the more he saw, the less he spoke

I was planning to write about The Quincunx tonight, but the book is like 847 million chapters long and if I do them one at a time I'll die of old age before I finish them all. But! There are five parts to the novel that are named after the five families of the title, and I’ll cover the first part, 'The Huffams,' next Sunday instead (I think the Huffams are first) (or is it the Mompessons?) (I am such a name-dropper) (I promise The Quincunx is not an insufferable mess suitable for cinematic adaptation into one of Julian Fellowes’s increasingly cringeworthy mash-notes to the English aristocracy).

In other news, I just started reading The Owl Service. It’s looking pretty good; I’ve already read Garner’s Thusbitch, and except for the fact that I don’t understand it at all I absolutely love it and would recommend it highly. When I was young I was also really fond of another of his YA books, Elidor (it had a picture of a unicorn on the cover, and I think some orphans?) (when I was little, I believed that the world was held together day-to-day only by the hard work of magical English orphan-children). The Owl Service seems to be, in part, about assimilated City people transgressing against the autonomy of uneducated Country people without any regard for their humanity. I find this disturbing, for reasons. *British fantasy fiction is definitely my most favorite thing ever, but occasionally I do get tired of its constant reliance on blunt-force lessons about classicism for plot structure. Sometimes it really seems like deep-seated class-hatred defines the shape of every possible British narrative. I can sort of understand how horrible it is, I guess, but it’s not my mess — not that we don’t have a problem with grotesquely vicious classicism in the US — so I suppose I see it as more a story-telling device than a thing that millions of people face and are defeated by on a daily basis. And, you know, I’m sure British readers/viewers get sick of everything from this country boiling down to problem-solving via colorblind teamwork. Oh, god, they think, not another book about how all men are brothers. And then they kick the butler. I’m just kidding! They don’t kick the butler. They kick the chimney-sweep.

I’d forgotten how weird it is to talk to yourself in a blog post. Other forms of social media are scarier but more immediate.

I’m doing the Japanese Rosetta Stone program. I wanted to go to Japan this year, but it turns out: 1.) It’s really expensive unless you’re making use of a short-term vacation package with a bunch of other people, and 2.) It is virtually impossible to make your way in a foreign country outside the bounds of teaching English, working for a multinational corporation, or employment in other "official" areas likewise and suchlike. So while I’m waiting for Contingency Plan #3 to work itself out (develop an online romance with a rich and hot but very introverted Japanese person who moves me in with the fam and supports me until I can speak Japanese fluently enough to get a job), I figured I might as well try to deal with my stumbling, heavily-accented grasp of the spoken language. It is going middlingly. Obviously I can’t tell how well the program works yet, but my biggest problem with it is that you can’t pause the lessons in the middle without skipping to the next exercise. Do not the programmers who wrote it ever have to pee? Also the voice recognition software strongly disapproves of my pronunciation of the "お."

So. I am getting a red flashy Severe Thunderstorm Warning in my weather station right now, so I'd better turn my computer off. The last thing I need is to be murdered by Thor after talking shit about his movie on Tumblr.



* "British fantasy fiction" is the default setting for English-language literature, and it is the among the greatest writing in the world, so don’t let anybody try to shame you out of it because of Harry Potter. (Not that Harry Potter was any worse than, you know, The Fault in Our Stars or whatever — but there’s something about large numbers of dumb people showing up to the theater dressed like the characters in the movie that does seem to rile the critics. I don’t know why.)

the sea, the sea

All right! Blogger is very difficult to use, and manages the not-inconsequential feat of being both idiotically basic and impenetrably technocratic technical (ETA: ?). Wow, that is kind of amazing! It doesn’t matter, though; I’ve had this account for over a year, I might as well use it before it turns into another embarrassing attempt by Google to conjugate Facebook.

I decided to start a long-form blog because: 1.) I recently read this hot New Republic article heralding the end of the blog as a form of personal expression, and 2.) I discovered that I am weirdly and forcefully attached to the writings of Doghouse Riley, but I only realized it after he died. I mean, surely anything Andrew Sullivan has grown to view as inessential must be the stuff upon which dreams etc. And what a nice thing it might’ve been if I’d noticed how much I looked forward to Mr. Riley’s opinion posts when I could’ve said something kind to him, and possibly made him smile/frown/whatever he did in reaction to digital flattery, right? Not a day goes by — quite literally — that I don’t wonder what magnificently evil things he might’ve had to say about the world’s Great Men pressing their ugly, dirty noses against the windowglass of public opinion, and then I think: Oh wait, he’s dead. I’ll never know what he thought of Rand Paul’s inability to conceptualize the utility of federal disaster relief. And I’m just a little sadder every time, and it's not even Christmas yet.

I am no eloquent political wit myself, however. I can’t squeeze out three words about a politician without one of them being "FUCK." Also I have some problems with engaging the world in a meaningful way; the accumulated wrongness of the human species makes me feel sad and angry, but it's also really boring. Like, really, really boring. And I do feel badly about my failure to care correctly, but it is what it is. I haven’t got the stamina to sift through the floods of information and sodden historical precedent that would make me a knowledgeable social critic. So, instead of writing about the world, which I dislike categorically, I would rather stay in the land that I love, which is writing about books. I don’t get to write about books as much as I would prefer. I write about them a lot, don’t get me wrong, and I do have a Tumblr — which is nice if you want to look at pictures of things, receive incessant status updates on the kind of creepy celebrity who thinks a contingent of involuntarily-virginal female nerds is a demographic worth courting, or get really, really angry over short-form explanations of global public malfeasance, but it’s not so great with the "talking about books" shit. Unless you like having all your carefully-edited criticisms adorned with breathtaking insights like "I AM ALL THE CRY" and "THANK YOU FOR FINALLY SAYING IT" and gifs of cats jumping into filled bathtubs. (I do not like that at all.)

Also, and speaking of which, I am going to talk about The Hollow Crown! One day soon! I have been trying to produce a suitably critical evaluation of it for over a year, just so my heart can rest peacefully in its eternal prison of bone, and it won’t come out. But I will make it come out, haha. It will come all the way out.

I’ll post here at least once a week (or maybe more!), unless something happens. The first works will be The Quincunx, Winter’s Tale, and King John (and maybe Mr. Simonelli, or, The Fairy Widower), if you’d like to read along. We will begin on Sunday. (Or, I will. I don’t know what you’re going to be doing.)