I’ve rattled on at length about my Packrat obsession, I’ve written a dreadful poem about playing Pirates—I don’t think it’s any secret that I’m fond of the games applications on Facebook.

But they’re all paling into insignificance now that I’ve found the Facebook application for Dungeons and Dragons: Tiny Adventures.

I’m slightly fixated on Dungeons and Dragons at the moment anyway, since it’s the first time in a decade that I’ve done any real table-top RPGing—I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it.

But Dungeons and Dragons: Tiny Adventures is both curiously passive and oddly addictive.

It’s curiously passive because you don’t actually do much yourself: most of it’s taken care of for you by the gaming engine.

So you select your character class—Elf Ranger, of course—and then the game invests your choice of name with a pleasing sense of weighty importance, by insisting that once you’ve selected it, you cannot change it. The character’s name, it seems, is inviolate.

Then you pick an adventures from a short list . . . and that’s the last active thing you do for a while.

I’m currently halfway through “Curse of the Wolf Moon,” trying to “travel through Felltooth Wood to find the legendary Mirror Lake of Felltooth Mountain. There blessed wolfsbane grows in the spray of the Singing Falls”; it’s the only way to save the villagers!

But once you’ve selected an adventure, a ticker appears in the top left-hand corner, saying “Next event in 9:00 [or 7:53, or 3:57, or any of a random assortment of minutes and seconds].”

And you wait.

The time ticks down.

And then you can click a refresh button, and see whether you’ve defeated the monster or been knocked around a bit.

It’s the strangest thing.

In fact, you don’t even know what you’re going to be facing until you’ve hit that refresh button, by which time, paradoxically, you’ve already faced it. The computer takes care of everything, including your dice roll. You could roll a natural 20 or a critical fail, and not even know it until the dust has settled.

Frankly, I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with it, since I have to keep finding things to do, to amuse myself while the ticker ticks down.

And yet I am oddly obsessed.

Partly, it’s that I’m doing unusually well in this current adventure. I’ve done this one before, but the server crashed over the weekend, and when I picked the application again today, I’d dropped back to level 1.

But I’m having more luck this time. Last time the sad-looking shepherd came up to me and told me he’d lost his magic sheep, I failed my Wisdom roll, looked him square in the eyes, told him there were no such things as magic sheep, and sodded off.

This time, I didn’t fail my Wisdom roll—and succeeded in not only finding the sheep but also looting a forgotten shrine.

I’ve also killed a dire toad, set fire to a zombie, and freed a caravan of people from the thrall of a sorcerer.

And picked up some nifty loot in the process.

I have also been stabbed by a goblin, but it was only a flesh wound—and that’s the price you pay for derring-do. (Which is why I prefer to do my derring from behind a computer screen.)

But I think the primary reason Nick and I are obsessed with this is the anticipation.

When you’re playing with dice and paper, you’re master of your own destiny—to an extent. If you roll a critical fail, you rolled it.

But with this version, the control over the dice is taken out of your hands. You wait your seven, eight, nine minutes and then, and only then, do you see which foe you’ve been facing, which treasure you’ve been grabbing, and how much damage you’ve taken.

It’s almost contrary to the spirit of the original game, and yet we’re fascinated.

All evening, the conversation has been running along these lines:

“Honey, come and make a cup of coffee.”
“In twenty-two seconds!”

“I just killed a zombie! I set fire to him with a branch out of the fire!”
“Cool!”

“Damn! I died on the last encounter.”
“Which one? Wolf Moon? Oh, that’s basic, that is.”

It’s odd: the pleasure and pride that one can take in achievements that are not only represented entirely by pixels but also occur entirely outside your control.

Seriously, it’s the strangest game on Facebook.

But awesome.

(At the moment, I’m planning on working my way towards Granny Weatherwax via Sue White, the completely insane Staff Liaison Officer in Green Wing, who deals with hysterically crying staff members by shouting, “Take this copy of Dealing with Difficult People and fuck off!” But Granny Weatherwax is the ultimate goal.)

I much prefer Terry Pratchett’s witches to his guards: I like the guard books, and I particularly enjoy watching the development of Detritus from his original, rather melancholic, appearance in Moving Pictures, but the witches are my real favourites.

