You don't have to fly into the sun

Oct. 18th, 2025 10:32 pm
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
Having somewhat wiped out my reserves with the glories of Corporation Beach, I only made it out to the salt marsh for about an hour between low tide and sunset, which was still great. I saw the copper-glaze glint of fiddler crabs in their burrows in the crenellated banks of mud. I saw the dark-fringed silhouette of an osprey sailing over the green-rusted brushes of cordgrass and salt hay, where they nest with the encouragement of the Callery Darling Conservation Area which includes the wetlands around the Bass Hole Boardwalk. The engine noise floating over from Chapin Beach turned out to belong to a powered paraglider who so annoyed me by effectively buzzing the boardwalk that I let all the other sunset viewers with their phones out enthusiastically take pictures of him. The long-billed, long-legged, unfamiliarly tuxedo-patterned shorebird stalking the deeper edges of a sandbar looks to have been a vagrant black-necked stilt. With the tide so far out, I am afraid there was little chance of another seal.

Take a little comfort from the little you've done. )

After which I ate dinner, read a little, and passed out for about an hour and a half. Family and friends have been sending me pictures of No Kings, the necessity of which I hate and the turnout of which I cheer. My mother told me about her favorite sign she did not carry: a photograph of the butterfly, the only orange monarch we need. I loved everything about the spare, specific exploration of marginalized languages and historical queerness in Carys Davies' Clear (2024) until the slingshot of the ending as if the author had lost a chapter somewhere over the side in the North Sea. Since the Cape is still autumnal New England, I am drinking mulled cider.
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
The very first thing that happened when I climbed over the huge barnacle-scaled chunks of granite and weathered pilings that form the breakwater at the western edge of Corporation Beach was that I saw a seal: sleek, dulse-dark, bobbing its head in the waves not more than two breakers offshore. It looked at me. I sang it the seal-calling song learned from Jean Redpath. If I had just spent the afternoon till sunset sitting on the breakwater and watching the tide come in serpentine-green under thick foam and burst into spray that showered me to the shoulders of my coat, it would have been a wonderful time.

Penny on the water, tuppence on the sea. )

Being now officially unemployed after an internal ten and really fifteen years at the same job and having Robert Carlyle on my mind, I should probably just rewatch The Full Monty (1997). Tomorrow I plan on a salt marsh.
osprey_archer: (Default)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
In my previous post about The Amber Spyglass, I wrote about the Lord Asriel, Child Killer. The child Lord Asriel killed, Lyra’s friend Roger, is now in the land of the dead, and Lyra and Will are headed to the land of the dead post-haste because Lyra would like to apologize for accidentally causing his death by bringing him to Lord Asriel. (Times Lord Asriel has wanted to apologize to Roger or indeed ever remembered his existence: zero.)

Will would also kind of like to talk to his father, but as usual Lyra’s goals are the ones that actually drive the plot. She’s the protagonist, and although the narrative feints toward the idea of Will as co-protagonist, really he’s just a sidekick. Would I find him more compelling if he had goals of his own that weren’t entirely centered on Lyra? Maybe. (Maybe not.)

But returning to Lyra, who after all is the reason we’re all here. Having come to the land of the dead to apologize to Roger, Lyra realizes that the dead are miserable in this unchanging underground existence, and decides that the thing to do is to cut a doorway into another world to let them out. Roger is the first to go, and he evanesces into the air, “leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in a glass of champagne.”

As a child I had a deep horror of the idea of death and oblivion, so I simply couldn’t get on with the dead joyfully dissolving into nothingness. And Pullman, like many a didactic writer before him, wants to make absolutely sure that you know not only what is happening but what your emotional attitude toward it ought to be. Mary Malone also witnesses the dead coming out of the underworld and joyfully dissolving. The alethiometer tells the Magisterium alethiometer-reader that the dead are now escaping the land of the dead and dissolving, and this is “the most sweet and desirable end for them.”

Okay, Pullman, I get it! You believe that when we die we dissolve into nothing and this is a GOOD and JOYFUL end that we should WELCOME. You may be right that this is what happens after death, but you CANNOT force me to be joyful about it no matter how many times you repeat that I should.

Having saved the dead from the horrors of eternal life, Lyra and Will emerge into the Republic of Heaven, where the forces of the Authority (God) are attacking Lord Asriel’s rebel fortress. Lyra and Will stumble through the battle searching for their daemons from whom they were separated when they entered the land of the dead (and again, this separation scene is SO powerful, curse you Pullman for being such a good writer).

While they look for their daemons, they accidentally kill the Authority. He is a very old angel who was being carried away from the battle in a crystalline litter when cliff ghasts attacked. Lyra and Will drive off the cliff ghasts and try to help this ancient, creaky, dementia-stricken angel, but when they help him out of his litter, the breeze blows him away.

Meanwhile, in the same world, the Authority’s right hand man (who seems to be the guy actually in charge, given that the Authority’s general mental state) is going mano a mano with Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter. They drag him into the abyss.

I’m sure these scenes were both super fun for Pullman to write, and they’re both powerful and memorable set-pieces. But this is a pretty classic example of making the weakest possible strawman out of your opponent’s argument and then punching it to death.

Pullman famously wrote His Dark Materials as a reaction against Narnia, because he so disliked the Christian didacticism of Lewis’s work. Not that he’s against didacticism, mind, he just thinks that Lewis is being didactic in the wrong direction, and he’s going to fix this by being even more didactic in favor of atheism. If he just repeats “Death is dissolution and this is JOYFUL” often enough, everyone will have to agree, right?

