(no subject)

[flemmings]

Cripdom is back with a vengeance, alas. I can't even complain of the bone rub: it's when the bones don't rub together click-clack that my knees yell at me. We won't even talk about hip flexors and such.

Reading Wednesday? Why not?

Last finished?

Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
-- the trouble with reading Nancy is that one has read Jessica, so one knows that all these mad! happenings are just anecdotes from the Mitford family history. Plus a little schadenfreude re: Diana, I'm assuming. The takeaway is that Lord Redesdale ought to have been shot, but whether before or after breeding I couldn't say.

Also for crap's sake, U and non-U Nancy, in what kind of society does it matter if people say 'notepaper' and 'mirror' and 'mantlepiece' instead of writing paper, looking glass, and chimney piece respectively? This isn't the 19th century, and wasn't even when you were writing 90 some years ago.

Reading now?

Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater
-- bad enough to be born in the bush of ghoxts, much worse to have the ghosts inside you. Or whatever they are. I wait to find out, not certain that I will. Wakaru hito wa wakaru, I think.

Pamela Dean, Tam Lin
-- the classic, now available as an ebook from the library. Feel obligated to read this fast, since a million other people are queued up behind me, which of course makes me stubbornly not want to read what I'm told everywhere is a classic. Tam Lin has never been a favourite archetypal story of mine, not since Diana Wynne Jones' head-hurty take, but maybe this will be more accessible.

Next up?
-- there's a Hilary McKay on its way from the library which should settle my stomach

Comments

[oursin]

I think Nancy (like Decca) had a somewhat ethnographic interest in these idiosyncratic quirks of Propah Usage - the moaning about Fanny picking up 'common' expressions in the process of actually getting an education (unlike her female cousins) is from Uncle Matthew, after all. People do tend to misunderstand Nancy's Nobless Oblige as being prescriptive rather than descriptive, and actually revealing how very weird the aristos are.

Nancy, one should recollect, was the family member who (quite properly) grassed up her sister Diana to the Government as a raging Fascist and foaming pro-Hitler Nazi at the outbreak of WWII. She may not have been as flaming red as Decca but was a fairly deep pink.

[flemmings]

But Uncle Matthew is a Good Egg! He puts time and energy into the Land! He isn't just making (eww) money like those horrible brewers bankers do! Yes, alright, I take your horse's mouth word for it, but I always had the impression that Nancy's ethnography became, or at least was taken for, prescriptive in very short order.

Did she really grass up Diana? I'd thought Diana and Oswald's support for fascism was already notorious, and surely some gov't dep't was keeping tabs on them.

[oursin]

I think there's an ambivalence between appreciation of Uncle M as a lingering survival of a fine old English eccentric type, and the sense that in any other station of life he'd have had child welfare people/educational authorities calling on him.

The authorities had immediately placed Sir Oswald in custody, but out of chivalrous sexist attitudes had not assumed that his wife, pregnant (or possibly already with a very young infant) was also a rabid and dangerous Nazi.