And Granny is my favourite witch.

Don’t get me wrong: I sympathise with Magrat Garlick. I suspect, in fact, that I’m closer to Magrat than I’ll ever be to Granny. That’s largely why Magrat’s not my favourite of the witches: there’s no wish fulfillment there and perhaps a little too much mirroring. I, too, am probably a wet hen.

For me, the same is true for Agnes Nitt, though her development as a character between Maskerade and Carpe Jugulum is intriguing.

And Nanny Ogg . . . well, the interesting thing about Nanny Ogg, as Agnes points out in Carpe Jugulum, is that Nanny Ogg is, in many ways, an uncomplicated person.

As a result, she’s not a very complicated character either or, at least, not a character who changes much through the books. Always delightful as she is, there’s not a great distinction between her role in Wyrd Sisters and her role in Carpe Jugulum.

But Granny changes with each encounter, becoming more extraordinary and more powerful as she faces down family members, elves, vampires, and even Death.

There’s something about Granny Weatherwax that reminds me of Miss Marple.

Granny has none of Miss Marple’s innate belief in superiority of men, although that something that Miss Marple honours more in the breach than in the observance: for all she states the Victorian tenets of her upbringing, she rarely abides by them in practice.

And Granny has none of Miss Marple’s fluttering, hyper-feminine, dithering camouflage.

But they both develop out of the idea that skills can be honed by observing one’s immediate surroundings: that experience is more a matter of applied intelligence than of frenetic activity.

And they are both characters restricted by their gender but ultimately refusing to be restrained by it.

For Miss Marple, the restrictions of her gender, of her gendered upbringing, and of social assumptions about old women become tools and, at times, weapons. In wielding them, she moves out of her restricted sphere into the wider one of the detective. And when Miss Marple starts detecting in December 1927—when what became the first chapter of The Tuesday Club Murders was published in The Royal Magazine—she was moving into what was still largely a male province; female detectives had been around, in small numbers, since the 1860s, but the first professional female detective, Loveday Brooke, appeared in 1894.

But for Granny, the restrictions are professional as well as gender based. She’s not a witch because she’s a woman: she’s a witch because she’s a witch. But, being a woman, she can only be a witch: not a warlock, not a wizard.

And, Pratchett points out in Carpe Jugulum, she’s a witch of the old school, from the days when witches were feared and persecuted: her weapons and tools, like Miss Marple’s, are disguised as safe, domestic objects, a protective colouring that she maintains even when witches are accepted and valued in Lancre.

Granny is isolated. Nanny and Magrat have their families: even Agnes has close relatives in the area. Granny does not.

And she’s an object of fear. As Pratchett makes clear, people in Lancre go to witches when they’re in trouble . . . but they don’t go near them at other times. Granny, of course, draws strength from this fear but it, and the isolation, are also used as weapons against her.

But, oh, she’s powerful.

And she’s strong.

And she never forgets who she is or what she is—even while she’s constantly fighting against what she was or what she might be.

Granny knows that we have to make decisions without always knowing whether they’re the right ones, and that we never find out if they were the right ones. And she knows that we have to watch ourselves if we’re to be sure of who and what we are.

It broke my heart when I realised that there weren’t going to be any more specifically Granny Weatherwax books, that she’d grown too powerful to be a central character, that there were no more enemies that could offer a challenge.

But that’s all right.

Because one day I’m going to be just like her.

Nick and I were waiting for Bones to start tonight—and on that note, how grotesque is that show? Seriously, CSI was never this revolting—and watching the final ten minutes of City Homicide.

I’ve never seen an entire episode of that show, although I understand it’s both very good and attracting some interest in the U.S.: largely Bittorrent-y attention, but still.

But mostly, we were waiting for it to end, and enjoying recognising all the characters, including one of my former Play School favourites.

And then they advertised next week’s episode with what I think is the greatest line I’ve ever heard on television: “Craig McLachlan is going to wish he never crossed Noni Hazlehurst.”

My money’s on Noni.

