Off the Cliff

The clear sun slants into my black and white hallway, shining from the blue sky of another and happier year.

Last year's reading challenge was a success, by and large, if we ignore that 'must come from the TBR pile' clause. The one category I didn't fill and more than fill is, ironically, the one that could have been furnished from books on hand, namely mainland Chinese literature. I have more books of Chinese poetry that I've only dipped into than I know what to do with.

But perseverance allowed me to clear the shelves of many things that had mutely reproached me for not having the perseverance to read them before- The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Pandemonium and Parade, The Radiance of the King, The Bucks and Bawds of London Town, Hear the Wind Sing, Raffles the Amateur Cracksman, The Angelic Avengers, Master Skylark, The Courtier, The Autobiograpy of Benvenuto Cellini, The Conference of the Birds. Also of more recent acquisitions that were just as dumbly reproachful of my inability to get into them or even start: The Famished Road, In the Skin of a Lion, Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, A Natural History of Dragons, The Dalemark Quartet, Dreamblood, and Moorcock's Gloriana- even if I didn't finish those last. These are picked-up books of the school of 'I should read this some day.' The dispiriting realization is that some day is now, not some indistinct far future/ twenty-years-from-now 'when I'm old and retired and at leisure.'

Book of the Year was probably the biography of Lorenzo de Medici, which acted as a springboard to a lot of other stuff. Most enjoyed, perversely, is Cotterill's oeuvre of Dr Siri books, even if I'll probably never reread them; and of course the latest Aaronovitch, Gladstone, 100 Demons and Library installments.

Our bus.cord makes cookies for everyone and hands them out in individual packages along with cards. The cookies are always excellent and I dole them out carefully over the holidays. Except this year because it's 2016 and one must carp the diem, so I ate them all for dinner.

Am with that person who tweeted that the nice thing about being Jewish is that for you, 2016 was over 3000 years ago. Mind, I bet +/- 3760 BC was no hot hell either.
( Mmmeme )

I am grateful that the snow hasn't started yet and I can still bike, because my knee and ankle are very upset about something and I don't know what.
( Speak, Memery )

Put gin in the freezer and it's fine. Put vermouth in the freezer and it freezes. Thus I had a Johnson Slushie tonight, which is fine. My ice is a bit iffy.

Starbucks has started posting calorie counts. Now I know where that weight gain came from. And now I'm happy to order a white egg breakfast sandwich and Earl Grey tea instead of the latte and croissant.
( Wednesday already? )

Finished in the last two weeks?
Damned little.

Laurie King, Dreaming Spies
-- King's Holmes, like Cumberbatch's, is convincing enough until one returns to the real thing, or even a pastiche of the real thing, and then just no. This book had Japan and Japanese and the crown prince Hirohito in it, but the plot-- well actually, the plot reminded me of a university friend's first novel, influenced by Pyncheon, that had unlikely conspiracies and obscure cabals formed for unclear reasons, which somehow required making the author's *ahem* self-insert believe something or other so he would go do something else (have sex with one of the plotters, was it?) The mastermind said the self-insert was indispensible to the conspiracy, but his actual role was so tangential he could have been left out altogether- a fact the author naturally didn't twig to. Here Holmes and Russell prove quite unnecessary to unravelling the mystery they're hired, under very unlikely circumstances, to solve. (Two large English people dressing as Buddhist pilgrims in Taishou Japan and being greeted enthusiastically on their pilgrimage route stretches my belief to the limit.)

But up to that point it was at least fun.

Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch
-- mystery set in '70s Communist revolution Laos. Had heard this and that about the series, but had not heard that mid-book it turns into Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I am enchanted.
( Continuing )

We had the replacement from hell Monday and Tuesday. He had a violin. He really really really wanted to play his violin, and did: LOUD LOUD LOUD and FLAT. Discover that in the event four separate people told him he was playing too loud for the room and the age group. 'Well, can I go upstairs and play for the preschoolers? They'd really like it!' And he's been doing this for ten years and still has no notion of adult: child ratio or sectional programming?

I'm terribly afraid we'll get him again in our current crunch.
( The usual meme )

paleaswater used to get fantoddy about the folk practices in 100 Demons, like bringing rocks down from the mountains or walking a certain route in the countryside without looking behind you. She said something to the effect of 'these people just didn't think like us.' A daughter of the Revolution might well look askance at something so foreign to her milieu. Cradle Catholic me, who unblinkingly accepted saint's hearts put on display in glass reliquaries and thin wheat wafers that are really and truly, no *really*, the body of a man murdered two millennia ago on the other side of the world, had no difficulty at all with these benign Japanese practices that only fleetingly, if at all, recall bloody dark deeds and obscure beliefs.

