The North is the dark place
1. We made the sushi candy. Courtesy of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrbelm, I had a package of sushi, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
phi brought the bento box, gaudior and rushthatspeaks provided the prep space and pictures were taken on M.'s phone. There were packets of powder and small plastic implements to mix with. Some items required sculpting. The sushi looked quite like the real thing when we were done with it. The breaded look of the chicken karaage was distressingly correct. We stared at it in existential confusion. Then we ate it and that didn't help at all. Everything from the sushi kit tasted like artificial grape (except for the furikake, which tasted like pure sucrose burn), meaning the natural sticky pop of the salmon roe and the chewiness of the glutinous rice were terrifying. Everything from the bento box tasted like we don't even know, except there was citrus; Gaudior suggested grapefruit, but I'm leaning toward Lovecraftian Kumquat. At the point at which I remarked dazedly on the squishiness of the candy noodles and Saira assured me that they were exactly the texture of Japanese fast-food Italian pasta, I understood we were in the presence of something special. Also, the salmon roe. You droppered them from one liquid into the other and they looked like ikura. You could scoop them out with the little plastic spoon and mound them on top of the candy rice with a wrapping of Tootsie Roll-like candy nori and they chewed like ikura and tasted like Dimetapp. It was an extraordinary achivement of kitchen chemistry. I plan never to eat anything like it again and I am so glad we did. If pictures surface, I will post them. We'll all look poleaxed, except for M., who shrugged and said it tasted like candy as he finished the panda-headed rice ball.
2. Rush-That-Speaks was writing to me last night about English folk horror, so I wrote back about Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate (2012). I read it on the train back from New York, darkness rushing by the windows. I could get out at South Station and wait for the subway withderspatchel. At home, in bed, I would have had to reach to turn out the light. The setting is 1612, the year of the Pendle witch trials, as infamous in English history as the Salem witch trials in this country. Among other reasons, they stand out for the number of deaths that resulted (eleven of the twelve accused went to trial, one having died in prison; ten of those were hanged) and for the official publication of the proceedings, an unprecedented level of documentation for the time. Winterson draws on Thomas Potts' The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613) for the facts of the case, but the book is not a historical reconstruction. She elides characters, invents histories, strips the story down to something very stark and genuinely dark, which is not an adjective I like to use when talking about fiction. But the Daylight Gate is dusk: the leaving of the light. Liminal, marginal, things half-seen. The two rival clans of Pendle Hill are mostly women, disenfranchised and forsaken in almost every way—viciously poor, all but feral, struggling just to starve—but they would not consider themselves victims, because they know themselves to be witches. Everyone knows that Old Demdike, matriarch of the Devices at Malkin Tower, sold her soul to the Dark Gentleman. Her family would call him again to free her. There is real magic in the book, both alchemical and Devil-dealing (John Dee is a significant character in memory, Shakespeare an appropriate cameo), the latter as disgusting as rituals of desecrated graves and stitched-up poppets should be; grimy, decaying magic, with none of the mathematical rigor and mercurial unease of the alchemy that the wealthy, self-possessed Alice Nutter once studied with Dee, Edward Kelley, and the green-eyed woman named Elizabeth Southern, her lover in London so many years ago. Historically, Nutter is the perplexing one: a yeoman farmer's widow rather than a pauper or a vagrant, whose only voice in the records of the trial is her plea of not guilty, which did not save her. Winterson gives her a backstory that is perhaps a little too like a modern interpretation of an intelligent, independent woman in a time that will not permit her, except that here again the supernatural is real; Dee spoke with angels in his mirror, the Dark Gentleman once offered Alice his hand. It excuses nothing that is done to her or the Devices or all the women who were casually destroyed and it is all woven through anyway with the witchery popery popery witchery of Catholic persecution, which makes no distinction between heresy and Satanism. The Gunpowder Plot is barely seven years past. A Jesuit is hunted through the bracken as cruelly and surely as a witch-man in the shape of a hare. Everyone is afraid. Winterson writes in sharp, spare, declarative sentences, her own kind of reportage to overwrite Potts'. The effect is at once beautifully evocative in the compressed way of poetry and vague as the kind of nightmare where the eye can only focus on a detail or two and everything is wrong with it and everything is wrong in the unseen spaces between and you keep staring at the horrific thing you can see, because to look away from it is to invite everything else in. I loved the book; I recommend it; I don't say it's an easy read. It's interested me in Winterson, though. I bounced very badly off The Stone Gods (2007). If the rest of her work is more like The Daylight Gate, I'll start looking again. He did not want to step through the light into whatever lay behind the light.
