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It's a house of tricks
I am in D.C. with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
strange_selkie and darthrami and three cats and a Jack Russell terrier. One of the cats is investigating my luggage, the other one is sandpapering my hands as I type. Until six o'clock this morning, I was not sure I was going to make the trip because I spent much of last night coming down with a cement-mixer cold, but I hauled myself out of bed and onto a train, which thanks to six years of Amtrak Guest Rewards I did not have to pay for; there's some free publicity for them. No free publicity for the woman who sat behind me in the quiet car and listened to music on headphones so loud I could make out the lyrics to the songs, so that I could not sleep on the train; I read Mary Doria Russell's Dreamers of the Day (2008) and a quarter of the new biography of Isaac Rosenberg and bashed my head against a poem. Selkie met me at the station. She brought mango chocolate. We met Rami at the apartment of two friends whose fifteen-month-old she was sitting; I did not get a chance to see the child in question, but said hello to the parents (who are probably on Livejournal, if someone points me in their direction) before coming home to be bounced on by the terrier before he started dashing in circles and rolling over. Apparently I can look at him so that he recognizes me as pack leader. I am sure this skill will be useful in various arenas of my life. (One of the cats, meanwhile, is contemplating drinking out of my water glass. Observe how deferential she feels toward me.) I have been awake for over twenty hours now, with three hours of sleep before that. I have remarked before that this state is what my brain recognizes as familiar, therefore normal: I really need to find a way of getting around it.
I feel ambivalently about Dreamers of the Day. It reads like two or possibly three novels spliced into one, but I think I would have preferred to read them separately. One is a novel whose protagonist is T.E. Lawrence, crossing paths with Winston Churchill and others at the Cairo Conference of 1921, poised between the shadows of what he has accomplished and what he will fail to achieve; the other is the reminiscence of a never-married teacher and librarian, Agnes Shanklin, whose seven weeks in Cairo were a love affair, an Oriental romance and a harsh jolt of self-awareness, and an encounter with the shape of the Middle East to come, even though she does not realize it until after her death; the possibly third being the fact that Agnes narrates all of this from the vantage point of an afterlife much like a slow bend of the Nile, where she has fetched up with other spirits, among them Napoleon and Saint Francis, who in life "drank from the Nile" and seem as a result bound somehow to its flow, anchored perhaps by the remembrance of the living, without even a Book of the Dead to guide them on. This fact is dropped casually into the last chapter, along with a rather didactic infodump summarizing her life and global politics up to the present day; I cannot be alone in thinking it's a terrific conceit, and not only because it enables such commentary on the current war as:
General Bonaparte has been particularly agitated lately. "Non, non, non!" he'll cry. "Imbeciles! You cannot win against an insurgency that way! Mon Dieu! Doesn't anyone study the Peninsular War anymore?"
"This is going to be a military blunder as catastrophic as your invasion of Russia," George [McClellan] predicted.
You can imagine how well that went over with Napoleon. Things have been pretty tense since then.
The problem is that once she leaves her native Ohio, where the first third of the novel brings her from birth to middle age and her mother's death, what Agnes primarily does is provide a limited third-person view onto the Cairo Conference and the famous personalities that attended it; I am genuinely not sure what her interaction with them adds, except layers of historical irony. Winston Churchill does not come off particularly well. Lawrence does, but with fewer complications than my admittedly limited knowledge of his life—yes, I know Peter O'Toole is not the historical record—led me to expect. I cannot tell whether Agnes is meant to be a reliable narrator or one whose own biases must be winnowed from the text like the prevailing geopolitical assumptions of 1921, which in hindsight of 2008 are a desk to the head. She claims the dead are clear-sighted. I have my doubts, but I worry that I am not supposed to. So I do not recommend against the book, but I'm curious for other opinions: am I missing the point? Has someone already written a novel about T.E. Lawrence? And why does Churchill's painting get such a bad rap?
