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Recent reading was not actually all historical fantasy, I lied.

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.

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Recent reading is all accidentally historical fantasy

I started with rereading A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay. I still like it! I fell off reading Kay at a certain point and am not planning to run to keep up with the stuff he’s written in the last ten years, but I do like going back. I had entirely forgotten the plot of this one, I enjoyed being swept up in it as though for the first time. Melodrama about the hinge-points of lives and kingdoms set in slightly-fantasy alt versions of bits of history: it’s Kay’s thing, he does it well. He gets more polish in later books but has the heart of what he’s doing here.

Notes: it is so easy to knock people unconscious with a sharp blow to the head and this never causes problems. Every named female character wants to sleep with the protagonist if the book considers them figures of desire (the two exceptions are, respectively, old and disabled.) The words ‘nuance,’ ‘implications,’ and ‘complexities,’ are used as often as they possibly can be, and it is funny to me that Kay loves the sense of subtlety so much he always waves at it with great sweeping gestures. This is a book that underlines everything in gold ink and then repeats it to be sure you noticed. That is a thing I enjoy about it, though I do have a dosage limit, I went in to reread one of the Sarantine books and two Kays in one month is too much for me. I finished it, but haven’t gone on to read the second half of the story.

But it does mean I have read two Byzantine books this month: I am awake at five am because of high billowing winds outside, so I just finally finished M.T. Anderson’s Nicked, a book about a Byzantine saint heist conducted by a monk who can’t tell a lie to save his life and a con artist who can never be pinned down on a truth. (They fuck.) I did not find this propulsive exactly, I put it down for a week here and a fortnight there even though it’s very short. But I do like it a great deal. It is funny, neat, precise in its blending of formal and informal language, vividly descriptive in few words, going off into flights of abstraction and poetry. I see why George Saunders is blurbing it. The opening invocation includes the line ‘Though I am an unbeliever, I pray for faith,’ and faith and holiness are things this book about stealing a saint’s bones for reasons mainly of tourism cares about and respects. Also, travellers’ tales from the period are true and there is actually a nation of people with the heads of dogs, we meet one in the first paragraph.

I am now listening to an audiobook of Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey, which I’ve not read before. One can guess from Arbonne that Guy Gavriel Kay is interested in bdsm because there’s a lot of power-play and erotic masked balls and people getting tied to beds by wicked seductress Italians. One can guess that Carey is into bdsm because the protagonist is the chosen one of the bdsm angel and receives training at the bdsm guild. This one is also set in fantasy-France (so I’ve gone France, Byzantium, France, Byzantium): there is scheming, mentorship, foreshadowed grief, sex, and people who despite living in a society consisting solely of incredibly beautiful people are even more beautiful than that. I am having a good time.

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Recent Reading

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.

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writing

Free-writing #4

( File: Meritch Incident. )

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Recent Reading

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.

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Scintillation 6, Sunday panel notes

Belated travel posting continues!

( The Underpinnings of the Future )

( Delany )

Then after lunch, an outdoor noodle experience, I went to Lila Garrott interviewing Sherwood Smith.

I did not take notes for this. Partly this is because Sherwood told some personal memories which she would already have put online if she wanted them there. But then I was simply too slow a writer to take any kind of useful notes while also being present in the stories she was telling. I will only say that Lila's last question to Sherwood was "Have you ever considered writing an autobiography?" and I will not argue with any of the good reasons she said she wouldn't, except for the last one, which was that it would just be Hollywood gossip and no one would be interested in reading it. I think I am not the one one in that rapt audience who was sitting there thinking "I would be interested in reading it!"

( Discovering Forgotten Writers )

( Why We Need Hopepunk More Than Ever )

And that was paneling! Raffle followed it. The table had been building up all weekend with beautiful and interesting things, and each winning ticket-holder could come up and choose something. I was minding someone else's tickets as well as my own, and while I turned out to be tired enough that comparing the called numbers against two lists of numbers instead of just one was like some imp's special project in hell, I was very pleased to get G. two of the things she most wanted! And she was taking me to the airport the next morning, which made for a very convenient exchange. Then there was low-key and restorative dinner, and enjoyable picnic, and that was Scintillation.

Entry tags:

writing

Writing from travel diary

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.