And here we are for the first of Steven Moffat’s two-parter about The Library. This, I’m sure I don’t need to warn you, will be nothing but a love-fest. I’ve made my feelings about Steven Moffat clear time and time again, and I adored these episodes.

Or, I would have, if I’d seen them before. Which, of course, I haven’t. Because they haven’t aired here, yet. And so watching them earlier would be bad.

Ahem.

Right, now we’ve got that out of the way, the absence of photographs for tonight’s blogging is a result of my spending this afternoon at a poetry festival, and therefore being very tired, especially since I haven’t quite finished working through tomorrow morning’s lecture. Nor have I finished my marking. Actually, this list of things I haven’t done that need to be done by 9 a.m. tomorrow is making me a little anxious.

Eh, c’est la vie.

Apparently, Australia won forty-something medals. I suppose that’s good? I’ve given up on the Olympics, and haven’t watched a single event this time around. But, hopefully, this means proper television will be back on soon.

I like the tagline “In this library, no one can hear you scream.”

Ooh, Colin Salmon. I love Colin Salmon. Last time I saw him, it was Hex. And before that, he was being sliced to pieces in Resident Evil.

The special effects in this are glorious. Most of it’s set-dressing, I know—but the shots of the young girl floating over the planet are beautiful.

I also really like Donna’s outfit in this—the tunic part, anyway. I’d like one of those.

I agree with Nick that this is one of the best teasers they’ve ever done.

“People never really stop loving books.” Well, good. You do need the smell of books. And their tactility.

A whole planet of books? Awesome. Whole continents of Jeffery Archer? Spare me.

The Doctor loves biographies and Donna thinks it’s because there’s always a death at the end? That’s a telling exchange, especially in light of some later revelations in this story.

Once again, the Doctor promises to take his companion to the beach, and they end up somewhere else. Mind, I’d rather go to The Library than to the beach. Oh, very definitely.

Did that sign read Xeno Biology/Art? How on earth are those two categories next to each other? Surely not? Not even in the Library of Congress system.

Ooh, but the set-dressing in this episode is beautiful. And the lighting—which is hugely important to the plot. But then it is Euros Lyn, who’s a stylish director.

“Count the shadows”? Man, now I’m creeped out—and I’ve already seen this episode.

NICK: Tennant’s quiff extends about three inches out in front of his head in this episode. It’s really quite extraordinary.

Oh, crap—now the lights are going out! Ooh, I’m easily freaked out by things that lurk in the dark.

And now the pay-off for the teaser, which is fabulous. I didn’t see the security-camera angle coming the first time around. I’m also impressed by Donna’s door skills, as the Doctor is (though saying you sometimes need the element of surprise with boyfriends is rather trivialising Donna’s character).

This scene with the Doctor using the sonic screwdriver on a sentient security camera is strangely disturbing—you’d think that the Doctor would know enough about strange varieties of life by now.

DONNA: It chose a real dead face it thought I’d like?

Oh, I’m with you, Donna—that’s just not right.

Ack! What’s casting the shadow? And now the lights are going out again! Damn—now the shadow’s gone. Oh, wow—this isn’t as jump-out-of-your-seat scary as “Blink,” but it’s damn creepy.

Ooh, the others have arrived.

Alex Kingston! Cool. And she’s calling the Doctor “sweetie”? Hmmm—I wonder what the story is here?

DOCTOR: I’m a time traveller; I point and laugh at archaeologists.

You’re a smug man, Doctor. A smug, smug man—but I love you despite that.

Other Dave: you’re not terribly bright, are you? But sweet: not as sweet as poor, dead Ross from two episodes ago, but sweet nonetheless.

The idea of The Library being silent for a hundred years—a disaster, killing everyone and then the whole world shutting down, the books left alone for a century. Fascinating idea.

DOCTOR: Almost every species has an irrational fear of the dark. But they’re wrong—because it’s not irrational.

Good line.

Now is probably the time to point out that I like River Song. There’s something appealing about her. Now I’m not a ‘shipper, and I don’t care personally what her back story with the Doctor is—though it’s quite clear there’s a back story (they’re now comparing diaries, so there’s definitely something there). I do understand that some fangirls have been shredding River Song online, but I have no patience with that, at all. She’s an endearing character, somehow—and a match for the Doctor, it seems.

