"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
I was worried, for a little bit, that today would be as slow and boring as last week, and it did get off to a kind of rough start. But soon enough it picked up, at least in terms of work to be done — and which, moreover, could be done — and it was nice to actually feel I’d accomplished something by the end of it.
I tried to watch some of the Perseid meteor shower late last night, but cloud cover — and what was probably not the best vantage point anyway — meant I didn’t see anything. (Beyond, y’know, clouds.) It’s okay, but I keep hearing such wonderful things about them and yet don’t think I’ve ever seen them for myself.
I didn’t sleep terrifically after that, for whatever reason, and it took a little while this morning to get Sunday firmly under my feet.
The crossword puzzle wasn’t much of a challenge this week, though clever enough. After lunch, I joined my weekly writing group and came up with this:
“Why are you so afraid?” the woman in the mirror asked.
The old witch stared back, anger coiling in her throat. She choked back what she was tempted to say, held back the rage knotting in her fists. Fury would not serve her well here, and she would not be goaded by this bothersome spirit.
“I am not afraid,” she said after a moment. “And you would do well to remember your place, djinn, lest you wish to gather dust in the tower for another thousand years.”
“I meant no disrespect, my queen,” said the golden-haired face hovering in the glass. Her face, reflecting all the beauty she had lost, showing none of the age and wear that ran like dusty rivers across the visage she now wore. The spirit dared mock her with this image.
“Then show your true form,” she spat, “and tell me why the girl yet lives. She ate of the poisoned apple, and you said — ”
“Which formula did you use?” the djinn asked.
A swirl of mist clouded the mirror, grayed it over like thin frost on a windowpane, then was just as quickly gone. The face was no longer the witch in her stolen youth, but was now the featureless, stony blank of the djinn’s true form — or what it had claimed was its true form. It had claimed many things, hadn’t it? Told her secrets of the dark crafts, spoken of prophecy and revelation, shown her the key to that meddlesome girl’s downfall. And yet where had it gotten her? The girl had not died, and she, the queen, was now a hag, hunched-back and broken, caught in this glamour, in no way the fairest of them all. She should have left the mirror where she found it, listened to the servants’ warnings rather than the riddles and rhymes so favored by the mirror’s sole inhabitant.
But the girl… It was bad enough that she should vie with the queen for her father’s attention, but that her beauty should be said (in some corners) to rival the queen’s own? No, that was intolerable. And that stupid huntsman had done nothing, had spared the girl’s life, bloodied his axe on a stoat or wolf rather than the girl’s slender neck. And the girl — her step-daughter, she thought with some revulsion — had escaped into the woods. And she lived. If the djinn could promise to undo all that, then what other choice did the queen have?
“What formula?” she asked. “The very one you spoke of, in the old books. I spoke the ancient spell, and she ate from the apple, but all she does is sleep.”
“Ah,” said the djinn. “Just another lesson learned.”
The ending doesn’t quite work — I was rushed trying to squeeze in that final sentence prompt — but I had fun with it.
Afterward, we went to see The Bourne Legacy…whose ending also doesn’t quite work, and which doesn’t do anything too remarkably. But what it does, it does intelligently, and I think it’s a solid B-minus.
A nice enough Saturday. I went for a pleasant walk and this evening watched American Psycho, followed by an episode of Blake’s 7. Both weren’t bad.
That’s all, really.
This whole week has been…I don’t want to say bad, because it hasn’t even risen to that. This week has been pretty much nothing at all, like a placeholder more than anything else, a week in which, quite honestly, the most I accomplished was finishing listening to an audiobook. This week was almost comical in its levels of blah, and I’m really glad to be done with it.
I don’t know what it is about this week. Maybe it knows that next week, and even the week after, are going to be considerably busier and it’s over-compensating. But oh man has there ever been nothing to write about this week.
I finished listening to It finally this afternoon. As I said here, it’s not a perfect book — it’s too big, in length and subject both, for anything like that — and it maybe is a little too long in places. Also, some of the characters — okay, Beverly mostly — get a little short-changed if not outright abused.
(There is, however, a nice moment nearer to the end when King takes what seems to have been his forgetting a character for several long chapters, and in fact maybe even confusing him with another character, and turns that into a feature. That the characters are interchangeable actually becomes somewhat important to the plot, and it’s a moment when you can maybe see the craft of the writing at work: King turning a first-draft mistake into an asset. Of course, it’s possible I’m just imagining that, and he had the whole thing planned out from page one. But, having read enough of King’s thoughts about writing, I don’t think that’s the way he works.)
Anyway, I really did enjoy revisiting it. I thought Steven Weber did a really excellent job reading the book, and the parts I hadn’t remembered well — I read it when I was a teenager — were some of the best parts.