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A bit more Montreal diary + Scintillation 6, Friday and Saturday panel notes

Last time I travelled internationally I did not yet have a smartphone. I look back and am amazed it went as well as it did. (I know people travelled perfectly well before smartphones, and I guess some of those people were also full of blithe confidence and hadn't bothered to get any maps, so maybe amazed is too strong. Pleasantly surprised.) This trip was the full Google Maps experience, and one of the best fruit salads I've ever had was served to me when I was hot and sore-footed after a trip up The Mountain and typed 'fruit salad' into Google Maps with no particular hope.

(I would not go back again to find the same exact fruit salad. None of my nostalgic memories of Montreal food came through for me this time: the amazing custard buns had become normal, and perhaps the default NZ croissant has improved or perhaps I was simply less croissant-hungry. This trip has laid down an entirely new set of great food memories.)

My plan had been to reach Montreal days early, get over my jet lag, and then be fully alert for the convention. This did not work. I reached Montreal, proceeded to have three lovely days using magic travel energy dredged up out of my bone marrow, and hit the convention without having begun to be able to sleep more than five or six hours a night and with the travel energy used up. 'I should make time to go back to my Airbnb in the afternoon and nap,' I said to myself. There was so much good stuff to attend I didn't do this, and I regretted it. The convention was great, but also, as I wrote at the time, 'A great case study in social tasks and burning out of them.'

(The advanced next form of plan, if and when I go to Scintillation again, will involve arriving in North America weeks beforehand, doing all my travelling first, going to Scintillation, and then leaving before the weather gets hot. It will also involve having a location within five minutes' walk where I can nap.)

Oh, but one lovely part of the first three days was wandering the city, and sitting in a coffee shop near the Basilica, while a conversation about road trip stories took place on the Scintillation discord. The discord is a thriving online community. Usually I'm offset from it by between six and eight hours depending on daylight saving time; it was great to be participating in conversations on there in real time! I'd type up my notes on this conversation too, since it felt basically panel-sized, (what are the most interesting things about road trip stories? What best separates them from other types of travel narrative like quest and pilgrimage?) only it feels slightly less the done thing when it's reporting on semi-private conversation instead of semi-public panels.

( Panel notes for 'Writing the Future' )

After lunch was a panel on How To Write Middle, where I took such scrabbly notes it's not worth typing them up, but it is immediately followed by some quick notes about how I could turn a random dream I had into a story, so it did its job re. giving impetus to go write things. This is also the panel during which William Alexander described the parlor game 'Smoke,' which I co-opted for use in a Starting Writers meetup later that day, so that was very useful and I was able to briefly tell him it had been - he seemed pleased! (The rules of Smoke are that it's twenty questions, where one person is thinking of a character and the others have to ask them questions to guess what it is. Except none of the questions can be factual. They all have to be sideways, poetical type questions. The first one is 'What kind of smoke would the person you're thinking of be?')

( Panel notes for 'Not Saving the World: Stakes in Fantasy' )

Other things that happened on Saturday: nice lunch-stroll with

ambyr. Frantic Fanfic session which was fun, although revealing of how much the website does for you: writing as much as you can in three minutes gets the added concern of shuffling paper! (I only realised partway through that the website would shuffle everyone's virtual papers up thoroughly, whereas we were passing papers in a circle and thus always writing in the same order. Not bad, but different. Next time I might shuffle in the middle of the table.)

Starting Writers meetup. I was organising this, and had been very blithe about it until day of, when I suddenly remembered to be stressed at organising a group of people. It went well enough, if I was doing it again I would do it totally differently. Following this, I joined

rushthatspeaks for dinner and helped generate The Incident With The Soup That Could Not Be Opened, which was stressful for all concerned - it was good to see him, and

sartorias and

nineweaving, but I am glad I could catch up with all three of them at less stressed times when there was no unopenable takeaway soup.

Then there was a panel on Education for which I had little remaining energy, though I was introduced to a Scintillator who will be moving to Wellington soon (this will be very nice, the only downside was that the introduction foiled my original plan of lying down on the floor right in back and hearing the panel that way). And then there was Beowulf reading, and home. Pleasantly, my Airbnb, though at a not-ideal distance from the hotel, was also in the same general direction as Gretchen and her friend S were heading, so I could talk more with them on the way about linguistics and Beowulf and things. (She lent me the charming Bea Wolf.)

