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If that's holy, I'll go with the devil and be burned in hell
And today I appear to be sick. I refuse to regard it as payback for the pleasure of the last two days. I'm still not thrilled about it.
1. My poem "Keep the Home Fires Burning" has been accepted by Not One of Us. I wrote it last November in a state of slightly hallucinating exhaustion because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ashlyme had written this post. It features the return of Charon's bee-stamped obol, which should be a title of its own.
2. Have a Roman glass fish flask. Because it is very beautiful and also looks like a fish.
3. This is a pretty great condensation of a hilarious episode from Herodotos. While we're talking about classical beauty, I cannot argue with this observation about Idris Elba.
4. I love this portrait. It looks like a frame from a slightly skewed film. The model's own photography is surrealist and great.
5. Last night I re-read Sheryl Jordan's The Raging Quiet (1999) for the first time since college. Now I'm trying to figure out why its setting still doesn't quite work for me when Orsinian Tales (1976) is probably my favorite book by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Background, in case you have not read the latter: Orsinian Tales is a collection of short stories set in a small country in Central Europe that is fantastic only by virtue of being fictional. It shares historical events with Hungary, the now Czech Republic, Poland; its language reminds me of Romanian. It is none of them and takes its name ultimately from its creator. It was her earliest secondary world. But it is shaped by the events of this one, as reflected in the stories—they are recurringly political and personal, the one against the backdrop of the other. The earliest takes place in the mid-twelfth century, the latest in the original collection in 1965; the title story of Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (1996) later extended that timeline to 1989 and something very like the Velvet Revolution, after which I have seen no more Orsinian tales. (The Compass Rose (1982) contains one other Orsinian story and a science fiction piece that shares some ambiguous references—I wouldn't count it, but Le Guin herself notes that one of the protagonists has an Orsinian name.) All together, they make a mosaic of an imaginary country that seems to exist, like Jan Morris' Hav, in the interstices of very real ones. I do not feel the same way toward Le Guin's Malafrena (1979), an ambitious attempt at a nineteenth-century novel which is not quite believable as Orsinian metafiction, but I recommend the collection to everyone I can get to hold still long enough to listen to me about it. "Brothers and Sisters" is one of the stories I keep coming back to. I was two years older than Stefan Fabbre when the keystone was knocked out of my arch.
The Raging Quiet's setting is one of the reasons I have trouble getting a fix on it. Nothing about the plot demands a secondary world. The protagonist is a sixteen-year-old widow accused of witchcraft in the small fishing village where her much older husband brought her, abused her, and shortly thereafter died; her closest friend is a deaf boy mistaken for a madman and beaten to drive out his devils; their only ally is the village's priest, who still cannot save her from being tried for witchcraft. The names are more or less Irish, except when—in the case of the landed gentry—they're more or less English. The author explains in an afterword that the characters and their story came to her "so vivid and complete that I found I could not force it into a particular time or place in history, for fear of distorting what I had been given. So I left their tale in the freer atmosphere of myth, and simply wrote a fantasy set in an ancient time." I have trouble taking the setting as either ancient or mythical; the coastal village of Torcurra and the manor house of Fernleigh have an eighteenth-century feel except for the outcroppings of medievalism, like some of the information we are given about men's clothes and the persistence of trial by ordeal, all of which I could accept as fantasy except that Christianity is a huge force in the novel, explicitly. And that anchors the story for me quite firmly in our world sometime, because unlike C.S. Lewis I do not believe that Christ just happens across the multiverse. As a result, it's impossible for me to accept the setting as purely otherwhere—like Greer Gilman's Cloud, which has witches and manors and a religious system which never even heard of monotheism—and I keep trying to evaluate it by the standards of historical fiction, against the author's wishes. I genuinely don't know why she didn't set the novel in historical Ireland. It already has characteristic speech patterns, weather, geology; there's peat-cutting, for crying out loud. There are stone circles and passage tombs. I knew much less about history in high school and I remember finding the half-fictionalization jarring even then. This time around, it really jumped out at me.