(Actually I’m not sure even Pullman fully agrees, because when Lee Scoresby’s ghost dissolves Pullman talks about how his atoms are going to join the atoms of his daemon Hester, which is not how atoms work, but a pretty good approximation of meeting your loved ones in heaven if you don’t believe in heaven.)

Unfortunately for Pullman, this is not how to teach readers a lesson through fiction. The reason Narnia works (to the extent that it does work in the “teaching a lesson” way) is that the stories are so strong. In The Golden Compass, Pullman shows that he can write a children’s fantasy as compelling as Lewis at his best. In The Amber Spyglass he shows that he can be as clunky as Lewis at his worst, as in That Hideous Strength, another work with some great setpieces that is basically spoiled because the author shunts the story aside in favor of venting his animosity toward something he dislikes but doesn’t really understand.

But Lewis has the advantage that all his books are basically standalones, even if they are also part of a series. You can hate That Hideous Strength and still like Out of the Silent Planet, or loathe The Last Battle and blissfully ignore it as you reread The Voyage of the Dawn Treader five hundred times. Pullman’s His Dark Materials, however, doesn’t work like that. It’s one big book that happens to be split into three pieces, and although the first piece is still exquisite, you can only reread it with the knowledge that the subsequent parts won't live up to the beginning.
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
This week having in the main sucked on ice, I am on Cape Cod drinking hot water with lemon from a tall mug hand-painted with a sea-green octopus and the call sign for WCAI. The hope for the next couple of days is a profound amount of nothing, with sea. I have already eaten some slightly fancy tinned fish.
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
I’m sure you’ve all been waiting with baited breath for my account of rereading Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass. Would I still hate it as much as I did when I first read it at the age of twelve?

Well, no, but largely because when I was twelve I hated The Amber Spyglass with the fiery passion of a thousand deeply betrayed suns. It’s impossible to feel betrayed in the same way upon rereading a book, since after all you basically know what’s coming and have decided to inflict it upon yourself again of your own free will.

I still hate it enough that it’s going to take at least two posts to pour out all my loathing, though.

But before I begin to tear this book to shreds, I must give it a couple of kudos. First: my god can Pullman write an amazing setpiece. He’s so goddamn talented and that’s part of what makes this book so infuriating; it couldn't be so maddening if it wasn't in some ways strong. I read this book one time as a kid and never reread because I loathed it so much, but some of the scenes were so powerful that they’ve never left my head. Roger leaving the land of the dead. The ancient angel that is the Authority blowing away in the breeze. Lyra touching Will’s lips before they admit their love.

(Okay, I remembered that one partly because it caused me such outrage, and I remembered it slightly incorrectly: I forgot that Lyra actually touched Will’s lips with a succulent red fruit because of COURSE Pullman is going full Garden of Eden with this. But still.)

Second, although I’ve spent decades complaining about the wheeled elephants in this book, they’re actually pretty cool. Mary Malone is having her own little portal fantasy adventure/first contact story, meeting these elephant/antelope type creatures who manipulate objects with their trunks and ride around on giant seedpods shaped like wheels. I love that for her. It’s very fun.

The problem is that Mary Malone’s portal first contact story continually mucks up the pacing of a book that already has big pacing issues. We’ll be at a moment of high tension, and then suddenly in the next chapter we pop over to Mary Malone having a chill time learning about mulefa culture, and in itself it’s interesting – but as a chapter that is interrupting the flow of the narrative, it’s maddening.

This is especially true because this book takes so darn long to get off the ground. Lyra spends the first twelve chapters in a drugged sleep under Mrs. Coulter’s watch, and the story remains in a holding pattern until Will finally arrives to wake her up.

While asleep, Lyra has been having a chat with her old friend Roger in the land of the dead, and she wakes up with a mission: she needs to go apologize to Roger! Right this very minute! Sure, the tiny Gallivespian spies who helped save Lyra from Mrs. Coulter want Will and Lyra to head off to help Lord Asriel in the war against God post-haste, but apologizing to Roger in the land of the dead has to take precedence.

This is one of the parts of the book I remembered incorrectly, and what I remembered made more sense, frankly. In my memory, Lyra promised Roger that she and Will would release him from the land of the dead, which would indeed have given an urgent reason why Lyra needs to go to the land of the dead right away, as “I want to apologize” does not.

The other maddening thing about this section is that, although Will and Lyra never do end up going to Lord Asriel, they never actually give or even think a reason why they don’t want to do this, even though there is a VERY OBVIOUS reason for them to avoid Lord Asriel. Last time that Lyra took a friend to Lord Asriel, Lord Asriel ended up killing that friend to rip a hole between worlds.

In my review of The Subtle Knife, I pondered whether Pullman would ever unpack the fact that his good guys are “catastrophically failing at the Kantian maxim to treat people as ends not means.” Having finished The Amber Spyglass, I can say definitively that the answer is no.

At the end of The Golden Compass, Lord Asriel kills an innocent child to rip a hole between worlds. This hole unleashes a horde of Spectres in the world of Cittagazze (a consequence Lord Asriel almost certainly doesn’t know about) and also causes the rapid melting of the arctic in his own world, leading to massive floods with (one presumes) the usual massive death that attends large and sudden floods.

But let’s leave aside the Spectres and the floods for the moment. Let’s go back to the murder of Lyra’s friend Roger. Lord Asriel’s stated aim is to defeat the Kingdom of Heaven and build the Republic of Heaven in its place, and his first action toward this goal is murdering a child. Is he building the Republic of Heaven or the city of Omelas?

