landingtree

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.

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

~

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

~

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

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

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

~

Deep Roots, by Ruthanna Emrys.

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

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

~

The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo.

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

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

~

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson.

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

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

~

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

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

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

Also bought at Scintillation.

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

These are gifts from

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strand Books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lovely lunch with my friend Alexander out on the Kapiti Coast today. I don't know if I've stopped in the township of Paekakariki before, it's on a very narrow bit of land between tall flaxy hills and the sea, on what's just ceased to be the main road after the (glory, halleluiah, hosanna in excelsis) completion of Transmission Gully.*

I liked Paekak (are non-locals allowed to call it that? unsure), its details seemed slightly weirder than usual. The first cafe we went into had cabinets full of delicious looking food, but their coffee and eftpos machines were both broken; I regret that we didn't go get cash out, because the pie at the cafe next door was not at all interesting. Outside the village hall, five minutes walk from the train station, signs saying 'north' and 'south' pointed almost at right angles to each other. Five minutes from there was the sea – we walked along a path over a steep slope of boulders, with the spray kicking up into distant mistiness. A set of steps whose railings were all odd curves went sharply down into the water. Two men were throwing driftwood for a terrier to chase, and as we came up behind, one of them turned around without knowing we were there, fashionable and sharp-cheekboned, and had to stop himself throwing the driftwood at one of our faces. A little road going up between the houses above us had a sign: 'Sand Path. No exit.'

At the nearby bookshop I found a lot of Margaret Mahy I'd forgotten existed – very good children's section, writers I expect to find in ones and twos were there in fives and tens – and also The Book of the Pearl: its History, Art, Science, and Industry. I know this is the kind of book I acquire in enthusiasm as a result of how oddly specific it is, and then don't read because it's actually long and boring, and I've mostly gotten better at leaving those on the shelf, but what the hell, it was cheap, and what if one day I wanted to open it up at random and learn a new technical term for 'strawberry-shaped'?**

I hadn't noticed at that point that the book had first been published in 1908. It is written by two men who have spent many years accumulating all the pearl-related information they can find, and refer to themselves in the introduction as 'the senior author' and 'the junior author'. Their acknowledgements begin with the Queen of Italy, go on for two pages citing diplomats and museum curators and the princes of states which no longer exist, and end with the collected officials of the British Colonial Service. I boggled. I'm not sure how long I'll go on boggling before I get rid of it again. Savage peoples are referenced within the first paragraph – and apparently when they want to adorn themselves with pearls it's a characteristic trait of savagery, but when English people do it the impulse, though analagous, is entirely different. That'll teach me to buy a book based on random samples from the middle.

*A road through the hills first proposed a century ago and now built at only a couple of hundred million over budget.

**Answer: I would almost immediately forget what it was, as well as the page number.

While sorting my thoroughly chaotic Dropbox folder (why does the folder 'Jack' contain the folder 'JackActual'? Why are all my school documents nested within both of those while my university documents are in neither? Where has the wizard gone?) I came upon the unfinished writeup of my tramping trip last January. Here it is, for the sake of memory.

The Department of Conservation maintains a number of Great Walks, keeping the trails clear and staffing the huts with rangers. A few months after New Zealand's borders closed last year, my aunt booked places on the Kepler and the Routeburn.

I love the unfolding stages of each day's walk, as you come round a bend and get a view of your next hour and a half, and the interesting question of what's going to be round the next crag after that.

Our first hut ranger told us about the local kea – how she once had a group trapping them to put identification bands on the legs, and has personally named two newly-identified kea, one after herself, the other, Aragorn. She also took a dark glee in narrating to us exactly what she and her trainee have to do to the sewerage system every time a tramper flushes wet wipes into it, thus making sure we'd all be on our best behavior in the huts to come. And she had us all singing a song she'd written about a rare duck being hunted by a stoat, inviting us all to join in as its racing heart for the chorus: 'Boom-diddy-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.' Some people at the next table over who'd had a few beers were still repeating 'Boom-diddy-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom' some time after the song had finished. She's working on another song about the last two stoats in New Zealand facing the ranger who intends to execute them. My aunt told us we shouldn't expect all hut talks to be so charismatically delivered – or all huts to offer such privacy of bunk nooks, come to that.

Next day we walked the alpine part of the track, on boardwalks over sensitive bits of wetland, up onto scree slopes, where I felt acutely that my heavy tramping pack and I could become a sausage rolling helplessly downhill if I took two steps to the right. The lake which I'd thought quite small extended a whole new arm beside us, and we got a view of the mountains beyond mountains which make up Fiordland: not all of them visited, many still not named but only numbered. The path went around a U-shaped ridgeline, dropped interminably (it was the end of a long day) through trees to the next hut, in the Iris Burn valley, amid Jurassic quantities of ferns and a couple of vampires' worth of biting sandflies.* The branches of beech trees showed pale in the dark foliage. There was an exhilaratingly freezing stream to swim in, fresh from midsummer snowmelt, and a waterfall to walk to in the evening, with the sun angled to set all the greens of the undergrowth burning. The ranger that night got everyone up and doing stretches, which I was tired enough to resent but was grateful for afterwards; her demeanor was, “This is the last day of my shift and I am so done with this,” but in a pleasant sort of way.

The next day was a comparatively gentle walk out along the river to the last hut; I spent it feeling completely drained, and it was almost a relief to discover that it wasn't because I'd burned through all my walking fitness, but because I'd caught a cold. (Not a relief for the several members of my family who then caught it too). The last hut was by Lake Manapouri, and its ranger said at the start that he'd give his hut talk to anyone who wanted to hear it, but it was about an hour long, so he wanted a show of hands to see if anyone was interested, and we were all free to leave at any time – before getting out a map of the region and telling a long, discursive, riveting story about the building of the hydroelectric plant and the campaign to prevent the lake being raised twenty meters – which would have increased the lake's effectiveness as a battery, while also drowning all the trees we'd spent that day walking under. He'd been in the area for a long time, and had an amateur historian's enthusiasm: he scarcely mentioned a location without adding, “which my son and I visited a few years back,” and scarcely mentioned a local character without saying, “who I chatted with about it one time.”

That last night, unlike the other equally crowded nights, I couldn't sleep, getting very slowly up from my top bunk in the dark, creak by creak, and out into the unlit dining hall, where I read The Body Keeps the Score for two hours by torchlight.

--

Two days later we were driven up a glacial valley on a bus, the steep bushy arms of old avalanches occasionally spilling out across across the thin soil of the dead flat grassy base, and we walked the Routeburn, a track which suffers in the wintertime, and which was being repaired as we walked it by a crew who occasionally, we were warned, used explosives. Once we heard them boom, far in the distance behind us. We hurried rapidly by most of the best views of the mountains, on the first day, because they were all signposted with 'danger: slip zone, do not stop.' Our hut that day was on a green lake edged with mist, a lake that rises and falls to encompass and release all the jumble of boulders which, during our stay, lay between it and the foot of the hut. That ranger told us the very-familiar story of invasive mammals in New Zealand – do any New Zealand children not get raised on this? – but he told it with love, and worked up to asking us all for donations to his trapping efforts in perhaps the most endearing way possible: by simply telling us that every bit of birdsong we'd heard during the day's walk was a result of the initiative he began, when DoC wouldn't give him funding and he bootstrapped his way from six local stoat traps all the way up to thousands.

The next day we tacked up over the ridge, looking back down on the green lake, up onto the top of the ridge and then around the point of it to look down on the next valley over and walk back against the heights.

*The Goddess Hine-nui-te-po created the sandfly in response to another god's too-perfect craftsmanship of Milford Sound, to make sure people wouldn't settle down there. The versions I find on a rapid google describe this as a spiteful act – Hine-nui-te-po is the goddess of death – but in our hut ranger's version, it was helpful: no one who sat down in front of that view would ever have wanted to stand up again otherwise.