(The Japanese used to have human sacrifice. They'd wall someone up in the foundations of a bridge, for instance. And the one story I read about this custom- one of Yumemakura's Seimei stories- had the spirits of the sacrifices making a ruckus to alert the world that the foundation of their bridge was about to collapse. Like, you may not want to be a human sacrifice and you may insist that the wife who informed the authorities that you had the marks needed to be the sacrifice also die with you, but in the end *of course* duty trumps everything. Whatever happened to that Japanese staple, urami? In Ima Ichiko, it's saved for people who starved during famines.)

But the oddity is that the Chinese stories in The Classic fantod me in spades. They recall a dark and primordial world where, yes, people don't think like we do.
( Maybe it's the translation? )

A Green and Ancient Light is an other-where other-when book. It takes you away by virtue of its luminous prose alone, because the setting seems pretty mundane to start with. Young boy, the narrator, is sent to stay with his grandmother during a spring and summer of The War. Second, we assume, because boy mentions that his dad has already had to fight in one war already. Grandmother and boy work in her garden, chat with villagers, receive and make visits. Boy also goes exploring the ruined garden up in the hills which is full of stone statues, the folly of a bereaved duke some 400 years ago.

This is where the 'are we still in Kansas?' feeling began for me. Elizabethan Dukes *might* have had follies with classical statues (though topiary seems more likely: and I had more than a frisson of Green Knowe throughout the book) but would they have had mermaids and sea serpents as well? The author is American; is that why he has boy and grandmother feeding 'crackers' to the ducks and growing tomatoes in their garden? And if boy has been sent away from the Blitz, why are his mother and baby sister still in the capital? Also- only one character is given a name, which I read as French because I would. Everyone else is an initial and a dash. Only one place has a name- Wool Island- which we're told isn't its real name, just what the villagers call it. This anonymoty removes the action from too definite a here and now (or there and then, if we're talking WW2 Britain.) It's in the timeless place which is childhood.

Understand, I noted these things in and around the plot events and the boy's attempts to solve the riddle of the stone garden, which touch Borgesian and Eco-ish echoes and are delightful in themselves. The ominous intrusions of an unlikable Major into village life didn't go where I was afraid it would because this is another kind of book, unclassifiable in my experience.

The afterword of course solves the book's riddle so that incongruities now make sense. No, it's not Haw Par Villa, or even close, but- well, parallels again. The learned will already have figured this out for themselves, but I am happily not learned.

Alan Garner's The Guizer is a collection of traditional trickster tales, and the tricksters in them- Coyote, Anansi, Raven- are not nice people at all. Impulsive, violent, casually cruel: somewhere between sociopath and brain damaged.

The tricksters in this collection were written by 21st century westerners and are a much more civilized lot. Only the evil suffer, if anyone suffers at all, which is how we like it in our fictional worlds. I don't say I'd like the trad figure in my stories, but these benevolent tricksters are, mh, well.

There *is* an amoral force in Jeffrey Ford's The Dreaming Wind, but it's the wind itself, which one can live with. And Theodora Goss' poem How Raven Made his Bride has sociopathic Raven, sure enough, who doesn't win in the long run. Otherwise I really liked The Fiddler of Bayou Teche for the setting- Louisiana bayous- and the semi-patois and the sad werewolves who live out in the swamp. Also Kelly Link's The Constable of Abal for its unique take on ghosts and oddly derived, not quite traceable, world building; and Jedediah Berry's The Other Labyrinth for the inevitable echoes of Borges and the unexpected and almost certainly unintentional echoes of Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard.

My sporadic and unsatisfying reading finally turns up something which is at least page-turny: The Angelic Avengers by Pierre Andrézel, aka Isak Dinesen. It was my mother's, probably an original hardcover, which I started in '98 but got nowhere with until interrupted by a gall bladder attack. I think it felt too High Wind in Jamaica for me at the time. However, I have learned to persevere and am now halfway through, having just learned what it is the angelic avengers are going to avenge..

Having discovered how goodreads can make any book seem not worth reading, I purposely read nothing about it, including the dustjacket blurb. This has led to an anxious few days. Because OK, clearly we're being set up for a Gothic, but are we going to get the subtlety of Dinesen's Gothic, or something closer to the genre tropes; or are we indeed going to slop over into de Sade territory? I mean, there must be a reason why she used a(nother) pseudonym. This is what happens when straight lit people wander into genre territory, as we all know. They don't know the rules so don't play by the rules so anything at all could happen and there's no guarantee of safety.
( Cut for spoilers )
I will say, it's actually refreshing to have young women who are shocked and unmanned by the wickedness about them, instead of cheerfully blase and managing like Burgis' Kat Stephenson. It's what makes Dinesen's early 19th century setting feel realistic.

