"Let no one's work evade your eyes..."
Oct. 4th, 2007 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperance...and if you're going to plagiarise, plagiarise the best.
I'm reading through and to some extent reworking the story I wrote last week, and I've just reached the scene where my best-ever eunuch dwarf is growing melancholy over a pipe of drugs, yattering with a sergeant about how the old times were better; and what he says is "We have seen the best of this city," and when I wrote it my fingers almost automatically went on to make it read "We have seen the best of this city, Master Sergeant," and I didn't really know why I'd done that, he hasn't referred to the man that way before; but Master Sergeant is of course a recognised rank, and it has a pleasing rhythmic ring to it, so I was happy to let it stand.
And now this evening, reading through, of course it's obvious where that came from: almost the same mood, almost the same rhythm,
"We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow."
And so the sentence stands, no question. I'm always suspicious when cinema gets self-referential, it's like it has nothing to refer to except its own brief self; but literature, now, when that reaches back to echo what has gone before, that just makes me feel at home and comfortable, settled in...
I'm reading through and to some extent reworking the story I wrote last week, and I've just reached the scene where my best-ever eunuch dwarf is growing melancholy over a pipe of drugs, yattering with a sergeant about how the old times were better; and what he says is "We have seen the best of this city," and when I wrote it my fingers almost automatically went on to make it read "We have seen the best of this city, Master Sergeant," and I didn't really know why I'd done that, he hasn't referred to the man that way before; but Master Sergeant is of course a recognised rank, and it has a pleasing rhythmic ring to it, so I was happy to let it stand.
And now this evening, reading through, of course it's obvious where that came from: almost the same mood, almost the same rhythm,
"We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow."
And so the sentence stands, no question. I'm always suspicious when cinema gets self-referential, it's like it has nothing to refer to except its own brief self; but literature, now, when that reaches back to echo what has gone before, that just makes me feel at home and comfortable, settled in...