The North is the dark place

1. We made the sushi candy. Courtesy of mrbelm, I had a package of sushi, phi brought the bento box, gaudior and rushthatspeaks provided the prep space and pictures were taken on M.'s phone. There were packets of powder and small plastic implements to mix with. Some items required sculpting. The sushi looked quite like the real thing when we were done with it. The breaded look of the chicken karaage was distressingly correct. We stared at it in existential confusion. Then we ate it and that didn't help at all. Everything from the sushi kit tasted like artificial grape (except for the furikake, which tasted like pure sucrose burn), meaning the natural sticky pop of the salmon roe and the chewiness of the glutinous rice were terrifying. Everything from the bento box tasted like we don't even know, except there was citrus; Gaudior suggested grapefruit, but I'm leaning toward Lovecraftian Kumquat. At the point at which I remarked dazedly on the squishiness of the candy noodles and Saira assured me that they were exactly the texture of Japanese fast-food Italian pasta, I understood we were in the presence of something special. Also, the salmon roe. You droppered them from one liquid into the other and they looked like ikura. You could scoop them out with the little plastic spoon and mound them on top of the candy rice with a wrapping of Tootsie Roll-like candy nori and they chewed like ikura and tasted like Dimetapp. It was an extraordinary achivement of kitchen chemistry. I plan never to eat anything like it again and I am so glad we did. If pictures surface, I will post them. We'll all look poleaxed, except for M., who shrugged and said it tasted like candy as he finished the panda-headed rice ball.

2. Rush-That-Speaks was writing to me last night about English folk horror, so I wrote back about Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate (2012). I read it on the train back from New York, darkness rushing by the windows. I could get out at South Station and wait for the subway with derspatchel. At home, in bed, I would have had to reach to turn out the light. The setting is 1612, the year of the Pendle witch trials, as infamous in English history as the Salem witch trials in this country. Among other reasons, they stand out for the number of deaths that resulted (eleven of the twelve accused went to trial, one having died in prison; ten of those were hanged) and for the official publication of the proceedings, an unprecedented level of documentation for the time. Winterson draws on Thomas Potts' The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613) for the facts of the case, but the book is not a historical reconstruction. She elides characters, invents histories, strips the story down to something very stark and genuinely dark, which is not an adjective I like to use when talking about fiction. But the Daylight Gate is dusk: the leaving of the light. Liminal, marginal, things half-seen. The two rival clans of Pendle Hill are mostly women, disenfranchised and forsaken in almost every way—viciously poor, all but feral, struggling just to starve—but they would not consider themselves victims, because they know themselves to be witches. Everyone knows that Old Demdike, matriarch of the Devices at Malkin Tower, sold her soul to the Dark Gentleman. Her family would call him again to free her. There is real magic in the book, both alchemical and Devil-dealing (John Dee is a significant character in memory, Shakespeare an appropriate cameo), the latter as disgusting as rituals of desecrated graves and stitched-up poppets should be; grimy, decaying magic, with none of the mathematical rigor and mercurial unease of the alchemy that the wealthy, self-possessed Alice Nutter once studied with Dee, Edward Kelley, and the green-eyed woman named Elizabeth Southern, her lover in London so many years ago. Historically, Nutter is the perplexing one: a yeoman farmer's widow rather than a pauper or a vagrant, whose only voice in the records of the trial is her plea of not guilty, which did not save her. Winterson gives her a backstory that is perhaps a little too like a modern interpretation of an intelligent, independent woman in a time that will not permit her, except that here again the supernatural is real; Dee spoke with angels in his mirror, the Dark Gentleman once offered Alice his hand. It excuses nothing that is done to her or the Devices or all the women who were casually destroyed and it is all woven through anyway with the witchery popery popery witchery of Catholic persecution, which makes no distinction between heresy and Satanism. The Gunpowder Plot is barely seven years past. A Jesuit is hunted through the bracken as cruelly and surely as a witch-man in the shape of a hare. Everyone is afraid. Winterson writes in sharp, spare, declarative sentences, her own kind of reportage to overwrite Potts'. The effect is at once beautifully evocative in the compressed way of poetry and vague as the kind of nightmare where the eye can only focus on a detail or two and everything is wrong with it and everything is wrong in the unseen spaces between and you keep staring at the horrific thing you can see, because to look away from it is to invite everything else in. I loved the book; I recommend it; I don't say it's an easy read. It's interested me in Winterson, though. I bounced very badly off The Stone Gods (2007). If the rest of her work is more like The Daylight Gate, I'll start looking again. He did not want to step through the light into whatever lay behind the light.

3. I just learned that Erik Blegvad has died. I didn't realize how many of my childhood books he illustrated until I began thinking about his style. I remember him best for Mary Norton's Borrowers and Carol Kendall's The Gammage Cup (1959) and Jane Langton's The Fledgling (1980). I think at least one of Margery Sharp's Rescuers series. Books of children's poetry whose names I no longer remember. But all these images I associate with the stories, and some of them I treasure, and I'm sorry to learn that the person who drew them is gone.

In London, during the reign of King Charles II, there lived a necromancer. (****** These six stars are to give you time to ask what is a necromancer. Now you know, we will go on.) He lived in a little house in Cripplegate in a largish room at the top of a narrow flight of stairs. He was a very nervous man and disliked the light of day. There were two good reasons for this; I will tell you the first.
—Mary Norton, Bonfires and Broomsticks (1945)