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And in the tray of colors, a whirlwind appeared
An assortment of fragments lying around my desktop. I imagine I intended most of them for roundup posts or further elaboration, but they got stranded. The longest one is from notes for a review of Byzantium (2012). I'm talking about Eddie Marsan in the first one:
I discovered him in 2008 when I watched an accidental double feature of Pierrepoint (2005) and Vera Drake (2004). Don't ever do this to yourself, by the way. I rented the one because it was the rare film starring Timothy Spall and the other because of Imelda Staunton and Mike Leigh. Then I was extremely depressed.
I scrolled too quickly down a page on Tumblr with a calendar of saints halfway through and read "Saint Deucalion." (Some saints hold wheels or scales, martyrs' palms, their own severed heads or breasts; he carries his mother's bones in his hands.)
I just received two pieces of spam from Hugo Jackarson and Alex Jackarson, respectively entitled "morning" and "staff." I'm just guessing at what they're the twin gods of, here.
The method of vampirism in this universe is single-source: an island somewhere off the Irish coast, a black rock spire cut by waterfalls and tides. Its slopes barely hold turf, only the endless cascading white water, but near its peak is the half-dome of a chamber cairn, built of the same black rock. Neolithic, not that the characters know by its shape. Birds spiral in and out of the entrance and the smoke-hole of the roof, like breathing. Inside is something referred to only as "the nameless saint." It manifests to each person as an apparition of themselves, which will answer truthfully any question they ask before it opens their throats with its pointed nail. To some it is violent, to others matter-of-fact, to yet others we do not see how it behaves. At the moment of transformation, birds explode in a cawing cloud, carrion-black, the white water over the black rocks thunders blood-red. The person who emerges from the dolmen hut is a vampire in most particulars of the legend: immortal so long as they sustain themselves by the blood of others and avoid critical trauma like decapitation, dismemberment, or destruction by fire; not unable to bear sunlight, but not especially fond of it, either; stronger than mortal humans, swifter, capable of perceiving more in the world; and possibly soulless, although we hear this only from one source, who may or may not have it right. It has never been relevant to one of our protagonists and the other ceased to care long before she was technically dead. It is unclear whether terminal illness is a prerequisite of the change. It plays a part in all four cases we witness (there is an aborted fifth), but it may just be the case that people are desperate enough to make the decision only in those straits. There are no fangs, pallor, other traditional tells beyond unchanging age. Under the right circumstances, the impetus of hunger or defense, the nearness of spilled blood or suitable prey, the thumbnail of each finger lengthens—like a cat's protractile claw—into a hard white razor point, ideal for puncturing a jugular or a vein in the wrist. After that, they drink as neatly or as messily as any human from a spurting liquid source.
While deleting a quantity of e-mail from my inbox, I finally remembered what Elizabeth Hand's "Near Zennor" reminded me of: William Sleator's Into the Dream (1979).
I need to remember that kippers are a delicious and inexpensive source of fish. I used to eat them more frequently as a child; they were one of my grandmother's standard breakfast foods.
Mary Gentle's First History does not count—her Carthaginians are Visigothic colonizers. (She really liked the Visigoths.) I love Ash: A Secret History (2000), but I am coming to realize more and more that her alternate histories entail some really weird forms of erasure.
Dancers.
Poetry is the wrong question.
I discovered him in 2008 when I watched an accidental double feature of Pierrepoint (2005) and Vera Drake (2004). Don't ever do this to yourself, by the way. I rented the one because it was the rare film starring Timothy Spall and the other because of Imelda Staunton and Mike Leigh. Then I was extremely depressed.
I scrolled too quickly down a page on Tumblr with a calendar of saints halfway through and read "Saint Deucalion." (Some saints hold wheels or scales, martyrs' palms, their own severed heads or breasts; he carries his mother's bones in his hands.)
I just received two pieces of spam from Hugo Jackarson and Alex Jackarson, respectively entitled "morning" and "staff." I'm just guessing at what they're the twin gods of, here.