No one ever asks this question. Even Lyra, who spends a certain amount of time obsessing about accidentally leading Roger to his death, spends no time thinking about who actually caused his death (Lord Asriel) or whether a man who would, I repeat, kill an innocent child to further his own ends is a man who is worth following.

Pullman, I think, is the kind of atheist who sees that the belief in God can be very destructive, but somehow has failed to notice that any kind of fanatical “ends justify the means” belief can be just as destructive, whether there’s a god involved or not.

Wednesday Reading Meme

Oct. 15th, 2025 10:02 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
An irregular installment of What I’ve Quit Reading: Maud Hart Lovelace’s Early Candlelight, a historical fiction novel about life at Fort Snelling in Minnesota in the 1930s. In between the lackluster Early Candlelight and Gentlemen from England I think I have to accept that I just don’t particularly care for Lovelace’s adult fiction. (But she does have one more picture book that I want to read.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A couple of months ago, I commented to [personal profile] skygiants, “I think I’m going to give up on Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.”

“You can if you want to BREAK MY HEART,” said [personal profile] skygiants, or words to that effect, so meekly I returned to the book, and at long last I have finished! And I am glad that I stuck with it (even though I also believe in my heart that Dickens maybe didn’t need a full eight hundred pages to tell this story) just because it’s nice to see how things play out for everyone. Special props to the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren, the real star of the show.

I had Monday and Tuesday off for fall break, so on Tuesday I hit up the archives and read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Good Wolf (a very slight fairy tale about a little boy who meets a magical wolf who takes him to a magical Snow Party which all the animals shrink down to the size of kittens to attend) and Alice Dalgleish’s A Book for Jennifer: A Story of London Children in the Eighteenth Century and of Mr. Newbery’s Juvenile Library.

This latter book I read because it was illustrated by Katherine Milhous, of The Egg Tree fame, and indeed the illustrations were charming. I particularly liked the one of the street with Mr. Newbery’s bookshop, with all the little detailed shops all around.

What I’m Reading Now

The stated purpose of Among the Shadows, the collection of L. M. Montgomery’s “darker” stories, is to show that Montgomery did indeed have a dark side, but actually I think the stories are mostly showing her melodramatic side: the man who falls in love with a magnificent but ruined woman only for her to die in his arms a week later, the girl who falls in a dead faint at the very moment her far-distant lover dies, etc. Now I enjoy a bit of good melodrama as much as anyone, but let’s face it, if you want to bolster Montgomery’s reputation as a serious writer, you need to showcase her Rilla of Ingleside aspect rather than the Kilmeny of the Orchard side.

What I Plan to Read Next

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

I'm not related to anyone

Oct. 15th, 2025 04:44 am
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
Marooned (1994) closes with an assurance from ScotRail that under no circumstances except the exceptional are items of left luggage opened, which fortunately no one told the protagonist of this elliptical, a little noirish, just faintly magical realist and haunting short film.

Peter Cameron (Robert Carlyle) mans the left-luggage office at Glasgow Central, but in his solitude, his oddity, and the dreamlike circling of his days, he might as well be employed in the outer reaches of Kafka. Ceaselessly surrounded by human movement and direction, he shifts to the other side of his narrow counter to change up the crick in his neck. The clock cuts his hours out in claim tags and skeleton keys, the dip of a paste pot and the closing of his hand on the coins he's dropped as impersonally as a vending machine. His eyes are absorbingly dark, the thinness of his wrists in their rolled uniform sleeves gives him a furtive, vulnerable look from his covert of sports bags and suitcases, taking a mugging, an assignation, arrivals and departures all in. The caustic familiarity with which he can greet a commuter of prior scrutiny, "And where's the redhead? I thought you married her. Did she finally figure you out?" never makes it past the thousand-yard crease in his stoneface that can crumple into real petrifaction if he's caught outside his professional script. The nautical title seems a touch dramatic for the hub of a mainline station, however landlocked, but Peter as he makes himself a precisely arranged cup of tea while listening to the shipping forecast in the office's industrially riveted recesses does have a kind of marine overcast about him, a glass-greenish tint filtering his regulation pigeon-blues, the tea towel's plaid, the leatherette of the Roberts R200 serenely intoning its warnings of gales in Fair Isle and Rockall. When he unlocks and examines the contents of bags in his care, it seems less voyeuristically invasive than quizzically alien, as if trying on the idea of what it means to have a life that can be carried in cross-section anywhere its owner feels like. He always repacks them unnoticeably. It seems a very small existence, but we have no idea if we should even wonder how he feels about it until we learn that he had a clear other choice, one which perhaps ironizes that daily ritual of a brew-up with the Met Office. "Have you been to sea? Nah, I didn't think so. You're the only one that's not been. You're breaking the tradition."

