Wooster on first impressions:

“What ho! What ho! What ho!” I said, trying to strike the genial note, and then had a sudden feeling that that was just the sort of thing I had been warned not to say.
P.G. Wodehouse, ‘Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch’

Felicity introducing herself via e-mail, subject line:

Hello hello!

I have the vapid repetition down to a T. Now if only I were moneyed quasi-gentry and could gad about helping young couples achieve marital bliss (in spite of their uncles) and occasionally biff off to the Riviera for the waters. I wouldn’t even stick at the musical shows and a spot of golf.

It’s not easy being addicted to T-shirts. You wake up in the morning and wish you could get away with wearing a Republicans for Voldemort shirt to work, or wonder what your coworkers’ reaction would be if you sported a picture of Darth Topiary.

But worst, worst of all is the desire for shirts that do not exist. Long have I longed to declare my loyalty to Oceania with one of these:

And just yesterday I imagined for the first time a shirt that would read ‘Saucy English Major (read my subtext)’:

But, you may ask, from whence do these pictures spring, if these shirts do not exist? Excellent question, gentle reader. Long had I also wished for a truly easy custom T-shirt website, that would provide more options than 10 characters in block print across a T-shirt, or uploading graphics to put on plain, boring shirts. Yesterday, wonko found it. It’s called Spreadshirt and it’s more fun than the law allows. Not only can you create your own shirts with varying fonts, colors and placements, but you can use graphics they provide, or upload your own. In addition, you can set up a shop to sell your designs — and you can easily price each shirt below the price a person would pay to recreate it for themselves, so everyone wins.

So here’s where the Faerye sells out: go buy my shirts at Pretentious T-Shirts, my little Spreadshirt store. Fun and games for boys and girls (except saucy English Major boys. Haven’t decided on a look for that, if it’s even [EMeta, you’re the perfect test case. Is there demand?|text|in demand].)

I will doubtless design more ambitious shirts as time goes on and Illustrator’s technological distinctiveness is assimilated into my own. I’ll keep you posted on the progress of my capitalist running dogism. If you like my shirts, you can even help this ol’ dog run.

I have always loved to swim. Here’s a rather poor poem about it (writ long ago and just now ruthlessly edited) if you like that sort of thing:

Used to be a mermaid—
tennis-ball lungs explained, passion for water
Ungainly halfworld thing
flopping fish tail.

My summer house,
chlorinated peanut of family sea
Water caress, the otherworld of stinging sight
Seeing jelly open to firm touch;

Water smoothed — swallowed dolphindive-wise
Plunge
silky kiss, pushing through embrace, face rushed—
Wishing never the lungs’ cry
Pushing feet to scrape on cruel matter,
erupting to air.

gambolling,
twirling otter sports
always tried to overturn, finish the flip…
always stopped when the mirror lapping above came near
when the second split into wrongway pressure
and the sun glinted silvered fear to my eyes
tight coil paused
and floundered back upright
Never turned into the blinking mirror.

I used to swim in Grants Pass, in that bowl of sunshine cupped in blue-firred hands. My cousins had an oblong pool with a dangerous, heterogeneously moistened slide; years of experience swimming; layers of muscle. All I had was sheer exuberance, but I would stay in, indulging that exuberance, until my eyes were layered with mists of chlorine and my fingers were somehow both raw and numb from their pale convolutions.

For some reason, I hadn’t swum in a long time until this weekend. Those cousins have grown up and their parents have moved away from the pool. My supply of swimsuits has run thin…out, even. This weekend — spent, coincidentally, in Grants Pass — I needed one anyway, so I hit the tag-end of several clearance sales (heavens forfend one should postpone buying a suit until early July!) and picked one up, just in time to swim in the warm, shallow hotel pool that night.

I had forgotten somehow just how much I loved it, how much the touch, the sensation of flying, the freedom appeals to me. It seems sometimes that it is my element (that or a library full of bathtubs — with typical geeky inconsistency I belong anywhere but here!), that I could bask in it forever (or at least until I accidentally imagine sharks.) I managed, for the first time in my life, to do flips underwater without chickening out, though I can’t do a backflip that doesn’t end in a strange contorting frontflip, chlorine up my nose, or both. I did handstands, raced, exulted and curvetted and emerged with red, veiled eyes and a happy, tired heart.

Somehow I hadn’t viscerally realized that my apartment complex has a pool until I spent today with a layer of longing. I came home and indulged that layer, took my exercise in the pool instead of on my be-Niked feet. My muscles are still singing softly of the effort that ‘effortless’ element demands, and my mind is so full of soft blue lappings that I feel sure I shall dream tonight of the sea….

The following are NOT WORDS.

• thru
• impactful

Okay, some dictionaries appear to show ‘impactful,’ but when even Microsoft Office does not recognize your bizspeak buzzwords, they are, in fact, not okay.

