I was looking at this picture by Arthur Rackham, and without knowing what story it was meant to illustrate, trying to figure out what the woman in it was up to.

Is she standing in shallow water?
Is she on the way up or down?
What about the faces in the water?
Is she asleep?
She looks as if she's stretching, waking from a dream of the shore.
Maybe she's dead.
Who lives in the white house with the red roof?
Who lives in the distant palace on the cliff?
She's wearing a cross around her waist.
On an overcast, blustery day.
Sometimes the waves are an exstension of her dress.
The ends of her blowing hair look like seaweed.
In the distance, there's a village with a church.
Follow the clouds to where they issue from the chimney of the white house with the red roof.

More and more often I find Zip and Jam sitting close together - not touching, but closer and closer.

This is not because of any melting of Zip's cold heart towards Jam. The fact is that Jam, in her quiet way, is stubborn. She waits for Zip to be settled down, and then she nonchalantly jumps up quickly and settles down close, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Zip is clearly furious, but not enough to get up from the nice comfortable place she has found, so she remains there, ears a bit rotated, tail swishing. Jam goes to sleep. Zip affects indifference.

And today, we find netmouse on the business end of the paddle!

Happy Birthday, sweetie--have a birthday that outshines every other special occasion evar, at least ten tons o' fun laced with treats, starting a year of nothin' but the best and the devil take the rest, all thrillah and no fillah. With whipped cream, sparkles, and extra kittens!

And hey--say it with me so I know you understand!--don't forget to live forever!

09:51 RT @Metafrantic A really excellent article: RT @rosalarian I wrote an article: Writing Gay Characters / tinyurl.com/yf7zjck #

09:52 @green_knight You travel by plane with a boat? That's novel! :-) #

09:53 @slovobooks It was still pretty embarrassing #

11:37 Can't believe it! The man is actually coming TODAY to fix the window! That's EARLIER than he said! And he is IRISH!! The end times are near #

11:39 @annafdd Yeah. But try Irish schools... #

11:40 I seem to be dissing Ireland this morning. Sorry! I'll diss some other nation later. #

11:43 Well, I often think Irish "mountains" are laughable, but then I think of the Netherlands... (this ok @irinarempt?) :-) #

11:43 ...oops, I seem to have managed to diss Ireland *again*... I'll do better next time, promise :-) #

11:44 As for Irish mountains, as my ex says, "people die on them, therefore they're proper mountains". Fair enough. #

12:17 @irinarempt I'll remember this for appropriate conversations :-) #

12:36 Yay! I have a window that locks again! ...and it's been fixed by the manager of Athlone Town FC! :-) #

15:46 @LadyCrow You put tiny little wheels under it, like a skate. Sheesh! :-) #

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LiveJournal: The First Decade

Just in time for holiday shopping, we're thrilled to announce the release of our ten-year anniversary anthology. Published by Blurb.com, the book showcases a decade of extraordinary talent drawn from LiveJournal users around the world. This must-read compilation features stories, memes, photos, comics, editorials, graphic content, and more, including:

1. Excerpts from Oh No They Didn't (a/k/a ohnotheydidnt), the largest community on LiveJournal, covering celebrity gossip, entertainment news, and pop culture
2. A look at post-Katrina New Orleans from the journal of Poppy Z. Brite
3. Gripping narratives, including a poignant reverie on a blind date
4. Photography that spans the globe, ranging from old-fashioned Polaroids to underwater photography
5. Mouthwatering dishes from food_porn

What began as a late-night inspiration back in Brad Fitzpatrick's college dorm in 1999 has grown to encompass nearly 25 million users worldwide, with journals and communities covering every conceivable hobby, passion, and topic. To get your copy, please visit the Blurb Bookstore. For updates and entries from book contributors, please join lj_turns10.

Tweaks and enhancements

• You can now ban a user from all of your communities and journals at once. To access this feature, hover over the person's userpic and choose Ban user everywhere from the drop-down menu.
• Follow LiveJournal on Twitter!

Give a little to help a lot!

In honor of National AIDS Awareness month, we've added a new charitable vgift. For each red ribbon you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to support the development and global distribution of an affordable HIV vaccine (we'll cover credit card fees). You can read more about IAVI at lj_cares. While we're on the subject, we raised $740 from our November fundraiser for Love Without Boundaries, which supports emergency healthcare and adoption of Chinese orphans. We thank you for helping us help others.

Photos of the week

We're back with more incredible pictures from our super-talented LiveJournal photographers. Congratulations to ilya_gorokhov, who is the winner of our very first lj_photophile poll.

We hope you'll continue to post, vote, and comment! A gentle request: Please post only one photo at a time and limit size to 350x350 (so images display properly on friends pages). And now, without further ado, get ready to cast your ballot and view more awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Stay safe and snug out there!

