the art of war

My duskglass.net strategy approaches the target from two different vantage points. First, I will examine the novel's language and culture using a critical method based in whatever I am thinking about at the time. Then, I will identify other manifestations of Uskglass-like characters in books that are not Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Also, there's a trebuchet (no there isn't).

The Uskglass parts aren't as hard as the other stuff; I think Clarke's character is such a deep-myth relic that other interpretations of it are relatively common. Uskglass has some direct (that Wikipedia image is an abomination) precursors (that Wikipedia image is also an abomination) in traditional British literature, but I'm currently pursuing antecedents in other cultures — early work has indicated possible involvement by Classical mythology, and maybe even some shady Yahweh influences. These parts are not only less than but also much different from the sum of their accumulation, of course. The transmitted object is not the clean, stable lines of some hypothetical story-symbol, but an atmosphere of mystery. Eventually the mystery usurps, and then erases, whatever was intended to be signified in the first place — and then the story itself becomes an expression of unnameable mystery. Nobody cares about that kind of thing but me, probably; I don't mind. I'm not working for tips. Vague antiquities aside, one of my favorite semi-Uskglasses appears in a recent YA novel called Archivist Wasp, in the person of a seductively nameless ghost who severs the novel's protagonist from the narrative of her own existence and initiates her transformation into the World Savior. Look at this:

The ghost was sitting in her only chair, surrounded by mismatched stacks of paper in various degrees of fire-damage, water-damage, unidentifiable staining, mildew, and general dissolution. It appeared to be reading her field notes.
“Get your boots off my table,” she snapped, and did not quite squirm under the look it fixed her with, or under the ensuing silence as it went back to reading.
Force of habit, she found herself studying it. It was all she could do not to pull out her notebook and start sketching it on the spot. Its clothing was basic and dark, something like a uniform but not one she recognized from any ghost she’d seen before. The gun and sword were in its belt. The ghost turned pages with a trained precision, a spring-loaded sort of predatory grace in which no fraction of any movement went wasted. Between its person and its clothing there was no color to it anywhere; it was all pale and dark, with those gray eyes. Its face was sharp, guarded, possessed of an icy and immaculate calm. Its posture was miles better than hers. It hadn’t moved its boots.
Usually Wasp didn’t find silences awkward and felt no need to fill them with pointless chatter, but this, this was unendurable.
“I didn’t know you could read,” she said.

And:

The ghost cut its eyes at her, pure scorn. “I see they were mistaken.”
It dropped a mocking little bow before her and walked out, trailing what remaining bonds of salt and blood she’d not yet broken, which it had snapped at whim.

I really, really, really like Archivist Wasp. I was going to review a series of YA novels last year, which I thought would be both fun and perhaps surprising. I find the Millennialesque reshuffling of gender norms inspiring, so why not their vision of the bildungsroman? Haha, what a gullible fool I am. After attempting to survive about twenty different popular books, chosen for their genre themes from Amazon, I begged off without even really starting. The worst, most conservative, heteronormative, claustrophobic, depressing, old-fashioned writing in the world is currently happening in the realm of YA novels. All the genre's heroines are exceptionally-ordinary self-inserts who are constrictingly adored by boring (and often violent) hunks. It's hunk after hunk after sad-manbaby 1950s beefcake hunk in the Young Adult World, all rendered in a primary-color paint-by-numbers palette that would strike a frustrated mid-century housewife as uninspiring. But Archivist Wasp isn't like that! Is, in fact, exactly not like that. (The ghost's lack of a gendered pronoun is suggestive, is what I'm telling you.) It was one of two YA novels published in the last 30 years by someone not named Ursula K. Le Guin that didn't make me want to kill myself. I highly recommend it, both for the Uskglass mirror-content and for itself. Best DRM-free $10 you'll ever spend. I hope there's a sequel. (That's a joke.) (Most YA novels are half-a-book's worth of content spread out into 34876 commemorative volumes.) (I would indeed be very happy to read Archivist Wasp: The Second, however.)

Well. I've also been doing a lot of reading, for the last couple of years, that pertains (in my imagination, at least) to JS&MN's literary contexts. Probably my most favorite of the contexts are written by Robert Aickman, who until very recently I believed to be a lesbian operating under a pseudonym. Aickman was not a lesbian, it turns out, but rather a very large, fluffy British cat that, in the 1950s and 60s, gained access to, and somehow learned to operate, a typewriter. I've read nearly everything Aickman ever published; I had to import hard copies of The Late Breakfasters (favorite) and The Model (not a favorite), but I read those, too. The Late Breakfasters is much different than the rest of Aickman's work, most of which he self-identified as "strange stories" because of some German mood-word that the late Mark Fisher was also interested in, and which I don't understand at all but will try to deal with later. Breakfasters has some weird-fiction attributes in common with the rest of Aickman's canon, but I believe it's primarily intended to be a social satire (?). Like Animal Farm, maybe (?), but with people. People Farm? Maybe. It's full of political and cultural details I don't get, or even understand how to unpack, but which Aickman presents in a way that makes them seem both ludicrous and performative. So... satire, right? Who knows. I identified hard with the novel's protagonist, Griselda. I consider that my life has mostly been an attenuated escape from the Geoffrey Kynastons of the world, and a simultaneous, resolute flight toward Louise. Although, unlike Griselda, I was never privileged to actually fuck Louise; I've only ever read about her in books. Still, it's maddening to imagine that she exists in the world somewhere, and I can't get to her. I'm going to keep looking. (I do realize.)

