We could be responsible—anything is possible

[sovay]

1. We have a bed! Or at least we will have a bed once the futon frame we ordered this afternoon arrives as it is expected to do next weekend! I am so looking forward to my back not hurting every morning!

2. yhlee sent me an amazing handmade-looking CD in a painted cardboard case. It's called The Sonic Arcana, subtitled Music Written for the Cheimonette Tarot, which I had never heard of, but it looks pretty great. Musicians I recognize include Jill Tracy and Meredith Yayanos. I am enjoying it tremendously so far.

(Did I mention that selidor sent me a postcard from Iceland this month? With a picture of an old map and a story of visiting Þingvellir.)

3. On our way home from ordering the bed, derspatchel and I passed the racks of dollar books outside the Harvard Book Store and stopped to browse, as is the norm. Why, yes, rack of dollar books, I would like an attractive paperback reprint of Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts (1977) with introduction by Jan Morris and M. John Harrison's A Storm of Wings (1980) in a completely battered ex-library edition dedicated to Harlan Ellison, thank you.

So all of that's good.

Comments

[yhlee]

The Cheimonette Tarot was a recently Kickstarted Tarot. The art wasn't my cuppa, but I got the music and thought I'd pass on the physical CD. I'm glad it reached you safely!

[sovay]

The art wasn't my cuppa, but I got the music and thought I'd pass on the physical CD. I'm glad it reached you safely!

I really like the music, especially Star St. Germain's "Detention," Jill Tracy's "Lament for the Queen of Disks," and Meredith Yayanos' "Radiant Void" so far. Thank you for it!

[yhlee]

I'm glad you're enjoying it, and you're welcome!

[phi]

We have a bed!

Congratulations!

[sovay]

Congratulations!

Thank you! It has been stupidly ages since I slept in a bed that wasn't some kind of makeshift and I am looking forward.

[larryhammer]

Þingvellir is the sort of place where you come out with stories. (Janni even got a novel there.)

---L.

[sovay]

(Janni even got a novel there.)

Cool!

I didn't visit, but I got a poem.

[larryhammer]

It's evocative at a distance!

(Meant to link the book. I also tell my own stories about our visit, and camping there while still not quite used to Iceland summer daylight.)

---L.

[sovay]

(Meant to link the book. I also tell my own stories about our visit, and camping there while still not quite used to Iceland summer daylight.)

Thank you!

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Hurrah for all of this! The Cheimonette Tarot is sumptuous.

"A Storm Of Wings" was the first Harrison I read. (Bought in Devon '85, terrible cover of a wasp-ravished woman; cheers, Chris Achilleos.) The ghost of Benedict Paucemanly did my twelve-year-old head in.

[sovay]

"A Storm Of Wings" was the first Harrison I read. (Bought in Devon '85, terrible cover of a wasp-ravished woman; cheers, Chris Achilleos.)

That is an extraordinary specimen of missing the point. At least, it doesn't appear to be that sort of invasion so far.

My first Harrison at novel-length was The Pastel City (1971), the Avon paperback with a fantasy-futuristic landscape swimming under the wrong number of moons (found it! See? Wrong number of moons). Prior to that I'd read "The Lamia and Lord Cromis" in the anthology Basilisk (1980) and, I think by then, "Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring." I didn't fall in love with him until I discovered "Anima" and "The Great God Pan" in their respective Year's Best Fantasy and Horrors. And then I found Light (2002) and The Course of the Heart (1992) and there was no going back.

The ghost of Benedict Paucemanly did my twelve-year-old head in.

I am halfway through and intrigued by Fay Glass. She talks like his later novels. The most interesting thing to me about A Storm of Wings right now—aside from the growing modernism of Viriconium as a city, the continuing breakdown of the fantastic motifs of the first book, and the Peake-level architectural density of the language—is the way it reads more like The Pastel City than anything else, but every now and then moments from the stories he hasn't written yet break through. "In my youth . . . I made my small contribution. Venice becomes like Blackpool, leaving nothing for anybody. Rebellion is good and necessary. I—"

[edit] I like also the way he weaves in Eliot: the moon and the madmen and the dead geraniums give it away.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Fay Glass first turns up in the story "London Melancholy" (1969), pretty much as the same character, only winged and proclaiming stuff like "BLOW YOUR MIND, GABRIEL ROSETTI". "Storm"'s insectile invaders are there too, except they arrived much earlier on in history and have pretty much wrecked the capital. It's in the collection "The Machine In Shaft Ten" if you can find it (caveat: there's a lot of sub-Ballard New Wave stuff in there).

[sovay]

Fay Glass first turns up in the story "London Melancholy" (1969), pretty much as the same character, only winged and proclaiming stuff like "BLOW YOUR MIND, GABRIEL ROSETTI".

That's hilarious.

I love the way he turns over figures and phrases, surfacing in one guise or another over the years.

[spatch]

Why, yes, rack of dollar books, I would like an attractive paperback reprint of Patrick Leigh Femor's A Time of Gifts (1977) with introduction by Jan Morris and M. John Harrison's A Storm of Wings (1980) in a completely battered ex-library edition dedicated to Harlan Ellison, thank you.

I was quite pleased to have scored a small copy of My Father's Dragon, the first two Red Dwarf novelizations, plus The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell. What a haul that day was.

[sovay]

What a haul that day was.

The danger and the glory of used book stores.