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It's quite an elaborate scheme, the fine art of poisoning
My health seems to have uncrashed. Knock wood, sacrifice to Asklepios, etc. Continuing this weekend's celebration, I met ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving for chocolate tonight and afterward watched A Room with a View (1986), which had both the luminous composition of an oil painting and characters who took up three-dimensional space (and Denholm Elliott, of whom I only wish there was a statue on Old Campus . . .). Sirenia #30 arrived in my inbox a little before midnight; there is a perfect Burne-Jones as illustration for "The Mirror of Venus" and "Rappaccini's Dragon" is as good as its title promised. If you haven't subscribed already, it may not be too late. I am going to bed, to finish reading M. John Harrison's Light. It has no lack of obsessions itself. Fine by me.
nineweaving for chocolate tonight and afterward watched A Room with a View (1986), which had both the luminous composition of an oil painting and characters who took up three-dimensional space (and Denholm Elliott, of whom I only wish there was a statue on Old Campus . . .). Sirenia #30 arrived in my inbox a little before midnight; there is a perfect Burne-Jones as illustration for "The Mirror of Venus" and "Rappaccini's Dragon" is as good as its title promised. If you haven't subscribed already, it may not be too late. I am going to bed, to finish reading M. John Harrison's Light. It has no lack of obsessions itself. Fine by me.
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Oh man, "Rappacini's Dragon" was *everything* it should be, both the plot and the writing. The WRITING!! Thank GOD people still write like that. It gives me such hope and joy. I'm so embarrassed to say that that's the first thing I've ever read by Caitlin Kiernan, but oh my, what a great thing to start with.
On a selfish note, I recognized all the poisonous plants. Yay, unholy interest in poison.
Very much looking forward to reading yours next!
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I'm so glad! Tell her!
Very much looking forward to reading yours next!
Hee. I don't think it's possible to follow such an act of poisons and paintings, but I hope you enjoy . . .
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I loved: black dandelion-clock of hair I was always cutting fruitlessly short, so it stood out like a magnetic demonstration
and ...took her gift from me as gravely as a commission--oh, I could see it. And she's quite you, quite you :-)
and he stepped off the docks at Ostia Naye with a dead man's papers in his pocket, a kerchief of coin so debased it nearly smeared off his hands like butter
And I love, love, love all the place names, even though I don't understand most of them.
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This makes me extremely happy. I have never felt qualified to write historical or allohistorical fiction; I have to do a week of research to feel comfortable with five hundred words. Then all of a sudden this world rolls together out of nowhere and now it's spinning off side stories—I am so glad to know they work! Thank you!
And she's quite you, quite you
Heh. Usually I feel like the odd artist out . . .
And I love, love, love all the place names, even though I don't understand most of them.
I can explain most of them, if you want. The one whose rationale I cannot remember is the Cátil River, which I suppose is fair; place-names sometimes evolve like that.
names
Yes, I'm really this ignorant (*sigh*)--but I no longer am too proud to admit it.
I got the reference to van Rijn, but how about Lykeio Raskrizje (sorry, don't know how to make my computer make a hacek)? Or all the coal in Minuits--was that an old name for Newcastle? I like the idea of Punic as a language, too--and Knossian for what's spoken on Crete? So cool...
Last but not least... will you share the quote from Vergil? (Google's Latin-English translator being, last I checked, nonexistent...)
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As I said, that's the one name I can't remember where it came from. The east coast of the northern Hesperides—the farthest westward lands, even beyond the Atlantic; in our history, the Americas—was settled primarily by the Venetians and the Dutch, so most of the place-names in Ostia Naye derive either from those languages, from Latin or Greek, or some combination thereof. The accent in Cátil makes me think I got it from Vèneto, but I don't know. I think it is our Hudson River, but Ostia Naye is not New York City, so I may need to sit down with a map. More than one bridge spans the Cátil, although the Pónte Venier, named for Sebastiano Venier, a late sixteenth-century Doge of Venice, is one of half a dozen built across the smaller, tidal river, the Cesca; Pharos Hill is a promontory out on the far curve of the harbor, where the main lighthouse stands.
The classical Ostia, now referred to as Ostia Antica, was Rome's harbor—since silted up and turned inland, which makes for strange tourism—and a major city in its own right, so it seemed an appropriate namesake for the oldest (European) colonial city in Hesperis Boreale. Its qualifier should properly be Nieuw, not Naye, which is more like Yiddish, but the city's name was really the first piece of the world to show up, so I kept it. As for the street names, Roman camps and cities were laid out along perpedicular axes, the north-south (main) street called the cardo and the east-west (secondary) the decumanus, with the forum usually placed at the intersection of the two; Ostia Naye is planned out on a grid, so Sètecardo might be translatable as Seventh Avenue and Caletànta as 80th Street. They are both reasonably major thoroughfares, although in very different parts of the city. The Paradijs, from the original Persian-into-Greek sense of paradise, a garden, is a park that used to be a forum and is still the first location for speeches, demonstrations, soapbox lunacies: it is filled with trees and monuments. Some of these are statues of people who should not exist at all in this timeline, but I have allowed myself some of the half-alternate leeway of historical figures, provided that I don't write them in all over the place; hence the statue of Giovanni da Verrazzano, likewise the Niccolò, the oldest (again, European) university on the continent, whose name is a nod to Machiavelli. Even if he was Florentine.
