landingtree

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... )

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 )

Rider at the Gate, by C. J. Cherryh

When I was halfway through this book I posted on discord:

"It's set on an alien planet where all the animals are overwhelmingly psychic, and humans can only survive by forming telepathic bonds with the native horses. Two things I find really compelling about this are: the image of daily life out in the wilds, constantly being brushed against by the viewpoint of mice observing you from the bushes (and the fear that it might be a large predator spoofing a collection of mice). And, the way it's about emotional regulation. A rider's emotions, if uncontrolled, will pass to their horse, who will broadcast it to other horses and back to their riders, making a feedback loop. This makes life difficult! Especially as one of the main characters is, for perfectly understandable reasons, very bad at it.


That remains basically my summary and sales pitch! More thoughts, having finished:

There was a conversation on that same discord recently about the degree to which people see what they read in the mind's eye. As I may have said here before, I'm in the middle, it depends very much on the book. I kept putting this one down, reading another grabbier novel, and coming back to it; I think the un-grabby part of this book, for me, is the way its descriptions totally fail to evoke images for me. I have no sense of distances, my mental images are restricted very closely to the events described. On a bridge high above a ravine, I see the planks, and I see the dangerous rocks below, but it's as though there's no gap between them. There's peril, but no space. And I have only the haziest sense of what the horses in this book actually look like.

The strengths of this writing, for me, are about the insides of people's heads. A lot of this book is trekking across snow, and it's not the snowy landscape that's vivid, it's the being cold and having a headache and having a splinter through your thumb. Even though I kept putting it down, I became absolutely sure I wanted to finish it once I got to the hundred page mark and there was a scene in which a callow young rider was being criticised/talked down to/taught by an experienced one, and the young rider couldn't stop projecting his dissatisfaction with this out through his horse's mind. Juicy uncomfortable dynamics! There are other emotional/logistical set pieces which are more spoilery to describe but really good.

And there's a great sense of people mucking along through contingency as best they can. I don't think there's a major character in this book who doesn't at some point make a huge mistake. I was trying to come up with a Lord of the Rings comparison, but at first, all the ones I thought of seem to be criticising Tolkien for not doing things he actually does do; it's not that people in LotR don't make significant mistakes, and it's not that people in Cherryh novels don't make heroic and successful efforts. Maybe in a Cherryh novel the Fellowship could succeed. But there's no grace here, as there is in LotR; no special likelihood that anything lies behind human effort.


The Bonobo's Dream, by Rose Mulready.

I hesitate to say much about this short book, because many of its pleasures lie in not quite knowing what world the characters live in. The first time it described somebody cutting a lemon 'with two hisses of air' I thought, that's not really an apt description of a lemon. The second similar description made it clear that something really weird was up with this household's fruit. Re. envisioning what you read, I spent a while in this book not knowing whether to see the characters as humans or bonobos.

The book starts with James; whatever species he may turn out to be, he's a boy who feels pressured by the attention of his parents and mostly wants to sit alone in his room drawing the trees out the window. His father is a famous artist who no longer even cares about the affairs he's having; his mother is lonely and bored and unsettled in her memories. His sister is coming home soon for her birthday. She always brings trouble; but perhaps not usually as much as this.

I bought The Bonobo's Dream from the $5 trolleys where I work, because it had a blurb from Margo Lanagan, and another blurb describing it as 'Aldous Huxley on more mushrooms than usual, or Angela Carter on pixie dust.' I think Angela Carter books themselves are already on at least this much pixie dust, (and I haven't read any Huxley), but I do think it's a less random blurb than a lot of 'this book is Classic X + Classic Y' blurbs are.

I didn't get to the end feeling totally satisfied - I think I wanted it to keep on developing a bit longer than it did, but its shape is quite simple in the end and didn't quite click for me. Still a good one to have read.

Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse.

I read about half of this. Based on that, it seems to be one of those accounts of good living that can't solve problems, though it offers a way of thinking that might sometimes successfully recategorise a problem as a non-problem. I found this annoying enough that I tried to take it back to the library partway through chapter two; beautiful enough that I read a few lines by the library drop-off slot, wandered away reading it, and wasn't annoyed again til I was two blocks away.

