Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-01-14 06:49 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-01-14 06:49 pm
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The return of the Annotated Brick!
Had my 20th birthday on Friday. (One more year, one more year... the US has the most back-asswards drinking laws.) Does this mean I'm not allowed to see Spring Awakening and enjoy it anymore? *g*
I got a giant pile of books for Christmas, but birthday was quality over quantity. So I got a really nice oversize ceramic mug with a built-in strainer and a lid, which means I can make looseleaf tea by the cup without having to break out the teapot. And--I love my mother forever for this--my very own shiny copy of Maurice Allem's annotated Les Misérables. Or in other words, the one with all the footnotes, commentary, and deleted scenes. All the rough-draft fragments I put up on the website were from a copy that is currently languishing in the Simon's Rock library 400 miles away; my last act before I left that godforsaken school for good was to photocopy about fifty pages' worth of footnotes and then return it to the library, but even a casual page-through reveals tons of things I missed. (Joly's "I swore to go through fire, not water," for example, was originally "So we have a choice to make between water and wine.")
Strange to think that the semester from hell was two years ago. There are things from that time that I'm still bitter about, things I haven't talked or posted about--at the time I couldn't see anything but the individual problems piling up, so I had no idea what a nasty situation I was in, and by the time I realized how badly I'd been fucked over it was too long ago to comment. And one of the only things keeping me sane at that point was spending hours in an ill-lit dorm room poring over the tiny print of that book with a pair of drugstore reading glasses, typing it up onto the computer and trying to translate it with my rusty high-school French.
One of the things I found on a random page-through:
Victor Hugo avait d'abord songé à faire connaître au père de Cosette, qu'il avait appelé Lebotelier avant de l'appeler Tholomyès, le mariage de son enfant. On a trouvé, dans le dossier des Misérables:
« Nous croyons devoir informer M. Gustave Lebotelier, avoué à Évreux, que sa fille, l'enfant de Fantine, s'appelle maintenant Mme la baronne Telbon, possède vingt-cinq bonnes mille livres de rente, et demeure rue du Hanovre, No. 17, au premier. Un citoyen honorable peut avouer et remplir les devoirs de la paternité vis-à-vis d'une personne ainsi placée. »
I'm imagining the look on his face, and it's priceless.
I got a giant pile of books for Christmas, but birthday was quality over quantity. So I got a really nice oversize ceramic mug with a built-in strainer and a lid, which means I can make looseleaf tea by the cup without having to break out the teapot. And--I love my mother forever for this--my very own shiny copy of Maurice Allem's annotated Les Misérables. Or in other words, the one with all the footnotes, commentary, and deleted scenes. All the rough-draft fragments I put up on the website were from a copy that is currently languishing in the Simon's Rock library 400 miles away; my last act before I left that godforsaken school for good was to photocopy about fifty pages' worth of footnotes and then return it to the library, but even a casual page-through reveals tons of things I missed. (Joly's "I swore to go through fire, not water," for example, was originally "So we have a choice to make between water and wine.")
Strange to think that the semester from hell was two years ago. There are things from that time that I'm still bitter about, things I haven't talked or posted about--at the time I couldn't see anything but the individual problems piling up, so I had no idea what a nasty situation I was in, and by the time I realized how badly I'd been fucked over it was too long ago to comment. And one of the only things keeping me sane at that point was spending hours in an ill-lit dorm room poring over the tiny print of that book with a pair of drugstore reading glasses, typing it up onto the computer and trying to translate it with my rusty high-school French.
One of the things I found on a random page-through:
Victor Hugo avait d'abord songé à faire connaître au père de Cosette, qu'il avait appelé Lebotelier avant de l'appeler Tholomyès, le mariage de son enfant. On a trouvé, dans le dossier des Misérables:
« Nous croyons devoir informer M. Gustave Lebotelier, avoué à Évreux, que sa fille, l'enfant de Fantine, s'appelle maintenant Mme la baronne Telbon, possède vingt-cinq bonnes mille livres de rente, et demeure rue du Hanovre, No. 17, au premier. Un citoyen honorable peut avouer et remplir les devoirs de la paternité vis-à-vis d'une personne ainsi placée. »
I'm imagining the look on his face, and it's priceless.