landingtree

In the last while I've been doing very little long-form writing, but I have been doing a bunch of sitting down at the table and seeing what I can write before standing up again. This began as deliberate automatic writing. It's interesting for me to read back over as I lose my memory of the exact thought process that produced it, and what had been a vivid map of that thought process goes partly dry and inexplicable, like a dying leaf. I will not share any of this because it would be dry and inexplicable to anyone else from the beginning. However, it did sort of nudge me imperceptibly closer to normal writing until I suddenly went 'I think this is now just me writing fiction again in the usual way.' I will post here a few of the bits toward the story-er end of this process. They are still not guaranteed to make sense or to resolve like stories, and to prove this, I will start with one that doesn't.

~

Dragon didn’t know what he was getting when he ordered that leg from a human. It’s a huge crystal structure all chain-hung and shivered by light and wind. The guru who lived in it fed her followers on meat she got from somewhere - they said she cut off pieces of her own flesh and grew again whole. I don’t believe it but it’s not as though I ever caught the delivery vans. I never ate there, though they say it tasted fine – better than fine.

There was a little village nearby that predated her structure and hadn’t changed much in relation to it. The cultists needed no supplies and the villagers weren’t friendly, having other gods. There, they made clothes by growing lichen on statues. You could order a dress for your granddaughter, hoping you’d have one and she’d be about such-and-such a size. Or you could get lucky. They were expensive but not that expensive – the village had such fields of statues in all different body-forms that it wasn’t a luxury reserved for kings. How they treated the lichen and got it off the statues in strong, supple condition, with the beautiful, wild patterns hiding in the green and grey, was a secret you could only have learned by staying there ten years and learning every part of the process – and no one in the village, taken away from all that lived-in expertise, could have set the thing up again! Just one of the nutrient paints had its own maker with her own handed-down teachings. Not secret, but hidden in day-to-day life.

So this was how things stood before the dragon came: the new cult with its cathedral-sized beauty of glass, and the old village where doctors weren’t trusted. The dragon turned up at the structure to eat human meat because it had been told that there, it was encouraged. Having slept through an age of the world, it wasn’t sure how things stood, and it was more cautious than some of its brethren, having the idea that humans had become a lot more dangerous in the meantime (and in that it was correct). It was less large than the structure but certainly no single person could have done it much harm, for even its eyes dwelt behind a membrane like iron, and the throat – that tunnel proof against fire – was the very toughest part of it. Dragon throats last while all the rest of the insides have rotted away, hanging in the skeleton and the suit of scales.

After some surprise and a lot of running about, the guru’s followers called her out of trance, which displeased her but she agreed it had been the right move when she saw the dragon. She agreed to give the dragon what it wanted and withdrew to her holiest chamber, where, allegedly, she butchered her own leg on a chopping block without ever shedding a drop of blood and then grew back upon herself layer upon layer like the fastest of lichens. And she emerged with the meat, which was perfect and not quite like anything – I had seen it and imagined a Pegasus, or one of the great birds. The dragon ate. And then asked for more.

Now, the sacrament could not become a dragon-feeding factory, so the guru said no. And so the dragon – why, no one knows – abandoned its patience and advanced after the guru when she withdrew into the structure of chains and glass. The noise could be heard for miles.

Whatever contest followed had no victor. The cathedral’s remains lie strewn now, tarnishing and scratched, over all that field, along with a few pieces of the dragon – though not as many as you would expect. No worshippers gather there, though now and then some sad pilgrim passes. The locals still grow their lichen finery and to them, it seems, what happened was only as memorable as that time someone’s uncle got indiscreetly drunk and proposed marriage to three people in a single evening.

It more or less began as an accident that I spent most of my trip to North America reading books set in New York. I was reading Deep Roots before I got to New York, and I bought The Chosen and the Beautiful having forgotten that The Great Gatsby, which it retells, is set around New York. Then I read Trouble the Saints to complete the pattern. No ill will toward Montreal, Washington D.C., or Boston, where I had good times - and in diverse ways actually better times than I did in New York - but I did not read books set in them.

~

Actually, my trip reading began with the first part of The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño. This is a long novel that a friend sent me and I thought I would take ages to get around to it unless I isolated myself with it on a plane. It made me laugh out loud as I read it walking onto the plane, so success there! Part one of the book is a diary written by a hapless young lamb of a poet as he enters into an avant-garde poetry movement called the Visceral Realists (without being quite sure what Visceral Realism is, except that he likes it when he sees it) and having a lot of yearning and sex with various young women connected to the movement. Part Two begins to be written from the perspectives of a whole range of other characters, in a way that seemed interesting and to open up perspectives beyond the yearning of the poet, but then I landed in Montreal and began buying books at a rate of about one per minute and the detectives were left behind. (Not literally. They are still in my house).

~

In Montreal, I reread The Other Side of Silence by Margaret Mahy for the first time in years and years, prior to giving it to the Scintillation convention raffle. (Since returning home, I've met up with a friend who has spent ages attempting to track down Mahy books in second hand shops. He thinks they're getting awfully rare here, and is aghast that I just shipped ten of them out of the country. It only took me two weeks of not-very-dedicated searching to find this stack, so either he is wrong or I'm just very lucky). The Other Side of Silence is one of Mahy's YA books, about a girl in a busy family who has decided to stop talking. The book is divided into sections of real life, which is the time she spends with her family, and true life, which is the time she spends climbing alone in the trees over the high walls of the mysterious old Credence house next door, though it becomes more equivocal and less purely her own as the house draws her into its own story. This is in some ways a fairytale retelling and in some ways Gothic. Most of it I like very much. From memory, this is Elizabeth Knox's favourite of Mahy's books, and I can see individual sentences from which I think she took notes. They share a way of being completely unhesitating in pushing themes and elaborate metaphors to the front of the stage.

I give Mahy some praise for being a white writer portraying rap and hip hop as positive things in the nineties: they are other varieties of the word-magic she loves, feeding into the book's themes of speech and silence. At the same time, she tries to write someone improvising hip-hop and I do not think she knows how.

Mahy wrote so much! I look at her bibliography and much of it I've read, some of it I've heard of, but then there's Ultra-Violet Catastrophe! Or, The Unexpected Walk with Great-Uncle Magnus Pringle. As far as I recall I have never seen this book.

~

Deep Roots, by Ruthanna Emrys.

