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And when the sun comes trumpets from his red house in the east
This question is directed primarily toward frequenters of the Boston Museum of Science, but anyone with with relevant information is free to chime in: does anyone know what happened to the murals in the exhibit that the Butterfly Garden replaced in 2005? I think it was called the Sun Lab; it focused on photosynthesis and meteorology, with time for hydroponics and the greenhouse effect. One of the murals depicted the main cloud types in brushwork that would not have embarrassed N.C. Wyeth, culminating in an anvil-topped thunderhead. The other was one of the most pagan things I have ever seen in a science museum: a yellow sun-face turning greener and greener, budding out and leafing, until its rays were a cornucopia of fruit and flower. Obviously, I want to find out they were not destroyed; I like to think they were stored in the basement or some wistful employee took them home. But I have no idea. Do any of you?
Last night I watched Mongol (2007), which I need to show Viking Zen. Genuinely epic, dirt under everyone's fingernails; I completely failed to recognize Tadanobu Asano from Zatoichi (2003) and Khulan Chuluun as Börte is to watch out for. It even has shamanism and the sky-god Tengri in the form of a blue wolf. It is also one of the few movies I've seen that achieves a visceral sense of violence through means other than blood-splatter and crunching sounds—its battle scenes have the kind of physical heft and minutiae I associate with the prose of Mary Gentle and the poetry of Seamus Heaney; a first-person swordfight should be nausea-making, but instead it functions as a shift in narrative voice—and it does not show the audience everything, which unobtrusively heightens the feel of an oral tradition, in which the inlay of a sword and a coat of bride-price sable can be described in ten lines, a span of seven years compressed into a single verse. I am sorry not to have seen its steppes on a big screen.
The kitchen is in such a state of renovation that nothing remains but the floor (which may be pulled up in part tomorrow; there were three compacted layers of linoleum, as there was wallpaper under decades of paint strata on the ceiling. The former owners of our house may have been very nice people, but from upkeep they knew nothing); the dishwasher and oven are junked out on the curb, the refrigerator has been moved downstairs to the summer kitchen. There is plastic sheeting fastened up over the open wall where the archway to the kitchen used to be. It looks slightly quarantine-like, a closed ward in a hospital. I spent my morning painting new boards in the driveway, my afternoon first mowing the lawn and then raking it. I finished just as it began to thunder. I feel like a character in the corners of a Breughel painting.
Last night I watched Mongol (2007), which I need to show Viking Zen. Genuinely epic, dirt under everyone's fingernails; I completely failed to recognize Tadanobu Asano from Zatoichi (2003) and Khulan Chuluun as Börte is to watch out for. It even has shamanism and the sky-god Tengri in the form of a blue wolf. It is also one of the few movies I've seen that achieves a visceral sense of violence through means other than blood-splatter and crunching sounds—its battle scenes have the kind of physical heft and minutiae I associate with the prose of Mary Gentle and the poetry of Seamus Heaney; a first-person swordfight should be nausea-making, but instead it functions as a shift in narrative voice—and it does not show the audience everything, which unobtrusively heightens the feel of an oral tradition, in which the inlay of a sword and a coat of bride-price sable can be described in ten lines, a span of seven years compressed into a single verse. I am sorry not to have seen its steppes on a big screen.
The kitchen is in such a state of renovation that nothing remains but the floor (which may be pulled up in part tomorrow; there were three compacted layers of linoleum, as there was wallpaper under decades of paint strata on the ceiling. The former owners of our house may have been very nice people, but from upkeep they knew nothing); the dishwasher and oven are junked out on the curb, the refrigerator has been moved downstairs to the summer kitchen. There is plastic sheeting fastened up over the open wall where the archway to the kitchen used to be. It looks slightly quarantine-like, a closed ward in a hospital. I spent my morning painting new boards in the driveway, my afternoon first mowing the lawn and then raking it. I finished just as it began to thunder. I feel like a character in the corners of a Breughel painting.
no subject
She is probably best-known for Ash: A Secret History (2000), a brickstop of a novel published in the United States as the quartet A Secret History, Carthage Ascendant, The Wild Machines, and Lost Burgundy. In the present day, a medievalist working on a new biography of Ash, a fifteenth-century mercenary captain whose meteoric rise and early death—and gender—made her a semi-legendary figure at the time and a controversial one in later scholarship, begins to notice discrepancies between the manuscripts he's translating and the historical record; at first he puts them down to late medieval mythicism, like the stories that Ash was born of a lion and saints advised her on the field of battle, but then he finds that the historical record itself seems faulty; in the meantime, we are reading the narrative of Ash's life and it is looking stranger and stranger. Ash: A Secret History may be the only novel I know that covers four different genres before it finishes. Be warned that its levels of violence (as one might expect from its protagonist's profession) are quite high, but its character work, its language, and its consideration of the ways in which things like gender, culture, and history are constructed is amazing. I actually discovered her with Rats and Gargoyles (1990), a kind of alchemical fantasy set in a city with five cardinal directions, Elizabethan rats, and incarnate gods; its heroes are the scholar-soldier Valentine and her sometime lover, the stunningly untidy architect Baltazar Casaubon. I read it on a flight to Seattle and it's become a comfort book of mine.
no subject
Interesting that the biographer is finding the historical record faulty; seems like this could make for interesting reading as well. Interesting, too, that you warn of the levels of violence and then name it a comfort book. I'd love to see why. Now if only I could finish the four books I'm currently reading before taking on a fifth!
no subject
I actually meant Rats and Gargoyles, but I suppose Ash: A Secret History is, too; I have certainly returned to it enough times.
Now if only I could finish the four books I'm currently reading before taking on a fifth!
I hope you're also enjoying them!