And I don't know if this is unfair of me, because Orsinia has a Karst like Slovenia and Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantium is blatantly remixed Byzantine history with more magic and if we want to be really brutal about it, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain isn't Wales, but you could have fooled me from the way people go around being named things like Gwydion. I don't know why I find it harder to accept Jordan's early modern not quite Ireland, unless it's the reasons thrown out above: it's neither close enough to real history to read without apparent anachronism nor sufficiently marked as some other genre (alt-history, high fantasy) to forestall comparisons; and it tells me something about Jordan that she didn't think of Christianity as a marker of our history. Or maybe I'm missing the point entirely. Has anyone else read this novel? It's YA, it deals with difference and disability, and I still like best the character I liked when first I read it, because some things about me haven't changed in sixteen years and character preferences, unless I do something boneheaded like forget Owen Davies, are one of them. I still wish it had been a historical novel. Given all the elements that are necessary for the story, I don't see how a real time and place would have damaged it.
P.S. Ashlyme sent me this just now and it's fantastic: Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange's "The Dreams: Sea" (1964), from a series of soundscapes built around people describing their dreams. I always die on the land. The land at the bottom of the sea.
1. My poem "Keep the Home Fires Burning" has been accepted by Not One of Us. I wrote it last November in a state of slightly hallucinating exhaustion because
ashlyme had written this post. It features the return of Charon's bee-stamped obol, which should be a title of its own.2. Have a Roman glass fish flask. Because it is very beautiful and also looks like a fish.
3. This is a pretty great condensation of a hilarious episode from Herodotos. While we're talking about classical beauty, I cannot argue with this observation about Idris Elba.
4. I love this portrait. It looks like a frame from a slightly skewed film. The model's own photography is surrealist and great.
5. Last night I re-read Sheryl Jordan's The Raging Quiet (1999) for the first time since college. Now I'm trying to figure out why its setting still doesn't quite work for me when Orsinian Tales (1976) is probably my favorite book by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Background, in case you have not read the latter: Orsinian Tales is a collection of short stories set in a small country in Central Europe that is fantastic only by virtue of being fictional. It shares historical events with Hungary, the now Czech Republic, Poland; its language reminds me of Romanian. It is none of them and takes its name ultimately from its creator. It was her earliest secondary world. But it is shaped by the events of this one, as reflected in the stories—they are recurringly political and personal, the one against the backdrop of the other. The earliest takes place in the mid-twelfth century, the latest in the original collection in 1965; the title story of Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (1996) later extended that timeline to 1989 and something very like the Velvet Revolution, after which I have seen no more Orsinian tales. (The Compass Rose (1982) contains one other Orsinian story and a science fiction piece that shares some ambiguous references—I wouldn't count it, but Le Guin herself notes that one of the protagonists has an Orsinian name.) All together, they make a mosaic of an imaginary country that seems to exist, like Jan Morris' Hav, in the interstices of very real ones. I do not feel the same way toward Le Guin's Malafrena (1979), an ambitious attempt at a nineteenth-century novel which is not quite believable as Orsinian metafiction, but I recommend the collection to everyone I can get to hold still long enough to listen to me about it. "Brothers and Sisters" is one of the stories I keep coming back to. I was two years older than Stefan Fabbre when the keystone was knocked out of my arch.