My brain still thinks it should be awake. A cat is sprawled across both my wrists, kneading my lap and generally doing her best to distract me from the keyboard. I'm going to shower.
strange_selkie and darthrami and three cats and a Jack Russell terrier. One of the cats is investigating my luggage, the other one is sandpapering my hands as I type. Until six o'clock this morning, I was not sure I was going to make the trip because I spent much of last night coming down with a cement-mixer cold, but I hauled myself out of bed and onto a train, which thanks to six years of Amtrak Guest Rewards I did not have to pay for; there's some free publicity for them. No free publicity for the woman who sat behind me in the quiet car and listened to music on headphones so loud I could make out the lyrics to the songs, so that I could not sleep on the train; I read Mary Doria Russell's Dreamers of the Day (2008) and a quarter of the new biography of Isaac Rosenberg and bashed my head against a poem. Selkie met me at the station. She brought mango chocolate. We met Rami at the apartment of two friends whose fifteen-month-old she was sitting; I did not get a chance to see the child in question, but said hello to the parents (who are probably on Livejournal, if someone points me in their direction) before coming home to be bounced on by the terrier before he started dashing in circles and rolling over. Apparently I can look at him so that he recognizes me as pack leader. I am sure this skill will be useful in various arenas of my life. (One of the cats, meanwhile, is contemplating drinking out of my water glass. Observe how deferential she feels toward me.) I have been awake for over twenty hours now, with three hours of sleep before that. I have remarked before that this state is what my brain recognizes as familiar, therefore normal: I really need to find a way of getting around it.I feel ambivalently about Dreamers of the Day. It reads like two or possibly three novels spliced into one, but I think I would have preferred to read them separately. One is a novel whose protagonist is T.E. Lawrence, crossing paths with Winston Churchill and others at the Cairo Conference of 1921, poised between the shadows of what he has accomplished and what he will fail to achieve; the other is the reminiscence of a never-married teacher and librarian, Agnes Shanklin, whose seven weeks in Cairo were a love affair, an Oriental romance and a harsh jolt of self-awareness, and an encounter with the shape of the Middle East to come, even though she does not realize it until after her death; the possibly third being the fact that Agnes narrates all of this from the vantage point of an afterlife much like a slow bend of the Nile, where she has fetched up with other spirits, among them Napoleon and Saint Francis, who in life "drank from the Nile" and seem as a result bound somehow to its flow, anchored perhaps by the remembrance of the living, without even a Book of the Dead to guide them on. This fact is dropped casually into the last chapter, along with a rather didactic infodump summarizing her life and global politics up to the present day; I cannot be alone in thinking it's a terrific conceit, and not only because it enables such commentary on the current war as:
General Bonaparte has been particularly agitated lately. "Non, non, non!" he'll cry. "Imbeciles! You cannot win against an insurgency that way! Mon Dieu! Doesn't anyone study the Peninsular War anymore?"
"This is going to be a military blunder as catastrophic as your invasion of Russia," George [McClellan] predicted.
You can imagine how well that went over with Napoleon. Things have been pretty tense since then.
The problem is that once she leaves her native Ohio, where the first third of the novel brings her from birth to middle age and her mother's death, what Agnes primarily does is provide a limited third-person view onto the Cairo Conference and the famous personalities that attended it; I am genuinely not sure what her interaction with them adds, except layers of historical irony. Winston Churchill does not come off particularly well. Lawrence does, but with fewer complications than my admittedly limited knowledge of his life—yes, I know Peter O'Toole is not the historical record—led me to expect. I cannot tell whether Agnes is meant to be a reliable narrator or one whose own biases must be winnowed from the text like the prevailing geopolitical assumptions of 1921, which in hindsight of 2008 are a desk to the head. She claims the dead are clear-sighted. I have my doubts, but I worry that I am not supposed to. So I do not recommend against the book, but I'm curious for other opinions: am I missing the point? Has someone already written a novel about T.E. Lawrence? And why does Churchill's painting get such a bad rap?
My brain still thinks it should be awake. A cat is sprawled across both my wrists, kneading my lap and generally doing her best to distract me from the keyboard. I'm going to shower.
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I'm sorry to hear about the loud-music-listening person on the train, about your cold, and about your lack of sleep. I hope you find sleep and feel better soon, and that you have a wonderful time in DC.
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My experience of Jack Russell terriers is limited, but I grew up with three cats.
I hope you find sleep and feel better soon, and that you have a wonderful time in DC.
So far, so good. I think today we're hitting a museum.
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We had a cat and a schnauzer when I was just a bit laddie--the cat died when I was maybe eight, and the schnauzer when I was eleven. Got a Jack Russell (out of our horsetrainer's dog) that next summer. He made it to thirteen or fourteen, and a year or so later we adopted the late beloved Marti, who would've been the dog I had when first I met you, and who was also a Jack Russell. We adopted Minnie last summer, and she just went three a week ago today, this being Saturday.
