I'm always so behind on memes.

[eye_of_a_cat]

The Renamer!

Which thinks my first and middle names would be much improved if they were transformed into the following:
The 'stylish' - Tender Trella. (Cool. I can make my film debut on Channel 5 late-night soft porn films. The stylish ones, of course.)
The 'traditional' - Cade Pavan. (Those are traditional names? Actually - those are names?)
The 'wild' - Panthea Devaki. (The eighth Thundercat, who left to form her own team.)
The 'creative' - Gillian Jaime. (Why did the first name I recognise come up in the 'creative' category?)
The 'natural' - Rane Mayda. ("And in the undiscovered mountains of fteek'kn!bxra, Queen Rane Mayda still rules by divine right...")
The 'quiet' - Flora Fionnuala. (I have a cousin named Fionnuala who could happily talk all four legs off a donkey. I dunno, 'quiet'...)
The 'friendly' - Shadow Hanna. (I could be friendly with that. In the form of stalking my friend Hanna and asking 'What do you want?' with the appropriate smile, yes, but friendly all the same.)
The 'philosophical' - Kalyca Anthea. ("But what is knowledge? Each of us thinks s/he knows how to pronounce 'Kalyca', but when we all have our own pronunciations, can we all be right?")
The 'ambitious' - Rue Mahogony. (And we come full-circle back to Channel 5 soft porn. "Rue Mahogony, a stripper turned rainforest preservation campaigner, thinks she has left her past and ability to spell behind her...")

Comments

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Where do they get these things from? Here I am:

"The stylish": Malaika Ellen. (Well, it's certainly different, and I know rather a fab writer called Ellen.)
"The traditional": Varian Alba. (Traditional if you're an Anglo-Roman priestess two thousand years ago, at a rough guess, but I happen to be of Jewish Eastern European extraction.)
"The wild": Corinthia Trella. (You'd have to be wild to live down a name like "Corinthia".)
"The creative": Stacie Aislin. (Compared to the other suggestions, that's meant to be creative?)
"The natural": Nyako Sunila. (That was Jewish Eastern European, not far Eastern, meme dear.)
"The quiet": Alice Shauna. (It's a bit more conventional, but I don't do quiet very often - or conventional, come to that - so how would I know?)
"The friendly": Raechel Yan. (Ok, it's got the Jewish part now, but it still thinks I'm Chinese. I mean, I've met a boy who had one Jewish parent and one Chinese one, but both of mine are from the wilds of north-west London. And I've never seen that spelling of Rachel.)
"The philosophical": Eva A'marie. (And if it thinks hard enough, it can almost come up with one of my names. It seemed to get a bit blurry by the second one - and I've told you, I'm Jewish, make it Miriam at least!)
"The ambitious": Thao Garima. (Aiming to rise to the dizzy heights where everyone knows how to pronounce those names, because they'd better learn if they want to keep their jobs.)

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

On pondering your generous offer, can we talk about seances, the hypnosis sequences in Drac, and ideas of speaking through people, please?

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Yay, fun! Very summarised summary of the stuff on Victorian spiritualism I'm looking at now says that it's a way for women (most mediums being female) to have quite a lot of power through embodying the Victorian feminine ideal of passivity. (Since the spirits would be quite open about speaking on political, social and religious issues, for one thing, but also because they weren't bound by Victorian society's constraints on physical contact and relationships - the second one might be more useful in regards to Mina's relationship with Dracula, I think. When spirits were actually materalised through the medium, they would quite often touch and kiss the sitters at the seance, or show a bare leg (omg!) to show they were real and solid. There's one mentioned in something I read where a male sitter noted that he the spirit wasn't wearing any underclothes under her dress, and he knew this for sure because he'd felt himself. Uh, all in the spirit of scientific enquiry, of course.)

Does that vaguely sound like it might be of some use? I'll get you references for papers and such, if it does.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Oh good, hints of necrophilia. That's really brightened my day. I'm sorry, absolutely darling of a tutor for this term who's a nineteenth century man, but the Victorians are weird, and you're not going to convince me otherwise. Mind you, I don't think he tried to, he just pointed out that we're also pretty weird and that it's all a matter of context.

Yes please, e-mail's probably best for the continuation of this. Did my last one arrive? I think our uni server's misbehaving now, it obviously wants to keep yours company.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Got it, yep. Apologies for the length of the e-mail that's currently winging its way to you in response ;)

Victorians were crazy.