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Many things that I am needing to keep me singing
I have awesome friends. A few days ago, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deadcities_icon sent me his stunning cybersexpunk calendar del.ici.ous tension: a digital romance, and today in the mail I received a packet of decaf masala chai from strange_selkie. Oddly enough, I feel better already. You guys rock.
I'm re-reading Tanith Lee's Sung in Shadow (1983), which I first discovered in late high school and which has slunk into my subconscious from time to time since then. I can't shake the feeling that, as a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, it's drawn more from Zeffirelli's 1968 film than from the bare play itself—particularly in the contrasts and relationship of its Romeo and Mercutio, the dark and beautiful Romulan Montargo, who is more innocent than he likes to think, and the older, fair-haired, sardonically unstable Flavian "Mercurio" Estemba. If so, I suppose it's nice to know that I wasn't the only one who fell in love with John McEnery's Mercutio.
"Why not anticipate? What else have we of free will but anticipation?" Mercurio, arguing for the discussion's sake, questioning nothing, believing very little, mesmerizing the guardsman as a matter of course, smiled gravely at him. "A man, young or old, may go to bed healthy, wake at dawn with a pain like a knife in his side, and be laid in a box by sunset. Or a man may cut his thumb on an awl, a scratch no bigger than a cherry pit, and he may sicken of that, and take that road to a box. Or the earth may shake, as it did here, ten years past, stones fall on your noodle and brain you. Or a plague may breed in the very air. Who can outrun plague? Oh, all roads lead to boxes. It is a chancy business, life. And so, my friend, we kill each other on the streets, the pith of the thing being Surprise! Amazement! My Lady Death, we are before you."
"Death's a woman, then?"
"Love and death, women both. Trust neither."
The grinding, soaring street cry of the whores wafted up again from over the walls. Mercurio, taking it as a bizarre accompaniment, began to sing a courtly love melody of the Higher Town.
"Dance with me while time is yet slow,
Clocks run faster far than you know;
Wear your rose flesh like a glove
For roses wither. Fear it, love."
His voice cut through all like a gold wire, through time, place, dust, heat and faith. A girl on a balcony averted her eyes from him superstitiously, among the terra-cotta pots of flowers. Romulan looked at him, entranced. None of them had heard a verse sung better, or a love song more like a knell.
"A rose will bloom; it then will fade . . ."
deadcities_icon sent me his stunning cybersexpunk calendar del.ici.ous tension: a digital romance, and today in the mail I received a packet of decaf masala chai from strange_selkie. Oddly enough, I feel better already. You guys rock.I'm re-reading Tanith Lee's Sung in Shadow (1983), which I first discovered in late high school and which has slunk into my subconscious from time to time since then. I can't shake the feeling that, as a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, it's drawn more from Zeffirelli's 1968 film than from the bare play itself—particularly in the contrasts and relationship of its Romeo and Mercutio, the dark and beautiful Romulan Montargo, who is more innocent than he likes to think, and the older, fair-haired, sardonically unstable Flavian "Mercurio" Estemba. If so, I suppose it's nice to know that I wasn't the only one who fell in love with John McEnery's Mercutio.
"Why not anticipate? What else have we of free will but anticipation?" Mercurio, arguing for the discussion's sake, questioning nothing, believing very little, mesmerizing the guardsman as a matter of course, smiled gravely at him. "A man, young or old, may go to bed healthy, wake at dawn with a pain like a knife in his side, and be laid in a box by sunset. Or a man may cut his thumb on an awl, a scratch no bigger than a cherry pit, and he may sicken of that, and take that road to a box. Or the earth may shake, as it did here, ten years past, stones fall on your noodle and brain you. Or a plague may breed in the very air. Who can outrun plague? Oh, all roads lead to boxes. It is a chancy business, life. And so, my friend, we kill each other on the streets, the pith of the thing being Surprise! Amazement! My Lady Death, we are before you."
"Death's a woman, then?"
"Love and death, women both. Trust neither."
The grinding, soaring street cry of the whores wafted up again from over the walls. Mercurio, taking it as a bizarre accompaniment, began to sing a courtly love melody of the Higher Town.
"Dance with me while time is yet slow,
Clocks run faster far than you know;
Wear your rose flesh like a glove
For roses wither. Fear it, love."
His voice cut through all like a gold wire, through time, place, dust, heat and faith. A girl on a balcony averted her eyes from him superstitiously, among the terra-cotta pots of flowers. Romulan looked at him, entranced. None of them had heard a verse sung better, or a love song more like a knell.
"A rose will bloom; it then will fade . . ."
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erm.
Angela Carter, eh? I honestly had never made the comparison. She seems to have a very distinct Decadant (cap-D) leaning, and of course there's that generalized "Goth" reputation which is nonetheless accurate.