Despite the buildup, this excerpt isn't from The Late Breakfasters. I have discovered that it's hard to excerpt the book and have it look suitably meaningful, because the story is so involved with its own conditions and symbols. This is from "Bind Your Hair," a very strange story that appeared in Dark Entries:

The next morning Clarinda had to admit to herself that she was very depressed. As she lay in bed watching wisps of late-autumn fog drift and swirl past her window, she felt that inside the house was a warm and cosy emptiness in which she was about to be lost. She saw herself, her real self, for ever suspended in blackness, howling in the lonely dark, miserable and unheard; while her other, outer self went smiling through an endless purposeless routine of love for and compliance with a family and a community of friends which, however excellent, were exceedingly unlike her, in some way that she did not fully understand.

omg it me

More when I find it.

even the cheese has got holes in it

Well, I thought I published this, like, two months ago. Whoops! I am not very successful at blogging; I only remember that I even have a blog when I want to complain about something. Relatedly, I have turned off comments so kind-hearted motherfuckers won't waste valuable time trying to think of something to say in response to my banality. (Also, I now hate this aesthetic passionately, and assume that I was drunk when I devised it. I'll deal with it later.)

I fixed up my blog a little! It's now pink, and features a mildly vaginal repeating pattern of poppies and poppy buds. So, neither a sea nor any rabbits, but at least the interface is visually acceptable. I had to sound unplumbed depths of moral fortitude not to include Comic Sans in my selection of custom fonts, but I managed to avoid it in the end; perhaps the urge only becomes irresistible once you've gone through menopause. I'm finding Blogger really reminiscent of mid-00s LiveJournal, though, both structurally and usability-wise — and I haven't been able to get my footnotes to work. That's a dealbreaker. Mama gotta have the footnotes. I'll keep working on it.

I don't have much to share today. I intend to post a long-ish essay about politics soon, but it's not finished yet and working on it would require me to do some online link-mongering, and also it is a depressing subject generally, so I'm putting it off until the pain of keeping my mouth shut drives me to overcome my aversion to reality. Also I don't feel like digging out any proper book reviews tonight. (I'm starting to be dissatisfied with the cover collages I put on the posts, too, have to look into that.)

I have been reading, of course, because I am alive. I gave up on The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry a couple of hours ago (I was about halfway through), because it was joyless and adorable and felt as though it had been constructed out of a commercially-produced postmodern-fiction erector set. It wanted to be Borges Revival very, very badly, but of course the primary obstacle to being Borges Revival is the desire to be Borges Revival. Borges Revival is like an orgasm, or the return of Christ; the more you want it to happen, the farther away from you it slips. I don't want to talk about The Manual of Detection at all, in fact, because it was both inconsequential and annoying, but I'm finding it impossible to just quit the thing, so shit on it here I go:

The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry A pseudo-mystery novel that gave the impression it had been assembled by a committee of mediocre professors of English during a brainstorming session in a writers' workshop. At gunpoint. During one obnoxious interlude, for example, the hapless accidental-detective protagonist is forced to participate in a poker game convened in a dive called "The Forty Winks" (the entire novel is arranged around a theme of 'magical' 'dream' 'imagery') with a couple of preciously Dick Tracy-adjacent twin gangsters; instead of money, though, the characters play for the right to ask each other questions. Or, rather, for the right to participate in a complex hierarchical information-gathering exercise — which is, amazingly, even more nauseating in context — and as if that wasn't bad enough, it becomes clear a little later in the book that the entire episode was confabulated specifically so Author could arrange to say, "They would not have taken Moore to the Forty Winks: too many questions to answer there." Because pastiche lol. This is what I mean when I say I hate postmodern fiction. And also that the only thing self-consciously postmodern writers care about is making sure you know they know you know they know how smart they are. I can feel myself turning into David Brooks, here, I have to quit.

I should say, in the spirit of full disclosure, that The Manual of Detection wasn't exactly poorly-written, and it had some attractive-looking sentences lurking within its inventory of pointless narrative signifiers — but Berry's talent was overshadowed at all times by his interest in devising an inorganic textual object. I think that if he'd leaven the Pynchon simulation with a bit of naturalism, or even some actual fantasy, I could be motivated to complete some of his novels one day.

Man, I feel a lot better.

For a change of pace — and because I am warming up the Hammond organ for a return to the Susanna Clarke fandom — I'll be reviewing a few non-fiction books here on the blog: Simon Schama's Landscape & Memory, Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie, and Carolyne Larrington's King Arthur's Enchantresses. They're all moderately(+/-) complex works of popular criticism, so I may write about each of them a chapter (or so) at a time to give myself a reference guide for the future.