The method of vampirism in this universe is single-source: an island somewhere off the Irish coast, a black rock spire cut by waterfalls and tides. Its slopes barely hold turf, only the endless cascading white water, but near its peak is the half-dome of a chamber cairn, built of the same black rock. Neolithic, not that the characters know by its shape. Birds spiral in and out of the entrance and the smoke-hole of the roof, like breathing. Inside is something referred to only as "the nameless saint." It manifests to each person as an apparition of themselves, which will answer truthfully any question they ask before it opens their throats with its pointed nail. To some it is violent, to others matter-of-fact, to yet others we do not see how it behaves. At the moment of transformation, birds explode in a cawing cloud, carrion-black, the white water over the black rocks thunders blood-red. The person who emerges from the dolmen hut is a vampire in most particulars of the legend: immortal so long as they sustain themselves by the blood of others and avoid critical trauma like decapitation, dismemberment, or destruction by fire; not unable to bear sunlight, but not especially fond of it, either; stronger than mortal humans, swifter, capable of perceiving more in the world; and possibly soulless, although we hear this only from one source, who may or may not have it right. It has never been relevant to one of our protagonists and the other ceased to care long before she was technically dead. It is unclear whether terminal illness is a prerequisite of the change. It plays a part in all four cases we witness (there is an aborted fifth), but it may just be the case that people are desperate enough to make the decision only in those straits. There are no fangs, pallor, other traditional tells beyond unchanging age. Under the right circumstances, the impetus of hunger or defense, the nearness of spilled blood or suitable prey, the thumbnail of each finger lengthens—like a cat's protractile claw—into a hard white razor point, ideal for puncturing a jugular or a vein in the wrist. After that, they drink as neatly or as messily as any human from a spurting liquid source.
While deleting a quantity of e-mail from my inbox, I finally remembered what Elizabeth Hand's "Near Zennor" reminded me of: William Sleator's Into the Dream (1979).
I need to remember that kippers are a delicious and inexpensive source of fish. I used to eat them more frequently as a child; they were one of my grandmother's standard breakfast foods.
Mary Gentle's First History does not count—her Carthaginians are Visigothic colonizers. (She really liked the Visigoths.) I love Ash: A Secret History (2000), but I am coming to realize more and more that her alternate histories entail some really weird forms of erasure.
Dancers.
Poetry is the wrong question.
no subject
I'm afraid it was Neil Jordan's dream, but it's a really good one. I loved Byzantium; I have reservations only about one element of the denoument and even they aren't story-breaking. You especially might like it a lot.
I haven't read any Gentle since "1610". I'm still fond of the Valentine books, though. My knowledge of history's not good enough to get the erasure.
Rats and Gargoyles (1990) is still very possibly my favorite Gentle. Ash: A Secret History (2000) after that. Floria(n) is one of my favorite female characters full stop and it is rare for me to like protagonists as well as supporting cast, so I really enjoy the fact that I like Ash. The worldbuilding is detailed, the writing often very fine, and the mindsets mostly not too modern; I understand the reasons Gentle wrote the dialogue colloquially, but sometimes I feel like it bleeds back into the fifteenth-century characters' attitudes as well. I love the mythos of the Green Christ and the Lion and the Sun; the Wild Machines and the quotidian miraculous reality of Burgundy are wonderful. It just took me fourteen years to notice that there are literally no characters in it who aren't Northern European despite the main antagonists being Carthaginian: they are Visigothic Carthaginian, pale-skinned, fair-haired, worshipping the Arian Green Christ. It is a jolt for Pierce to see Ash at the end in "our" history because she has "black hair, and brown eyes, and dark skin . . . Arab in appearance"; he has to remember that "Ash was never European by race." And then I noticed that the same anti-Arabic epithets are still applied to the Carthaginians when the Lion Azure are fighting them and they're not even Muslim in this history, so what the hell.
I have a lot of problems with Ilario: The Lion's Eye (2006), which is set in the same history as Ash about a generation prior. On the bright side: gender-variant (intersex) protagonist, gender-variant (eunuch) romantic lead, absolutely awesome father-figure who doesn't end up dead (he's a career soldier with a political price on his head; it's a legitimate danger). Lots of travelogue of Gentle's alternate history, which she has evidently put a lot of time into. On the less bright side: a lot of problems with the basic idea of being female to the point where the non-binary protagonist decides to live as legally male (or at least legally not female) because it is so impossible to be a woman and a person—rather than a piece of fuckable furniture—in European society, as exemplified by Ilario's mother. Rosamunda is one of the few cis women in the novel and she is a terrible, damaged, abusive person to whom the novel extends a weird combination of analysis and contempt; Ilario understands why she turned out the way she did in the royal court of Taraco, but condemns her on the same page for not running away to some other city-state like Alexandria where women have equal rights with men, as though it would have been that easy. And we are expected to agree with Ilario: that Rosamunda was a weak person, too fettered by her beauty (she is very beautiful; it is her only resource, with all her considerable intelligence counting for nothing unless her husband puts his consent behind it) and too lured by her safe privileged life to save what really mattered about herself; she is complicit, we do not care about her. It is one thing for Gentle's book to make an argument that being a woman in its alternate early fifteenth century is awful. It is another for it to expect us then to shrug and assume there's nothing to do but default to male. Especially with a protagonist whose self-definition is "hermaphrodite."
(Please continue to the next comment; I ran out of room here.)