The book distinguishes between finite games, which always have beginnings, endings, and winners, and can't alter their own rules; and infinite games, which may begin but do not end, and have only the goal of extending play. This is metaphorically powerful, though in terms of pure thinking about games, it's pretty easy to come up with finite games that violate Carse's definition of 'finite game'.

The beautiful bit is about a love for play, a love for the finite; entering into the drama without reserve, and valuing its continuance more than one's own life or circumstances. I think of the heroes in Book of the Three Dragons praying for their enemies to be made strong so they can have more joy in defeating them.

But if that sounds like it could have limits as a way of understanding the entire world: the first thing in the book that annoyed me is the claim that both sides in a war have to sign up to the role of 'participant in a war' before the war can happen. It is true that all citizens of an invaded country could, in theory, ignore the invaders and keep having tea while the tanks rolled in; I don't think it's relevantly true. I don't actually want to handcuff the author to a lamp-post and then observe his attempts to exercise radical freedom, but it's the kind of thought experiment that comes to my mind. (There may be no rules, but I think this book undersells principles and natural laws).


Wish I Was Here, by M. John Harrison

I have notes on this somewhere in a notebook at home, but since I'm away from home: this is called an anti-memoir on its cover. It is partly a statement of Harrison's antagonism toward the concept of story, as applied to life as much as anything else.

Harrison is tacking toward a realer, more complicated destination than actually exists. All the contradictions of 'realer than the actual' are implied. Every gain is undercut automatically; every self-account gets co-opted.

There are beautiful bits of matter-of-fact daily life in this book, un- and half-stated things moving about under them; bits of talking about writing that click perfectly into place perfectly with my feelings, such as the suggestion: write nothing that isn't metaphor, and if that overloads a piece of the story with meaning then let it fall over and keep doing stuff with the wreckage.

It is also the kind of book that sometimes seems to be leaning off the page and saying, "You! Hey, you! You're an idiot!" I mostly do not experience this feeling, but I mention it because I think I would if I hadn't built up a tolerance. This book leans hard into 'Your problems cannot ultimately be solved, certainly not by methods you're conscious of.' As a prescription, this feels half true and half like giving up too soon. (I think I stole this phrase from Harrison).

Example: Harrison talks about loving climbing, but calls that love too simple, too obviously "an addiction to body-chemicals." I don't believe in the account of value this implies. There's more to the climbing story, of course: an inner-ear disorder, recovery to find old habits lost, a sense of emerging into a newly non-obsessive self which only seems to have lost something in retrospect. Given all those later reasons, it's striking that the insufficiency of "addiction to body chemicals" needs to be invoked too.

As a description of society: Harrison thinks we're in the Age of Fantasy, of a pervasive delusion seeping out of spectacle and genre. I do not agree that there exists such a seeping delusion, or that, if it existed, it would determine very much. I noticed his mention of Antonia Forest's Peter's Room as a book fundamentally about how a fantasy life is unsustainable. As someone who made up lots of stories with his sister while we bounced about on a trampoline for whole childhood afternoons, I'm not super sympathetic to this reading; I think the good thing about Peter's Room is that the game the children play is neither condemned nor praised, but is rather double-edged.

As a self-description: the book leaves me with great affection for Harrison as someone temperamentally and philosophically unable to stop besieging any house in which he lives.

Based on the recommendation of my creative writing supervisor last year, who says it's at the least good to argue with, I've just got Robert Mckee's screenwriting book, Story, out of the library. I'm not likely to get through it, but reading a single page of it has me putting it in the category of Thing Harrison Is Arguing Against. Story as the unlocatable soul of text and life, the metaphor that animates. I hear Harrison's teeth grinding.


The Grand Domestic Revolution, by Dolores Hayden.

Book club book. Read two thirds of this, then ran out of time. Optimism says I'll read the rest this week, book club history indicates that I have never yet done this.

The book is an account of what it terms material feminism: a line of feminist thought starting in America in the 1860s, that focused neither on suffrage nor on class struggle - both of which also had movements underway at the time - but on the kinds of unpaid work society required of women, and the houses and facilities designed to rely on that work. This is a history of experimental socialist housing arrangements; attempts to get co-operative laundries and cooking facilities off the ground; attempts to get husbands to pay collectives of their wives to work; the rise of home economics, which tried to put housework on a scientific foundation, and ended up tactically disparaging the existing practices of housewives in a way that was ultimately double-edged; and numerous popular utopian fictions. Of the movement's thinkers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, great speaker and populariser, was remembered, and the activists she was responding to and arguing with tended to drop out of memory.