I feel as though the poppies have somehow affected the tenor of this post.
Next time, then.

uprooted, naomi novik

The shorter of this review is: The novel was thematically indiscriminate and inappropriately old-fashioned, and Novik seemed to have no control over the mechanism of the story — but I am always #dtf wizards. Here's the longer:

[AND OBVIOUSLY THERE ARE A GREAT MANY SPOILERS]

I have the same problem with Uprooted that I had with Novik's very successful genre franchise Temeraire/Her His Majesty's Dragon ¹ (whoops!), which is that it is sordidly, pointlessly conservative and it makes me want to vomit. Temeraire is, in fact, much easier to detest than Uprooted, because it possesses an authority-worshipper's monomania for the war-theatrics of colonial-era England (and France), a temporal location for which hatred is painless — which, indeed, invites hatred. Everyone who matters has disavowed all the things that colonial Europe celebrated, pursued, and believed in; uninhabited now (or, "now inhabited only by barbarians"), it's become a safe place to romanticize, to cleanse of its intrinsic annihilative compulsions and retcon into a fairytale kingdom that only makes the kinds of mistakes that can be fixed.

This fills me with a mindless, igneous rage.²

Uprooted is more subversive even than that, though! It hides behind the same lopsided romanticization of a familiar elsewhere, but instead of occupying itself with various babyish wargames it attempts, among other objectionable goals, to equate goodness with guilelessness.

Begin at the beginning: Uprooted is a genre romance novel, sort of; looked at dispassionately, it's a slightly dirty fanfiction dedicated to the popular pairing The Great Magician/Nerdy Female Reader. The novel's love object is a wizard called "the Dragon" (lol), who is mostly just a more athletic version of Snape, but tethered to the mystical architecture of Luthe the Mage-Master (we have discussed Luthe elsewhere) (if you don't know him, you should contrive to meet him forthwith) (basically Luthe is a less-scary version of Galadriel) (but with a penis) (he self-reports a penis) and with a few elements of Howl stuck onto the back end of him to make the novel's conclusion look bittersweet and strange. And maybe also some Chrestomanci? The Dragon isn't as glamorous as Chrestomanci, for certain, but he shares that character's enthusiasm for dressing like Liberace. The much-less-interesting heroine is an amalgam of Hermione, Sophie, and, as I mentioned earlier, the Reader. I began to have some real trouble with the story because of this character, whose name is Enoby Agnieszka, because there was a very wide, very cold expanse of blank space separating her perception of the story's reality from my own (no, I don't think it was fancy postmodern backtalk). The fantasy landscape that surrounds the two protagonists is above average, in fact, but it includes some peculiar topography and is mostly just a map, if you see what I mean (you will).

The novel's plot is this —

In a fake version of feudal Poland, some shitty little rural towns are perpetually menaced by an evil enchanted Wood that ruins the people's crops and food animals and turns them intermittently into homicidal maniacs, by means of an impenetrable magic. Therefore, there are wizards. This one wizard collects girls, but he lets them go later, and on one special occasion he chooses to collect the novel's narrator instead of her importantly pretty friend. The wizard is very mean to the narrator, and doses her with invalidating insults at every encounter, while also saving the lives of the poor farmers that live around his castle. The narrator haphazardly performs tasks of domestic servitude for the wizard, while constantly and silently monologuing about how boring and ordinary she is, and how everything that happens to her is frightening in one way or another. It looks for awhile like the wizard has apprenticed the narrator in vain, because she sucks at magic — but later, after some scary things happen, it turns out that the narrator is actually really great at magic, because she has Feelings and also understands the tiny lives of the poor/the whispers of the wind. Suddenly the narrator's pretty friend has been eaten by the evil Wood! The narrator saves her, with Feelings, but the pretty friend is now a superhero. This is presented as a minor tragedy. Also there's a handsome and bellicose prince, who is both rapey and transiently villainous (he represents Toxic Masculinity) (much different from the masculinity practiced by the Dragon, which is 100% legit). Subsequently, many dumb and confusing events occur; they are all boring. The narrator is, for various reasons, forced to go to the City all by herself, where she finds that literally everyone is small-hearted, superficial, and vicious. They laugh at her because she's boring and ordinary and lived on a farm. This is presented as a tragedy of colossal proportions. Then the narrator realizes she loves the wizard, sort of, and other confusing and complicated things happen. They too are boring. The narrator, who has inexplicably become a powerful magician, goes back home and has sex with the wizard, but she is sad because he doesn't have Feelings, not like she does. There's an epic, unusual battle between the forces of Good and Evil, and then a long denouement which is not super-consistent in either its tone or structure. The reader learns the secret of the evil Wood. It is one million times more interesting than the rest of the book. Then there is a happy ending, for certain questionable definitions of the words "happy" and "ending."

book reviews, part three of ∞

CLOSE ENOUGH.

I feel like these sorts of posts might not be as exciting for other people as they are for me (lifelong tragedy), so I'll try to think of something else to post here. Naked pictures, maybe. (Not of me.)

