More bookery and lookery

[Tabouli]

Amber:
> Wah! Tabouli! You have the red-green version? (of the Neverending Story)

I owned one in 1987, lost it at school, and when I went to replace it I firmly boycotted the fraudulent black and white edition.  No *way*.  Then I put in a search for a second-hand red and green version in about three places and after about three months, they actually found me one!  Cost me a fortune, but hey.

And yes, The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye.  The illustrations were actually done by the author herself, IIRC!  To be recommended, as I for one often base my ideas of what a character looks like on the illustrations.  Which is why I couldn't bear Lucy in the Lion, the Witch etc. miniseries.  Yeuch!  Everyone knows she is dainty with blonde pigtails...

All the same, I *do* detest the tendency for film-makers to beautify book characters before they're considered fit to be seen on screen.  Even more than the great Spectacle Myths.  Yes, the first Neverending Story film was close enough to the text of the first half of the book, but Bastian was a short, pale, fat boy. This was mentioned many times, and in fact later becomes quite important to the plot in the bit they didn't film.  Why did we have to have that dark skinny kid in the role?  Was he the child actor of the month, or was it just that film-makers (and drama schools) think that they have to make over the star to sell tickets??  Mutter mutter.  Worst of all, they might even be right, which is very depressing.

Back to illustrations.  For HP, the pictures that best fit my ideas of what the characters look like are those by Tealin Raintree, especially her Lupin.  Which means I do *not* want Colin Firth as Lupin, no way, wrong, wrong, wrong.  He needs to be thinner, more wan, tired but kindly, with lighter, straighter hair.  Wonder if we'll ever get to see JKR's original illustrations her publishers didn't want?

Joywitch:
> books whose main characters are always horny, ugly old men who for some inexplicable 
reason are extremely attractive to beautiful, sexy, young women.

The worrying thing is that this combination does actually happen often enough in real life, though not nearly as often as it does in the fantasies of many male authors.  Not that the older man-younger woman relationship is necessarily a bad thing, but one has to wonder about combinations like Zeta-Jones/Douglas or Pavarotti/whatshername, or Woody Allen and his foster daughter.  (I think there definitely need to be more older women with toyboys about...)

I blame the Meat Market Index, and its different scoring system for men and women.

Mind you, I rather like Tom Robbins' quirky novels, which are another classic example of this sort of thing (Tom clearly fancies himself as this sort of middle aged maverick with an failproof ability to seduce gorgeous, naive young women by introducing them to the wild, seedy, sexual side of life in indulgent, macho fashion).  I like Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas best (not that the 29yo Eurasian heroine has anything to do with this).  Written entirely in the second person, which is interesting - it gives the intimacy of the first person, but with a wry distance the first person can't provide.  Again, like Gone With The Wind, politically dubious, but I must confess that his portrayal of Gwen the money-hungry, status-obsessed, image conscious Filipina reminds me so much of various Chinese Australians of my acquaintance that I have to chuckle wickedly...

"...you consented to consider the Werewolf, since it has a state-of-the-art ventilation system, and since substantial persons -- real persons, persons with incomes above five figures -- have been known to show up there (although if they observe you in the company of Ms Huffington, it could do you more harm than good)."  (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, p40, "Midnight April 5th").

All too true... I have known some nameless people who refuse to enter certain stores because they are not high class enough and they might be *seen* there, people who snub friends in public because they aren't wearing the Right Clothes, people whose parents shun daughters' boyfriends who own property (!) but in the Wrong Suburb, people who look down on anyone who isn't a doctor or at least a lawyer (my poor mother was so embarrassed that I did an Arts degree).  Hey, it's not that status-consciousness doesn't exist in the Anglo-Australian middle class as well, but it tends to be more discreet and less publically approved of, whereas in some of the wealthier Asian migrant communities it is pretty much the norm, and people who reject it (like me, alas... should be pulling down that 6 figure income and married to a doctor by now) are considered misguided at best.  An Australian Chinese friend of mine commented that he couldn't bear to go back to Hong Kong, where he'd have to step out of his minute apartment wearing Armani and a Rolex and drive to work in a Mercedes to be taken seriously...

Tabouli.


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