Off the Cliff

Muggy mug and everything hurting. A bit better after acupuncture. Rain tomorrow and colder on the weekend and then a return to the low and probably humid 20s of September.

Finished Emma and Inventing the Renaissance and rerereads of Exit Strategy and Rogue Protocol. Remains only System Collapse, my least favourite Murderbot installment, but since all I really want to read these days is Murderbot, that I'll read. Brokedown Palace is proving a slog: Brust really needs a distinctive voice, either Vlad or Paarfi's, to be at his best. Have an Inspector Mcdonald in ebook and a Charles Finch in dead tree, but not really tempted by either. Maybe back to Point of Hearts since I can usually read Points books without pain.

Accountant's minion emails me Saturday that my return is ready and I can pick it up in outer Scarberia at my convenience. I email her back that I'm near as dammit housebound-- only a slight exaggeration-- and can she courier it down to me, and she says Sure.  So now is to wait its arrival. I have a Fedex sticker on the door which I believe obviates the need for a signature, but I'd still be happier if I was in when it arrived. Porch pirates have been sighted in the neighbouring side streets. Is supposed to rain tomorrow, so I can stay in, but I have physio on Tuesday.

Found that I bought Artificial Condition from kindle at some point so I reread that, because High Vaultage is slooow. Must get myself the Kobo app so I can buy stuff from them. But not soon because in addition to those tops, I bought the latest Points in dead tree from Indigo. This after buying it in e-form from the press, which said they wouldn't ship books to Canada. But it reads all wrong in ebook, so I suppose I'm glad to have it in a congenial format. However that and my cell phone exhausts the discretionary spending limit on my card. If I'm getting a refund on my taxes then I shall buy Murderbot 3 and all the Ferrars that Kobo has and Kindle doesn't; but if not, then it's belt-tightening time. Trump's flip-flops make it a bad idea to take money from my portfolio any time soon.

There was a mammoth yard sale down Borden benefitting some Ugandan youth project. Passed it yesterday on my way to acupuncture, when I didn't have time to stop, so went round today after my eggs benny at Pauper's. (Their eggs benny are merely so-so, but my delicate gut today wanted eggs and only eggs, so Pauper's it was.) If I were in furnishing mode, there was much to tempt me there, but I'm in the opposite just now (de-nesting? possessions weigh the soul?) so I picked up half a dozen ancient Agatha Christies that will do me for when the hot weather melts my brains.

Meanwhile I finished both Nightwatch and Point of Sighs and feel pleasantly replete. What to read after that? Well, I do have a police procedural set in Ghana that might do the trick, though the overarching and congenial Discworld/ Points theme of The City is absent from that one. Still, best to end diminuendo.

A day or two ago I was wondering if it was warm enough to open the windows at night. Opened them. Concluded after five minutes that it wasn't and shut them again. Have been sleeping in t-shirt and long-sleeved shirt quite happily, with socks occasionally, in my flannel sheet sandwich. Removed flannel from the side bedroom but figured it was too early to change the bedroom.

But today was warm, regardless of what the thermometer said. The unbreathing mug of incipient summer. This week will be in the high twenties C/ high 70s low 80s F, if you believe the gov't's webpage (cooler selon le Weather Network, who I hope are right.) Must begin the Fan Dance at night, starting with bringing the fans up from the basement.

Read all three of Paul Cornell's Witches books Friday and Saturday, a regular zipalong. Yes, they're more like novellas, 120 pages; but so is Wole Soyinka's play Death and the King's Horseman, and I can barely manage twenty pages of that at a time. Yappari, genre is easier, except that Point of Sighs is genre and that goes even slower than Soyinka.

OTOH I polished off a mystery in an evening, William Marshall's Sulduggery, set in a Hong Kong police dep't, pre-handover, that could surely not exist unless the English were even more incompetent than one thinks. Probably a different genre entirely: police procedural surreal comedy. The surreal bit only half calms thoughts like 'how very noble of the Det-Insp to care so much about the identity of the 20 year old skeleton who was once a living breathing human being, you chaps: but would he have cared so much if the skeleton had been Chinese and not white?

Cornell's witches are a pleasant break from his angsty-wangsty doom and gloom Shadow Police, and amusing enough after reading Pratchett's witches. Can't help suspecting some influence there- or maybe it's a coincidence that Witch A has a grown son called Shawn who's the town's one police officer.

