no subject

Job hunting is so needlessly stressful and unpleasant. But it proceeds apace; interview this afternoon!

I'm starting so many seeds this spring. I want to fill out the garden, but, as I hope our time here will be coming to an end soon, I don't want to spend a lot of money on it this year; so, as many starts as I can get going! Between new starts and volunteers, I'm getting comical quantities of lupines. The opposite of a problem, lol.

I need to write about recent reading. I've got behind there. RN, I'm trekking through James Meek's "To Calais in Ordinary Time," which I picked up for plague reasons, but am most interested in because I want to see where the formalist experiment with period prose is going, and how Meek is going to pay it off. The writing is simple but truly archaic. Time spent reading untranslated Chaucer, and reading French, are helpful in smoothing the experience.

My dad and sib got a room for eclipse viewing, and I'm invited to roll along if desired. IDK... there's been a lot of schlepping about since my parents started splitting up, and these two-sisters-and-one-parent excursions keep being Weird and A Lot. Maybe I'm sticking with my newer family unit. B's 19th birthday coming up shortly before the eclipse date, and I want him well fussed-over, since his ties with his biomom have definitely been fraying over the last year.

Dune 2 review

Went to see the second part of Dune the other day, after water pipe issues led to jackhammers in the street on Sunday afternoon.

On the one hand, yeah, that's a science-fiction film. In an early shot, uniformed people shift seamlessly from walking to grav-boot flight up the sheer face of a cliff, an absolutely breathtaking example of SF's ability to disturb the comfortable with grace and beauty. The fashion, the space-ship design, and the heraldry aesthetics are all on-point, unique, and worth seeing.

While I don't have a lot of time for Léa Seydoux on the whole, her Margot Fenring was pretty darn hot.

And, in a similar, see-it-on-the-big-screen way, Paul's first ride on a sandworm is like the most exciting GoPro footage ever sent back by a wilderness athlete. Watching it is like watching people sail alone around the world, with the real power of nature made visible: the small human making their way through/with that power, fearful but competent.

On the other hand, these films aren't catching all of Herbert's Dune, not by half. I miss the planetary ecology, the worm biology, Alia, and the religious awe. It's not fashionable to explore the pleasures of belief; but imo that's a big core of Dune's textual erotics, and the story gets less sexy when you center disbelief, instead. This Paul feels like a fake messiah, not like a boy becoming possessed by his own godhood, and it's the latter pleasure/horror that I think really hooked me into Dune in the first place.