Off the Cliff

However if I can't brag about my presents I can certainly blog about them.

So deepfryerfire and stanking gave me Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic. Tragicomic because Bechdal is a... err, mangaka (I shall never be able to use the word 'cartoonist' again) who draws the famous Dykes to Watch Out For strip. I opened it at random and read two chapters, thinking as I always do 'Man western comics are wordy', before putting it back down to get on with my Christmas morning present opening. ( I was wrong, of course )

Not sure what the moral of this is. 'Pictures good', maybe. More time for pictures. And of course, thanks hugely, deepfryerfire and stanking.

I finished The White Darkness. ( Cut to avoid any kind of spoiler for the experience )

I picked TWD up at the library on Friday morning and went to get a coffee before work, and found myself obscurely dissatisfied that I only had TWD to read because what I *wanted* to be reading was Master and Commander. Which is, you know, very odd. ( Cut here for people not enamoured of larboard mizzens and t'ps'ls )

Santa Claus parade today and everyone in filthy tempers trying to drive away from it afterwards. But still, officially Christmas season in TO, hence my Christmas icon from xsmoonshine

'I shall read the latest Ishiguro to cleanse my palate of genre fiction.'

Turns out the latest Ishiguro is science fiction.

Perfect happiness when I was 17 was a new Alan Garner and a bag of soft-centre chocolates in my coat pocket. Perfect happiness almost 40 years later is having enough money to buy the new Diane Wynne Jones in hard cover and the newest Kazuo Ishiguro (even if what I was looking for was The White Darkness) and then to come home and- not read them, in fact, but instead to dismantle the toppling stack of Gangans and ZeroSums and WARDs and put various episodes into files where I have them at need. All my Gaiden eps in order in the clear file book someone has finally thought of importing from Japan. Ah, such happiness.

Also to discover I *can't* dismantle ZeroSum because there are too many series that look too interesting. I shall build a wall with them instead.

ETA: to add to my happiness, sort of, this. The PO is a horse's tuchus, as ever, but the union makes us strong.

Note for those who might try it: Don't read Susannah Clarke's new book (a collection of short stories) while sickening for the flu. It makes the world look very odd indeed.
( Thoughts )

There was a welcome back barbecue Saturday for shiny_monkey out west a ways, and casting about for good bus reading (assuming I'd be able to read on the bus) I took my last unread Brust, Orca. Turned out to be an inspired choice. How brisk and business-like Brust is, even when doing his sometimes confusing braided narratives. I'd put off reading Orca from some confused idea that it was one of the non-Taltos narrated ones that don't work nearly as well as the I-style. (Brust has this in common with Mary Renault, by and large. The Paarfi ones I call pastiche and don't count.) But someone having a hissy fit about the unfairness of authors keeping secrets from their readers, the swine, cited Orca as a possible instance of same: and the possibility of having a secret revealed gave me the incentive to read. I like authors who keep secrets from their readers, as long as we find out what the secret is eventually. If they keep a mysterious silence, like John Fowles, I'm tempted to write them off as fakers and/or pretentious teases.

The change of TO scenery was welcome, and the change of reading material more so, because I'd been reading Graham Greene.

I read a bunch of his novels in hospital in France, they being about the only English books the French bookstores had, or perhaps the only thing my cousins thought I might want to read. (I'd been travelling with War and Peace, and Greene was indeed a pleasant change.) I remember nothing of them now, but that might be due to, well, reading them in hospital flat on my back in traction. The only impression I retain is an odd kind of strangling claustrophobia.
( Voice from the past )

I think Bunny the Younger has passed on his strep throat to me. Glands swollen, faintly feverish, I go out to buy necessities like duvet covers that keep the dust mites inside. Wander into the bookstore and find Black Powder War. Wander into the super and find cold boiled lobsters on sale at $6 each. (State of fever indicated by me wanting to write 'bold coiled lobster.') Wander home, and propose to spend the evening on the sofa eating cold boiled lobster and reading Napoleonic dragons. Life holds little better. Well, a chilled Chablis along with the lobster would be nice, but not in the allergy season.