3. I just learned that Erik Blegvad has died. I didn't realize how many of my childhood books he illustrated until I began thinking about his style. I remember him best for Mary Norton's Borrowers and Carol Kendall's The Gammage Cup (1959) and Jane Langton's The Fledgling (1980). I think at least one of Margery Sharp's Rescuers series. Books of children's poetry whose names I no longer remember. But all these images I associate with the stories, and some of them I treasure, and I'm sorry to learn that the person who drew them is gone.
In London, during the reign of King Charles II, there lived a necromancer. (****** These six stars are to give you time to ask what is a necromancer. Now you know, we will go on.) He lived in a little house in Cripplegate in a largish room at the top of a narrow flight of stairs. He was a very nervous man and disliked the light of day. There were two good reasons for this; I will tell you the first.
—Mary Norton, Bonfires and Broomsticks (1945)
mrbelm, I had a package of sushi, phi brought the bento box, gaudior and rushthatspeaks provided the prep space and pictures were taken on M.'s phone. There were packets of powder and small plastic implements to mix with. Some items required sculpting. The sushi looked quite like the real thing when we were done with it. The breaded look of the chicken karaage was distressingly correct. We stared at it in existential confusion. Then we ate it and that didn't help at all. Everything from the sushi kit tasted like artificial grape (except for the furikake, which tasted like pure sucrose burn), meaning the natural sticky pop of the salmon roe and the chewiness of the glutinous rice were terrifying. Everything from the bento box tasted like we don't even know, except there was citrus; Gaudior suggested grapefruit, but I'm leaning toward Lovecraftian Kumquat. At the point at which I remarked dazedly on the squishiness of the candy noodles and Saira assured me that they were exactly the texture of Japanese fast-food Italian pasta, I understood we were in the presence of something special. Also, the salmon roe. You droppered them from one liquid into the other and they looked like ikura. You could scoop them out with the little plastic spoon and mound them on top of the candy rice with a wrapping of Tootsie Roll-like candy nori and they chewed like ikura and tasted like Dimetapp. It was an extraordinary achivement of kitchen chemistry. I plan never to eat anything like it again and I am so glad we did. If pictures surface, I will post them. We'll all look poleaxed, except for M., who shrugged and said it tasted like candy as he finished the panda-headed rice ball.2. Rush-That-Speaks was writing to me last night about English folk horror, so I wrote back about Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate (2012). I read it on the train back from New York, darkness rushing by the windows. I could get out at South Station and wait for the subway with
derspatchel. At home, in bed, I would have had to reach to turn out the light. The setting is 1612, the year of the Pendle witch trials, as infamous in English history as the Salem witch trials in this country. Among other reasons, they stand out for the number of deaths that resulted (eleven of the twelve accused went to trial, one having died in prison; ten of those were hanged) and for the official publication of the proceedings, an unprecedented level of documentation for the time. Winterson draws on Thomas Potts' The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613) for the facts of the case, but the book is not a historical reconstruction. She elides characters, invents histories, strips the story down to something very stark and genuinely dark, which is not an adjective I like to use when talking about fiction. But the Daylight Gate is dusk: the leaving of the light. Liminal, marginal, things half-seen. The two rival clans of Pendle Hill are mostly women, disenfranchised and forsaken in almost every way—viciously poor, all but feral, struggling just to starve—but they would not consider themselves victims, because they know themselves to be witches. Everyone knows that Old Demdike, matriarch of the Devices at Malkin Tower, sold her soul to the Dark Gentleman. Her family would call him again to free her. There is real magic in the book, both alchemical and Devil-dealing (John Dee is a significant character in memory, Shakespeare an appropriate cameo), the latter as disgusting as rituals of desecrated graves and stitched-up poppets should be; grimy, decaying magic, with none of the mathematical rigor and mercurial unease of the alchemy that the wealthy, self-possessed Alice Nutter once studied with Dee, Edward Kelley, and the green-eyed woman named Elizabeth Southern, her lover in London so many years ago. Historically, Nutter is the perplexing one: a yeoman farmer's widow rather than a pauper or a vagrant, whose only voice in the records of the trial is her plea of not guilty, which did not save her. Winterson gives her a backstory that is perhaps a little too like a modern interpretation of an intelligent, independent woman in a time that will not permit her, except that here again the supernatural is real; Dee spoke with angels in his mirror, the Dark Gentleman once offered Alice his hand. It excuses nothing that is done to her or the Devices or all the women who were casually destroyed and it is all woven through anyway with the witchery popery popery witchery of Catholic persecution, which makes no distinction between heresy and Satanism. The Gunpowder Plot is barely seven years past. A Jesuit is hunted through the bracken as cruelly and surely as a witch-man in the shape of a hare. Everyone is afraid. Winterson writes in sharp, spare, declarative sentences, her own kind of reportage to overwrite Potts'. The effect is at once beautifully evocative in the compressed way of poetry and vague as the kind of nightmare where the eye can only focus on a detail or two and everything is wrong with it and everything is wrong in the unseen spaces between and you keep staring at the horrific thing you can see, because to look away from it is to invite everything else in. I loved the book; I recommend it; I don't say it's an easy read. It's interested me in Winterson, though. I bounced very badly off The Stone Gods (2007). If the rest of her work is more like The Daylight Gate, I'll start looking again. He did not want to step through the light into whatever lay behind the light.3. I just learned that Erik Blegvad has died. I didn't realize how many of my childhood books he illustrated until I began thinking about his style. I remember him best for Mary Norton's Borrowers and Carol Kendall's The Gammage Cup (1959) and Jane Langton's The Fledgling (1980). I think at least one of Margery Sharp's Rescuers series. Books of children's poetry whose names I no longer remember. But all these images I associate with the stories, and some of them I treasure, and I'm sorry to learn that the person who drew them is gone.