Delightful thing discovered in Dunedin 1: twelve brightly-coloured hammocks sewn together edge to edge with bushels of milk bottle tops strung off them, hanging in an art gallery, which visitors are invited to crawl along. My friend Alexander told me about this exhibit and I thought, "Oh, well, that sounds entertaining enough." I did not expect to be grinning wildly by hammock two, surrounded by blue and not quite sure how to move. From the outside a row of twelve hammocks looks quite short, but from inside it feels like an ocean, and the swing and balance of it is very strange. I don't know when I last had that much sheer fun on a structure; no playground I know can match it. Which would be very pleasing even if it was the only part of the exhibit, but after that there's a net covered in dangling plastic bottles which you can stand up underneath and shake as though it's your robe, or crawl about under making smaller-scale music, and after that, in the next room, there are hexagonal tables, with eighteen drawers each containing a different herb or spice or tea, with hot water and cups and teapots -- and intention of the whole thing, the reason it's in an art gallery, is to make political conversation with strangers comfortable. The only conversations we had with strangers there were about the tea, but I can vouch for the theory. I can hardly think of a better tool for lowering social barriers than those hammocks. (The tea stations also reduce the velocity of the many small children attending the exhibit in a way their parents probably appreciate).

However, do not make tea out of pure devil's claw. Alexander put a very little of it in his mix of herbs and hibiscus flower, which was very nice and like nothing I've drunk -- astringent and strongly fruity but without the stick-in-your throat quality that I dislike in overbrewed fruit teas. I wanted to see what the devil's claw brought to the mixture, and drank some straight. It was terribly unpleasant, but interesting enough that I kept drinking it for a while. Violently bitter with an earthy raw-potato quality that increased the longer it steeped and gave me indigestion. If the Dright were serving his guests tea, this would be it.

(The other thing I saw at the art gallery was a huge wall covered in abstract paintings which looked very serious and impenetrably conceptual, but which when you walked close to them turned out to be covered in whimsical bits of writing and quotes and jokes. It was visible from the hammock room's window, and seemed to fit in).

Delightful thing discovered in Dunedin 2: the computer game Goragora. I'm hunting my memory for anything which would prevent me from calling it the most beautiful game I've ever played, and not coming up with anything except possibly (in a very different direction) Go. Goragora is a puzzle based on relating images to each other. You have a grid of four pictures or scenes. Sometimes you can zoom in on an image of a room to find a hanging on the wall which itself contains four images each of which you can zoom in on. Sometimes you can move the images around such that two of them become halves of each other, and something happens as a result. Sometimes, if an image is in a frame, you can move the frame and put it around something else, and then zoom out to find that the context has changed. What you are looking for, glimpsing amid the images, is a dragon, or a constellation, or enlightenment, or beauty itself, though the search is hard and the times are dark.

After I played Goragora I was having a conversation about the significance of someone's bumblebee tattoo, why she'd chosen it and what she thought about bumblebees. That kind of symbolic thinking which links the dead bumblebee on the path to the live image on a person's wrist is the kind that Goragora uses, and I haven't seen anything like it before.

(There should be a word for the moment when you find yourself applying a sort of thinking where it can't apply. I've found myself after games of Go thinking about a social situation as though it were a Go problem; after playing Goragora I found myself expecting the floral pattern on the ceiling to be a puzzle component. And there's a split second when I don't notice myself doing it).

Delightful thing discovered in Dunedin 3: a setting for a roleplaying game that I'm about to run, which suddenly came together in my head with a whoosh at the point when I was saying to myself, "Well, it seems to be tending Westernish, but it would be fun to add Lovecraftian cults in, I know where I am with Lovecraftian cults, only

seahearth wouldn't want to play if it was entirely madness and doom..." My previous attempt to run a roleplaying game was not a total failure but consisted largely of stress and things not quite going right; also, planning a game takes the same brain as writing. I hadn't quite realised how nervous I felt about it until the ideas I'd piled into a heap became a living creature, drew a deep breath, and told me that God was a Tree, that the world was being built outwards from Its paradise in a ring, and that Its wealthy human servants built temples to house Its seedlings in exchange for exclusive control over the fruits of the field and the sleep of the mind and the healing of the body on their new-made land. (It helps that in a roleplaying game I am allowed and indeed encouraged to steal things wholesale. Perhaps I should allow and encourage myself to do this all the time).

As well as these, there were the friends I was going to stay with, and the other friends I was going to visit, who have been kind enough to move entirely independently to the same part of the country. The fact that I knew about them already does not stop them being delightful too.

As for Dunedin itself -- which I realise to my slight surprise is the first unfamiliar-to-me bit of New Zealand I've seen since moving to Wellington five years ago -- what stuck out to me were chimney pots, stone churches, and holly hedges. The hills and landscape are fairly Wellingtonian, though I haven't seen anywhere in Wellington which has quite the kind of wide swooping street I was staying on, a gentler roll than Wellington's larger hills tend to have, meaning that I could sit in the bay window and see the street peak at each of its top corners, once far and once near. Alexander drove me out onto the peninsula, to Sandfly Bay, named not for insects but for how far up the valley from the coast the wind takes the sand, as though a bit of beach had been picked up and lain inland lengthwise. We attempted to catch an illicit view of New Zealand's only castle, but its managers have done their work well -- there's no view in through the screening trees from any part of the road outside the ticket gate. Other than that, I did less exploration than I thought I would, except little circuits of the nearer streets. It was a very holidayish holiday, full of background music, and talking, and of computer-game-playing and t.v.-watching (two things which aren't really integrated into my life except in small corners and as bits of failed self-care, so it was interesting to be visiting lives in which they were well-set-up and social and so suited me down to the ground).

Back from Prague, back to summer and family and flatmates and a keyboard I can actually type on. (This laptop feels normal to me again now, but for about five minutes it was more amazing than it's been since the day I got it). The thing I notice about being in this city again is the greenness -- the walk up the hill to the house is between great walls of tree and shrub. Summer from winter, of course -- but even in winter this city is green. And at four in the afternoon, Prague midwinter sunset, the sun here is higher than Prague midwinter noon.

Today and Monday I was back in the garden, Tuesday I spent putting off doing anything useful, which surprised me: I'd forgotten I did that. The negative side of home habits. This evening I've been writing, and wandered down to the summer light display, listening to a little bit of the concert my flatmates were picnicking at, but not feeling in the mood to stay. One of the things I missed most intensely while I was travelling was music, unexpectedly. I haven't thought of music as terribly important to me, since I don't listen to a great range of things and nine times out of ten I feel more like silence. But if I spend a few weeks having the tenth time be silence too, turns out I notice: feeling like a song in particular and not being able to hear it. (I give thanks to the internet for this strange luxurious normal). In the Heraklion hotel lobby, Tori Amos' 'Winter' came on, and I froze in place for a while. Today I gardened with music (as well as podcasts about the Mexican Revolution), and it was good.

Here are four photos from Greece, out of a total of some hundreds:

( Read more... )

Sitting in Prague airport waiting for check in to open for my flight home. Charlotte is following tomorrow, leaving before I'll have arrived. These have been a very good few days - we've more and more got the hang of Prague as we've gone along.

When I was going to our apartment for the first time I walked several times around the square trying to make sense of the street signs and find it, going into and out of a dark empty commercial/residential courtyard, typing my entry code into several wrong keypads, and managing to fail to follow the pointing fingers or directions of no fewer than three friendly locals. The crepe shop from which I finally got both dinner and a landmark I could use was never again open when we tried it, morning or evening - perhaps it only helps people in particular need.

