If you swam to the edge of things where the earth meets the sky

[sovay]

1. My copy of the limited edition of Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One) arrived in the mail right before I had to leave for Plymouth. It is a pretty, pretty book. I imagine the still-available trade paperback is also quite nice.

2. I dreamed of watching the livecast of a fictional play with some influence from The Camomile Lawn and mid-twentieth-century travel writers. It was being staged outdoors, at a kind of garden party. All I can remember is the line: "She asked for a knife, but they gave her paper and ink instead."

3. I have only two real complaints about A.S. Byatt's Ragnarok (2011). One is that more could have been made of the frame-story, the "thin child" who discovers Wägner's Asgard and the Gods while evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz and so understands the war through the lens of Norse myth, imagining her airman father in North Africa ("with his flaming hair in a flaming black plane") as part of Odin's Wild Hunt, puzzling over the relationship between the Germans who told these stories she loves and the Germans everyone is fighting and hates. She may be a version of Byatt's own childhood, but I believe her as a bright, mistrustful child, disappearing into books except when she finds it impossible to believe them (Sunday school is a no-go). I would have read a novel about her, not just through her eyes. The second is that I'm really not sure the author's extended afterword needed to be included in the book: it directs too much of the reader's attention away from the myth and toward the reasons for Byatt's treatment of it, which are interesting, but I'd rather have had the last words in my head be her last words of a fallen cosmos, "the bright black world . . . at the end of things." On the other hand, she cares about Loki and she writes him well, which is not true of most authors who work with this mythology; and she devotes an attention to his monstrous children that I haven't seen elsewhere, like an entire sequence of chapters from the perspective of Jörmungandr and one of the better evocations of Hel. The writing is some of Byatt's most graceful and scientific, which is not a contradiction. I found myself a little sorry she'd confined herself mostly to the creation and destruction of the Nine Worlds, because I would love to have seen how she handled some of the stories in between. But it is a novel of Norse myth (that isn't by Diana Wynne Jones) that I don't want to kill with fire, so I am pleased, and I feel a lot better about her now than I did after The Children's Book (2009).

(My third complaint is probably not fair. Byatt associates the trickster god with Ariel: "Odin was Power, was in power. Ungraspable Loki flamed amazement and pleased himself." Result: I resent never seeing Karl Johnson as Loki. I can't expect A.S. Byatt to fix that. But damn.)

4. lesser_celery and I have nearly finished the first season of Millennium (1996–1999). We have met the enemy and she is Lucy Butler.

5. Walking night roads in Plymouth with schreibergasse, I saw the Milky Way, and a shooting star.

I need to sleep. I have to see doctors in the morning.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Wägner's Asgard and the Gods while evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz and so understands the war through the lens of Norse myth

Have I mentioned that I would really like to see your reaction to David Gurr's The Ring Master ?

[sovay]

Have I mentioned that I would really like to see your reaction to David Gurr's The Ring Master?

Never. What is it?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

It is a hefty historical novel about the inner circle of the Third Reich and the Wagner family from the point of view of a classic English upper-class twit for whom these people are basically his social circle, with a sister who is a superstar soprano at Bayreuth, mapping everything onto a complicated layering of Wagnerian imagery and peculiar structural stuff in which our narrator has aspects both of Parsifal and Siegmund, all told with him looking back from Spandau Prison where he is captive as Rudolf-Hess-doppelganger. It is somewhat uneven and slow to start, and could probably have done without the some of bits where Carl Gustav Jung drifts by to provide exegesis, but much of it is very impressive and it is gloriously ambitious; there's really not much nominally mainstream that is that mythopoeic out there.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

On your recommendation, I'm reading The Hurricane Party and really enjoying it.

[sovay]

On your recommendation, I'm reading The Hurricane Party and really enjoying it.

I'm very glad!

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Lucy Butler is nobody's friend.

[sovay]

Lucy Butler is nobody's friend.

I realized some time after I'd gone to bed that I should have written, "We have met the Adversary . . ."

