Our Heroine Finds A Literary Meme

I don't know enough bloggers to get meme-tagged, but I saw this literary meme at The Curt Jester and I wanted to play.

Name up to three characters . . .

1) . . . you wish were real so you could meet them.

Tertius Lydgate (Middlemarch by George Eliot)
Tony Last (A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh)
Sydney Carton(A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens)

2) . . . you would like to be.

Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery)
Dorothea Brooke (Middlemarch by George Eliot)
Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare)

3) . . . who scare you.

The Specialist's Hat (The Specialist's Hat by Kelly Link )
The entire Rook family (Like Water Off a Dog's Back by Kelly Link)
Arawn the Death-Lord (Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander)

I didn't do it intentionally, but I notice that every single one of the characters I'd like to meet is a tragic hero, and I know that is because I would want to use my time with each one of them to try to save them: "Tertius, don't marry Rosamund!" "Tony, don't leave Hetton!" "Sydney, you DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS!"

Our Heroine Sheepishly Confesses She has Wandered Off-Track Again

Ok, ok, people! (especially BMT) I know I owe y'all an Iliad post. I know this. I promise I have been reading The Iliad and I have thoughts. They aren't great thoughts, or even particularly interesting, but, such as they are, they are ready to share.

It's just, well, Eifelheim arrived in the mail this weekend, and I thought to myself, "Self, why don't you just read few pages of this, to see if it's any good, and then you can easily go back to the men of Troy?" So I peeped page one, and, I'm sorry, but I can't stop.

Can I tell you why I'm loving it so much? I am loving this book because the author is a master of dramatic tension, in particular, dramatic irony. Seriously, my sense of coming tragedy began with the tone of resignation in the opening monologue.

The reader is made aware immediately (practically from the dust-jacket) that something terrible, genuinely unimaginably terrible, is going to happen to the people of Eifelheim. There's no secret to the fact that whatever it is, it's likely the result of the Black Death and aliens mixing (don't smirk). But, as curious as the reader may be about what exactly the mechanism of the town's destruction is going to be, curiosity takes a back seat to her growing distress over the fate of the characters. Why? Because, so far, each of the inhabitants of Eifelheim is struggling to behave in as noble and Christian a manner as his experience and disposition permits, in confusing and stressful circumstances. Yet the reader knows this same nobility must mean, ultimately, everyone's destruction. Do you know how hard that is to read, and yet, how impossible that is to not read? I keep hoping everyone is going to fly off into outerspace, holding hands and drinking tankards of ale, and yet every page indicates to me that this is just not going to happen. I have never wanted so badly to be proved wrong.

I also am having to read it with a dictionary because the author's vocabulary is ridiculous. This makes me feel first, stupid, and then, smart.

And here's a tip for my readers who are "horrific grasshopper alien" snobs, and so don't give a good dadgum what anyone has to say about "tension" and "tragedy" and "dramatic irony," so long as aliens were used to create them: have you people listened to Neil Finn's, "She Will Have Her Way" recently? No? Then go rock out to it immediately (AFTER you pay your taxes).

Our Heroine Notes Family Differences

Warning! Contains spoilers, the word "weenie" and a brief discussion of quantum physics and string theory. Proceed at your own risk.

Y'all, one of my favorite parts of watching Lost is the emails that fly back and forth the next day between me, my cousin Steph, my cousin Mish and my little brother Ray. We so totally represent a hilarious spectrum of personalities

Email from our heroine (try not to be awed by it's intellectual heft):

Why does every dork on that island have a girlfriend but Sayid, the hottest and smartest of all of them?

Email excerpt from cousin Mish (she's the softy):

...I totally think we learned a lot last night.
First, we learned how utterly hot Sawyer can be when hes in love. I mean, the face he made when he saw Kate was priceless.

Email excerpt from cousin Steph (she likes old-school justice)

I HATE JULIETTE! Sayeed should have killed her when he had the chance. Is it just me but isn’t it strange that no one is making her tell them everything. As soon as I saw her I would have made her spill the beans!

Contrast all of the above with...

Email from my brother Ray (I have known him for more than 30 years, and, nope, I still don't know what to say about this. He's just freakin' awesome, I guess):

Agreed. Jack is so whipped. He sees a blonde and he starts thinking with his weenie. I too wish the Losties would ask more questions, but I’m willing to accept that doing so would put an obvious end to the show. As it is, it’s a TV show people, and we need to keep some mystery through to the end, at least of this season. I think the writers actually do a decent job of throwing us a bone by having the characters at least attempt to ask (via Sayid, who is like the audience’s representative) and then craft some quasi-credible reason for Juliet not to answer yet. We can assume that the other random Losties may have wanted or tried to ask their own questions but have been given the same brush off by Jack and Juliet for now, we just aren’t shown all the question-asking on camera.

That said, I suspect that Juliet may be a double agent. I mean, after seeing what she went through with Ben and her sister, I can’t imagine she has totally forgotten how Ben treated her and I wonder if she isn’t biding her time, doing Ben’s bidding, and secretly playing both sides waiting for her chance to break out or turn the tables. Of course, I still hope she dies a gruesome tortuous death – I’m just telling you how I think the plot may be heading.

It is very possible that Sun’s baby wasn’t implanted, but that has not been stated for sure. It was Claire who was implanted with something that could trigger an illness, so maybe Michele mixed that up. Of course the Others did view the Losties as potential moms for their experiments, so it is quite possible that they engineered Sun’s pregnancy somehow as another control test just like Claires. We must wait and see. In fact, this may be why Juliet is being planted with the Losties...to continue their research on Sun just like Ethan was doing with Claire.

I am starting to think the Island is in some alternate dimension involving quantum theory of strings and wormholes. There may be designated places on the planet where you can walk through larger wormholes into this other dimension, and that is how flight 815, Desmond’s boat etc all accidentally ended up here, and why Juliet must drink the tranquilizer before her “bumpy ride” from Portland. It would explain alot and still be anchored to real accepted modern theories of physics.

Our Heroine Has Admin Privileges

Our heroine is an aspiring grad student, no longer toiling my days aways as a corporate stooge on Wall Street. But when I was in the office, I said and did things very much like Strongbad. Please note, however, that my ideal job involved royalty, couture and smooth, shiny hair. Space whales and pantsuits never factored into the equation.

New Strongbad at work email

Our Heroine Approves this Message

Although our heroine is a Romanist, and therefore someone likely to give the great Herr Luther a massive case of deep-intestinal gas, I must admit the Doktor's onto something here:

Luther at the Movies: Dwight Schrute is America's Only Hope

Our Heroine Wishes You a Joyful Easter

I'll be gone for the Triduum, y'all, and back blogging on Monday. While I'm celebrating great and holy things by mainlining ham and manicotti in Vermont, I leave you a very lovely and appropriate poem by the wonderful John Donne:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Our Heroine Is Like a Big Jam Donut With Cream on the Top

What we mean is, like a donut, her arrival gives us pleasure, and her departure only leaves us hungry for more.

This is one of my favorite Python sketches, in which Oscar Wilde, James MacNeill Whistler and George Bernard Shaw compete with eachother to sling the most outrageous insults at the King of England, whilst wriggling themselves out of offending him. Hilarious (but a bit risque)!