What happens to jolt this recessive character out of his routine naturally involves some illicitly opened left luggage, but much of the pleasure of the small, slant plot that precipitates is how steadily it doesn't even seem to refuse the expected next move, it just stands aside at its own slight angle. It's no twist that a man who lives at such a second hand of other lives will have no defenses when one of them touches him directly, so deer-shocked by the appearance of the black-haired, sad-eyed Claire (Liza Walker) that even before he finds her suitcase filled with the evidence of the end of a bad affair, Peter misses a tongue-tied beat of the transaction, their hands holding the same receipt for such a momentous second that for once he volunteers information he doesn't have to—"I close at half past eleven." Even more than the off-duty sight of him outside the cavernously murmuring habitat of the concourse and climbing the stairs of a grottily sodium-buzzed terrace at that, it is a real shake of the kaleidoscope to have this isolated figure situated suddenly within the ties of a family, especially a brother as big and blond and laddish as the sometime merchant seaman Craig (Stevan Rimkus), boasting of his girls and their tricks while the slight, silent shadow of his sibling holds so still that his pulse can be seen hollowing the side of his throat. "I jumped ship in Port Elizabeth . . . I owe some guys rather a lot of money. Can you help me?" A tighter, more conventionally triangulated narrative could make more of these tensions, like the snapshot memento of a happier Claire wrapped playfully around a denim-jacketed Craig that queries her unfamiliarity to Peter. Marooned lets its uncertainties lie between characters who know their own histories and turns its attention instead to the consequences that skitter off more obliquely, as riskily compassionate as enclosing a first-ever note for a fragile passenger or as heedless as slamming into a fight that wasn't expecting a mad little coathanger of a man that can't normally get three words in order, never mind a crowbar. Afterward he looks just as worried as ever, flattening himself around a seedily lit kitchen on just the wrong trajectory to avoid the other person in it. If he's peeling himself off the sidelines of the life he has always screened through timetables and sea areas, stories observed in fragments or construed from odd socks and bottles of scent, he may not be much less awkward when he gets there. Where? Standing on the deck of the ferry Juno, wiping the windblown curtains of his dark hair out of his eyes as the firth and the fog churn past almost the same sea-sanded steel-blue, he's already difficult to picture fitting as neatly behind his anonymous counter as the first time we saw him folded there, consolations of the shipping forecast or no. In the end, the hardest thing he may have to do—or the easiest, when he finally sees it—is take his own advice.

Marooned was written by Dennis McKay, directed by Jonas Grimås, and BAFTA-nominated for Best Short Film in its year, which it would have deserved: it does not feel in 20 minutes like a sketch or a slice but an elusive, immersive hinge of time where we don't need the details of the past filled in to understand the weight of what has happened in the last few days. Dialogue-wise, it's nearly silent, but it's shot by Seamus McGarvey with such an Eastmancolor-soaked combination of cinéma vérité and slow-tracked tableaux that it has the intimacy of a photo album and something of the same selective quality of time, too, edited by David Gamble as if we had to be there to find out what happened between the snaps. Occasionally it reminded me of the short fiction of M. John Harrison and not only for the late sequence where nothing more than an ear-filling hum on the soundtrack, a splutter of tea, and a pair of stares that seem to meet through the fourth wall, one somber, one shocked, confirms a fact like a folktale. The score was composed and partly performed by Stephen Warbeck and it is minimal, modern—accordion, saxophone, bass—not hopelessly sad. Much of the rest of the sound design was contributed by Glasgow Central. I found it on Vimeo and was unable to get it out of my head. It looks at almost nothing straight on, which doesn't mean not deeply. So much of it happens in Carlyle's eyes, so dark and soulful that in another kind of Scottish story, they would clinch him as a seal. "I forgot about you for three whole hours yesterday, but then it started raining and you were back in the front of my mind." This relation brought to you by my only backers at Patreon.

You are a case of the vapours

Oct. 13th, 2025 04:21 pm
sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
[personal profile] sovay
[personal profile] choco_frosh just came by in the nor'easter which had better be amending our drought and dropped off the attractively Manly Wade Wellman-sounding T. Kingfisher's What Stalks the Deep (2025) and a bagful of apples, including a Golden Russet and a Northern Spy. Digging into my book-stack was the best part of last night. I remain raggedly flat, but I really hope this person whom [personal profile] selkie brought to my attention gets their Leo Marks fic for Yuletide.
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
The promised nor'easter has not yet materialized out of the escalating rain, but I have had in the main a really nice birthday observed with my parents, my brother, and my niece, including a hand-drawn card from the latter—a dragon in a party hat—and an almond cake with rosehip jam. I am in possession of an astonishing book-stack, featuring Tobias Wray's No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man (2021), Carys Davies' Clear (2024), and by some incredible sleight of used book stores, On Actors and Acting: Essays by Alexander Knox (ed. Anthony Slide, 1998). The latter looks like a windfall of material I would not have been able to locate for myself through the Internet Archive or JSTOR since much of it was published posthumously with the assistance of Doris Nolan, but at the moment I am deeply charmed that the introduction takes such pains to impress on the reader that on no account should be the quirky and sharply intelligent actor be confused with the blandly authoritative image of President Wilson, since coming from the exact opposite direction of his filmography I had already concluded that in the most complimentary sense, Alex Knox was something of a weirdo. Major points, however, for once while perusing tide pools with friends' children committing the extreme dad joke of suddenly shouting, "Kelp, kelp, I see anemone!" My niece and the twins are currently engaged in a late-over watch of The Black Stallion (1979), which they keep comparing to How to Train Your Dragon. [personal profile] thisbluespirit made me Elemental art of Clive Francis as Tungsten. I have a CD of the Dropkick Murphys' For the People (2025).
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
[personal profile] sovay
After a run of welcomely lovely days, it was perhaps inevitable but deeply resented that I should hit a couple that sucked on toast, logistically, emotionally, resource-wise. I lost one completely to driving to a doctor's appointment that could have been virtual and too much of this afternoon and evening was spent in the kind of frustrated flat uselessness that I hope counts as convalescence because otherwise it's even more of a waste than it feels to me. Without spending that much time in the car, I have been listening to a lot of college radio. Girl in Red's "I'll Call You Mine" (2021) turns out to be a queer outlaw ballad while Jay Som's "Float (feat. Jim Adkins)" (2025) is a sweetly affirming house party. I was doing all right with the Divine Comedy's "Achilles" (2025) until it pulled out Housman and Patrick Shaw-Stewart and then the video was directly in the line of Jarman. I am unduly entertained by the reference to methylene blue in Jealous of the Birds' "Tonight I Feel Like Kafka" (2016).

