The awesomeness of my weekend...
Apr. 25th, 2010 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catherineldfit does happen sometimes. :-)
Just learned that Night's Kiss is a 2009 Lesbian Fiction Readers Choice Winner in the erotica category. V. pleased. :-D And huge congrats to the other winners who include Sacchi Green, C.M. Harris, Georgia Beers and Lee Lynch, among others. Yay!
It comes with this nifty certificate which gets to join the one for Crave:
Accomplishments thus far this weekend:
2 stories submitted for consideration in The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Vol. 10 (with thanks to the fine folks at Circlet Press who sent out a reminder earlier this week when I was in the throes of overtime and work wackiness and had forgotten that I hadn't sent these in yet).
Went to the Dead Sea Scrolls show at the Minnesota Science Museum yesterday. Kind of a mixed bag on this one. The scrolls are quite interesting but the exhibit seems to have a lot of filler in it. There's an abundance of pottery and coins which may or may not have anything to do with the people who may or may not have written the scrolls, but not so much on say, scrolls from elsewhere in the world or writing implements for same or why bitumen is significant. The first part reads a bit like an ad for visiting Israel while the last part, which is the St. John's Bible exhibit, has a "Look, look, Minnesota has sacred texts too!" thing going on. Mind you the Bible is all hand calligraphed and illuminated and quite spectacular but it looks like an add-on here. Where the exhibit comes closest to succeeding is on some of the educational portions which have some interesting things in them. I know zip about religious sects of the time period so I learned a few things. Not a total bust, by any means but not as strong as I'd hoped. The Omni Theater show on "Arabia" also has its moments - spectacular shots of Riyadh and Mecca, some interesting views of daily life - seems to play fast and loose with some prehistory (as well as some less than fun facts about contemporary history). For instance, it's implied that the capital of the Nabataeans, Petra, was located much further south on the Arabian peninsula proper rather than in its actual location in contemporary Jordan. The shots of Meda'in Saleh (which is well to the south of Petra) were pretty impressive though. Again, worth seeing if you're already at the Museum and have shelled out for the pricey exhibit ticket. Just be prepared to pick up some additional reading material if you want much real information on the Scrolls or some of the other topics covered.
After that and dinner, we went to Theater Unbound to catch Medea: A Noh Cycle. This was a pretty interesting show (last one's today at 2PM if you want to catch it). It was done as a hybrid of noh and kabuki with some other elements thrown in. The staging was quite good and the performances excellent, though we both thought a bit could have been trimmed. This was particularly true of the ending. The play was written by Carol Sorgenfrei in the mid-1970s and is intended to be a feminist revisioning of the Medea story (girl with magical powers meets boy who wants Golden Fleece, wacky hijinx and lots of fatalities ensue, boy not very cleverly decides he wants a different girl of a nonmagical, less homicidal variety, bad things happen). The problem is that Medea is a difficult character to reclaim, though Edith Hamilton does her usual excellent job in Mythology, and once you remove some of the historical specificity, by the time we get to the point in the plot where she's laying waste to everything Jason loves, she comes across as merely peevish. Taking out some of the issues that a woman of her general time period would have faced on being thrown aside (her sons would most likely have been killed by Jason's new family, for instance), means that a contemporary audience sits through this and wonders why she doesn't just leave. Does she really need to kill all those people first? There was also a perfect ending moment, about 10 minutes before the actual end. We got a lot of good discussion out of it though so definitely worthwhile, flaws and all.
Just learned that Night's Kiss is a 2009 Lesbian Fiction Readers Choice Winner in the erotica category. V. pleased. :-D And huge congrats to the other winners who include Sacchi Green, C.M. Harris, Georgia Beers and Lee Lynch, among others. Yay!
It comes with this nifty certificate which gets to join the one for Crave:
Accomplishments thus far this weekend:
2 stories submitted for consideration in The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Vol. 10 (with thanks to the fine folks at Circlet Press who sent out a reminder earlier this week when I was in the throes of overtime and work wackiness and had forgotten that I hadn't sent these in yet).
Went to the Dead Sea Scrolls show at the Minnesota Science Museum yesterday. Kind of a mixed bag on this one. The scrolls are quite interesting but the exhibit seems to have a lot of filler in it. There's an abundance of pottery and coins which may or may not have anything to do with the people who may or may not have written the scrolls, but not so much on say, scrolls from elsewhere in the world or writing implements for same or why bitumen is significant. The first part reads a bit like an ad for visiting Israel while the last part, which is the St. John's Bible exhibit, has a "Look, look, Minnesota has sacred texts too!" thing going on. Mind you the Bible is all hand calligraphed and illuminated and quite spectacular but it looks like an add-on here. Where the exhibit comes closest to succeeding is on some of the educational portions which have some interesting things in them. I know zip about religious sects of the time period so I learned a few things. Not a total bust, by any means but not as strong as I'd hoped. The Omni Theater show on "Arabia" also has its moments - spectacular shots of Riyadh and Mecca, some interesting views of daily life - seems to play fast and loose with some prehistory (as well as some less than fun facts about contemporary history). For instance, it's implied that the capital of the Nabataeans, Petra, was located much further south on the Arabian peninsula proper rather than in its actual location in contemporary Jordan. The shots of Meda'in Saleh (which is well to the south of Petra) were pretty impressive though. Again, worth seeing if you're already at the Museum and have shelled out for the pricey exhibit ticket. Just be prepared to pick up some additional reading material if you want much real information on the Scrolls or some of the other topics covered.
After that and dinner, we went to Theater Unbound to catch Medea: A Noh Cycle. This was a pretty interesting show (last one's today at 2PM if you want to catch it). It was done as a hybrid of noh and kabuki with some other elements thrown in. The staging was quite good and the performances excellent, though we both thought a bit could have been trimmed. This was particularly true of the ending. The play was written by Carol Sorgenfrei in the mid-1970s and is intended to be a feminist revisioning of the Medea story (girl with magical powers meets boy who wants Golden Fleece, wacky hijinx and lots of fatalities ensue, boy not very cleverly decides he wants a different girl of a nonmagical, less homicidal variety, bad things happen). The problem is that Medea is a difficult character to reclaim, though Edith Hamilton does her usual excellent job in Mythology, and once you remove some of the historical specificity, by the time we get to the point in the plot where she's laying waste to everything Jason loves, she comes across as merely peevish. Taking out some of the issues that a woman of her general time period would have faced on being thrown aside (her sons would most likely have been killed by Jason's new family, for instance), means that a contemporary audience sits through this and wonders why she doesn't just leave. Does she really need to kill all those people first? There was also a perfect ending moment, about 10 minutes before the actual end. We got a lot of good discussion out of it though so definitely worthwhile, flaws and all.
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