The TARDIS-patterned diary? Hmm.

Aha! So accessing the security protocols sets things off in the mysterious little girl’s house? (Trying to “call up the data core”? Hmm.)

No wonder the father’s worried enough about the little girl to call in the doctor: all those endless drawings of The Library.

Nick tells me that one of the complaints about this episode online was that it is set in The Library, but doesn’t thematise books or writing, at all. That’s something we can discuss in the comments thread, if you like. I’m not sure that’s an accurate complaint, and Nick thinks some of the arguments were overblown.

There’s certainly, it seems to me, a celebration of imagination, both within the story and in the construction of the episode itself: textually and extratextually, it’s about imaginative power. In part.

MISS EVANGELISTA: My dad said I had the IQ of plankton, and I was pleased.

Oooh, Steven Moffat! That’s a recycled joke from Press Gang! Shame!

Donna is sweet in this episode—I can see why the crew, knowing each other and working together—treat Miss Evangelista as an in-joke. But it is cruel. (Oh, don’t go through that door, Miss Evangelista! No, you silly cow! Oh, too late.) And Donna’s approaches to Miss Evangelista are a mark of a genuinely open and kind nature, which is something that expands in Donna the longer she stays with the Doctor, and the brassiness, for want of a better word, is rubbed off.

Another gorgeous set. I believe this is a decommissioned library, somewhere.

Well, that scream doesn’t bode well for Miss Evangelista.

Oh, dear—dead and stripped of all flesh. Oh, that’s not nice.

She’s ghosting; her neural relay has caught and recorded her consciousness, and now she’s speaking as though she were still alive.

NICK: Correct use of “presently.” Most people would use “momentarily.”

I argue that that use of “momentarily” is largely an American idiom—although you do hear it in Australia, as well—but Nick disagrees with me.

This data-ghosting scene is awful to watch—poor Donna! (Poor Miss Evangelista, too, but she’s dead and doesn’t really know what’s happening.) Donna’s human, and she’s not set up for this, especially when it’s not quite clear whether Miss Evangelista ever really hears Donna’s reassurance that she won’t tell the others. To try and reassure a woman you know is already dead, and then not be certain that you’ve even succeeded? That’s the kind of thing that’ll haunt you at three a.m., when you’re lying awake reviewing the failures of your life.

Ah, Dr Moon is back! Hurray for Colin Salmon.

DR MOON: The real world is a lie. And your nightmares are real. The Library is real.

Oddly, despite seeing the Doctor move through The Library for forty minutes, that exchange blew my mind the first time around.

This exchange between Donna and River Song—Donna’s well able to understand what River is saying, and she does, in a way. But once River realises that this is Donna Noble, the whole thing changes: when Donna realises that River knows the Doctor, but doesn’t know her, there’s heartbreak there.

I’ve seen it argued online that Donna’s heartbreak comes from a sense that there’s a closeness between the Doctor and River that she can’t share, that the heartbreak comes from Donna’s devastation at the fact that the Doctor doesn’t love her.

I think that’s rubbish, frankly—but I’ve been made my point about Donna, the Doctor, and Donna’s complete lack of jealousy quite clear. It’s what I love about their relationship. Donna’s heartbreak, to me, comes from the sense that there’s a point in the Doctor’s future where he know River but no longer knows her. It might be after her death: we don’t know. But it’s something she hasn’t considered.

Oh, no! Proper Dave’s got two shadows! Oh, poor Proper Dave.

Wait, River Song has a sonic screwdriver. In-ter-est-ing.

And what’s just happened to Donna? Damn. Whatever it was, it sounded painful.

Oh, damn—now the swarm’s in Proper Dave’s helmet. And, double damn—he’s repeating himself. Oh, bugger: he’s ghosting. Poor Proper Dave.

Ack! Skull! That’s creepier than it has any right to be.

So River Song has a sonic screwdriver and a Captain Jack-style sonic blaster? Man, she’s cool.

“Donna Noble has been saved”? Damn that little girl’s creepy.

