I can see the alchemy

Oct. 23rd, 2025 02:59 am
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
We had to wait until the clouds were only bands sliding across the stars like transparencies, but we saw the Orionids like sparklers in the southwestern sky, short streaks at the triple stars of the hunter's belt, one incredible fireball straight from the red coal of Betelgeuse at his shoulder. The air was softer than we had expected, but still clear enough for all seven of the Pleiades. Jupiter looked like gold inlay under the arm of Gemini. The DJ on WHRB commented melancholically on the cold turn of the weather and then played what she called a lot of warm songs to compensate. This is being a wonderful year for meteors.

Is it the lustre of immortality?

Oct. 22nd, 2025 11:00 pm
sovay: (Renfield)
[personal profile] sovay
I liked so much of T. Kingfisher's What Stalks the Deep (2025), I just wish it had leaned as sfnally into its premise as it had the scope for.

Or a fear that forces us to displace our identities? )

In conclusion, I enjoyed the novella, I argued with it, I finished it and wrote a long string of e-mails to [personal profile] rushthatspeaks from which this post has been largely rearranged and went to bed and read Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) and "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"  (1971). I can always re-read Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), too. And Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" (2008).

Wednesday Reading Meme

Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:08 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I picked up Vivien Alcock’s The Cuckoo Sister intending to read a chapter or two, and then ended up mainlining the whole book. Before Kate was born, her older sister Emma was kidnapped from her pram. When Kate is eleven years old, a girl shows up at the door with a note saying that she’s Emma… but is she?

The focus of the book is not so much on the “is she or isn’t she?” detective work (it’s 1985, so they can’t get a DNA test, but they could at least get a blood test), but on the emotional impact primarily on Kate and Emma, who was raised as a Rosie and had no idea she might be the kidnapped Emma until Kate’s parents let her read the note she had unwittingly delivered. Totally absorbing. A fast read, highly recommended.

I also intended to take my time with D. E. Stevenson’s Young Mrs. Savage, in which a young widow and her four children return to the Scottish seaside town where she grew up, but instead I ended up taking it down in two gulps. One thing I really like about Stevenson’s work is that her children are always people: you never think she’s saying “How do six-year-olds act?”, as if six-year-olds were interchangeable, but “How would Mark and Nigel react to this circumstance?”

You would imagine that more authors could do this, as every author was at one point a child, but in fact this seems to be surprisingly difficult.

I also read Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden, a memoir/novel about an Englishwoman married to a Prussian count who finds happiness through reviving the garden on his estate. Gorgeous garden descriptions, almost quit in the middle because I was so fed up with the narrator’s smug sense of superiority to just about everyone: peasants of course, Germans in general, people who want to live in towns and don’t think the idea of being snowed in all winter sounds just lovely. Persevered, glad I finished it, doubtful if I’ll seek out any of von Arnim’s other work even though I loved The Enchanted April, as I suspect now I’ll see traces of that selfsame smugness in it all.

What I’m Reading Now

I finished Among the Shadows, so I’ve swung back around to A Cavalcade of Sea Legends, which actually I think is more effectively spooky anyway. There’s just something eerie about the sea.

What I Plan to Read Next

Procrastinating on Interview with the Vampire, because I’m pretty sure that when I read it, it’s going to become my entire personality for about a month. Will that be because I love it or because I hate it? Well, it could go either way.
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
And now for a wrap-up of a few final Amber Spyglass thoughts that I couldn’t fit into my earlier posts.

First, beyond all the other reasons I hated the ending of The Amber Spyglass as a child, I also loathed it as yet another variation of the evergreen classic of the children losing the magic at the end of a children’s fantasy novel: Peter and Susan can’t return to Narnia because they’re too old, Fern loses interest in talking animals because a boy took her on the Ferris wheel, etc.

Upon reread, I discovered that this isn’t technically what’s happening at the end of The Amber Spyglass. Yes, the timing does happen to coincide with Will and Lyra falling in love, but technically Lyra loses the ability to read the alethiometer because that ability was given to her by grace (by the rebel angels, one presumes) and has been taken away now that her quest is over. And Will breaks the subtle knife (which gives him the ability to travel between worlds) because the subtle knife turns out to be releasing a soul-eating Spectre every time it opens a doorway between worlds.

