Last night I dreamed paint dripped off a white wall, brightly soaked plaster falling away in handfuls from the human form beneath, a woman's torso with tintype teeth at the ends of her wrists, veiled or decapitated by the unmarked portion of wall still solid above her shoulders. Her breasts were painted with black-lashed eyes, greasepaint or pastels. I remember them a bright, flat blue, like charms against the evil eye, but I couldn't swear. It looked like a New Wave film. Years ago, I dreamed of a woman with a pair of soft, lidded eyes at the tips of her breasts; I put the image into a story which never went anywhere. If I were a surrealist painter, I could make this a recurring motif, in different perspectives and colors and more or less emphatic or careless renderings, I'm sure someone already has. My dreams all have better plotting and visual design than anything from my waking brain.
Before then, we lit the candles for the first night of Hanukkah; the tree is settling out quietly in its corner of the living room, beside my grandmother's sculpture. I now have (and have devoured)
eegatland's The Empty Kingdom (2008), the fifth in her Arthurian-Ethiopian cycle and now swinging around again from Aksum to Britain: it made me even more impatient for The Sword Dance, as though pale red-eared hounds hadn't already. Taken as representative of its series, it also made me want to construct a paper around the works of Elizabeth E. Wein, Megan Whalen Turner, and Patricia McKillip. Again, I'm sure someone has. The trick is convincing myself that's no reason I shouldn't, too.
I saw exactly one episode of this show when I was in elementary school. For years I thought it was called Children of the Sun, from the two lines I remembered of the theme song; I had no idea it was an anime. It looks so much more spectacularly strange than that one episode suggested—Scott O'Dell! Now with sixteenth-century post-apocalyptic steampunk! Lost continents for the win!—I probably need to see it. Someday I'm going to rediscover a piece of my childhood that's less weird than I remember and I'm going to be devastated.
Before then, we lit the candles for the first night of Hanukkah; the tree is settling out quietly in its corner of the living room, beside my grandmother's sculpture. I now have (and have devoured)
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I saw exactly one episode of this show when I was in elementary school. For years I thought it was called Children of the Sun, from the two lines I remembered of the theme song; I had no idea it was an anime. It looks so much more spectacularly strange than that one episode suggested—Scott O'Dell! Now with sixteenth-century post-apocalyptic steampunk! Lost continents for the win!—I probably need to see it. Someday I'm going to rediscover a piece of my childhood that's less weird than I remember and I'm going to be devastated.