sovay: (Psholtii: in a bad mood)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2008-06-25 02:23 am

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.

Answering the Last Question (Okay, Trying to Answer)

[identity profile] cucumberseed.livejournal.com 2008-06-26 04:33 am (UTC)(link)
I'm up to my eyes in the world that Esther and Ayelish share, so my thoughts on this are colored by those experiences.

Interact with it from without, possibly. The hero faces a heritage, but that heritage belongs to someone else. Granted, this is mostly the bus that mighty whitey uses to roll into town, but this is the principle behind the Blue Vervain ballads; pruning the tragedy out of the family tree with murder, using blood to wash up after blood.

Reject it, since it's technically an interaction. Okay, that's a cop out.

One thing I'm running into with PSwC is that Esther's heritage is as old as her parents. The Coyles are sly bastards and the Kapshaws are latter-day Sawney Beans, but those aspects aren't nearly so relevant as what her parents did to make her the way she is, and that responsibility is shared by seven others.

Granted, just because it's done a lot doesn't mean it shouldn't. What distressed me was not that I was doing it, but that I was doing it without knowing what I was doing. Heritage is a damned interesting thing. Knowing your own is important, I think (I envy people with a clear line back). Figuring out why your family is the way they are, why you are the way you are... or your characters, that's good stuff.

On the other hand, the thing that sprang first to mind was the travails of the virgin-born Anakin Skywalker from the prequel trilogies, a painful squandering among painful squanderings. Between that and spending too long reading blogs that keep tabs on the grotesqueries of hate groups and racists, it makes me wary of heritage, and feeling like I've stepped in the intellectual bear trap again.

I will read those books you mentioned. Soon.

Cannot promise anything on a death metal story, but it does feed into a cheesy, secret writer goal of mine.

[identity profile] cucumberseed.livejournal.com 2008-06-26 02:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh no, I didn't think you were; you could probably remove issues of heritage from myth, but I think it would be a bloody operation. I think I was afraid of giving you the impression that I was somehow sneering at what is a legitimate and useful trope. That said, I'm also really interested in how you subvert it as well. To a certain extent, it is what it is, embrace or reject, it remains the same... unless someone had the means of retroactively altering their own heritage.

Hoom...

The midi-chlorians! They burns us!

A tiny part of my brain has been taken over by this mad little gnome who works day and night to make those movies suck less. He's made it through most of Phantom Menace, but when he looked at Clones I think he just started crying.

Midgard Serpent, or something with mad metal skillz

See I had this dream where I was looking at an advance copy of a novel I wrote, entitled Jukebox Hero with the cover art being a person with a long coat and guitar, in sillhouette, jumping between two buildings, against a midnight blue sky.

I wish I knew what it was about. It sounds deliciously cheesy.

[identity profile] cucumberseed.livejournal.com 2008-06-26 06:06 pm (UTC)(link)
Come on. This is Omar Sharif. I've just seen you and Stephen Boyd play a love scene that gave Attack of the Clones a run for its money, which I didn't think was physically possible. You'd throw over Omar Sharif for a man who can be out-acted by a toaster? I despair of humanity.

Oh dear. That sounds dreadful, though the rest of the movie sounds awesome.

I have vague memories of I Wish That I Had Duck Feet, and lots of dreams in which I get to alter my shape a little, but it never goes back exactly the way it came. I have to wonder if my dream self resembles Clayface by now.

The retroactive heritage change struck me as a sort of Yekl (sp?) transformation. In that book the main character keeps saying he is various and sundry different ways that are demonstrably untrue. A recurring line about "my people do/are X" that changes as the character changes came up while I was thinking of it.

Your dreams have the best publisher.

I wish I had gotten a chance to peek inside. I want to know what that book was about.

Yekl

[identity profile] cucumberseed.livejournal.com 2008-06-26 06:18 pm (UTC)(link)
The very same. Read it in college. It was good.

Write it and find out?

Oh, it's on the queue. Definitely on the queue.