bedlamsbard | (no subject)

So yesterday I was fruitlessly trying to register for ILLiad (the inter-library loan system) as a new user, and it kept erroring me out and/or telling me my username was taken, so I gave up and resolved to just go to Howie-T today and ask how to ILL a book, except then I got back from class today and right there IN MY E-MAIL was my ILL account. I just. What the fuck. I'm glad one of the easy usernames actually stuck, though, not one of the whacky ones I was trying. (I don't know if it's automated or not, but I suspect that ILL might be really made at me now.)

Anyway. I have put in an ILL request for Virgil's Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England, which sadly neither Tilton nor Monroe has. My first ILL request! I feel all grown up or something.

Meanwhile, yesterday I was having a Sad, so I went to Maple Street meaning to just go to the bookshop and get a book I'd been eyeing for awhile, but I just kept meandering and ended up in Swap, which is a consignment shop I really like. I ended up with a skirt and a shirt. I wish I was better at being aggressive; the embroidery pattern on the skirt is slightly marred by a loose thread where the stitching's come undone, and while it has eyelet hooks, there aren't any clasps, just loops of thread, which doesn't seem quite right for a high-quality garment. The clasps I brought up, the loose thread I didn't, but eh. I mean, it's still a good price for a nice skirt -- it's a lot harder to find heavy cotton skirts than you'd think it would be, everything's rayon or polyester or, at best, a light cotton these days. The shirt is your standard cowboy-ish style button-up -- I know I could get a similar shirt at Goodwill for ten dollars less, but I can't get to Goodwill and it still wasn't a bad price. (My roommate just spent $130 on a shirt from the Alexa Chung collection, which even she admits is ridiculous for a shirt, so I'm keeping it in perspective.)

I did end up going back to the bookshop and getting the book I wanted, which is Jennifer Roberson's Lady of the Forest. I read it a long, long time ago, probably in middle school, and my public library now longer has it and it's been haunting me for a while. I can't remember if it's actually any good, but now I can find out! ...eventually. When I have time to read it. (There are one or two scenes that I'm pretty sure are from this book that really stand out for me, but since I've never reread it, I don't know for sure if they (a) are from this book or (b) actually exist.)

I'm now wondering if it's Lady of the Glen, which I read around the same time (but which had a different cover, DEAR GOD), that had the massacre; for some reason I thought it was that Little House book that was set in the Highlands, but...that doesn't seem like a very Little House thing to do.

Also, I think I have figured out the frame concept for the next Rilian story, because I want to worldbuild laaaaaaaawcoooooodes. I think I switched to writing more Telmarine Narnia than Golden Age because the worldbuilding is more full of lulz, let's be honest. I was thinking of doing ballads, but I think lawcodes will be lulzier. I know. My writing process is so refined. Elegant, one might say. Distinguished, even.

If a Mole or a Rabbit or any other Person shall build their burrows or homes in the track of a road or path or any other place known to be frequented by Men, Horses, or any other Persons and an injury should result, then the Builder is liable to be sued for damages resulting...

(Yep. Reading Las Siete Partidas, which is way more full of LOLZ than I'm pretty sure Alfonso X of Castile meant it to be. But that's just me.)

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Unless you're thinking of the massacre at Acre by Richard I, there are no massacres in Lady of the Forest, which I know...perhaps too well, since I wrote a chapter of my undergrad honors thesis on the Robin Hood novels of the 1980s and 1990s. And that book miiiight have come up when I wrote my Master's essay on Robin Hood romance novels. *shifty eyes* Which cover did you get? The early editions have a very striking white background with the painting as an inset, mid-range ones take the painting and blow it up so it is the entire cover, and then it got a recent reprint run with a photo-paint cover that would look cheesy on a grocery store or Kindle-exclusive romance novel.

It's not in Lady of the Forest; I think it might be in Lady of the Glen -- it's definitely a massacre set somewhere in Scotland, I think it's a family feud, I think it might, um, take place at dinner? Black Dinner, something like that? (There is also the complete possibility I am melding things together that do not exist or am making things up. I mean, I know my memory of it predates the Red Wedding in GRRM's A Storm of Swords, so that's not where it's coming from.)

I think I've got the first edition hardback from 1992 with the painting.

That seems like an awesome thesis topic, I'm just saying. My Chaucer professor is apparently teaching a seminar on Robin Hood this semester, which can only be awesome, I wish I was taking it.

Lady of the Glen is a retelling of the Glencoe massacre. So that's probably it. IIRC, it's the book with the cover art that looks disturbingly like Michael Praed, who played Robin of Loxley in Robin of Sherwood...

That must be it! Because it seemed very unlikely to be in a Little House book, but I suspect I read both around the same time and got them mixed up. (I, um, also suspect that I probably shouldn't have been reading Lady of the Glen in elementary school, but whatever.)

I should warn you that although I like a lot of Roberson's work, the Robin Hood novels (especially the second one) didn't age well...

Have you read the Tiger & Del books?

I am mostly just curious to see if the scenes I remember from it actually exist or if I just hallucinated them. (Or borrowed them from another book, heh.)

I think I might have read one of them, but they didn't make enough of an impression of me to stick with them.