(Using my Tenpou mosquito coil icon from the picture KaKa drew for me last year, in honour of the first- but alas not the last- hot day of the season.)

The latest Saiyuki ep arrived Monday (and is on its way in the usual fashion, those who know.) Lovely interaction with Hakkai and Gokuu, leaving me shaking my head yet again at the insistence, by those that way inclined, on Hakkai's scary semi-psychotic dangerousness. Even being sensible as a doorknob, as here, and empathic and tactful and down-to-earth, can't save him from people who want to harrow up their souls and indulge a little horripilation over the grinning psychopath. "Hakkai is a dark and twisted man! He killed a thousand youkai!" Yes: and the slaughter was clearly just a passing whim of his that had no repercussions worth mentioning, and that certainly left him with no special feelings about it at all. So one may reasonably expect him to wander out some afternoon and murder another thousand youkai. Because people work like that. If I bang my fist into the wall in a fit of rage and break my fingers, next time I get mad I'll certainly hit that wall again. Unh-hunh. Is the idea that actions have consequences, and that those consequences change you profoundly, so foreign these days? Or is some perverse Calvinism at work: your character is decided forever by 18 and you are predestined always to act as you acted before?
( Read more... )

Spring melancholy. The 20-somethings squeeing over Peter and Harriet make me feel old. I too squeed once. Then I reread the books twenty years later and thought 'what an odious unlikable pair.' Nothing comes as it came before, and everything looks worse second time around...

( But is for others undiminished somewhere. )

Everything looks worse second time around except for Miyazaki maybe. I finally watched Howl in a decent copy, not pirated with crappy sound and surrreal subtitles. Followed it with a reread of the book. I like the Miyazaki better than before, naturally, but I'm surprised to find it edging the book out as well. Miyazaki's WTF interpolations- the war, the bird, that disconcertingly story-book disguised prince- who gave me the creeps BTW- are on balance no more WTF than Jones' own trademark and casual WTFs- like the dog man who's actually two people, that I still can't figure out precisely what happened to him where, and what was going on between Howl and the Witch and why, and all that stuff in the last quarter of the book that's just there, deal with it. There's a lot of thready loose-endedness in Jones, which is doubtless a change from the common run with every last blessed detail explicated into the dust, but it does annoy the tidy-minded, like me.

And of course Miyazaki has his landscapes, straight out of 1920's children's books with the colours intact. This is no fair because he's a master of landscapes and wins with them over just about anyone I can think of.

Reading A Great and Terrible Beauty on Emily's recommendation. It was the Utena mention that pulled me in. I've just realized that, fan as I am of the series, the memory of Utena gives me- here's that word again- the fantods. (My fantods are a milder and more dark-dank-ineffable-British version of the creeps.) The whole of the late-90's does, for various psychological and (oddly) political reasons having to do with reverse culture shock and returning from half a decade away to find your happy socialist homeland taken over by a right-wing dictator who regularly has social assistance programs taken out and shot every morning before breakfast. Also hospitals and schools and little infrastructure institutions like that.

(The Harris regime left deeper scars than I'd realized. In local news, the police officer who shot the Indian protester over a decade ago died in a traffic accident before he could testify at the continuing and much delayed inquiry. Would that the guy who gave him implicit orders to do so had done the same, because I have no confidence that Mr. Harris will ever be forced to take responsibility for any of his actions, and his continued presence in my city and government offends me.)

Well, fantods are a good background to reading Great and Terrible Beauty because fantods are what it's about.
( But there's always a fly in the ointment )

Inverting again, the Nataku & Gokuu frontispiece from Gaiden 2 ch 10. Nataku looks a bit Christlike to my eyes but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
( Reading )