Only four books, this time! Same rules:

Bryony And Roses, T. Kingfisher - A horrible knock-off of Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter, but much less good. The author admits that McKinley’s book inspired her own in the introduction, but that isn’t any kind of an excuse. The only differences between the two treatments were the comparative awkwardness of Kingfisher’s fanfiction-y version, a bunch of hyper-boring gardening details, the worst and unsexiest Beast ever, and legitimacy. I’ve read several of this author’s other fairy tale novellas and found them brilliant and charming in ways that no other author (including McKinley) could touch, so I don’t quite know what happened here. I mean, the story was poisoned by a lack of originality, is what happened here, but I don’t know why. I feel like Kingfisher could have actually achieved something of historical interest if she had written her own, un-influenced version of Beauty & the Beast, and if that ever happens I will definitely give it a chance — but this one should be skipped by everyone. No, seriously: It tapdanced upon the knife-edge of actionable plagiarism, I am not even being a dick about it.

Child Of The River: The First Book of Confluence, Paul J. McAuley - Starring some evil pig people who live in a land of eternal electric night and who settle issues of inheritance by killing their fathers. Nope. (ETA: Fixed the title! Whoops, sorry. Apparently this is the first in a long series of fantasy novels grounded in Hindu mythology, or something. Still don't like it!)

Creatures Of Light And Darkness, Roger Zelazny - Another Riddled-sourced book selection! This one was much better than Astra & Flondrix, but to be honest that’s not much of a compliment. This book, however, is fantastic. It suffers from some unfortunate oldman-isms re: sex and gender, but they’re really not that bad considering the novel’s publication date. Unique employment of mythology and the narrative structures of science fiction, but transcendent of both traditions. I recommend this book very highly, especially if you’d like to see what 75% of the writers of modern scifi epics are trying and failing to achieve. Also, Creatures of Light & Darkness is clearly one of the references Douglas Adams incorporated into The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (along with elements from Norstrilia, about which something will be said later), if you are the sort of person who cares about that sort of thing. I’m going to read more Zelazny soon, starting with Roadmarks or Jack of Shadows (I don’t know if I can handle the talking dog one yet).

Daughter Of Smoke And Bone, Laini Taylor - Just the worst piece of shit ever. Really badly written, characters that the author clearly believes are transgressively unique but who actually resemble a week’s worth of Daily Deviations from 2009, disgustingly barfy adolescent love story, everyone is so beautiful you can’t hardly stand to look at them, etc. The kind of book that gives small-minded realism fetishists reason to sneer at genre fiction. Someone put this novel in a "if you loved Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, you’ll love this book" Tumblr post awhile ago, and that should tell you everything you ever need to know about Tumblr’s Clarke fandom.

This one was pretty mean! The next batch will have some better books in it, I promise.

I'm going to be — "busy" is a strong word — occupied with all manner of shit until after the new year. I probably won't even have access to my exuberance of review notes until next weekend, so I will regale you then(ish) with more of my Important Opinions. Have a lovely New Year, friends and passersby, and try not to get too drunk/ill/weird/belligerent. Well, you know — getting too weird is usually a good idea. But not the other stuff. You could end up in the hospital, or in jail, or elected President of the United States of America.

book reviews, part two of ∞

Haha! I think you'll find that one day is just as good as — and in many ways nearly indistinguishable from — another.

Nothing particularly bad happened to me recently, I should vouchsafe. I was just busy with holiday shit. Although my washing machine did break down mid-cycle last week, whilst chock full of every pair of pajamas I own, and I had to wring out the entire load (it had rinsed) using my only good pair of hands. That was somewhat traumatic, from a feminist perspective.

I'm going to stop setting deadlines for myself here, because all I do is break them, just break them and break them and break them, but in my next post I'll put up a normal-length review of Naomi Novik's Uprooted, which I was surprised to discover had been recently nominated for a Hugo Award (ETA: And it won a Nebula Award). Maybe they have a "Best Dime-Store Romance Novel" category now, who knows? Anyway, same rules as last time, let's go:

Annabel, Kathleen Winter - A novel about an intersex child born to two annoying Canadian people in the 70s. Or 80s? The 60s?? I can’t remember. One of them is far more annoying than the other, and the answer to "which one is more annoying?" might surprise you. (SPOILER: They are both the most annoying.) The prose was mostly very beautiful, in a self-consciously "literary" way (excessive use of poetical metaphor, the blank verse-like exegesis of complex character motivation, etc.), but often it seemed to be trying too hard to get me to like it. The novel had a lovely, closely-woven plot involving Death and Dying and Realizing Your Dreams, and it was relatively interesting considering that there weren’t any fairies in it. I was delighted to read about someone growing into a non-binary gender as part of the ordinary bildungsroman-y processes of becoming an adult — and I identified with the characterization of gender-assignment as a potentially crippling extension of filial loyalty (an actual trans/intersex person might feel differently) — but I thought the story would be more fantastical than it was. If you see what I mean. I have zero interest in the elaborate woodcraft practiced by annoying rural Canadian people. I would read other books by Kathleen Winter.

Astra & Flondrix, Seamus Cullen - I saw this book mentioned at Riddled, and then I bought it. This was a very terrible decision. If you are a crazy religious person who would like to stop your adolescent children from having sex, ever, you should make them read this book many times. Provide them with a barfbucket first. Horrible, gross book. Suggestive of satire written by the tortured souls of the eternal damned in Hell, who have been burning for so long they no longer remember what laughter is. There are fairies in this novel, but I wish there hadn’t been. I would not read anything else written by Seamus Cullen, including a grocery list.

