landingtree

I’m sorting my old notebooks, because they are a mess that now needs an index in order to be useful, and came upon the notes I took in the Hamilton Library archive about the construction of the Hamilton Gardens, research for the book I was writing at the time. Back then, I wrote up what I'd learned about the creation of the Japanese Garden here, and always vaguely meant to make more posts about it, so: here is what I recorded about Head Gardener Neil Colyer’s work diaries. I've put it under a cut, since it’s dry stuff and probably of most interest to those who already know the Hamilton Gardens - not that there's no charm in the diary format. (I had fun gradually working out who was writing the diary – before remembering that his name was right there on the infosheet the librarians had brought me.)

( Read more... )

I do fairly little reading in my workday at the bookshop, despite being surrounded by books. Recently I started picking books up of the store shelves at complete random to try the starts of them, partly to give myself more points of reference in what we stock, but also because I do very little reading of things that haven't been recommended to me, and it's interesting to read a first page having no idea. The first two things I read were litfic about people being sad in late life, one of them with vivid material detail like the sawdust falling out of the imprint where a tack is pulled from a plasterboard wall, and one of them with absolutely nothing I liked. Neither seemed to have plot.

I think it is good for me to read small bits of things I hate, because then I went home and read the first page of Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching. I have owned that book for years, and read the first page at least three times, but this time I went, "Oh my gosh this is so much better than those books I picked up at random," and kept reading.

White is for Witching is great. It is about a girl called Miranda, who we learn on the first page has vanished, perhaps died. It has the most beautiful descriptive language and it is about an extremely eerie haunting (one of the narrators is a house) and it has a strong sense of structural coherence despite having twists and turns that I could never predict. One of the things it's like is if Oyeyemi read two Shirley Jackson novels and decided to combine them. I am not entirely sure I know all the things I could know about the plot's causes and consequences, because I paused in the middle to read a whole different book and that was a bad idea, but that's okay, I will want to read it again. As well as the rest of Helen Oyeyemi's books, possibly.


The book I read in the middle of that one was The Works of Vermin, by Hiron Ennes. I had been waiting for it at the library for ages. (Leaflemming has several times asked why I don't just use Libby, the library ebook app, and one reason is that I'm out of the habit of reading on an e-reader, but the other is that I have so much access to books that the library reserve system is a useful filter.)

The Works of Vermin takes place in a city built into and on top of a giant rotting tree stump that straddles the poisonous River Catoptric. One of the protagonists, Guy, is an exterminator, whose team goes out and deals with the weird creatures that keep climbing out of the river and infesting the tree; he is poor, his job is poisoning him, and he's barely keeping ahead of the debts tattooed onto his body. The other protagonist, Elspeth, is a genius of a perfumer in the upper city; she is materially comfortable but has been poisoned by the city in a different way, and chafes under the close watch of an employer she cannot escape. When a giant centipede arrives in the city and begins causing trouble, their lives become entangled as they deal with the consequences.

This is a very queer book full of parasites, much like Ennes' first novel, Leech. It is a giant weird magical city book whose focus is surprisingly small and personal. It did not work for me perfectly but it did work for me really well.


Also reading: the only book that has so far grabbed me into reading on in my bookstore random reading is Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk. (Spoilers if you care, but in this case I suspect you don't.) This is in fact the third book in a loose series, and it does a very sneaky job of starting with a whole section from the perspective of a baby. The baby's narration is impossibly un-baby-like - this is not trying to do naturalistic child perception like Jane Smiley does in Some Luck - but in its manneredness it is vivid and funny and interesting, even if it's just a bit too much like someone who thought about philosophy of language in undergrad. But there is a question about how much of it is being reconstructed afterwards which makes that interesting, since as the baby grows into a small child he knows he's already forgetting and overwriting some of his past. Good descriptive writing, story zips along, people are rather given to contempt, but maybe any minute now some of this insightful characterisation will be applied to something other than faults.

And then there is another section and Edward St. Aubyn has deceived me into reading a book about a middle-aged man having an affair during a mid-life crisis. In a way I am grateful for this deception, since I have never actually read the classic novels about these, since all my sources of recommendation warn me away from them like good trustworthy lighthouses. This one is wry and absolutely embroiled in psychoanalytic self-destruction. I will keep reading and see if the section from the point of view of his wife helps any, but Edward St. Aubyn's good initial sales pitch has soured greatly.

