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potiturque sua puer Iphis Ianthe
And sometimes the universe just gives you a present, like finding Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy (2007) at Raven Used Books, where ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 and I were browsing this afternoon. It's one of the Canongate Myths, the third I've read and right now the one that makes me sheerly happiest—I'm still not convinced of the need for a straight-up evil corporation in a novel as playful and dancingly genderqueer as this one, but it's retelling Iphis and Ianthe in present-day Inverness and I have no difficulty believing in Robin and Anthea at all.
We woke up. It was light. It was half past two in the morning. We got up and opened the window; we leaned together on the sill and watched the world wake up, and as the birds fought to be heard above one another before all the usual noise of the day set in to drown them out she told me the story of Iphis.
A long time ago on the island of Crete a woman was pregnant and when the time came close to her giving birth her husband, a good man, came to her and said, if it's a boy we'll keep him, but if it's a girl we can't. We can't afford a girl, she'll have to be put to death, I'm so sorry, but it's just the way things are. So the woman went to the temple and prayed to the goddess Isis, who miraculously appeared before her. You've been true to me so I'll be true to you, the goddess said. Bring the child up regardless of what it is and I promise you everything will be fine. So the child was born and it was a girl. The mother brought her up secretly as a boy, calling her Iphis, which was a name both boys and girls could be called. And Iphis went to school and was educated with her friend Ianthe, the beautiful daughter of a fine family, and Iphis and Ianthe grew up looking into one another's eyes. Love touched their innocent hearts simultaneously and wounded them both, and they were betrothed. As the wedding day approached and the whole of Crete prepared for the celebration, Iphis got more and more worried about how, being a girl like Ianthe, she would ever be able to please her bride, whom she so loved. She worried that she herself would never really enjoy her bride the way she longed to. She complained bitterly to the gods and goddesses about it. On the night before the wedding, Iphis's mother went back to the temple and asked the goddess to help. As she left the empty temple its walls shook, its doors trembled, Iphis's jaw lengthened, her stride lengthened, her ribcage widened and broadened, her chest flattened, and the next day, the wedding day, dawned bright and clear and there was rejoicing all over the island of Crete as the boy Iphis gained his own Ianthe.
Though, actually, the telling of it went much more like this:
A long time ago, on the island of Crete, Robin said behind me, into my ear—
I've been there! We went there! I said. We had a holiday there when we were kids. We spent a lot of it at the hospital in Heraklion, actually, because our dad went to hire a motorbike to impress this woman in a motorbike hire shop, and before he'd hired one he rode it a few yards round a corner to get a feel for it, and fell off it and scraped the skin off half the side of his body.
A long time ago, Robin said, long before motorbike hire, long before motors, long before bikes, long before you, long before me, back before the great tsunami that flattened most of northern Crete and drowned most of the Minoan cities, which, by the way, was probably the incident responsible for the creation of the myth about the lost city of Atlantis—
That's very interesting, I said.
It is, she said. There's pumice stone fifty feet up on dry land in parts of Crete, and cow-bones all mixed up with sea-creature remains, far too high for any other geological explanation—
(I have had that conversation. I called uprushthatspeaks and read it to them. They agreed.)
This is a myth I care about; I wrote it a poem in 2006 and hardly anyone does anything with it. (Seriously, I cannot think of another novelist; and someone must have beaten me to the poem, but I don't know who.) The best of this book is as erudite and funny, shape-changing, and sexy as Robin and Anthea in bed like Odysseus and Penelope reunited, telling themselves to one another, telling stories. When I opened it at random in the store to see whether it could actually live up to its premise, I got a sex scene and a discussion of Greek pronunciation in Scottish English and I knew I had a winner. The worst of it leans too hard on the monolithic laddishness of the water-bottling corporation where Anthea's stressedly eager-to-please sister Imogen has been working her way up through the ranks as an advertising consultant and the only upside to Anthea's brief, disastrous employment was meeting Robin, first glimpsed spray-painting protest graffiti all over Pure's front gates in calligraphy handwriting and full Highland dress ("She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life"); it's not a revelation like Anthea's love for Robin that global monopolies are a bad thing, or that narratives can be used to silence and reduce as well as liberate and transform. Note, however, that I'm still fizzing about the book hours later—I don't think this slight conventionality hurt it very much. Did I mention the uncredited cameo by Orpheus?
And it doesn't hurt that I got to hang out with Fleur-de-Lis, whom I hadn't seen since the Fourth of July. And eat a lamb saag roll-up at Chutney's in the Garage, which we discovered while nebulously debating dinner. And get rained on, which was rather a constant of the day. I am still awake, but I do not have a migraine. I like when I have days that don't suck. In short, yay.
fleurdelis28 and I were browsing this afternoon. It's one of the Canongate Myths, the third I've read and right now the one that makes me sheerly happiest—I'm still not convinced of the need for a straight-up evil corporation in a novel as playful and dancingly genderqueer as this one, but it's retelling Iphis and Ianthe in present-day Inverness and I have no difficulty believing in Robin and Anthea at all.We woke up. It was light. It was half past two in the morning. We got up and opened the window; we leaned together on the sill and watched the world wake up, and as the birds fought to be heard above one another before all the usual noise of the day set in to drown them out she told me the story of Iphis.
