And those who can remember when the night sky was a tapestry
In the afternoon there was eggnog, in the evening there was roast beef, and after dinner with my parents and my husbands and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nineweaving, there was plum pudding with an extremely suitable amount of brandy on fire.
At the end of a battering year, it was a small and a nice Christmas. There was thin frozen snow on the ground. In addition to the traditional and necessary socks and a joint gift withspatch of wooden kitchen utensils to replace our archaically cracked spoons, I seem to have ended up with a considerable stack of books including Robert Macfarlane's Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places (2020), Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020), and the third edition of Oakes Plimpton's Robbins Farm Park, Arlington, Massachusetts: A Local History from the Revolutionary War to the Present (1995/2007) with addenda as late as 2014 pasted into the endpapers by hand, a partly oral history I'd had no idea anyone had ever conducted of a place I have known for sledding and star-watching and the setting off of model rockets since childhood. The moon was a ice-white crescent at 18 °F. After everything, as we were driving home, I saw the unmistakable flare of a shooting star to the northwest, a stray shot of the Ursids perhaps after all.
nineweaving, there was plum pudding with an extremely suitable amount of brandy on fire.
At the end of a battering year, it was a small and a nice Christmas. There was thin frozen snow on the ground. In addition to the traditional and necessary socks and a joint gift with
spatch of wooden kitchen utensils to replace our archaically cracked spoons, I seem to have ended up with a considerable stack of books including Robert Macfarlane's Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places (2020), Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020), and the third edition of Oakes Plimpton's Robbins Farm Park, Arlington, Massachusetts: A Local History from the Revolutionary War to the Present (1995/2007) with addenda as late as 2014 pasted into the endpapers by hand, a partly oral history I'd had no idea anyone had ever conducted of a place I have known for sledding and star-watching and the setting off of model rockets since childhood. The moon was a ice-white crescent at 18 °F. After everything, as we were driving home, I saw the unmistakable flare of a shooting star to the northwest, a stray shot of the Ursids perhaps after all.
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Thank you so much! I still bet yours was great.
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"Look – five forms moving fast through the forests to Ness.
"Look – here it comes, its bones are plastic, it builds itself from pallet slat & bottle-top, rises from sift, is lashed & trussed with fishing line. It is drift: it has cuttlefish nails & sea-poppy horns, it breathes in rain & it breathes out rust.
"Look – here he comes, his bones are willow & he sings in birds. He rises in marsh, slips forwards by ripple & shiver. Between his tree-ribs birds flutter, then swoop ahead to settle, sing, quiver. His head is a raven's, his eyes are wrens' nests. By day from his throat fly finch & fire-crest & in anger he speaks only in swifts.
"Look – here she comes, her skin is lichen & her flesh is moss & her bones are fungi, she breathes in spores & she moves by hyphae. She is a rock-breaker, a tree-speaker, a place-shaper, a world-maker.
"Look – here they come, their eyes are hagstones & their words are shingle. They rise on the shore, rock-cored, flint beings, scattering chert to signal their passage, sending stones through time to foretell their seeings.
"Look – here as comes, who exists only as likeness, moves as mist & also as metal, cannot be grasped or forced, is the strongest & strangest & youngest & oldest of all the five, slipping through trees, past houses, rolled by the wind at years each minute – rolled by the wind as if through time & in it.
"it, he, she, they, as
"All five know where they must go &
with what they must grapple &
where they must go is to the Green Chapel"
FINE TECHNICALLY NEW YEAR'S BUT SERIOUSLY HAPPY CHRISTMAS.
(It is exceedingly weird to read someone with whom I have no other connection but I can tell he read Robert Holdstock just as imprintingly as Susan Cooper and Alan Garner and I'd put money down on Heaney and Hopkins from this passage alone. I want to see what happens when he reads Greer.)
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Has any convention ever attempted to invite him? I understand he gets filed under nature writing and that poetry in terms of genre remains weirdly siloed, but I can't believe he's never attracted the attention of the Mythopoeic Awards. Ness (2019) is deeply site-specific and also not mimetic or interested in being so. It reminds me of George Mackay Brown, especially his mythologically nuclear-anxious novel Greenvoe (1972). The other thing made me almost instantly think of was Penda's Fen (1974), which Macfarlane is too dug into old weird political Britain not to have encountered. I repeat as you know, he co-adapted Susan Cooper. It can't be that nobody's tried.
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I have made inquiries. Will let you know if anything pans out.
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This. They should have a mythic non-fiction award.
I'm not in Macfarlane's league.
Nine
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Ness isn't even non-fiction! That was what flipped the switch on wondering why I'd never seen him put up for any genre recognition on top of his stack of travel literature prizes. I mean the man just wrote an opera called The World Tree.
I'm not in Macfarlane's league.
That's your Tiny Wittgenstein.
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Maybe yours and mine could go off to Norway together with a cross-cut saw.
Nine
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We went for a walk on Christmas night and I swear the fat crescent moon got lower and brighter as we walked, like it was a boat trying to swing in close to offer us a lift.
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The aurora this year was heavy on currants and sultanas and delicious.
The Mermaid of Black Conch sounds **great**--might have to read that myself. (Robert Macfarlane too, but it's his rivers one that's on my list first.) And a partly oral, hyperlocal history? Wonderful!
People found incredibly thoughtful books! The Robbins Farm Park in particular amazed me. At the moment I am between the Macfarlane and the fenland weird.
Not to mention being blessed by a shooting star.
A grace note.
We went for a walk on Christmas night and I swear the fat crescent moon got lower and brighter as we walked, like it was a boat trying to swing in close to offer us a lift.
I don't doubt it. In Hirsh Glik's "Dos Zangl," it's a זעגלשיף—a ship with sails.
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Thank you! I hope yours was likewise.
Thoughts
Re: Thoughts
Lovely! I am glad your sky still supports it. We saw the aurora last year from that same star-watching park.
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Thank you! It is then carried to the table, flaming, in state, while everyone else sings "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" in a sort of intramural wassail.
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Your holiday seems to have qualified as a Jólabókaflóð. Well done!
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And the alcohol burned off before the pudding itself caught, too, which is the other important thing.
Your holiday seems to have qualified as a Jólabókaflóð. Well done!
Thank you! Presents within my family have always been primarily books. It's pretty much what I gave people in return. (I could not resist a bumper sticker for my mother that proclaimed that as long as we have cats, everything is all right. I sandwiched it between her books.)
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I love the way you've caught that afternoon and night in amber. I can take it out and turn in my mind.
*hugs*
Nine
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Thank you! And light the brandy.
*hugs*
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So cool!!!
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It makes me very happy!
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You should totally upload a pudding icon!
(Thank you!)