kadharonon

I've spent so much time yelling about Le Morte d'Arthur to people I know in real life as I try to read this thing, because it's ridiculous. But the people I know in real life are getting tired of it, so instead, I'm going to go through and post each chapter of this thing with incoherent annotations, because that might be the only way I get through reading it.

I'll probably be posting these semi-frequently over on the tumblr blog shitpost-arthurania, and will probably try to import them here on occasion, possibly in bulk batches of chapters, whenever I feel like manually formatting the HTML.

I am not a scholar of Arthurian Legend, just someone with a broad but very shallow knowledge of it. I am not an English major. It is likely that I will stop every sentence or sometimes every few words of this nonsense in order to yell. But if you'd like to join me for that journey, well, continue on below the cut!

( Come with me into the land of being furious with Uther Pendragon )

Reading Le Morte d'Arthur continues, but very slowly, because all of these people are... just not very bright. These knights keep going on quests where they make the most boneheaded decisions possible, often when there's someone else there warning them that they're making a boneheaded decision.

Igraine remains at the top of the list of wronged Arthurian women who deserve to go on a killing spree, but honorable mentions include:

• The nameless mother of Sir Tors, who was probably raped by Pellinore, who followed up this indignity by stealing her dog
• The nameless woman Sir Tors stole a dog from, who knew dog-stealing was a trait that's nature, not nurture
• The nameless damosel who was waiting to go on a quest with a guy who was then slain by an invisible knight, who then went on that quest with Balin instead, and was (a) forced to bleed a silver dish full of blood for a random woman they met on the way, and (b) then died when the castle the invisible knight was in fell on her head.
• Lionors, an earl's daughter, who Arthur knocked up and then apparently just immediately forgot about

I'm sure there are others, but so few of them have names that they all kind of blend together.

In other news, I'm back on a tarot deck kick and considering another set of major arcana for the podcast Waiting for October. I need to comb through and figure out if there's enough support there for a full major arcana. But while I was thinking about that, my brain presented me with. well. are you ready for this.

Hexwood major arcana.

I've only got thoughts for a few, but so far:

• Vierran as the Fool
• Mordion as the Magician
• Hume as the Hanged Man, maybe?
• Reigner One as either the Devil or The Emperor
• The Bannus as The Wheel of Fortune (unclear whether this should be separate from Yam)
• Mordion and Vierran as the Lovers (obviously)
• (Maybe Arthur's the Emperor? He's not a huge presence outside of Vierran's head for most of the book.)

Anyway, got to think about that one a bit more the next time I do a re-read, since I'm not entirely certain there are enough prominent characters to support a mostly-one-character-per-card style major arcana, but it might come close if I made some of the cards specific scenes instead. Like, the scene where they're trying to figure out what salve to fix Hume's eye with is very much The Magician.

I keep telling myself I want to start using Dreamwidth more, so time to actually buckle down and start using Dreamwidth more. I suspect part of what's been stopping me is I just in general have less to blog about—my days are pretty samey, most of the time, and I've been re-reading things more than reading new things—but listening to the podcast Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones has gotten me all hyped up again to go read some of the things she grew up with and had as reading material as a young child instead of books for, y'know, children.

In particular, I want to:

• do a dive into Arthurian Legend, since I've been existing at a "broader knowledge than the average joe off the street but puddle deep" level of knowledge there since I was a teenager
• read the rest of the Mabinogion, since we really only covered Pwyll in my Medieval Welsh course
• read the assorted Icelandic sagas we didn't cover in my freshman year Scandinavian Mythology course 
• read the rest of the Canterbury tales, I've only read a few of them
• read the Faerie Queene

Anyway, currently reading Le Morte D'Arthur and no one has ever deserved to go on a murder spree as much as Igraine. I anticipate finding a new woman who deserves to go on a murder spree approximately every 50 pages of this sucker.

And it is terribly annoying.

That is all.

I’m probably not going to write a lot of smutty bits in the Kit and Edie stuff, but I am playing with the idea of writing a bit of the awkward parts of these two sexually-inexperienced 30-somethings trying and failing to have good sex.
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This follows roughly after the last post. I don't have a name for this story yet, though I've been posting worldbuilding nattering and random character and story stuff over on my tumblr under the tag "kit and edie".

Kit frowned at the unconscious woman in his sitting room. He was used to people reacting with shock and disgust when they first saw his face, but this was, as far as he knew, the first time a woman had taken one look at him and immediately fainted. A lowering reaction, and one he had not been prepared for. He knew he was ugly, but was he really that terrifying to behold?

She seemed very young. He had taken her for one of Charles’ daughters at first, had wondered if it had really been that long since he had last seen his friend, though that impression had lasted only a moment. Charles had only been married for thirteen years; while the birth of his first daughter had followed his wedding with what some thought was unseemly haste, this woman was far too grown to be that child.