The Raging Quiet's setting is one of the reasons I have trouble getting a fix on it. Nothing about the plot demands a secondary world. The protagonist is a sixteen-year-old widow accused of witchcraft in the small fishing village where her much older husband brought her, abused her, and shortly thereafter died; her closest friend is a deaf boy mistaken for a madman and beaten to drive out his devils; their only ally is the village's priest, who still cannot save her from being tried for witchcraft. The names are more or less Irish, except when—in the case of the landed gentry—they're more or less English. The author explains in an afterword that the characters and their story came to her "so vivid and complete that I found I could not force it into a particular time or place in history, for fear of distorting what I had been given. So I left their tale in the freer atmosphere of myth, and simply wrote a fantasy set in an ancient time." I have trouble taking the setting as either ancient or mythical; the coastal village of Torcurra and the manor house of Fernleigh have an eighteenth-century feel except for the outcroppings of medievalism, like some of the information we are given about men's clothes and the persistence of trial by ordeal, all of which I could accept as fantasy except that Christianity is a huge force in the novel, explicitly. And that anchors the story for me quite firmly in our world sometime, because unlike C.S. Lewis I do not believe that Christ just happens across the multiverse. As a result, it's impossible for me to accept the setting as purely otherwhere—like Greer Gilman's Cloud, which has witches and manors and a religious system which never even heard of monotheism—and I keep trying to evaluate it by the standards of historical fiction, against the author's wishes. I genuinely don't know why she didn't set the novel in historical Ireland. It already has characteristic speech patterns, weather, geology; there's peat-cutting, for crying out loud. There are stone circles and passage tombs. I knew much less about history in high school and I remember finding the half-fictionalization jarring even then. This time around, it really jumped out at me.
And I don't know if this is unfair of me, because Orsinia has a Karst like Slovenia and Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantium is blatantly remixed Byzantine history with more magic and if we want to be really brutal about it, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain isn't Wales, but you could have fooled me from the way people go around being named things like Gwydion. I don't know why I find it harder to accept Jordan's early modern not quite Ireland, unless it's the reasons thrown out above: it's neither close enough to real history to read without apparent anachronism nor sufficiently marked as some other genre (alt-history, high fantasy) to forestall comparisons; and it tells me something about Jordan that she didn't think of Christianity as a marker of our history. Or maybe I'm missing the point entirely. Has anyone else read this novel? It's YA, it deals with difference and disability, and I still like best the character I liked when first I read it, because some things about me haven't changed in sixteen years and character preferences, unless I do something boneheaded like forget Owen Davies, are one of them. I still wish it had been a historical novel. Given all the elements that are necessary for the story, I don't see how a real time and place would have damaged it.
P.S. Ashlyme sent me this just now and it's fantastic: Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange's "The Dreams: Sea" (1964), from a series of soundscapes built around people describing their dreams. I always die on the land. The land at the bottom of the sea.
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"...fear of distorting what I had been given..." Ugh. You're the author, lady, your job is to tidy this up after dreaming it and make it work together smoothly. Lumping together the past, mythology, and fantasy into one big messy salad only works if you know what you're doing; this just sounds like carelessness. (Or, more accurately, disrespect for what each of those things is and does. Of course they can work together! With conscious choices and care.)
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That's all right: I might not have mentioned it here, but I have. I found my copy in a used book store, filed without comment in Travel Literature. I briefly considered trying to see if anyone I knew had contact information for Jan Morris so that I could tell her.
You're the author, lady, your job is to tidy this up after dreaming it and make it work together smoothly. Lumping together the past, mythology, and fantasy into one big messy salad only works if you know what you're doing
So it's not just me, is what you're saying.
(That's actually a useful data point; thank you.)
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I agree! On principle and as described; I haven't read The Raging Quiet.
Or, rather, I think I did try reading it in high school. If it's the book I'm thinking of, I didn't so much bounce off as wander away having never really been hooked enough to bring it home instead of reading part of it during a lunch period one day. (Being a super-cool and popular kid, I spent many lunch periods hanging out in the school library.) Does the deaf boy use sign language? I remember being disgruntled about a book, whether this or another, where that was the case, because I knew enough about the specific historical circumstances of the creation of modern sign language to be cranky about it being ported back centuries. If I were reading it now, I would probably be more forgiving, depending on how it's handled; ASL and BSL and so forth are very era-specific in the exact details, but it's not as if they're the first time anybody did that. Anyway, I don't know the book enough to comment on how the author handled the specifics of historicity, but I agree that it sounds like the answer is "sloppily."