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(No worries. Online, I steal them from the Wikipedia article on diacritics.) Raskrižje is Croatian for "crossroads," Lykeio from the Greek Λύκειον and then the term lyceum to describe a secondary school. It's something like an international academy of the arts.
Or all the coal in Minuits--was that an old name for Newcastle?
No; it's somewhere equivalent to Pennsylvania, in the Coal Region. Peter Minuit was Director-General of New Netherland, Dutch territory that extended from Delaware to Connecticut in the seventeenth century. He shouldn't exist either, but I want some of these associations, so I need the names.
Any other names? Parencza is a tinkering around of Poreč, a two-thousand-year-old coastal city in Istria, which, in our history, belonged to Venice from the mid-thirteenth century until the late eighteenth, when la Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta folded up under the Turks and then Napoleon. Before that happened, the Arsenàl was the shipyard of Venice, unparalleled in its assembly-line speed and productivity. And in Japanese, Tōkai means "Eastern Sea" and nowadays refers to the Sea of Japan, but I have extended the sense to the entire Pacific, since our name originates with Magellan. "Atlantic" goes back to Herodotos, however, so I can keep it.
I like the idea of Punic as a language, too--
Punic is a completely historical language: extinct, Semitic, a dialect of Phoenician spoken in Carthage; it survived into the time of Saint Augustine, and I bear him something of a grudge for never putting together a dictionary. It's known from names and inscriptions, and I believe it's decently understood. There are also texts from Pyrgi, Italy that are bilingual in Punic and Etruscan, and this is one of the coolest things ever.
and Knossian for what's spoken on Crete?
Correct! Technically it's me fudging a name for the language of ancient Crete, whose writing system was the still untranslated Linear A; in this history, however, it's been decrypted, well-studied, and can be learned by students of philology or ancient history at the Niccolò and most liberal arts universities worth the name.
Last but not least... will you share the quote from Vergil?
As spoken by Neptune to the winds sent by Aeolus (at Juno's command) to drown the Trojan refugees:
Make haste, clear off and tell this to your king:
not to him was power over the sea and savage trident
given by lot, but to me.
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And i like that there are bilingual Punic and Etruscan texts in existence. What a rich world we have.
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Gods are like that. The ones in the Aeneid—as in anything by Euripides—may be all kinds of damaging, cruel or contemptuous or incomprehensible, but they are not simply us writ large; they are not human.
And i like that there are bilingual Punic and Etruscan texts in existence. What a rich world we have.
Yes. It's full of odd interconnections. I don't even have to make this stuff up!
(Another name. The Etruscans called themselves the Rasenna, syncopated to Raśna; hence Thesanth's complaint.)
Tôkai I did recognize but wasn't sure if you meant the Japanese
Yeah. I need to work out more of Asia; I know China settled much of the western coast of the Hesperides, but the widely accepted name for the ocean between their continents is Japanese, and Korea is not so isolationist as it was in our timeline. Oh, well, more excuse to read fascinatingly weird history . . .
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Interesting. Knossian makes as good a name for it as any. Is the term Pelagian used in this universe at all?
There are also texts from Pyrgi, Italy that are bilingual in Punic and Etruscan, and this is one of the coolest things ever.
Very much.
There's a website out there by a bloke who thinks that Etruscan is a cryptolect invented by the priests of an Italic-speaking people. It strikes me as a pretty daffy hypothesis--he lost me when he referred to the Italic priests' "cousins, the Celtic Druids, who invented their own secret language, Ogham"*--but it's an interesting example of fringe scholarship.
*I wish there were a punctuation mark to indicate "paraphrase." Or at least that we had different words to help distinguish the two; something like "quoth" to mean "he said 'I blah blah blah'" and "said" to mean "he said he blah blah blah."
My Bad
Pelasgian, I meant. Sorry about that.
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I know the feeling. I'm intimidated by both as well.
My Young Adult Vampire Challenge Piece seems to be set in an alternate history--I thought it was just set in the state of Shawnee (which seems to be a sort of combination of Wisconsin, Ohio, and maybe Illinois), in the sense that Sinclair Lewis set novels in Winnemac, but it seems increasingly clear that enough minor things are different that it's really an alternate of some sort. There are Girl Guides instead of Girl Scouts, and they're organised in patrols instead of troops.
Very glad you've got a world rolling out of nowhere and spinning off sidestories. I hope you get a lot of enjoyment from them.
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I bet!
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God, but he was a fine actor!
He really was!
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Excellent. Wood is knocked, and... well, I can't seem to remember what sort of sacrifices Asklepios likes, so I'd better hold off on sacrificing to him until I can be reasonably sure of not offending him.
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A rooster should be safe and satisfactory. Absolutely not snakes; they are healing.
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Thanks for the advice.
No snakes, I'll keep that in mind. Not that I'd want to sacrifice one of them, anyhow. Roosters are much noisier and more irritating.
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I'm working on another story right now. I can promise.
Thank you!