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'Cept for hurry up and hit the road
If I am to get up early without sleep, I much prefer catching a train to see an incredible stage production to looking at an apartment which I will probably not be able to rent, but the latter was this morning nonetheless. Let's get back to New York.
Essentially, I had four goals for this trip: see Hadestown, hang out with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladymondegreen (with bonus points if I got to talk to either akawil or pecunium for longer than the traditional forty-five seconds in the middle of Arisia), hang out with Michael Cisco, and buy books. All were achieved. I expected to sleep on the train down from Boston, but instead I wrote a poem.
I appreciate that Lady Mondegreen's work-mates seemed to be all right with me stashing my stuff under her desk and running off without much in the way of introduction. I got in a brief conversation about Tolkien with two of them. The security guard in the downstairs lobby apparently missed me coming through the first time, which worked fine until I tried to get back into the building. In hindsight of the state of my foot, possibly I should not have walked the mile and a half to the Strand, but since I will prioritize books over almost any other comfort I don't actually regret it, especially since I scored a hardcover of Barbara Hambly's Graveyard Dust (1999) and two Hard Case Crime reprints with superlatively pulp titles, namely David Goodis' The Wounded and the Slain (1955) and Ed McBain's The Gutter and the Grave (1958), which I did not intentionally purchase as a pair. I keep thinking about McBain's So Nude, So Dead (1953), but I'm genuinely not sure it will be able to live up to its title. I hadn't realized before that the bookstore ships, which of course makes sense if you're thinking about international business—Boston is objectively not that far off, but it still enabled me to send my mother a pair of Dick Francis hardcovers which would otherwise have been difficult for me to transport. No luck on the biographies of Van Heflin and Dorothy Arzner or the translated poetry of Aleksei Kruchonykh. I will bravely face of the prospect of more used book stores.
For dinner before the show, we ended up at Whole Foods, that being the easiest place to feed Lady Mondegreen and in this case about four blocks from the theater. I am weirdly unsurprised that Whole Foods in New York City carries the crunchy things of my childhood for which I have been searching fruitlessly in Boston for over a year now. I bought several bags. Then I had to carry them everywhere. Still worth it. I did not realize until we got there that the New York Theatre Workshop was next to KGB Bar, where I have been many times. We saw Hadestown and I loved it. Afterward we could have cut our time to the PATH by catching the subway, but we took the scenic route on foot. I didn't think we had walked as far as the Manhattan Bridge, but I don't have another explanation for the massive granite arch and colonnade that caused me to remark again that more cities should have monumental architecture. That said, I find the high-vaulted underground station at the World Trade Center a very strange space. Apparently it is supposed to resemble an eye or a bird in flight; I looked at its ribs and spines and sternum of marble and paint-whitened steel and could think of nothing unless a cathedral designed by H.R. Giger or Stanley Kubrick's idea of an ossuary. Lady Mondegreen informed me that part of it is also a mall. I am pretty sure you are not supposed to put a mall in an ossuary. I would also lose the gigantic American flag currently unfurled from one level to the next, although perhaps that's only because I am feeling very wary of the ways in which national symbols can be used these days. On yet the other hand, I asked for monumental architecture and I got it. It's an enormous art installation for the practical benefit of the public and it's even made out of materials designed to last more than a lifetime. I am probably happier that it exists than not. It's got the 1968 Penn Station beat sideways, that's for sure.
Most houses are mosaics of the people who live in them, but the one in which I was staying the night had an especially distinct personality—it featured a kitchen with about ten different kinds of honey on offer (I put two of them in my blueberry tea), a balcony garden containing etrogs, olives, and pomegranates (which I have just been informed are blooming), and a bathroom decorated with mermaid pictures. We could not figure out how to turn on the fan in my bedroom, but I opened a window; there are not many stars visible in the light-smudged sky over Jersey City, but there was an immense hunter's moon with craters like scrimshaw that had tracked us through the streets as we walked from the theater. I browsed Lady Mondegreen's shelves and we talked about children's books and early imprints and late, important discoveries. She gave me a shell from Israel as a down payment on further fragments of antiquity and the sea. We stayed up way too late and I slept almost nine hours, including through some insistent morning construction across the street.
Pecunium was still at home when I woke up the next afternoon and not only talked to me for more than forty-five seconds but helpfully provided some antibiotic cream and molefoam padding to cushion around my heel. I found my way back to Manhattan in time to meet Michael for what turned out to be dinner at Cha-an Teahouse: in my case, lavender mint tea, smoked salmon toast (nota bene: the toast is approximately the dimensions of a Roman brick and the salmon heavily layered underneath a mustard-dressed salad; this is a feature, not a bug), and black sesame crème brûlée, which came surmounted by black sesame ice cream and a savory, buttery, doily-ish object I can only describe as a black sesame Florentine. Afterward he treated me to a ceremonial shot of mezcal at La Palapa, having correctly diagnosed that I would like Del Maguey Minero because it is essentially the peat monster of mezcals. He charged me with writing either a story or a poem with the title "I Left My Heart with the Banana Slugs." Somebody hold me to that. Lady Mondegreen very kindly waited at her office so that I could retrieve my once again desk-stashed stuff and we parted on the far side of the shortcut through Café R, which is fortunately nowhere near as impassable as the Styx.