I'm reading Stevie Smith's Over the Frontier now, since the Points book is too heavy to cart around. As always, she writes a bit like Amos Tutuola, and as always, I find her voice just a wee bit annoying. I read to have it read. The trouble with non-genre is that you never know what it will do, even if so much non-genre is doing exactly the same thing cough cough the desperate lives of middle-class married white people cough. This open-endedness ought to be exhilarating, I suppose, but I read slowly and life is short and with non-genre there's no guarantee of satisfaction. It isnt necessarily there to entertain, which is genre's main virtue; and frequently enough it isn't there to instruct either, which is the (unintended but present) side-pleasure of reading non-white writers. So I often end up asking myself why I'm reading a non-genre book, and I have no answer.

Spring melancholy persists. Possibly fall-out from the stubborn sinuses and spasming lower back, possibly part of the sadness that goes with cherries and lilacs and too-warm days, possibly just weltschmerz from Buttercup and the Dying Earth. (Hm. See this article for differentiation between angst, ennui, and weltscmerz. Maybe it's angst after all.)

This is heightened by the arrival today of Point of Sighs. The Points series for me always carries bittersweet echoes of 2001, which mind insists was a time long ago and far away and so much better than it is today. Well, curate's egg: parts of it were excellent, and the Point of Dreams part was one of them.

I read the Kalevala fr the same reason, actually: it recalls just about the only unforced memory from last year, coming home the first Saturday in January to find it in the mailbox. It too has a faraway feel, almost Discworldish. I read a few chapters but then that old niggling dissatisfaction crops up again. I'm reading something edited, not something in its original form. Yes, I know: the 'original' was already corrupted by Christian interpolations, if nothing else; and its oral tradition perhaps spans thousands of years, with that much more opportunity for improvisations and interpolations and what-all. But the things that motivated, say, Homer's rhapsodes to improvise and interpolate were different from what motivated Lönnrot; nationalism was not a concern of Iron Age Greece as far as I know. So- well, yes.

I do have my sense of smell and taste back, though I'm disappointed that I didn't drop a few pounds during the three weeks I didn't have them. Evidently I still ate too much, even if I couldn't taste what I was eating. And I would like to be back to what I weighed in 2014-2015 even if I don't care for the cause (chronic anxiety, if you ask.) Was sitting next to a woman at the physio's today who'd just had her second knee surgery, and her accounts thereof don't make me eger to experience it myself. Not that I'm likely to be sharing a hospital room with a 95-year-old Russian woman with dementia who speaks no English at all and wails non-stop- just a one-time screwup at St Mike's while they moved departments, perhaps; nor will I have problems with my blood oxygen because the staff forget to give me my CPAP during recovery, because I don't use a CPAP; but then again, I don't trust St Mike's to do anything right, for various reasons, and I'm not sure about other hospitals either. (Remembers her punctured lung from ten years ago.) I have this naive belief that losing another fifteen pounds would make the bone on bone rubbing in my knee go away, and would be happy to be proved wrong if it meant I was fifteen pounds lighter- because that *would* make stairs easier.

This is the crazy time of year when new babies start one per fortnight: which, yes, is better than one a week. But we're getting little babies, five or six months, and they teethe and fall sick and hate their bottles and cry piteously because the Boob has gone and everything hurts oh oh oh. Thus I spend my days patting their backs and rocking them to sleep and am sometimes paid for my labours, and come home knackered.

Possible the fatigue causes brain rot, but in fact I'd had it in mind for a while to call the gas company to ask if I'd booked my furnace check-up and if so, for when. Came home last night from two Long Island Ice Teas and a salad, to several calls on the machine. First from the gas guy to ascertain if I was at home that morning, which I wasn't; then to say he'd have to cancel because his car had broken down; and a third silence, which might have been him or, equally likely, some call centre. Dodged a bullet there, whichever. And now I *must* call the dentist to ascertain if my appointment is Oct 10 or Oct 19, because both are marked on the calendar.
( Wednesday )

The author writes for cracked.com. That, in fact, seems to be his day job. Why am I reading this book? Besides its odd echoes of the imperfectly remembered even if twice-read Armor of Light?

I go back to White Teeth with relief. That one acquires depth and gravitas by contrast. And still reminds me of The Midnight Mayor, though god alone knows why.

(Perverse reaction, as ever- I really want to be reading Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. Quite a different England from Zadie Smith's- or Kate Griffin's, come to that.)

