Setsuled's Journal

Woo-hoo! My sleeping schedule is off the hook!

I woke up to-day and lay in bed thinking, "Damn, I think I just got the first full night's, unbroken sleep in a week! I feel great, totally rested, ready to go, and altogether fresher than I felt before I went to sleep!"

Then I looked at the clock and saw that it was only 11:30am, and that I'd only been asleep for five hours, at best. Oh well. I won't fight it this time. To-day's the first Boschen and Nesuko page, anyway.

Yesterthursday's requisite stumbling about in the garish waking world saw me buying movies. I got Rope, Gun Crazy, To Catch a Thief, Charade, and Kagemusha. That's two Hitchcocks, two Cary Grants, and two John Dalls, for whatever that's worth.

I also picked up a copy of The Wedding Banquet, which caused me to observe Fry's curious system of movie sections. I'd already checked the Foreign section and had determined that they didn't have The Wedding Banquet. Then when I noticed Kurosawa's Dreams in the Drama section, I decided to check Comedy for The Wedding Banquet. And there it was. I guess they said "Foreign" when they meant "Fringe." Sheesh. At least Fry's has a section for Criterion movies, which is nice.

On what I'm pretty sure was Wednesday night, I finished reading Caitlín R. Kiernan's The Five of Cups. Well, now, I guess that was Thursday morning. In any case, it was a good book.

It was Caitlín's first novel, its publication long delayed for various reasons. It feels very much like her first novel. It less prominently features the lingering love of textural language that shapes her subsequent works, though it does display her tendency to dwell on a series of interesting moments, rather than forcing the thread and needle of plot through them. It's a vampire story, maybe better described as a series of isolated vampire perspectives that are interwoven. I guess it reads as a fascinating series of testimonials.

As a vampire novel, I must say I was very happy about what one agent referred to--apparently as a negative quality--as the "uniform brutality." This isn't a story that wimps out like the Anne Rice books eventually do. None of the night predators eventually cop out and become secret defenders of justice, like Lestat. They stay creatures who feed off human death--man, woman, and child--from beginning to end. And it works.