You’ll note that I’ve managed to avoid saying “Vashtanarada” all post. Until now: but I think that’s a plausible spelling. It’s a plausible word, too—or, at least, I like the sound of it. Unlike some earlier words, like the Slitheen’s home planet, which struck me as stupid, though I haven’t the faintest idea how to spell it.

Oh, damn! Donna’s face on a statue? That’s so not right. How are they going to get Donna back? And here’s Proper Dave, again. Or, rather, Vashtanarada swarm in Proper Dave’s suit.

And that’s one hell of a cliffhanger.

Oh, there’s so much that I wanted to say about this episode and that I could have said, if only I could have typed faster. It’s such a rich story—such complex world-building.

But, have at the comments thread, if you noticed anything that I missed.

The danger of miming or why I don’t hold conversations when I have my mouth full:

NICK: How about I make some coffee and we watch Burn Notice?
ME: (indicates an extremely small span with my fingers and then makes the universal gesture for insanity, as perfected by Edvard Munch)
NICK: What? A small amount of coffee equals a lot of screaming?
ME: (shakes head)
NICK: You’ve had too much to drink?
ME: (shakes head)
NICK: You’re scared of the pincer movement?

I’ve been marking all afternoon, so I have an abundance of headache and an absence of energy.

But, thankfully, I also have an abundance of girls’ school stories, including May Wynne’s The Term of Many Adventures.

I should think it was a term of many adventures!

In this one book alone, the schoolgirls deal with mysterious gipsies:

With friends who don’t know enough not to accept mysterious jewelry from mysterious gipsies (honestly, you’d think they’d never read a school story):

With curiously co-ed adventures in late-night archaeology:

With furious working-class Irish villagers, who aren’t pleased that the girls broke into their house and, to quote the ringleader, “made it fit to live in” (113), spoiling most of the furniture and breaking the rest in the process:

And a mysterious man of unspecified ethnicity, in a turban:

It’s a miracle the girls had any time for classes at all.

From May Wynne’s The Term of Many Adventures, illustrated by Roberta F. C. Waudby. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, n.d.

This brief dialogue, which I’ve just exchanged with the television during the ABC’s airing of Cards on the Table, sums up my attitude towards these current adaptations of Agatha Christie novels:

RANDOM CHARACTER: Why would she do that?
ME: She didn’t. Now I’m bored.

And yet the adaptation of Cards on the Table was doing so well up to this point. It was beautifully set-dressed, relatively faithful to the plot, and fairly well acted (excluding the woman playing Anne Meredith; she’s fine in this, but she was dreadful in Rome, as Cleopatra, and that’s all I can see when I’m watching this.)

But then it all went to hell in the last ten minutes.

Frankly, I’m fairly impressed that they managed to make such hay out of such an intricate and carefully organised plot with so little time left.

I suppose that’s a compliment of sorts.

And, as I type this, Poirot has just outed the murderer and his “regular bridge partner” Mr. Craddock, who “practise for hours with the door closed.”

And I thought Nick was being far-fetched with his comment about lesbian Nazi nuns.

(On the plus side, this post is bound to turn up some interesting Google results.)

While watching the adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table:

ME: This is an extremely clever book. I hope they don’t muck around with it too much.
NICK: Don’t worry; I’m sure there’ll be lesbian Nazi nuns any minute now.

This conversation brought to you by an unusual burst of humility on my part.

ME: But it’s outside my alloted role, and there’s a name for people who move outside their alloted role.
NICK: Heroes!
ME: I don’t think so. Beowulf was a hero.
NICK: Yep.
ME: Well, he didn’t move outside his alloted role. He went out and died at the hands—if you’ll excuse the metaphor—of the dragon in the final part of the poem because it was his responsibility as king. Well, it wasn’t his responsibility to die, but it was his role to fight the dragon.
NICK: Right.
ME: So I dispute your definition of the word “hero.”
NICK: Well, in that case, I’m going to play some Diablo.

You just can’t argue with game-bound geeks.

Where the storms begin?

So I’m always being terrified by thunderbolts that come from nowhere?