This is the first collection of stories - partly inspired by Sherlock Holmes and in fact written by Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law - about master criminal Raffles and his reliable sidekick narrator. It was sold to me by a friend who said 'If you took the scene where Raffles the master criminal is getting reliable sidekick narrator to agree to do crime and replaced 'crime' with 'gay sex', it would make as much sense if not more.' This is true! E.W. Hornung also knew Oscar Wilde and named his son Oscar, and when Raffles never just has an 'arm' but always a 'splendid arm,' well, generations have wondered and indeed have not always felt they had to wonder very hard.

In terms of cunning crime highjinks, I could predict all the plots of these stories except one (though that one got me good.) I think I'm downstream of too much subsequent caper plotting. What I couldn't predict is when Raffles would fail - because though I call him a master criminal, he isn't at all in the near-supernatural mode of always getting away with it: he's a passionately motivated burglar who's good enough not to have been caught yet, but he routinely messes up. Partly I suspect this is about not being allowed to let your burglar get off scott free, but I like the effect of it. These stories are efficient, feel psychologically accurate - even the contrivance of having Raffles hate explaining his plots so as to hold back a surprise for the reader fits in with the way Raffles is generally annoying - and I like the network of explicit metaphors (cricket, crime) with the implicit one (being gay.)

(Or 'Having liveblogged The Power Broker, part 2'? I feel like at this point it's just normal blogging. Anyway.)

( Notes become denser as book continues. )

- and it wasn’t the sort of thing I expected at all. A bit like when someone up the hill put on Akira, which I knew as ‘Maybe an anime of some kind?’ and which caused me to go ‘Holy heck what is happening’ within the first ten seconds.

Jiří Barta’s stop-motion Czech pied piper film from the eighties is wild. All the people and the town are grotesque and characterful, angular like robots or suits of armour: in fact they’re carved from wood. The main things that look organic are the rats. The film starts with slow scenes of people going about their business in Hamlin, with the rats gradually rising around them, eating scraps the town’s greedy rich men throw away.

( Interesting spoilery adaptation choices were made. )

From Hell, by Alan Moore.

I wonder what this would’ve been like in black and white. This is a book about Jack the Ripper’s killings, and it was interesting to see when this edition’s colourist chose to use black instead of red for blood. I read it because a media podcast I listen to, Shelved by Genre, is doing a run of Alan Moore. I am more interested in the podcast than I was in this book. I want them to tell me about Jack the Ripper scholarship, and British comics takes on Jack the Ripper (supernatural elements thereof) and this book in its context. I think the book is good and I didn’t need to read it, I got to the end and went ‘okay, I could’ve stopped in the middle, but I guess I needed to read to the end to discover that.’

(Also, why would you call this book The Master Edition? Maybe I am too attuned by Le Guin’s thoughts about the word Mastery. Maybe they thought it through, maybe they thought it was apt for this book full of the deliberate symbolic weight of men doing violence against women and Man doing violence against Woman.)

Tripoint, by C J Cherryh.

Which is also among the kinds of violence this book involves. The first of them, anyway: actually the second not so much. I do not recommend this as a place to start Cherryh because the emotional dynamics of the start of it made me put it down and go read various other things I’ve just posted about. It makes me think that I found Merchanter’s Luck so palatable in contrast to other Cherryh because its main characters start out in positions of deep control and competence. Do they stay there? Are the places they start in healthy ones? Not necessarily! But there is a comfort to it. Which this book does not have at all, the protagonist has very little to hold onto in life except a bad relationship with his mother. Also, Cherryh does not miss the opportunity to invent a kind of hyperspace travel that involves physical discomfort and sedative-hazed dreams about incest that might drive you insane. There’s one Diana Wynne Jones story in which a writer uses the sensory experience of being tiredly slumped over a keyboard drinking coffee and trying to finish a draft novel to write umpteen heroic captains at the controls of spaceships battling through physical discomfort, and I want to reread it to see if I think Jones read Cherryh directly before writing it.

Anyway! Do the emotional dynamics of this book get less fucked-up by the end? …arguably they get more so, but in a more bearable-to-me-personally way.

The Cowboy Dog, by Nigel Cox.