I have a huge amount of Lee's books. You ought to tell me which ones are good and which ones are trash, so I can be discerning when tackling the pile sometime in 2043...
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It might just be me: I have no academic evidence to support this. But I discovered Angela Carter after I had been reading Tanith Lee for some years, and she was the first person whose language reminded me of Lee's—it operates in a different register, but there's the same lush elaboration of imagery and a sort of linguistic synaesthesia. (Semi-relevantly, there seems to be a site here devoted to favorite images from Tanith Lee.) I'm not sure that Carter was writing early enough to have been a formative influence on Lee, but there's still a definite aesthetic likeness.
You ought to tell me which ones are good and which ones are trash, so I can be discerning when tackling the pile sometime in 2043...
Heh. Okay: which ones do you have?
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Honestly? Probably all of them. My book collection is quite... um... extensive.
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Of her early sword-and-sorceries, I really like The Storm Lord (1976) and Anackire (1983). The first is the traditional sprawling mythic adventure in which the son of a king and a priestess, one from the race of the conquering Vis and the other from the subject Lowlanders, grows from obscurity to claim his kingdom and change the world. The second occasionally veers off into the mystical, but it also charts what happens in the aftermath of a myth: once the hero has walked away from mortal kingdoms and out of this world as we know it, what happens to everyone left behind to pick up the practical, political pieces? (I believe there was also a third novel, The White Serpent (1988), but I've never found or read that one.) I am also very fond of the science-fiction pair Don't Bite the Sun (1976) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977), which chronicle the attempts of their androgynous narrator to grow up in a future city-state where adolescence by law lasts for decades and no one is expected, until adulthood, to do anything serious with their lives. They're not quite dystopian and often very funny, and are written partially in a futuristic teen slang that wouldn't keep Anthony Burgess awake at nights, but it's onomatopoeically entertaining.
There's also The Silver Metal Lover (1981), which was reprinted my senior year of high school: on a future Earth where the accidental capture of an asteroid some generations ago has changed the planet's topography and shaken up society, a girl falls in love with a robot; and maybe, if it's not just a trick of his programming, he loves her back. It's beautifully written and detailed, its characters make the story work absolutely even when the plot slides over into the melodramatic—although the narrator is sixteen years old, so melodrama in her reporting can be forgiven—and so it was with great regret that I discovered I didn't like the sequel, Metallic Love (2005), at all. Fortunately, it's not the kind of bad sequel that destroys the original. I'm just hoping there won't be a third.
One of her recent novels I did like was Mortal Suns (2003), in which an old poet who was once a princess looks back on her life and the fall of a dynasty: the royal house of Akhemony, into which she was born, from which she was rejected as an infant, and which she may have helped destroy. The culture's a fascinating, half-familiar blend of Greek and Egyptian and characteristic Tanith Lee, and the trajectory of the love story is not what we are led to expect from all the traditional signposts. And her young adult novel Piratica (2004), about a girl in an alternate eighteenth-century London who runs away from her oppressive girls' school to follow in the footsteps of her famous mother, whom she remembers as a pirate queen, was really excellent.
Er . . . I love The Secret Books of Paradys, even though I found The Book of the Dead much weaker than the other three. The novella "Malice in Saffron" in The Book of the Damned (1988) is one of my all-time favorite pieces of Tanith Lee. I'm ambivalent about The Secret Books of Venus: I love the first two, particularly Faces Under Water (1998), but the third felt far too constructed and the fourth was just sort of there. I'm now formally too tired to do reviews—so I'll just recommend Sabella, or, The Blood Stone and Kill the Dead (1980), Elephantasm (1993), Volkhavaar (1977), and the collection The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales (1985). If you can find a novella entitled "Into Gold," that is also most worth reading: it involves both Greek and Arthurian myth, which is not a feat one sees often.
That help?
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And how!
Now I know which one to read next.
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Cool. Which?
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Heart-Beast was so-so, indeed, and Vivia -- you know I don't think I actually read it, though it's sitting on my shelf. White as Snow I liked, I believe, but did not find particularly memorable.
Look now, you started talking about Lee and I cannot stop posting! This is the secret magent to draw me out of lurk! Eeek! Sorry!
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Eh. It has a wonderful cover (which appears in the text), but the story left me cold: a girl who has become a species of vampire through a strange encounter within a mountain, the warrior-sorcerer who wants to use her for his own gain, and the artist with whom she falls accidentally in love; it starts and it goes on and then it just sort of stops. She's just written so much better.
Look now, you started talking about Lee and I cannot stop posting! This is the secret magent to draw me out of lurk! Eeek! Sorry!
No apologies necessary! It's good for you. : )
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Thanks for the summation. Vivia shall probably remain on my to-read-someday shelf for quite some time.