Life in the UK does, indeed, mention the Reformation. Thus:

[Potted history of Henry VIII's break from the Church.]

At the same time the Reformation - a great movement of opinion against the power of the Pope - was happening in England, Scotland, and many other European countries.

No mention of any German or Swiss whatsoever.

Later:

Mary was a devout Catholic and brought England back to obedience to the Pope. Under Mary, Protestants were persecuted. [...] Elizabeth I was more moderate than Mary in her religion. [...] Elizabeth expected everyone to attend church but did not ask questions about their real beliefs.

Now, I haven't had the privilege of a British education, but I seem to vaguely remember something about Catholics being persecuted too at some point. Am I wrong?

I AM definitely starting to understand deep truths about Life in the UK. I'm not sure they are the one I'm supposed to learn.

Especially if you are a font, pardon, typeface nerd.

I am reading the Official Life in Britain text, ie the text I need to memorize to pass the citizenship test.

The first section, on which I will not be tested, is a short history of the British Isles.

It tells you everything you need to know about the whole affair. I offer choice bits here for the edification of my friends and the potential death by apoplexy of my historian friends. (Nothing in it is wrong as such, but...)

The period after the Norman Conquest is called the Middle Ages or the mediaval period. It lasted until about 1485.
[...]

During the Middle Ages, the English kings also fought a long war with the French, called the Hundred Years War. The English won some important battles against the French, such as the battle of Agincourt, which Shakespeare describes in his play Henry V. Later the French fought back and reclaimed their country. (p 10)

And this is ALL that is said about the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars:

The American colonies defeated the British army with the help of the French. After a brief period of peace, wars with France continued, especially after the French Revolution of 1789. Britain's navy at that time was the strongest in Europe. Britain fought against combined French and Spanish fleets, winning the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In 1815 the French Wars ended with the defeat of the Emperor Napoleon by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo.

(It's not easy to sum up a couple of millennia and change of history in easy to understand language and limited space, but, well, this manages to be confusing as well as a bit misleading. You'd think, for example, that the Hundred Years War as a French-English affair, instead of a catastrophe that devastated the whole of Europe for close to a century and prepared the ground for the Reformation and all of that. Also, I see the little help provided by the Russian winter, and, well, the Russians, to the defeat of Evil Forces from Europe goes unrecognized once again.)

Of course, this is a history of the British Isles, but I wonder: is the history that is taught at school in Britain so Brit-centric? Italy is so bound up with European History for various reasons that even wanting to we can't dismiss the whole issue of the Sacred Roman Empire and various European nations whacking each other on the head. And since Napoleon helped substantially (if mostly unwittingly) in creating modern Italy, we kinda study a lot about him as well. (I admit that I know very little about Scandinavia, though. Apart from how Queen Christina killed Descartes by making him wake up early in the morning and lecture in freezing rooms... )

Reading this I have a new understanding of how British sentiment is so set against the idea that Britain is a part of Europe. It's possible, with some sleigh of hand, to pretend that Europe was a separate continent far, far away, that only constituted a problem now and then.

Reading between the lines, it's surprising to see how much British history was, in fact, intertwined with the Continent, at all levels. Britain, at reading even between this lines, must be one of the most ethnically mixed nations in the world. Sort of how we got the most interesting weather because we sit at the intersection of five or so climate systems, so we seem to have a pretty interesting ethnic makeup - as the language clearly show.

I will add that although obvious care has gone into using basic level English, the choice of a sans-serif font, black on gray, doesn't do wonders for legibility. The illustrations are very, very nice, but some captions would have helped me identify the King on page 11.

11:01 @pm10 Ehi ciao! Quanto tempo da quando leggevo ihc... :-) #

14:28 And off to the dentist (again!) I go... #

19:13 @annafdd Now you know why parents hate you when you give their kid a trumpet... :-) #