In London, during the reign of King Charles II, there lived a necromancer. (****** These six stars are to give you time to ask what is a necromancer. Now you know, we will go on.) He lived in a little house in Cripplegate in a largish room at the top of a narrow flight of stairs. He was a very nervous man and disliked the light of day. There were two good reasons for this; I will tell you the first.
—Mary Norton, Bonfires and Broomsticks (1945)
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The names "Nutter" and "Device" suddenly explained a lot about Good Omens. [edit] AS I SEE HAPPENED WITH OTHER PEOPLE TOO.
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I do recognize Erik Blegvad's style, even though I don't think I've read most of the books you name-check, except for The Borrowers. It's very woodcut-like, with all that cross-hatching. He didn't do anything for the Green Knowe series, did he?
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As far as witch-novels are concerned, I am not sure it is possible to go too far.
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Nine
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But I love that the magic works—the poppet paralyzes, the head speaks—because the point is not that the witch trials were terrible because the women were innocent and if they had really sold their souls to Satan, it would have been okay; some of them did. (Some of them didn't and the spell works anyway.) The system is fucked beyond repair. It's terrible, full stop.
It makes me feel like I didn't go half far enough.
"History's Crust" is pretty nasty.
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The New York Times just gave him an obituary.
"Mr. Blegvad, who had always liked to draw, entered the Copenhagen School of Arts and Crafts. Though he described himself as having been a poor student there, he was allowed to graduate—a function, he later said, of his having spent several days in a Nazi prison for distributing Danish resistance literature.
'There was a rumor that the only reason I graduated was because I had been arrested by the Gestapo and that the school did not want to see somebody who had been arrested also fail his exams,' Mr. Blegvad said in an interview quoted in the reference work Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults."
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Wow man. That's saying a lot.
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Also, have you read Carlo Ginzburg's Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath? It would make a great companion read for The Daylight Gate, I suspect.
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Cool. I will give it a try. Any others of hers you recommend?
Also, have you read Carlo Ginzburg's Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath? It would make a great companion read for The Daylight Gate, I suspect.
I have not, although I think it may have been recommended to me.
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Wikipedia tells me the original Ramune flavor is lemon-lime, which makes a certain amount of sense, but still doesn't help, really.
Thank you for the sushi candy. It really did provide us with hours of entertainment and a lifetime of mild trauma.
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Is a terrifying thought.
I loved early Jeannette Winterson; fell off of her. The Daylight Gate sounds like the perfect book to reacquaint myself with her, if I can bear the dark. Not chthonic magic, but of earth: mud magic, grave and slough and flint.
Oh dear. I love Erik Blegvad's work (and you've chosen just about my favorite picture of his). Thank you for the link to his granddaughter's memorial: those pictures of his studio are wonderfully evocative. Bless him for delighting us so surely and so long.
Nine
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I think you will find it interesting even if you don't like it, but I think there's also a more than decent chance you'll enjoy the book. What early Winterson did you love? I'm taking recommendations.
I love Erik Blegvad's work (and you've chosen just about my favorite picture of his).
My omnibus of Bed-Knob and Broomstick (1957) is in a box. I will unpack and read it soon.
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Nine
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I knew the title. You make it sound like something I would enjoy (and very much like something you'd gravitate to, a companion piece to Iain Banks' Whit).