Otherwise last night with The Little Girls turned out to be dinner and a show, and the show was Despicable Me, which of course I'd never seen before. Now I know where Minions come from. I only see films when I'm at TLG's place and this was certainly several cuts above the Disney Princesses.

1. OK, autumn says, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Forget those balmy lows of 15/16 and those daytime humidexes of 30. We're going for COLD (ie under 10) with a north wind to back it. Close the windows, wrap up in quilts and flannel, pray you don't need the furnace this early. And now I'm almost wishing I had a space heater, though those things suck electricity, just to warm up the bedroom, the way the window A/C cools it down.

2. One positive reinforcement of adulting is the nice clean fresh-smelling terrycloth robe. Oddly, this doesn't work for sheets and pillow cases, but that's because I do those at home in energy-efficient cold water detergent, which doesn't smell nearly as nice as the laundromat's hot water Tide.

3. Note trees going red, street gutters golden with fallen ash leaves (if they are), pure white clouds in blue sky etc. A brisk Thanksgiving, I think, unlike the past two or three years: but then look at past stats and discover it's quite as warm as those past Thanksgivings. Try 2012 with its highs, not lows, of 8 and 9. And last night my bro and s-i-l went swimming in Lake Erie, so yeah.
( Cut for reading )

Middling day of sun and clouds and rain and threatened storms, muggy and insect-bedevilled. Early morning tomorrow, so am waiting for sweet ativan to work. Finished an Akitada, started the next one, within three pages Akitada had put his foot in it and exited on his high horse, possibly jobless. Do not remember Akitada being this thick in earlier works, but if he is now, I may be spared reading the series. Started instead Amy Tan's Saving Fishes from Drowning, about a dead woman in the afterlife narrating her life, which is pretty much what I want now.

My but Li Yu liked putting the wind in his poems. This entry could as easily be called "Last night the wind and rain together blew/ The wall-curtains rustled in their autumn song", except it's this night and the rain hasn't started yet. In fact there's great swaths of blue-black sky showing between the clouds. But the wind certainly buffets my study and billows the curtains enough to knock things from the shelf.

And now I wonder why the English poet wanted the *western* wind to blow, 'That the small rain down can rain'?
( Memeage )

Reading The Pound Era which is... quite indescribable. Fun, but not at all what one expects of either an exegesis of a poet's works or a literary history of his times. Am glad it's not about someone I like, because Kenner's grasshopper approach and linguistic games would probably make me gnash my teeth if it were. As it is, if he wants to blather on about Henry James and James Joyce and Bernart de Ventadorn and Wyndham Lewis while dissecting Pound's Cantos, that's great, because Pound's polyglot Cantos never did anything except annoy me. (And the rest of those guys are pretty annoying too.)
( However )

Though it burns less since that deluge this evening. So now it merely steams.
( Usual memeage )

(*I gather this crux in Catullus has been resolved by removing one of the taedets, but this is how I learned it and have repeated it in my head for nigh on half a century)

Either dry eye or age, but I can no longer read comfortably with my naked eye, which is a pain, especially in allergy season. Must wear lens and use reading glasses. Chiz curses sa molesworth.

There was a martial arts demonstration at Dufferin Grove Park with lotsa young boys in flounced gold trousers and red jackets waving poles and swords to drum usic. Could not see clearly who and what because of previous paragraph.
( Slightly better )

Oh central AC and ativan, how delicious the sleep you bring, how sweet the dreams, how gentle the wakening into a civil dry world that smells of nothing at all. One feels like a human being- one registers the way it 'sposed to be- for a half hour or so, before one leaves the house at Fartooearly.am and goes into the hazy sun and muggy polluted air, bound for a 90 minute dentist appointment.

But all things pass, and the evening wind blows, and it's currently cooler than it was last night (is why the AC was on.)
( Cut for book and RL natter )

Two days of dry cool- not that 25C is actually *cool*- just to remind us that it exists, and then back to a thankfully rare-this-year phenomenon, the muggy sunny day. Have had to close cellar door against the mold fumes, and must hang laundry I stupidly left down there for two days out on the line in the sun to get the sneezy smell out of that as well. 'At least there's a bit of a breeze,' an utter stranger remarked to me as I was pushing my bicycle up one of Brunswick's one-way stretches in a fit of unusual law-abidingness. There was, and it was well under 30C, but I was Tokyo-sopping nonetheless.