Also, when you use the word ‘tickle’ for ‘automatic reminder,’ it sounds dirty.

The other day, I was ambling about the workplace about my various tasks, when suddenly I was brought short by something I saw before me on the carpet. It was a piece of wooden plank, broken diagonally along the grain on one side, so that it came to a point. It was, unmistakably, a stake.

Now, this is an area where pallets have been known to rest on their weary travels, so I thought it was just an amusing coincidence. Thought so, that is, until I went to the grocery store a few days later. As I swanned down the frozen food aisle, I glanced idly at the Ben & Jerry’s. There, nestled among the pints, was the austere form of yet another stake.

Last time I heard, Ben & Jerry were not making Splinters ‘n’ Cream.

It was then that I realized my destiny, what the mysterious stakes are trying to tell me. I’ve been Chosen. I’m a vampire slayer.

I’m not sure when the Watcher will show up to take me in hand, but I’m excited about some aspects of my new duties. For one thing, I bet Slayer toughness negates asthma, and I don’t think I’ll ever need to count calories again in my life! There is something to be said on the negative side there; I am pretty long in tooth for a new Slayer, and not particularly naturally athletic, so it’s probably going to be a very short life. But hey, I always said the appealling thing about action and survival movies was the elegant simplicity of the goal, right? Now my life has elegant simplicity. I can get behind that.

I may have ruined the whole aeons-of-secrecy thing by blogging about it, but I think I can make that redound to my benefit. Namely, I think as soon as the Watcher shows up I’m going to rope together a meeting with Nike and ask them to sponsor my Slayerdom. I mean, no one knows by what unearthly office Buffy continues to turn up in brand-new designer clothing all the time, even when she constantly trashes it, right? I have to look after my own apparel needs, and I’m thinking an endless supply of stylish activewear sounds good. Not to mention a great boost for Nike Women’s Fitness. If you have a spokesmodel who can lift motorbikes, and the competitor has…three stripes… where does that leave them?

I don’t know how much time I’ll have to blog in my new life as a Slayer, but I’ll try to keep you posted until I go out in a blaze of glory. For the moment, I have to run…I think there’s time for coffee before I save the world.

Those in the know may find it humorous that I am only now reviewing Master and Commander, the first in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series; I am, after all, nearing the close of The Nutmeg of Consolation, the fourteenth. Some O’Brian nut even suggested, based on the author’s having written all 20 books as one long novel, that I should crack on like smoke and oakum and keep the reviewing to myself until I could review the entire work (or should I say oeuvre?).

However, such a review, if compendious enough to do its subject justice, might break the back of the internet, so I will proceed to review, or perhaps simply muse upon, Master and Commander.

It is simple to state in the baldest terms what this book is about. It’s set when the British Navy was chivvying Napoleon in the world’s oceans, and concerns Jack Aubrey, a hitherto disappointed first lieutenant in that navy, and Stephen Maturin, an even more disappointed physician and naturalist. As the title implies, Jack, eating and drinking himself into moderate debt whilst he awaits his first command, does receive that command; and I spoil very little by saying that Dr. Maturin is convinced to come aboard as ship’s surgeon. The novels could hardly be called ‘The Aubrey-Maturin series’ if they merely bumped into each other in the street once and met no more, or if one killed the other in a duel in the first few chapters. The book follows the fortunes of their first voyage together.

Simple enough, in theory, and stripped of the more exciting elements of that voyage in order to keep them a delightful secret. But what any bare description of the matter of the books fails to convey is the richness; of character, of detail, of reality. These are painstakingly researched books which do not seem dry; books full of specialized detail which do not seem didactic; books which recreate a long ago world with men who belong to it, and do not seem alien or archaic. In some ways the burden of learning and detail is heaviest in this book, for most of us have a sad dearth of naval knowledge or merely the dusty remnant of what we gleaned from our voyages with Ishmael long ago. However, Dr. Maturin — who never, despite his preening, truly becomes an experienced sea-dog — is in precisely the same state of ignorance. As he is enlightened, so are we, and by the time the weathergage truly comes into play, we have at least some idea of what a weathergage may be.

As for the rest, the characters are, as I said, vivid; to begin with, perhaps, Maturin has a little more depth and focus — all the more natural if you consider Maturin has a great deal in common with his creator — but I assure you that if you acquire a taste for O’Brian and read on, you will find that Jack Aubrey has more to him than wine, women, and naval genius. The secondary characters are evocative sketches which, in many cases, fill in and become familiar and beloved as the books progress.

The third class of characters, one might say, are the ships, the sea, the creatures of the multifarious world in which the ships and sea strive, clash and reconcile. These are just as vivid, especially the sea, which occasionally flares into prominence and fills a page with glorious description, leaving the reader gazing around the static, enclosed world in which she reads, confused by the sudden lack of glinting waves and white-scrubbed deck boards, and by the sudden silence after the delighted song of the wind in the sails and shrouds.

