Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in frostfern's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, October 24th, 2009
12:52 pm	Note to self: coffee does not wake you up. It only gives you acid indigestion, a headache, and the shakes. Stick to tea in the mornings. That was yesterday--rather a good day despite grogginess and an astronomy lecture coming within measurable distance of quantum physics. "Traces our knowledge of solar system objects from ancient times to the present", my foot! We spent two days on history, and two weeks on the properties of light and matter. And now telescopes. They certainly didn't spend any time on astrolabes. But Latin makes up for it. Nice Latin. One knows that looks and personality don't always go together, but it's still amusing to see it demonstrated: there's a fellow in my Latin class with "football player" written all over him, and rather a Labradorish manner--- he's gunning for a passage from Virgil in the midterm. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 24th, 2009
7:52 pm	The dog is getting on very well, but the cat is Not Pleased, and spends most of his time upstairs, as Dash has not yet learned how to manage them. She's also chased him a few times---grayhounds chase anything that runs away. We should be able to reconcile them eventually. Round about the end of the school year I was struck by a desire to read the Conan the Barbarian stories. But I haven't yet managed to find a copy of any of the collections (except to buy over the internet). The university library here does not have anything, nor any of the half-dozen libraries at Toronto. In fact their catalogue blandly denies the existance of any such person as Robert E. Howard. You may reply that I have been looking in all the most unlikely places, but I went this weekend to a secondhand bookstore, the kind with six-foot stacks of books on the floor in all the aisles and quite a sizeable fantasy section, and they didn't have it either. They did have two of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser collections (the second and fourth) so I got those instead. I did find one Conan story, in The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
11:03 am	Sheesh, it's been a while, hasn't it? I got accepted by the University of Toronto--- at their Mississauga campus, oddly enough, since I applied for the St Geoge one! But they mentioned that, and I got a separate rejection letter from the St George. Ha! I also took Sayer's translation of The Song of Roland out of the library. It is translated in the proper metre--- it has a detailed explanation of that metre--- and it is the same metre as the Cid. We're getting a dog! Adopting a greyhound, from the racing-greyhound-rescue people (ie, they find homes for gryhound that have finished racing of weren't good enough to race). Her name is Dash. We get to pick her up this weekend. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
8:19 pm	I think I may be broken down and flung aside by the Paradise. It's much less narrative and more philosophical than the others, and reading more than a canto at a time gives me the headache. Not because I object to sentens in a work of art, but because this sentens is to hard for me to understand properly. Poor baby Ned died today. She was old and had been failing for quite a while, so it was expected, and at least she did not have to be put down like Algy did. But she was such a sweet rat---so pink and white and puzzledy looking. This should have come first, I suppose, but the other followed so naturally from the previous entry. I shall talk of other things as well, at the risk of seeming callous. I don't know what that egregious bungler Burton Raffel thinks he's at. A poetic translation which is completely unmetrical ought at least to have the excuse of literalness. He is prosy and lumpen, and seems (if the tone of his translations is anything to go by) to percieve no difference in tone between Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Song of the Cid. That he has become the school text of the former two is criminal. It was the Cid itself that spurred these refections. I wouldn't have bought Raffel's transltion at all, except that it has the Spanish text on the left. I have no Spanish, but I figured that I would get a tolerable impression of the poem with Raffel to give me the sense and the original to give me the sound. I have, as I said, no Spanish, but my French acts as a crutch or map, and I can understand enough to see that Raffel is not literal. The lines of the two versions are not in the same order, phrases are different, and so on---all normal things in a translation. But than why not write in metre? The Cid, admittedly, is in a queer metre: irregular lines which sometimes rhyme but mostly don't; each line made up of two equally irregular half-lines (in fact "irregular" is the only word you will get out of the introduction on the subject of metre. I am thrown back on my own knowledge, which is very slight. Prosody is not taught at all in the public schools). But it has a pleasing sort of rocking-horse motion which Raffel, of course, has made no attempt to reproduce. And with all this metrical irregularity floating about, you'd think it would be easy. But he sticks to the same porridgey free verse that he used for Sir Gawain and Beowulf----poems that do have well defined metres. (Admittedly alliterative verse is very difficult. But why tackle a job that you know you can't do? Even blank verse would be better: because blank verse has been the common and accepted vehicle for narrative poetry for so long, occupying roughly the same place in modern English as the alliterative metre does in Old. It is also very suitable for speaking aloud and thus appropriate for a poem which would have been declaimed to a company---like all the poems Raffel has debauched). (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
