So I've been offered the librarian job. The terms will be sent to me next week for my approval and I'm totally terrified. I'm a beta person at heart and while perfectly capable of assuming an alpha role I'd rather not do it my first professional job. However, the project is exciting and much closer to home. I need to come up with a budget and talk to other librarians, find someone to mentor me.
I'm reading Body Count by P.D. Martin, an entirely forgettable detective story featuring an Australian woman working for the FBI in Washington, DC. She has psychic visions and she and her friend Sam and her new FBI boyfriend Josh are trying to find the DC Slasher. The writing is competent, the author did her research on criminal profiling and forensics, the plot generally moves forward, and the characters are at least somewhat engaging. She lays everything to do with the subject of profiling out as it comes up in informative paragraphs without being distracting. There is nothing very challenging or inventive (she does all right on the killer though). This is light reading at its best (as far as rape, torture, and killing go anyway). Also, I totally know who the killer is. The clues are not particularly subtle, unless they're a misdirect. If I'm wrong I'll be pleasantly surprised. If I'm right I'll be smug.
I'm also reading I, Claudius by Robert Graves. I love history and he has created an engaging character to bring this story of Augustus, Livia and their pawns, family, pawns to life. Livia is a manipulative, cunning, mean-spirited, ambitious woman and Augustus is her perfect puppet. I've tried to create a crib sheet to keep track of the Claudian and Julian families but the lines are all over the place. Graves does a pretty good job of keeping everyone and their story lines separate though. Each chapter sets out sets out an intrigue or theme based around Claudius and his kin so that it occasionally jumps backward and forward in time a little so that other family members stories can catch up. I'm going to take my time with this one.
I watched Naked Lunch. Ohhh well. What to say. It is obviously not the book. That's not really possible; the characters would blend one into the other and half the screen time would be nothing but guys have sex. I mean, a lot of people would watch it of course but then it wouldn't have Ian Holm in it and I think we can mainly agree that that would be a shame.
It combines the Interzone country (a fictional place nowhere they've set in Northern Africa filled with drug cabals, agents, and bugs posing as typewriters (that last part wasn't in the book)) with parts of Burroughs' own life, such as the accidental shooting of his wife and the writing of Naked Lunch. His hallucinations seem to mesh well with reality anyway, allowing him to wander through his time in Interzone acting as an agent writing reports and his book. He also gives monologues consisting of passages from the novel. He gains a pretty boy lover named KiKi and there are even more bugs and parrots and the 'black meat'. Then it possibly starts all over again but I'm not sure.
Honestly I think this movie is for people who've read the book and know something about the author. Though if it makes even less sense maybe it's more intriguing? It was good. I'm rambling and tired.
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