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Down to the river we will run
I had to reconstruct this entire post after my e-mail ate it. So much for save-to-draft. I think it was much better written the first time around, but at least the content should be functionally the same.
1. My poem "Similes" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It is one of the few poems I've written about being happy. Next up, I insist on this, trees.
2. I am in the wrong country this month. Have some assorted articles about Derek Jarman. Dammit.
3. The original cast recording of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is out on CD this month. I want that.
4. After nine years, the Wikipedia entry for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel's mildly surrealist interactive fiction Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die has been deleted. Which sucks on general principle, and Rob is being classy about it, but I am personally side-eyeing one of the reasons given: "Text adventures were already an obscure hobby by the mid 90's following FTL's release of Dungeon Master in 1989." Any archive that uses obscurity as its first reason for exclusion or removal seems to be failing the definition as far as I'm concerned.
5. I finished Ben Aaronovitch's Broken Homes (2013). It's spoilers from here on.
I will not be pleased with this series if it turns out that Lesley really did go over to the Faceless Man just so that she could get a normal face back. One of the things that interested me about the ongoing storyline was a female protagonist living with facial disfigurement that was not magically fixed, a visible disability that was neither attractive nor aestheticized. It altered her relationship with Peter in awkward, believable ways: he didn't suddenly lose interest in her, their friendship didn't break up, but he isn't getting used to her face as it exists, either—he tries not to say anything to Lesley about it, but given how often he remarks internally and self-consciously on her appearance, he's probably doing a pretty bad job of camouflaging his reactions—and it feels both truthful and telling that by the time of Broken Homes, Lesley claims to feel most comfortable around nonhuman people, who genuinely don't care if she leaves her mask off. (Refreshingly, that non-reaction is not used to explain why she's fucking the partly-fae Zach "maybe more than a bit." We've not given any explanation, really. They seem to get along. I'm cool with that.) I don't ship her and Peter at all, but I really appreciated Aaronovitch avoiding the story where Peter loves her just the same despite everything. Nor did it careen in the opposite direction, equating the value of her life with her lost beauty from the start. Lesley May was a good cop, a good apprentice wizard, intelligent and methodical and ferocious in applying herself to a problem, and the series accepted all of these traits as the essentials of her character, the fact that her face fell off after an extended bout of possession by Mr. Punch being one of the things that happened to her in the line of work, much like Ettersberg to Nightingale. It's not that her face doesn't matter: of course it does. It affects her day-to-day life, every interaction she has with a member of the public or a friend who isn't Zach and his contacts from the goblin market, how comfortably she can eat a meal or have a conversation. But it wasn't presented as her only motivation for everything.
I was fine with her wanting to know if anything could be done by magic. I'm not sure I'd consider it sufficient foreshadowing. The number of times Peter refers to Lesley's latest round of reconstructive surgeries, the idea of spending a few intense sessions with Nightingale—or becoming a skilled enough practitioner to do the working herself—can't help but appeal to anyone who's had her fill of waking from anesthesia with new bandages and a whole new range of expressions that hurt. I also consider it fairly normal not to want your picture taken by rubbernecking teenagers if you leave the house in a hurry. But there are enough stories where women turn evil because not being beautiful is worse; it's not a pattern that Rivers of London needs to reinforce. Not to mention the trope where women use magic for dangerous selfish reasons and men use it responsibly. I don't like that one much, either.
And I liked most of the novel, which felt less self-contained than previous books (a lot of groundwork, a cliffhanger, not much resolution in any of the subsidiary plots—Skygarden's Stadtkrone blows just as designed, but we don't get to see the fallout past the suggestive return of Mr. Nolfi's facility with werelight, nor do we find out whether dryads are common in council house gardens or whether this one was just a side effect of Stromberg's industrial channeling), but otherwise a successful opening-out of the world.
