Kaboingy.

[elfs]

A friend of yours has fallen in love. Hard. And he won't stop talking about it. Everything about his life now centers about his new love, his new obsession, and there are times, when you're sitting together at lunch, when you really, really wish he'd just shut up, because, y'know, he's really being an asshole about it.

He has New Relationship Energy Syndrome.

I'm reading Kushiel's Dart, and the author reminds me of this friend. She has wandered through the initial stages of association with the leather/kink community-- abhorrence, curiousity, investigation, participation, rejection, acceptance, embrasure-- and has now gone to that stage where she's madly, passionately, wholly in love with the very idea of S&M and the community that supports her participation. She now has a relationship with the leather/kink community, and it's so beautiful and so magnificent that she has to tell the whole world about it.

But she can't, really. Not about this. So she takes this New Relationship Energy and a degree in French History and she pours it out into this massive novel. And, like this friend, she wants to let you know every last detail about why she's so hooked, so into, this new and wonderful thing she's found, even if it's not your thing, even if you don't care.

I mean, when she uses the word 'algolagnia,' a word manufactured by the denizens of alt.sex.bondage for the sole purpose of sounding scholarly about whatever it is that they do, it just makes me want to toss the book at the wall, hard. Internet neologisms do not belong in novels set in a 17th Century pseudoFrance.

Don't get me wrong. Kushiel's Dart is a well-written novel with a nicely constructed fantasy world and some decent adventures. But great Ghu, I so want tell the author, "Honey, get over it already!"

[Edit] I found out, through an interview that I read of hers, that Ms. Carey is not into The Scene, but merely did a lot of research. If so, I'm impressed with the breathless way that she made Phedre seem. I'm also almost disappointed, in a way, that such energy could be written so convincingly. It makes it all seem so... capturable.

Comments

Neologolagnic pedantry

[patcat.livejournal.com]

'Algolagnia' has been around for a while. It was used in 1904, according to this link (http://www.feastofhateandfear.com/archives/man_into_wolf.html) (which talks about S&M and lycanthropy, peculiarly enough) and was coined in 1895 by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing ("I know Notzing!").
It's a bit like 'lame' -- a word that seems of recent usage, but which has had its modern meaning for quite a while. (It's also a bit like 'television' in that it's a combination of both Latin and Greek. :)

Re: Neologolagnic pedantry

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Really? Curious. I recall it being dredged up on alt.sex.bondage back in the mid-90's; I always assumed that like a lot of the other terms there someone had just crafted it together, like "polyamory," another Greek-Latin Frankenstein of a word. Thanks for the info.

Re: Neologolagnic pedantry

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

really... Schrenck-Notzing coined it, and it was picked up by Albert Eulenburg and then Havelock Ellis, which was lucky for it as S-N was a bit of a kook (*coughMorning Glory Zellcough*). In other words, it was brewed up in another intellectual hothouse environment as overgrown as a.s.b. ever was, without the benefits of USENET-- the world of turn-of-the20th-century German-school sex researchers. :)

It is used in medical literature to this day, albeit rarely. For goodness' sake, even www.m-w.com cites it :)

But regardless of this -- even if it were of more recent coinage, why do you dislike it? new words are coined all the time, and often from worse pedigrees; scientific literature and popular language is rife with Greek-Latin hybrids, which follow predictable rules. Why should this matter? Unless you are a fluent speaker of Latin or Greek, the sound does not offend the senses, and so to raise a fuss about a word's impure polyglot origins smacks of intellectual fustiness greater than the original wordsmith's. Seeing how you've never struck me as a very fusty, quibbling guy, the reader must assume you have a chip on your shoulder about those who use the word, rather than the word itself, yes? :)

(Still, you're right that it does not belong in 17th cent. French setting, especially as there speakers could be expected to know their Greek and Latin better than us modern folk)

Greek-Latin Frankenstein?

[grendelkhan.livejournal.com]

You know, Greek-Latin hybrid words (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_word) aren't restricted to recent invention. Hyperactive, monolingual, neonate, sociology, television and polyamory are all Greek slapped together with Latin.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language
is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't
just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages
down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for
new vocabulary. --James D. Nicoll (http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1990May15.155309.8892%40watdragon.waterloo.edu"), rec.arts.sf-lovers

I don't even know if you're being a language snob, but I was surprised that "kilometer" is the type of word to piss off linguists.

[fallenpegasus]

Funny, my friend missdimple just read it.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/missdimple/89976.html

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Can't read it. Not on her friend's list.

Nice to meet you...

[missdimple.livejournal.com]

fallenpegasus mentioned that you were reading Kushiel's Dart. Someone suggested I read it months ago...it's taken me that long to finish it. I finally came to the last page today. Here's my post about it....

I finally finished Kushiel's Dart. I know, I know...miracles will never cease. For all of you fans, the book royally sucked. Her writing style is amateurish, she is incapable of creating complex stories without completely confusing the reader, and she only hints at character development. That said...yes, I'll slog my way through the other two. Mostly, I think, because I have a crush on Joscelin. *laugh* Actually, I see myself a lot in Phedra. Thick headed. She also made me think a lot about other parts of my personality.

It's unfortunate that she wasn't developed by a more skilled writer.

You mentioned that you thought the author was into the BDSM scene. I was fairly confident that she wasn't. I have my reasons...ones that I'd rather not post in an unlocked entry. If you're interested in having a discussion about the book (something I love to do..others may not), let fallenpegasus know that I gave him permission to give you my email.

Good luck with the book. May it not take as long as it did for me.

Oh, and I agree about what you said about the French degree. Could she try any harder to prove that she knows "smart stuff." *sigh*

Re: Nice to meet you...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

A pleasure to meet you as well. My impression from the way she wrote was that she had recently embraced the scene with all the energy of a drunk embracing AA and desperately, passionately reading Bill W's Big Book and saying, "yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah..."

Re: Nice to meet you...

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Huh.

I just finished the third book in the set, Kushiel's Avatar, and I liked the entire series far more than I really expected to. The books are complex, they involve a helluva lot of character development, and while the main characters start out being fairly likable and sympathetic, they aren't mature and they tend to make decisions that end up causing harm to other people ... which they end up having to deal with later on. I also enjoyed the twists on history that you find throughout, but that's just me.

Well, to someone who is thoroughly into the scene,

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

her books definitely do _not_ read as if written by someone who knows what she's doing. Little things here and there definitely mark her as a watcher, not a player. For example, anyone who'd ever actually _played_ with blades or razors (flechettes, she called them) will know that while they hurt, yeah, _unless_ you are being cut so deeply that it'd become life-threatening, it most certainly doesn't qualify as the most painful thing you can have done to you. It doesn't even come _close_. A sharp blade barely breaking the skin should in no way elicit the reaction it did from Phedre, who is supposedly a hard-wired masochist, because it's just not that big of a deal. That's the most glaring example I can think of, as it's been quite a while since I read the book, but there are others, mostly in the philosophy but also in the representation of physical acts.

That said, I did enjoy the books, but strangely enough, I just skipped most of the sex scenes. Some of them were a bit hot, but mostly they felt fake and shallow to me. The overall aura of sexual tension was done well, though.

The style...drove me insane. It took me 2 months to finish the book because I kept putting it down to read something more enjoyable, but kept picking it up again because I wanted to know what happened. But first person is hard enough to pull off...throw in a heavily lyrical style and lots of sap and angst, and it's damned near impossible to read more than a few pages at a time without gagging. Nevertheless...I liked the first book, and the second, and will eventually read the third. She has a lot of potential as a writer, and it's my hope that she won't become so wedded to the style of KD that she never developes that potential.

Velvet