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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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Feel better soon.
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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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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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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."
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That fish flask is great. As is that Herodotos story condensation!
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