I remember brighter days when all this was a mystery

[sovay]

In the last three or four days, to judge from the pile beside my bed, I have read Mary Renault's The Charioteer and The Friendly Young Ladies, Lawrence Durrell's Justine and Balthazar, Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That, David Mura's Angels for the Burning, and Aischylos' Oresteia (in Greek).

I cannot possibly predict what effect this combination will have on my writing, but I hope to God I like it.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Good heavens, that's rich. Do you never read froth?

Nine

[sovay]

Well, the Oresteia was because I had to: everything else is for pleasure. All right, I don't find Goodbye To All That exactly a pleasure, but I'd finished David Jones' In Parenthesis and this was the only other book from World War I in the apartment. My Robert Graves comfort reading is, naturally, I, Claudius.

Unable to sleep tonight, I read Angela Carter. I am dealing with an intense and hopefully soon to pass envy of her earlier novels, The Magic Toyshop and Honeybuzzard in particular. It's the tactile crowding of objects and setting along with characters who possess a three-dimensionality unassociated with the usual definition; people in her world have weight, their surroundings are cinematically realized down to rust cracks in the sink and thumbprints in the soap. It's the mundane written in such detail that it becomes fantastical. I don't know, I think, how to do that. I wish I did. Nor do I know how to practice it. I should either develop this skill promptly or get over this longing or both.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Isn't she just?

It's the mundane written in such detail that it becomes fantastical.

Yes. It's worldbuilt. A.S. Byatt does that, in her different way.

Nine

[sovay]

It doesn't work for me with A.S. Byatt, for whatever reason. I appreciate Possession, but I don't fall in love with it; her language doesn't fire my brain in the same way. I think the register might be wrong.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Wow, this I must read at some point.

[sovay]

Yes. You must. Honeybuzzard (also published as Shadow Dance), The Magic Toyshop, and Wise Children are my favorite Angela Carter novels; I love almost all her short fiction, but The Bloody Chamber especially. She will do things to your language.