This is the second Nigel Cox book I've read, after Tarzan Presley, and it's also about taking American myths and putting them in the middle of New Zealand. The boy Chester, soon to be known as Dog, flees his home in the cattle-ranching lands after his father is shot, and makes his way by rail to the city, Auckland, which doesn't work like places he's used to. There, he's taken in by the owner of a burger joint, who treats him a little bit well and a little bit terribly, a bit like a boy and a bit like a dog. One day he'll go back to the lands and avenge his father. (But New Zealand doesn't really have the kind of cattle-ranching lands he remembers. Are his memories of them real?)

This is an odd book. Partway through I was absolutely convinced that Chester had overwritten most of his childhood memories with cowboy-related radio shows and stories and dreams, and we were going to learn that the place he came from had never existed. This tension keeps being played with through the book, but not in the way I'd have guessed. The style is spare and beautiful and has that feeling of having literary fiction antecedents I haven't read.

If I was summing up the book in a sentence, I'd say it's about the violence of men in Westerns. There's a lot here about Chester's ability to see and diffuse it in the faces and postures of men. It's a very inside-the-male-gaze book, there are two female characters and they are both defined largely by their appearances and by the violence men do them.

One thing about this book is that it was written in very little time, as Nigel was dying. I am impressed by it, knowing that. He was a friend of my dad's, and I met him, though I don't have many memories of him.




The Known World, by Edward P. Jones.

Courtesy of ambyr and coffeeandink. This is a book set at the very end of slavery, before abolition, centered on the plantation of Henry, a Black man born in slavery who is freed and goes on to own slaves himself. I liked it so much that I nearly started it again from the beginning once I'd finished it. I didn't find it hard to read, but various plot-threads did end bleakly enough to dissuade me from this idea. I definitely will read it again, but maybe in a year or two.

The story begins with the day of Henry's death, and then proceeds both backward and forward, with frequent spikes into the far future. (Often you learn how a character is going to die - sometimes violently and soon, sometimes peacefully in seventy years.) It's an extremely digressive book, and despite not being all that long, feels like a vast book, too, in a good way. A new chapter is often telling the story of a character who's been in the background til then, and in some cases, doing a different thing than the rest of the book is. (If anyone has a strong reading of the magic-realist-feeling Job chapter, I would be curious to hear it.)

The title refers to the many small worlds the book's set in. Overseer Moses, who knows the plantation where he's enslaved well enough that he can taste the soil and know what it means for the crops, but is helplessly lost if he goes a mile from its borders. And the social worlds of slavery, which people can't see out of.

The book jumps about in place and time, constantly digressing in small ways, flashing forward to the future lives and deaths of its innumerable characters. This helps make the book bearable, in a way, as it's constantly looking at a world beyond slavery. Its narration is able to cross the border of the various known worlds, and look back on them from other places and from after abolition. That also emphasizes the contingency of everything in the book. Slave-owners could free their slaves; slaves could take the risk of running North. The book is very good on the matter-of-fact reasons why they don't. A good number of the slave-owning characters say things like, "Well, slavery is bad, but I'll do it really well. It will be different. It will be okay owning this person who's basically a best friend/daughter to me." Or they simply find freeing slaves terribly awkward. Or, as Henry himself more or less says at one point, "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

~

And now I am reading Tripoint, only it instantly overwhelmed me with its uncomfortable emotional dynamic so I switched to The Incandescent. And at work I am rereading Hexwood. I am never sure from reread to reread how much I'm going to like Hexwood. I think it has the problem of deferring most of the reasons for caring about what's going on until after the first third, but I just got past the first third and am encountering them again.

This was going to be titled 'Books ambyr gave me edition' only then I kept reading more books beyond these first two.

The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai.

I had a lot to say about this but that was two weeks ago. It's very good. It's a dual time-period novel about AIDS. In the eighties, Yale is seeing friends die around him, taking refuge in his monogamous gay relationship when that lifestyle choice has gone from 'a bit unusual in this community' to 'possibly a matter of life and death,' and trying to handle a tangled bequest of what may be incredibly valuable art for the gallery where he works. In the 2000s, Fiona, family to the first man we see die back in the eighties strand, is grown up and trying to track down her daughter, who fell out of contact in circumstances relating to a cult. Hanging over the book, notably undiscussed as the 2000s strand proceeds, is: who is dead by the time of the present? How did the events of the eighties play into what's happening later? The two time periods let the book be about AIDS as a disaster that happened, but also as a disaster that kept happening, and kept on having happened; and the plot brings in the political malice of American AIDS education and healthcare, and is about the way history never sits still, and how AIDS took a vibrant room full of people and swept it empty - but never quite empty. It's a book full of tension-questions about what the ending will be, since very quickly it's clear that nothing resembling a conventional happy ending is going to be possible but also that the book will balance its tragedies to a bearable degree. I was happy with all its choices. (I mean, not happy. But.)