This I bought at Scintillation. It's the sequel to Winter Tide, which I liked fine. At some point I must go back and see if her writing changed or if I did, because I loved both this book and her subsequent one, A Half-built Garden. This series takes Lovecraft and says 'What if he was just as bigoted against his invented monsters as he was about everyone else who was in any way different from him?' It continues the story of Aphra Marsh, survivor of the concentration camps in which the American government killed most of the rest of the land-dwelling branch of her people. She begins the book going with her brother and people they came to trust in the first book to New York, in search of lost members of her blood family. New York is in itself overwhelmingly strange and loud and thronged, but quickly they find that its mundane complexities are not the only ones at play. They encounter people from the wider universe who certainly mean humanity well; the question is whether humanity in general - and Aphra and the agents of the American government she's involved with in particular - will agree on what 'well' means.

This continues to take what's good in Lovecraft - the sense of deep time, overshadowing all-too-mortal humanity; the love of what's comforting and small and known; the difficulties of dealing with what's radically different from you - and reply to it without the horrible racism in really interesting ways. Emrys is very good at writing books about the need to compromise with people whose values you truly don't share. I don't think anyone comes out of this book having got everything they wanted.

~

The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo.

This is one of those 'I am going looking for everything else she's written' kind of reads. It was also an odd experience, because I haven't read The Great Gatsby. Sometimes I can tell things about the original from this retelling - which makes Jordan, not Nick, the narrator; maybe makes the whole thing much queerer and into not so much a love triangle as a love blob (although I am not absolutely sure that doesn't happen in the original); and adds more magic and demons (presumably not quite so directly present in the original or you'd think someone would've told me). I feel like I can guess a lot about the original Gatsby, and something about the original Nick and Tom, and less about the original Daisy, and least of all about the original Jordan because as the narrator the retelling fills her in so thoroughly. The language of this is beautiful, and it fits magic into the world in a way that really works, and I am assuming that about race and sexuality and what it was like to be in New York in its time, it is wider than Gatsby, although I just started reading Gatsby so I get to find out.

...wait, she wrote a sequel? Huh.

~

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson.

This book starts as the story of Phyllis Green, an assassin in New York as the Second World War looms, working for a mob boss who maybe doesn't have a whole heart made out of gold, but at least has some teeth made of silver, and that's something, right? Phyllis is black, but passes for white to gain his acceptance and move through society as she must - and keep her old family safe from any mob-related fallout.

I am told that a lot of people started reading this book for the badass magical assassin, and were therefore not best pleased by the turns it took. Phyllis is a badass magical assassin, whose saints' hands give her astonishing skills with a knife. But the book is much heavier than that description would indicate. It's more about the consequences and weight of violence - both personal and societal - and the degree to which individual moral choice, and individual loves, can and can't stand up to that. What are one assassin's choices in a world of segregation and war? Well, something. But not enough.

~

...and that is all the books I read in America! Is it all the books I acquired in America? ha ha ha no. I had gone to my mother's house, last stop before travel, with a perfectly reasonable size of suitcase. I then realised I could borrow her suitcase if I wanted, which was twice as big. I returned with the suitcase almost literally full of books - I had three pounds spare in my luggage allowance home. The other books are:

Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman. Bought at Scintillation, have been looking forward to this, could just have waited til it came in at the library but oh well.

Ship Without Sails, by Sherwood Smith.
Tone and Opacities, by Sofia Samatar.

Also bought at Scintillation.

Hunger: An Unnatural History
Resurrection Man, by Sean Stewart
The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai.

These are gifts from

ambyr. The last two are interventions in me buying a book in a shop, when ambyr said "You know, you could just take mine."

The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison by Jenni Calder
Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, by Genevive Valentine
Kingdoms of Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Tumble Home and The Dog of the Marriage, by Amy Hempel. (This is the favourite writer of someone in my creative writing course a few years ago whose writing I liked.)
Merchanter's Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis

These were from a good D.C. bookstore whose name I forget. [Capitol Hill Books! See comments.]

Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, On Homo Rodans and other writings.

These were from a museum shop. Expensive things look half as expensive in U.S. dollars as I'm used to, and these looked very nice. I had kept on being struck by Varo's art from a distance in the museum and then checking the artist and going, "Oh of course it's another Varo." Richly-textured scenes of magic being done in a somewhat Miyazaki-Howl's-Moving-Castle way. Also I can send one of them to the Australian friends who sent me Savage Detectives.

Warlock, by Oakley Hall.
God Stalk, by P.C. Hodgell

Strand Books.

The Incredible Digging Leviathan, by James P. Blaylock.
The Crane Husband, by Kelly Barnhill.

Behold my incredible restraint in buying only two books in Boston having already decided that I wouldn't have the luggage allowance to buy any more books at all.

The above gloating over my treasures shall inaugurate a time of restraint. I have not actually signed my name to a promise not to buy books for a year - a thing

jsthrill once did and that I am considering - but I certainly intend to let the balance between getting and reading swing back to true for a while.

More accounts of my trip to follow, hopefully, unless I get swept away by the present.

Some of you may not know that I’m in the U.S. at the moment - in theory I may write more about that here at some point, though time is likely to get away from me. (I have been to Scintillation! I have visited ambyr!)

This is me cheating by copying messages to immersive-theatre-enthusiast ambyr into a post, and it has not been checked for coherence. All spoilers but by the nature of immersive theatre I do not know what happened and so cannot spoil everything. The play takes place in an arts center on Governor’s Island and the ticket price includes ferry. (This ticket was a birthday gift from leaflemming, by the way.)

The Death of Rasputin: feels like an incomplete experience but I made it especially that way by following no single actor and staying in no single place.

It began in a bar with the audience - all dressed in black as instructed - buying drinks and mingling. I eyed people but none were secretly actors so far as I learned. (The format made me much more of an eavesdropper than usual, I wanted to hear if people were talking about the revolution!) Oh and I’d also thought that some people in the queue were talking in Russian because they were actors but I’m now pretty sure they just spoke Russian.

The play began with actors bursting into the bar from the rest of the set, declaring that the revolution would soon come and that til then we should hang out in their bar and stay away from those filthy royals up in the palace. I promptly went to the filthy royals’ palace.

