subdee

Tried pomegranate tonight. Suddenly all those lines of poetry about lips stained red like, chapters in books about perfectly in-season when, throwaway mentions of seed-spitting while, 8,000 (it was probably more like half a dozen) times in the 1001 Nights someone prepares a dish of, etc, make sense. It's like there was this entire poetic vocabulary I was missing out on.

( Photograph of pomegranate trees from Greece two summers ago )

Speaking of things I should have done sooner, I really want to see the new Pride and Prejudice movie (so does my younger brother, unsurprisingly) but first, MUST READ THE BOOK. Marcie said she'd be finished with it two weeks ago, aauuuugh. If this goes on much longer I may cave -- it's a (famous!) romance so it's not like the movie will ruin the surprise ending, haha.

Speaking of un-surprising romances, worldsepent! Do you remember when we were talking about Hana Yori Dango and ( spoilers? )

Have you ever had one of those all-nighters where you think, this is so STUPID, it's only three hours of work so why am I spending all night on it? Yeah. On the plus side I did manage to finish two books during my "break" from lab-report writing. (On the minus side, they weren't very good books. ;_; C.J. Cherryh, I'm realizing, can be almost entirely desribed by the phrase "unnatural preoccupation with sentient alien lizards.")

This entry is part of my ongoing struggle to post shorter entries! I'm a natural lumper so this splitting-content thing is hard even if it is more organized. Poll!

[Poll #599957]

memlu's on an uploading roll! Her summaries are really good too. The two series she's done recently are:
1. Gokusen and
2. Hana Yori Dango

1. Gokusen
Gokusen's basically a yakuza/high school gag comic, like Giant Step or GTO or Cromartie High School. It was made into a live-action drama a few years ago. The drama's cuter than the manga, but ultimately not as funny *I* thought (although on the plus side it did have a fairly hot guy playing Shin).

I love Gokusen with all my heart, however I am sort of bummed that in the ONE case where I am all for student-teacher, the student-teacher relationship isn't canon. Or, well, it sort of is, but it is also canonically problematic and so...perhaps I take these things too seriously. Repeat to self, they aren't real yakuza, they're manga yakuza. They aren't real yakuza. Yeah.

2. Hana Yori Dango
aka that manga I had this nagging feeling of having heard of before, but didn't actually know anything about. (tarigwaemir wrote fic for it? And team7 sometimes mentions Meteor Garden, the live-action soap opera. Other than that, nothing.)

I'm up to volume 5! I'm having a really hard time. I swore in the first volume I'd never like That Jerk With the Pouffy Black Hair and, horrible track record aside, I haven't really seen anything to change my mind. It's less that Dyou-whatever is a terrible monster (this isn't Hot Gimmick) than that I can't STAND it when he succeeds in guilt-tripping Tsukkaki for something that is OBVIOUSLY not her fault.

It's a shame about HYD, actually, because how many times in shojo manga does the heroine NOT end up with the first guy she shares a panel with? In a way it's subversive.