At The Mouth Of The River Of Bees, Kij Johnson - A very, very, very good "weird fiction" anthology. When successful, this story collection is an extension of the tradition of animal-mediated magic that (possibly) predates the origins of human storytelling, but which is often confined in modern fiction to the dated constructions of 18th century European fairytales. (I know, right? I didn't notice it before, either.) I really appreciated the way Johnson’s piercingly imaginative animism accepted the trappings of contemporary life without losing any of its mystery. The title story is one of my most favorite short stories ever, and I have no criticisms of either its structure or thesis. The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change was completely amazing as well — narratively sophisticated and well-written, and also a strenuous exercise of the Disney muscles around the eyes that control tearflow. Really great writing, also. I hope it won some awards. Some of the other stories weren’t as good; Fox Magic was weeaboo original fiction shit, and I couldn’t make myself finish The Horse Raiders, but mostly: The best. I will certainly make an effort to read other things by Kij Johnson.

Aurorarama, Jean-Christophe Valtat - An alternative history of Alaska; clockpunk or something, historypunk, geodesic-domepunk, who cares. Not my thing. No fairies. A very pretty and deceptive cover featuring a zeppelin, the Aurora Borealis, and a polar bear that looks like it might be capable of speech (but it is not). Probably no more Valtat, unless he writes something with talking animals (or elves) in it.

Beauty, Hubert Boulard and Kerascoet - A very famous comic that I mostly found annoying. I don’t like Kerascoet’s art, either. Made a statement in the first ten pages and then spent 125 more underlining it in purple glitter ink. Definitely not the worst thing ever — especially for adolescents struggling to define their self-image — just not for me.

Blindsight, Peter Watts - I saw this book recommended somewhere online (Crooked Timber?) (??), but I can’t remember where now. It was well-written and intelligent and probably very good, but it isn’t the sort of thing I like to read. I tapped out in the middle of the first chapter because I was suffocating to death under the story’s "science." I tried to wait around long enough to hang out with the vampire space captain (any port in a storm), but Watts kept insisting on telling me about how the boring spaceship worked and I had to save myself. I’m sorry. If you like this kind of book, this is the kind of book you will like. I probably wouldn’t read anything else by Watts, but not because he’s untalented.

Bloodchild, Octavia E. Butler - It seems as though a Butler short about male pregnancy and sexy alien bugmonsters would be good, but in fact it was nearly as bad as Astra & Flondrix. I found The Evening and the Morning and the Night too disturbing to finish. Near of Kin was a Bible-inflected slice-of-life story about REDACTED, no comment. Speech Sounds was really great, and if I were a college-level instructor introducing freshmen to theory, I would use it as an example of how to incorporate postmodern elements into traditional narrative without being a dick about it. Crossover: depressing but good. Of the newer stories, Amnesty was pretty clearly a dumb, failed early draft of ideas that would flower and bear fruit in the Xenogenesis Trilogy (eternal fave), and The Book of Martha was as legitimate a short story about the subjective experience of god as I have ever read. Both the essays are absolutely amazing, and should be required reading for anyone who thinks they want to write. Worth buying, especially if you’re a Butler fan. (I am a Butler fan.)

The Bone Knife, Intisar Khanani - Free, but too boring to read. Written in the first person, and suggestive of the AO3. Not the good parts of the AO3.

The Bread We Eat In Dreams, Catherynne M. Valente - Your reviewer’s first Valente! Some of these stories are favorites — especially White Lines on a Green Field, The Bread We Eat in Dreams, The Shoot-Out at Burnt Corn Ranch Over the Bride of the World, The Wolves of Brooklyn, and Silently And Very Fast — and the rest of them are merely very good. I would describe Valente, in this collection, as 'similar to Ray Bradbury, but also better in many ways, gay+, and not dead.' Highly recommended, and I have read and will continue to read Valente.

Brightness Falls From The Air, James Tiptree, Jr. - I am grateful for Tiptree’s trailblazing from the bottom of my heart, but I find her fiction boring as fuck. This novel went to extensive lengths to normalize non-heterosexual characters/behaviors, which I really appreciate — also, the protagonist was a heroine straight out of pulp adventure stories, but feministically re-centered into the middle of the narrative. Great! But it turned out that the fairies were actually unfuckable aliens, ugh, and I got so bored with them. So, so bored. It also looked like a couple of the human characters were warming up to engage in virtual incest, and I don’t get down like that. I’ve never managed to actually like any of Tiptree’s books, but I suppose I should keep trying if I want someone to ask me to the Feminist Nerd Prom this year.

I am actually being curtailed by Blogger's refusal to accept more than 200 characters in tags per post, here. I will post another batch tomorrow, on Christmas Eve (no, I will), and then we will commence upon our normal schedule after that.

More next time!

book reviews, part one of ∞

Oh my god, I forgot!

"Friday" is very similar in construction to "Wednesday," ask any expert.