A few notes I made along the way or that came up in book group: free love turns up a lot, with people both for and against it, but notably in the 1800s it's turning up as 'freedom to abstain' just as much as 'freedom to have lots of': complete chastity or monogamy outside marriage are equally falling under its heading.

Appliances were invented at industrial scale and only later miniaturised, so it was natural to imagine the centralisation of housework, before capitalism and convenience caught up and the labor-saving devices started to save more and more labor.

This book is fairly old and says nothing about developments since the 80s.

It's interesting to look back and forth from the ideas in this book to the things we do and don't have - laundromats pretty pervasive, but shrinking; houses still pretty much always having private kitchens; ready-meals far more available than they were; food delivery services useful, exploitative, and expensive. (Speaking of this, our next book is about the success of Uber in dealing with local government regulations).

On the book club call we spent a while talking about our different housing arrangements - me in a group of four friends, someone living alone, someone in the orbit of a large community house, someone in a household tied together by romantic relationships that spans two houses and at least three people. It's lovely to be in a space where none of these arrangements are controversial, though even now the space isn't big enough.

I am too sleepy to attempt much of a non-spoilers section to this post. This post is growing like coral off of the notes I made on paper after a screening. But: Poor Things, like The Favourite, has Yorgos Lanthimos directing, Tony McNamara writing, and Emma Stone as a lead - really the lead, this time. And they are all doing what they do as well as ever: it is well-designed, uncomfortable, sharp, and funny.

The beginning of the movie was dense with surprises when I first saw it. The second time, all the elements it introduces were old acquaintances: ah yes, hello again perfectly normal [person/animal/place]. I liked it enough to see it a second time in theatres partly because of how expansive it felt the first time; I'm pleased I did, and not just because it helped me gather my thoughts about things that were niggling at me - I had a great time both times - but the whole thing did feel smaller when I knew where it was going.

I notice myself getting very immersed in movies these days; or maybe I mean I've seen a lot of examples of movies aimed directly at the brainstem over the last few years. This, Dune, Across The Spiderverse, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Is spectacle hitting me different? Or am I just forgetting past immersions?

( Complete spoilers commence )

My Masters course encourages everyone to submit to its online magazine, Turbine, towards the course's end. Since I had no short stories finished and little spare time what with working on book, I threw some poems at it. I don't know whether they stand up - my poems are all written in a back-and-forth with my grandfather, and no poets but we two have seen them - but as part of a conversation it's some of the most fun I've had writing in the last few years.

This magazine was edited by three of my coursemates. While the rest of us rested in the month after the course finished, they were reading four hundred submissions - hats off to them!

https://turbinekapohau.org.nz




(oh also there's a bit of my reading diary up there, which I mention because it has what leaflemming will consider spoilers for my book in it, don't read until later!)

1. I have glasses for shortsightedness. Each time I put them on, I spend a while going, 'Gosh, distant things are beautiful,' and then I adjust and start thinking wistfully about being able to see like an eagle. Having regained the ability to read the names of shops across the street, it's easy to imagine being able to read the names of boats across the harbor.

2. I am finishing my writing-course novel by Monday. When I say 'finishing', I mean 'slapping the wishy-washiest, most dream logic-y ending I can onto about the first two thirds of a novel.' The material in the unwritten third includes all the events I thought would be in the novel when I started it. To the amazement of all who know me, I turn out to be bad at plans.

However, since I got covid two weeks ago, which completely knocked me down for what was meant to be a period of intensive writing, I am happy just to have made wordcount. Also happy that covid appears to be departing gracefully. I can already smell things again.

3. I have a part-time job in a bookshop. This is the same one I did a day at a while back, now ongoing. I have been asked to recommend books to order, and given a budget to draft an order of boardgames, since the shop owner knows nothing of them. (The sad part of this job is that I've got it because the co-owners, who were a couple, split up; it's the departing one who handled the board game side of the shop).

Today my bookshop job also involved helping carry the masses of plywood left over from the renovations out to a surprisingly small car with a surprisingly small trailer parked (surprisingly) in the middle of the main street with its hazard lights on, since there had been nowhere else for it to park. (Why was there so much spare plywood? Did a shelving plan change? Must ask).

