Shopping

It's been a while since my last post. Work's been a little heavy - classes, committees, a seminar or two - but not so much as to justify my laziness in posting.

Anyway, it's also been a while since my last trip to Amazon. One prompt for doing so now was a conversation with a potential Senior Project advisee. Normally, if they want to do something in geometry, I give them a copy of a certain book and ask them to pick a topic from anywhere after Chapter Three - but I'd already lent my copy to another possible advisee! The library didn't have a copy, so I told him I'd order one to lend to him. (It's probably good for me to have two copies of that book, anyway.) So, this morning, I went upriver and ordered that book. I also had decided to buy some more CDs, but instead of seeking out new performers, to get more albums by performers I didn't have much of. The result: I ordered Al Stewart's Past, Present and Future, Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and Sara Bareilles' What's Inside: Songs from Waitress. On top of all that, I downloaded copies of Martha Wells' The Ships of Air (#2 in the "Fall of Ile-Rien" trilogy), Andrea Höst's The Pyramids of London, and Carrie Vaughn's Kitty and the Midnight Hour, and ordered dead-tree copies of Barry Strauss' The Trojan War, Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age, Terry Pratchett's The Shepherd's Crown, and Bill Willingham's 1001 Nights.

I'm still plowing through Lyell and Fustel de Coulanges (although the end of the latter is in sight); I've finished off Andrea Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, P. G. Wodehouse's The Adventures of Sally (amusing; a bit less manic than his usual, though), and Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (short, but very creepy - it reminded me a bit of Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow, which I think is roughly contemporary with it). Current fiction includes a reread of the 1632 books - Ring of Fire at the moment - and Harry Connolly's The Way into Chaos.

Today I have no reason to go onto campus, and I'm feeling very sluggish. I think I might take a nap.

This Time Get It Right

Over at tor.com, there's a wonderful review of the classic Young Frankenstein, in a memorial of the career of Gene Wilder. One of the commenters pointed out something I had never noticed before.

The tragedy of Frankenstein was the scientist's refusal to take responsibility for what he had done: rejecting his "child", causing the creature to become the monster we all remember. The creature was good-hearted, incredibly smart, and lonely; that it became a mass murderer can be laid at its creator's feet. In Young Frankenstein, Frederick gets it right. He approaches the creature (admittedly under duress and after several false starts) with love, and eventually makes it what the original monster should have been.

I never thought of that before. That film, incredibly enough, has just gone further up in my esteem.

(Oh, by the way, Mel Brooks wanted to cut the "Puttin' on the Ritz" scene! Fortunately, Wilder talked him out of it. Good grief, Mel!)