landingtree (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
landingtree) wrote2018-11-16 03:56 pm
landingtree) wrote2018-11-16 03:56 pm
Five questions
Questions from rushthatspeaks. If you want questions, ask.
1. What's your default icon? I really like the art style, and I don't recognize it.
It's Shaun Tan's -- Tales From Outer Suburbia.
2. Place in the world you'd most like to travel that you've not been?
Excluding Greece, where I will be in, dear god, six days... Well, there's Antarctica, and on a less life-reshaping plane of likelihood, there's Florence. Someday I will go to Florence. Those are places I've seen and read a lot about -- the Florence in my head is accreting material quite rapidly, and Antarctica doesn't need to, one documentary has established it forever. This last trip has made me more aware of how many more places I haven't read anything about, though. I passed briefly through Calgary and through Nadi, I'm following someone's facebook posts about visiting Hanoi... That doesn't change the answer to the question, but it makes me think about how it might change. (And writing this has got me thinking on Norway, where some of my family's roots go. It doesn't take much thinking to make me want to go most places).
The other thing about being in North America is that it brought home to me how little of New Zealand I've seen as an adult. My family road trips to the islands' points are ten years old. So in terms of near-future plans, I want to go walking in the South Island, hear the roaring of the wasps in the beech forest around Nelson Lakes again,* visit the people I know in Dunedin. Also, I see the Rimutaka mountains every day from my flat. Sometime in the next year or two I want to stand on them and look back.
3. Something good you read recently?
The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford. It was there in a local second hand shop when I got home. I read it with the intention of writing about it here, and found that wasn't going to be fully possible. It's a very good book on the level of incidents and individual observations, and it handles indirection like a scalpel. On the level of characters and plot, it is waiting patiently for me to read it again and fathom it. I see the logic of what did happen (well, except for some of the convolutions in an inn), but not why it was correct that those things happened and not anything else, which is partly a matter of lacking historical context and partly the book's unpadded complexity. Off to read the relevant Shakespeare, among other things. In the meantime I can write about the book's first chapter, which I have the most finished sense of.
The first moment of effective subtlety that stuck out to me in the book is an early point of view trick. A boy, Hwyl, sees soldiers on the road, runs home, warns someone that they're approaching bringing a chained wizard -- and realises a paragraph later that he doesn't know how he knew it was a wizard, since he'd registered the chains only by their clanking. In the moment when Hwyl mentions the wizard, I thought I was being clued in on something which he'd known all along, meaning that I was rather far back over his shoulder, since it hadn't been mentioned at the point where he sees the soldiers. It narrowed the distance between us considerably, and was eerier, for us to realise what had happened at the same time.
That's also the chapter beginning to do something I've read a dozen times: magic-user arrives in rural community, senses protagonist's latent magic, whisks protagonist off in direction of plot. But it has a complexity beyond most of even the good versions of that trope I've read, such that at any point it might have become something entirely different. It's full of people causing each other fear, pain, and embarrassment, with wizard and pupil's relationship beginning in hatred as much as anything else; but there is loyalty and fastidiousness and friendship and happiness there too. Most things this grim I can call to mind painted grimness in fewer shades. I could see the rest of the book that would emerge from it, a story of what the wizard and his pupil would become to each other as they moved through the world; and it could have gone a number of ways, none of them likely to be pleasant. John M. Ford saw me seeing that, nodded happily, and wrote an entirely different book, taking up three different characters in what it turns out (further depth of spoilers) is Hwyl's old age, as his life's work approaches a flash point. (The experience of this is changed very much by the first chapter not having been a prologue. Wizard mentors are often given their start in prologues, and I'd have been expecting the time-jump -- but Hwyl, though older and initially in touch with the most secrets, is in the same position as the other characters in many ways, and the structure doesn't privilege him). I think I'd have had more initial enjoyment from the book Ford didn't feel he needed to write, and also that he was almost certainly correct.
4. Mermaids or unicorns?
When I think about it, I don't meet many of either. I would say, in theory, mermaids. When I think 'unicorn' I have to struggle to come up with an image, and when I think 'mermaid' I think of many, sea and mangrove and river and coppery lake, solitary, schooling, city-building... Unicorns are more brittle in my head, I suppose. Since I've been reading answers to these questions, and it was waiting on the shelf, I've just read The Last Unicorn -- which I like very much, but it doesn't change the brittleness. She's a unicorn of fairy-tale, and could only change so far while staying that.
5. Favorite visual artist?
Still going: Shaun Tan. Sometimes I see art and want to write the stories of it. With Shaun Tan, whenever I have that feeling, a moment later I think, 'No, this drawing is already that story.' And I love Tales from Outer Suburbia and The Arrival. (Which I must look at again now I've been travelling). I don't follow his work from book to book. I forget he exists for long periods, and then go, "Oh wonderful, Shaun Tan has done two more things!"
But I have recently been in New York and Boston, so, oh dear, Turner? Rembrandt? My options have opened up substantially! I will say Monet. Growing up with my fatherleaflemming's faded print of Monet's bridge didn't prepare me for the way it glowed. (Which is the kind of preparation I'd have wanted, actually).