Rather than writing stupid capsule summaries of these books — you can look those up on Wikipedia or Amazon, you goddamn lazy bastard —  I have tried to convey a general idea of what they felt like to me, and to communicate whether I found them worthwhile diversions, without going into elaborate specifics about their plots. I don’t want to spoil a great story for anybody, obviously, but also I frequently disagree with other readers about what constitutes a spoiler. I never really know what to mark. You should consider that all these micro-reviews contain bales and bales of unmarked spoilers — or perhaps no spoilers at all. We’re all mad here. Let’s do it:

Daybreak On A Different Mountain, Colin Greenland - Currently in purgatory. Although very well-written and intelligently plotted (it seems to contain the rudiments of some of the John Uskglass parts of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) (Greenland is Clarke’s husband, and the two met during one of Greenland’s writing workshops) (Daybreak was published in the 80s), this novel has two of the most obnoxious protagonists ever in history. One of them is an unrepentant pederast, and he’s by far the less-annoying one. The book does a pretty decent job of suggesting that its female and non-straight characters are worthily human, but it also features a bit of instructive, violent misogyny and a creepy association between physical deformity and spiritual impurity — which, to be fair, might get finessed in the novel’s conclusion in a way that could turn out to be inoffensive. (If I ever get there to meet it.) I absolutely loved Greenland’s Plenty Series when I was in high school, though, and I would certainly consider reading the author’s other works. And maybe also finishing this one, when I’m in a better mood.

Elidor, Alan Garner - A childhood favorite! It felt less cohesive and explicable to me as an adult, but that will happen. Also, the confluence and eventual intersection of recognizable reality and the novel’s fantasy realm is handled in a much scarier and more interesting way than similar events that appear in most children’s fantasy novels. I am looking at you, Harry Potter and the. (And also at all the other children’s fantasy novels.) Also, there is a unicorn. That’s very important. I would, and have, read other Garner books.

Lud-In-The-Mist, Hope Mirrlees - This novel is almost certainly the birthplace of John Uskglass proper, whose narrative forefather appears here in the form of a horrible, jolly, rapey Lord of Misrule named Duke Aubrey. One cannot help one’s relatives, of course; 47% of my fuckheaded family voted for Donald Trump. I’m trying not to hold it against him. The novel itself is quite weird, and suffers (as nearly all novels do) from a shortage of fairy action — but it’s still a haunting and beautiful work, and worth tracking down. If you’ve read it and think you know what’s happening in it, please feel free to look me up and explain it to me. ("Something something the transformations of magic as a metaphor for the ecstatic transcendence of death something something something"?) Also: It appears that "Lud" could be the Aulde Tymes word that mutated, eventually, into the modern name "London," a fact which you may or may not find edifying. And: The ebook’s cover borders upon "malicious vandalism." (A common problem for old books put out by philanthropic epublishers.) Many thanks to the Big Bad Bald Bastard for recommending this novel to me; I’m sorry it took me so long to say thank you. I would read more work by Mirrlees, but she’s been dead for ages now and her other two books are regular realist fiction :[

Among Others, Jo Walton - A really wonderful, unique fantasy novel. I read Among Others years ago when it first came out, but I couldn’t remember it very well & so I decided to go through it again. It’s a metafictional text, I guess, but postmodern novels usually go out of their way to be obnoxious about themselves, and this book isn’t like that at all. Narrative works as a symbol and a signifier in Among Others — as does magic — but it’s also just a story. Things that I’d remembered as textual flaws the first time around seemed on this reading to be sophisticated character work (subtle, unconscious misogyny as an expression of discomfort with your designated identity, for example), and the only element I ended up actively disliking was the boring rebellious super-gorgeous boyfriend. But, even he was a manifestation of the self-fulfilling powers of storytelling, in the end. (I think.) Recommended highly, and I would certainly read more of Walton’s novels/stories. (I hope she minimizes further readerly contact with ultra-beautiful dreamboats, however.)

This Census-Taker, China Miéville - I have no real idea what the material events in this novella actually consist of, which I gather is more a feature than a bug when it comes to Miéville, but I had an intense emotional reaction to the story & I read it from cover to cover without stopping. Effortlessly attuned to the humanness of its characters, no tacky world-building, lots of very original detail which rendered his setting explicable while also dislocating it from anything identifiable as reality. Frightening violence which was not instructive at all. I’ve never read anything else by Miéville despite the fact that he’s a heavily-hyped critical favorite; I’ve always been skeptical of the "urban fantasy" aesthetic in general, and also my only other contact with the author was a whiny editorial he published on the Wall Street Journal website (?) complaining that hyperrealistic CGI effects in movies like Avatar will murder the imaginations of the children of the future (???). Nobody’s perfect. My only real problem with This Census-Taker is that it used as an epigram (and praised in a postscript) the writing of an author named Jane Gaskell, whose novel The Serpent I made the terrible decision to subsequently purchase. The Serpent is one of the worst pieces of shit I’ve ever tried to read. It’s a fucking romance novel. It’s not even a good romance novel!!! It praises the feministic virtues of tanning!!!!! At this point I was going to say, "it was so awful that the next time Miéville comes to the US I’m going to go to a book signing and throw a shoe at his face," but I just Googled him to find that WSJ link and he’s pretty scary-looking. So I’ll just frown at him from afar. Anyway: I have purchased Perdido Street Station and I intend to read it next. (Or "next," probably.)