A long time ago on the island of Crete a woman was pregnant and when the time came close to her giving birth her husband, a good man, came to her and said, if it's a boy we'll keep him, but if it's a girl we can't. We can't afford a girl, she'll have to be put to death, I'm so sorry, but it's just the way things are. So the woman went to the temple and prayed to the goddess Isis, who miraculously appeared before her. You've been true to me so I'll be true to you, the goddess said. Bring the child up regardless of what it is and I promise you everything will be fine. So the child was born and it was a girl. The mother brought her up secretly as a boy, calling her Iphis, which was a name both boys and girls could be called. And Iphis went to school and was educated with her friend Ianthe, the beautiful daughter of a fine family, and Iphis and Ianthe grew up looking into one another's eyes. Love touched their innocent hearts simultaneously and wounded them both, and they were betrothed. As the wedding day approached and the whole of Crete prepared for the celebration, Iphis got more and more worried about how, being a girl like Ianthe, she would ever be able to please her bride, whom she so loved. She worried that she herself would never really enjoy her bride the way she longed to. She complained bitterly to the gods and goddesses about it. On the night before the wedding, Iphis's mother went back to the temple and asked the goddess to help. As she left the empty temple its walls shook, its doors trembled, Iphis's jaw lengthened, her stride lengthened, her ribcage widened and broadened, her chest flattened, and the next day, the wedding day, dawned bright and clear and there was rejoicing all over the island of Crete as the boy Iphis gained his own Ianthe.
Though, actually, the telling of it went much more like this:
A long time ago, on the island of Crete, Robin said behind me, into my ear—
I've been there! We went there! I said. We had a holiday there when we were kids. We spent a lot of it at the hospital in Heraklion, actually, because our dad went to hire a motorbike to impress this woman in a motorbike hire shop, and before he'd hired one he rode it a few yards round a corner to get a feel for it, and fell off it and scraped the skin off half the side of his body.
A long time ago, Robin said, long before motorbike hire, long before motors, long before bikes, long before you, long before me, back before the great tsunami that flattened most of northern Crete and drowned most of the Minoan cities, which, by the way, was probably the incident responsible for the creation of the myth about the lost city of Atlantis—
That's very interesting, I said.
It is, she said. There's pumice stone fifty feet up on dry land in parts of Crete, and cow-bones all mixed up with sea-creature remains, far too high for any other geological explanation—
(I have had that conversation. I called up
rushthatspeaks and read it to them. They agreed.)This is a myth I care about; I wrote it a poem in 2006 and hardly anyone does anything with it. (Seriously, I cannot think of another novelist; and someone must have beaten me to the poem, but I don't know who.) The best of this book is as erudite and funny, shape-changing, and sexy as Robin and Anthea in bed like Odysseus and Penelope reunited, telling themselves to one another, telling stories. When I opened it at random in the store to see whether it could actually live up to its premise, I got a sex scene and a discussion of Greek pronunciation in Scottish English and I knew I had a winner. The worst of it leans too hard on the monolithic laddishness of the water-bottling corporation where Anthea's stressedly eager-to-please sister Imogen has been working her way up through the ranks as an advertising consultant and the only upside to Anthea's brief, disastrous employment was meeting Robin, first glimpsed spray-painting protest graffiti all over Pure's front gates in calligraphy handwriting and full Highland dress ("She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life"); it's not a revelation like Anthea's love for Robin that global monopolies are a bad thing, or that narratives can be used to silence and reduce as well as liberate and transform. Note, however, that I'm still fizzing about the book hours later—I don't think this slight conventionality hurt it very much. Did I mention the uncredited cameo by Orpheus?
And it doesn't hurt that I got to hang out with Fleur-de-Lis, whom I hadn't seen since the Fourth of July. And eat a lamb saag roll-up at Chutney's in the Garage, which we discovered while nebulously debating dinner. And get rained on, which was rather a constant of the day. I am still awake, but I do not have a migraine. I like when I have days that don't suck. In short, yay.
no subject
If you can find a copy, snag it. I'm very curious to see what the rest of Smith's fiction is like now.
(And now I want lamb saag.)
(I can't argue with that.)
no subject
I've read Hotel World and The Accidental. I liked the latter better - it had interesting characters and events that were well-served by the stream-of-consciousness style. In Hotel World, I felt she over-emphasized literary technique at the expense of plot and character, like making a beautiful bottle and filling it with flat champagne.