Truly, you couldn't have better summer weather than this. 27C, dry, cool breeze, pleasant even in the warm sun. The day is not quite perfect-- the coffee machine is broken at the Vietnamese restaurant so no iced Vietnamese coffee for me; but I tried the serve-it-yourself frozen yoghurt place instead and over a tri-mix sundae read Point of Knives-- wherein Phillip declares himself to be a motherless man.

However, one thing about the Points series. Many Astreianters, including Nico, have Silk Lands blood, as indicated by their tight curly hair and what I must read as epicanthic-folded eyes. The language used to describe them reminds me of nojojojo pondering how to describe Sieh's eyes, which she explicitly meant to be far east Asian. Now, Chenadolle is not Kansas: it has two suns just for a start. The fact that names and social mores and dress map onto approx. 17th century Belgium is, well, as it is: a manga moment, if you like. But it does lead to semi-this world expectations.

So when I find that the nobility and the haute bourgeoisie tend to pale blue eyes, I'm going to see it in conjunction with pale white skin: and often enough, it seems, that's what the landames and whatall are said to have. What then to make of people finding Phillip's white skin an interesting oddity? I'd be happy for Astreianters to be dark-skinned, with blondness a foreign Chadroni trait-- except there seem to be a fair number of light-haired Astreianters too. So maybe the city's just one big melting pot; and maybe blue eyes do in fact exist in conjunction with dark skin and hair.

(In my world blue eyes are rare, usually found among Ashkenazim. You'd never guess this was once an Anglo-Saxon city. I'd probably feel differently if I lived in Kitchener or Winnipeg or some place the Germans and Swedes actually went to.)

One of my regular reads has squash growing in his garden-- taking it over, in fact-- and bursting with flowers, but no fruit (?) as yet. Commenters told him how to tell the sex of the flower: the ones with bulbs are female. And here was me thinking that was a pollinated plant. But I have indeed one lone female squash flower, and shall try hand-pollinating it with a q-tip tomorrow.

In the stray happinesses dep't, this morning was grey and washy and coolish, and I was having my coffee and croissant at the local and reading Point of Hopes out on their patio, when mind offered me the forgotten o-Bon vacation of '91. A week off in early August, taking the Shink up to Fukushima on a day exactly like today, and spending the night in my old prof's manshon-- except I think he was away, and how did I get into his apartment if so? Odd corners of the past: but yes, I was using the JR pass that had expired by a week when I went to activate it, only the clerk stamped it anyway. (Largely I think because my response was 'Oh dear, is it expired? Ah well, too bad', and turned to leave without further argument. It sometimes pays to be a Torontonian of the old school.)

1. Dreams feel the same as 100 Demons stories: a larger place with diffuse lighting and odd details that don't survive waking/ a first read.

2. My Japanese has deteriorated some, but three times through any of Ima's 'first glance meaningless' sentences usually tells me who's saying what about whom. Note that not all Japanese authors or mangaka are as (deliberately) obscure as this.
( Read more... )

I believe that was Ole Golly from Harriet the Spy talking about being proposed to, but Harriet thinks later that reading makes the world feel bigger too. And reading something as personally and fannishly resonant as Fairs' Point in an out-of-time cool summer (that alas my scrambled brains won't recall, even if it was just this morning) also makes the world feel bigger. The other world of the book, the other world of fandom itself: a great big room with a blue ceiling large as the sky.

Am a little sad it's finished, though one could go back and reread to get the names straight (really wanted a dramatis personae, there.) But am happy there's a spring Ghost Tide, because I've always felt April should have one as well as November. Am happy to see the Prince-Marshal back, even if no one explains how or why he's a prince and a marshal. Really hope there's more coming in this series because I love it so much.

And if I want more fandom, my 100 Demons 23 arrived with great dispatch, a week after it was shipped (air mail all the time for me now.) Let me get through tomorrow's 8-5 day, as I got through today's sleep deprived 9-4 and back for an abortive meeting, and ah! how I shall indulge.

Ah well. I'm trying to be Buddhist about not clinging to happiness and not saying to God, 'Encore.' But it was nice having friends here and I'm sad they're gone. And because it was great talking books with M again and because she said Max Gladstone's settei, as described by me, reminded her of C.S. Friedman's, I've rousted out the first volume of the Coldfire trilogy from where I hid tidied it away (after thinking 'oh rats must have despaired of ever getting to it and put it out on the lawn sometime') and started reading it.