6:47 pm	Were it necessary, I now have proof positive that I am eccentric, having stayed up far too late last night in order to finish Dante's Purgatory (only dittelantes stop at the Inferno. Full speed ahead!). The cucumbers flourish apace. The potatoes were left outside in a frost and most of them died, but that is alright because it's nearly the time to plant potato sets directly. The vegetable bed are finished except for edging, which I am very particular about. Peas have been planted. I've been accepted by the University of Ottawa! Not my first chaoice, so we'll see what Toronto has to say. Queen's, I read in the paper, is dropping Medieval Studies for under-enrollment, and I didn't much like the look of their history program anyway; so it doesn't matter wheter thay accept me or not. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
2:14 pm	Spent the morning with my legs spraddled and my head down, exactly like a giraffe at a watering hole, so that I could shake the dirt off of clumps of sod. This is possibly the worst part of digging a new bed. I also took the opportunity to collect worms, and moved several of the houseplants outdoors. Also the several trays of seedlings which are hardening off (rather a pain to put out every morning and bring in every night, since they're upstairs). And now I think I'll just veg. . . . Except that I have to go to the library. Umf. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 20th, 2009
1:20 pm	Really, of course, I'm supposed to be working on my essay comparing two film productions of Hamlet. I find myself slightly hindered by inability to remember whether Zeferelli is spelt with one f or two. I've setttled on the former, but it's a kind of mistake that I seem of be prone to; misspellings like "differrent" and "tommorrow". I finished reading another Sheridan Le Fanu novel, Wylder's Hand, which bore out the rule that a revelation too long delayed becomes anticlimactic. This particular edition was also plagued by printer's errors--- mostly forgetting to put in the second of a pair of quotation marks ("Thus and so, he said) but once they transposed all the letters in "hanging from" so that it became "gnignah morf". Most cheeringly I managed for the first time to finish a book-length poem: Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. I liked it very much, but don't ask me to describe it--- I'm quite hopeless at describing books ("Sort of a Robertson Davies kind of love story, only not so comic, and she falls in love with him first and gets rejected, and then the other way round, and he kills hid best friend in a duel and the ending is very abrupt"). Current Mood: lazy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
10:09 pm	Can it be that it has been over a week, and I haven't said anything about the flower show? My mum and I went to Canada Blooms in Toronto during March break. Dad was working, so we took the train, which meant getting up at nine in the morning because trains in Canada are nuts. And we couldn't go back until around six. (Mum and I trundle around a vast concrete floored hall until one o'clock. "So," says I when we return to start, "when does the train come?") We oohed and ahed, and inspected garden ornaments, bypassed booths about lawn care and irrigation, and inspected stalls of jewlery (any crowd spontaneously generates jewlery salesmen. This is a law of nature). We recieved a free sample of worm castings. We entered raffles. And then there were seeds. Several seed companies, both large, and small and organic, had stalls. There were native plants (I bought sundial lupine and wild bergamot). Their were heirloom vegetables. Not only were there several varieties of yellow tomato, there was a green tomato and a black cherry tomato (little Goth tomatoes!). I bought a yellow variety called "Earl of Edgecombe", which is sprouting nicely (so are the damn potatoes). An organization was giving away free packets of wildflower seed. I chose Rattlesnake Master (Erygonium yuccifolia), an awesome but nearly indescribable plant which is drought tolerant and which mum likes, and mum chose evening primrose (Oenothera biennis). The U of G was there, and gave out free native seed mix. "Can we have two, because there's two of us?" asks Mum. "Sure, take lots!" says the man, giving us five. Since them we have been impatiently snuffling about the garden for signs of spring. The bulbs are coming up. The squirrels have moved more crocuses. The reticulated iris is blooming (reticulated iris is a very small, very early iris that grows fom a bulb. Good for rock gardens). The sorrel is sprouting. The Alberta spruce was seen to shake and shed needles, while impassioned cheeping was heard from within the branches. Definitely Spring. I have also been taken up with copying down quilt patterns. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