A Darker Shade Of Magic, V.E. Schwab - "How can I combine my mindless love of otome games, Doctor Who, and Game of Thrones in a way that suggests all my writing experience was earned in the creation of erotic Sherlock fanfiction?" thought author V.E. Schwab, who is a moron, one day. And then he or she or etc. wrote A Darker Shade of Magic, an incredibly shitty and boring novel (with a weary magical bishounen hero), which I read 38 pages of before deleting. No more V.E. Schwab novels.

A Knot In The Grain, Robin McKinley - I am a major McKinley fan, to my continuing surprise, but this short-story collection isn’t her strongest. However, its first two stories, "The Healer" and "The Stag-Man," allowed me to spend some time in the company of Luthe the Mage-Master, one of my favorite characters ever (shut up, you don’t know him). Don’t let this be your first McKinley (your first McKinley should be Sunshine, which is fucking amazing) — but it’s okay.

A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, Harry Harrison - This book stars out with the kind of vicious misanthropy I associate with British writers, who can bleed you dry of human sympathy before you even notice you’ve been cut, and so I was surprised to discover that Harrison is American. There are, indeed, reasons for this secretive contrivance of narrative identity, but if I tell you what they are I’ll spoil the novel’s Twist, and then there would be no reason for you to read it. So I won’t do that (don't waste my love and look it up) — I will, say, however, that it’s all disposed of very elegantly, considering the large number of novels that feature similar Twists and are terrible (Newt Gingrich, I'm looking at you). As a matter of fact, it may be that A Transatlantic Tunnel was the first book to perform this particular Twist in public! (It was written in the 60s.) But I don’t know for sure, sorry. I didn’t like this book enough to finish it, but I can see where someone else might think it’s really terrific (NEWT). I would try other Harrison novels.

And Other Stories, Emma Bull & Will Shetterly - A very uneven collection, with stories that are unreadably boring ("all of the stories written by Will Shetterly") and stories that are pretty great ("most of the stories written by Emma Bull"). I don’t know what to tell you. If you’re into slightly less than half a book of short fantasy stories with a crummy cover, this might be your new favorite. I like Emma Bull, but I’m not sure I would go for any Shetterly books in the future.

More on Monday, or on whatever day of the week I happen to remember I have a blog.

when i hear songs, they sound like a swan

No Quincunx for you; I didn’t read it. I DIDN’T READ IT, LIKE IN SCHOOL.

Thor took my electricity for two days after my last post, probably because I said he was boring (Thor you are boring) (I’m very sorry, sir, please try to work your hot ass into a better series of films), and so I ended up having to read an actual book. Made of pages. And it wasn’t about English people. I’m still recovering.

Instead of The Quincunx — which in addition to being excellent is also physically heavy — I read Kalpa Imperial again. Like The Quincunx, it is also one of my favorite novels, but it can be picked up with only the one hand. Kalpa Imperial is a collection of stories by a single author (Angélica Gorodischer), writing in the voices of dozens of different storytellers who are compiling the pseudo-oral history of a great, fallen, and imaginary empire; it consists of radiantly original fairytales germinated from myths originating in Spain, Persia, and the United Kingdom, among others. Like most great books, though, it builds from these ordinary materials a house no wind blows over. (An incandescent house? Made of flowers?)

My very favorite of the parts of Kalpa Imperial is a story called "The End of a Dynasty, or, The Natural History of Ferrets." You can get it in its entirety for free here (it's an excerpt by the book's English publisher, not an illegal download). Go read it, I’ll wait.

That was great, wasn’t it? I truly have the best taste in books, I know, I should start a blog. Would you like to watch me connect this story to another of my favorite books, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, using evidence? Of course you would, what am I saying:

You have, I’m sure, noticed the presence of a nameless king at the center of each of these fictions — if you wanted to be picky you might point out that in the case of the Ninth Head of the Hehvrontes Dynasty the monarch is technically an emperor, and an emperor and a king aren’t the same thing, but what are you, the police? — despised and marginalized and chased from his lands and his Right, and also something other than mortal (the Nameless 9th’s "[…]father took as his empress a Southern woman reputed to be not entirely human") (John Uskglass is like 645 years young in the pages of Strange & Norrell) (and hot-looking) (important). Both John Uskglass and Loo’Loö are famous poets, and although we aren’t allowed to see any of Loo’Loö’s poetry or music we know it’s good enough to have gone down in history. His name has been stolen from him and ruined, but he could not be divested of his authority over the hearts of men. Both characters represent the reconciliation of the dark and the light together, embodied in their dispositions and in their fortunes as well as in the pigmentation of their persons — and also in the weather, which provides both Uskglass and Loo with theatrical backdrops for particularly dramatic scenes. Both characters preside over the dismantling (by others, all right) of the crippling patriarchies established without their consent in their forgotten names. Both characters pass from the servants' quarters to the throne — but unfortunately for poor Loo, he goes down toward tragedy instead of ascending in the direction of the historical. They are both my boyfriends.

