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You look like a good way to break my heart
1. Yesterday was my brother's twenty-sixth birthday. We watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead (2009) and grilled all the things.
2. I dreamed last night of lying in bed with someone who was a patchwork androgyne of two lovers of mine, with both their memories. It took me some while on waking to realize this fact; in the dream I had mostly noticed the presence of each by turns, except for the scars.
3. A.S. Byatt on Norse myth and her upcoming novel:
As a child I had always sympathised with Loki, because he was a clever outsider. When I came to write this tale I realised that Loki was interested in chaos—his stories contain flames and waterfalls, the formless things inside which chaos theorists perceive order inside disorder. He is interested in the order in destruction and the destruction in order. If I were writing an allegory he would be the detached scientific intelligence which could either save the earth or contribute to its rapid disintegration. As it is, the world ends because neither the all-too-human gods, with their armies and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker know how to save it.
I still cannot tell whether she is going to have written a book I like or whether I will want to throw it across the room, but I am coming to the conclusion that everyone who reads Norse myth as a child imprints on Loki; at least, I've never heard of anyone who came away from the D'Aulaires desperately wanting to be Thor. (I liked Skaði, who loved mountain forests and winter and hunting with the bow, but the bit where she couldn't stand to live by the sea confused me.) Also, if no one has written a modern Loki as a chaos theorist, someone should get right on that, please. He would wear a lab coat for the affectation of it, but the glasses would be real: they could be used to burn.
Off to hang out with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sigerson, sen_no_ongaku, schreibergasse, and other people whose livejournal names do not begin with S.
2. I dreamed last night of lying in bed with someone who was a patchwork androgyne of two lovers of mine, with both their memories. It took me some while on waking to realize this fact; in the dream I had mostly noticed the presence of each by turns, except for the scars.
3. A.S. Byatt on Norse myth and her upcoming novel:
As a child I had always sympathised with Loki, because he was a clever outsider. When I came to write this tale I realised that Loki was interested in chaos—his stories contain flames and waterfalls, the formless things inside which chaos theorists perceive order inside disorder. He is interested in the order in destruction and the destruction in order. If I were writing an allegory he would be the detached scientific intelligence which could either save the earth or contribute to its rapid disintegration. As it is, the world ends because neither the all-too-human gods, with their armies and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker know how to save it.
I still cannot tell whether she is going to have written a book I like or whether I will want to throw it across the room, but I am coming to the conclusion that everyone who reads Norse myth as a child imprints on Loki; at least, I've never heard of anyone who came away from the D'Aulaires desperately wanting to be Thor. (I liked Skaði, who loved mountain forests and winter and hunting with the bow, but the bit where she couldn't stand to live by the sea confused me.) Also, if no one has written a modern Loki as a chaos theorist, someone should get right on that, please. He would wear a lab coat for the affectation of it, but the glasses would be real: they could be used to burn.
Off to hang out with
sigerson, sen_no_ongaku, schreibergasse, and other people whose livejournal names do not begin with S.
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I'll look for it—I've never read that one. Thank you!
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2. Astonishing dream.
3. I wonder what books of Norse myth Byatt read as a child? I thought the D'Aulaires were sempiternal, but they only came out in 1967.
Nine
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It was very ordinary in the dream. I remember a lot more about the darkness and the trees outside the window, the kind of northern-hotel look of the apartments where I was visiting them. It was raining, as all the best nights when you curl up in bed.
I wonder what books of Norse myth Byatt read as a child?
The back-cover text for Ragnarök references Asgard and the Gods, so that might have been it.
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I want to read this as well.
Also, oooh Byatt dealing with myth. This is at least worth a look.
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Have you read her Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye?
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That was the very first book of hers I read: I picked it up in a used book store because of "The Story of the Eldest Princess," which I re-read just this afternoon in Jack Zipes' The Outspoken Princess and the Gentle Knight. I would re-read the rest of the collection now that I've been reminded of it, but I think it's in a box.
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Agh. I'll see what I can do.
This is at least worth a look.
I have at least enjoyed everything I've read of hers except for The Matisse Stories and Possession, which everyone tells me I should try again; I adore Angels & Insects and Elementals. Based on the latter, I could trust her with the fire and ice of Ragnarök.
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Loki, Dynamicist
incite the end of all scattered planets, fireflung into frost:
this rime that rims the outer worlds
owes all care to all my computation; the more bodies I add the better
though always it lacks neatly-nailed resolution.
The bounds to every problem last a star's lifetime.
Once in quickflicker kindness I might be inclined to exchange my eccentricity,
be governed in slow tides:
gravity's rule, stretched branch-wide, encompasses all my arguments -
No. Better, to watch all the worlds burn
sent slow into the sun
there is such glory in every grain of darkness.
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sent slow into the sun
there is such glory in every grain of darkness.
. . . Would you be willing to send this to me at Strange Horizons? Holy blap.
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(The orbital dynamicists I know are not like Loki. Which is a Good Thing™, really).
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Thank you.
(The orbital dynamicists I know are not like Loki. Which is a Good Thing™, really).
Goodbye, planet . . .
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You should have e-mail from my editorial address.