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Yes; the protagonist invents it to communicate with him and then it evolves rapidly between them—by the end of the book it's capable of expressing complex concepts, although I'm not sure how Deaf readers would feel about it. I don't mean that snarkily. I don't know any sign languages except for the ASL alphabet and a couple of really common signs, so I can't evaluate anything about Marnie and Raven's invented language as a language. I can wonder about the way it's translated and the way it's used in the text. The author says in her afterword:
Also, I drew on my own experience in writing of Marnie's difficulties as she tries to communicate with Raven, who is deaf. For several years I worked with profoundly deaf children in schools, and spoke with them through signs. Marnie's dealings with Raven—her difficulties, frustration, despair, joy, and triumph—are all things I have experienced. The sign language she invents is obviously different from the official sign languages of today, though some signs are based on natural gestures, and are therefore similar.
What I can't help noticing about this statement now is that it reframes the process of Raven learning to communicate (with signs; he is just learning to speak aloud by the end of the novel) entirely in terms of Marnie, which on the one hand is fair enough—she's the protagonist and most of the narrative is from her perspective—and on the other elides Raven's experience, when it's apparent from the text that he feels a lot of frustration, despair, joy, and triumph himself. And that makes me more skeptical of the author's handling of signing overall, if she thinks of it in terms of Marnie's success rather than Raven's, or a joint triumph. Maybe there are some writers who just shouldn't talk about their process. I'd have problems with this novel without the afterword, but the author's own opinions only seem to strengthen them.
Anyway, I don't know the book enough to comment on how the author handled the specifics of historicity, but I agree that it sounds like the answer is "sloppily."
Yeah. And it's frustrating, because there are many elements of the novel that I enjoyed the first time and still enjoyed on re-read, but they're hampered by issues like the setting and the questions I have about its handling of Raven's deafness. I mean, he's also the romantic hero, which is pretty cool. It's just . . . It could have been a better book.
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Yeah. I don't remember much about the details of how it's handled -- and even if I did, or reread it now, being a hearing person with a few years of ASL classes under her belt is very, very different from being deaf or even from being a hearing person more immersed in Deaf culture, so I don't have a lot of idea how a deaf/Deaf person would view her handling of it. But that's not a quote that shows her off particularly well.
I often love reading writers talking about their process, but sometimes it just stomps on all the benefit of the doubt you were trying to give them.
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That.
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Feel better soon.
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Feel better soon.
Thank you on both fronts!
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You're welcome! I like "Unlocking the Air" a lot; it's a sequel to "Brothers and Sisters" and "A Week in the Country." Even if it was not planned as the last Orsinian tale, it's a good possibility to end on.
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2. I want to drink from that flask; by rights any wine poured from it should have an edge of brine. Damned gorgeous.
4. I love that portrait too. I don't know why, but Locquard (distorted as he is) reminds me a bit of David Tibet. It might be the tousled hair or something in the eyes.
5. I need to go back to Orsinia; it's been so long that I'd forgotten the book ran into the twentieth century.
And I'm really pleased that you enjoyed "Sea". Get well soon.
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Thank you. I am very glad it will have this home. Would you mind if I dedicated it to you?
I want to drink from that flask; by rights any wine poured from it should have an edge of brine.
Yes! I love its little stickle back.
Locquard (distorted as he is) reminds me a bit of David Tibet. It might be the tousled hair or something in the eyes.
Show me a picture of David Tibet? I only know what he sounds like!
I need to go back to Orsinia; it's been so long that I'd forgotten the book ran into the twentieth century.
The years in which the original stories take place are 1960 ("The Fountains"), 1150 ("The Barrow"), 1920 ("Ile Forest"), 1920 ("Conversations at Night"), 1956 ("The Road East"), 1910 ("Brothers and Sisters"), 1962 ("A Week in the Country"), 1938 ("An die Musik"), 1965 ("The House"), 1640 ("The Lady of Moge"), and 1935 ("Imaginary Countries"). I do not remember that "Two Delays on the Northern Line" comes with a date attached, but it has a mid-century feel: trains, telegrams, taxis, government regulations; I think it has to take place after WWII. "Unlocking the Air" is very specifically 1989. I believe there are some Orsinian poems from early in Le Guin's career, but I don't know if they're available nowadays. She said once in an interview that she had heard nothing more from the country since 1990; I am hoping that is not because its present-day circumstances would be too sad.