I always forget there's a tiny bookstore in Penn Station. I went in for a bottle of water and came out with Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman's The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard's Most Daring Rescue (2009) becausenegothick had mentioned at Readercon that one of the co-authors was rather distressed at the romanticization of the story. Much to my surprise, I got back to Boston while the subway trains were still running. I did a lot of catch-up work and wrote about Hadestown. I didn't sleep at all, so we'll see how the rest of the day goes. It may involve city-walking with derspatchel, since I'm fond of the one I live in, too.
It was a really splendid forty-eight hours.
Essentially, I had four goals for this trip: see Hadestown, hang out with
ladymondegreen (with bonus points if I got to talk to either akawil or pecunium for longer than the traditional forty-five seconds in the middle of Arisia), hang out with Michael Cisco, and buy books. All were achieved. I expected to sleep on the train down from Boston, but instead I wrote a poem.I appreciate that Lady Mondegreen's work-mates seemed to be all right with me stashing my stuff under her desk and running off without much in the way of introduction. I got in a brief conversation about Tolkien with two of them. The security guard in the downstairs lobby apparently missed me coming through the first time, which worked fine until I tried to get back into the building. In hindsight of the state of my foot, possibly I should not have walked the mile and a half to the Strand, but since I will prioritize books over almost any other comfort I don't actually regret it, especially since I scored a hardcover of Barbara Hambly's Graveyard Dust (1999) and two Hard Case Crime reprints with superlatively pulp titles, namely David Goodis' The Wounded and the Slain (1955) and Ed McBain's The Gutter and the Grave (1958), which I did not intentionally purchase as a pair. I keep thinking about McBain's So Nude, So Dead (1953), but I'm genuinely not sure it will be able to live up to its title. I hadn't realized before that the bookstore ships, which of course makes sense if you're thinking about international business—Boston is objectively not that far off, but it still enabled me to send my mother a pair of Dick Francis hardcovers which would otherwise have been difficult for me to transport. No luck on the biographies of Van Heflin and Dorothy Arzner or the translated poetry of Aleksei Kruchonykh. I will bravely face of the prospect of more used book stores.
For dinner before the show, we ended up at Whole Foods, that being the easiest place to feed Lady Mondegreen and in this case about four blocks from the theater. I am weirdly unsurprised that Whole Foods in New York City carries the crunchy things of my childhood for which I have been searching fruitlessly in Boston for over a year now. I bought several bags. Then I had to carry them everywhere. Still worth it. I did not realize until we got there that the New York Theatre Workshop was next to KGB Bar, where I have been many times. We saw Hadestown and I loved it. Afterward we could have cut our time to the PATH by catching the subway, but we took the scenic route on foot. I didn't think we had walked as far as the Manhattan Bridge, but I don't have another explanation for the massive granite arch and colonnade that caused me to remark again that more cities should have monumental architecture. That said, I find the high-vaulted underground station at the World Trade Center a very strange space. Apparently it is supposed to resemble an eye or a bird in flight; I looked at its ribs and spines and sternum of marble and paint-whitened steel and could think of nothing unless a cathedral designed by H.R. Giger or Stanley Kubrick's idea of an ossuary. Lady Mondegreen informed me that part of it is also a mall. I am pretty sure you are not supposed to put a mall in an ossuary. I would also lose the gigantic American flag currently unfurled from one level to the next, although perhaps that's only because I am feeling very wary of the ways in which national symbols can be used these days. On yet the other hand, I asked for monumental architecture and I got it. It's an enormous art installation for the practical benefit of the public and it's even made out of materials designed to last more than a lifetime. I am probably happier that it exists than not. It's got the 1968 Penn Station beat sideways, that's for sure.
Most houses are mosaics of the people who live in them, but the one in which I was staying the night had an especially distinct personality—it featured a kitchen with about ten different kinds of honey on offer (I put two of them in my blueberry tea), a balcony garden containing etrogs, olives, and pomegranates (which I have just been informed are blooming), and a bathroom decorated with mermaid pictures. We could not figure out how to turn on the fan in my bedroom, but I opened a window; there are not many stars visible in the light-smudged sky over Jersey City, but there was an immense hunter's moon with craters like scrimshaw that had tracked us through the streets as we walked from the theater. I browsed Lady Mondegreen's shelves and we talked about children's books and early imprints and late, important discoveries. She gave me a shell from Israel as a down payment on further fragments of antiquity and the sea. We stayed up way too late and I slept almost nine hours, including through some insistent morning construction across the street.
