You look like a good way to break my heart

[sovay]

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 sigerson, sen_no_ongaku, schreibergasse, and other people whose livejournal names do not begin with S.

Comments

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

Someone did write a terrific take on Loki as a rogue scientist/magician: Roger Zelazny in Jack of Shadows. My favorite of his over many better known works.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

1. A most excellent celebration of prime + prime.

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

[alankria.livejournal.com]

Also, if no one has written a modern Loki as a chaos theorist, someone should get right on that, please.

I want to read this as well.

Also, oooh Byatt dealing with myth. This is at least worth a look.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

So you slept enough to dream: that's good.

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.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

That is exactly the song I saved to one of my Hexslinger playlists. Strangely.;)

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).

[rose-lemberg.livejournal.com]

How can one not like Loki? He's a halfblood with all kinds of halfblood issues, plus the fabulous gender-change aspects... I do hope Lindow finishes his Loki book at one point, it's going to be so great.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

I do love Loki, but it was Odin I imprinted on first and hardest. Finding a god of war and wisdom and cunning and self-sacrifice for knowledge and power meant a lot to me when I was young.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

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.

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.

[larryhammer]

Wait wait wait -- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead? HELLO WHAT?

---L.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Happy belated birthday to your brother, and I hope you've all of ye had a lovely time hanging out.

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?

[justice_turtle]

I've never heard of anyone who came away from the D'Aulaires desperately wanting to be Thor.

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...)