Perhaps you are not aware, however, of the provenance of "the Raven King" in British folklore? (Or maybe you are, in which case you can skip this paragraph.) Although the origin of the myth is probably long gone — and may never have represented a single folkloric menhir in the first place —  the Raven King was first committed to ink in The Mabinogion, which derives from the prehistoric myths of Wales (?), and is also some of the most ancient folklore in the Western world (??). The modern versions of these stories are contaminated with Christian influence in much the same way that the earliest British Arthurian stories have been ruined by it; everywhere you see a seductress or a villain or a vain, preening coward in the Matter of Britain, you can usually find a pagan hero, a famous Jesus-resistant king, or a goddess behind the curtain. The Children of Llyr have been similarly transfigured by Celtic monks, changed from gold into leaden hagiography. In many versions of their foundation myth they became such devout worshippers of Christ that they hung around a stupid monastery in the form of swans for centuries and then deferred to the spiritual expertise of a priest :[

But the swan siblings probably predate not just the Christian misconstructions, but also the more contemporary fairy tale iteration from which Shakespeare might have worked (Shakespeare didn’t work from that one, sorry) (unless he had a time machine & a library card, which I wouldn’t rule out). The theme is older, perhaps, than even writing. According to the long-forgotten authority of some ancient narrative law or other, the Children of Llyr are always associated strongly with the creatures of the air — Bran itself means "raven," even though the character doesn't seem very raven-like at all; in one of the stories in the Mabinogion, Branwyn, the lady third of the Raven Triumvirate, makes use of a starling to communicate with her brothers; the trickster/magician third of #TeamRaven, Manawydan, is linked occultly with cranes — peculiar, possibly, because "llyr" means "sea," and all three of the Raven Children were sea gods. (I think?) The story, which seems to appear in some form or other in all the cultures of the British Isles, isn’t super-coherent, and swaps mythemes pretty promiscuously with other tales which may or may not be derived from the same source(s). And although the shape of the bird-children changes from story to story, the sense of their tragedy endures — death and pain and loss, dislocation and injustice, wings beating against the vacancy. I’m not sure how starlings, cranes, and ravens turned into swans, either — and then, you know, turned into swans, if you see what I mean. There certainly couldn’t have been three or four old kings called Llyr hanging around in Iron Age Wales whose children transformed into supernatural birds, could there? Maybe it’s just that a crane looks like a swan when you see it through sea mist after you’ve had your head bashed in with a club during a battle over tribal territory? Or perhaps an official Irish storyteller just thought swans were pretty and would suggest a unifying poetic metaphor that the original stories lacked — the Wikipedia entry suggests that Britain Christianized beneath the Children as they flew uncomforted from lake to lake, and then describes how they died immediately upon descending.

Back to the context: The image of the swan is tied immediately to Loo’Loö’s position of exile in the garden where Livna’lams eventually meets his father (more on this later), "[t]he prince and the empress were already in the gardens. Sun or snow or rain or wind or hail, lightning, thunder, whatever the weather, the two of them, the little boy and the woman in white, walked every morning to the central fountain, where eight marble swans opened their wings to the water falling from a basin of alabaster." Loo even looks like a swan: "This one was shorter and slighter, lanky, also very tanned, cleanshaven, with tangled black hair, bright black eyes that looked amused, a wide mouth and a long, delicate neck." Loo’Loö sings, presumably, and plays some sort of guitar or lute-like object. He is better at cards than anyone (cf. "bluffing").

There’s an element in one of the branches of the Mabinogion which indicates that Bran, the Raven King himself, cannot be contained in a house — this is always interpreted by scholars & writers as a description of Bran’s giganticness, but I also think it might mean that Bran was just too enormous/magical/dangerous a presence to submit himself to the domestication of the hearth — and in fact attributes his untimely death to his disregard for this proscription. Although Loo and Renka (Loo’s loyal, reckless, and — coughcough — gigantic companion) are alleged to work in Livna’lams’s palace, neither of them is ever spotted indoors. They appear at the bottom of the garden always, mysterious and secret as fairies.

Lastly, one of the branches of the Mabinogion tells the story of a character called Lleu Llaw Gyffes, an isolated boy-warrior who is rejected by his wicked royal mother, who ultimately rejects the company of women himself, and whose various dialect-inflected names, if stuck all together, probably sound a bit like "Loo’Loö." (Lleu is briefly transformed into an eagle at one point as a means of escaping death, and thus he carries on the family tradition.)

Not for nothing (literally for nothing), but the story of Lleu’s failed love for his faithless flower-wife Blodeuwedd, and the inescapable weight of the myth in the blood, is the main substance of the novel The Owl Service.

I don’t know, either. It could be that when you’ve lost everything to conquerors, down to your own history, and find yourself trapped beneath the suddenly-empty sky, even the escape of death begins to look like the beautiful flight of birds.

I haven’t been able to determine if Gorodischer intentionally called upon the Mabinogion in her own variation on the story of the lost king of heaven, or if there's an Argentinian or a Spanish myth congruent to the British version, or if it just turns out that Fitzgerald was right, at least about the crossing: we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

EDITED 11 NOV 2014:  I attempted to minimize my Gingrichian fondness for modifiers in this post, and I also stamped out an outbreak of #Funny Tags.

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.)