I like the introduction of Varvara Sidorovna. She's a complicating factor, a full-fledged female practitioner in a novel which opens with Nightingale skeptical of an older man's claim to have learned the most elementary of formal spells—lux, the werelight—from his mother. I hope she's not a one-off character; I like her comfortable amorality, her formidable, elemental magic, and there is something pleasingly Milkweed-like in Nightingale's laconic description of the Soviet "night witches," all-female regiments trained strictly in combat-magic, a curriculum so high-attrition that British wizardry tried and then abandoned an equivalent project in 1939. (Aaronovitch takes care in his author's note to distinguish the real-life 588th Night Bomber Regiment from his fictional battle-wizards, although I wish he had clarified the difference between колдуньи and ведьмы.1) It's been mostly background until now, but I really like that Sidorovna's existence as a middle-aged woman in 2013 confirms that Nightingale is not unique in his unexpected Merlin trick. I suspect we just hadn't seen enough living practitioners of his generation to bring it into view before. The obvious next step is to wonder how many others like them are out there.
I like the invention of Erik Stromberg, who I was entirely willing to believe as one of the unfortunate things that happened to architecture in the '60's until I read the author's note. Magical Brutalism is such a terrible idea, I'm only surprised there isn't more of it. I'm wondering now if it explains some of Boston.
I like that the novel reminds both Peter and the reader that not all German magic had to do with the Nazis. I like that it insists on human evil. None of England's serial killers was magical. Whatever Ettersberg was, it wasn't the reason for the Holocaust.
I just don't like the idea that the promise of getting her face rebuilt by the kind of magician who shotgun-murders his experiments when he's done with them and sets people's bones on fire to prove a point was sufficient to override everything we've heard previously about Lesley's instincts for and commitment to police work. (I might feel differently if she had spent the previous nineteen chapters worrying about how the situation with her face was going to affect her ability to continue in her job, but we don't hear anything like that. She's the second apprentice trained by the Metropolitan Police since before World War II; she's invaluable to the Folly.) If it turns out that she made a deal with the Faceless Man in order to get a working knowledge of chimerical magic out of him and then drop him into the arms of the Met once she's done, I'll probably consider that morally ambiguous enough to be fine with. But the explanation currently going does not satisfy me, so I'm hoping Aaronovitch has something cleverer up his sleeve.
1. I'm reproducing the Cyrillic from the author's note; I hope it's not unfair of me to want outside input. Aaronovitch is not as bad with Latin as Jim Butcher or that passage of Buffy I had to rewrite to feel better about, but some of the names he gives the English wizarding formae are less than intuitive. The personal imprint left on a spell, by which its caster may be identified and traced, is called a signare—that's the present active infinitive of signo, to set a mark on, impress, seal, etc. and it just looks wrong with an article or a possessive pronoun in front of it. I have never been able to figure out why he didn't just use the neuter past participle signatum; as a substantive it would mean a marked thing and look a lot less jarring. Even the first principal part would have sounded a lot more like something a person with training in the classical languages would actually say.
DooWee & Rice no longer exists, but the Teriyaki House that sprang up in its stead is serving Duy Tran's menu until the end of the week. Going by the takeout menu I got this afternoon, their regular lineup also seems to have incorporated some of his dishes, like the chicken (or steak) and rice, the crispy chicken hearts, and the several different flavors of bao, but the full former range is available through Friday, meaning among other things many different flavors of bao. I can attest to the kind made with Dominican longaniza. Lime habanero needs to happen before it's gone for good.
1. My poem "Similes" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It is one of the few poems I've written about being happy. Next up, I insist on this, trees.
2. I am in the wrong country this month. Have some assorted articles about Derek Jarman. Dammit.
3. The original cast recording of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is out on CD this month. I want that.
4. After nine years, the Wikipedia entry for
derspatchel's mildly surrealist interactive fiction Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die has been deleted. Which sucks on general principle, and Rob is being classy about it, but I am personally side-eyeing one of the reasons given: "Text adventures were already an obscure hobby by the mid 90's following FTL's release of Dungeon Master in 1989." Any archive that uses obscurity as its first reason for exclusion or removal seems to be failing the definition as far as I'm concerned. 5. I finished Ben Aaronovitch's Broken Homes (2013). It's spoilers from here on.