I several times hung back when big groups were leaving the room, which let me see some interesting aftermaths. Three times, I was in small groups of people who’d stayed behind after a big scene. Once was a general plotting the downfall of Rasputin (very engagingly, and he had audience members read out bits of various incriminating documents - he handed me a book and had me open it to reveal a secret page. Generally the cast were great at interacting in-character when issuing instructions, telling you to speak up or clear a chair for them, etc. It was a lot of people in sometimes confined spaces but it all worked
.
Another aftermath and one of my favourite single moments was having seen Rasputin and a character whose name I never knew - a witch - do a sex-magic dance in the downstairs cult forest (I barely saw what went on in the cult forest, there must have been so much else there!) and then seeing the priest making his way through the large departing audience crowd to look dumbfounded at the remnants, ‘sex magic’ being clearly not within his experience.

Then somehow I wound up upstairs following a maid into a revolutionary radio meeting, and then I followed the maid into someone’s private chamber where she poured out liquid into a small cup and I thought she was going to kill herself, but I never learned who drank from that cup because she moved into the next room and we helped her choose a dress for the big party which she had decided to attend despite the overtones of being a class traitor because she was going to finally kill the czar with a kitchen knife. She gave us scarves and bracelets to go over our black; me, she gave a small stone.

Then we whirled through to the ballroom where other revolutionaries one of whom she was in some kind of intense connection with were handing out dynamite, a plan that enraged her. And then everyone in the room was told to quickly start waltzing so I waltzed with a stranger and to audience members entering the room a moment later it must have looked like that had always been going on, with no trace of dynamite.

And then all the characters swept in and there was a grand final dance, and perhaps Rasputin died or perhaps the revolution began or both at once, and what I was mostly watching was the distress on the face of the maid who was standing there waiting for the palace to blow up and still not having the strength - would it have been strength? she’d asked us - to stab the czar.

This whole last passage was so, well, immersive - I loved being swept along in it. I could glimpse other things from context as I passed by - I know the czar was given a pig’s head in a macaron box. The czar gave a great speech at the end about there being no alternative to the pain spent building Russia, and Rasputin came sweeping in being a sort of counterstatement. Though at the same time he clearly had a thing for being debased by Mother Russia (who was usually the czarina but I think he seduced everyone possibly including the priest).

I have so many questions! What was the small white lounge? What could you have seen if you hid for long enough in the grandfather clock with a grille looking into the next room? Why did the general end up dancing with the witch at the end, and what became of his plan, and was she really a witch? What was the fully-furnished locked room connected to the bar? I think it would’ve been great to do with a group that could scatter across the experience and then debrief afterwards - as it was I did this just a little bit with some friendly strangers on the ferry back to the mainland.

The meme that’s been going round! I went with ‘Books which influenced me most or made the strongest impressions’ rather than ‘favourites’; although those categories overlap a lot, there are plenty of books here I don’t like anymore. (The Orson Scott Card collection and the Dr Seuss are there because they are the two books I read as a child that gave me new behavior-modifying fears that lasted more than six months each). Series and writers mostly represented by single books.

Here’s the list. How many have you read?

Just leaving Derek Jarman gallery, where I did not have time to see Blue so I’ll be back another month. This is my first time going on a proper expedition alone in an owned/borrowed car. The gallery was dimly lit and the soundtrack of Blue - his last film, made while dying - went all through it. Thick textures of paint. A black plane falling marked with feathers. In a photo, on a piece of quartz, the word ‘life’ roughly scratched.

I have bought Jarman’s last diary. Also a life-size glass head, for some reason. One of those little shops with everything which it wasn’t wise to go into. will make it a late Halloween costume and then it can live in the garden.

It’s very odd to have a car. I don’t know how to use it yet - I can drive, but I don’t know how to fit driving into my routines. How long to stay out for, where to go, how to make a day of it.

Cycling round Miramar singing to myself, I did not notice I was learning the words to 'Bread and Roses' on Labour Day - I'd forgotten what day it was til evening, since my work is closed on Mondays anyway. But happy Labour Day!

~

Read Shadows, by E.H. Gombrich: very slight survey written to accompany an art exhibition about shadows selected by the author from the collection of London's National Gallery. Probably the most interesting fact in it is that he didn't find much to choose from, shadows being a bit of a disfavoured subject; he quotes Leonardo (keen student of light and shadow in life) specifying that the sun ought to be obscured by a fine mist in painting to avoid the need to paint hard-edged shadows, as these are generally disapproved of.

Other random detail: the difficulty of tracing a shadow, since one's own shadow gets in the way, solved by casting a sitter's shadow onto a translucent screen and tracing from the other side.

~

I am one-quarter less wise, and it wasn't as painful as I expected, and now that tooth won't do its yearly advance-and-retreat maneuver.

~

Other reading: bits and pieces. Some Robert Aickman stories, which I rather like though I have yet to experience him as The Acknowledged Master Of Strange Tales. (The first one I chose by chance to read my flatmate was far too long, and had a structure where you know for its entire length there's a ghost in the phone and then the story tries to go, "And then, by god, they discovered that there had been a ghost in the phone!" Though even that one is interesting from the point of view of how differently phones used to work).

I have started an audiobook of War and Peace, the Anthony Briggs translation, which seems very good. I was expecting it to be slow to catch my attention, but there's such an eye in it for humans doing human-like things that I keep on wanting to remark whenever anyone around the house says anything, 'Ah, that's like what this character in War and Peace did' to an extent that would become annoying if I didn't stop myself. It is helpful not having to interact with the book as a giant brick. (The only time I ever picked it up off a shelf, thinking 'I have read books that long', I discovered the absolutely tiny print, and put it right back again). Also I am helped by having listened to the Revolutions podcast and so being at least that informed about Napoleon, and also by having been to a production of Dave Malloy's Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, an adaptation of a small section, which I didn't end up liking that much but which is helpful now in getting the characters straight. (I couldn't keep from reading the character of Pierre in the musical as 'Dave Malloy has some thoughts about Dave Malloy', though I went in expecting that due to reports I'd seen on Dreamwidth. I like Pierre much more as a book character so far).

Also reading Gene Wolfe's Book of Days, which has one short story per American holiday. Many are slight or just plain perplexing (I assume some of them are jokes I don't get), but come to think of it I did read the Labour Day one recently, 'Forlesen', one of those satires of a businessman's working life that I feel like I've read before but this is a good one.