And I keep getting caught in the rain, because I always forget how quickly tropical storms can come up out of nowhere?

And I forget to check BOM before I put a load of washing on, and then suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, it’s bucketing with rain?

When it can be pelting down in the front garden and still sunny in the back garden, as it is now?

When the lightning is so close that I feel the fillings jump in my mouth and I wish that my bed were higher off the ground, so I could hide under it?

Is it that time of year already?

I love that time of year.

These are all from Peter Haining’s compilation of The Fantastic Pulps, which I bought today.

What I love about this first one is that the illustration, by John Newton Howett, is from an Edmond Hamilton story called “The Indestructible Man.”

Not unless he can find some way to work around that knife sticking out of his back, he’s not.

(Oh, I know he might not be the man of the title. Just go with the joke.)

This one’s lovely, though: a Hannes Bok illustration for Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Devotee of Evil.”

(He looks, from this angle, rather like a devotee of the kind of dancing that used to frighten me way back when Nick still dragged me to Goth clubs. But it’s a beautiful image.)

Apparently, Ray Bradbury was a fan of Hannes Bok: I can see why.

But this: this is the jewel of the collection, I think.

This is a H. W. Wesso illustration for a John W. Campbell story, “Piracy Preferred.” (But preferred to what? That’s what I want to know. Alas, the story isn’t included in the collection.)

It’s an indictment of the prevailing attitude to pulp artists that someone capable of this type of work doesn’t get their own Wikipedia page. Sure, Hannes Bok has a page, but Wesso’s work is a gorgeous example of the classic sci-fi art that I love. I would think there’d be some room for him on Wikipedia, surely?

(All taken from The Fantastic Pulps, edited and compiled by Peter Haining. London: Gollancz, 1975.)

Despite the fact that it’s Thursday night, I’m exhausted, and we haven’t organised dinner yet, despite the fact that Nick’s had two colds in a row and is apparently self-medicating by playing Diablo very loudly (and currently killing something that squeals horribly when it dies), and despite the passive-aggressive anti-smoking prats this afternoon, I’m perfectly content.

Because I’ve been book shopping.

We had a relatively small book sale in the department this afternoon, run by one of my M.Phil. supervisors (who knows perfectly well that I’ll buy almost anything in book form, and so kept putting tantalising books directly in front of me).

Mind, I was well behaved: I only bought half a dozen. (The two that I bought for Nick don’t count, despite the fact that they’ll all go on the same shelves.)

But I couldn’t turn down Victorian Feminism, could I? It’s not the most recent book but, as I keep telling students, that’s why MLA isn’t an author-date method of referencing: not everything goes out of fashion. (Plus, I mainly read the bibliographies of these books, anyway.)

And I certainly wasn’t going to turn down a lovely, shiny copy of Dr Johnson’s Women; even if it is a little early for my research, it’s bound to be fascinating. Dr Johnson’s high opinion of Charlotte Lennox might even induce me to finally get around to reading The Female Quixote, which I’ve owned for years and, I suspect, have never even opened.

There’s no way I could go past The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction. Sure, the essays manage to more or less completely skip the Victorian period, bouncing from Anna Clark’s “The Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture, 1748-1848”—covering, at least, the beginning of Victoria’s reign—to Derrick Price on How Green Was My Valley (1939), but it’s still fascinating. And Price’s work on romanticised Wales makes a nice companion piece to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s work on the forcible traditionalising of Scotland in The Invention of Tradition.

I’m sure the title of Root of Detection: The Art of Deduction before Sherlock Holmes explains why I bought that one, to go with my numerous other books of Golden Age detective fiction—although this one offers quite a different interpretation of “Golden Age,” since the first offering is a piece from Herodotus’s Histories.

(Mind, I’m a little worried by the blurb, which describes the collection as containing “a little surprise from the novel by Mrs. Henry Wood published over a hundred years ago, the source for her celebrated play, the ineffable East Lynne.” Partly I’m worried that, in a book published in 1983, the play of East Lynne—“Dead! And never called me Mother!”—is considered better known than the actual novel. But mostly I’m just surprised to hear a novel called “ineffable.” “Little known”? I would have accepted that. “Overblown melodrama”? Sure. “Unintentionally hilarious”? Absolutely. But “ineffable”? That’s a little odd.)