I will not be pleased with this series if it turns out that Lesley really did go over to the Faceless Man just so that she could get a normal face back. One of the things that interested me about the ongoing storyline was a female protagonist living with facial disfigurement that was not magically fixed, a visible disability that was neither attractive nor aestheticized. It altered her relationship with Peter in awkward, believable ways: he didn't suddenly lose interest in her, their friendship didn't break up, but he isn't getting used to her face as it exists, either—he tries not to say anything to Lesley about it, but given how often he remarks internally and self-consciously on her appearance, he's probably doing a pretty bad job of camouflaging his reactions—and it feels both truthful and telling that by the time of Broken Homes, Lesley claims to feel most comfortable around nonhuman people, who genuinely don't care if she leaves her mask off. (Refreshingly, that non-reaction is not used to explain why she's fucking the partly-fae Zach "maybe more than a bit." We've not given any explanation, really. They seem to get along. I'm cool with that.) I don't ship her and Peter at all, but I really appreciated Aaronovitch avoiding the story where Peter loves her just the same despite everything. Nor did it careen in the opposite direction, equating the value of her life with her lost beauty from the start. Lesley May was a good cop, a good apprentice wizard, intelligent and methodical and ferocious in applying herself to a problem, and the series accepted all of these traits as the essentials of her character, the fact that her face fell off after an extended bout of possession by Mr. Punch being one of the things that happened to her in the line of work, much like Ettersberg to Nightingale. It's not that her face doesn't matter: of course it does. It affects her day-to-day life, every interaction she has with a member of the public or a friend who isn't Zach and his contacts from the goblin market, how comfortably she can eat a meal or have a conversation. But it wasn't presented as her only motivation for everything.
I was fine with her wanting to know if anything could be done by magic. I'm not sure I'd consider it sufficient foreshadowing. The number of times Peter refers to Lesley's latest round of reconstructive surgeries, the idea of spending a few intense sessions with Nightingale—or becoming a skilled enough practitioner to do the working herself—can't help but appeal to anyone who's had her fill of waking from anesthesia with new bandages and a whole new range of expressions that hurt. I also consider it fairly normal not to want your picture taken by rubbernecking teenagers if you leave the house in a hurry. But there are enough stories where women turn evil because not being beautiful is worse; it's not a pattern that Rivers of London needs to reinforce. Not to mention the trope where women use magic for dangerous selfish reasons and men use it responsibly. I don't like that one much, either.
And I liked most of the novel, which felt less self-contained than previous books (a lot of groundwork, a cliffhanger, not much resolution in any of the subsidiary plots—Skygarden's Stadtkrone blows just as designed, but we don't get to see the fallout past the suggestive return of Mr. Nolfi's facility with werelight, nor do we find out whether dryads are common in council house gardens or whether this one was just a side effect of Stromberg's industrial channeling), but otherwise a successful opening-out of the world.
I like the introduction of Varvara Sidorovna. She's a complicating factor, a full-fledged female practitioner in a novel which opens with Nightingale skeptical of an older man's claim to have learned the most elementary of formal spells—lux, the werelight—from his mother. I hope she's not a one-off character; I like her comfortable amorality, her formidable, elemental magic, and there is something pleasingly Milkweed-like in Nightingale's laconic description of the Soviet "night witches," all-female regiments trained strictly in combat-magic, a curriculum so high-attrition that British wizardry tried and then abandoned an equivalent project in 1939. (Aaronovitch takes care in his author's note to distinguish the real-life 588th Night Bomber Regiment from his fictional battle-wizards, although I wish he had clarified the difference between колдуньи and ведьмы.1) It's been mostly background until now, but I really like that Sidorovna's existence as a middle-aged woman in 2013 confirms that Nightingale is not unique in his unexpected Merlin trick. I suspect we just hadn't seen enough living practitioners of his generation to bring it into view before. The obvious next step is to wonder how many others like them are out there.
