meme-o-cratic

from maevah (ahem) i mean lady heather:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Her Eminence the Very Viscountess Sharon the Encompassing of Larkhill under Porton Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

wtf does that mean?

do over, do over!

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Her Grace Lady Sharon the Philomath of Tempting St Mary Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

ok, i give up.

that friday meme thing again

wearing, planning, reading...

1. wearing: i'm wearing jeans, a bright pink sweater, and my glasses. no shoes.

2. planning: this weekend (today through monday) to spend as much time as possible--i.e. either as much time as there is, or as much time as we both/each can stand, whichever happens first--with my sweetheart.

3. reading: Mockingbird by Sean Stewart and The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau. i've read selections from de Certeau's book before--mainly the introduction and "walking in the city," so i'm deepening my familiarity with his ideas about tactics vs. strategies. it's really interesting stuff. in a nutshell...and in terms of "the city" (one of his objects of study): "strategies" refers to the planned city, the city laid out according to a rational order, as a structure to "contain" social life; while "tactics" refers to how individual people and the masses actually use the city--the chaotic and anarchic practices of the lived city. you can transfer the same logic to distinguish between any other imposed order vs. how the space delineated by that order is actually inhabited and lived. therein lies revolutionary potential.

as for the sean stewart book, i recently read another of his books, Perfect Circle, which i had picked up at random from the university bookstore. it was fabulous. his stuff is shelved in the sci-fi/fantasy section, though i would be hard pressed to say whether it's sci-fi or fantasy. it's neither, really; more like magical realism. anyway, i'm enjoying his work a lot. i'm only on page 35 of Mockingbird, but already it's an absorbing tale. the subtitle of this book is "a novel of voodoo, sisters, and dangerous gifts," if that helps to shed light on its subject matter at all, and it's set in houston, tx in the present or recent past. what i love about both this book and the other one (he's published a bunch of others, too, and i'm planning to read all of them) is how everyday magic and the spirit-world are to the characters. the attitude is like, "i know this seems crazy, nobody believes in this stuff, but here's what happened..." it's a treat to read someone who draws such complex, interesting, and believable characters, too.