Amateur, by Thomas Page McBee

An account of going into boxing as a trans man, McBee working through feelings about masculinity and violence and ways men socialise (and don’t) in America at the present time. Also the ways his transition has changed his relationship to family members. McBee is a journalist and his interviews with various researchers on masculinity and race are woven through the book. Liked this a lot, zipped through it, wrote many reflections about it and my own experience of masculinity that I can’t reach because I’m under this cat.

Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman

Trans archivist vampire romance, pretty even-handed in its coverage of each of these four things. Protagonist had recently begun transitioning, stepping into a new vibrancy of life, when he was infected with vampirism, a disease with many of the usual effects, most notably, the problem of sunlight: any trace of the sun is lethal and its mere proximity is terrifying. The protagonist takes refuge in his job as an archivist in a sunken archive in which he is safe from the sun, sleeping in his office without his superiors’ knowledge, living a dryly sustained life in desperate need of changes he does not necessarily consider possible, but towards which he is strongly prompted after meeting a donor to the archive with issues of her own. I did not trip and fall into this book quite as headlong as into Fellman’s The Two Doctors Gorski the other week, partly because there were things I didn’t like about the resolution, but this is one of those cases where I was too tired to think clearly but the resolution because I self-defeating stayed up far too late to finish it. I love Fellman’s style.

Partway through:

Confounding Oaths, by Alexis Hall. Gay regency romance narrated by Puck. I am coming down on being more irritated than charmed by Puck’s narration and the similar registers of his wit and the mortals’ wit, so reading slow and may or may not finish, (he protests too much about his distance from mortal business and lack of care for it, claims to like chaos but shows every sign of being rather humanly attached to the people whose story he’s narration) but there is something basically pleasing in having a fairy zipping around as the omniscient narrator, paying attention to whatever he feels like. (At one point some characters go to the opera and he goes and pays attention to someone else for a bit because he finds the opera so dull.) As for plot, so far there is a ball and a duel and one of those deeply unwise wishes. This is a sequel that I have jumped to, I may find book one.

This book a good dilution for:

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. Halfway through. A book of matter-of-fact cruelty and grotesquery .A house of cards of bitterly funny ironies in which everyone is at all times lying more than might be expected. I am more or less liking it, it was not disturbing me, yet I have stalled in the middle due to not wanting to read about the things it’s about. In a small medieval township in a world not exactly ours but near enough, a hale god-fearing lamb-herder beats his deformed son, who is glad of it because God will love him for it. The violence is so taken for granted between them that without it, their relationship would come to make no sense.

One reason I want to finish this book is that I want to know whether I agree with my friend who read it and hated it so much that when I said I’d really liked another book by Moshfegh she was, not quite closed to the possibility, but extremely surprised.

Cat is still here! This is unusually calm, social evening behaviour for this cat, who would usually be on a circuit of the neighborhood about now.

The No-show, by Beth O'Leary

Romance novel in which one man stands three women up for dates on the same day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening. And then the book follows these three women in their lives and in their relationships with the man. They are a tree surgeon, a retail worker who left her old life at a law firm for Reasons To Be Explored, and a life coach, each with their own small well-realised cast of side characters. And the man is absolutely sweet, too good to be true - evidently, since he isn't telling the three women about each other. The book presents a tension between the dickishness of his behavior, the non-dickishness of his vibe, and the fact that, well, he's the romantic lead, isn't he? Or is he? But for which romance?

I can see finding the way it all checks out annoying - I did for a bit, but came round on it.

The Rest Of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness.

The chapter titles of this YA novel describe the adventures of teen protagonists that you might find in a Buffy-esque TV show - i.e. Chapter the First, in which the Messenger of the Immortals arrives in a surprising shape, looking for a permanent Vessel; and after being chased by her through the woods, indie kid Finn meets his final fate.

This describes what is happening at the same time as the chapters. What happens in the chapters is mostly something else entirely: the lives of an unrelated group of teenagers living realist-ish teen-novel lives at the same school, having normal, well-rendered problems like OCD and parents. Except that Buffy is happening in the next clique over, and it always has been. Something opened a Hellmouth under the gym when your parents were teens - they don't talk about it much. Who knows what it was. But every so often the big story is a bit too close to your own small story for comfort.

You have to do it well to sell the premise of 'The cool tropes you like to see? This book is about not-those, about the negative space of those,' and this does. Also I just really like the structural conceit, and it plots and characterises economically.

The No-show is in conversation with romance novels - its structure means you know from the start that it can't exactly play the genre straight - while being one. Another book I read slightly longer ago, Kelly Link's The Book of Love, is in conversation with romance novels (and contains a significant romance novelist) while not being one - and The Rest Of Us Just Live Here has a lot of teen romance running through it, but is very specifically not ending on anything like settledness or permanence, while The No-show - well, it has something to say about interpersonal settledness and permanence, anyway. As someone who's read very little in the romance genre, these an interesting three to have in my head at the same time!

Next I'm reading Alexis Hall's Confounding Oaths, a regency romance narrated by Puck.

I keep tweaking this in the hopes that it will cohere into an essay, and one that is not based on experiences as un-generalisable as dreams, but I have a large proofreading job to do and also accidentally deleted part of a previous draft because of how Dreamwidth post-saving works, so to hell with it.

"I wonder whether it costs you a lot of thought or trouble, or springs ready-armed like Athene from the brow of Zeus?” wrote Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Woolf made her famous reply:

"Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year."

Did she think differently next year? I don't know. Here's a related quote, this time from one of those Delany essays I was reading last year called Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student.

"The first side [of literary talent] is the absorption of a series of complex models—models for the sentence, models for narrative scenes, and models for various larger literary structures. This is entirely a matter of reading and criticism... Nothing else effects it... Generally speaking... the sign that the writer has internalized a model deeply enough to use it in writing is when he or she has encountered it enough times so that she or he no longer remembers it in terms of a specific example or a particular text, but experiences it, rather, as a force in the body, a pull on the back of the tongue, an urge in the fingers to shape language in one particular way and avoid another. To effect this one must encounter that model or structure again and again in other texts and experience it. . . well, through the body. Clumsy, inadequate, and not quite accurate, that's the only way I can say it."

