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Only air, that old breath
The sore throat was a harbinger: I am sick. Everything hurts and my brain feels like someone scooped it out of my skull. I just want to lie down for hours and I can't. Assorted notes on things I should have posted about yesterday.
1. The annual Strange Horizons Fund Drive has begun! Read the details and donate here; read the bonus issue as it's funded here. Content this year includes short fiction by Kelly Link and Roshani Chokshi, nonfiction by Johanna Sinisalo and Aishwarya Subramanian, and poetry by Rose Lemberg, Shweta Narayan, Jane Yolen, and more. Of especial note: Strange Horizons now has a Patreon, for everyone who's always wanted SH in e-book form. There are also some excellent prizes. Our goal this year is $18,000. It will be worth your while.
2. I just learned that Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid is going to be published posthumously. I think of his underworld first as an Irish one—stories excavated from the bog bodies of North (1975), the personal and political ghosts of Station Island (1984)—but if you're going to leave a poem speaking from below the earth, Aeneas' descent is a good one. I still want to finish translating Book VI of the Pharsalia. I worry about losing my languages when I feel like this.
3. The frustrating thing about Lynne Reid Banks' The Indian in the Cupboard (1980) is that she is explicitly writing to deconstruct stereotypes and teach a lesson about not treating people as things, but still fails to notice that she has made her title character a straight-up noble savage with less moral authority than an English schoolboy. The plot makes its point when Omri and his friend Patrick realize that despite their miniature statures and the magic which brought them alive in present-day London, Little Bear and Boone are not toys in a live-action game—an Indian for Omri, a cowboy for Patrick—but real people with their own lives in the historical past to which they need to be allowed to return. It's a good moral. It only works if the historical people are real, which is where the book falls down. Yes, Omri learns that not all Native Americans live in tipis or ride across the plains chasing the cavalry, like in all the Westerns on TV; Little Bear is 18th-century Iroquois, his clan is allied with the British and he doesn't own a horse, and one of the first things he does on understanding his situation is make Omri get him birch bark with which to build a longhouse. Omri thinks blood brotherhood is "an old Indian custom." Little Bear doesn't know what he's talking about. When the main characters are watching television and a Western comes on, it's a disaster: while Boone cheers on the rifle-toting settlers circling their wagons, Little Bear watches in horror and outrage as the whooping actors in redface are massacred. It makes Omri deeply uncomfortable to watch; it is intended to make the assumed-to-be-white reader uncomfortable as well. And yet Little Bear speaks in stereotypically broken English, just like the movies we're supposed to discount as racist and unfair; he has "fierce black eyes" and his moods swing between warlike, stoic, and crafty; when he's not threatening to scalp Boone, he's cajoling Omri to bring another plastic figurine to life so that he can have a wife. (I'm not even touching that plotline. It's terrible.) He has the moral high ground on the dissolute Boone, but Omri can still always tell him how to behave—and be right. Considering that Omri is about ten years old, there's an obvious problem.
In terms of subversion, the book is actually more successful with Boone. As an inadvertent time-traveler from the 19th-century American frontier, he's saddled with Banks' tin-eyed idea of Texas dialect, but he's otherwise quirky enough to come across as a person, not a type—belligerent and easily spooked, he bursts into tears at the drop of a hat (his nickname back in 1889 is "Boohoo"), thinks Omri and his giant-size world are a hallucination brought on by some really rotgut whiskey, and sketches his hometown in meticulous, graceful detail in Omri's art class. His less comic/sympathetic side comes out in his casual, period-accurate racism, which plays a major part in Omri's reappraisal of his ideas about cowboys and Indians; it actually gets Boone shot at one point, for which I think the narrative lets him off lightly. I wouldn't go so far as to call him a three-dimensional character, but he's written deliberately against the heroic ideal of the Hollywood cowboy and it makes him memorable. Little Bear is not permitted the same nuance. I think the book would have worked much better if he had been.
I don't know what conclusions to draw here. I suppose it's just another iteration of the pattern where unmarked, default characters can be all sorts of things, while characters who are outside the default are characterized first by their otherness. I hate to resort to TV Tropes, but it's a quick example: four members of the Five-Man Band are described by their roles within the team; the fifth is The Chick. It gets tiresome. I hope the sequels managed to amend this problem; I have little faith that they did, especially since I can remember very little about the two I read except the colors associated with the covers of the editions I read in elementary school and the between-books death of a minor character, because I had liked him despite his equally minimal characterization and approximately four pages of screen time. There are two further sequels that came out later; there's a mid-'90's film adaptation I haven't seen. I did not realize until I was double-checking her bibliography on Wikipedia that the names of Omri and his brothers are the names of Banks' children. This was definitely not the most demoralizing childhood re-read I've encountered, but it was an instructively counterproductive one.
