Ikh vel betn di klezmorimlekh, zey zoln zikh nit ayln

[sovay]

I am returned from the recording session of A Besere Velt with Polina Shepherd and Lorin Sklamberg. We had four songs on which we had been working all for lack of a better word semester: they will be part of an album coming out next year, along with songs from the London Yiddish Choir, the London Russian Choir, the Brighton & Hove Russian Choir, the Brighton & Hove Yiddish Choir Chutzpah, and Lorin and Polina themselves. It was tiring and fun and the last time I was part of a choral recording was twenty years ago; this time was remarkably like, including the part where I ate a sandwich halfway through. I got to tell Lorin afterward that his music had formed an important part of my writing. I got told to audition for a local theater company by someone connected with it, had a nice drive back from Acton with skygiants and genarti who described to me a gonzo item of eighteenth-century French science fiction, and came home to discover that sara had sent me a CD of Brivele's A Little Letter (2018), rounding off the theme of the day. It made up significantly for spending my entire morning at urgent care, trying to get someone to pay attention to my sinuses. You can keep T. Witt making lebkuchen, selkie.

Comments

[choco_frosh]

Boo sinuses! Yay music! What IS the gonzo item of eighteenth-century French science fiction?

[sovay]

Boo sinuses! Yay music!

Thank you!

What IS the gonzo item of eighteenth-century French science fiction?

I don't know its name! It is a journey through the center of the earth, from pole to pole, apparently predicated on a theory of the circulation of ocean currents that claimed they just poured in an unending cataract through the planet from north to south, which is how the narrator and his whole whaling crew who are just doing their thing around Greenland end up in not yet Antarctica where there are tons of islands and bears and strange birds and sea cows and man-eating flying fish. According to genarti, it had an extraordinarily dry title, no plot structure to speak of, and an ending like the narrator was just about to launch into an entire other book full of early eighteenth-century sf tropes, but also some amazing images, like the gulf in the sea at the top of the world where a great cloud of birds is always flying. Its language is sufficiently weird and antiquated as to make translation a complicated prospect. I still want her to do it.

[genarti]

It was published in 1723, and is entitled Relation d'un voyage du Pole Arctique au Pole Antarctique par le centre du monde: Avec la Description de ce perilleux Passage, & des choses merveilleuses & étonnantes qu'on a découvertes sous le Pole Antarctique. AVEC FIGURES. (Account of a Voyage from the Arctic Pole to the Antarctic Pole through the Center of the World: With Description of this perilous Passage, & of the astonishing and marvelous things discovered beneath the Antarctic Pole, WITH FIGURES, although I have not attempted to replicate the, uh, not exactly modern spelling in my title translation.) The 'figures' are not really illustrations in the usual sense; they're occasional things like, "And then we found a mysterious temple with a mysterious sigil on a plinth! I reproduce the sigil here. We never did find any people who built it, though they presumably exist around here somewhere, weird. Anyway next we found an island with weird sorta-geese on it..." sovay has accurately reproduced my description of it, which really contains all the salient points that I remember a few years later. It's an astonishing read because it's so completely divorced from all modern expectations of what a book ought to entail and what a coherent or satisfying plot should contain. Neither the narrator nor any other characters are ever named, nor given much of any personality; the focus is the gonzo weirdness of the Antarctic, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the real world's Antarctic, including being consistently cold. I said, "What?!?" to the page on a frequent basis. It's available on Project Gutenberg here and probably just barely novella length, although only in early 18th century French, with no translation available that I'm aware of. I found it when innocently looking for free sci fi to practice my French with, some years ago. Someday I may yet attempt a translation, if only a few other people can experience the gonzo-ness of it for themselves, but it would be a long and challenging process and is definitely a "maybe someday" thing for the moment.

[sovay]

AVEC FIGURES.

This seems presented as such a selling point that I am extra entertained it's just the occasional reproduction of a weird thing the protagonists failed to investigate.

Someday I may yet attempt a translation, if only a few other people can experience the gonzo-ness of it for themselves, but it would be a long and challenging process and is definitely a "maybe someday" thing for the moment.

I will bear this statement in mind and bug you about your own fiction instead.

[genarti]

This seems presented as such a selling point that I am extra entertained it's just the occasional reproduction of a weird thing the protagonists failed to investigate.

Right? Sometimes they're rather clunkily stylized depictions of weird bushes, but... I do wish it were more accessible to more of my friends so I could shove it at them, though.

(Also, apologies for that last paragraph being all one massive paragraph! It was originally three, but then I edited it on my phone to add in the publication year and DW immediately ate the paragraph breaks and refused to put them back in.)

[sovay]

I do wish it were more accessible to more of my friends so I could shove it at them, though.

I feel like somebody would write Yuletide fic for it.

(Also, apologies for that last paragraph being all one massive paragraph! It was originally three, but then I edited it on my phone to add in the publication year and DW immediately ate the paragraph breaks and refused to put them back in.)

I regularly write paragraphs of that length like they're normal, so please, do not worry!