Merchanter's Luck, by C.J. Cherryh

I have read Cyteen and it was amazing and I bought more Cherryh books and proceeded to not read them. Later, unrelatedly, I read Rider at the Gate and it was a slog but in a 'we will enjoy having gone in this hike in the rain' kind of way. But this I just found gripping and involving. I've already got the sequel on order at the library.

Sandor is a marginer, running small freight cargos in his beloved spaceship Lucy, absolutely not within the fringes of the law but pretending to be. His life is small wagers, and small profits, and talking his way out of anything, and knowing that everything he has could be taken away from him at the snap of a port official's fingers. He has no choice but to be constantly prudent. And then, in a bar, he sees a beautiful woman who is entirely out of his social class and potentially dangerous even to interact with, and something in him goes, 'Well I have to be living for some reason, don't I?'

Allison is senior crew on the starship Dublin, one of the great merchanter Names, and... I won't actually summarize why she has any interest in Sandor at all, because her point of view chapters start a bit later and it's fun to be as lost as Sandor is initially, but despite being structured around eyes meeting across a crowded room, this book isn't necessarily or exactly a romance, so much as about two people who each discover that the other may represent both opportunity and risk.

I want to compare this to Bujold - mostly to sell it to members of my family who like Bujold and have bounced off Cherryh, it is true. And because it's space opera with jumpship logistics. But also because it's about characters with very intense emotional situations generated by well-realised economic situations, in which being Vor having a Name matters deeply. This book is bleak at points but much less so than Cyteen, or for that matter, Mirror Dance.


After Merchanter's Luck, I tried to go back to reading The City In Glass, a Nghi Vo novel that I've started and expect I will like. Except I'd already felt as though the mundane world of her Gatsby retelling was anchoring the supernatural in a way I liked, while The City In Glass is much more wall-to-wall numinous magical touches. I think I'll like this, but I did turn from Cherryh feeling strongly as though I didn't want to read about demons doing magic, I wanted to read about uncomfortable humans solving logistical problems in spaceships.


Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

From rachelmanija's rec. This was great! A+ uncomfortable humans solving logistical problems in spaceships. For fans of creative alien biomes being encountered by humans who would love to know if anything's going to eat them in the next ten minutes. A corporate-dystopia-ish human expansion fleet discovers a noxious moon which seems to be screaming on all available radio bands, and the reason seems to be 'aliens.' There is no light on the moon of Shroud, and the atmosphere is very weird, and no one in their right minds would plan a piloted mission to the surface instead of just using drones, but some of the higher-ups in the company do not share this perspective, which is part of how our protagonists find themselves very unhappy. And something on Shroud may be trying to understand them with just as much interest as they're trying to understand Shroud.

I had read the first of Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt books and gone 'yeah this is okay.' I actively disliked And Put Away Childish Things, his Narnia novella. But no one had ever told me those books were good, and lots of people have told me that lots of his other books were good, so I kept going, and he really does seem to be a hydra of a writer: if you don't like one of his books, by the time you've finished reading it he's already written two more that are totally different.

(Literal-insect count: low but non-zero. Things-kinda-like-insects count: fairly high.)


And then having finished Shroud last night, confronted with a whole interesting pile of library reserves, I ignored them all and read the first half of The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. After the prologue I thought 'I cannot bear to read very much of this staid, formal butler narration in one go, I'll break my streak of reading only one book at a time and alternate this with something else.' Then I read the next half of the staid formal butler novel in one go. It gets rather compelling. I sort of already knew the main things this book was doing, since the friend who leant it to me described a pivotal scene very near the end and then saying 'Oh, I guess I shouldn't have enthused about that part.' It is a novel about someone who has made his own life and perspective achingly narrow - and why he did that, and what it's caused. It is also energetic and funny. (There's a sequence where the butler narrator has been tasked with telling a young man about the birds and the bees, except he keeps approaching the subject with such subtlety and decorum that the young man thinks he is literally just a nature enthusiast.) A book that lives or dies on its voice and seems to be living.