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I can recommend Angels & Insects (1992) if you are interested in either nineteenth-century natural history or the appropriation of women's voices in the literature of the time; I am unreasoningly fond of Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998), which contains both realist stories and fantasies and things in between; I am very ambivalent about The Children's Book (2009), which I liked very much on first read and which diminished each time I went back or learned something else about E. Nesbit, to the point that I think it should either have been a straight historical novel or a totally fictional invention, because the numbers are not quite filed off enough to avoid sounding like a judgment on the real-life writer. I may also be the one other person on the planet who liked The Biographer's Tale (2000), which starts out like Possession redux and then turns into something a lot more elusive and Nabokovian.
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I dreamed too, and for once not about cabbages or something equally mundane.
I dreamed about ice falling from the sky in the shape of keys, and of jumping from a height into a snowdrift, and of being in a market street, with lots of stalls with cloth roofs over them, just at dawn or maybe still in nighttime, because the light was strange, and thinking, "I should write about this on livejournal."
Mission accomplished.
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That is lovely.
and of jumping from a height into a snowdrift, and of being in a market street, with lots of stalls with cloth roofs over them, just at dawn or maybe still in nighttime, because the light was strange
Story?
and thinking, "I should write about this on livejournal."
Hee.
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Chaos theorist Loki is perfect, and glorious. Also: How great that you too liked Skade! She was my favourite female Jotun, and the first instance that caused me to note how all male Jotuns are described as ugly and all female Jotuns as pretty (except for Angrboda on one side, and Loki on the other. Which cannot possibly be an accident).
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Glad you liked it. It's stuck in my head!
Chaos theorist Loki is perfect, and glorious.
If you get to it before I do . . .
Also: How great that you too liked Skade!
She was awesome! Huntress, badass, got paid her father's blood-price in a constellation and a husband with shapely legs (although not Baldr, which would have been interesting) . . . No one seems to write much about her, either.
how all male Jotuns are described as ugly and all female Jotuns as pretty (except for Angrboda on one side, and Loki on the other. Which cannot possibly be an accident).
I hadn't thought of that. Brain. Thank you.
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Oh, yeah.
I do hope Lindow finishes his Loki book at one point, it's going to be so great.
I have heard nothing of this! He's writing a full-scale study of Loki? Want.
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Okay, that's cool.
How do you feel about Athene?
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I had a dream very like this about 8 years ago, where I woke and realized that while the dream lover had been one person, zie very clearly had someone else's scars.
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This was clearly two people and a little science fiction. Just in the dream, why would it be unusual?
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---L.
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Early in the film, a young actor on his way to rehearse his newly landed, off-off-off-Broadway leading role is abruptly pulled aside by a homeless woman who wants his autograph, only to receive this cautionary advice: "Just remember—if you're ever in a play about Hamlet and vampires, call the number on the side of this pen. You are in great danger."
Later on, he calls the number on the side of the pen.
There are ways in which I find it impossible to tell whether Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead is a good movie, except that I think it was inevitable from the moment the writer-director thought of the title: the plot is a classic secret history/literary conspiracy treated with headbanging absurdity and then played totally slacker-indie straight. The results are very funny, if a little like watching a comedy made out of Verfremdungseffekt; I'm just not sure if the film should have maybe stopped one layer back. (Oddly, I think the same combination would made a brilliant short novel.) My brother and his wife really seemed to enjoy it, though, which was the point of the exercise. And I'd definitely check out whatever the director did next.
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---L.
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I'm glad you're having interestingish dreams again.
I like the idea of Loki in a lab coat. Perhaps you're the one to write about him?
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I think it was a good birthday. There was also homemade cheesecake.
I like the idea of Loki in a lab coat. Perhaps you're the one to write about him?
Thank you. Maybe.
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I always wanted to play Thor as a kid, because he was The Hero and because I was a relatively uncomplicated child, but I don't know that we had D'Aulaire's Norse myths; I know we had their Greek ones. (I did always want to be Odysseus, but was rather uncomfortably aware that my brain doesn't actually do the twisty trickster thing.)
My mental image of Loki is this Doré-ish engraving of him bound, with the serpent and Sigyn and the basin. I do remember trying to mentally engineer a system that would work better than holding up a basin, which probably says a lot about me. ^_^
(As I got a little older, my affections switched to Heimdall, because the steadfast guardian thing is kind of my jam. Although, trying to double-check my memory, I'm not sure if Wikipedia is just being unhelpful or if I've conflated other castle-guardian stories into my mental image of Heimdall...)
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That's great! Thank you for being a data point.
My mental image of Loki is this Doré-ish engraving of him bound, with the serpent and Sigyn and the basin. I do remember trying to mentally engineer a system that would work better than holding up a basin, which probably says a lot about me.
What did you come up with?
(As I got a little older, my affections switched to Heimdall, because the steadfast guardian thing is kind of my jam. Although, trying to double-check my memory, I'm not sure if Wikipedia is just being unhelpful or if I've conflated other castle-guardian stories into my mental image of Heimdall...)
Steadfast guardian sounds like Heimdall to me.
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Well, I was three, so nothing immensely clever. I think I got as far as switching off two smaller basins, but got tangled up trying to make that setup automatic and give Sigyn's arms a rest, rather than realizing that what I really wanted for a permanent system was a funnel. ^_^ (These days, I'm more dubious that the Aesir would let a permanent structure be built, because the dripping venom was presumably an important part of the punishment, but I'm also a little fuzzy on why Sigyn would be allowed to help out, in that case. But me and my ex-Catholic feelings on propitiatory suffering are a whole other essay. ;S)