Hey Harmodius, let's play hide-the-sword!

Seeing Les Mis with lady_iphigeneia again, back-to-back matinee and evening on Saturday the 24th. Which should be interesting this time round, because apparently Drew's still doing matinees. (And Daphne will be gone, and Nikki will be on. Yay!) If anyone wants to meet us there for coffee and/or see one of those shows, gimme a holler.

It should also be less bank-breaking this time round, since I got limited-view third-row orch right for the matinee and the cheap seats in the back for the evening show, as opposed to $120 orch center tickets for both shows like last time. And managed to find a bus ticket for $35, yay.

I was originally horribly bored by how dry Paris Between Empires was, but now I'm further in it's become rather entertaining--for a reason the author didn't quite intend. See, in the early chapters I thought his choice of wording and quotes showed a slight, annoying bias in favor of the Restoration and against the Revolution and the Empire, but thought I was reading too far into it. But the further I go, the more I'm starting to realize Mansel assumes his audience already knows for a fact that constitutional monarchy is awesomesticks, revolutions are embarrassing, and Buonaparté ate kittens for breakfast. And then he went and dedicated an entire chapter to how much Britain pwns. In a book about France.

...yeah. The factoids are interesting, but maaaan.

Strangers, on the other hand, is all sorts of shiny. In addition to being full of interesting and useful (if annoyingly undated; I don't want to end up using 1880s slang in a story set in 1830!) information, and giving me the "god, I know that feeling" warm-and-fuzzies a lot, it dedicates some of its space to completely smacking down Proust and the notion that homosexuality didn't exist before it was named and identified as such. Not enough to be annoying, or make it primarily a historians-sniping-at-each-other polemic instead of an actual useful book, but enough to make its point. And the more I read, the more I become convinced that all the Grantaire/Enjolras subtext in the Brick is not only a valid interpretation of canon, but entirely intentional on Hugo's part. mmebahorel and I were talking about this a bit when we got coffee after seeing Into the Woods last night; how the allusions Hugo uses provide a completely different view on some of the Amis than what's said straight-out in the text. I mean, Hugo doesn't come right out and say they were boinking each other's brains out (or wanted to), but when he goes and refers in quick succession to Antinous, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaestion, Nisus and Euryalus, etc. etc... there's no way he wouldn't have known he was basically going through the checklist of code words for homoerotic subtext. (Cf. Jean Prouvaire, who looks like a total pansy unless you look up his reading material.)

Hey Harmodius, let's play hide-the-sword!

Seeing Les Mis with lady_iphigeneia again, back-to-back matinee and evening on Saturday the 24th. Which should be interesting this time round, because apparently Drew's still doing matinees. (And Daphne will be gone, and Nikki will be on. Yay!) If anyone wants to meet us there for coffee and/or see one of those shows, gimme a holler.

It should also be less bank-breaking this time round, since I got limited-view third-row orch right for the matinee and the cheap seats in the back for the evening show, as opposed to $120 orch center tickets for both shows like last time. And managed to find a bus ticket for $35, yay.

I was originally horribly bored by how dry Paris Between Empires was, but now I'm further in it's become rather entertaining--for a reason the author didn't quite intend. See, in the early chapters I thought his choice of wording and quotes showed a slight, annoying bias in favor of the Restoration and against the Revolution and the Empire, but thought I was reading too far into it. But the further I go, the more I'm starting to realize Mansel assumes his audience already knows for a fact that constitutional monarchy is awesomesticks, revolutions are embarrassing, and Buonaparté ate kittens for breakfast. And then he went and dedicated an entire chapter to how much Britain pwns. In a book about France.

...yeah. The factoids are interesting, but maaaan.

Strangers, on the other hand, is all sorts of shiny. In addition to being full of interesting and useful (if annoyingly undated; I don't want to end up using 1880s slang in a story set in 1830!) information, and giving me the "god, I know that feeling" warm-and-fuzzies a lot, it dedicates some of its space to completely smacking down Proust and the notion that homosexuality didn't exist before it was named and identified as such. Not enough to be annoying, or make it primarily a historians-sniping-at-each-other polemic instead of an actual useful book, but enough to make its point. And the more I read, the more I become convinced that all the Grantaire/Enjolras subtext in the Brick is not only a valid interpretation of canon, but entirely intentional on Hugo's part. mmebahorel and I were talking about this a bit when we got coffee after seeing Into the Woods last night; how the allusions Hugo uses provide a completely different view on some of the Amis than what's said straight-out in the text. I mean, Hugo doesn't come right out and say they were boinking each other's brains out (or wanted to), but when he goes and refers in quick succession to Antinous, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaestion, Nisus and Euryalus, etc. etc... there's no way he wouldn't have known he was basically going through the checklist of code words for homoerotic subtext. (Cf. Jean Prouvaire, who looks like a total pansy unless you look up his reading material.)