We've never had a cat since that first one, but I'm fond of them. There were always barn cats about when I was a boy. I'd like to have a cat or two, but never seem to be in a position to--I don't think Minnie would be happy with another small furry being in the house, right now.
So far, so good. I think today we're hitting a museum.
Excellent. Have fun!
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Nine
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And then
Except for the headbanger.
It wasn't even punk! I think it was very loud contemporary pop. I don't get it.
Next time, tell the conductor; that's what they're paid for.
Will do. The car didn't prohibit headphones, so I wasn't sure I had grounds to complain . . .
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The quiet car decrees: no music, no phones. That's the whole point of it. I am ticked that the conductor didn't speak to her. I've seen people politely told to switch it off or move. She may not have noticed the signs.
Nine
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Eventually! And when I woke up, there was newly baked pastry and a cat who had missed me all night!
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> waves at you from across town<
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Hey!
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XD
That's where I live ... I didn't realize that you would be in the area!
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I wasn't sure myself until yesterday morning. I didn't realize I should have warned people in case they were local!
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No worries - my dance card is pretty full and I imagine yours is as well.
Welcome to the area!
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From your three quoted lines, I can't buy that the dead are clear sighted.
The first line reminds me of the one in The Princess Bride about winning a land war in Asia. If the author's hoping for that resonance, for humor, then that's good, but otherwise maybe a little embarrassing?
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I don't think so. It was not the kind of historical fiction that wildly namedrops, so it did not, thank God, come off like Forrest Gump's tour of the Middle East; I think the intention was an ordinary person's perspective glancing off events whose ultimate results no one, not even the people who thought themselves the most well-informed at the time, could fully have predicted, but I think first that since the narrator's interlude in Cairo is not a turning point in her life—"It's funny, isn't it, how you can be so different when you're away from home?"—merely its most colorful and vividly remembered period, the more historical and the more fictional strands never feel joined by anything more than a coincidence of the author's desire, and second that the narrative frame, by which the narrator has access to all the hindsight of the present day, actually undercuts the power of these overlays of history, because not only do we know how it all turned out, this fact is heavily underlined for us in the closing statements. And it is not a bad novel. The style is fluent and visually detailed, if not particularly of the 1920's, the characters are sharply drawn, I had none of the complaints about language that kept me from loving A Thread of Grace as much as one of its protagonists deserved. I enjoyed Dreamers of the Day. But I would have liked it to be up to the depth and grip of its ambitions, even if that meant two novels instead of one. Or another author writing it.
If the author's hoping for that resonance, for humor, then that's good, but otherwise maybe a little embarrassing?
I think definitely humor. But again, if you're going to throw the ghosts of Napoleon and Saint Francis and at least one Ptolemy into the mélange, do more with them! There's a whole strange novel there. Navigate the river while negotiating the currents of memory it brings, the land you passed through once in life and keep returning to in death, in dreams, while gods you never believed in walk up and down the banks and those who might once have worshipped them are shades you cannot touch, as once you disdained to speak to them, the dark-skinned extras in your private film: tell me that story. I know it's not the one Mary Doria Russell wanted to write. But it tantalizes me.
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...though now that I think about it, I can see the connection: you thought the world was one way when you were alive, and it turns out, from the vantage point of death, to have been different; you imagined certain deities to be fictional and thought you knew what afterlife would be like, and you turn out to have been wrong about that too.
(There's a line in one of Laurie Anderson's songs where she says "Oh boy. Wrong again." Jumps to mind here.)
As for the writer not quite being up to the challenge, wow, yes, I think that can happen. I ask myself sometimes, what do I (and you can replace "I" with "anyone" and adjust verbs accordingly, because I wonder what other people decide on this point, too...) do if the story I want to tell is one I'm not up to telling. How does one gain the power to write the story? Do you write other things, write around it, until you figure out how? But what if you never get there? Or do you struggle to write it, and maybe do a poor job? And if you do that, can you try again?
People answer those questions in lots of different ways, I realize.
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I think those implications may be there in the last chapter, but I would have liked them to be more the novel and less the last-thought dressing. Maybe you should write it.
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It is not the world's most flexible system of accruing travel points, but it enables me to visit D.C. and back for free: I won't kick it out of bed for eating crackers.
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...though, you know, cats usually carry their tails up high, so maybe they have nothing to worry about.
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I got it from
...though, you know, cats usually carry their tails up high, so maybe they have nothing to worry about.
Long-tailed kinkajous?