I've become attached to the apartment and Zizkov. There was time for it to start feeling homey. We had a regular and very tasty dinner place (Lavicka, the one with the cosh ragout). Left from our door, along past the side of the square and up a few steps was the main street on which Lavicka was, and a fruit shop and bakery, and a tram stop. On up the gentle hill six or seven blocks (between four-storey apartment buildings, some in pastels, some soot-darkwned like so much of the older pale stone has been, many with statues, faces, decorations on them - and no gaps between them, one face against the cold), past the landmarks of presumed-brothel, nightclub, roundabout planted with long grasses cinched up in leaning bundles, with the communications tower on the left (ugly, I thought at first, but I became fond of it, and it was a very useful landmark the time I was walking home from some way away without a map), was the suburb's main square, great big church with the clock in the wide chest of the tower instead of the head, Christmas market, metro station.

(The metro lines are a long way below the city. Tall rapid escalators which made me momentarily miss skiing, thinking of ski lifts. In Athens the wide platforms were on either sides of rails running trains in both directions, and the trains came curving out of wide dark tunnels looking distinctly threatening. Here, the platforms are between the rails, with a line of pillars to pass through on either side to get to the rails you want, and concave and convex circles in metallic colours like unusually large dalek components decorate the walls begind the rails. The tunnels are narrow enough that a wind presages each train, and when the train arrives its lamp-eyes make running curves of light on the shiny concavities and convexities. It all feels much more comfortable and benign. Doesn't hurt that in Prague the trains come more than twice as often, either. We never had a wait longer than four minutes).

At the other side of the little square outside our window run a road which, taken right, leads to a large rectangular graveyard, earliest graves from the early 19th century - and many of those still tended. Graves grown with ivy, or covered in pine branches. In that direction is a mall, also, just as dull as the malls at home. Taken left, the street points at the war memorial on the low hill we could see from our windows. Largest equine statue in Europe, apparently, and I can believe it. It looks rather savage. The near side of that hill is good for walking, set up for cyclists. I got some of my first direct sunlight in Prague there, on day three or four, which made me realise for the first time how low the sun stays here. Four or five palms off the zenith at noon, and four o'clock is sunset - or was, when we arrived. Days have begun to lengthen. On thebfar side of the hill, Charlotte and I foundour way onto a mess of small paths whose 'keep out' ribbons had mostly fallen down. We didn't notice the first we passed, if there was one at all. Below that side of the hill runs the rail line, on the other side of which is the suburb of Karlin. We passed under the rails on the end of the hill which is left when faced from our apartment, and walked back rightwards through a gradual shading from rundown into hip. A church of St Wenceslas there with amazing arched doors each composed of five patterns of arch and five kinds of capital on the ornamental columns, nested from smallest to largest. I would have liked to wander around inside more, but it was in use: unlike in Greece, most of the historical buildings here are also functional.

My plane is boarding. The rest of this post will follow when I next have both wifi and a working mind, which may or may not be next airport.

In Prague, they greet the new year with fireworks. Amazing quantities of fireworks, some of a size that might turn up in Wellington's big public Guy Fawkes display, rat-tat-tat in four colours at once - but let off in the streets and in the square outside our window, rising over the four-storey apartment buildings. They've been going for an hour and a half, but at the stroke of midnight they went full siege-simulation. If the local bell tower rang the hour, we coudn't hear it over the cracking and banging. Lightbursts peeking out over the roofs opposite, or shot from the roofs themselves, or entirely out of sight except for the flash like lightning. One of the larger golden-blossom ones misfired and went off at ground level, filling half the square and leaving a wide haze. An ambulance went past, and a police car not long after. I'm glad New Zealand has taken from its citizens the means to make chaos this glorious, but it's quite a thing to watch from a fairly-safe second storey window - fireworks the way they looked when I was a lot smaller myself.

A distant chorus of Auld Lang Syne. I'd been wondering if that was sung here. I wonder if we'll get to sleep before three - not betting on it. Welcome in, 2019.

My reading order seems to have partially sorted these posts into 'books I really liked' and 'other.'

The Furthest Station, by Ben Aaronovitch. A novella taken out of order because it happened to be on my kindle when I felt like something short and undemanding - I've only read the first of the novels so far. Policeman wrangles supernatural situations related to London's long history. Ghosts on the underground. Pleasant enough. I think I'll be enthusiastic about these when I've read three or four of them, there are clearly bits of overplot being put in place here. It doesn't obviously spoil anything, either - but I think 'short and undemanding' was the wrong prescription, translating to 'requires energy without returning energy'. Most of the books I'm writing about here I read parts of during the third hours of bus rides I'd have preferred to stop at two hours).

Child of a Hidden Sea, by A. M. Delamonica. I only just liked this enough to keep reading it. The main character is immediately whisked to a location which is certainly magical and might very well be another world, while in small flashbacks giving us the circumstances which lead to the whisking. I immediately did not care. The reason I did keep reading was a worldbuilding detail that turned up and made me go 'ooh', and true to promise, those kept on coming. Some of the ways in which this is not set in Default Magic Land are fun and more complicated than usual, and the reasons for both our society in general and the main character specifically being kept from knowledge of magical goings on are more interesting than usual. I'm happy to see a character get to a Magic Land who has the right skillset for it and whose first response is, "Plot? I don't want to have a plot, I want to study those shellfish over there, far more interesting." There was also a romance, pirates, an implausibly wonderful genius sibling, and the bonding of estranged family members - all of which was schematically as I'd have wanted it, and actually left me cold. There kept being bits of dialogue which seemed like what you write when you know you need a bit of dialogue, instead of like either a person speaking or something in a style of its own - which generalises to what I didn't like about the book overall. But the ending jumped out and moved me, and it does have the coolest sea otters ever. I may read the sequel.

Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis. This would have been a very different experience if it had been the first thing of his I'd read. It's a version of the Cupid and Psyche story, but so much of what it's doing he also does elsewhere. The relationship of pagan gods to the Christian God. A person's detailed moral decision-making against temptation. An approach to the problem of pain - and to the question, why do gods let themselves be doubted? And for the most part I prefer the workings with those I read earlier, Perelandra and Screwtape and The Great Divorce. In fact I put this down a little way in, because I was finding it stolid, to reread The Great Divorce - which is so much book in so few words. I find it almost as entertaining and almost as insightful as ever, though now that I've assimilated what's beautiful in his vision of Hell, some of the individual sinners whose lives are based on ideas about human nature I don't share pop out at me more than they used to.

Several of those are about the nature of women. Till We Have Faces is written in a woman's first person, which makes it both better and worse than Lewis usually is about that. Orual is strong and clever and flawed, and her flaws

( are spoilers, I suppose )

There are ways in which this is neat, as a version of Cupid and Psyche and as a flawed person engaging with her soul's salvation; there are thoughts and sentences which strike true. But it felt overall less like a book I wanted to be reading for its own sake and more like a collection of evidence about a mind I'm interested in. There are places where Lewis' theology strikes me as so beautiful I wish I believed in it. This is not one of those. This foregrounds some of the reasons I don't. (But I can think: if he was right about the nature of God, and made the right choice, then he has by now understood his own blinkers better than anyone living does, and discarded them. His own thinking allows for that).