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Tomorrow night, Dec. 3rd, I will have the pleasure of reading with Ekaterina Sedia, the author of the novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone. She is also the World Fantasy Award winning editor of the anthology Paper Cities. We will be appearing at the Eagle Theatre in Hammonton New Jersey at 7:30. $12 for admission, $10 for students.
Here's the home page for The Eagle: http://www.theeagletheatre.com/index.html
Here's their page for directions: http://www.theeagletheatre.com/pages/directions.html
Hope to see you there.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret
Garden, Jackie C. Horne and Joe Sutliff Sanders are soliciting essays for a
proposed volume in the Children’s Literature Association’s Centennial
Studies Series. The series seeks to reexamine children’s classics from a
contemporary perspective. All critical and theoretical approaches are
welcome. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The novel in the context of Burnett’s writing for adults
• The novel in the context of Burnett’s other children’s novels
• The novel in the context of other children’s literature of the period
• “Sentimental” and “realistic” constructions of childhood in Burnett’s
children’s texts
• Animal studies and the (tenuous) line between human and animal in the
novel
• “Queerness” and other sexualities
• Construction of the narrator/narratee
• Approaching the novel from the perspective of disability theory and the
history of disability in Western culture
• Construction(s) of masculinity
• Gardening in the period and/or Burnett's personal history with real-world
gardens
• Re-envisioning the garden metaphor in later children’s texts
• Precursor texts: return from India narratives (Ewing’s Six to Sixteen,
etc.)
• Constructions of nationality: British, Indian, American
• Construction of motherhood/mothers and their replacements
• Mourning customs of the period reflected in/resisted by the novel
• Burnett and mysticism/religion
• Ideologies of class in the novel
• Secrets in the novel – those revealed and those kept
• The novel’s ending(s)
• Illustrations/covers for the novel
• Film adaptations
• Theatrical productions; Burnett and theatrical copyright law

Deadline for abstracts: January 10, 2010. Completed articles will be due by
June 1, 2010. Please send abstracts of 250-500 words by email, with “SECRET
GARDEN” in the submission line, to the following editor:


Joe Sutliff Sanders
California State University – San Bernardino
joess at csusb.edu
________________________________

Proposals are invited for papers at Bloodlines: British Horror Past and Present, a major two-day conference on British screen horror at De Montfort University and Phoenix Square, Leicester (the UK's newest digital media centre) on 4 and 5 March 2010. As well as panels and keynote lectures, the conference will include screenings, film premieres, and interviews and round tables with directors.

Plenary speakers so far include Kim Newman, Pete Walker, David Pirie (TBC) and Peter Hutchings.

Papers should last no longer than 20 minutes and may cover any aspect of British horror on film and television. Please send 300 word proposals, with a biographical note including any institutional affiliation, to Ian Hunter: iqhunter@dmu.ac.uk.

The strict final deadline for proposals is 15 January 2010.

For more information please contact iqhunter at dmu.ac.uk or visit the conference's Facebook page.

University of Westminster - School of Media, Arts and Design

Fixed Term, full-time for 8 months
£36,678 per annum (incl. L.W.A.)

Applications are invited for a post-doctoral Research Fellow, to work on the project 'Building Collaboration and Engagement for Media Professionals and Academic Researchers'.

The post holder will be required to develop a network which connects media professionals and academic researchers, and which develops ways in which academic researchers can utilise new technologies to communicate about their research. They will organise events, and produce an associated website and research report(s).

This post is full-time and for eight months starting in January 2010. Applicants should have a PhD in media and communications, sociology, social psychology, or a related area.

Closing date: Friday, 11 December 2009
Interviews will be held on Friday, 18 December 2009

Please see details at:
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AAJ250/

**EDIT Thu Dec 3 23:24:15 UTC 2009 **

Hey Everyone, we are about to run the last alter job that we need to on our database servers. This will effect userpics / scrapbook / vgift images for the next few hours. Have no fear, your images aren't lost, there is just a really intensive process running on the servers which store the information for mogilefs. Thank you for your understanding and all the LJ love...

Hey LJers,

I just wanted to let you all know that we are going to be performing some mogilefs maintenance over the next few days. We will be upgrading our current version to latest stable as well as changing some db config information to better handle the amount of files we are currently hosting. This shouldn't cause a big impact on site stability, but you may see some minor delays with userpic / scrapbook images appearing or other requests associated with our mogilefs. We would love to not have that happen, but unfortunately with some of the steps we need to take we have to cause a delay with images. I figured this was a better solution than taking down all of LiveJournal because well lets face it, we all need our daily LJ fix ;)

Thanks,

I had never read this children's classic (nor have I read Burnett's other well-known works, Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess), but like a lot of people who watched mid-70s kids shows on the BBC I have tremendously fond memories of the 1975 TV version, in which Mr Craven was played by John Woodnutt, aka the Draconian emperor / Broton the Zygon leader, and the three main child characters were played by actors who have since disappeared (though one of them is active in local drama in New Mexico).

I do remember starting to read it as a child, and being deterred by the grim first couple of chapters, where Mary's parents die and she is sent to her uncle's isolated Yorkshire home where she is insufferably unpleasant. I wish I had kept going. It is a lovely story of psychological and physical healing through close encounters with the regenerative forces of the natural world and also, y'know, just being nice to people.

The wind must have been worse than I realised today, because I found I had something in my eye a couple of times as I read the last chapters. Perhaps the plotline of a disabled child whose condition markedly improves resonates more with me these days than it would have thirty-four years ago.

The Recommended Reading Page at The Well-Built City has been updated for December. This month's theme is The Lives of the Artists. Check it out:
http://www.well-builtcity.com/recommended-reading.html