When you're raised on the river, washed in the blood
This is a logical train of thought. It starts with Pamela F. Service's Tomorrow's Magic—the recent omnibus reprint of Winter of Magic's Return (1985) and Tomorrow's Magic (1987)—which I picked up from the bookstore this afternoon and have just begun to re-read. The last time I read the books was age eleven, at the latest; I had remembered the post-apocalyptic Arthuriana, but completely forgotten that it takes place in Wales. This reminds me again that between the Prydain Chronicles, The Dark Is Rising, The Crystal Cave, The Owl Service, the Mushroom Planet books, and Howl's Moving Castle, it's probably some kind of miracle I ever realized that Wales was not in fact synonymous with the otherworld. Time out for a fragmentary, tangential recollection of the dream I had last night, which contained Merlin and Nimue (and someone had stolen my face), which zigzags back to wondering whether magical talent / sensitivity in novels and stories usually is ethnically tied: not to pick on Peter S. Beagle, Julie Tanikawa's ability to summon the goddess Kannon in The Folk of the Air; whether that's orientalism or merely a reasonable expectation that a god will listen most attentively to its traditionally affiliated kin-group; e.g., there are not many goyishe golem stories. I am too tired to draw up a proper list in my head (either for or against) and decide to stare at my bookshelves tomorrow. Nonetheless, the sentence that still resolves at the end of this contemplation is: I totally resent my genetic inability to sing golems into being. It's a good thing I like my brain.
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Wales isn't as exotic as you probably think. It's very peculiar for me when I meet Americans who think it is the Otherworld and are very surprised to find it's a real modern place with politics and industry and unemployment and more people speaking Gujerati than Welsh.
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I crashed before I read more than another chapter, but I remember liking them. There's a third one now, Yesterday's Magic, which I have not read.
It's very peculiar for me when I meet Americans who think it is the Otherworld and are very surprised to find it's a real modern place with politics and industry and unemployment and more people speaking Gujerati than Welsh.
Maybe they will read your not-Industrial Landscape of Elfland (I don't know what title it settled on), and the shock will not be so great.
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