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I'm going to need to read that book.
The candy sounds terrifying, I don't think I could manage.
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I recognized it vaguely, from seeing it on frontispieces. The art is one of the definitive styles of my childhood, along with Robert Lawson and Trina Schart Hyman.
I'm going to need to read that book.
I think it is very much your sort of thing.
The candy sounds terrifying, I don't think I could manage.
It's a sufficiently weird experience to be worth trying if anyone you know ever makes it! That person is just never again going to be me!
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The Daylight Gate sounds utterly fascinating, and I too find myself wondering about inspirations for Good Omens...
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It was suggested, but people who know what yuzu tastes like better than me didn't think so.
The Daylight Gate sounds utterly fascinating, and I too find myself wondering about inspirations for Good Omens...
They must be the most famous names associated with witchcraft in the UK. I never had any idea.
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Buddha's Hand?
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It was an artificial flavor! I don't know! That is the most tentacular fruit I've ever seen!
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Get a really big jar of vodka and then you can have a Wunderkammer.
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Oh em jee I really want to make this sushi! Little Springtime sent the ninja girl a similar kit for her birthday, but it made not sushi but an itty-bitty tiny microwave cake. There were the same tiny plastic implements, though, and also sculpting! Plus tiny decorations.
We stared at it in existential confusion. Then we ate it and that didn't help at all.
LOL! … truly, I think I may have to copypaste this paragraph into an email to Little Springtime. She too will LOL.
Lovecraftian kumquat …. compels me to ask, are ALL kumquats Lovecraftian, or only some. Either option has a different flavor of terrifying.
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That sounds about right. What did it taste like?
truly, I think I may have to copypaste this paragraph into an email to Little Springtime. She too will LOL.
Feel free. It may stand as either encouragement or warning to the curious.
are ALL kumquats Lovecraftian, or only some. Either option has a different flavor of terrifying.
Just the ones that taste like sushi candy!
(I like kumquats. I believe I first heard the word in connection with the Muppets, which made it slightly difficult for me as a small child to track whether they were real or not, but somewhere in late elementary school I had the chance to try to eat one for myself—I attempted to peel it, which I'm still not sure I should have done—and it was entertaining and tasty and not quite like any of my familiar citrus fruits; I approved of it. At that point in my life I ate lemons with my lunches in the same way as oranges or clementines, so if it was tart, I didn't notice.)
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I like lemons too, to eat.
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My dentist discouraged me.
I like lemons too, to eat.
Vindication!
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Wow, yes: I know exactly that sort of thing.
Talking to angels in his mirror. Very, very cool. When you say it's not an easy read, what makes it not an easy read?
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Here is where I would love to show you Derek Jarman's The Art of Mirrors (1973), originally subtitled The Summoning of Angels (the two always go together in his work), but the only copy on YouTube is both low-quality and backed with the wrong music. Remind me sometime we're in the same place and I have brought the Kino DVD of Jarman's The Tempest (1979).
When you say it's not an easy read, what makes it not an easy read?
Content rather than style. There is a lot of violence in the text, casual, brutal, pleasurable, directed constantly at women and nearly as pervasively at Catholics. Rape is not rare in this book and it is pointedly (see
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I think I could deal.
and now the picture
I never read this series. Why does our narrator only tell us the first reason? And I guess the children time travel, yes? And do you know what the device underneath the unicorn picture is? It looks like some period equivalent of a ouija board.
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It's my favorite illustration in the book and the first depiction of the character introduced in the quotation (the first paragraph of Chapter 4, named "The 'Past'" because of course it isn't to the people who live there). His name is Emelius Jones and the two reasons for his nerves are: having been apprenticed to a necromancer as a boy, so that it's the only trade he knows; and having been blithely informed by his dying master that all his necromancy is bunk, so that he could be arrested and executed at any time for practicing a complete fiction. He is unsurprisingly something of a wreck.
And the fellow himself appears almost welcoming.
He's very startled, but putting his best manners on. He never expected to summon anything.
I never read this series.
The Magic Bed Knob (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1945) were very freely adapted by Disney as Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), after the omnibus title Bed-Knob and Broomstick (1957). This is the edition I have with the Erik Blegvad illustrations. The first is a solid children's fantasy with a magical adventure, although the cannibal island episode does not hold up; the second is the one with time-travel and my favorite. I keep an eye out for hardcover editions in used book stores, but I've never found any; I suspect they were either snapped up early or kept by their original owners.
And do you know what the device underneath the unicorn picture is? It looks like some period equivalent of a ouija board.
I believe it's Emelius' clavichord.
clavichord