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I write this sitting in the kitchen sink
(This post was written a little before three o'clock.)
This is strange snow. It's the first real storm of the winter, for which I am thankful, but it's peculiarly out of practice—the slightest shift in the temperature swings snow around to rain, hail to sleet, with less warning than a hawk or a handsaw. In the two hours I spent shoveling, everything from Christmas tinsel flakes to stinging seed-beads of ice to what felt like bucketsful of freezing water fell on me, occasionally within the same fifteen minutes. (And then we had a blackout, which was cold. Fortunately the power just flickered back on, because as much as I love fires, the lack of hot water is not my favorite. I had enough of that in my old apartment.) I started this post with the heavy, swirling, stuck-together flurries that pile up into drifts and snowmen. Now it's thin, dryly sifting slants that hiss on the panes. Oh, never mind, it thickened again. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised at snow locusts.
I should post about all the films I've seen recently, like Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), which was phantasmagorically weird and which I loved, or the books I'm in the middle of, like Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and Ian R. MacLeod's The Light Ages (2003), or even about the onion soup that my mother and I are making from scratch. It's Valentine's Day. She makes cards for everyone in our family out of red construction paper and white and pink foil. I had a cherry cordial chocolate for breakfast, which was a definite improvement on the ways I usually wake up. But I have to shovel the driveway again, and in any case there's no internet because it never came back with the lights and the heat. I'll fix that later. The snow is still strange.
This is strange snow. It's the first real storm of the winter, for which I am thankful, but it's peculiarly out of practice—the slightest shift in the temperature swings snow around to rain, hail to sleet, with less warning than a hawk or a handsaw. In the two hours I spent shoveling, everything from Christmas tinsel flakes to stinging seed-beads of ice to what felt like bucketsful of freezing water fell on me, occasionally within the same fifteen minutes. (And then we had a blackout, which was cold. Fortunately the power just flickered back on, because as much as I love fires, the lack of hot water is not my favorite. I had enough of that in my old apartment.) I started this post with the heavy, swirling, stuck-together flurries that pile up into drifts and snowmen. Now it's thin, dryly sifting slants that hiss on the panes. Oh, never mind, it thickened again. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised at snow locusts.
I should post about all the films I've seen recently, like Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), which was phantasmagorically weird and which I loved, or the books I'm in the middle of, like Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and Ian R. MacLeod's The Light Ages (2003), or even about the onion soup that my mother and I are making from scratch. It's Valentine's Day. She makes cards for everyone in our family out of red construction paper and white and pink foil. I had a cherry cordial chocolate for breakfast, which was a definite improvement on the ways I usually wake up. But I have to shovel the driveway again, and in any case there's no internet because it never came back with the lights and the heat. I'll fix that later. The snow is still strange.
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THIS IS LITTLE GRANULATED ICE CRYSTALS THAT LODGE IN THE SKIN OF YOUR FACE. :(
At least the HGS courtyard is all white, now!
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. . . Can you wear any of your amazing hats for protection against it?
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Sadly, hats are not protection against icy 'cleaned' surfaces. :(
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Ergh. Curl up with Gene Wolfe and recuperate.
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I'm a little less than halfway through, but so far I love it. It's steampunk as done by someone who seems to understand intimately the ways in which a supernatural Industrial Revolution might have progressed, not just the cool smoke effects, and the hints of alternate folklore and myth that underlie the radioactive nature of aether—the mystical element on which these new Ages of Industry are founded—are fascinating. The time frame slips and mixes the expected Victorian rookeries and dollymops with twentieth-century counterculture and student revolution. And in one thread of the plot, there are certain similarities to Great Expectations, which is just awesome. Unless the novel falls apart disastrously in the second half, I will gladly read its recent sequel, The House of Storms, which I discovered at Pandemonium this weekend. (I have wanted The Summer Isles ever since I saw it reviewed at Strange Horizons.) This is my first encounter with MacLeod's work. Do you like him?
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Oh, and the bear-shaman poem based on that Viking dream? I sold it to Goblin Fruit for the Fall 2007 issue. *beams*
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I think The Light Ages is closer in tone and concern to The Etched City than to Perdido Street Station, but it's very much its own novel. (And it doesn't fall apart disastrously in the second half!) I'll be curious to hear what you think of it.
Oh, and the bear-shaman poem based on that Viking dream? I sold it to Goblin Fruit for the Fall 2007 issue.
Awesome!
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*eyes to-be-read pile*
*is daunted*
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Thank you. Your daily descriptions of the city are always beautiful, so I'm glad to be able to return in kind.
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In Words of Mercury there is some follow-on to some of the unresolved issues in Between the Woods and the Water.
Fermor is my favorite travel writer. I think he's everybody's favorite really, they just don't know it. Brilliant, brilliant man. And talk about panache...
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I have not: I found Between the Woods and the Water misfiled under children’s literature in the Book Trader Café in New Haven last week and, never having read anything by Patrick Leigh Fermor before, promptly bought it. (That was a good book haul. I also left with a trade paperback of I Capture the Castle and Edith Pargeter's The Heaven Tree.) I am now inclined to read anything he's written.
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Gooood, gooood, another convert.
The difficulty is there's not very much. But those two (the walk to Constantinople) have been reprinted in unattractive but widely-distributed paperbacks and recently.
If you are inclined to firsts, Fermor is still alive therefore still affordable. The firsts are more attractive than any of the reprints thus far. The Mani and Roumeli firsts include photos by Joan which later reviewers have complained were left out of later editions.
So, go forth and seek and read:
A Time for Gifts (you will then want to reread Woods and Water)
Mani
Roumeli (You'll love these too.)
Words of Mercury
Then round up any of the small stuff you can find.
I have The Traveller's Tree, but I am an inveterate author-rationer and have been saving it. So I cannot speak firsthand for it. But Fermor is excellence personified. Note that Time to Keep Silence is about Mt Athos, not a follow-on to the Constantinople stories as such.
He has not completed the third volume, so we don't know what happened on the last half of the journey... after his wife died he had a hard time, I think.
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I actually discovered him through an article in The New Yorker in May: and then recently I found out that Powell and Pressburger had made a movie about him, which my mother has seen. This is awesome.
Then round up any of the small stuff you can find.
I will let you know what I think!
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Snow locusts are an interesting concept.
I hope the onion soup's as enjoyable as it sounds--we're having red beans and rice tonight. (Leftover red beans from last Thursday--they're better that way.)
Glad your power came back quickly, and I hope it stays around.
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I don't see why they shouldn't exist. There must be plagues in winter.
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"I never wrote fifty pages in less than three months even when I could write!"
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Now I must see this Tales of Hoffmann! Thanks for the information!
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Excelled only by a high school trip to France, where the standard breakfast was hot chocolate and croissants. That was pretty decadent.
Thanks for the information!
You're welcome! Let me know what you think of it!
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. . . How did you see only one-third of it?
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