Once you see it right, I'll take the mirror

[sovay]

I seem to have gotten into this pattern where I have a very intense few days, make some kind of short-cut, not very explanatory post about it afterward, and then the whole thing happens again. (This last one was not an emergency, like Readercon. Someone I care about was doing something very stressful. It all worked out. Everyone falls over now.) I have this pipe dream that the rest of the week will involve nothing more energy-taking than reading some books, watching some movies, seeing a very few people and then, I don't know, not doing much of anything this weekend. I am scheduled to show the original Norwegian Insomnia (1997) to lesser_celery tonight, which will be a lot of fun. I don't know why I dreamed first about seeing a massive retrospective of a nonexistent, Delvaux-like Surrealist at the Museum of Fine Arts and then about half-reading, half-enacting a loose variant on Return to Oz (1985) in a heavily Dickensian setting. I've never seen the movie; I read Joan D. Vinge's novelization sometime in elementary school and it scared the daylights out of me. rushthatspeaks has a copy and I'm not even sure how I feel about re-reading it.

I may have to re-read John Bellairs, because I did not expect to find him all over my new book of M.R. James, which I finished very happily over the weekend. There's a bit in The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb (1988) that has to be a direct shout-out to "The Tractate Middoth": that face full of cobwebs freaked me the fuck out when I was eight. There's another apparition in "Rats" that I met first in The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull (1984): a lolling scarecrow with its foot made of white bones. (Oh, hey, is that what that dream of Peter Wimsey's in Busman's Honeymoon (1937) always reminded me of. Thank you, brain. Making connections long after it would have been useful for me to know why, in high school, I found that image especially disturbing.) And then of course the general tone of antiquarianism, the curious or apparently ordinary objects invested with dread and the hauntings that are just wrong enough: "That guy at the high school wasn't alive. He was a ghost or something like that. Real live people don't have cobwebs all over their faces." ("'What sort of man?’ McLeod wriggled. 'I don't know,' he said, 'but I can tell you one thing—he was beastly thin; and he looked as if he was wet all over: and,' he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, 'I'm not at all sure that he was alive.'") It's like I had a primer for James between the ages of eight and twelve and I didn't know it. I'm wondering what else I would recognize now that, at the time, only made me want to hide the book behind its shelves and hope it never took notice of me again.

This has been a hard week on authors of my childhood: Jean Merrill, Mollie Hunter, Harry Harrison. I admit I hadn't re-read the last of these in several years, but we were just talking about the Stainless Steel Rat at my brother's birthday last Monday. Mollie Hunter gave me A Stranger Came Ashore (1975) and The Mermaid Summer (1988), two early impressions of the sea and the beautiful, dangerous things in it that played by no human rules. But as soon as I saw sdn's link on Facebook, I went downstairs and took my copy of The Pushcart War (1964) off the shelf, because I read that book like nobody's business when it was reprinted in the mid-eighties. It reminds me now of Damon Runyon; then it went straight into my mythscape of New York City, no matter what I thought or didn't about a future in which there were still pea-shooters and hit polka tunes. Jean Merrill. "By Hand."

In conclusion, The Big Lebowski (1998) is a very entertaining thing to watch in a theater full of people who shout "Shut the fuck up, Donny!" and a vanilla float made with the ginger and blackcurrant perry from Fox Barrel Cider is a great idea and I am glad I have no plans to leave the house today.

[edit] And the mail just brought me copies of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (for which I wrote the afterword) and The Yellow Book, which I am greatly looking forward to. I have an afternoon plan.

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I hope you can get something at least a little bit like your pipe-dream.

...I dreamed first about seeing a massive retrospective of a nonexistent, Delvaux-like Surrealist at the Museum of Fine Arts and then about half-reading, half-enacting a loose variant on Return to Oz (1985) in a heavily Dickensian setting.

That "half-reading*, half-enacting" thing in dreams is very strange. I'm sort of glad to know I'm not the only one who gets it.

This has been a hard week on authors of my childhood:

Mine as well. Hunter wasn't much part of my childhood, although I've a strange feeling of having read a book of hers and I'm thinking I should definitely read some now. But The Pushcart War was a huge thing in my childhood. I never saw New York City until I was twenty and my parents moved to Connecticut**, but the version with giant trucks and pushcarts and pea-shooters, that I have never entirely forgotten.

Jean Merrill. "By Hand."

Yes.

That float does sound delicious. I'm glad for the books, and I hope your afternoon plan was enjoyable.

*Or half-watching, as often happens to me.
**Dublin, Cork, London, York, San Francisco, Montréal, Québec, even Boston, all of these I saw before NYC, as I think on it. Chicago comes after, and Stockholm and Oslo, and I've still never seen Philadelphia or Glasgow or Edinburgh or Paris. For that matter, there are still places in New York City I should see, such as the place where the John Street Theatre was from 1767 until 1798, a theatre in which John O'Keeffe's The Poor Soldier and Charles Macklin's The True-Born Irishman were great favourites during the 1780s and 90s.

[sovay]

I hope you can get something at least a little bit like your pipe-dream.

So far, no, with a dentist's appointment first thing on the docket for the morning, but I am nothing if not optimistic.

Okay, I'm generally not an optimist at all, but I really insist on this one.

Or half-watching, as often happens to me.

Also with me.

Hunter wasn't much part of my childhood, although I've a strange feeling of having read a book of hers and I'm thinking I should definitely read some now.

Major author of the Scottish (and occasionally Irish) fantastic. Selkies, kelpies, things that figure less often in mainstream American fantasy—I don't know if she invented the Grollican, but it's sort of like a Grendel of the Highlands, complete with mother—and fairies also written to an older strain, shape-changers, soulless, to be kept at bay by iron knives and the singing of hymns, but more beautiful than anything mortal and not wicked, because that is not a word that applies to the otherworld. You should read A Stranger Came Ashore, if nothing else. It has guisers.