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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
(Continued from previous comment, because character limit.)
Also, there is an entire detour of the plot where Ilario falls in love with an Etruscan woman in Rome, courts her, marries her, and then it all falls apart because Ilario can tolerate her being socially outcast, physically disabled (though beautiful; she has a clubfoot), and slightly magical (the clubfoot is seen in its true aspect as a goat's hoof within her family's sacred grove), but Sulva's reaction to Ilario's hermaphrodite nature is to throw a fit and then throw Ilario out of the house, nastily and with modern transphobic langugage, ordering Ilario to stay away for the seven years it will take the city to declare them legally dead and then she can marry someone "normal." Because it turns out that's all she wants. Someone to normalize her. Not to treasure her for being Etruscan, or strangely beautiful, or partly descended from fauns, but someone to hide her from all these things and assimilate her into mainstream society, which a half-woman husband will never be able to. At which I point I almost threw the book across the room. Not only does this conclusion turn the episode into a digression—it is the entire upshot of the interlude in Rome; nothing has changed about Ilario's life, except for an inconvenient marriage license which now needs time-in-exile to expire—it leaves the reinforcement that men come in all flavors, but women are emotionally volatile, basically hypocritical, and self-limiting. Sulva does not come away with Ilario when given the opportunity, despite the lacerating fight they have just had. She stays in her cage.
For the record, Ty-amenhotep of Alexandria is cis and she's awesome: she is physically tiny, fiercely intelligent, a canny ruler and mother of three children. But she is, explicitly, not very feminine by the standards of even her egalitarian culture or our own. In the end the book left me feeling that it couldn't be queer-positive without being misogynist and I really, really didn't like that.
Also, Rekhmire' was the obvious romantic match with Ilario from his first appearance and I think it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting if the match with Sulva had worked out and everybody had had to factor that into their feelings.
I talked a little about Ilario and the erasure of Jews here: basically, all the anti-Semitic slurs and the problems of assimilation, prejudice, and/or passing with which a Jewish family in our early fourteenth-century Rome would have been expected to contend are transposed onto the Etruscan family of Sulva Paziathe; Jews might as well not exist in Ilario despite their known presence in Ash only a generation later. It is weird and struck me as weird on first reading and is weirder every time I try picking up the novel again. The Etruscans are awesome and I want more representation of them. Mary Gentle seems only to be able to conceive of one underrepresented axis at a time. Genderqueer characters, women under the bus. Persecuted Etruscans in the world of the Green Christ, goodbye Jews.
[edit] OH RIGHT INCREDIBLY PROBLEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF TRANS FEMALE CHARACTER HOW COULD I FORGET. I mean, I think it is trying. But I do not consider it all right for other characters to use Neferet's male birth name as a rebuke to her and for Ilario's observations to keep focusing on the male tells of her physique as contrasted to her feminine dress and movement, as though what is most important about her is that she does not pass entirely.
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It was an immensely frustrating book. I read it breathlessly when it came out. The political pull is very strong, even diluted by the meandering around the Mediterranean that makes up most of the book's physical action, and Ilario's attempts to assert an identity in a world that wants to categorize them as either really male or really female or really not human are legitimate and compelling, and the book builds many of its central questions around the exploration of slavery, the ownership of human beings, either explicitly (cash in hand, collars on necks) or by social and economic exploitation (laborers bound to land they do not profit from, women as the property of their husbands)—what people do when other people belong to them. The dynamics of Ilario's family, once the novel finally gets around to talking about them, are wrenching. But it never came together for me as a novel rather than an extended series of sketches on similar themes and the writing is nowhere near as tight or as eloquent as Gentle has shown herself capable of and the gender problems are huge and screaming and ended up blotting out even the love story for me. I was sad. I mean, Roz Kaveney says very nice things about it on the cover. But it didn't work for me.
[edit] Her latest novel is Black Opera (2012), which I have not read. I am feeling a little burned now and cautious. Also, it's about opera, so if she screws up technical things about classical singing, I will be really annoyed.