sovay | 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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What gets me is what to do if you really don't particularly care for your ethnic heritage, whereas you have a fascination with some other heritage.

I've never particularly cared for my Italian heritage, I think because I see a cultural line back to the Romans, and I don't care for the Romans much. The Renaissance is interesting, I guess--and

sovay's musings about an alternative Venice has made me see more potential in that area. But I've always been more interested in the Scottish stuff I inherited from my mother--and then in places and cultures I have no genetic connection to, like Japan or India or Mongolia, etc.

I'm grateful to you and to traditional folk music for making me discover U.S. history as a place to look for stories. I never used to care for U.S. history--an aversion born of too much of it in grade school, I think--so I'm very glad to have it now in the yes!interesting! category.

Tell me about it. My name is Norwegian. The rest of me is a big bastard question mark (literally in some lines). The problem with having Nordic as your only identifiable heritage is that it gets abused by some embarrassingly miserable, wicked folk. It makes me deeply ambivalent.

When you're raised on the river, washed in the blood

Re: sorry if this double or triple posts

Re: sorry if this double or triple posts