3:32 pm	I knew I should never have started the potatoes. Potatoes, understand, are a very frost sensitive sort of plant, and so there is no way they're going into the garden before May. I, thinking no evil, potted up some sets (little bits of potato with an eye, which sprout) a few weeks ago. Two of them poked charming little green snouts out in the first week, well and good. But I wasn't bargaining on them doubling in size every day. Yesterday I repotted the two charming snouts so that they would be buried up to their leaves in soil (they were getting rather leggy) and found them to be already potbound. Snout Major had to be planted in a galvanized sap bucket that Mum once bought as a hanging planter, while Snout Minor was content with a tall, narrow flowerpot. And now they have twice as much green showing again. . . . So I shan't be starting the cucumbers, despite the packet saying "four to six weeks before last frost". Because it also says not to set them out until early June. It's a good thing there is a seed packet in this case; if I had done things blind as I did with the potatoes, the results might have been disastrous (Family of Three Slain By Raging Vegetables. Neighbours were alerted by foliage protruding from windows). But I read in the newspaper that this is exactly the right time to start tomatoes. . . . (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
6:10 pm	Signs of spring in the Morris household: seeds are bought, although it is to early even to plant them indoors. Mum has nasturtiums. Dad has "Mammoth Russian" sunflowers. I have snap peas, corn, love-in-a-mist, lupines, and a funny cucumber. It's called "Lemon" and is globular and yellow. There really is an astonishing variety in cucumbers. Most of them are just a little bit longer or shorter or thicker of knobblier than the others, but there was one other oddity called "Armenian Foot Long", which looked nearly as rude as it sounded--- sort of curved and ridged and greyish. Similar variety in tomatoes, including a yellow one. Ought to have bought some to go with my cucumbers. Seeds are always tempting, but a worse temptation for us is the houseplants. Such beautiful little houseplants! Only two ninety-nine each! We have an ordinary butterfly plant already, but this one turns pink. Those money trees are lovely. Those colourful crotons. Or how about trying a china doll again? or a jade tree? And all those ferns! The only reason we escape with any money is bewildering variety. But we bought a jade tree. Dad is to have the sole responsibility for it, and we'll se if it survives (unlike the other two). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 7th, 2009
9:33 pm	Got Undine last week - finally. I also found the Elder (or Poetic) Edda. The Edda is a collection of Old Norse mythological poems, and they're very awsome. Old Norse verse used the same alliterative metre as Old English, but divides the lines into stanzas, which the English doesn't. Now the fine thing about this translation is that it retains the old metre, (But ignoring quantity because quantitative verse is nearly impossible in modern English). Most transltions wouldn't even try (one thinks of that hair-raisng fraud, Burton Raffel). And it's wonderful: Agantyr awake! Hervor calls you, your only daughter whom you had by Tofa. Give up from the grave the gleaming sword That the dwarves smithied for Svafrlami. Hervard, Hjorvard, Hrani, awake! Hear me, all of you, under the tree-roots, With sharp swords, with shields and byrnies And red spears, the rig of war. Much are you changed, children of Arngrim Once so mighty, are you mold now? Will Eyfura's sons refuse to listen Or speak with me on Munarveg? I've been copying things out into notebook-of-quotes. So far I have "The Sayings of the All-Wise"---five pages. I began to copy "The Sayings of the High One", but that was too much. It would have been twenty pages. Reading Norse poetry makes one relize how very Norse Tolkien is. One is reminded of him at every turn (backwardsly), especially by the names. Not least in "The Song of the Sybil": Tolkien took the names of all the dwarves in The Hobbit from the list of dwarfs that the Sybil recites, and dwarfs are called "Durin's folk". And one can see that Tolkien has had a certain influence on the translators, for they write "dwarves" instead of "dwarfs", which is the proper English plural. (More indisputably, one of the trans. is W H Auden, and admirer of Tolkien, and the book is dedicated to Tolkien as well). Tra-la-la, I blather. I know that I have an audience of exactly two, and one of them doesn't like Tolkien. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
7:25 pm	Exams are over. French was delayed one day because of the weather, otherwise I would have had all three in a row. Literature was exactly like a grade nine exam. Art was also easy. High school art exams are always easy---"John Doe painted Splodgey Thing and was one of the founding members of the Splodgist movement". French was quite easy because I'd done Gr 12 French before. They used the same sight passage as last year. I've decided to take up the Victorian era, and since there aren't any good general books about it I've mostly read novels (I hadn't realized how lucky the middle ages really was with popular historians; Alison Weir for biography and Frances and Joseph Gies for social history). I read Nicholas Nickleby because it was the only Dickens we happened to have in the house, and I enjoyed it immensly. Now I'm chewing on The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. I prefer Dickens and Sheridan Le Fanu. I still haven't managed to get Undine, on account of leaving my wallet, with library card, in my locker. But I shall get it tomorrow (just wait, when I get there someone will have taken it out). And I've been reading the letters of C S Lewis, whom I admire beyond anything. He's so gloriously sane and lucid and clever. I have the first two volumes and hope to be able to find the third. (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 18th, 2009
