Babel Clash

Yours truly has fallen down on the posting today thanks to some OpenOffice formatting issues with the promised short story, whose resolution was interrupted by out-of-town visitors, but on the other hand, I can now tell you that Mole at 205 Allen Street downtown makes truly fabulous margaritas, fajitas, and tres leches cake, which is information you may find valuable if you are ever in NYC!

So that I don’t leave you entirely in radio silence as I finish wrestling with the code, I will ramble a bit instead:

In a comment from yesterday, Cy asks:
what do you think of fantasy stories that use anachronistic vocabulary/speech styles in character dialogue?

Like everything else, it depends! I can definitely enjoy a high fantasy or even a historical piece with modern language or dialogue so long as the author signals to me that she’s deliberately trying to play (as opposed to being lazy and not wanting to/not being able to write a satisfying period voice). I think what doesn’t work is the sort of thing where you have a Regency romance where the characters’ attitudes are entirely modern, and it feels all very much like a dress-up party pretending to be something it’s not.

For me, for instance, the BBC Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth works better than the Keira Knightley version (though that one rescued by the fabulous Darcy, Matthew Macfadyen, who conveyed a really nice intense shyness that I liked very much as a characterization of Darcy) because she felt too modern for me.

On the flip side, the current Sherlock Holmes movie is a good example of a period piece done with lots of anachronistic elements and a more modern Holmes that *did* work for me, largely because they set up the steampunky universe and vaguely-bruiser Holmes well both in the trailers and in the opening — the whole thing had a brush of fantasy over it the whole way that meant the anachronistic elements could feel just like more fun and glitter thrown over it all, rather than jarring me out of what I was expecting to be a recreation.

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