Are the Newbery books kid friendly?

Oct. 10th, 2025 08:33 am
osprey_archer: (Default)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
[personal profile] hedgebird asked: Do you think the books generally are actually kid-friendly, if kids aren't put off by the dead dog rep?

Well, obviously I’m hugely biased, given that I started the Newbery project when I was eleven, so clearly they were friendly enough that I at least decided to try to read all of them. After I had read Out of the Dust, too, which doesn’t have a dead dog but does have pretty much everything else that a child could find off-putting in a Newbery book.

My impression is that for the first few decades of the Newbery, say 1920-1970, either the Newbery committee or American children’s publishing as a whole was committed to kid-friendly children’s books. This is not to say that nothing bad ever happens to anyone - in fact, I can think of two books off the top of my head where the ending is “Well, a volcano just blew up our civilization” - but I never finished any of those books with the feeling that the author had intentionally taken a crowbar to my soul just to watch me bleed.

This is not to say I would blithely give the books from these decades to children today, as some of them have other content (e.g. racism) that you might not hand to a modern eight-year-old. But with the sole exception of Old Yeller I don’t think any of these books are so sad that they’d make a kid want to forswear reading.

Then around 1970 Newbery committee and/or American children’s publishing discovered animal death in a big way, closely followed by relative death and general “something bad happened in my life and this whole book is going to be about my misery.” So after that point there are some books that are great which I loved as a child (Catherine Called Birdie, Ella Enchanted, The Thief) and some books that are scarring like Out of the Dust and Jacob Have I Loved.

Although I HAVE met some people who loved Jacob Have I Loved in their youth, so clearly “kid-friendly” can be quite subjective. Some kids love misery! I myself loved The Long Winter best of all the Little House books! It’s just a different kind of misery than Jacob Have I Loved’s “Waaaah everyone loves my twin sister more than me because she is better than me in literally every way and frankly even the reader can see it so shut up and stop whining and maybe people will like you more, annoying protagonist.”

All the trees carve shards of light

Oct. 9th, 2025 11:47 pm
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
Since [personal profile] spatch's schedule blocks him from joining my birthday observed this weekend when my niece will be in town, it was important to him to take me somewhere nice on the day itself, and after some reconfiguration of plans based on parameters of pain, sleep, and sunset and some obstruction from construction and accidents on Route 2, we managed somewhere very nice indeed.

Panoramas two-thirds sky and one-third land. )

We did not make it to the originally proposed bookstore: it was fine. We drove home down looping roads close-lined first with trees and then with malls as we made our way back from the Pioneer Valley into MetroWest. Fog drifted once across the highway from the marshes we were driving over. I looked for further meteors out the window through the least light-polluted hills and meadows, but saw mostly that I could still have read by the eighty-five-percent moon. It was a lot of time in the car and all worth it, an inland gift. It was, for everything going on in my life and outside of it, a good birthday.

Fierce as the Baltic sea

Oct. 9th, 2025 12:55 pm
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
It is my birthday. I am forty-four years old, the age some fictional character must be. I woke to a pair of packages, one from [personal profile] nineweaving that proved to be Vaughn Scribner's Merpeople: A Human History (2020) and from my parents which was a DVD of The Sea Wolf (1941). Hestia was a small black round of purr like an extra present at the foot of the bed. It is bright and brisk and cloudless as all the classical autumns outside.

Wednesday Reading Meme on Thursday

Oct. 9th, 2025 08:14 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
I forgot to post this yesterday because... I forgot it was Wednesday... so that's where I'm at right now, but I have Monday and Tuesday off next week, hooray!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ralph Keeler’s Vagabond Adventures, a memoir about Keeler’s life after he ran away from home at the age of twelve. After bumming around for a bit, he found work as a traveling blackface minstrel (yes I KNOW, but this is chock full of interesting information about the 19th century entertainment industry as a whole), but after three years life in the footlights palled and he decided to go to college instead. Literally he saw the campus of a college with the college boys having a good time and decided “I’m going to go back there and study.”

After studying for a few years in American universities, Keeler worked for a few months in the post office. Upon realizing that his life savings amounted to $150, he decided to chuck the job and head for Europe, where he matriculated at a German university (did he, you ask, speak German? Not at the beginning!) and managed to eke out three years in Europe with only very slight additions to his capital by writing sketches of his European experiences for newspapers back home.

I also read Mary Stolz’s Cider Days, the sequel to Ferris Wheel, and I am a little baffled that these were published separately as they’re really two halves of one book rather than two separate books. And both quite short! Could easily have been published together! Truly the decisions of the publishing world are sometimes strange.