The reason I have not been making small posts about being in Prague is that this post has been sitting half finished as a draft, and this device gives me no way to save text, so I can't transfer it to another file and come back to it later, I have to finish or delete. Other books I read in Greece: Song of the Vikings. Nonfiction about the Iceland of Snorri, writer of the Edda from which comes a great whack of the Norse mythology we have. I knew very little about Iceland, which rather surprises me. A harsh landscape, a most storied and storiable politics. I grew up with Norse myths on the shelf, and have powerful dim memories of Volsungs and a man whose enemy has cut his leg tendons slowly forging himself a substitute; before that, there were the Noggin the Nog picture books, which all begin in the Lands of the North, with black rocks and the cold sea and people gathered close around the fire listening to a tale. This is a good book. Its main effect is to make me want to read the sources it's talking about, and though it feels partial enough to Snorri that I want to double-check its claims for him, it doesn't feel partial to the point of leaving stuff out. I wanted its chapter on how ideas about Norseness made their way into European popular and academic thought to influence a) Tolkien and b) Nazism to have been a whole book on its own, but I'm sure that book exists and I can find it.

Oathbringer, by Brandon Sanderson. Book three of a projected ten. I hadn't expected ever to bother with this, but the bus ride was long, it was on my kindle, why not?

By the end of part one of five, itself book-length, I had come up with some good reasons why not. Characters developing on a schedule of, 'too many books left, need another arc.' Language going thud, thud, thud. And more than that, because I can like Sanderson's charcters and tolerate his style. I remember loving the first book in this series when it came out, and going, 'Need sequel now, need sequel now!' I suspect I'd still like it: interesting world, interesting people making significant choices, so many tempting threads. By book three it has congealed. I suspect this is because Sanderson gives each book only as much time as he has, and the first book got years of loving redrafting because no publisher was calling for its sequel yet. Certainly his prose style can range from the polished transparent to the was-this-even-edited? Also book three of ten is a more difficult proposition than book one of ten. But in book two a whole lot of beautifully set up bits of suspense wilted drably into resolution, and book three is no better - unless it's only the three-hour bus ride talking. (I think that one may actually have been a five-hour bus ride).

So I did what I never do and skimmed it.

( Major spoilers for all three existing tomes )

So when the fourth tome comes along, unless anyone tells me otherwise, I'll be reading the first and last two chapters of every part.

Those are all the books I read in Greece. However: another reason I haven't been posting is that it turns out I can explore a new city and write journal entries, or explore a new city and read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but not all three at once.

seahearth, Justy,

leaflemming, you would very likely like this. It's a fan novel available in full online, and viewable with no trouble on a kindle's browser, so it need not be read off a radiant screen. For the first six or so chapters it is merely quite entertaining. Then it starts going places. So very many places. Its premise is that Harry Potter, raised by a family other than the Dursleys, enters the wizarding world as a child genius - imagine what an eleven-year-old Miles Vorkosigan would do upon discovering Diagon Alley, as well as what kind of writer would be required to do that idea any kind of justice, and you'll get a sense of both how clever and how funny this book is. It is considerably cleverer and funnier than the original series, though part of that comes from being able to incorporate into its worldbuilding the full suite of things Rowling probably only came up with as she went along, while telling jokes using the original continuity. This is the longest bit of fanfic I've (half, so far) read, and seems like a good public relations animal for fanfic: complete in itself, yet dependent on the original to the point where the serial numbers are printed on its heart. It also teaches the scientific method rather better than my first two years of university Biology, and does about six things I was wishing had been done when I walked out of The Crimes of Grindlewald. It is probably, when I stop to think about it, ludicrously paced, but I don't care. It just keeps on ticking 'Have you ever wanted someone to take x seriously?' boxes, while making Tolkien jokes, and remaining aware that Hufflepuffs can be wonderful.

The neighbors have stopped singing now, and it is midnight, so I will shortly go to bed. Prague. Delicious food and chamber music this evening, art galleries behind Prague Castle this morning, amazingly convenient trams, mulled wine wherever we look, otherwise quite unassuming restaurants happen to be in the basements of medieval monastic orders, the Charles Bridge flows with tourists morning to night...

Bed. Or just one more chapter, says a voice I must deal with using methods of rationality one way or another.

Sleep was the plan. Additional journal entry is what actually happened. I should never say, "I'll just spend another ten minutes writing" while believing I migt mean it. But instead of writing about the other books I've read on the trip just now, I will, in fact, go to bed.

What's Bred in the Bone, by Robertson Davies. The only book I brought in hard copy, because I'd just started it when I left on the trip, and because I didn't want to have absolutely nothing in the event of my kindle's untimely demise on the umpteen-hour flight. If I'd liked it less I'd have discarded it in Athens, but I think it'll make a good circuit of the family, so I carry it still. Set partly in bits of the world I've newly come into contact with: Canadian high society and art culture, relevant to my earlier post about forgery in Classics and the experts who try to resolve it. (I seem to be accidentally reading an awful lot of books set in places I've been travelling to - I suppose the number of books Montreal, New York, Boston, and Athens shed light on is just very high). Detailed descriptions of the craft of art restoration, in the biography of a man served and disserved by various forms of Christianity, as narrated by his recording angel to the daemon who had charge of making him just a little larger than life. A very rich book, sentence by sentence and incident by incident. A book, alas, that isn't good about its female characters. It has good female characters, with wants and lives, but their positions relative to the main male character are not all they could be, and when the narrating immortal spirits start making incorrect generalisations about them it's particularly jarring.

I read that on a plane trip, and I also watched Ocean's Eleven, I forget in which order, but the combined result was to make me splutter "So much maleness! So much George Clooney!" and reach for:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. When I went to buy this on kindle I found I already had it in my library. Yours,

leaflemming? Have you read it? I can see you starting it and being instantly deflected by its tendency towards heavy stylistic emphasis, one-sentence paragraphs and italicised phrases. Those are things I've learned to see as the equivalent of spelling errors in a text, things to weed out, and they annoyed me a lot in the first few chapters, but this is so good. (By the end about two thirds of the emphases had won me over as part of a successful style. The rest I'd have weeded). This is a very dark book. It's not a spoiler to say that it begins with the ending of a world which has ended mutiple times before. It's only a slight spoiler to say that the world which ends is one so dark that the question of whether its not ending would have been better is complicated. If the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist deals seriously with the common metaphor of superpowered group as oppressed minority, The Fifth Season does that without cheating, without having 'standard comic book superhero universe' as the target its worldbuilding has to hit. But it's neither hard nor unpleasant to read. It zips along, faster than I expected, what is horrible in it is also fascinatingly logical, there are many worldbuilding questions I very much want the answers to, which is to say nothing of my questions about the characters. I finished it thinking, 'Oh dear oh dear where's the next one...?'

Didn't instantly buy the next one. Instead, started Open City, by Teju Cole. In some ways this reminded me of Rachel Cusk's Outlines. (Which is set in Athens and which I read en route to Montreal thence New York. Open City is set in New York and I read part of it in Athens. This is what I mean about accidentally relevant books). A highly skillful yet dry prose style. A main character who is something of an absence in their own life. A focus on the details of part of a traveller's day to day life instead of a plot in which apparently large things happen. A resulting partial absence both from my memory and from my desire to keep on reading in the moment, due to shortage of the things I'm best at remembering, but certain bits which made very strong impacts. These books together make me realise how little literary fiction so-called I read. They feel like books I don't have the map to, or perhaps only books I'd need to reread but may or may not want to, to fully get a view of the images they're working with. (Though I'm saying that about so many books recently, for various reasons, that I may just make it a general principle that a fully read book is a reread book. The Fifth Season, now, like Too Like The Lightning, is a revolutionary book, a book which sketches a society and that society's change or collapse at the same time, and at high speed. Which again leaves part of me saying, "Wait, wait," at the same time as the rest of me says, "Oh, this is so good!")