And at this point I was going to talk about the film we watched last night, but I think it deserves its own post. God, I wish my head did not hurt so much.
1. The annual Strange Horizons Fund Drive has begun! Read the details and donate here; read the bonus issue as it's funded here. Content this year includes short fiction by Kelly Link and Roshani Chokshi, nonfiction by Johanna Sinisalo and Aishwarya Subramanian, and poetry by Rose Lemberg, Shweta Narayan, Jane Yolen, and more. Of especial note: Strange Horizons now has a Patreon, for everyone who's always wanted SH in e-book form. There are also some excellent prizes. Our goal this year is $18,000. It will be worth your while.
2. I just learned that Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid is going to be published posthumously. I think of his underworld first as an Irish one—stories excavated from the bog bodies of North (1975), the personal and political ghosts of Station Island (1984)—but if you're going to leave a poem speaking from below the earth, Aeneas' descent is a good one. I still want to finish translating Book VI of the Pharsalia. I worry about losing my languages when I feel like this.
3. The frustrating thing about Lynne Reid Banks' The Indian in the Cupboard (1980) is that she is explicitly writing to deconstruct stereotypes and teach a lesson about not treating people as things, but still fails to notice that she has made her title character a straight-up noble savage with less moral authority than an English schoolboy. The plot makes its point when Omri and his friend Patrick realize that despite their miniature statures and the magic which brought them alive in present-day London, Little Bear and Boone are not toys in a live-action game—an Indian for Omri, a cowboy for Patrick—but real people with their own lives in the historical past to which they need to be allowed to return. It's a good moral. It only works if the historical people are real, which is where the book falls down. Yes, Omri learns that not all Native Americans live in tipis or ride across the plains chasing the cavalry, like in all the Westerns on TV; Little Bear is 18th-century Iroquois, his clan is allied with the British and he doesn't own a horse, and one of the first things he does on understanding his situation is make Omri get him birch bark with which to build a longhouse. Omri thinks blood brotherhood is "an old Indian custom." Little Bear doesn't know what he's talking about. When the main characters are watching television and a Western comes on, it's a disaster: while Boone cheers on the rifle-toting settlers circling their wagons, Little Bear watches in horror and outrage as the whooping actors in redface are massacred. It makes Omri deeply uncomfortable to watch; it is intended to make the assumed-to-be-white reader uncomfortable as well. And yet Little Bear speaks in stereotypically broken English, just like the movies we're supposed to discount as racist and unfair; he has "fierce black eyes" and his moods swing between warlike, stoic, and crafty; when he's not threatening to scalp Boone, he's cajoling Omri to bring another plastic figurine to life so that he can have a wife. (I'm not even touching that plotline. It's terrible.) He has the moral high ground on the dissolute Boone, but Omri can still always tell him how to behave—and be right. Considering that Omri is about ten years old, there's an obvious problem.
In terms of subversion, the book is actually more successful with Boone. As an inadvertent time-traveler from the 19th-century American frontier, he's saddled with Banks' tin-eyed idea of Texas dialect, but he's otherwise quirky enough to come across as a person, not a type—belligerent and easily spooked, he bursts into tears at the drop of a hat (his nickname back in 1889 is "Boohoo"), thinks Omri and his giant-size world are a hallucination brought on by some really rotgut whiskey, and sketches his hometown in meticulous, graceful detail in Omri's art class. His less comic/sympathetic side comes out in his casual, period-accurate racism, which plays a major part in Omri's reappraisal of his ideas about cowboys and Indians; it actually gets Boone shot at one point, for which I think the narrative lets him off lightly. I wouldn't go so far as to call him a three-dimensional character, but he's written deliberately against the heroic ideal of the Hollywood cowboy and it makes him memorable. Little Bear is not permitted the same nuance. I think the book would have worked much better if he had been.
I don't know what conclusions to draw here. I suppose it's just another iteration of the pattern where unmarked, default characters can be all sorts of things, while characters who are outside the default are characterized first by their otherness. I hate to resort to TV Tropes, but it's a quick example: four members of the Five-Man Band are described by their roles within the team; the fifth is The Chick. It gets tiresome. I hope the sequels managed to amend this problem; I have little faith that they did, especially since I can remember very little about the two I read except the colors associated with the covers of the editions I read in elementary school and the between-books death of a minor character, because I had liked him despite his equally minimal characterization and approximately four pages of screen time. There are two further sequels that came out later; there's a mid-'90's film adaptation I haven't seen. I did not realize until I was double-checking her bibliography on Wikipedia that the names of Omri and his brothers are the names of Banks' children. This was definitely not the most demoralizing childhood re-read I've encountered, but it was an instructively counterproductive one.