Anyway, much like the first book, this is a lovely evocation of Vermont - autumn this time, although despite the title no actual cider! But it meanders around without ever quite turning from a succession of events into a story.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun L. M. Montgomery’s Among the Shadows, a collection of her darker stories, which so far has mostly meant ghost stories. Nothing truly haunting yet; in fact nothing as dark as the story in one of the Chronicles of Avonlea collections (I can’t remember which) about the girl who is devoted to her brother, refuses an offer of marriage to stay with him only to be turned out of his house when HE married, only then he gets smallpox and his wife flees and his sister comes back to nurse him and dies happy because he finally needed her.

What I Plan to Read Next

After MUCH TRAVAIL, I’ve finally got my hands on Elizabeth and Her German Garden! So I’ll finally be able to finish my 2014 list, HOORAY.

I want what's true

Oct. 8th, 2025 11:49 pm
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
Most of the Draconids we saw tonight were short flashes like Morse in the mind of the dragon, but even through the faint haze and the half-sky shine of the harvest moon just past, we saw two true long-tailed fireballs like dragon-stars, streaking through Lyra and Boötes. Their radiant stands in Eltanin and Rastaban, the dragon's eyes. Meteors, too, feel like a gift for an erev birthday. I still dream one will earth itself in a field while I am watching.
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
[personal profile] a_reasonable_man thought I could use a talisman and brought me a 1923 Peace dollar that belonged most likely to his grandfather's second wife. It's as old as my grandmother would be. I have buttoned it inside my coat. It's a treasure.

For when the heart's a sinking stone

Oct. 7th, 2025 11:24 pm
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
[personal profile] sovay
He said, I'm just out of hospital,
but I'm still flying.

—H.D., "R.A.F." (1941)

I had a lot of help—I was that sort of chap.
—Margery Allingham, The China Governess (1962)

Northbound and once again rear-facing for all the good that selecting my seat in advance did me, I watched the trees start to change beyond the gravel-span of the tracks from late southerly green to the occasional bright lick of Halloween leaves, as if the train were coming in to autumn. [personal profile] spatch met me at the station with a roast beef sandwich. Hestia sniffed me all over intently and then licked my nose: I was acceptable despite a week in the company of other cat. I spent the rest of the night in a sort of liquescent state and reconstituted myself this afternoon just enough for a doctor's appointment, after which I promptly decohered for several hours again.

It was such a good trip. It was low-key, which was literally what the doctors ordered. I sat on a bench with my godchild and watched him sketch in his lesser notebook. I slept into the afternoon and no one cared that I often napped after just about any exertion from a walk around the block to dinner out at a Balkan market that served me a pljeskavica that it was doing its best to be bigger than my head and the first can of Schweppes Bitter Lemon I have seen in a store for years. I ate several species of fancy tinned fish. I did not manage to get to a museum with [personal profile] selkie, but all things considered it may have been even better that we spent so much time just hanging out, mostly on the couch where one night my godchild came down to impart weird medical facts before returning to bed. Because he's reading it in English class, I left the first two lines of the Odyssey written for him on the refrigerator in dry-erase marker and Homeric Greek. I took many fewer photos than usual, but have my favorite: my godson, the Star.



I did not get a picture somewhere in Connecticut of the old fender pier of a swing bridge so overgrown with trees and brush, it had become an oak-trussed island, like the prow of a ship burial, but it was the best thing I saw on the return train. Changes in circumstances still being assimilated, but at least I was somewhere loving when they hit.

Book of Mormon + Horse Girls

Oct. 7th, 2025 12:15 pm
osprey_archer: (art)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
I attended two theatrical productions this weekend! (In fact, I narrowly escaped attending three: Macbeth was on offer, but we ended up going to a cinema showing of Interview with the Vampire instead.)

First, I went to Book of Mormon, which I’ve wanted to see since 2014 despite a nagging feeling that possibly making a musical comedy about someone’s holy book was maybe not the best thing to do. However, I had a great time: the songs are super catchy and the show is a lot of fun, very energizing. I generally turn into a pumpkin around ten p.m. but did not pumpkin at all during the show!

Then I went to the Sunday matinee of Horse Girls, a play put on by the university theater department, whose productions range from “AMAZING” to “well, you tried.”

The lead actress was great, and the set designers were clearly having a ton of fun trying to cram as many different horse objects as they could into this twelve-year-old’s bedroom, but the script was… well. Let me just say, by the end of the play, there are three horse girls down. One gets boinked over the head with a riding trophy, another impaled on the surprisingly sharp ears of that selfsame riding trophy, and a third strangled with her own braid.

Also, the playwright seems to be under the impression that Anne Romney (wife of Mitt Romney) is some sort of patron saint of horse girls, as evidenced by the fact that when their stable is in trouble, our horse girls attempt to contact Anne Romney in the White House. (Oh, this play takes place in an alternate universe where Mitt Romney won the 2012 election, I guess.) And the director’s note is all about how Anne Romney originated or at least popularized the concept of the horse girl, which also makes me feel like I’ve stumbled into some bizarro alternate universe, because the horse girl has been around much longer than that? I’m sure there were horse girls in the 1990s if not before? Am I insane or is the director?

The director’s note also notes that horse girls are “often considered prissy, privileged, or just plain weird,” which seems like an unpromising set of assumptions to bring to the table when you are directing a play that is literally called Horse Girls. Although possibly exactly the assumption you want to bring to a play where the horse girls are homicidal maniacs.
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
Kicking off my Halloween reads with Tasha Tudor’s Pumpkin Moonshine! This was Tudor’s first book, about a little girl who climbs up the hill to get the very best pumpkin from the field to make a pumpkin moonshine (known as a jack-o-lantern to us non-Vermonters). But the pumpkin is too big to carry, so she has to roll it; and when she starts to roll the pumpkin down the hill, well, it starts to roll faster and faster…

I rather expected this to end in pumpkin pie, but this pumpkin is made of stern stuff, and survives its roll down the hill to be carved into a toothiest, scariest, most beautiful pumpkin moonshine in Vermont.

