there will be a fish

A friend of mine moved to Nicaragua recently, for whom I scanned a few essays to PDF from my first edition copy of Dorothy L. Sayers' Unpopular Opinions, which I have mentioned here before. The book is out of print, and the essays are wretchedly difficult to find elsewhere; I thought some of you might be interested, so I've uploaded them to Mediafire as well:

Foreword

Aristotle on Detective Fiction

Are Women Human?

Forgiveness

I'm completely in love with "Aristotle on Detective Fiction," which uses Aristotle's Poetics to analyze the detective genre. Sayers was an Oxford-trained scholar and a popular writer during the golden age of detective fiction, so she knew whereof she spoke. It's also slyly hilarious in the best Sayers style.

"Are Women Human?" is one of the most sensible essays on feminism that I've read, and it was written in the 1930s; this is why I love Sayers. I really wish I could give it to some of the people I went to school with. "Forgiveness" was interesting, but I mostly scanned it for my friend's sake.

[ETA: new links 12/18/11]

- So I just realized that I never posted the results for the unguessed pairings in the quotations ship meme a couple of weeks ago. I've now updated the post with the answers -- no one guessed Miss Parker/Jarod (The Pretender), Josh Lyman/Donna Moss (The West Wing), Olivia Dunham/Peter Bishop (Fringe), Napoleon Solo/Illya Kuryakin (The Man From U.N.C.L.E.), or Steve McGarrett/Danny Williams (Hawaii Five-0). For shame on the last one, people. The rest I kind of expected -- serves me right for being ridiculously multifannish. The pairings that were guessed were Brad Colbert/Nate Fick (Generation Kill), Bertie Wooster/Reginald Jeeves (Jeeves & Wooster), John Watson/Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes books), Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane (Lord Peter Wimsey series), and Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski (Due South).

- I have started compulsively watching QI again. Why is Stephen Fry so awesome, seriously? I just want to be his friend, give him a hug, and sit around drinking tea and/or madeira while talking about obscure trivia. (SIGH why am I not Emma Thompson)

- Question: does anyone know where I might *ahem* look for video editing programs, with, say, an eye patch on, if you know what I mean? I've been really wanting to make some vids, but fuck if I'm going to do it with Windows Movie Maker again.

- In other, unrelated news, I can't stop listening to Janelle Monáe's song "Cold War". I'm not sure why. It's awesome. :)

1. Zombie fic! I'm one of those folks firmly in the "everything is better with zombies" camp, so imagine my delight at running across these three ficlets. Especially because one involves Jeeves & Wooster, of all people, and another involves Holmes & Watson. My only regret is that they are not longer, but YAY ZOMBIES!

2. So apparently Lord Peter Wimsey kinda started life as an OC in unpublished fanfic. I find this hilarious. :D

3. Discovered: an online glossary of WWI slang. It's an Australian publication, so it skews toward that country's vocabulary, but there are lots of general/American/British terms as well. I've been amusing myself looking up bits of slang that Bertie Wooster uses, and comparing the meanings for words like "bung" and "old bean" and "biff." Also: WWI is apparently where "cooties" originally came from (see this page). Who knew?

4. I've been running into a lot of characters recently along the lines of this trope and this one, in such bizarrely different sources as the Temeraire series, Georgette Heyer's Devil's Cub, Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion – even James Bond, and a little bit of Jeeves, weirdly enough. It's been making me think about how pretty much all of my favorite fictional characters run along these lines: burdened with an superfluity of principles and a shortage of self-interest. (They tend get really battered along the way.) The rest tend to be rogues, thieves, con artists, and the morally-ambiguous-but-good-hearted types. I wonder what this says about me.

5. Did you know that Mark Twain forbid his autobiography from being published until 100 years after his death? I sure didn't. But apparently this is the year, and it finally will be published. Isn't that cool? Talk about outrunning death...

One of the last things I did before leaving New York City and my college was return a bunch of library books. This grand undertaking involved three trips, several giant cloth shopping bags, and the assistance of my twin to achieve. I was most saddened by the necessity of returning a collection Dorothy L. Sayers essays, titled Unpopular Opinions. I'd only managed to work my way through two of the essays – "Aristotle on Detective Fiction," which rather awesomely uses Aristotle's Poetics to analyze the detective genre; I discuss the other essay further below.

Sayers is best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels from the 1920s and 1930s, which is how I was introduced to her work. In fact, it was the reason I even found Unpopular Opinions in the first place – I was having a crisis of faith, academia-style, and the best remedy I could imagine was a prompt application of Sayers' Gaudy Night.

It worked like a charm, with the bonus discovery of an entire two shelves of books that included Sayers' essays, plays, criticism, and collected letters. (I spent several hours sitting at a carrel doing good-parts-version re-reads of Strong Poison and Have His Carcase, and paging through her letters. Homework, what homework...) Anyway, I checked out Gaudy Night for a full re-read, and Unpopular Opinions for kicks. To give you an idea of why I mourned its loss, here's the book's opening:

"I have called this collection of fugitive pieces "Unpopular Opinions", partly, to be sure, because to warn a person off a book is the surest way of getting him to read it, but chiefly because I have evidence that all the opinions expressed have in fact caused a certain amount of annoyance one way and the other."

Who doesn't want to read a book starting off like that? In all seriousness, I adore Sayers' brain. She combines the intellectualism of an Oxford graduate with a refreshingly grounded, humanistic outlook on life, and a talent for effective and witty debate that she no doubt sharpened on friends like C.S. Lewis. The results make for great writing.

Anyway, I was reminded of the book for two reasons, the confluence of which led to my tracking down and buying a used copy of this (sadly out-of-print) book from a British vendor. 14-45 days shipping time, baby! But it's in great condition. :D?

( Reason The First: my friend makes one little comment about feminism, and this is what happens )

( Reason The Second: all roads lead to Holmes )

All right, that's enough of that. See what my brain does? One tiny comment in someone's comments and one current fictional obsession, and I end up writing all this and linking all over the interwebs. And I'm restraining myself here. *shakes head*