I <3 kelpies

So Sunday, to calm down and take me outside of myself, I went to the bookstore. I went to the mythology section and browsed. I was thinking of getting the Norse myth book eselgeist has been working through - it was on the shelves, and is, indeed, pretty cool - but I ended up with The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, one of Katharine Briggs' books on fairies, and on total impulse, The Raid, a very enthusiastically un-bowdlerized retelling of The Táin, a major Gaelic epic about, um, cattle-rustling.

I haven't read the latter, aside from the initial skimming in the bookstore that prompted me to buy it; instead I've been inhaling the Briggs. She's a fairly major authority on the creatures, it seems; the book that had pointed me to her noted that most of the text of the Brian Froud/Alan Lee book Faeries, my first real introduction to the weird nastiness of the Good Folk, is lifted directly from one of her books. There's lots of analysis of themes and recurring images in this, with the occasional capsule synopsis or fragmentary quote.

This capsule synopsis is one of the most beautiful things I've read in a long time:

One story commonly told [of Kelpies, evil water-dwelling horses] was of seven little girls who were out walking on a Sunday, and saw a pretty little horse grazing near the lochside. One after another they got on its back, which gradually lengthened itself so that there was room for them all. A little boy who was with them noticed this, and refused to join them. The horse turned its head, and suddenly yelled out, "Come on, little scabby-head, get up too!" The boy ran for his life, and hid among the boulders where the thing could not get at him. When it saw this it turned aside and dashed into the loch, with the seven little girls on its back.

And nothing of them but their entrails ever came to land.

The "scabby-head" line is great, but I laughed out loud at the last line. It's just so perfect. It's a beautifully elliptical way of saying "the Kelpie gobbled them all up". How did anyone know it was their entrails?

I might stop reading the Briggs soon, in favor of The Raid; she's stopped talking about themes in the stories and the various creatures, and moved on to the 'in literature' part, which is much less wonderfully feral.

It's funny: I remember reading something Bruce Sterling said once. That he doesn't read science fiction much any more, that he reads all kinds of weird research, because he needs to to be able to write SF. Reading mythology is kind of like basic research for fantasy; it gives you a head full of the older, unsafe versions of themes that're done to death, and ways to spin off in completely weird directions - I never knew until Sunday afternoon, for instance, that faeries can be interpreted not only as magical Other People, but also as fallen angels too nice to be demons, and as the dead. Yes, the dead. A damn long way from Tinkerbell.

journal archiving

One of the features LJ has been lacking in is a way to archive the entirety of your journal. Sure, it lets you grab a month's worth of entries in a plain text format you can keep (go here), but there's no way to get the meat of what makes LJ different from other blog services: the comments.

Some very meaningful entries of mine have depended entirely on the comments for their power. But it's impossible to find a specific comment. Maybe Google, if you're lucky and it's on a public entry.

This morning I had a little flash of insight on a way to work around this lack: lean on the e-mail comment notifications. Every damn comment someone besides you makes in your LJ generates an e-mail to you, unless you turn that off. With a subject that's pretty easy to filter for. With handy URLs that reference back to the entry and the comment itself, and the entire text.

How about a system wherein your e-mail program (whatever it is - this could all be done via a platform-independent script language with some specific tweaks for interfacing to your preferred mail program) passes the comment notification to another program on your machine that archives the parent post if needed, and adds the comment to it? Bonus points for cacheing the user picture used, too - that can be an important part of the meaning of a comment, and I believe they may all have unique, never-reused IDs, even when deleted...

There could be a web-based interface - I know OSX ships with Apache in it, just install a couple cgi-bins to let you browse and search the stuff. You could even get it to archive discussions you engaged in on other people's journals. Keep your own copy in case LJ vanishes into the ether, search it, run parody generators on someone's comments, play Burroghs cut-up games with it, whatever.

The one catch is that you don't get notification e-mails on your own comments; this could be dealt with by, say, having it screen-scrape the entire comments page for such things, maybe looking at entries every hour or so for a day or two after recieving a comment in case you replied to it... it'd have to be able to have your LJ password stored in it, so it can access the same protected entries you can.

Extra bonus points for being able to handle multiple journals. And for checking now and then (daily? upon demand?) to make sure it has all the stuff you post, even if it gets no comments.

I do not have the time or skill to build such a thing. I could acquire the skill to get something semi-workable but ugly, but there're too many other things I'd like to spend what little energy I have on. So. If someone reading this wants to start hacking, feel very free. I'd be quite happy to be a beta-tester! I'd even help in the make-it-look-pretty stage.