I’m going to say little about the lovely little hardback—in a fabulously 1970s, bright-yellow, Gollancz cover—called The Fantastic Pulps, because I’m going to copy some illustrations from it into another post in a moment, as a counterpart to the terrifying cactus of The Quatermass Experiment. But I will say that having looked at the front matter, I now want some of the author’s other compilations: The Wild Night Company (Irish tales of fantasy and horror), The Clans of Darkness (Scottish tales of fantasy and horror), The Magic Valley Travellers (oddly enough, Welsh tales of fantasy and horror), and, of course, The Penny Dreadful. Bless you, Peter Haining. Your obsession with pulp enriches us all.

But my favourite find for today is, alas, a work in two volumes, of which only one volume was available. But, better only volume two of Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines than no volume at all.

There’s something so intrinsically Victorian about a two-volume work detailing the early lives of fictional characters. And, yes, it’s intensely romantic, in its way, and the prose is a little overblown.

But Clarke was a true Shakespearean scholar, who produced a Shakespearean concordance in 1844-1845, in a period when most women were discouraged from reading large sections of Shakespeare’s work. (Of course, her concordance may have referred to the bowdlerised texts: I’ve not seen it, and I don’t know. But that doesn’t negate the scholarship behind that sort of undertaking.)

She published The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines in 1850, and there’s a fascinating feminist impulse behind the extraction—albeit in heavily fictionalised form—of the education, training, and development of characters who so often are simply pawns for the more powerful characters, as with Katharina, or sacrifices on the altar of tragedy, as with Ophelia.

Of course, married lady though she was, she was also a Victorian woman, and she doesn’t answer the question that always intrigues me: why was Juliet’s nurse so keen to influence her charge’s—horrifyingly early, by modern standards—sexual experience?

Had it been a Victorian text, I’d argue that it critiques the way in which the system of domestic servitude brings people of different social classes into close communion with one another. Nineteenth-century texts so often present the working classes as either sexually depraved or, at best, less restrained than the middle class and the aristocracy. Since the latter were doubly restrained by social convention and by the obligations of primogeniture (so at least you had to be sure who your first-born son’s father was), the clashing of the two classes within the home throws up some interesting tensions that, had the play been written four hundred years later, might prove thought-provoking.

Of course, I can’t be sure Shakespeare’s intending any such thing. In fact, I’m fairly certain he’s not.

But I would really like to know why the nurse is seemingly so fascinated with Juliet’s marital experience.

People who walk up to where I am legally smoking, sit down next to me, and then loudly point out to each other the “No Smoking” signs several metres from where I am legally smoking irritate me intensely.

I feel that’s a valuable lesson.

Not learning it might have led to social confusion and some ill-judged friendships.

I’ve been uninspired lately, or tired, or still fighting off this cold that I seem to have passed on to everyone else, or secretly eaten up with remorse that I didn’t kill more kobolds at last week’s D&D session, or something.

I don’t know quote what, as the list above indicates. But I haven’t been my usual effervescent self (oh, yes: I am humble. I’m famous for it). I haven’t thought of anything interesting enough to blog about and I haven’t been reading as much, either.

That, though, I blame on the avalanche of marking that’s descended.

But I have been re-reading, recently. Re-reading is something of a divisive issue in this household: Nick doesn’t do it, much, whereas I don’t see any reason to deny myself the pleasure of, for example, Pride and Prejudice just because I happen to have read it before. (Re-watching television and movies is an even more divisive issue and, since those are common activities, I’ve had to resign myself to a period of inactivity before Nick will agree to re-watch something.) But re-reading I can do on my own.

And, sometimes, you’re just not in the mood for a new book, no matter how good at looks, or how fond you are of the author, or how long you’ve been waiting for it to be published.

Sometimes, you want familiarity. You want characters whom you’ve met before, situations that are familiar, nuances that you missed the first or second time around.

Or, at least, I do.