You can tell this is an early work by Tudor, as the style seems not quite fully formed yet, perhaps more Currier and Ives than her later works. I really liked the vignettes around the first letter on each page, particularly the ones on the pages where the pumpkin is rolling down the hill: you have the big illustration on the left-hand page showing the pumpkin scaring the goats, say, and on the right, the first letter features a goat standing atop the I and staring down in dismay at the progress of the runaway pumpkin.
sovay: (Cho Hakkai: intelligence)
[personal profile] sovay
The sheer lamination of meta in the source material must have attracted Orson Welles to The Immortal Story (1968): a story about the failure of the creation of a story. Perhaps to cap the parallel, it should have remained, like so many of its writer-director's projects before and after, unfinished, but instead it was the last non-documentary feature he completed in his life, a lyrical, theatrical, troubling curio around which the rest of a projected anthology of adaptations never materialized, stranding it like a chip from a mosaic of dream. The 58 minutes it clocks in at are at once ethereal and formal, so sensorially precise, what they detail cannot be real. If I had heard of it before last week, appropriately I had forgotten.

The screenplay by Welles from the 1958 Isak Dinesen novella preserves its nest of narratives sometimes down to the word, even as it chronicles how slipperily they can twist away from even the most controlling teller. Late in the nineteenth century of tea-trading Macao, the autocratically self-made Mr. Clay (Welles) has become obsessed with a story he heard long ago on his passage to China, of a penniless sailor hired by a childless old man to service his beautiful young wife for a fee of five guineas. It is not the titillation of this scenario that occupies his gout-ridden hours in the great house that belonged originally to the partner he ruined over the miserly debt of three hundred guineas, which may be the stuff of scandal to the European colony but for the aged merchant is merely one more sum in the million-dollar litany of his own ledgers read nightly back to him by his head clerk Elishama Levinsky (Roger Coggio). It is its unreality, which so offends this man of closed accounts and futures only in the sense of investments that he determines to render this maritime legend fact: "People should only record things which have already happened." Unmarried himself, he will arrange for the union of a woman procured for the role of the wife and a sailor authentically solicited from the docksides, wined and dined, proffered the traditional piece of gold and brought to the candlelit bride-bed "in order that one sailor in the world will be able to tell it from beginning to end as it actually happened to him." They will engender between them not a child, but a true history. The defeat of this project will be apparent to anyone with half a head for story. The tale of the lucky sailor has its own reality to which historical truth is irrelevant, its own vitality of the oral tradition which is predicated on exactly the fact that it can be told by any man on the sea as if it happened to him because it never did. It is known across ships, it lives on them, it replicates itself through the reception of travelers from London to Singapore. It can never be made to happen for scare-quotes real because in the narratological sense which eludes the literal-minded god-game of Mr. Clay, it happened the first time it was told. The most he can achieve with his mortal marionettes is the second order of a reenactment, inescapably aware of its own script—Welles doesn't need to force the further metatext of capturing this stagecraft of bodies on film, it shimmers under the surface of the production like the ironies inherent in Dinesen, the pitfalls of collective art. "You move at my bidding," Mr. Clay crows at the hymeneal scene, directorially prepared to oversee its consummation until the curtains like a furious proscenium are jerked closed in his face. "You're two young, strong and lusty jumping-jacks in this old hand of mine," but his desire can dictate only the act. The idiosyncrasies of their chemistry, their conversation, their lovemaking and most of all what any of it may mean past the morning remain out of his grasp, these surrogates for his authorial potency whose own histories he seems curiously, adamantly oblivious to. Does he recognize the elegant, embittered Virginie Ducrot (Jeanne Moreau) as the daughter of the man he drove to suicide, now the mistress of another of his clerks after her own tumultuous sexual adventure at sea? Can he hear more than fantasized frustration in the reticence of his choice "catch out of the harbor of Macao," the ragged yet quietly independent Paul Velling (Norman Eshley), shipwrecked a silent, solitary year? It seemed not to register with him when Elishama alluded to a flight from Poland before reading from the amulet of the prophet Isaiah which is his one remnant of a trauma-drowned childhood. All these true stories lie within his reach and he disregards them, hellbent on masterminding the simulacrum of a meme, perhaps because in his greed for realism he prefers the roles to the actors, more likely because it has never occurred to him to listen. It is left to the other principals of this chamber fable to share themselves through their stories, their silences, their songs, their lies, a cat's cradle of relationships at once foreclosed and facilitated by the moves of the tale which from the start is unraveling beyond its boughten bounds. "No man in the world can take a story which people have invented and told and make it happen . . . One way or another, this story will be the end of Mr. Clay."