Though Delany is talking about learning writing always and only from other writing, while Woolf is talking about learning style from whatever you perceive, they agree that writing is a matter of setting working in yourself, or submitting to, a pattern you've already absorbed. In this view, is writing beyond the bounds of what can be learned consciously? That was my initial disheartening impression of Delany's essay, and what a creative writing teacher friend of mine thought of it too; even if that were true, it wouldn't be much use. But I no longer think that's the implication. In any class that's about learning to reproduce a method, I find that I'm searching for the experiences a teacher’s language corresponds to. I only really notice this when it's difficult. At aikido, when I was a child, we used to be told ‘find your centre;’ more than a year after we stopped going to aikido classes, I was doing the stretches in the back garden and went, “Oh, that’s what they meant.” And then for two days I walked different. Although it consists of using words, I don't know that the act of writing is necessarily more describable in words than physical movement is – and I don't think it's less describable, either. The bottom-up and the top-down are interlaced like fingers.

( Cut for length and for wandering around through my psychology of writing in a way that doesn't come to a conclusion )

I went to the orchestra with my flatmates tonight. In the last while, my experience of music has changed in small but expansive ways, so I'm noting it down. (This might be Jack's Psychology Hour part one of two, since this morning I wrote a whole lot of notes about my experience of coming up with stories, and then I went to the concert and had some vivid ideas to put in stories: music has a lot to do with narrative for me, though this post's about the bit that doesn't). My context for classical music is background knowledge and comfort; not what I think of as a lot of front-of-mind knowledge, but I was taken to classical concerts all my childhood, and it was most of the music that played in my houses back then.

The first half of the concert was Leonie Holmes' I watched a shadow, which has been blotted out of my mind by the pieces that followed it except for the image of a giant shivering bronze object stranger than, but similar to, an egg; and then Strauss's Don Quixote, which I loved. By the start of the second half of the concert I was tired, and then it was Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony. At first it seemed to consist of big, simple sections – not exactly shallow, but interested in making surfaces, much less roiling with textures than the pieces in the first half. Like bits of the Sydney Opera House, or the side of an apple. Even the roiling bits were sort of the minimum necessary roil, like a step down into a muddy ditch and a step up again.

I thought I might have used up all my caring-about-music for the evening (these concerts seem long! It's like they serve you a feast, give you fifteen minutes, and then sit you down at a second feast). But taking off my glasses and pressing my hands to my eyes created an area of deeper darkness, which was a stage on which the music could happen. Not visually. I often see images while listening to music, but I wasn't seeing anything at that point. But the darkness and the combination of posture-change and things accompanying it made a place from which I was getting the exhilaration the music seemed to want. I straightened up and the music was distanced again (though still perfectly fine); I pressed my fingers to my eyes and the emotions came back. Then after a while this stopped being relevant and I sat in a different way.

I couldn't have remembered it all, but this kind of thing was going on throughout the evening.

Twice in the past, I've had what I think of as gestalt experiences of movies and music while in not-entirely-legal altered states. What's new to me, as of this year or maybe last year, is that the music can alter my state in the same way. It isn't consistent (today was a weird, high-energy day, and it's not like chocolate and caffeine aren't substances) but it's happened three times now, enough that I know it doesn't take any very specific alignment of circumstances. What I mean by gestalt is that I'll have experiences like taking a sip of sweet/sour wine at a point when that seems appropriate to the music, and that'll be part of how I'm experiencing the music: it worked fine, in this case, but it would've been even more appropriate to have a still sweeter drink like a fruit juice. I get these experiences of analogy between different senses. Since I'm a human listening from a too-small chair rather than a shapeshifter listening from a large couch, it's generally a sort of compromise, with some movements relegated to the mind: I know when I'd have flung my hands directly forward if that wouldn't've whacked someone in the head. But I do the smallest possible dances with the tension in my hands. Position of eyebrows. Posture. Also the passing thought about whether my flatmate's having a good time or if it interests them or worsens their experience that my finger is tapping.

(I didn't wear a mask during this concert. I think of myself as very lax about this, drifting with the majority. I don't know if I'd manage a whole symphony concert with any effective mask I've yet tried; the experience would become 'mask mask mask mask.' I think I could do half of one okay though).

The fundamental difference between concert music now and a few years ago for me – which I think is a result of doing partly meditation-based therapy throughout 2022 – seems to be a practiced acceptance of whatever's going on, a widening of the tolerances of what the experience can include. Right at the start of the concert those tolerances are narrow because I haven't sunk into it yet. In the middle of the concert, I can fold things like coughing or even a phone going off three rows back into the experience, just like I can fold in a sip of wine: maybe not ideal, but a working compromise. This is in contrast with the exclusive kind of focus, i.e. the way, as a child, I used to fall so deeply into reading that someone could say my name right next to me three times and I wouldn't hear. I don't know when I lost that capacity, but I like this new one and I hope it sticks around.

Does this relate to your experiences of music? I really like it, and it gives me an "Oh, this is why the institution of concerts exists!" feeling, but I'm not sure what's going on in the other heads in the audience. Certainly my three flatmates, though we all seemed to have a lovely time in each others' company, seemed to experience the music in a milder way and do not report any shivering bronze objects stranger than eggs.

My reading momentum is low these weeks. I'm still working my way through one shelf of books, but actually most of the reading I've been doing is around the sides of that - 'small bit of a random philosophy book with breakfast,' 'handful of poems on a long dull afternoon,' 'the intro to a book from the five dollar bins at work that I can safely read while eating'. Also, I have taken a message from the fact that I am reading all of the fiction on the shelf, postponing all of the nonfiction, while listening to a bunch of nonficton podcasts: I've started listening to an audiobook of Children of Ash and Elm, a history of the Vikings which I've had a paper copy of for two years now without reading.

However, from the official list of Books In Queue:

Nova by Samuel Delany.

I don't get this book. Partly it's the thing I felt with Babel 17 where late Delany has ruined me for early Delany, partly it's the way this book centers on an unpleasant rivalry/revenge quest, but also, I just don't get this book. I don't particularly care about anyone in it; I don't know why it's the shape it is. I guess that means I'll read it again sometime? he said dubiously.

Nifty stuff: the way a character will periodically mention to another character something that's been true of their world the whole time but not yet relevant, i.e. the fact that disease has been so totally vanquished that nobody cares about dirtiness anymore. The sensory syrinx, an instrument that plays not just music, but visions and smells.

Unquiet Landscape by Christopher Neve.

British landscape painting book, one chapter per painter. DNF. I think this might be worth reading in between two visits to a British art gallery. Good things about the author's stated method: he saw every picture he wrote about, he was friends with a number of the still-living artists and had long talks with them. I like hearing what painters paint and why, but not enough to prevent me from wandering off.