Entry tags:

life,
writing

Book-buying vow + thing I wrote before Popes became topical

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.

Entry tags:

travel

Travelling to Montreal

I probably won't post about my whole trip in detail, but here's the start of it!

From my travel diary, leaving Wellington toward Palmerston North after a day spent frantically packing:

"Set out at 9pm. Desire to make a start, however impractical. Took wrong turn. Drove for a half hour thinking 'What a fun, exciting, stupid shortcut Google Maps has found!' Was in fact driving into the Tararua Ranges. Potholes. Ferns. Slips. An abandoned wall from some old stone building. Only when I found I'd lost cell signal and couldn't tell where I was - but not, by compass, heading north - did I twig to it. Followed the first rule of getting lost: go back to when you weren't. In this case the town of Shannon.

Lovely start to trip. Now in motel. Staff kind, coffee (decaf) godawful yet welcome.

Car good for: shouting like Benjamin Bagby."

...

The next day, the rest of the trip North was tiring/pleasant/dull/alarming. It took nine hours, by far my longest trip as driver up to that point, though it would've gone quicker if I was a more experienced driver, or one who didn't keep getting a little bit lost, or if there hadn't been storms. I ended up driving incredibly slowly in pelting rain towards the end of the trip, with the lights of oncoming cars glaring against the smeared Tararua Ranges mud on the windshield, and being overtaken by large trucks.

It was very nice to stay at Onewhero with Justy and Tim! I had not been there in perhaps a year, partly because of confusion about how my annual leave worked. (This is the first job I've had that has annual leave.) My grandmother Ann visited, and we walked and played cards. All our regular walks felt shorter than they once did - I guess I'd been in quite a stable long-walks habit since last visiting.

...

At San Francisco airport I somehow found myself spending $40 NZ on an egg burger, because I forgot how US dollars and tipping and taxes worked. It was not good, but almost every part of it was unexpected, so that was something. The bacon was a different shape! The cheese was a different color! In New Zealand that menu description would have been talking about an open sandwich! This was the most 'unfamiliar foreign US food' experience I had on the whole trip. I ate plenty of food we don't get in New Zealand, but none that fell into the uncanny valley.

That airport also had a bookshop perhaps as good as Wellington City's main new books bookstore. This is new in my experience of airport bookshops. I bought a cheap paperback of Perhaps the Stars there because the cheap paperback edition never reached NZ to my knowledge. (Later I would discard this book at

ambyr's house, having become less whimsical and tired and worked out that I had no use for it and a heavy suitcase.)

Just before boarding at San Francisco, we heard two large beeps and the words 'May I have your attention. There is a fire emergency in the building. You are-' and then silence. So that was exciting.

From the air over the US I saw: a great reflector dish focusing light to the center. Lakes next to lakes, like puddles after rain. Wide clear lines in the forest: firebreaks? (Power line right-of-ways, someone said later.) And coming into Montreal, a moving patch where the city lights seemed to intensify like jewels. (Perhaps it was the sun's reflection off the plane? It seemed big though. And not in the least glary.)

[Note because I'll forget it otherwise: on my departing flight to Houston I later saw the clearest possible oxbow lakes - every phase of them demonstrated, just like I vaguely think I once learned in school. Even crescent-shaped places where the forest was a different color on top of some old lake now filled in.]

As the plane landed in Montreal, a small kid repeated with great glee, "You said a bad word! You're getting emotional!" It is fun to be a small kid who's worked out that rules point both ways.

...

Before bed on the first night, my Airbnb host told me about how Hegelian dialectics helped him succeed as a music agent in the early 2000s. I did not make much reply.

Entry tags:

writing

A bit of free-writing

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.

Entry tags:

New York books read on the East Coast

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.

Entry tags:

theatre,
travel

The Death of Rasputin

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.

Entry tags:

books

100 Books

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?

(no subject)

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.

Entry tags:

(no subject)

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.

Entry tags:

Recent reading in brief while I can’t move from under this cat

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.

Entry tags:

Recent reading is structurally nifty

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.

Entry tags:

"I wonder whether it costs you a lot of thought or trouble...?"

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 )

Entry tags:

Feeling concerted

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.