So they’re not losing the magic because they personally have grown too old, which at least still leaves room for another child (for instance, the child reader) to have a magical adventure. They’re losing the magic because every magic doorway forever must be closed, because the magic portals are actually EVIL. The magic was BAD ALL ALONG.

***

And finally, swinging back around to Dust. In the first book, Dust is a big mystery: it settles on humans, especially adults, but not animals, not even the armored bears who talk and wear armor and have kings etc. The Magisterium thinks that Dust is sin, which, okay, the Magisterium and I clearly have a different understanding of sin (the bears clearly have the ability to knowingly do wrong, which is how I would define sin), but sure! Why not! The Magisterium is clearly supposed to be wrong anyway and the story is great, so I’m not getting bogged down in metaphysics.

Unfortunately, the story became less great and the metaphysics became more explicit. In The Amber Spyglass, we learn that “Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves.” Dust is like “the stars of every galaxy in the sky, and every one of them was a little fragment of conscious thought.” And the doorways between worlds are draining away the Dust, and without Dust, “Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly.”

Well, first of all, this breaks Pullman’s own worldbuilding. We know that the armored bears are capable of conscious thought, feeling, and even imagination: we saw Iofur Raknisson with his doll daemon perched on his knee. They understand themselves to be bears, think about what it means to be bears, and understand death. Why don’t they get Dust?

I think the answer to the armored bears question specifically is that Pullman hadn’t fully thought through that aspect of his worldbuilding in book one. But unfortunately for Pullman, this issue is far wider than the armored bears. It touches on one of my pet topics of animal intelligence, and can I just say: Holy Descartes!

So animals are merely brutish automatons, incapable of thought, imagination, or feeling? I realize that research in animal intelligence has become more widely known since this book was published in 2001, but that was still decades after Jane Goodall did her pioneering chimp research. The general public may not have been up on the intelligence of cephalopods and crows, but we knew great apes and dolphins were smart. We may have even been vaguely aware of elephant intelligence.

And I simply feel that if you are writing a book series about the nature of consciousness, maybe you should, in fact, familiarize yourself with the latest research about the nature of consciousness.

It’s incredibly frustrating that Pullman is taking aim at the destructive impact of certain Christian teachings on Western society but straight-up recreates the belief that humans are different from animals not merely in degree but in kind. We are not simply the smartest animals, we are the only conscious animals at all, in fact not really animals but marked out by the cosmos as different by the way that we attract the glowing golden particles of conscious thought that are Dust.
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
The rain eased off after four o'clock, but until I got to Chapin Beach I still thought I would be making an affectionately overcast farewell to Cape Cod Bay, not arriving just in time for one of those conch-pink flaming sunsets for which my camera creakily consented to make an effort for about five minutes before shutting itself back down again and stubbornly refusing to be coaxed further. I walked back and forth on the wet metallic sands and collected a fragment of white-and-purple-whorled shell and watched the clouds fade to peach and charcoal. I put my hands in the water where it ran clear over the wave-rounded litter all faintly green-tinged, just to feel it on my fingers colder than before. I had all the talismans necessary to remember myself.

Did the shamrock on your shoulder bring good fortune and pay off? )

It was such good sea. I had not had so much of it daily in years. And it is not that I can get none of it in the still working seaport of Boston, and Cape Cod remains sandier than the mountain-folded ledges of Cape Elizabeth or the glacier-scraped boulders of Cape Ann, but it is still Atlantic and still cold to the touch and still live. I am home now and approved by Hestia for the second time in a month, an unusual sign of travel in my life these days. Dinner was with my parents and [personal profile] spatch and came from Szechuan's Dumpling, who thanks to my being literally the last customer in and out of the restaurant threw in an order from earlier in the evening that no one had ever come to collect, i.e. free crab rangoon and what it just occurred to me to recognize as suan la chow show made by a kitchen that wasn't Mary Chung's. I did not get anywhere near as much done with my brain as I had wanted, but I am working on thinking of it as recharge rather than failure. I am not acclimated to unemployment. Tomorrow I plan nonetheless not to move very much.