8/05/2023

I am continuing not to get around to much reading, and even less writing about it! This has been a stressful and busy couple of weeks. However, in the days before I have to return it to the library, I'm dipping into Joan Aiken's collection of Armitage stories, The Serial Garden. This is about a family to whom peculiar events happen, but only on Mondays. The stories' strength is the way they blend the mundane with the fantastic. I just read a story in which a witch tries to bake one of the Armitage children in her new electric oven. After a while the boy realises that the witch, unfamiliar with the technology, only turned on the temperature switch and not the 'bake' switch, so the oven is actually staying cold. 'I've had the same problem as that witch!' I thought.

I don't really expect 'blends mundane with fantastical' to be a very interesting goal these days, I feel like the number of wizards who ask their neighbors for sugar and dragons who do income tax is pretty well up there at this point (and maybe that's why I put off these stories till nearly too late). But again and again the practicality of the details observed got to me. A recurrent, 'Well of course it would go that way.'

by E.R. Eddison.

7/06/2023

I was read The Worm Ouroboros and Mistress of Mistresses as a teen, but this is the first time I've read one of these books myself, silently. It has a wonderful speaking rhythm; there's nothing more likely to make me put off starting a book or hasten to finish it once properly started.* For about the first half I was thinking 'Why did I wait? This is so beautiful. Why do I ever read prose that isn't like this?' - thus mistaking as I am wont to do a passing mood for a general truth of my experience, because in the second half I did begin to get moments of 'This house has been being described for awfully many lines' and 'Do these people talk about nothing except Time?' which are two of the things I'd expect a reader who hated this book to hate. (For the third thing, see below).

This book, like the other Zimiamvia books, moves between an Earth on which the book's hero, Lessingham, lives like a man out of his native time and ideological context, and Zimiamvia, a land of willful lords and ladies like unto the dawn. Lessingham woos Mary, who loves him yet resists the love; the folk of Zimiamvia spar, adulterize, and talk at evening. The question is which of these worlds is primary, which, if either, real. Elswhere Eddison writes wonderful action set pieces (mountain-climbing, military clashes), but more than the other two, this is a book of peacetime - action is smaller. Here is cricket, courtly love, philosophy. If pain, suffering, and oblivion are not the final reality, then why are they a temporary reality? If Time is a Gordian knot, why does God not cut it?

I once wrote about Phillip Mann's Wulfsyarn that it seemed oddly heroic rather than systemic in how it saw the world, its tragic plot the working out of one flawed soul given complete remit for action. Implicit in my dissatisfaction was a sense that the book could have been otherwise, that if the hero had stopped being the be-all and end-all, there would have been some book left. That is not true of A Fish Dinner in Memison. Here, all relevant women are Aphrodite,** and no great man ever fell save by internal causes; if those facts were removed, you'd be left with blank pages and a dusting of punctuation. In fact, the whole matter of the book is stated in the author's Letter at the start: the same themes which characters will dwell on for pages is there, and the worth of the book is how much one likes their orchestration. Luckily, see again re. prose style, I like it a lot.


Content notes: racial slurs in two places, hero is good British colonial man, gender binary is metaphysic absolute. This last one cannot be stressed enough. I recall vaguely that it's true in both the earlier novels, but this one draws closest to Earth and so perhaps shows it more starkly. In his working through of 'why is there a point to experience?' and 'what is beauty?' Eddison says a lot I find congenial, but wrapped up so tightly in 'The name for the thing that motivates experience is Woman, the name for the thing motivated is Man' that I want to throw bits of modernity at him. Only I think they'd bounce.




*Started as bracket but got too long and became footnote: I have only read two Virginia Woolf novels and seldom had two reading experiences so immersive. For one of them I sat down next to the bookshelf thinking 'I'll read a few paragraphs of Mrs Dalloway to myself' and had finished it before I stood up again. The same conversation my class had about readers by ear or inner eye had a mix of people finding the Woolf excerpt completely absorbing or completely deflecting, and it would be neat if I could say that corresponded precisely with what kind of reader people identified as, but I don't recall that it did. It's because I'm someone who doesn't necessarily see things in my head when reading that a few bits of Orlando were so powerful for me, because I did see those - one blue kingfisher, one smooth green tide of lawn. Have I written this on Dreamwidth before? Quite possibly.

**not entirely true: there are nymphs.