“Who is she?”

“Edie,” Charles said, as if it should mean something to Kit. “Trev’s wife,” he added when Kit gave him a blank look.

Ah, yes, Trevor had gotten married, hadn’t he? How long ago had that been? Kit gave Charles’ companion another look. She was not much to look at, truth be told. Taller than him—which was never saying much—and slim, girlishly so, with an unremarkable face framed by a smooth and severe bob. The only attractive thing about her was the perfect little bow of her top lip, and even that he suspected owed more to cosmetic enhancement than any natural charms she might possess.

He realized now how misleading that slender girlishness was. He had taken her as a very young woman at first, perhaps no more than twenty, and had been ready to judge Charles’ brother severely for it. But a closer look revealed weary little lines creasing her face, the sort that only came with both age and deep exhaustion. This was a woman barreling towards middle age with the rest of them, and as worn down by life.

“And why is she here?”

Charles looked at him as if he were stupid. “Couldn’t stay on the road any longer tonight,” he said, stating the obvious. “Figured you wouldn’t mind us here. ‘S what Great Houses are for, isn’t it?”

“Trust you to remember that old custom when you need something.” Kit sighed. Oh, he had no doubt that one of the housemen was already making up bedrooms for these two—Hiram was efficient like that, and would have seen to it after stowing their car—but it had been a long, long time since Langford House had seen any guests, and Kit feared that bed linens and blankets in good enough condition for guests were in short supply. They would probably have to settle for slightly shabby, with not-too-many holes. “And that wasn’t the question I was asking. What brings the two of you to this part of the country?”

Charles’ cheeks flushed, a clear sign he was about to lie. “Doing Edie a favor. She and Trev had a bit of a tiff,” he said, shrugging his large shoulders. “He decided to teach her a lesson and ran off. Last we heard of him he was somewhere up this way, carousing.”

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This is an extension on some noodling I was doing earlier today that might be where this whole thing begins. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll actually be able to write this entire thing, but suspect I'm going to get bogged down some time in the middle, as Kit and Edie spend a month snowed in in Kit's Extremely Possessive house.


Kit Langford was not the sort of person who entertained. The house he lived in, large and old and inherited, had been built to host visitors, but these days most of the furniture lay beneath dust-cloths to ease the workload of his limited staff. If he could have rid himself entirely of that house and the expectations it brought with it, he would have. But Langford House was not so easily thrown off as that.

Some days, he wondered what would happen after his death. He had heard of old houses driven mad when their families died out for good, and the great workings that were necessary to lay them to rest. Langford House was not as old as some, but he was the last of the family line. Unless some by-blow came to claim it, Langford House would have no guardian, and the government that was so eager to keep him in place would likely have no recourse but to destroy one of the last Great Houses in the country, for the safety of all.

Even if he left it, it would still be his. A Great House devoid of its guardian could neither be safely leased nor sold to anyone not of its bloodline. So for now, he was bound to this place, by blood and inheritance, the last Langford of Langford House. And because he had never been the sort to go out into society, society did not come to him.

It was easier now than when he had been a child. Letters and telegrams had given way to telephone service; slow travel by carriage to railways and cars. He could conduct the business of maintaining the more liquid parts of his inheritance from a distance, and could demand that others came to him if they wished his company.

Not that anyone ever did, of course.

Langford House found it disappointing to so seldom be put to the use it had been built for. The Langford who had laid the foundation had had a large family; fourteen children, a half-dozen of whom made it to adulthood and produced children of their own. Langford House had been filled to the bursting in those days. But plague and war had taken their toll, until all that was left was Kit.

He thought that perhaps those long-ago Langfords would have given the whole business of creating a Great House up as the folly it was if they had known it was all going to end with him.

Because Kit Langford was never going to have a child of his own.


And here are some doodles as I try and figure out what Kit and Edie look like. Well, I already knew what Edie looked like; Kit's a work in progress.

This started as a piece of fanfic, but is so far from the source material that I started trying to file the serial numbers off... and promptly lost interest in writing more after I got through a few small chunks of it. But there are still some things I like about it. The main characters are now named Manfred and Hippolyta.

An introduction to Manfred as a small child, circa 1940-something:


There had always been stories about the castle. Manfred had heard them from his parents, when his parents still lived. He had heard them from other students in school, whispers of ghosts, of lights seen in the middle of the night, of pale figures moving. The more foolhardy among his peers had dared each other to go there late at night, though he thought that none of them had ever actually been brave enough to do it.