(Wish I could remember what I did with Point of Knives as well. This is what tidying does: makes things unfindable.)

Finished Scott and Graham's Lost Things. Which was well enough, but gave me all through it an unplaceable lowering of the spirits. The mid-West setting? The late 1920's time frame? The feeling of either myself or the characters being slightly out of focus, so that things failed to jell properly? No idea. But as in Death by Silver, there was an awful lot of getting from point A to point B-- in planes, this time, not hansoms; and I couldn't quite see the point of it. Props however for not taking the plot where I was almost certain the plot was going (to Germany, if you must know); I just wish it had gone-- well, somewhere more interesting to me than planes and dirigibles.
( Sighs for yesteryear )

Ha! Point of Dreams *was* rereleased in trade paperback, with the new artwork version on the cover. But one must evidently go through amazon for it, because anywhere else only has the first edition with the original cover-- which I prefer, FWIW. That edition came out as a trade and a paperback too, but did I ever see a whisker of those anywhere? I did not.

(And does the local SFF bookstore stock the new editions, to say nothing of the new Astreiant books? It does not, and sneers as it doesn't, on the grounds that it can't be bothered to deal with a press so small. Is why I am conflicted about the local SFF bookstore.)

Grey and blowy day. Would not complain if the rest of the summer was like this.
( Cut for June reading and Death by Silver semi-spoilers )

Have more Takahashi in Japanese, who avers that the dragons on Nihonbashi Bridge are in fact winged kirin. Solves that problem.

1. Reading journals are dangerous things. I have two regulars: Things Mean A Lot and A Striped Armchair. Was secretly a little relieved when RL issues intervened in their keepers' keeping, but there's still, alas, the back archives. A Striped Armchair is especially dangerous for its lists of books that relate to this book.

2. Not sure when my life's goal became Read All The Things, but it does seem to be what occupies my time these days-- my fandom in the absence of a true fannish time occupier. I'd hoped that getting library books would impose some order and limit: books must be returned therefore must be read by a certain date therefore maybe I should read instead of playing solitaire? Hasn't worked that well. I still have the acquiring addiction, and the stacks of unread books has now taken over the kitchen table. Clearly what I need to work on is that maternal reflex, 'you never know when you may need this'. I never know when I may want to read LeGuin so yay for the five volumes left out on the Front Lawn Library.
( Read more... )

1. Am reading Invisible Cities in a brown-edged Picador paperback. I found this passage, which I pass on to qwerty:

True, also, in Hypatia the day will come when my only desire will be to leave. I know I must not go down to the harbour then, but climb the citadel's highest pinnacle and wait for a ship to go by up there. But will it ever go by? There is no language without deceit.

Which is not quite air-borne triremes, and there are no mermaids or Wild Hunts in the subway (so far) but is a start.
( Cut for more reading and appalling accidents )

Because I am an aesthete at heart, I wanted to read Point of Knives in the grey autumnal weather that best suits Astreiant, but I missed that window of opportunity (last weekend, basically) and thus began it in this week's mug. Finished it tonight, on a cool blue evening after relentless rain all day. *So* nice to be back in that city among those people, even for the short space of a novella. There's a new one next year, which is reason enough to keep on breathing.

Here is the Locus review of Point of Hopes and the Points series, to have it handy. I might write more but allergies are making me feel like I haven't slept in three days, so I go to sleep.

I was going to tell you about my lovely week. That was on Tuesday. The rest of the week went pear-shaped, with half the full-time staff *and* the casuals away or sick (including me), and since then I've been a Pratchett-reading zombie that does nothing but read Pratchett. And eat, of course.
( Yes, this cut thing sucks, and the override doesn't work for me )

Yesterday's dream was some wonderful Miyazaki film about a boy and his huge plume-tailed wolf in the lush and teeming grasslands of their world, who had to rescue the same region in an alternate world that had become, well, southern California scrubland, basically. Last night was a mishmash that contained a not bad apartment I was subletting/ sharing with my old friend M back when he was M (diffident, considerate, bookish) and not the academic who drank himself to death two years ago. Living areas divided by curtains, shaded courtyard and outside stairs somehow filched from University College here. Featured also M's blond feckless roommate, some small child from work, and an Indian friend who said the original sublease hadn't run out so he was still entitled to share with M even though there was no space. All influenced by beginning Unseen Academicals before bed and the achey flu-like whatever that I currently suffer from.
( February reading )

Evidently the Points books have become my comfort reading. Since there's going to be a new edition of Point of Hopes, I'm half-tempted during this current re-read to mark up my old copy, noting when little snippets of information are being dropped as to what's located where and how people look and things like that. Possibly with a view to fanfic, but possibly just so as not to be lost when the new works come out.