Pecunium was still at home when I woke up the next afternoon and not only talked to me for more than forty-five seconds but helpfully provided some antibiotic cream and molefoam padding to cushion around my heel. I found my way back to Manhattan in time to meet Michael for what turned out to be dinner at Cha-an Teahouse: in my case, lavender mint tea, smoked salmon toast (nota bene: the toast is approximately the dimensions of a Roman brick and the salmon heavily layered underneath a mustard-dressed salad; this is a feature, not a bug), and black sesame crème brûlée, which came surmounted by black sesame ice cream and a savory, buttery, doily-ish object I can only describe as a black sesame Florentine. Afterward he treated me to a ceremonial shot of mezcal at La Palapa, having correctly diagnosed that I would like Del Maguey Minero because it is essentially the peat monster of mezcals. He charged me with writing either a story or a poem with the title "I Left My Heart with the Banana Slugs." Somebody hold me to that. Lady Mondegreen very kindly waited at her office so that I could retrieve my once again desk-stashed stuff and we parted on the far side of the shortcut through Café R, which is fortunately nowhere near as impassable as the Styx.
I always forget there's a tiny bookstore in Penn Station. I went in for a bottle of water and came out with Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman's The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard's Most Daring Rescue (2009) because
negothick had mentioned at Readercon that one of the co-authors was rather distressed at the romanticization of the story. Much to my surprise, I got back to Boston while the subway trains were still running. I did a lot of catch-up work and wrote about Hadestown. I didn't sleep at all, so we'll see how the rest of the day goes. It may involve city-walking with derspatchel, since I'm fond of the one I live in, too.It was a really splendid forty-eight hours.
no subject
It is excellently plotted, and completely surprised me too. On rereads though, you can catch slight allusions to Hannibal conceiving of himself as dead in previous books as well, which is just an amazing feat of characterization to be stretched out over multiple years of writing. I do constantly wonder how far ahead Hambly plots her books, because she lays the groundwork for future developments so very, very well; you can partly do that as you go along, but hers is so exceptional that I can almost never catch the seams.
And yeah, Jesus it's emotionally compelling. I mean, you'd think fake-suicide would be emotionally and dramatically powerful enough on its own, but it somehow becomes ever more so by Hannibal's absolute commitment to it.
no subject
At the risk of too much information, it hit especially hard with me because I thought of myself as dead for years after my life derailed badly from its expected course in grad school; it took a very long time for me to unlearn the habit and it still comes back when I am doing badly. It's where my collection Ghost Signs came from. I was a classicist by training at the time. My go-to underworld was full of Greek shades and Roman sibyls. I thought of the process of learning to be alive again in explicit terms of katabasis, making my hard way back to the upper air. So I got a double whammy from the novel: while in no suspense whatsoever as to the present-day identity of "the son of the eleventh Viscount Foxford, who drank himself to death on a bet in Paris at the age of thirty, leaving behind a much-relieved wife and a five-year-old son" and perfectly well aware that the story was taking place in October, I still failed to foresee that the natural dovetailing of these facts would come to Hannibal playing his own shade for the Feast of All Saints—"the night when those dead and buried come back to help the living"—and that of course he would refer to his state with classical allusions throughout, because when has he ever missed a chance in this series to deploy a dead language? I finished the book and wrote some notes on it to a friend of mine and puttered around for a bit and then a bomb went off in my head. It's one of the weirdest things that has ever happened to me with a book I really enjoyed. I had to stay up talking the rest of the night and it still took a couple of days to exorcise. Major verisimilitude points to Hambly, because she absolutely nailed the way that someone with a sufficient classical education will think of themselves if their life really goes down the tubes, but I didn't expect to be the test case in my friend group for it.
What other long-term plot arcs have you tracked throughout the books? I was paying attention to any hint of Hannibal's backstory from the start, because it was obviously going to be dramatic, but any number of other developments I think I just accepted as they came.
no subject
I haven't had any Classical training and understand a great deal of Hannibal's dialogue solely through the aid of Google translate, but I do sympathize. My life also took a drastic turn in grad school, and it took years (or more accurately, probably "is taking") to unlearn the habit of thinking constantly about where I "should" be, what I should be doing, what I would have been doing instead of what I am. It's very hard not to dwell on all the expectations I had that are just not going to happen, and to instead relearn everything – how to live and work and what sort of future to plan for. I didn't have the specific death and underworld symbolism, but it's easy to see how applicable it would be. So – yeah. I do so why the book would have been so effective.
To change topics...
What other long-term plot arcs have you tracked throughout the books?
I meant not just that the facts of Hannibal's background are set up, but the specific way he behaves in the earliest books of the series gives off a strong air of "whatever I do doesn't really matter/I'm not really part of this", which fits in explicitly with his belief in himself as dead. Which is surprising to me – not just that Hambly had thought out who he is so early on, but also the specific way he thought about it and processed it.
A couple of other ones I was particularly surprised by was how well-set up the Mexico adventure in Days of the Dead was; it would have been easy enough to just say "Hannibal's gone to Mexico" at the beginning of that book, but instead Consuela is introduced two books ahead and Wet Grave is entirely missing Hannibal. Another is the pirate treasure in Wet Grave – at the time it seems just like a slightly over-the-top happy ending, but several books later in Dead Water it's heavily implied that the Virgin Mary arranged things to Ben and Rose to find the money, specifically so they could buy a house that could be used as part of the Underground Railroad, which fights so well with the general vague supernatural appearances that it feels more deliberate than after-the-fact to me.