And I'm really pleased that you enjoyed "Sea". Get well soon.
Thank you. I have an attentive cat nurse and a lot of water and some very fine things to listen to, which you have helped with.
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I'd be delighted! Thank you.
Here's a picture of Tibet:
http://www.centrosangiorgio.com/rock_satanico/articoli/immagini/david_tibet.jpg
I remember that the UK cover of "Orsinian Tales" probably illustrated "The Barrow": a sword thrust into a cairn, just a few streaks of blood lifting the monochrome. I'll look for a second-hand copy!
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I've asked
Here's a picture of Tibet
I can see why you thought of him. It is the hair and the eyes.
I remember that the UK cover of "Orsinian Tales" probably illustrated "The Barrow": a sword thrust into a cairn, just a few streaks of blood lifting the monochrome.
I have a little paperback Bantam fourth printing with tape patches on the spine; I believe after years I finally tracked down a hardcover for my mother, but it's not mine. It's one of the cases where the edition I read first is so firmly memorized that any other feels strange. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975) was like that, too, but I don't own that paperback anymore; I have a hardcover first edition and have been slowly acclimating myself to it since grad school.
I'll look for a second-hand copy!
Good book-hunting!
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I can see that being disorienting.
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Sometimes you really *don't* want to reference a particular country, but you very much want a story to be set in the real world--that's how I felt for Pen Pal, so I tried, in my clumsy way, to do what it seems to me you're describing LeGuin as doing successfully. But it sounds as if, with The Raging Quiet, the author wanted to have various trappings of our particular, happened-in-history, world ... but not be our world. And yeah, that's a problem for exactly the reason you say: because you keep trying to figure out the where and the when of it.
I'm reading Yoon Ha Lee's collection Conservation of Shadows, and right now I'm reading "Iseul's Lexicon," which uses, essentially, the time and more-or-less events of Japan's invasion, under Hideyoshi, of Korea--but in an alternate world, with alternate names, plus magic, plus creepy elder gods. It's working really really well for me.
Congratulations on the poem! And I loved the fish and the Herodotus--both of which I reblogged (tagging Ann Leckie on the fish).
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Yes, I think so: it may have started out as a Ruritania, but then she took it—and the countries it was drawing from—seriously. And that's a distinction which really makes a difference. The more I think about it, the more I have trouble with Jordan's claim that a historical setting would have distorted her initial inspiration. I feel like that grounding you mention could only have clarified it.
I've seen Tanith Lee get away with the kind of neither-here-nor-thereness that Jordan was trying for. I should have thought of her sooner: her novels tend to be more clear-cut, but many of her short stories take place in settings that are almost eighteenth-century France, or almost twentieth-century Shetland, or almost nineteenth-century Russia, without ever being explicitly anything else; everything is just slightly alternate and no one really has those names in our world. They don't leave me with the same feeling of vagueness and irritation, though. It might be that they're just far enough from reality to work.
that's how I felt for Pen Pal, so I tried, in my clumsy way, to do what it seems to me you're describing LeGuin as doing successfully.
Hey, it works in Pen Pal. Do not knock yourself down for not being Ursula K. Le Guin. Most people aren't!
Iseul's Lexicon," which uses, essentially, the time and more-or-less events of Japan's invasion, under Hideyoshi, of Korea--but in an alternate world, with alternate names, plus magic, plus creepy elder gods. It's working really really well for me.
Yes! That sort of thing I'm fine with! One of the things I love about Yoon's fiction is his ability to refract history through fantastic or science-fictional lenses without making it feel like either a facsimile or a foregone conclusion.
Congratulations on the poem! And I loved the fish and the Herodotus--both of which I reblogged (tagging Ann Leckie on the fish).
Thank you! I hope Ann Leckie likes the fish.
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True that! I now have an image of UK Le Guin looking anxiously at a series of almost-doppelgangers, thinking, "Oh no... those ones are really very close..."
I hope Ann Leckie likes the fish.
She reblogged it. Tumblr is such a tacit forum that that's about as affirmative as it gets.