Open City has a lot in it about New York, and the complexities of being a black man in New York, and the ways 'black' is used as a category for good and bad and irritating - the main character has complex feelings about his own frequent assignation to that category by people who feel comfortable within it. (This and The Fifth Season are both from a list

seahearth and I put together of books by non-white writers to read together. On my side, that was partly because of a conversation I had at Scintillation after the John M. Ford panel - I was enthusing about it and someone said, "Yes, he sounded interesting, but I know what I'm reading for the rest of this year and next year I'm not going to read any white men I don't know personally." I've always resisted or decided against any sort of self-imposed reading rule, because I like reading through recommendation and free-association. But I had that conversation at the same time as I was noticing how very many African-American people there were in Montreal, compared to the bits of Wellington I'm usually in. It bothered me that that felt odd, and that the whiteness of Scintillation itself felt normal. A list of titles is being a good method for this, working with active enthusiasm instead of the kind of sense of duty which made me dawdle over any book English class ever set me. I'd have read The Fifth Season, but this meant I read it now. I would not have read Open City. And though that's only two books, it's changed my thinking - for example, my instincts about varieties of hair. Slightly scary that my free-associative reading hadn't already given me language to describe hair diversity. I have been narrower than I noticed). What was I saying before those brackets? My entries look hugely long on this kindle screen. Oh yes. Open City also has a sting in it, which I feel I should indicate the presence of but can't, I don't think, describe. I will reread the book, though it has no pull to it, it isn't a raconteur like The Fifth Season or What's Bred in the Bone. I want to mull it. I may or may not be glad I mulled it.

But because of the lack of pull I put it down halfway through and read Ancilliary Justice by Anne Leckie before picking it up again to finish. Tis the season for beginning sf trilogies I've been vaguely meaning to read ever since people were enthusing about them, apparently. Liked this a lot. What it does with gender would probably have been new to me when it was published. Not now. But that makes it nice to read in another way. It has a good world, just sufficiently inspired by Rome to make me go 'Neat' while reading it the day after Jeff the Roman history lecturer talked to us about soft power and architecture, and it has good characters in a way which makes it feel more than usually about what having a character means. This is a book whose plot hangs on the choices people make in split seconds without having any idea why they make them, and on the choice one character in particular has deep-rooted difficulty making.

Sometime on the bus ride between Athens and Thessaloniki I reread the end of Komarr, by Lois McMaster Bujold - I forget quite what made me want to, whether it was before or after I thought the above about Ancilliary Justice. I often used to read little bits of books in isolation, but it's a long time since I have. Anyway, one of the things Bujold is extremely good at, in general but in Komarr especially, is the nonlinearity of choice. She dramatises the process of thought up to and across the moment at which it produces change - which should be unexceptional, since books in which characters make important choices aren't exactly rare, but it's often not done or done badly. The balance between a choice just happening and a choice being fully reasoned can look so much like 'the plot made me do it', but if done well feels so different. (Why am I still reading Brandon Sanderson? The answer may now be 'I'm not'). As someone in Ancilliary Justice says, the reason to give AI emotion is to prevent every choice from devolving into a maze of inconsequential factors. ("How shall we satisfy when we meet, between 'shall I?' and 'I will', the lion's mouth, whose hunger no metaphors can fill?" - writes Auden, approximately). This stuff is useful to bounce about i my mind, as reading family members may guess, partly because I've always had a talent for letting choices devolve into mazes of inconsequential factors. It started when I was first asked to selected baked goods from a shop counter, and has only grown subtler with age.

There have been a lot of hills to climb, many of them fortified. Although the signs called it closed, I walked up the switchback stair of the Citadel over Nauplion, getting glorious and more and more acute views down on the lower fort on the peninsula, and though the gates of the Citadel itself were locked, i could go up the stair on the Bastion of Robert, which I wouldn't recomment to anyone more afraid of heights than I am. Wall with arrow slits to left, fall of some metres down to the main stairway on right.

The next day there was a thunderstorm in the evening. Louder, longer peals than I've ever heard - and though I spent most of it indoors, when my roommate came in soaked to the skin and described the lightning I went out to see. It was windless, such that a borrowed umbrella kept me almost completely dry despite heavy rain. That wouldn't work in Wellington, where the rain likes to come in sideways. And I saw one bolt go across the sky over the Citadel from one end to the other. I hadn't really stopped to consider why Zeus was a stronger god than Poseidon, and now I don't really have to. (Although I have also swum in the waves off Kommos, which are the largest I've met in a long time. I felt slapped and buffetted by them, if I didn't ride them. At the West Coast beaches I'm most used to I simply wouldn't swim where the waves were that high. Ruapuke Beach does not love to let its swimmers go again).

I made the mistake of climbing all the way to the fort above Mystra, too, having been so pleased by the Citadel and Acrocorinth. The gates of Mystra were closing at three, no matter which side of them a given tourist was on, and the climb was longer than I and a bunch of others expected. Some of the wiser of us peeled away early to spend a leisurely time walking through beautiful Byzantine churches. I saw most of those churches as I hurtled past downhill half an hour later, in my heavy boots again, avoiding a twisted ankle as much by luck as judgement.

I wrote all the above at Delphi, in a hotel room looking out over the mountain valley. When we got there the sun was going down to the right of the far slope, but if you raised a hand to hide the glare you could see the faintest possible snowfall, uncatchable, like dust. And all of the twenty-five of us had rooms on that side of the hotel, so we could see each other on our balconies below and above as we all separately came out into the view.

That was a few days ago. Now I've left that travelling micro-world, its jokes and patterns, and though it was a social situation I found stressful as well as pleasant, I'm missing it more than I expected. But I'm not missing my partner Charlotte any more, which is very very good. We're in Prague, and she's asleep early, having arrived yesterday from Wellington instead of Athens. Today we mosied around getting our bearings, and for dinner ate some of the best food I've had in weeks. No more ten-person decisions to negotiate means easier better results. Czech food is winter-heavy. Venison and bacon dumplings in red wine sauce felt like being courteously coshed by a professional.

Now I will let myself fll unconscious, and tomorrow, the old city.

Now we are in Nauplion, for an incredibly luxurious three consecutive days. The last leg: from here it's Olympia Delphi Athens home - or in my case Olympia Athens Delphi Prague, home. I have begun to be able to be excited about Prague, as it comes out from behind the other places. This may very well be the greatest number of new places I ever see in a year, let alone three months. It may take me more than a decade to stay in this many hotels again.

I am getting dangerously used to the idea that sweet pastries are a breakfast food. I have also, less dangerously, come around to cucumber as one. There is a decent array of fruit, muesli (although the bowls are too small), some egg I haven't dared try yet - and some boiled eggs I shall not, hotels here seem uniform in boiling their eggs grey. Also peach juice. The hotel lets us have two key-cards for our room, thus simplifying a lot of logistics as to meals and city-wandering (especially since I'm not using a cell phone). The beds are soft, and there are for the first time blankets - I would almost always rather have blankets than duvets, which give me restless dreams. In one hotel I resorted to lying on top of all the bedding and wearing thick socks. The bathroom, meanwhile, has a real door, and the controversial theory that consistent hot water and an effective system for stopping water going onto the floor can coexist in one shower is finally proven.

Greengrocers are cheap and plentiful, the success rate for mandarins is high, and bananas can almost be relied upon to be edible. I have finally stopped reading '[phi]apmakeio' (pharmacy) as 'mapmakers' at first glance. (Those common letters. Back in Athens I had three or four moments of thinking, 'Ooh, what an interesting shop to find, no wait'. This despite the green LED cross all pharmacies have here). I can still say hello and thank you and not much more in Greek, and this has still never really been a problem; the phrasebook I carry goes unconsulted. Now we're back from Crete it is no longer necessary to buy bottled water, though many of us still do, preferring its flavour to the hotel tap stuff. I disliked all water here for the first days in Athens, and have now got used to it - or perhaps it was my general jet-lag weirdness I was disliking. It will be interesting to get back to NZ tap water. A dinner staple remains gyros, veges meat chips and tzatziki in a pita wrap - everywhere we've been some shop has turning vertical skewers of pork or chicken waiting to serve us. Very cheap. No food poisoning yet.