In its first pages I am worried by phrases like 'Must have struck him', 'Must have produced in him', and, "Nash cannot have failed to notice the surreal brevity of the shutter's click in relation to the unimaginable antiquity of the sites he photographed and subsequently painted." To which I react, 'well, sure he can. Where are you getting this impression from?' A lot of the general claims being made make me call bullshit or at least call for citations. Music "Depends, like life, on development, which is why it has a hotline to the emotions." "God becomes a preoccupation in the landscape more easily than in the town. The fact that the land is instinct with suffering and hardship induces it." what do you mean. Sometimes an expert's wishy-washy-seeming claims resolve into exactitude when you know the subject better, but this is not criticism that offers a lot to me, as someone who doesn't know these painters.

I like the chapter on Ravilious more than the chapter on Nash, because Ravilious is cheerful and Neve is not viewing his paintings as infused with the inexpressible but rather the opposite, steadily insisting on being a cheerful assemblage of unusual bright shapes even when some of those shapes happen to be WWII tanks doing exercises.

The chapter on Stanley Spencer is a grand narrative because Spencer was an obsessive character in love with a single township. (The hints about his domestic and sexual life seem important but aren't expanded).

I read the first story in this book and thought, 'I don't see why I'd read another one', and then I read the second story and thought, 'Well certainly I'll want to space them out', and now two days later I've read them all.

My aunt A used to be visited by cousin B whenever he was in town for a conference. He received no invitation, and gave no warning; he would arrive in the early afternoon, and would not leave until five hours later once he had been served dinner. None of the usual hints that it was time to go worked. Having figured out the schedule of his conferences, my aunt A began buying the lowest-quality mince from the butcher, and serving it to the whole family on toast on the nights of cousin B's visits, without sauce or salt. After a few of these meals, the visits ceased.

Imagine whole lives that are like that all the time, and you'll have these short stories. Except often more R-rated, (I assume those anecdotes happen in my family too, I just haven't heard them), and with sharp class distinctions (I have no information on the financial position of Cousin B except for what's implied by 'in town for a conference'). This book of stories abridges human life, seldom feeling like parody by addition, but paring off most of the stuff that make it feel sensible while it's underway. There's not a lot of closure here. Stories may end with change or resolution, but they may just end at the point when the water is clear enough that you can see the sunken object from all angles. There's a lot of humour in them, and cruelty, and contempt, and... not kindness really, but some of the possible ways things can go well when you see humans in the round.

There are lines and moments when it falls over the line of believability for me and I think: this isn't humans anymore, the acid-pitted glass I'm looking through is now doing too much work. If there's one thing I find particularly hard to read, it's the contempt felt by the various narrators and protagonists - contempt for people's appearance, intelligence, weight, poverty, wealth. I sometimes thought, 'Yes, I get it, this is too much.' Though often the person the contempt is directed at is the narrator's mirror, only the narrator can't notice: an irony I didn't get tired of.

There are three stories here about men experiencing love at first sight, and the bizarre, cruel, threatening, and/or simply oblivious things they do in response. By the third one I was thinking 'How many of these will there be?' but that story seemed to know I was thinking it, and went off in a different direction.

There is a story in this book where a young man (who has an eating disorder) and his beloved uncle (who has a colostomy bag) eat cakes together, and the complete matter-of-factness with which they then go and deal with their mirrored digestive problems before getting on with the rest of their morning came across to me as both funny and touching. I trust these stories to do that. YMMV.

This is an amnesia story, where the protagonist finds herself in a situation she doesn't understand and has to work out what happened; and where she turns out, along the way, to be a person of remarkable power and importance. As such, it zips along. I find the amnesia both too convenient (it's carefully targeted to avoid causing any problems that aren't useful to the plot) and really effective. Adding to the paciness, the protagonist (who doesn't initially know her own name) shares with other Butler protagonists I've read a clarity and force of mind and motive: around her, things will get done, and they'll get done well.

It's fun to start amnesia stories not knowing any more than the character does, but also in this case maybe not. Plot description commences here: it's vampires. Or something like them. The protagonist quickly finds that she wants to drink human blood, and that when she does so, the person she drinks from becomes emotionally bound to her, extremely interested in her welfare, and extremely suggestible. Being fed upon is a sexually charged pleasure. This starts out uncomfortable because the protagonist appears to be about eleven years old, but quickly does a partial flip and becomes uncomfortable in the opposite direction as well: the protagonist has to reckon with the control she's achieved before even knowing what kind of being she is, and with the circumstances that deprived her of that knowledge.

( Late-book spoilers on how this power dynamic shakes out )

This is a short story, but I read it in its own volume with afterword. I went in expecting a great feminist horror story, and it is one, and still worked given the expectation. I found it anger-producing but not unbearable (I think in a past year I picked it up and read the first few pages and went 'Not today'.)

The story's narrator is being encouraged by her husband to remain, for her health, in a room she dislikes, doing nothing; a room with curious furnishings, and even more curious wallpaper. There's a great efficiency of implication throughout. "John laughs at me, of course," writes the narrator on the first page, "but one expects that in marriage." This is about when I started going 'aaaaaaaaa' internally, and I did not stop until some time after the end.

...

The odd thing about the afterword, which fills in details of Gilman's own life (she herself was treated by the psychiatrist she names in the novel, for a depression he diagnosed as stemming from her work, but which abated noticeably in the absence of her husband), is that it doesn't talk at all about ghosts. Whereas by the story's second paragraph, the narrator is joking about whether she's in a haunted house, and I'm very much inclined to think she is.

Regions of impossible physics have occurred on Earth, full of alien detritus that's deadly or valuable by turns. In daylight, government officials enter to brave the deadly and retrieve the valuable; at night, it's the turn of the stalkers, a new professional group of smuggler-ranger. The book's protagonist works both sides.

It's always interesting to see if the source material survives its offspring. I've met two things inspired by this book, M. John Harrison's Nova Swing and the Tarkovsky film of it. They're both to some degree faithful adaptations, and did they exhaust this book? Not at all! It's one of those novels I get to the end of and go, "How was there this much novel in only that many pages?"