Beyond the simple outline I gave above, I think Master and Commander is about fortune and greatness; the way in which our deeds are determined not only by our merits but by the people we happen to meet along the way. Jack is, there is no doubt, a tactical genius, a thoroughgoing seaman and a bold, energetic fighter; but without Stephen’s counsel, tact, knowledge and quiet interference, some if not all of his potential would never have come to fruit. Stephen is brilliant, resourceful, subtle and, frankly, a badass. But without Jack’s impetus to entrain him back into the world, his vigor, directness, and his intense ability to live in a single moment, Stephen would have wasted away in his poverty, fatalism and melancholia. This is one of the great friendships, by dint of which both friends are raised above themselves, brought closer to their ideal potential, enriched and bettered. Even while Master and Commander whisks us away to a vanished world, it inspires us to look about ourselves, and recognize, if we are fortunate enough to have them, such friendships, such partnerships.

Master and Commander, stellar as it is, is only the first movement of the concerto, the first statement of the theme. The visceral excitement of a sea battle will return again in various forms, as will the dry and raucous humor of the doctor and the crew respectively; but they will be joined by political intrigue, personal tragedy, love, discovery and triumph. Tide waits for no man! Come aboard, and waste not a moment!

Bottom line: O’Brian’s writing is literary to the point of shivers; exciting to the point of 3 am bedtimes; funny to the point of laughing raucously in the echoing vastness of the Nike cafeteria. The first treasure in a great gleaming trove.

This post contains mild spoilers for Buffy: the Vampire Slayer Season Seven, I suppose, but much larger implied spoilers for Buffy Season Six. And not those good Spoilers who run around in a purple cowl writing crimefighting ‘Dear Diary’ entries and being slaughtered by unfeeling comic book companies.

Wonko and I, avid Buffyvores though we are, are having significant trouble making it through Season Seven. We stalled for months at Episode 14 until trustworthy friends told us we had stopped just where it got better. Episode 15 did not seem noticably better to us. The characters still seemed less rich; the dialogue less funny, intelligent and layered; the plot rather slapdash and less rife with meaning and implication than it was once wont to be. Even the fabulous acting seemed to be taking a breather. I think I really viscerally know what “phoned in” means now.

All this I had remembered and expected. When Dawn is the most engaging and intense character on the screen, that’s a sad state of affairs. But what I had managed to suppress, just a little; to forget JUST a little; was HOW MUCH I HATE KENNEDY.

Kennedy is, for those of you who have been successful in forgetting and will now curse my name for reminding you, one of these Potential Slayers swanning about Chez Summers in Season Seven. She has thrown herself at Willow and managed to hit at last. I wish she’d missed and hit the Hellmouth instead.

Among the key attributes of the Kennedemon:

• She’s a poorly socialized bitch and we’re supposed to think it’s cute, or perhaps that that is what a strong woman looks like. Constantly mouthing off ineloquently on topics you have no real idea about and abusing your apparent Senior Potential status to play drill-sergeant and lap up the sweet, sweet power is not feisty, and it’s not funny.
• The relationship with Willow seems forced to me. Not only is it poorly supported by the writing and the thinly-drawn character of Kennedy, but it totally lacks on-screen chemistry. I wince with disbelief whenever they are together, and wonder whether the actress playing Kennedy wants constantly to reassure us, the viewing audience, that she is not a lesbian, no sirree. Not a lesbian. See the lack of any feeling or natural warmth in this scene? Totally straight.
• On the basis of this stiff young relationship, she is weirdly possessive of Willow. Sorry to break it to you, sister, but you’ve been dating for three weeks. All these people have shed blood and averted apocalypses together. Maybe they are closer to Willow than you are.
• Maybe I’m forgetting something after my months-long break, but why is she in the Slayerette gang now? Kennedy drills the other Potentials and bosses them around. Buffy says “Potentials upstairs” and Kennedy stays. Does snogging a main character make you a Scooby? Cuz I’m sure one of those other girls is legal enough she could throw herself at Xander if she knew it would get her more lines and a better chance at longevity.
• By the nine muses, her acting! She reminds me of the more mediocre turns I saw in school plays growing up. “Now I say my line, now I’m s’posed to turn and put my hand on the doorknob, then I look ‘thoughtful’, then I leave. I remember to do it all in the right order, so I am a thespian!” She manages to imbue a two-dimensional character with one-dimensionality.

In short, ladies and gents, Buffy Season 7 is, so far, better than many things on TV. It’s rather like drinking the ice-diluted dregs of a Coke; it still has a savor of delicious sodie-pop, but ultimately just makes you wish you had some real, full-strength Coke. That alone would be sad, but quite within the natural order of television. However, someone seems to have hocked a glistening loogie into that dilute ur-Coke, and that loogie’s name is Kennedy the Power-Hungry Cardboard Girl.

