Everything we do tonight is wrong, wrong, wrong

[sovay]

From kraada, a meme. I will be out of town for the weekend and potentially AWOI (absent without internet), so my replies may take a few days, but—

Comment and I will:

1. Tell you why I added you to my friends list and/or why I keep you there.

2. Associate you with something. A song, a color, a work of art, a character in a play, a piece of fruit. SOMETHING.

3. Tell you something I like about you.

4. Tell you a memory I have of you/us.

5. Associate you with a character from a book or a film.

6. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you. (Or else I'll just ask a random question. I reserve that right.)

7. Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.

8. In return, you must spread this disease in your LJ.

Comments

[sovay]

1. I convinced you to get a livejournal, so it would have been fairly shabby of me not to read it. But also you wrote a book that was autumn in almost all the ways that are important to me.

2. The color that comes with winter twilight, the luminous smoke-blue that fills the sky down into the streets and clings to the edges of things, branches, house-eaves, streetlights, so that you expect to breathe it in with the cold: there is an incredible depth behind that color, and it takes up space.

3. Your apartment is what branch libraries want to be when they grow up.

4. We were once accidentally locked inside an ornamental garden at Harvard.

5. Doctor Dianus Shaachen, from Tanith Lee's Faces Under Water.

6. Do you see any of your characters as avatars of yourself?

7. The one with your illustration of the tinker.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

1. But also you wrote a book that was autumn in almost all the ways that are important to me.

The book did its work then. I'm glad.

2. The color that comes with winter twilight...

Heavens. That's one of the loveliest things anyone's ever said to me.

3. Your apartment is what branch libraries want to be when they grow up.

At best a shard of one. There are chasms in it, huge gaps in my holdings. You wouldn't know there'd been an Enlightenment. An aspiring child could not read up on Economics or Engineering. And that's just the Es.

4. We were once accidentally locked inside an ornamental garden at Harvard.

If they ever do the movie...

5. Doctor Dianus Shaachen, from Tanith Lee's Faces Under Water.

All I can find is one review from amazon.ca:

"Humor and odd bits of truth are provided by Furian's friend/mentor/irritant Dianus Shaachen, an aging doctor who dabbles in alchemy and other mystical arts, dotes on his pet magpie, loves to be cryptic, and may actually know something of use to Furian."

Tell me more.

6. Do you see any of your characters as avatars of yourself?

From within me? Not as such. Though some, poor souls, bear aspects of myself; and all of them share my habits of metaphor and voice. I can't do inarticulate.

7. The one with your illustration of the tinker.

Well, it's not an icon as such, but I'm fond of that drawing.

Nine

[sovay]

All I can find is one review from amazon.ca
Tell me more.

Faces Under Water is the first book in Tanith Lee's recent Secret Books of Venus, a quartet set in a Venice which is, like the Paradys-Paris of her earlier Secret Books of Paradys, just alternate enough to allow her to play with the feel of history without having to worry about names and dates. There is a loose elemental theme, which manifests primarily in the first two books, and a similarly loose arc that only becomes visible in the last book; the first two are my favorites, and Faces Under Water especially. It takes place in what seems to be the early eighteenth century, one year at Carnival. The protagonist, who calls himself Furian Furiano, has run away from his family's wealth to live out a peculiar penance in the slums of the city Venus, drinking when he would rather be sober, sleeping with whores when he would rather be alone, and fishing up bodies from the canals for the aforementioned Doctor Shaachen, who runs a free clinic and studies anatomy from the murdered and the drowned and is popularly rumored to be over two hundred years old, "having sold his soul to Lucefero for knowledge. Probably he was sixty." He is obsessive, distracted, dramatic, cagey in ways that exasperate Furian and so genuinely private that it is not until two-thirds of the way through the book that his first name is mentioned, or the fact that he's Jewish. Through the wings of his magpie, he is associated with the color that permeates the narrative, blue. When he practices alchemy, his patron is the goddess Diana. And while Furian and the woman with whom he becomes infatuated, the blue-eyed, mask-faced Eurydiche, are legitimately at the center of Faces Under Water, the last corner of the plot turns on the nature of Shaachen's conjurings, whether he is only the trumpery doctor of the commedia, or sometimes a magician. He is not at all decorous and he has most of the best lines in the book.

Well, it's not an icon as such, but I'm fond of that drawing.

Yes. And I would like to see it as an icon.