In the tombs of Mycenae there's a most amazing echo. Huge buried cylinder of stone, gravel on the floor, and every footstep snapping back and forth across the space crisply, as though each disturbed stone of the gravel was speaking individually, as though one was very important or was being paid very close attention by something. A perception I will use sometime in a story for being looked at by a god. Now I have come home from a twenty-first birthday dinner, with nicer food and a greater quantity of spirits and wine than has been the usual, so I will post this without further details - and go to bed.

Today was Corinth, in the pouring rain. At least it got me a laugh when I said, "This is one of the drier areas of Greece..." while explaining the geology of springs. I presented on the South Stoa and Peirene Fountainhouse, and on the Peribolos of Apollo a bit, although by then it was in the form, "In that mess of stone we can't walk into there was an archaic temple, an altar, then shops, a bronze foundry, and then a peribolos court first of limestone and then marble. Also there was a drain. You may now get out of this weather." And then I determinedly walked around looking at things for five minutes before admitting to myself that even though this was my site, I too wanted to get out of the weather. Alas, temples of Corinth, perhaps someday I will return and look at you properly.

But it wasn't raining on Acrocorinth. I'll take that trade. Once the bus driver had got a bystander to find the owner of the car which was making the street too narrow to turn into, we drove up to the carpark, and those of us without injured knees and still-raging colds set off up a path of stones slippery enough to have injured a few more knees if we hadn't been careful. We were already well up on the sde of the hill, which would be beautiful to climb even if it didn't have ancient fortification walls and towers all over its one accessible face, looming in the mist which slowly cleared as some of us sat around the tower on the lower of the two peaks, eating lunch, or a mandarin in my case, taking photos. (At some point I will post photos).

We've been flitting, no two nights in the same beds. But I seem to have come into energy again, through the part of the cold where I felt trembly-tired - and through the part of the trip (or a part of it) where I couldn't find enthusiasm for another bus ride to another set of walls, as well.

Someone I met a few years ago went on this field trip and broke both her wrists falling into a tomb. I went into that tomb today, safely over the uneven bit of slippery stone its upper steps have become, and into others, stark slots in the earth their entranceways, spiders spinning over the mouths of their dark single-room chambers. On the Hill of the Wild Oaks, at Armenoi, and from the deep bottoms of the slots you could look up at the twisted branches of those oaks. Horror-movie conventions are never going to get a better straight line from me than that. There are generations of burials in some of the tombs, which were made to be buried and re-opened, the old bones shoved aside to give new bodies space. We felt merry there, as naive students are meant to at the start of horror movies. Complete structures you can go inside, after a week of nothing but walls!

Yesterday we went to the museum in Heraklion, and to Knossos. The museum lays out an incredible sweep of time. I'm used to thinking of Archaic Greece as the borderland of my antiquity, but now I've seen ceramic diningware which was already older to Archaic Greece than Archaic Greece is to me. Knossos, meanwhile... doesn't have that kind of effect, because Sir Arthur Evans scorned such pedantic principles of archaeology as 'Before you tear down a wall you aren't interested in, make a note of where it was', and 'Try to make your reconstructions distinguishable from the originals, especially when you are not using evidence to make them.'

Two days ago, Palaikastro, a Minoan city only a fraction of which has been excavated, with a centrally-designed street plan, drains which received not just repairs but regular maintenance, and one drain which was notably mismade, too steep to not flood, with a great big ornamented outlet from it to cope with the problem. Early excavators looked at the ornament and said, "Hmm. Probably ritual functions," until someone thought of actually pouring a lot of water into the drain to see what would happen.

Today, from Armenoi, we drove into modern history: to Souda Bay, where we spent half an hour walking between the tombstones of Allied soldiers dead in the Battle of Crete, many of them New Zealanders. I felt as distant from that history as I'm used to feeling at war memorials, although I'm not, very. This here is an island on which the Second World War was fought; something that hadn't come into my head as we drove through mainland Greece. What I feel in a place like that, set aside in beauty, is the space where memory ought to be. A silence on the group of us, nobody taking photos anymore, as we did in those millennia-older tombs. My thoughts wandered as I walked, reading names. Some of us were crying, seeing a sixteen-year-old's stone, reading, "Came to visit you, uncle" in the visitor's book. But I have that distance. Only as we drove away did I really start to think: about retreating in exhaustion and bad weather over mountains, and about what it might be like to give one's life.

Today we were granted entry to a place as holy in its own way as Sounion: INSTAP, the Institute of Aegean Prehistory. It's the kind of place that sits between the site and the museum, producing the results which will later turn up in lines like 'The presence of haematite demonstrates...' We were shown heaped bags of soil samples waiting to be filtered into heavy, light, and waste portions (tiny shards of bone or pottery, carbonised plant remnants, miscellaneous mud), and the water-recycling system put together by the Institute and its plumber to balance the needs of filtration against Crete's frequent droughts. We saw a cemetary's haul of bones laid out on trestle tables, many of them chips no larger than a fingernail, others looking like wood or cinnamon quills, and one or two precious bits of skull large enough to hint at the sex of the dead. We saw pithoi jars in several stages of restoration from shards, everything done to them reversible, and a Roman silver coin partly cleaned under a microscope. We saw the kind of basement that results from the need to throw nothing away ever, where shelves are being removed on the basis that the little gaps left between them are too valuable to waste. That lot there, said the woman giving us the tour with evident satisfaction, we're analysing for another organisation, so in six or seven years we can give them back. We saw a lab in the corner of the same basement for cutting tiny pieces off ceramics, saturating them with resin to make them non-friable, sanding them down to a thickness of three microns, and using a microscope to determine exactly what kind of clay they were made from. And we saw people at work on giant electronic artists' tablets making acurate sketches of finds for publication. The whole place had the number eight wire feel of a discipline still inventing itself with anything to hand, with a lot of money but never enough, sandblasting pottery with ground walnut shells, using dental wax to mold fills for gaps in pottery, and cursing the predecessors who wrote crate lables in quick-fading red ink.

...

Tonight's hotel was meant to be the worst on the whole trip. True, the mattresses are thin. But there are also kitchenettes! We get to cook! A potluck is convening on the upstairs balcony, all ingredients from the shop across the street. My lentil soup is on the stove, my roommate's chicken sliders are on the table; much is right with the world.

(I am finally catching the group cold. Ah well, can't have everything).

Two days ago we were in Thessaloniki, looking at the parts of Tetrarch Galerius' immense palace which aren't currently under commercial buildings, having walked along a waterfront where the sky and the sea met in a bright haze on which a container ship faintly floated. The Tetrarchy was a briefly stable variant on Roman imperium: co-emperors of east and west, each with a junior emperor as colleague and successor. I know very little late Roman history. Must fix that. Today we were on Crete, at Phaistos, a palatial complex from the other end of antiquity: Minoan, middle Bronze Age. I've studied that even less, but will get a lot more of it in the next week. On the day between, after a start that should have had our alarm clocks protesting criminal orders, we flew from one to the other, Thessaloniki to Heraklion, and I spent the rest of the day partly exploring and partly putting my notes on Corinth in order but mostly finishing Ancilliary Justice. Heraklion feels welcoming. It's comparatively small, cleaner, we're near a park, there are children moving around.

(Pause while I hear the other side of the Why Roomate Cannot Be Tolerated One Second Longer rant. I heard the first side over dinner, and the two balance each other neatly. Sigh).

