basically, into another Laura Fairlie. Which completely destroys everything that made the character so likable - for Christ's sake, Collins had numerous single guys writing letters to him asking to know the identity of the original for Marian, and if so if she'd marry them! (And this is in spite of being described as having a mustache!) And it ends, as in the book, with Walter and Laura getting together, but instead of Marian quite happily choosing to stay with her beloved sister and her close friend, it ends with her being all mopey and "oh noes my man is taken," and all through the early part of the play Marian's all "omg i'm pining why doesn't he notice me instead of my sister" which PISSES ME OFF AUGH.
...er, anyway, I think my rant has gotten quite long enough for today, and I have to make supper, so I'll leave it at that. >_<
Edit: ZOMG BLEACH SOUL SOCIETY DATING SIM WTF
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-14 02:59 pm (UTC)Well, yeah, you have to. He's mainstream. Fight the Man!
I read about three-fourths of The Woman In White after seeing a miniseries on "Masterpiece Theater." I didn't finish it, because I got bored with Wimpy Walter and the whole fuss around Laura. Don't get men wrong; I really felt horrible for what happened to her, but I just thought there was too much time devoted to portraying her as traumatized. Then again, I am a product of a completely different era, so I'd have to say I'm heavily biased.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-14 07:47 pm (UTC)Plus y'know the whole Marian/Laura femslash subtext, or am I like the only one who sees that?