The answer-

(structural spoilers commence)

-is that it moves through time at a much quicker clip than those other two works. The Tarkovsky film moves with the patience stalkers themselves require; the book doesn't. It knocks scenes, places, and characters into existence with one or two blows of the hammer each, fully confident in the integrity of the structure it's building.

One of the things that makes the Zones interesting is that it's so unclear whether they'll change everything or nothing. An opportunity appears and humans exploit it, do crimes with it, make it into batteries and maybe weapons too: close enough to what we were doing before that at times the job of stalker seems only a metaphor for any other kind of precarious getting-through-the-day. Also they're an existential threat of a never-before-seen kind that might change or obliterate the world in another half-hour.

The hypersignificance of each small detail in the Zone-navigating passages reminds me - and maybe it's just because a scene in the Tarkovsky film, which is working from further outside the characters' heads than the book is, had made me think this first - of a children's game. A small stretch of ground is doing a huge amount of work. Pebbles become threats to life and limb, and a twig becomes a road to safety. There's nothing really there, and what you're witnessing is a person moving very slowly, full of tension and patience, over a small, normal-looking stretch of ground. How often did I cross a stony creek as a child, pretending that my choice of stone was vitally important? That's part of the satisfaction of the Zone story for me: the skill-set of knowing a place's hidden rules. The book gives another, adult example of place-knowledge working: at one point the stalker protagonist escapes from police by applying his skills to a perfectly ordinary neighborhood he knows equally well.

There's an offhand misogyny to this book - the Zone itself is at one point described as a bitch - which I think is part of what Nova Swing is written about and against.

I did this a disservice by rereading only the second half of it. This is because, on a dreary day, I let the tail wag the dog and listened to a podcast episode about the first two stories in the book before rereading it, so I will wait a bit longer before I read 'Finder' again.

This leaves me having read three stories. Spoilers follow!

I like 'The Bones of the Earth', without needing it to exist particularly. I like that there is a holy place of the Old Powers of the Earth on Gont. Several of these stories are putting women back into the roots of history, and I like the place of Ard in this story, forgotten by two degrees, yet vital: a woman who taught an old man the magic of the earth, who in turn taught the young man whose more visible work was remembered. It's a 'complicating the origins of something you thought you knew' story which neither bothers me nor seems like a revelation: it fits, I nod and move on.

I like 'On the High Marsh', the animals, the great mountain Andanden. Maybe it's my favourite of the three, but I have least to say about it.

I had forgotten almost everything about 'Dragonfly' and was pleased to reread it. I like everything it sets up. I like the character of Dragonfly, swearing the air blue at the pack of dogs her father keeps (because that's just what's normal to her - and yet as we see in 'The Bones of the Earth', another sign of how she's coming at power orthogonally, since Roke mages must be careful never to swear). She's raised in bleak seclusion, certain she wants to be elsewhere and other than anything her upbringing has shown her, not yet knowing the way but going through the door that opens for her. And I like the character of Ivory, who is that door, a petty, cruel fool and manipulative asshole who you can imagine growing out of it, and who in the course of the story keeps wanting to see Dragonfly as a sexual object and keeps being startled by how that isn't sufficient to anything, not even his own desires.

The story resolves in a way that feels abbreviated, more like a prologue to The Other Wind than its own whole thing, and makes Dragonfly herself feel suddenly more like an enactor of Plot than the person we've been getting to know. The story is about her wanting to find herself out, and the ending is less her discovery and what she learns, than the confirmation of the fact that she shall learn. On the other hand, the Roke bit of the story seems very much like the other hand of 'Finder', which I did not just reread.

I like how this collection continues to ring changes on the rest of Earthsea: the wounded mage and the farmer's widow in 'On the High Marsh', the various Kings (one of them a mineral and one a chicken). At the same time, I have a general sense that Tehanu was the crucial book and these three stories are all a sort of methodical and good working out of revisions already implied. Tehanu ends in a place where great change is coming which is to say that day-to-day life is possible, and 'Dragonfly' ends in a place where great change is still coming, but now it's nearer.

The massive tome of all the Earthsea books is on reserve at the Library so I shall get to The Other Wind before long, and the later short stories that I never read.

I read a whole great russian novel! It went well, I may read others.

It was funnier than I expected.

It starts with the student, Raskolnikov, who has spent a month being almost too depressed to get out of bed, contemplating a course of action he won't name to himself, because he isn't really going to go ahead with it... That would be stupid, not to mention wicked... Of course if he were to do it, he'd do it better than it had ever been done before, but of course, it's only a thought experiment... And if he did do it, it would of course be virtuous really...

One of the book's strengths is the way it hovers near Raskolnikov's motives, without letting them seem overridingly important. The book has a lot of good monologues, from various people: it lets them say their pieces, but is in may cases quite reticent about how much you should believe them. (Not always: sometimes Dostoyevsky just tells you. Occasionally I wish he didn't).

This is also one of those books where on a first read, it's interesting not to know what shape it is, so I won't say much else about it. It's full of small structural symmetries, and it leaves its title up for grabs. There's an obvious crime for it to be referring to, but there are also other crimes, and things that might be crimes; at one point, some people in the background of a scene are engaged in a massive argument about what turns out to be the theft of a teaspoon.

Some of the things here to dislike: a few bits of casual antisemitism, a few bits of eye dialect.

~

I read, and liked, the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation. I still have very little sense of Dostoevsky in his context (I have read none of the writers he loved and know barely any of the history) but from the start of the prologue, Dostoevsky was not someone who lead a boring life: before beginning the novel I read up to the part about how, after spending ten years in prison for anti-government activities, and while travelling overseas to escape his creditors, he was required to finish a novel in a great hurry as part of a contract with an unscrupulous bookseller who would receive ownership of all his past and future works if he defaulted. Then I stopped reading and thought, maybe I'd better learn the rest of this after reading the book. Good thing too, since the rest of the prologue describes most of the events in the plot.

~

Within five minutes of finishing this, I wanted to go reread Cyteen next, because that's another very long solid novel to spend time in, and also read something by Saramago, for reasons unknown, and also to read other Russian novels. One reason to have a to-read shelf and stick to it for a bit is that every book I read with enthusiasm logically implies several books to read immediately following it, and then every one of those also implies several more books, and none of this branching tree of reading actually happens since it forms anew with different books every half hour until I give up.

Another reason is to make me excited to read these books so I can get to those books, and then makes me excited to read those books because I've been waiting, which is a better model than the kind of 'book soup' sensation I sometimes get.