And at this point I was going to talk about the film we watched last night, but I think it deserves its own post. God, I wish my head did not hurt so much.
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Re: ObClericIcon
Thank you. Tell your icon I appreciate it.
no subject
Also there's, like, a tiny Cockney thief, and possibly a tragic tiny-cupboard-person/actual human-sized person romance? My memories are vague and EXTREMELY BEFUDDLED.
(Hope you feel better soon!)
no subject
Holy Christmas crackers. I stopped reading after The Secret of the Indian (1989). I didn't realize the primo batshit I was missing out on. Is the last book equally gonzo, or is it just kind of there?
Also there's, like, a tiny Cockney thief, and possibly a tragic tiny-cupboard-person/actual human-sized person romance? My memories are vague and EXTREMELY BEFUDDLED.
You should re-read this for LJ/DW. It can't be worse than The Alchemist's Cat.
The real problem with this re-read is that I can remember liking Banks' The Fairy Rebel (185) and I, Houdini (1988)—the one from the perspective of the hamster escape artist—and now I'm afraid to revisit them in case something as absolutely not okay as Little Bear's characterization leaps out at me. I mean, you really can see what she was going for with him. It just doesn't work and it doesn't work to a painful degree of cognitive dissonance. (Also, I think when I was younger I did not quite register how racist Boone is in this book, because the answer is as fuck.) I just found out her novel Tiger, Tiger (2005) is a historical fiction set around the gladiatorial arena in third-century Rome and I don't know if I want to check it out or if I just want to wander off whistling in a nonchalant way to ensure it doesn't follow me. It is apparently written partly from the viewpoint of the tigers.
no subject
...Oh my god, WHAT.
That's kind of great. I have zero idea how it would work in practice, even aside from the glaring questions of historical accuracy and research, but I'm bewilderedly curious now.
no subject
You see my dilemma!
. . . I assume one would do a lot of research about tiger behavior and about what's known about the treatment of arena animals—bestiae—and then hope the voice comes out more like Ratha's Creature than Redwall? This opens the additional problem that, if it turns out she did a good job, I'm not sure I'll want to read a novel about tigers in gladiatorial combat, because I will almost certainly find it very upsetting. But this object exists. It is possible for one or both of us to read it. Or get
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I very much do!
I wonder what age it's pitched at? Because as you say, Redwall, But In The Gladiatorial Arena, Also With Tigers is a distinctly worrisome possibility, and people who can write animals-qua-animals as well as Diane Duane and Richard Adams are few and far between. Not to mention the death toll.
...They have it at the Somerville library.* Fatal curiosity may have just struck me.
* I just typed "Middleman library" into my browser, wondering all the while why it wasn't autocompleting the url, instead of Minuteman. Good job, me. But now I'm enjoying the mental image of a MiddleLibrary open to the public.
no subject
GOD BE BETWEEN YOU AND ALL THE DARK PLACES WHERE YOU MUST WALK.
(Obviously, if it's good, let me know about that, too.)
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no subject
That makes a lot of sense to me. I have vivid memories of the pink-haired fairy who wears blue jeans and the blue streak in the human girl's hair when I can remember almost nothing else of the plot.
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Thank you. I'd like to!
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Was that the WWI-era medic? I was sorry to lose him too, although I found it a poignant image that if you try to bring someone forward whose timeline (in parallel to yours, anyway) has ended, you just get their miniature, empty, neatly-folded clothes.
no subject
Yes—Tommy Atkins. I think it was my first encounter with the name and Kipling came later, but I'm honestly not sure. The internet tells me Steve Coogan played him in the movie, which I approve of.
I was sorry to lose him too, although I found it a poignant image that if you try to bring someone forward whose timeline (in parallel to yours, anyway) has ended, you just get their miniature, empty, neatly-folded clothes.
Agreed. It's one of the few things I remember from The Return of the Indian (1985), along with a vague sense that Boone is less of a jackass, otherwise I wouldn't have remembered him affectionately, which I did, which is one of the reasons I did this re-read to myself.
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Oh $#!7, I am so sorry. Let me know if there's anything I can do, including cook you things.
no subject
Thank you. I have actually just e-mailed you to ask a favor. If it is not physically-spatially possible, it's all right.