Before some of you (say, for instance, my sister) begin to complain that my 1.5 sentence blurb on Batman Begins did not contain sufficient detail, I shall write a real review.

I had high hopes for this Batman movie, based in no small part upon the simple fact that it was inspired by Batman: Year One by Frank Miller, which is probably my favorite Batman story ever told. Year One is an intelligent, believable, slightly noir story about Bruce Wayne becoming Batman. Batman Begins is an intelligent, believable, not quite so noir story about Bruce Wayne becoming Batman. I was not disappointed.

The first step to making a serious Batman movie seems to be to fill it with serious actors. This was a fabulous idea. Christian Bale, being a classically trained badass, played both Bruce Wayne and Batman to perfection, and was perfectly believable in both. Michael Caine’s presence, and perhaps the rough edges of the working-class accent he used for Alfred, made that character, the dubious, critical, highly moral ur-parent, have the importance and power he does in the comic books. Liam Neeson was fabulous beyond measure, and I think perhaps Christopher Nolan played off the fact that the last role in which the general audience saw him was Qui-Gon Jinn. Gary Oldman made a wonderful Gordon; tense, moral, but aware of how to play the game. He even looked right, but maybe anyone would with that moustache.

I was really dreading Katie Holmes, both for her own sake and because I am rather sick of new love interests being trotted out for Batman every time there’s a movie, as if to say, “No, he’s totally not gay! Cuz, look, GIRLS!” However, I was pleasantly surprised. The character was not a dixie-cup damsel, was played just fine, and fit intimately into the plot.

The second step seems to be getting an intelligently written script which crams in just enough character-building and dialogue of pith and moment without overwhelming the viewer. The script plucked out specific themes from the Batman mythos - fear, most prominently - and wrote a totally unified, tight script around those central concepts and emotions. This is a Batman movie that feels like it was written by an English major.

And everything else? The dressing, the action, the fun? The props, the gadgets, all the Bat-trappings were beautifully believable, letting you suspend just the right amount of disbelief. The city? As Frank Miller wrote, “Gotham City was cold shafts of concrete lit by cold moonlight, windswept and bottomless, fading to a cloud bank of city lights, a wet, white mist, miles below me.” It was kind of like that. The action? Exciting and badass and scary. He treated Batman, from the point of view of the thugs, like the monster in a monster movie. That is, after all, the point.

Were there things I didn’t like? Sure. I wasn’t 100% pleased with the Waynes, or with the seminal Crime Alley scene, and the music was cookie-cutter and forgettable. Batman did one thing I thought was not in character. But the rest of the movie was so fantastically awe-inspiringly shiveringly beautiful that I quite simply did not care about the few things I didn’t like. I was, to put it mildly, riveted and thrilled.

The history of the Batman movie franchise has been not unlike one of those VH1 specials about a young band. Young franchise shows early promise, makes a lot of money, has experimental phase, loses sight of its identity and spews out several slickly-produced but horrifically dumbed-down albums that the original fans abhor, and breaks up. In the last act, the band gets back together; older, wiser, more worldly and more subtle. The music means something. Here’s to a run of new albums, guys. Keep rockin’ on.

Bottom line: 9.5 out of 10. Best Batman movie ever made; emotionally true, viscerally exciting, thematically cohesive and resonant. The .5 is for not grabbing me by the music center.

Retraction, 2008: After rewatching and years of distance, I must tell you: Katie Holmes was not forgivable. Only being high on a good Batman movie led me to let her slide the first time. She clashed with the film on every level, from the visual (as I said elsewhere, she’s “about as noir as Hello Kitty”) to the emotional (not one, but TWO toddler-slaps for your friend who was planning on committing murder? Puhleez.). She’s so bad she distracts me from the good, which is why I am so happy that they’ve replaced her for Dark Knight.

They made a Batman movie with Batman in it.

Really. BATMAN.

I think I’m getting old before my time. Evidence:

• Amount of time spent discussing comfortable shoes with mother in past three days: 17 minutes
• Estimated price of groceries (frozen lunches, yogurt, etc.) accidentally left on counter to spoil on way to work in morning in the past three months: $20
• Number of prescription drugs in purse this morning: 4
• Estimated number of times exclaimed ‘Heaven to Betsy’ in past three months: 36
• Number of chapsticks mislaid in past three days: 3
• Estimated number of times bookbag or other item left in car upon reaching work, cubicle on leaving work, friend’s apartment upon leaving, et cetera, in past three months: 10

If we take these highly scientific figures and add them to my natural age (24+17+20+4+36+3+10), we discover that I am 114 in absent-minded decrepit old-fashioned years. No wonder I keep doubling back to check that I locked the car and counting my parcels before leaving a ladies’ room.