We came to Phaistos over the orchard-dotted hills. A cultivated landscape looks very different when the format is dots instead of squares or lines. Phaistos was first found by an archaeologist looking for King Minos' palace, and he skewed his interpretations in that direction. We get 'Minoan' from him. And there was certainly no bigger or more impressive kind of building before it, great stone walls and courts visible from the whole plain below, a collective building project on an unprecedented scale. But they aren't known as palaces anymore, rather palatial complexes, where rulers sat and were glorified, but also where business was done, religion practiced, manufacturing. Villages in palaces. And the rulers may not have been king and queen so much as clan heads.

Before I came to Greece, if I'd ever heard of the Phaistos Disk, I'd forgotten it. But it's been available as neckace and earrings in jewellery shops wherever we've been. A double-sided clay disk stamped with symbols from Linear A and Cretan heiroglyphics, two untranslated writing systems, mixed with symbols found nowhere else. The best recent attempt to decypher it, culmination of a long process of study, takes it to be a prayer tablet, including the name of a mother goddess - at which point in the day's presentation Diana could be heard hitting herself over the head with the collected course notes. The person presenting went on to make it clear that no interpretation of the disk is generally accepted.

Except, "It's a forgery," Diana said after he'd finished talking about pier and door partitions and megarons. "The growing scholarly concensus is that it's a forgery. I would say I was certain, except I almost never like to say that about an issue in Classics. It's just too peculiar and would have been too easy to fake." Which prompted a very interesting discussion which may become a tutorial topic in Diana's next Art and Arxhitecture paper. Classical archaeology is awash with forgeries. The Getty museum has run an exhibition of all the forgeries it's ever unwittingly bought - and uncovered, that is. Our Victoria University Classics museum has a genuine sarcophagus the carving of which is forged, (a purchasing decision made before my time, put in Jeff), which was uncovered by a visiting Norwegian scholar who realised that its inscription had been directly copied from a different sarcophagus. A decree now accepted as genuine was suspected a forgery for the first five years after it was unearthed, on the grounds that it was unrealistically informative. The Getty has a kouros whose feet and head seem to be eighty years apart in their art styles; it held a colloquium on the artifact's authenticity and got one expert in the field saying "As soon as I saw it I felt a sense of wrongness" while a second praised its majestic workmanship and said it clearly had a master's touch. Stone isn't easily dated. The best they can do with marble like the kouros is try to replicate the patina on it - if the patina can be replicated quickly and cheaply, it was probably forged, because forgers wouldn't tend to be able to spend years working on a piece. They haven't replicated the Getty kouros yet. And there are so many forged Cycladic figurines, while so few of the distinctive figurines like 'man drinking from cup' have provenances, that some scholars have declared those figurines can no longer in fact be studied usefully. Those little tall people with only noses on their faces, another thing seen in all the souvenir shops.

Meanwhile the tour guide for the other group there was heard speaking authoritatively about the Phaistos Disk's ritual significance, which may very well have centered on the zodiac. If anything found from the Bronze Age is a little peculiar, said Diana, someone will be saying it had ritual significance. The past is a large and fuzzy place.

Of course, I know better. I and my kind were there at the time. But we mostly keep quiet about that.

A can't stand B and finds C a maddening roommate despite evident heart of gold, my judgement of A becomes partly dependent on my observations of B and C who I rather like but am beginning to understand the irritating qualities of, the question of how unreasonable the parents of A and C really are becomes relevant and is probably unanswerable in this context, nobody likes E, and I have given the benefit of the doubt to one man of his particularly-male type of obnoxiousness already and consequently won't do it this time because the benefit of the doubt is one of the things it thrives on... Meanwhile F is low-key, charismatic, generous, easy to live with, and my roommate, everybody thinks G is lovely except presumably Q, for an unknown value of Q... And the in-jokes proliferate, such that I am widely known to have faerie powers. So goes the soap opera of a group of twenty-three twenty-somethings, and I look forward to seeing what's become of us in twenty days.

Today we caugt the bus to Thessaloniki, which is why we were all hungry and tired and jittery this evening, which advanced some of the soap opera's subplots. Filler, I say! I'm watching it for the scenery, apparently they're shooting on location but it's so underutilised...

On a plain with hills and mountains all around. We've been driving for an hour, out of Athens. Crop fields now; before that suburban industrial, before that conifers. Reading about Corinth, but my mind is off in the Farer worlds, and the great grey plain on which a hill-sized stone bowl is endlessly turning, grinding out the words of the treaty by which humans may come to that place and leave again unpursued by its inhabitants...

Earlier there was snow on mountaintops to the left. These low hills are scrub textured by stone, or stone spotted by scrub. Still windmills on the skyline. The road rises past a cliff on the left incised with vertical lines. While I wrote that (I'm copying from my journal now) a lake opened to our right, and the cliffs became orange - weathered white - and craggy. Lake shores below are fans of stone, knobbled - I want to say cracked, but not leaving any pattern of fissures, no gaps.

Another cutting.

What I'm used to identifying as swamp grass grows on limestone, on the big cliffs now to the right. Dark big shrubs here and there, something low and pale green and sprawling, and the grasses, are what grow on the whole hill-face.

Now to my left, mist at their bases making them pale as an empty horizon, are snowy mountains again. Snow broken by black stone. And now again we come into expanses of worked land hedged by water-channels head-high with dead-looking grass. Some fields bright green, others dry.

Green direction signs. A deer warning. And frozen turbines at awkward angles on nearer and much further hills: the flat opens in a curve on the right.

Not entirely unlike the falling angel statue from Athens, but standing watch here - only the hubs which make the turbines' heads grow too small at distance, so the ones furthest, on hills whose dark skylines stand on mist, I can't see as living.

A hill closes in on the right, blocking that vista. Thick scrub, limestone only here and there, but I can see it's beneath everything. Why you could besiege Athens from as far off as the Black Sea: grain supply.

The sun blazes in a faint cloud, and tall trees stand here and there in the scrub now. This sun seems more overwhelming than the Dogsbody Sol I say hello to sometimes. He's in a blaze of work, maybe. Our road turns, and the shadows of my head and the bus' windows slide left to right out of existence.

High face of stone to the left, orange brown mark - like muddy water, or the stain on a bandage.

In all this, what took me longest to write was positional. On the left. On the right. Where things are is trickier than what they are. Interesting too the difference between a simile that I created because I liked it and which grew stronger with thinking on it - the angels - and one I felt on the tip of my tongue, that colour on those stones reminds me of something, what? In fiction I naturally write the former, 'words can do this, therefore let it be done', creating from the language backwards. I have the sense from what I've read of him that this is what Peter S. Beagle does, much better than I do, which is both what I like about him and what I get tired of after a while in him. Sometimes I want a sentence that sounds less as though it has been crafted for sound. On my long plane flight home from the states I read a bit of a Delaney essay where he talks about his suspicion with talking about writing plot and writing character. Those are things he finds to be emergent properties of the kind of writing he does, which is to imagine a scene in as much detail as possible and then see what happens. I tried that. The snippet I wrote in precise physical terms (does she glance at the six woman in the bar as she stands swinging on the door in the crampt space at the bottom of the narrow stairwell waiting for her friends to descend? No, she can't, they're in the wrong corner, not visible unless she enters the room) and in similarly precise mental terms (which she doesn't because...) is vivid to me like memory, now, and I have much more detailed writing-process information about it than I normally would. I can answer more questions about why it is the way it is. And it has also become much less optional to me. t can usefully anchor whatever comes next.

And then, if that sort of detail will just let itself be yoked perfectly to the second level, where I already know I want the pylons to be angels... Emergent book!

But before I got distracted I was talking scenery. Truck stop by a lake in a wide circle of blue hills. Silence. A silence very welcome after hours of bus and days of Athens. When I start thinking about it there's a lot of foreground sound in a silence like that, but the backgroud is bigger. And fresh cold air.