4:31 pm	School proper is finally over and study week begins on Monday. School between now and the end of the holidays coasted along quite well, exepth for the night of Thursday the fifteenth, when I had to stay up late typing my Literature essay, and then my French essay. This was bad because i) I dislike typing, especially if I have to think about what I'm typing instead of simply copying it down, as I was in this case---editing on the fly. ij) Because of the relative positions of computer, heating vent, and drafty window; a constant icy breeze blows over my hands. For all that, I like my essay. It was on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel, by Susanna Clarke; a book I love. Knowles asked for a five paragrph essay (that abomination! I mean the essay, not Mr Knowles), he has gotten an eight page essay. In my defense, I may point out that it still had only three points, and that one page was all quotation, and tht he didn't mind when he got two pages instead of one paragraph about Grendel at the beginning of the semester. I had decided that I was going to try reading Freidrich de la Motte Fouque's Undine in French. It is a German novel, and the University library only has it in the original and in French---so I thought I'd have a go at the latter; I need the practice. But all this went bang because the roads are to bad to out today. Next week, I suppose. Current Mood: cold (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 10th, 2009
9:35 pm	Suffered a major reverse in my story (provisionally titled Roman de la Rose), having written my way down a dead end. Bah. Of course even without that I can only get so far for the nonce, because I don't know how it ends. Yesterday was the opening our art class's show. This wasn't very exiting since of course I'd seen everybody's stuff already. But my friend Kendra was there, since her holidays aren't over yet, and it was nice to see her again. And there was nice food. I was rather annoyed that the gallery people (at least I assume it was them) had put out a common dollar-store notebook and pen, and people were signing in that instead of in out guestbook---because I'd made that guestbook myself! A nice little quarto in single-needle coptic stitch, and it turned out beautifully, not wobbly like my only other attempt at coptic. I was everso pleased to learn that I'd won the contest for designing the graduating class stained-glass window. Fifty dollars to spend on BOOKS. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
8:18 pm	Ah, the relief of school being out for Christmas. I managed, with much grief & indecision and Nerves, to get my university applications done. (Toronto, Queen's, and Ottawa). Bless the Guidance councillor, she is the most sympathetic and patient person ever employed by a school board. My Nerves have fully deserved a capital letter these last few weeks. They've plagued me with weariness and weepiness and inexplicable fears--- in short, with Nerves. Hopefully (although the word isn't meant to be used that way) I shall be fully recovered by January. I have been writing a story, and inventing the world in which it takes place. It is Victorian Canada, but with magic. One of the important figures in it is my old chronicler, Ardea Canadensis (born Alice Drummond to a wealthy merchant in Toronto). There is also a hero named Macalister the Bold, who the story is about; a cunning man (which is a kind of village magician and physician), John Faber; a werewolf; the academic study of magic; and so on. I've even been contemplating and eighteenth century part, although I'm not very fond of the eighteenth century, and all that I have for it is one character; the coureur de bois and mystic Jaques-Valentin Crevecoeur de Barbizon. A resounding name and one I'm very proud of. He is the author of Cabinet des monstres, Decouvert de la magique Canadienne, and his cryptic magnum opus; Declaration du grand Ouendigo. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 11th, 2008
9:24 pm	Randomness I had a terrible, terrible dream the other night. I dreamed that my lettuce bolted. Oddly enough, too, since I don't think the cultivar I have does bolt. (When lettuce puts up a long flowering shoot and goes to seed, it is said to have "bolted". This is a bad thing because the lettuce gets very bitter then. So people spend great effort in developing nonbolting varieties; kind of the same idea as seedless fruit). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008