The only person he had never heard the stories from was his sister. Renate had always laughed when he’d come to her with a new story, laughed and told him there was nothing there to fear but crumbling stonework… and if he knew what was best for him, he would stay away, and not risk injuring himself where there would be no one to find him.
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Manfred meets Hippolyta:

Manfred glanced at his phone again. The last text from Renate’s friend, Hippolyta, said that she was on her way to meet him at baggage claim, but he couldn’t spot anyone nearby who looked anything like the photo Renate had shown him. Not that he would have expected her to look exactly like the photo—Renate admitted freely that it was from a party with a formal dress code and almost a decade old now—but the Black woman in the photo gave such an impression of glamorous abundance that she must surely stand out from a crowd, even if her hair and makeup and clothing were different.

“You Manfred?”

He jumped and turned around. The woman who had just spoken was short—she barely came up to his chin, if that—and dumpy, and dressed in the sort of baggy clothing he expected from a teenager… and, he realized on a closer look at her face, she was almost certainly the woman from the picture. “Hippolyta?”

She made a face. “Your sister still refuses to use anything but my full name, huh? I prefer Lee.”
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An amusing interlude in the kitchen about feeding habits, once Lee's figured out that Mani's a vampire (which takes approximately 30 seconds after she gets him into her apartment):


“Could I, uh, get you something to drink? If you drink things that aren’t blood, that is,” Lee added in a rush.

“Do you have milk?”

“Nope. Afraid not.”

Manfred sighed. “Then just a glass of water. I have some dried milk in my suitcase. Not as good as the real thing, but...”

“Wait a moment, I’ve got some half-and-half. For my coffee. Would that do?”

Manfred clapped his hands together, looking gleeful. “Oh, very well, if I can warm it up a bit.”

Lee poured out what was left of the half-and-half into a mug. Hardly a cup’s worth. “Will this be enough?”

“I will want to follow it with some of the dried milk, but it will be much better than just dried. Thank you.” He kept himself at a cautious arms length from Lee and the silver rings she’d jammed on each finger as he picked the mug up off the counter. She watched for a moment, amused in spite of her own caution with him, as he popped it into the microwave and watched it heat up with the rapt gaze of a predator.
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Sometime after they've been living together for a while, when Mani accidentally gets caught outside after the sun comes up:


Lee looked up, startled, as Manny slammed the door of their apartment closed. The sun had been up for a couple of hours at this point, and the day was blazingly hot, so she had assumed that he was already home and safely tucked away in his bedroom.

He stumbled into the living room and tried to fall onto the couch, but he must have misjudged the distance; he caught the edge of a cushion in his fall and wound up slumping to the floor instead. His face and arms—all of his visible skin—were flushed a sickly-looking pink.

Lee stayed the impulse to rush to his side long enough to pull some cold packs out of the freezer. “Jesus, Manny. You sunburnt?”
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Reading through some old NaNo/Camp NaNo stuff for anything I want to work on, and found this conversation which I quite like even if the rest isn't salvageable. Context is an unattractive but extremely wealthy woman in her 30s who has never been married who has been trying to convince a man to be her lover:

"I have some caveats."

"Certainly. I have no wish to make this an unpleasant experience for either of us. You should feel free to make whatever demands are necessary for your comfort."

"Very well. Number one, then, is that I am incapable of intimacy with a woman I am insufficiently acquainted with. We would need to spend at least a few weeks getting to know one another."

"I shall send you my schedule."

"It's that simple?"

Priscilla shrugged. "For me it is."

"Very well. Number two is that, even if we become intimate, you must not expect marriage to be the ultimate outcome."

"Good lord, of course not. I'm looking for a lover, not a husband."

"Good to know that we are both in agreement on that matter. Number three, then: I have no need of money or love trinkets or anything of that sort, if you were thinking of producing such items for me."

"Well, I had heard that gentlemen treat their mistresses to expensive jewelry."

"No jewelry, I beg you."

"A pity. I had my eye on a particularly spectacular quizzing glass studded with diamonds."

"Heaven forbid."

"I shall have to assuage my urge to purchase incredibly tacky jewelry in some other fashion, then."

I haven't really been using Dreamwidth for much, but thought I might as well start posting some random snippets of original work. This is something from one of the past few NaNos; I don't have names for the characters, but it's set in (I think) a 1920s-ish fantasy world, and the woman has what are colloquially known as elf-shot eyes, which are a grey so pale as to be unsettling and considered to be unlucky.

“My husband left me for a man,” she said.

“Did he.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last week.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

She laughed, a high, tinkling thing with no humor in it. “Why, I suppose because after this weekend I’ll never see you again.”

“I see.” He paused and considered her. She looked fragile at the moment, on the verge of snapping, and he couldn’t tell what she needed more: to be swaddled up safe from her own fragility, or to be allowed to snap, allowed to yell and hurl things, allowed to discard all those womanly graces that society foisted upon her, even if only for a short while.

( Read the rest )