Kindle is siezing up. Will post beforeit reb

The word 'mystery' derives from the Greek 'mysteria', which meant 'rites' until the Eleusinian Mysteries became as proverbially secret as they did. We still don't know what happened at Eleusis, really. Otherwise highly informative writers stop when they get to the Mysteries and say "I intended to record what I witnessed, but it has been forbidden me in a dream." Specialists in Greek death (i.e. Diana) gnash their teeth. Something about the afterlife was promised to initiates, possibly. There was a great dark hall, and the unmasking of a goddess in fire, probably. The story of Demeter, Kore/Persephone, and Plouton/Hades was the framework, but gods were worshipped there who appear nowhere else. Eleusis is a tangle of stone on two levels, fortification walls (it being the most westerly deme of Attika, close to sometime enemies like Corinth) and the support structures and many generations of a temple which had to accomodate a substantially-increasing population as the centuries passed. When we were there three enthusiastic dogs were running around on it. After we applauded the one of us giving her presentation, a dog standing in the middle of our group added a single definite bark. (This makes a change from most of our sites, where there have been cats, often contriving to be the same colour as the marble they're standing on, and sometimes chasing butterflies).

After that we went to the Keremaikos, the best-excavated Greek cemetary, in use since the third millennium BC, foundation of our ability to accurately date great swathes of Greek pottery, potters' quarter ('ceramic'), site of the largest and most famous gate into Athens, Diana's favourite place in Greece, and with enough remaining bits of city wall that we could spend occasional moments sheltered from the freezing wind. It's good I'm writing down some of these fascinating complexities, because my main actual memory from the Keremaikos is, 'So cold, so very cold, can we get out of this wind soon, hands too stiff to write notes, making implied complaints about the heat was bloody stupid, why didn't I wear twice this much merino and a woolly hat, there is an interesting grave stele and I wish I wanted to go looking in the marshy stream for turtles but also it is cold...'

This evening: dinner at local restaurant, mousaka and a free shot of ouzo (mixed blessing) and brief terrible fun dancing to two old men on guitars. Tomorrow: Aigina. This means a ferry. This means three layers of merino and thick wool socks.

The metro was closed for a strike today, as we discovered when the twenty-five of us tried to walk down the steps into it. Luckily nowhere we were going was very far - though I've been slowly getting more of a sense of how things fit together, only today did I realise just how close we were to the metro stops we've been using. Athens looks from the Acropolis like a deep drift of seashells up against the hills, and I knew to begin with that despite its being built very much on the flat its population is higher than New Zealand's, so I've been imagining the distances as larger - it also doesn't hurt that the slum our hotel's on the edge of looks worlds away from even Panepistimiou, to which I'd walked before. ('All-knowing', I was told today; it's the university street. What's that in Maori, I wonder? We should study there, instead of on Kelburn Parade, while we're at it with changing venerable names, oh great Vice-chancellor).

Past the music of the strike in the square. To Hadrian's library, and the Roman agora, with its eight-faced Tower of the Winds. Sunny day. (Native Greeks have been observed in fur jackets, but eighty percent of the wardrobes of our group remain unused, waiting for parts northerlier). Lunch next to the monument awarded a tragedian, I've forgotten its name - lunch of dried apricots, feta cheese, sausage, grapes, and croissants, all bearing a suspicious similarity to foodstuffs available in the breakfast buffet of the hotel. I plead Nanny Ogg. And then to the day's most interestingly complicated monument.

The temple of Zeus Olympieos was designed at the behest of the tyrant Pesistratos, or perhaps his son Hippias, before the year 500 BC. Tyranny works better when the city you tyrannise can see itself thriving, and whacking great temples can be a component of that. But they also take a while. Athens was not then the power it became, and this was to be the largest temple in Greece. Only the foundations were laid before the Pesistratids fell. Then for several hundred years they remained right where they were, as a monument to the end of tyranny.

In 174 BC, Antiochus IV Epiphanes had pissed off the Romans considerably, and also started the Macabean Revolt, which did not go well for him. He was fairly short of friends. Something to do about this was give the Athenians a whacking great temple - euergatism, the word of the week on this field trip - using a Roman architect, because that would play in Rome. By that point, the end of tyranny wasn't aging very well, so there were some foundations going begging.

A fair number of expensive pillars had been raised by the time Antiochus IV Epiphanes' money dried up in his veins. They were nice enough pillars that when Sulla passed through at the head of an army sent to demonstrate that siding with Rome's enemies was never, in any way, going to be a good idea, he took some of them back to Rome with him for the rebuild of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. And the foundations remained where they were. Rather later Augustus added a pillar to them, and then stopped.

It's Hadrian's Olympieion which stands today. He was the great philhellene Emperor, and he had definite opinions on how Hellenes should go about Hellening. With imperial resources to pour into making a Hadrianic Athens, the temple was finished within two years. Eight columns by ten in double rows in a vast precinct, the temple housed a chryselephantine statue of Zeus which, if no larger than the adjacent statue of Hadrian, was at least no smaller. And that very temple, commenced as a statement of benign tyranny's advantages and finished under a very different incarnation of those advantages, stood on through the years, enduring changes of rule, adapting to different social norms as changes swept the Hellenic world... until it was torn down by the Heruleans in 267 AD.

(Today I saw one of the best photos ever, although nobody reading this will quite know why. It shows Classics lecturer James Kierstead standing on the Acropolis with laser beams shooting out of his eyes into the ground, and it is captioned, 'The 2016 field trip, when the Heruleans invaded and we had to help James learn to use his powers. On top of site visits and assessments we thought the workload was a bit unfair.' You'd need to meet James, really, but if I had a dollar for every time in the last week I've heard the words 'until it was torn down by the Heruleans in 267 AD', I would have enough money to buy a cheap tourist bronze of Zeus Olympieios).

The temple was not in fact torn all the way down. Sixteen pillars still stand, and do the best job of being huge of any of the temples we've seen so far. Most of the rest of the temple became essentially a marble quarry, but a seventeenth pillar stood until the nineteenth century, when it came down in a thunderstorm.

And we walked in the city gardens on our way to the museum of post-Classical Greece, where there were some beautiful and intricate Byzantine icons - I'm getting better at spotting the Annunciation from a distance. Since the icons delayed me I left the museum after the people I'd been going to have dinner with, and walked to one of the places in Ada Palmer's gelato atlas, which led me well in New York and leads me well here. (Ann, I'll send you a link to it when I'm next on a device high tech enough to do links. If you feel like gelato when you visit New York it's a trusty guide to what's excellent). Then I wandered to the Plaka, slightly disconsolate because I expected to fail to locate any dinner people, and ran into them almost immediately coming out of a jewellery shop. We spent a while having a very cheerful Greek woman who did her Honours on T.S. Eliot and a Wellingtonian who now runs the next shop over trying to sell us things, I fatally compromised an attempt to haggle by admitting to the possession of a borrowable two dollar coin, and there was merriment and ridiculous portions of gyros or salad for dinner. Nice to be getting to know these people, having conversations of friendship and interest instead of 'fate has placed us at the same breakfast table and now we must say words.' And despite a choice of route we won't be making again, we weren't mugged on the way home.

Now it is ten o'clock, and tomorrow is Eleusis. Bed.

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Entries tagged with travel

Travelling to Montreal

New York books read on the East Coast

The Death of Rasputin

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An old walking diary

Dunedin

Being home, and photos from Greece

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2019 arrives in Zizkov

The books I've been reading in Greece, part two

The books I've been reading in Greece, part one

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Details of travel

My boots pay their passage

Down to the well-built house

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Phaistos disk is faery magic, agree ninety percent of CLAS 312 students

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Persephone has left the underworld so we can be chilly again

A vexed temple

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