*Terribly invasive creatures, those wasps, so I shouldn't keep them as a sentimental touchstone, but I do.
rushthatspeaks. If you want questions, ask. 1. What's your default icon? I really like the art style, and I don't recognize it.
It's Shaun Tan's -- Tales From Outer Suburbia.
2. Place in the world you'd most like to travel that you've not been?
Excluding Greece, where I will be in, dear god, six days... Well, there's Antarctica, and on a less life-reshaping plane of likelihood, there's Florence. Someday I will go to Florence. Those are places I've seen and read a lot about -- the Florence in my head is accreting material quite rapidly, and Antarctica doesn't need to, one documentary has established it forever. This last trip has made me more aware of how many more places I haven't read anything about, though. I passed briefly through Calgary and through Nadi, I'm following someone's facebook posts about visiting Hanoi... That doesn't change the answer to the question, but it makes me think about how it might change. (And writing this has got me thinking on Norway, where some of my family's roots go. It doesn't take much thinking to make me want to go most places).
The other thing about being in North America is that it brought home to me how little of New Zealand I've seen as an adult. My family road trips to the islands' points are ten years old. So in terms of near-future plans, I want to go walking in the South Island, hear the roaring of the wasps in the beech forest around Nelson Lakes again,* visit the people I know in Dunedin. Also, I see the Rimutaka mountains every day from my flat. Sometime in the next year or two I want to stand on them and look back.
3. Something good you read recently?
The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford. It was there in a local second hand shop when I got home. I read it with the intention of writing about it here, and found that wasn't going to be fully possible. It's a very good book on the level of incidents and individual observations, and it handles indirection like a scalpel. On the level of characters and plot, it is waiting patiently for me to read it again and fathom it. I see the logic of what did happen (well, except for some of the convolutions in an inn), but not why it was correct that those things happened and not anything else, which is partly a matter of lacking historical context and partly the book's unpadded complexity. Off to read the relevant Shakespeare, among other things. In the meantime I can write about the book's first chapter, which I have the most finished sense of.
The first moment of effective subtlety that stuck out to me in the book is an early point of view trick. A boy, Hwyl, sees soldiers on the road, runs home, warns someone that they're approaching bringing a chained wizard -- and realises a paragraph later that he doesn't know how he knew it was a wizard, since he'd registered the chains only by their clanking. In the moment when Hwyl mentions the wizard, I thought I was being clued in on something which he'd known all along, meaning that I was rather far back over his shoulder, since it hadn't been mentioned at the point where he sees the soldiers. It narrowed the distance between us considerably, and was eerier, for us to realise what had happened at the same time.
That's also the chapter beginning to do something I've read a dozen times: magic-user arrives in rural community, senses protagonist's latent magic, whisks protagonist off in direction of plot. But it has a complexity beyond most of even the good versions of that trope I've read, such that at any point it might have become something entirely different. It's full of people causing each other fear, pain, and embarrassment, with wizard and pupil's relationship beginning in hatred as much as anything else; but there is loyalty and fastidiousness and friendship and happiness there too. Most things this grim I can call to mind painted grimness in fewer shades. I could see the rest of the book that would emerge from it, a story of what the wizard and his pupil would become to each other as they moved through the world; and it could have gone a number of ways, none of them likely to be pleasant. John M. Ford saw me seeing that, nodded happily, and wrote an entirely different book, taking up three different characters in what it turns out (further depth of spoilers) is Hwyl's old age, as his life's work approaches a flash point. (The experience of this is changed very much by the first chapter not having been a prologue. Wizard mentors are often given their start in prologues, and I'd have been expecting the time-jump -- but Hwyl, though older and initially in touch with the most secrets, is in the same position as the other characters in many ways, and the structure doesn't privilege him). I think I'd have had more initial enjoyment from the book Ford didn't feel he needed to write, and also that he was almost certainly correct.
4. Mermaids or unicorns?
When I think about it, I don't meet many of either. I would say, in theory, mermaids. When I think 'unicorn' I have to struggle to come up with an image, and when I think 'mermaid' I think of many, sea and mangrove and river and coppery lake, solitary, schooling, city-building... Unicorns are more brittle in my head, I suppose. Since I've been reading answers to these questions, and it was waiting on the shelf, I've just read The Last Unicorn -- which I like very much, but it doesn't change the brittleness. She's a unicorn of fairy-tale, and could only change so far while staying that.
5. Favorite visual artist?
Still going: Shaun Tan. Sometimes I see art and want to write the stories of it. With Shaun Tan, whenever I have that feeling, a moment later I think, 'No, this drawing is already that story.' And I love Tales from Outer Suburbia and The Arrival. (Which I must look at again now I've been travelling). I don't follow his work from book to book. I forget he exists for long periods, and then go, "Oh wonderful, Shaun Tan has done two more things!"
But I have recently been in New York and Boston, so, oh dear, Turner? Rembrandt? My options have opened up substantially! I will say Monet. Growing up with my father
leaflemming's faded print of Monet's bridge didn't prepare me for the way it glowed. (Which is the kind of preparation I'd have wanted, actually). *Terribly invasive creatures, those wasps, so I shouldn't keep them as a sentimental touchstone, but I do.