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
In my previous post, Lyra and Will cut a doorway out of the land of the dead so the dead can rejoin the living world and joyfully dissolve. They also accidentally killed God. Has Lyra fulfilled the prophecy that the fate of the entire multiverse hinges upon her actions?

Nope! The actual fulfillment of the prophecy comes when… drumroll please… Lyra and Will fall in love!

I cannot express how much I hated this development as a child. Not only did I generally hate romance in books, but I had pegged Pullman in my mind as “one of the good ones,” an author of complex and interesting children’s books that did NOT involve romance. So I felt incredibly betrayed when Will and Lyra not only fell in love, but this romance with the central linchpin the story.

Since I knew it was coming this time, I couldn’t feel betrayed by it in the same way, but I still think it’s just silly that this is the fulfillment of the prophecy. Whatever you may think theologically about letting the dead out of the land of the dead or killing God, you have to admit that these are both momentous and prophecy-worthy actions. A couple of pubertal kids falling in love? This is happening in five thousand middle schools as I type. Why should it have gigantic multiversal consequences when Will and Lyra do it?

Pullman offers no explanation. I think we’re just supposed to accept that it’s so because Lyra is the most special girl in the world, and listen. I agree that Lyra is the most special girl in the world. It makes total sense to me that character after character becomes willing to die for her within about fifteen minutes of their first meeting. [personal profile] littlerhymes and I started to call this “getting Lyra-brained” because it happens so often, and I too am completely Lyra-brained.

But I am not so very Lyra-brained that it makes sense to me that Lyra falling in love would have cosmic consequences not just for her own world but for the entire multiverse, especially given that, let’s face it, Will is not the most special boy in the world. Pullman can tell me as many times as he wants that Will is such a fierce warrior that Serafina Pekkala can’t meet his daemon’s eyes, but at the end of the day, Will is just some guy. Sorry Will. It’s not his fault that he’s boring, but he is in fact just boring.

However, even though I hated Will and Lyra getting together, I also hated that they get torn apart more or less immediately thereafter. It turns out that gateways between worlds drain the Dust out of worlds (Dust, by the way, turns out to be stuff of conscious thought, and we’re going to return to this in a final post), and because the gateway out of the land of the dead has to remain open, it’s impossible to keep a doorway open for Will and Lyra to visit each other. And also they can’t decide to live together in just one world because if you live outside of your own world, you sicken and die in about ten years. Sorry! Those are the rules!

If Pullman had established these rules earlier, then okay MAYBE, but he basically pulls them out of his ass in this book to ensure this tragic end, especially the bit about “there can only be one doorway.” Really? Really? There isn’t enough Dust in the whole multiverse to keep two doors open? You couldn’t keep a second doorway open for the boy and the girl who LITERALLY SAVED THE MULTIVERSE?

Also, for a series that is about rebelling against Authority, the characters are awfully quick to buckle down and renounce happiness when an authority figure tells them to do so. Will and Lyra, have you considered saying “Fuck you” to Xaphania when she tells you a second door is out of the question?

Distant as a northern star

Oct. 19th, 2025 10:05 pm
sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
[personal profile] sovay
The oldest gravestone still extant in the Ancient Cemetery in Yarmouth dates back to 1698, but I did not encounter it as I photographed a small selection of winged death's heads and lichen. Afterward I went back to the salt marsh where my camera with unnecessary aptness apparently died.

Wood and whisky, time and tar. )

Judah Thacher d. 1775 had a rather bland angel at the top of his gravestone, but some unusual stars and curlicues down the sides and above all both fancy lettering and the best memento mori I saw in the entire burying ground:

Reader ſtand ſtil & Spend a Tear
Think on the duſt that Slumbers here
& When you think on yͤ State of me
Think on yͤ glaas that runs for yͤ


I just side-eye my camera taking it to heart.

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.

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