Of this folkloric quartet, I am predictably fascinated by Elishama, effectively the stage manager of this devil's comedy who explains his complicity in it with a sort of corporate stoicism: "I'm in Mr. Clay's employ. I cannot take on work anywhere but with him." With his Dickensian wire-rims and slicked-ink hair, he looks a familiarly servile figure in his coat as pen-black as his eyes, his hands so often folded as if with his hat in them, pale-faced as a horn-shell. The film flags his Jewishness long before he introduces himself by name, but any threat of caricature blows off with the wry courtesy with which he contradicts his master as to the nature of the story which he heard so many more times in the tempest-tossed travels that led him to Macao, and the longer the film spends with him thereafter, the more enigmatically he will emerge as a small man of substance, disillusioned, ironical, not without compassion, not even old for the concentrated fatalism of his scant room by the company's godown, "things not yet to be recounted which moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind." Dispatched on a pimp's errand, he approaches it without excuse; the straw of his sober pork-pie hat is a concession to the climate, but it lends a dapper silent clown's dignity to the implacable matter-of-factness with which he waits for Virginie to realize that, like himself, she is infinitely purchasable by the mad rich men of the world. "I suppose that nobody could insult you even if they tried," she appraises him challengingly, meaning it to, like the slap in the face she gave him for delivering his master's proposition. With the same grave lightness as if taking it as a compliment, Elishama replies, "Why should I let them?" The executor of his employer's whims, he makes at the same time a strange, tacit confederate for his chosen heroine, so unfailingly respectful of her person rented for the three hundred guineas of her father's final debt—instructed to offer her a hundred, he in fact brought the correct amount—that when she begins to disrobe vehemently in front of him, the haste with which he gets the door slammed between them is the clumsiest we have seen this self-contained man, his faintest compression of reluctance as he reopens it at her call as good as another character's monologue. Paul he deals with as an impersonal factotum, but to Virginie he reveals his own stark, poignant history, hears out in turn her fears of reentering the house of her childhood, play-acting the seventeen-year-old innocent she has not been since the night of an earthquake in Japan. Her table is scattered with a time-stained deck of Tarot, but it is Elishama who foretells like the pattern in a shawl or a bottom line of figures the fatal conclusion of Mr. Clay's desire. He alone discerns that her real price is revenge. In our one direct insight into his interiority, we were assured by the intermittent narrator that he "might well have been a highly dangerous person except that ambition, desire in any form had been washed and bleached and burnt out of him," but he does not seem all that much more innocuous in its absence, a dispassion that should not be mistaken for weakness. From the right, unpredictable angles, his sharp-lined, heat-sweating face is more beautiful than the tall young sailor's in its aureole of angelically fair hair. "I thought you were a small rat out of Mr. Clay's storehouse," Virginie reconsiders him, standing before her still like a question she cannot avoid answering, "et toi—tu es le Juif Errant."

It is a stupidly gorgeous film to look at. If Welles had never worked in color before, if he spoke disparagingly of it as an element of film, he knew how to use it: cinnabar-red, malarially gold, boat's-eye blue or the bridal white of mourning, contrasted in such lapidary profusion by DP Willy Kurant that even open-air shots such as the veils of smoke against a dust-lichened wall that bloom across the initial conversation of Elishama and Virginie look as dreamily artificial as the room red-walled as sealing wax and side-splashed with the sheen of a five-guinea coin in which Mr. Clay makes his ritual pitch to Paul. The set decoration by André Piltant fabricates its port of Macao—in Dinesen it was Canton—out of landlocked Chinchón and a handful of its Spanish neighbors through the gloriously stagelike expedient of dressing their balconies and pillars and arcades with lanterns and banners, papering the walls like theatrical flats with signs in Chinese and the occasional Portuguese and stocking the market square with Chinese extras from chestnut-sellers to children at play. The harbor is suggested by nothing more than the ragged tilt of sails, just as the ellipses of the climactic sex act will be explicitized by the chirping of crickets in the equally imaginative sound design of Jean Nény. The score itself is selected from the melancholy solo piano of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes of Erik Satie. Edited chiefly by Yolande Maurette, the film moves at a pace it is not meant as a disservice to call entrancing, since it isn't a euphemism for glacial, especially when it strolls into handheld camera or breaks itself up in a quick-cut flourish of gossip or conspicuous consumption or the blowing out of candles lensed like calla lilies. Every now and then it can feel caught between its art forms: the greyed and jaundiced streaks of makeup used by Welles for the ailing Mr. Clay would convince even from the front row of a theater, but at the distance of a close-up are obviously paint, all the odder since Moreau's rouge and powder are judiciously in character. If it makes the film feel a little handmade, it's of a piece with the carefully spare props and costumes, an ivory-headed cane, a poppy-colored wrapper, the nacreous whorl of a turban shell, a print of the Empress Eugénie of France. It's too tactile to reduce to a hall of narrative mirrors. After all its talking, it ends with an unheard song.

Because Welles hardly ever met financing without conditions, The Immortal Story was a co-production of the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française and can in fact be viewed in the alternate cut of Une histoire immortelle, shorter by eight minutes, deeper by a few lines, texturally altered by the revision of voices as well as language—Moreau handled her own ADR in French and English, but Welles was dubbed by Philippe Noiret while Coggio in the French-language version can actually be heard as himself; he has a drily musical, effective voice that runs against his deferential appearance and I prefer it to the lighter dubbing of Warren Mitchell, although the two versions are best viewed in any case as their own movies. I discovered the English-language one on TCM and it turned out to have an entire small collection on the Criterion Channel, but it can be watched on the Internet Archive from its fairy-tale-like opening to its ultimate, perhaps inevitable punch line. "Yes, a comedy. I'd forgotten the word." It would be nice if further little jewel-boxes of Dinesen had followed, but then I'm still bummed that Welles' film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) once again with Moreau fell apart in the final stages of production. At least, unlike Mr. Clay, he made this one story as real as any performance ever is. This ambition brought to you by my recounted backers at Patreon.

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