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Well, nonetheless: nice!
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"but don't quote me lol never quote me I get this shit straight from the bathhouse aka God's ear"
(If you haven't yet discovered BetterMyths, I recommend the site to you.)
I have discovered BetterMyths, because it is inevitable if you are a classicist who imprinted on Norse myth as a child and spends any time on the internet. We even have the book of Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes. I hadn't seen there was a new book of American myths, though! Someday when I have money again . . .
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It's really profane and really charming. Highly, highly recommended.
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So it feels like not quite historical fiction, not quite fantasy, and either way not really thought through? That would frustrate me.
(I read Quicksilver when it came out, but can remember almost nothing about it except the narrative voice, some details from the life of Lawrence Waterhouse, and the fact that I couldn't believe Eliza as a character at all. I should have read The Confusion and The System of the World ditto, but I can't remember anything about them, so maybe I didn't after all. I enjoyed the historical sections of Cryptonomicon. I'll put up with a lot for Turing.)
And has long since apparently decided that editors are for other people. Bah.
I really wish that were not the default failure mode for successful authors. It doesn't happen to everyone, but it happens to too many.
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To me, yes. I didn't get past the first one, either. I just read his latest one, Seveneves, and overall enjoyed it--he's gotten a LOT better at writing female characters over the years. The best description I've read called it a fast-paced SF adventure novel with a slow-moving, but fascinating 585-page prologue. But it once again lacks an actual ending--he seems able to generate either a real beginning or a real ending, but never both at once.
I really wish that were not the default failure mode for successful authors.
Yeah. The more editing-of-friends I do, the more I itch to take a red pen to some of my favorite authors' work.
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Ghost money. O my. I wish that panel at Readercon had been longer, or twins. Because Charon's bee-stamped obol.
2. Miraculous. How could a thing that fragile, passed from hand to hand, survive? What a beauty!
3. I get this shit straight from the bathhouse aka God's ear. Brilliant.
I hadn't even heard of Idris Elba--he's in all those movies I don't go too--but wow.
4. Unsettling. Really good but unsettling.
5. Orsinian Tales looks deceptively simple. It's perfect.
Love "Sea."
Nine
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Thank you!
Ghost money. O my. I wish that panel at Readercon had been longer, or twins. Because Charon's bee-stamped obol.
It might turn into a poem. Yoon made beautiful use of it—somewhat refracted—in his story "Two to Leave."
Miraculous. How could a thing that fragile, passed from hand to hand, survive? What a beauty!
It looks even better up close. There are patches of iridescence on its glass skin like scales.
Brilliant.
That is pretty much Herodotos. I can't remember anymore which of my professors likened him to the guy who sits down next to you at the bar and just because you said hello now won't stop telling you all these weird anecdotes that are about half really interesting and half almost certainly bullshit, but it's stuck with me. He is a dubious ethnographic source. I am very fond of him.
I hadn't even heard of Idris Elba--he's in all those movies I don't go too--but wow.
He got on my radar with Pacific Rim (2013) in which he, like all the cast, is wonderful. Otherwise he has a really interesting filmography that I have mostly not seen. His image appears frequently on Tumblr.
Unsettling. Really good but unsettling.
I just really like it. He looks like a trickster, and possibly not quite human, even allowing for the distortion of the eyes.
Orsinian Tales looks deceptively simple. It's perfect.
I really think it is my favorite: I loved it when I discovered it early in college and I loved it two nights ago when I picked it up and re-read "Brothers and Sisters" just because it was there. I don't think it's out of key with Le Guin's other work, either. I would love to read her Orsinian poems sometime.
Love "Sea."
I need to hear more by Delia Derbyshire. I have the soundtrack to The Legend of Hell House (1973) and a handful of her work for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but she really was prolific and I've never heard most of it.
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That fish flask is great. As is that Herodotos story condensation!
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Thank you!
That fish flask is great. As is that Herodotos story condensation!
I always enjoy when Tumblr appreciates the ancient world. Case in point: it never ceases to make me happy that this obscure and hilarious bit of Assyriology has become an internet darling.
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