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

2nd season is probably my favorite (right up to the end, which I did not like that much). I particularly like the construction of the Owls and the Roosters.

[sovay]

I particularly like the construction of the Owls and the Roosters.

They sound like people of yours already.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

I use it a lot (and explicitly) in organizing background characters for stories and games - people whose actions I need to predict but whose stories are not being told just then. Owls and Roosters, Crows and Swans, Sparrows and Geese... I think I used it explicitly when I was messing around with the goblin game.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link.

I'm rather fond of Loki's monstrous offspring. *g*

[sovay]

I'm rather fond of Loki's monstrous offspring.

You will like this retelling.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I did my own weird little treatment of them in the Edda of Burdens books, and I kind of love finding other people's games played--especially now that mine is finished.

[sovay]

I did my own weird little treatment of them in the Edda of Burdens books

I'll check it out!

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I hope it leadeth not to eye-sporking! I kinda took a left turn at the Voluspa and kept running.

[sovay]

I kinda took a left turn at the Voluspa and kept running.

"Second völva to the right and straight on till chaos . . ."

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Hee!

Nine

[sovay]

I actually special-ordered the UK edition of CB when it first came out, that's how desperate I was for new Byatt -- altho then I heard apparently it heavily rides her hobby-horse of Writing Is Bad For Children And Other Living Things, up with which I just cannot put, and also apparently has a problematic portrayal of E. Nesbit.

My initial reactions to The Children's Book were positive. It has a wonderful solidity of art and its world and the German master-puppeteer Anselm Stern is still my favorite character. Then I read some about E. Nesbit and the Fabians and it became clear that the novel should either have been a historical about its real-life models or it should have been entirely imaginary, because as it is it comes off as a sort of disapproving roman à clef—in folding Nesbit's open marriage into the same fictional family as the shadow side of children's literature (Kipling's Jack, the lives and deaths of the Llwelyn Davies boys), Byatt appears to draw the conclusion that being a polyamorous artist is an unforgivable selfishness that will destroy your children's lives and manages to do so in such a fashion that Olive Wellwood, so open-minded and well-intended, lovingly appropriating her favorite son's nursery dreams for her best-selling play, actually comes off worse than the incestuous mad potter who is basically Eric Gill with the numbers filed off. There's a daemonic inspiration in fucking your daughters, but it's a different thing altogether if your art kills your son? Very problematic.

[sovay]

(Christ, long comment FROM HELL, sorry about that)

No apologies necessary for conversation!

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

"She asked for a knife, but they gave her paper and ink instead."

And she knew how to use them.

Nine

[sovay]

And she knew how to use them.

I associated the character with Gráinne O'Malley, who I never thought of as much of a writer, but maybe I need to reassess.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

Now I REALLY want to read this. NOW. I guess I have to buy it first, huh?

[sovay]

I guess I have to buy it first, huh?

It's probably faster than finding an illegal download.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

1.

I'm glad for this.

2.

Sounds an interesting play. I like that line--I can see why it stayed with you.

3.

Nice reviewlet. I'm glad you don't want to kill the book with fire. I might think about it as a birthday gift for my mother.

5.

Sounds lovely. I hope ye had a good time.

I also hope you've had sleep and that all has gone/is going well enough.

[sovay]

I'm glad you don't want to kill the book with fire. I might think about it as a birthday gift for my mother.

If she likes Norse myth or A.S. Byatt, I think it would be worth trying.

I'm not sleeping at all, but it would be nice.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

If she likes Norse myth or A.S. Byatt, I think it would be worth trying.

She does, so. Thanks for the advice.

I'm not sleeping at all, but it would be nice.

I'm sorry. I hope things improve soon.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Thank you for mentioning Ragnarok; I think I would read it for "her last words of a fallen cosmos" alone.

- Ash

[sovay]

Thank you for mentioning Ragnarok; I think I would read it for "her last words of a fallen cosmos" alone.

You're very welcome. Enjoy!