This book starts with three giants on a spaceship. They've grown so much since getting on board that they can't move, but are compressed into the spaceship's rooms like people trapped in tiny cupboards. And they have to keep talking to each other, because the spaceship, Audition, is powered by the sound of their voices.

There is room to doubt what I've just said, because the whole first part of the book consists of dialogue. I wondered sometimes if there was really a spaceship, or if these people were talking for some other reason. It's interesting that the book begins this way, since the two other Pip Adam novels I've read begin in mundane life, and only gradually reveal how speculative they are. This book moves the other way to those ones, beginning with a surreal s.f. premise that's mostly explained by the end of page one, and then offering the possibility that some other account of things will undo it: a different dialogue with the mundanity or weirdness of what's going on.

Like the other books, this takes something that's absolutely a metaphor, and treats it literally beyond the metaphor's requirements: in this case, the experience of being a giant stuck in a spaceship.

Pip Adam's books have been ones I fall under the influence of. After reading The New Animals I went walking in a strangely altered state. I couldn't tell you what exactly had just happened, but I'd been submerged in that book. This one, to go with the water metaphor, feels like it's full of little rips and currents and shallows. Now and again it pulls me under, or pulls me along quick, and then I'm viewing another bit of it from a distance while I crawl over a sandbar. I really like some things it does, and may read it again to see if they all cohere next time, but at the moment I don't feel that they do.

Some possible reasons for this: it's a more complicated book. It's a book which puts the giants in a spaceship ahead of the apple cart, in a way that removes the particular satisfaction I took from the other two: difficult daily life, matter-of-factly described, with some estranging mysterious factor that points beyond it. All that's here, but shuffled. Like the other two, this is a book in dialogue with the question, 'Is this plausible?' and more than the other two I kept on having the reaction, 'No it isn't.' And: this book is didactic. At a talk last year (which I may be misremembering) Pip Adam has talked about her increasing comfort with didacticism, with just taking the point you want to make and putting it in there. I like some extremely didactic books, but in this one I experienced a scattering of lines that landed 'bonk' on my head instead of feeling braided into it. The metaphors are rising close enough to the surface that maybe I like the interviews and articles that go alongside this book better than the book itself. (Also it's the first of the three books that seems to me to contain, and to be partly about, hope of systemic change - I remember my reaction to Everything For Everyone was partly 'Oh how nice a book about systemic change' because I read it after Pip Adam's Nothing To See, which is so much not that).

Under the cut I'll say what some of the metaphors are metaphors for, though don't read the book's jacket copy either if you don't want to know that.

( Read more... )

Ever since Rush wrote this essay about Tanith Lee, I've been keeping half an eye out for the handful of books he considers her masterpieces. This is the first of them I've found (though I did read some of the Books of Paradys while I was waiting) and it's a sort of appetizer-masterpiece: the one whose first fifty pages are perfect and then... the rest isn't.

I was curious whether I'd feel the same. Happily and sadly, I pretty much did. I enjoyed the first fifty pages so much that I read them very quickly, glancing at the page count in alarm every so often as it ran out from under me. And then... It feels to me like Lee was in such a useful writerly frame of mind at the start of this book, or had come up with ideas so compellingly real to her, that place and people and plot all spun out together as a single object; and then she hit the part of her plan for the book which said, in big letters, 'I will work this out when I get there', and unfortunately she didn't. The book gets vague and wandering. Some good and interesting things happen but they're not brilliant, they're just... some more reasonable enough book.

There's a teenage girl living in a castle in the desert with her annoyingly sorcerous mother. It's comic and numinous - and I can see the castle and the people in my mind's eye right now - and I think you will enjoy reading about them very much if you treat them as belonging to a strikingly open-ended short story.

In danger of becoming overwhelmed by my to-read pile - a state in which I'm constantly reading the first chapters of good books without much joy and then putting them down - I've once again sectioned off eighteen books and decided not to read anything else until I've finished these. This is the kind of exercise I seldom finish but find value in starting. I seem to adjust to the presence of books on my shelf as normal and uninteresting, so just changing the order the books are in gives me the same pleasant "New treasures!" feeling as opening a parcel. (Pakij!)

I am alternating sixths of Crime and Punishment with shorter books, beginning with Tehanu.

This is the first time I've reread any of the second three books of Earthsea. I plan to go on to both the others (which is already an amendment to my eighteen books rule!) because I'm currently listening to the Shelved By Genre podcast, which has got up to this book in their Earthsea-reading.

I remember as a teenager reading these books for the first time, thinking 'What would an Earthsea book look like that wasn't about mages?' This memory now confuses me; I don't know what I then read in Tehanu, because this book now seems to me like Le Guin asking and answering the same question. In some ways it's a book about lacking power. It's not that the first three Earthsea books don't complicate their happy endings, their grand quests; but they are involved with a hope of finally achieving balance, achieving piece, making things right. Tehanu starts with 'But what do we do with things that can't be right, not ever?' It starts with a child whose burns no magic can cure, whose burns were inflicted by cruel men, in the patriarchy that Le Guin put into Earthsea when she reached for some of fantasy's default settings.

I was interested to see she'd written this book after Always Coming Home. That's another book I've never reread, but I recall it being an attempt to feel out the shape of a society almost wholly beyond the ills of our present world, in which patriarchy is remembered in a scary fable told to children. Tehanu is not that story. Tehanu is starting squarely inside patriarchy, with characters feeling their way tentatively toward what might follow it. Some of its thoughts on gender and gendered power seem very limited to me for that reason. At the same time, I like the way it leaves the series turning toward an unanswered question. It's interesting that this was ever billed as The Last Book of Earthsea, given the degree to which it seems to be setting up sequels; I have very few memories of the sequels and am keen to reread them, but in the meantime I rather like to imagine the open sea beyond this book, the sequel-less-ness we might have gotten.

The book feels strangely choppy to me, different chapters taking place in such different modes such that I find myself remembering it as a bundle of different pieces; it's also Le Guin at the height of her powers, writing with efficiency and elegance, such that I find myself remembering it as a whole world. It depends on the minute.

( Spoilery thoughts )

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Homesick For Another World, by Ottessa Moshfegh

Fledgling, by Octavia Butler

The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

(some of) Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Audition, by Pip Adam

Black Unicorn, by Tanith Lee

Recent reading: Tehanu