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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.
no subject
"...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.)
no subject
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.)
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
That.