I like the invention of Erik Stromberg, who I was entirely willing to believe as one of the unfortunate things that happened to architecture in the '60's until I read the author's note. Magical Brutalism is such a terrible idea, I'm only surprised there isn't more of it. I'm wondering now if it explains some of Boston.
I like that the novel reminds both Peter and the reader that not all German magic had to do with the Nazis. I like that it insists on human evil. None of England's serial killers was magical. Whatever Ettersberg was, it wasn't the reason for the Holocaust.
I just don't like the idea that the promise of getting her face rebuilt by the kind of magician who shotgun-murders his experiments when he's done with them and sets people's bones on fire to prove a point was sufficient to override everything we've heard previously about Lesley's instincts for and commitment to police work. (I might feel differently if she had spent the previous nineteen chapters worrying about how the situation with her face was going to affect her ability to continue in her job, but we don't hear anything like that. She's the second apprentice trained by the Metropolitan Police since before World War II; she's invaluable to the Folly.) If it turns out that she made a deal with the Faceless Man in order to get a working knowledge of chimerical magic out of him and then drop him into the arms of the Met once she's done, I'll probably consider that morally ambiguous enough to be fine with. But the explanation currently going does not satisfy me, so I'm hoping Aaronovitch has something cleverer up his sleeve.
1. I'm reproducing the Cyrillic from the author's note; I hope it's not unfair of me to want outside input. Aaronovitch is not as bad with Latin as Jim Butcher or that passage of Buffy I had to rewrite to feel better about, but some of the names he gives the English wizarding formae are less than intuitive. The personal imprint left on a spell, by which its caster may be identified and traced, is called a signare—that's the present active infinitive of signo, to set a mark on, impress, seal, etc. and it just looks wrong with an article or a possessive pronoun in front of it. I have never been able to figure out why he didn't just use the neuter past participle signatum; as a substantive it would mean a marked thing and look a lot less jarring. Even the first principal part would have sounded a lot more like something a person with training in the classical languages would actually say.
DooWee & Rice no longer exists, but the Teriyaki House that sprang up in its stead is serving Duy Tran's menu until the end of the week. Going by the takeout menu I got this afternoon, their regular lineup also seems to have incorporated some of his dishes, like the chicken (or steak) and rice, the crispy chicken hearts, and the several different flavors of bao, but the full former range is available through Friday, meaning among other things many different flavors of bao. I can attest to the kind made with Dominican longaniza. Lime habanero needs to happen before it's gone for good.
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I agree with nearly all of your Broken Homes commentary. I too hope that Aaronovitch has some cleverness lined up; I liked the bones of #4 better than its execution, and not only re: Lesley. But I will read #5 to see (the author's inability to distinguish polite discourse notwithstanding, since I don't need a writer to be a Good Person in order to produce interesting work).
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I agree that the Wikipedia editors don't seem to understand the purpose of an archive.
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An unrelated thought: there's something, some parallel that tugging at me, with the start where that old gentleman was taught by his mother and Peter and his little cousin where the old gentleman assumes she is Peter's daughter. Mothers and sons and fathers and daughters and magic twining like the wonder, like the power, like the danger we pass down to those we call our own. Something there, that bears simmering on.
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I'm really hoping that the next book addresses this, because if it doesn't... well. I will be disappointment itself.
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(Will come back in a bit to read the rest of the entry)
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edit: I mean if I recall my Latin correctly. Not whether I recall correctly that you know far more Latin than I do; that's not in dispute!
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...pshaw. Twine stories are text adventures, and they are the coming thing.
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I am so jealous.
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2. I doubt it's much consolation, but I'm in the wrong damn city. I'll watch "Blue" in the next few days to compensate for it.
4. What the hell, Wikipedia?
5. Gah, I need to get back to this series! (I'm good with the spoilers, though, as realistically I'll have forgotten most of them by the time I reach Broken Homes.)
* Magical Brutalism is such a terrible idea, I'm only surprised there isn't more of it.*
I'm scratching my head now, wondering whether I should have a go at that thought! There's plenty of the mundane sort around here. (At least I think it's inert Brutalism.)
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