Are you going to Strawberry Fair?
Jun. 6th, 2009 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I got back several hours ago from going to Strawberry Fair with three of my friends. It was loads of fun. We followed the dreadlocked, brightly-dressed, percussion-beating, stilt-walking throng as they paraded through central Cambridge to Midsummer Common (taking a slight detour and getting lost...). I felt a momentary twinge of regret that I was not one of the drumming multitude. Sometimes I miss my days of doing street theatre for Amnesty. I miss being one of the weirdos that everyone looks at.
Anyway, the fair was great. I actually ate decent food (a felafel roll that actually tasted like it was freshly made, from a vegetarian shop, a crepe with lemon and sugar, and home-made lemonade). We mostly spent our time people-watching. It was as if there was a whole different Cambridge, and it only came out once a year. Dreadlocked hippies. Goths in black lace and scary-looking platform boots. Girls dressed in day-glo leggings, ballet skirts and fairy wings. Emo kids in asymmetric haircuts and 'Team Edward' jumpers. Where have these people been the past eight months? Hanging out in attics on Mill Road? THESE are my people.
Oh, don't get me wrong, Cambridge does quirky, but it's a different kind of quirky. The kind that involves tweed, monocles and mispronounced Latin mumbled in thanksgiving before sitting down to dinner in Hall.
We spent the last hour or so at the fair listening to music and passively smoking way too much of the pot that the group behind us was smoking. That might explain why we came up with the brilliant idea of Pimp My Punt. We were talking about Pimms, and somehow my friend misheard it as 'pimp' and somehow this led to the idea of punts fitted out with subwoofers, lurid paint and bling. It made sense at the time.
Anyway, then I came home and reread Sunshine by Robin McKinley. My God. It's been a while since a book has possessed me like this one. I bought it yesterday and have already read it four times. I've been listening to Nightwish nonstop, which with me is always a sign that something epic is going on. When I came home from Watchmen, I switched on Nightwish and blasted my room. Same when I read the 'The Sound of Her Wings' Sandman comic.
It's a funny thing, my love of Sunshine. The writing is merely adequate (I remember one sentence with two adjectives to every noun), and the story doesn't quite do what I want it to do, but McKinley gets vampires, and she gets how they interact with humans, and under what circumstances these interactions might change. It's a rare thing in vampire fiction.
What I found intensely irritating, however, was that there was no sequel, and that there will be no sequel. I think it's fairly clear from where the book ends up what's going to happen next, but I'd have loved to see it confirmed in writing.
And, bitterest of ironies, the one book for which I'd desperately like to read fanfic (yes, even misspelled gibberish written by twelve-year-olds high on Edward Cullen's 'scintillating arms') is written by an author opposed to fanfic. Normally I'm completely uninterested in fanfic. I'd make an exception here, because I'd imagine most fans are, like me, dying to tie up the loose ends in Sunshine.
But I must simply take a deep breath, remind myself that authors, both fanfic and otherwise, are not my bitches.
It doesn't make me feel any better, though.
Anyway, the fair was great. I actually ate decent food (a felafel roll that actually tasted like it was freshly made, from a vegetarian shop, a crepe with lemon and sugar, and home-made lemonade). We mostly spent our time people-watching. It was as if there was a whole different Cambridge, and it only came out once a year. Dreadlocked hippies. Goths in black lace and scary-looking platform boots. Girls dressed in day-glo leggings, ballet skirts and fairy wings. Emo kids in asymmetric haircuts and 'Team Edward' jumpers. Where have these people been the past eight months? Hanging out in attics on Mill Road? THESE are my people.
Oh, don't get me wrong, Cambridge does quirky, but it's a different kind of quirky. The kind that involves tweed, monocles and mispronounced Latin mumbled in thanksgiving before sitting down to dinner in Hall.
We spent the last hour or so at the fair listening to music and passively smoking way too much of the pot that the group behind us was smoking. That might explain why we came up with the brilliant idea of Pimp My Punt. We were talking about Pimms, and somehow my friend misheard it as 'pimp' and somehow this led to the idea of punts fitted out with subwoofers, lurid paint and bling. It made sense at the time.
Anyway, then I came home and reread Sunshine by Robin McKinley. My God. It's been a while since a book has possessed me like this one. I bought it yesterday and have already read it four times. I've been listening to Nightwish nonstop, which with me is always a sign that something epic is going on. When I came home from Watchmen, I switched on Nightwish and blasted my room. Same when I read the 'The Sound of Her Wings' Sandman comic.
It's a funny thing, my love of Sunshine. The writing is merely adequate (I remember one sentence with two adjectives to every noun), and the story doesn't quite do what I want it to do, but McKinley gets vampires, and she gets how they interact with humans, and under what circumstances these interactions might change. It's a rare thing in vampire fiction.
What I found intensely irritating, however, was that there was no sequel, and that there will be no sequel. I think it's fairly clear from where the book ends up what's going to happen next, but I'd have loved to see it confirmed in writing.
And, bitterest of ironies, the one book for which I'd desperately like to read fanfic (yes, even misspelled gibberish written by twelve-year-olds high on Edward Cullen's 'scintillating arms') is written by an author opposed to fanfic. Normally I'm completely uninterested in fanfic. I'd make an exception here, because I'd imagine most fans are, like me, dying to tie up the loose ends in Sunshine.
But I must simply take a deep breath, remind myself that authors, both fanfic and otherwise, are not my bitches.
It doesn't make me feel any better, though.