I am to make a man for the Consulate. Having little time and no hard place to ground my pride, I make him shoddily. The fine detail will be up to my usual level, but his body is slapped-together mud around a strong but not enduring mesh. The mud’s dampness will have him rotting from the inside by the end of the year, but for this first month he will be perfectly fresh and stable and that is what my sponsors require. I set his body up under grow-lights, which shine through the wide-stretched drums of Luvian cloth and give the man history. The great dun zibeline above him drenches him in the subtle basics, years of walking and talking and eating. As it ages him he takes different time from the smaller, deeply-colored grow-lights. He is like a baby but not a baby, like a child but not a child. I mute and unmute the zibeline to draw him slowly through one phase and fast through another; I place and remove grow-lights so that his boyhood is strongly influenced by a calm nursery, but only enough of his adulthood to give him a formal way with children. Under neutral lights which keep him from sensory deprivation in the meanwhile, yet no longer change him, I sculpt his finer features. There he is: as though forty, a man of wide experience and learning who has talked politics at the cafes of Maroon and ridden rocs down the Fickle Stair. He never sees my face. I send him off to the party.


A week later I am informed that an important visiting queen has fallen in love with him and I should therefore perform any touch-ups necessary for a lifespan of thirty-odd years.


I am very good at what I do. This is impossible. I feign slow preparations for the procedure while starting work on a second man, as similar as I can make him.


Six months later I meet the first man face to face. We are in my receiving room, which is full of reminders of my craft and his nature. The queen’s attendants have been persuaded to retire with graphic descriptions of the work I am allegedly to be doing.


We look at each other. He is a fine piece of work and I gave him no inclination to foolishness. “To what degree will I survive this procedure?” he asks.


“You won’t.”


“Then pour me a little of the orange,” he says, gesturing to the low, black-glass drinks cabinet, “and tell me something about human memory. No one I have asked describes it well. Immersed too deep, I think.”


I could cheat him now: it would be prudent. Instead I turn my back on him with no further precautions. I am a slight woman and he remembers adventurous killing; and he loves life, and is good, by his own lights.


“Thank you,” I say when I have straightened up holding bottle and glasses.


He shrugs. “A great deal of nothing worth having. But I appreciate the offer. It was fair-minded.”


And we sit and drink and talk a little about human memory – what a spacious and perplexing thing it is compared to his, which all informs him in every moment – and he keeps his eyes open as I unravel him, watching a grey beetle flit in the corner.


The queen is pleased and leaves the city soon thereafter, and his replacement never sees my face. My work for the Consulate continues. I dream of places far away.

Until I turn thirty, in about a year's time, I will not buy any books for myself unless they are:

-audiobooks.
-by a personal friend.
-for a book club.
-by Gene Wolfe or Tanith Lee.

Other people may buy me books, and I may buy books for other people, but I am not allowed to cheat using either of these facts.



~
Free-writing #2
~

First pope blue, tall, scowling. Second pope smaller and cursed. Third pope rotated, screaming, then popped. At this point the equipment was recalibrated. Fourth pope knew nothing of sin; this pope was kept. Fifth pope explained all real politics as a cheese factory and seemed promising but was terminated when its growth became exponential. The committee is worried about the sixth pope as its termination process was interrupted; it is suspected that this pope was rescued and taken home by employee Angela Smythe and investigations into her disappearance and a series of murders around Crabtree Lake are ongoing. Equipment was reset to most conservative values. Seventh pope resembled a pope. Eighth pope specifically identical to Pope Benedict XVI. Greater deviation was introduced. Eighth pope blue, porridge-flavoured. Ninth pope entered radioactive fusion and damaged main test chamber. Experimental protocols mandated a shutdown for re-evaluation and the entire project was deemed a failure, with no return on investment and no product saleable to the client. During this time it is now known that a further twelve popes were generated by Dr Alvarez using a sophisticated procedure for zeroing all sensor readouts; the committee was informed of the problem when one of its members read the manifesto co-written by Alvarez in the morning news. It is the position of the committee that Alvarez had not been an extremist Collyridionite prior to his joining the Institute but had instead neglected exposure procedures clearly stated in the safety manual. Background checks performed by the Institute’s hiring department are vigorous and no atheist or extremist staff members can have been admitted to the papal generation chamber.

The committee can guarantee that all equipment related to the project has been rendered nonfunctional. The advance of the Alvarian Popes toward Rome continues, but the government of Italy has the complete co-operation of the Institute and effective countermeasures will have been deployed by this report’s time of issue. The identity of our client remains confidential at this time.