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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 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.
Re: Loki, Dynamicist
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.
Re: Loki, Dynamicist
(The orbital dynamicists I know are not like Loki. Which is a Good Thing™, really).
Re: Loki, Dynamicist
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.
Re: Loki, Dynamicist
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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.