Hello, readers.
Having watched Before Sunrise last night, I’m reminded of many things, including this trip taken while in Korea which I had happened to be remembering earlier in the day as I rode the bus home from school. What I was thinking as I rode the bus home from school was how, once upon a time on a mountainside in Korea, I met someone and we talked, and we explored, and we rode the bus, and we wondered if we would ever see each other again, and then we did see each other again, and again, and had many adventures, and then I left Korea and we haven’t seen each other for some months. What I was also thinking on the bus home from school was how so much of my time in Korea was built around a moment in which I met someone and we understood each other before we knew who each other were and it all seemed inevitable in retrospect, but it was pretty much totally evitable and fragile and incredibly happy and sad to remember.
What had led me to think these thoughts on the bus was seeing a girl sitting by the window with an empty seat beside her. I wondered, what would happen if I sat next to her and said hello? And then I remembered what happened the last time I did that.
Here are some things that caught my attention this past week.
William Boyle–friend, writer, fellow noir lover, devourer of music and film–has written a book called Gravesend. I’m so damn excited to see how his love landed on these pages.
By way of A.S. Moser, a nifty deal on the so-far five books of The Song of Ice and Fire.
Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, discussed at Feminist Fiction. It encapsulates a lot of what I loved about the show (Tennant, the humor), some of what I have felt about the show recently (the favoring of dramatic whamwow over emotional continuity and narrative logic), and some thoughtful thoughts on the recent treatment of the women that surround the Doctor. I found myself, while watching the 50th anniversary special, to be so charmed by the proceedings, and so moved by the finale, that my misgivings over recent Who did not misgive me this time around. The dynamics of 10 and 11 and The War Doctor sparkled and sparked with so much emotional bite that I felt, at last, here was Moffat back to engaging us so deeply in the emotions and emotional arcs of characters that any possible narrative flim-flammery barely registers because we the emotional arc sustains us.
I’m so excited for the Christmas special and what might come next.
Happy Saturday, readers.
Enjoy your burrito.
the magnelephant review 