Am having one of my Christmas marathon reads, aided by minimal hours at work and much phthisic languishments on sofas still. But because I'm a visual reader my mind is the most unholy stew of fragments and moods in consequence. Moods partly because I read Gene Wolfe's There are Doors in a day or so, where the narrator's dreams and his reality have exactly the same flavour, and the flavour is 'Something's happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?' When you live alone and have minimal social contact with other people, it's as well to keep that kind of book balanced by more mundane stuff, or your own reality starts looking iffy. Thus I finished Point of Dreams finally, sad that the glimpse of Ruling Women wasn't quite as I'd remembered it, and Castle Rouge to have it finished, irked by CofE Englishwomen who call themselves Episcopalian and writers who don't know the difference between ravaged and ravished.

Oh, and PoD does a Hammett. Someone shoots at Lord Whatsisface and they forgot to tell us who it was.
( Cut for bibliomania )

One thing I like about the Ghost Tide in Point of Dreams is that the book is surrounded by its own ghosts in my head. Most vividly is me reading it on a rainy cool August afternoon, at a window table down at the defunct Tasty's, with paleaswater's copy wrapped in a plastic bag inside my knapsack so it wouldn't get wet. My aunt is in there somewhere as well. Summer was when Aunt H always came visiting so I must have seen her, back from her last trip to France, about the time I was reading the book. (The identification is doubtless underlined by her dying suddenly two months later.) My memory does tend to free associate, sometimes on the most tenuous connections. For example, there was a walk along Olive St in late November of 2001, which ended up with coffee at Tasty's, and Tasty's means Point of Dreams. So now Olive is associated with that first read too.

People, places, long ago events: all crowd the margins and flicker out the corner of my eye as I reread.

There's only one problem with this. Paper diaries state unarguably that in August I was reading The Armour of the Light, and that I read and finished Point of Dreams in July. And of that I remember nothing except, sort of, reading the book in my bro's hot and empty kitchen: cat-sitting while he was off in France chaperoning Aunt H.

Is grey and rainy and Seattle-ish: is Melville's damp drizzly November of the soul, and our mayor is a jerk and my teeth hurt and the latest collection of Holmes pastiches, for which I paid full price, is disappointing so far, but I can't tell you why without spoiling for those who might read it. So I probably shouldn't be hanging out at First Known When Lost, a blog of poems and artwork put together by someone of my generation.

A Journey Round My Skull, which was all uneasy-making graphic art from the 19th and 20th centuries, has moved and changed format and I don't like it as much. I find Mr. Pentz's choice of works just as uneasy-making, but I can't say why. English landscape painting should not give me the fantods but it does, almost as much as MR James. Still, I can't help poking at it to see what the fantods are about. I think it might all be a vision of damp grey November when your teeth hurt, even the summer entries.

Shall shortly return to the sunshine of Point of Dreams. Or go look at Hasuis, whatever.

Breaking news! Melissa Scott is working on the Points series again. A novella called Point of Knives now, that happens between the two existing books, and a novel called Fairs' Point to follow! Christmas comes early this year.

It's not that I spoke to no one on this long weekend. I had daily conversations with my 90 year old neighbour across from me, and a prolonged gossip about house prices with Prof and Mrs Islamic Studies two doors up; I passed the time of day with the gardening grandmother down the street and saw a ridiculous number of young friends in passing. But in general I was antisocial. Passed up the Sunday morning zazen because my knees hurt-- my knees always hurt too much for zazen-- and decided not to go to the 'pay what you please' Chinese language classes because they require a (refundable, granted) $75 deposit and I'd just splurged on a new boombox; and for the same reason denied myself another Thai massage. And besides my eyes *hurt* and I couldn't *see* and I was feeling ill-used by the world. Zazen and massage might have helped with that; but then again, maybe not.

Nor did I paint the black keys of my stairs. Bought the paint, but my knees hurt and I couldn't *see.*
( What I *did* do... )