10:38 pm	I've been doing two things this week: painting, and reading Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's novel Uncle Silas. The former I shall discuss later. The latter is a product of my trip to the University library on . . . was it Monday? (I have no sense of time). Being eighteen this year, I signed up as a "community borrower". Twenty bucks for all the abstruse texts you want for a year, renew them as many times as you like, Huzza! So I got Uncle Silas, a late Gothic novel; Morris' Story of Sigurd the Volsung (and we'll see if I can finish a long verse narrative for once); and the Malleus Maleficarum. This last is a very scholarly, somewhat abridged translation, so a number of anecdotes are only summarized. Sad, because of course the anecdotes were what I was really after. My theological knowledge isn't good enough to appreciate the technical bits, although did pick up a rather neat one, thus: It was in the section about witches stealing men's penises or rather - and this is the key bit - making men believe that their penises have been stolen. Because, according to Institorius, harmful magic is not actually done by the witches but by evil spirits who serve them. And these evil spirits only have so much power over people, for various theological reasons that I kind of skimmed over. So what they really do is decieve the senses. The man in question has still got a penis, but no one can see or feel it. Well, I thought it was amusing. I also sent out my short story Esdoorn to a magazine, and only realized afterwards that I had forgotten to change the name of the country in which it takes place. You see, the country is a kind of, er, medieval Canada. Just kind of existing for its own sake and without any detailed alternate history or anything. There's method in the madness, but I shan't explain it here. Anyway, it was originally named Rupertsland, which was (as two words) historically the name of the northwestern bits of land that no Europeans were really exploring yet (I have no idea who Rupert was). Same as "Northwest Territories" which used to be everything west of Lake Superior. And it appealed to me for some reason. But it isn't a very good name, especially if you don't know the reasoning behind it, and I had come up with the much better "Outremer" ("Oversea" in English). (This was also once tha name of a real place, in this case the Crusader kingdoms in the Middle East like Jerusalem and Acre). But I forgot to make the change in the Word document before I printed it out and mailed it. Argh. Also, I owe my Dad a hundred dollars for a book. Oof. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
9:42 pm	Misc. Saw Hero the other day. So. Awesome. The most impressive part visually was the fight between Moon and Snow, I think. The most impressive dramatically was when Nameless stands waiting to be executed. Yesterday my parents old friend Reg, who now lives in Zambia, came over for a visit (that family spends some time in Canada or Europe every year, and come visit us for a bit of it). Of course he and my parents spent much time reminiscing about the kibbutz, where they met. Everyone there seems to have been very odd, including the dogs. Item: Realized that my highschool careeer is Sisyphean, not Kafkasque. Sisyphean is easier to spell, too. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
9:29 pm	All Madness on a Small Stick . . . . A useful Dutch idiom which I have decided to adopt. I have now, after doing a week of quite strenous work, I have been kicked out of summer school, because they found that my mark on entering the course was a whopping five per cent below what was required, and I should have signed up for the full five week deal. It is now far too late to do so. They did at least admit that it wasn't my fault, and somebody should have caught it. Ah, well. It was harrowing, but I got, I think, two---, no, three things out of it. i)A good source of information on MLA citations. ij) I took a really close look at Roethke's poem "Forcing House", which was neat. I like Roethke's greenhouse poems. iij) I read Life of Pi, which I wouldn't have done otherwise. However, none of this changes the fact that I am utterly screwed for the credit. My highschool career is rapidly assuming Kafkasque proportions. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Gothic Voices - ma seul amour et ma belle maistresse (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
6:25 pm	Summer school starts soon. Yay. This is not entirely a bad thing. I did summer school last year and loved it---it was like scholarly day camp. Very easy. And that particular English course was structured around Northrop Frye and archtypes and things, and so we watched The Princess Bride, which was the first time I'd seen it. And there was Arthurian legend, which was a mixed blessing because while I adore it, I also love it to much to hear it ill spoken of (which such people as my contemporaries are sure to do eventually) and the worry is very hard on my nerves (I have nerves, like a character in a Victorian novel). Summer school this year however, is an internet course. This is the school board's latest wheeze an I was hoping to try it next year since most of my school problems stem from theoretical disagreements with my teachers and general irritation with my contemporaries.* But they are supposed to be very difficult for some reason, and so it was suggested that since I was bound for summer school anyway, I take it in the manner aforesaid. So so so. We'll see. *I have this trick of referring to my agemates as my "contemporaries", on the grounds that they certainly aren't my peers. This is Pride, but I can't help it. Most of them are just so ignorant. At least it's a novel source of angst. (1 Comment |Comment on this)