So lately I’ve been re-reading the Girl Genius series of graphic novels. The seventh trade came in from Amazon last week—many, many weeks after we originally ordered it—and the complex plot of the last couple had largely escaped me in the months since volume six came out. A refresher course seemed appropriate.

Girl Genius comes from Studio Foglio, although it doesn’t look as though their website’s been updated for a while. I’m not terribly familiar with Phil and Kaja Foglio’s other work, though I gather their other well-known series is XXXenophile, described on the Wikipedia page as whimsical alien erotica—and, no, I’m not linking to the Wikipedia page. You can search for it if you like, but bear in mind that the cover they offer is not suitable for work. It’s not tentacle porn (thank heavens!) but it’s not suitable for work. Or for young children.

Girl Genius, on the other hand, has its own website, given its existence as a web comic. I’ve not read the web version, because I find sequential web comics a little annoying, and prefer to wait for the trades.

So far, I’ve read the first seven trades, and don’t like to contemplate how long I have to wait for the eighth volume.

What I really enjoy about it, though, is the fact that the mad scientists, the “Sparks,” are completely and utterly insane. They can’t help it: it’s just the way Sparks work. At one point, the townspeople are uncertain whether or not to accept a new Spark—said to be the heir to a famous, long-lost dynasty—and are convinced not by her ability to create extraordinary machines, but by her tendency to blow things up and then shout, “I meant to do that!”

And Agatha Heterodyne herself, the Girl Genius of the title—well, okay: she spends a lot of time running around in her bloomers and is about as pneumatic as you’d expect of the heroine of vaguely Victorian melodrama. But she’s also tough—physically, emotionally, and intellectually—and talented in a number of fields that female characters still don’t often explore, especially not the science-fiction and fantasy narratives: she’s a scientist, a mechanic, an inventor, even a resurrectionist when she needs to be.

I’d written earlier in this post that it was rather odd that I enjoyed this series so much when steampunk isn’t really my cup of tea.

But I went back and deleted it when I remembered that the books are sub-titled “Gaslamp Fantasies”: according to the Wikipedia page, Kaja Foglio coined the term as more appropriate to the work than the usual “steampunk.” And it’s true that the Sparks are concerned with far more machinery, though the “clanks” are fabulous: the wicked Heterodynes of old, about whom we have only received tantalising snippets, also created the Jagerkin, fanatically loyal but vicious monsters with heavy Romanian accents and an obsession with hats, and there are also the constructs, Frankenstein’s-monster-style humanoids, some convincingly human and some nightmarish.

There are also miniature mammoths.

I don’t know why, but they seem to be sold as a tasty treat. On a stick.

And a cat created to be Emperor of All Cats, so that he could mobilise his people as silent spies and saboteurs: it works brilliantly, apparently, until they fall asleep or see something move.

But, honestly, you saw my point once I mentioned the miniature mammoths, didn’t you? Or maybe the bloomers?

But there’s so much more to this series, which ensures I couldn’t not read it.

Like the fact that the Heterodyne boys have become the stuff of legends in the eighteen years since they disappeared, so the world is full of dime novels inconsistently recounting their adventures and travelling Heterodyne shows that specialise in melodramas ranging from the violent to the raunchy, depending on the audience. In fact, the whole series plays with the mutability of narrative, including short pieces at the end of the trades that range from Agatha’s adventures as a full-blown Heterodyne—before she herself is even aware of her heritage—to the James Bondian adventures of Trelawney Thorpe, Spark of the Realm, to the fan-fiction of a young girl supposedly telling Heterodyne stories to her brothers but unable to resist putting herself into the narratives.

There are shades here of the great celebration of imagination that is Alan Moore’s third League of Extraordinary Gentlemen trade.

Really, I can’t resist anything that has at its heart a passion for melodrama and the mutability of imaginative story-telling.

And when you throw in vaguely Victorian robots, imaginary European cities, sentient castles, and fanged monsters who insist that any plan that involves killing anyone who sees you killing people and then losing your hat is a bad plan?

Well, I don’t know how anyone could resist.

It’s been a long day followed by a lovely sunset, so why not combine the two in a transparent attempt to make it look as though I’m updating my blog?