And now the blue hour is before 8:30 and it's nautical twilight* before 9, in spite of the authorities saying it doesn't happen till quarter past. I know dark when I see it, guys.

Thus am at a summer dead end, wanting a nice cozy British mystery and not finding it. Thought I'd got one for a loonie last night- The Death Pit- but failed to read the blurb about the book being 'charged with erotic energy.' Do Not Want, thank you very much. Probably should just settle on an Ian Rankin, but I Do Not Want coppers of the old school either, who hang around with criminals and beat up suspects and ignore rules. Thus I chug along with one of the Mammoth Books of Holmes pastiches, purely so I can remove the badly-edited beast from the shelves.

*Nautical Twilight: The time period when the sun is between 6 and 12 degrees below the horizon at either sunrise or sunset. The horizon is well defined and the outline of objects might be visible without artificial light. Ordinary outdoor activities are not possible at this time without extra illumination.

Boccaccio needs to work on his summaries. "Ludolfo Rufolo is ruined and turns to piracy; he is captured by the Genoese and shipwrecked, but survives by clinging to a chest, full of precious jewels; finally, having been succoured by a woman on Corfu, he returns home rich." Exactly what it says on the tin, so why did I bother reading it?

Insomnia last night, so whiled away a few hours with Boccaccio, who goes down well enough. Am not sure I'm up for another 700 pages of these undistinguished stories, though.

Rebuked, my copy of The Midnight Court emerges from the poetry shelf where I so thoughtlessly placed it. Would that the other two might appear as well.

Age or the example of my sister leads me to a divesting mindset. It's true that I never know when I'll want a book again: I was pleased to discover that I didn't trun my copies of Ciardi's Dante all those years ago. But now I can't see me really wanting to read Anne of Green Gables ever again; Montgomery cloys whenever I try her. I should drop this in a wee free and let someone else gloat.

Or those 'may want to read this' purchases. Fifteen pages into Soseki's neglected work, The Miner, Jay Rubin's colloquial translation, which makes Soseki sound like Murakami Haruki, begins to pall, as Soseki starts sounding like Soseki again. Go on with it or give it up? I'd rather be reading Dante. Hell, I'd rather be reading Boccaccio. This is because I'm a naive reader, and the Italians wrote to instruct or amuse in an age of WYSIWYG. Dante's version of Hell I know to be more interesting than Soseki's, having better company in it.

1. The coffee shop is back open again. Sometimes I get jaded by it being the only game in my neighbourhood, but after a mere five days of making do with Starbucks and Second Cup, ohh that lovely smooth latte goes down so well.

2. The wind blows and it's not as hot as before. Rain comes in and yes, it steams, but hey, rain!

3. Because it rains and I'm stuck inside (not by the rain but by the severe thunderstorm warning) I embroider a little at the spotty tank top's spots and sew some more of the ragged tank top's ragged hems. Sewing is not good for people with neck problems but does give satisfaction.

4. OTOH the problem with the Craft series is that I know nothing about the upper echelons of banking and finance and stocks. Never could understand leverage and buying on margin and short-selling; I think it's a form of math dyslexia because I've always had it. Possibly I shouldn't worry about the details and just pretend these are people attacking divine players. Just, old-fashioned gods usually had more power than mortals, and their not having it confuses something basic in me.

5. Environment Canada has somehow mislaid their stats for summer 2005, but I seem to remember something similar then, in the 'ever-receding approaching cold front'. Two weeks ago they said it would be here last week; now it's supposed to arrive week after next. As long as it comes...

1. Come into my house after work. Ah how cool and dark! Oh how my house retains the coolness from last night's AC! ...and today's all-day AC, because I turned up the thermostat and left it on, a detail that disappeared in the heat outside. The heat alert is now lifted, and they say it's 24C out there, but it's a humid unmoving 24C. I shan't be happy until we get lows of 15 again, unseen since the middle of June.

2. Picked up a cookbook off the boulevard, One Pot Low-cal Wonders. Which is fine up to where nine recipes out of ten call for tinned tomatoes or tomato paste, two ingredients that kill the taste of everything else.

3. I need meat and veg reading to make the lighter fantasy and mystery feel substantial. Granted, Gladstone is pretty chewy all on his lonesome, and Retold Chinese Tales doesn't provide any sense of corrective balance. But Japanese works just as well as history or biography and rather better than both, especially when it's Ima Ichiko's impenetrable Phantom Moon manga. Very very chewy and still not quite making sense.

4. The local coffee shop is closed next week, which is sad, because the other coffee shop is now a Mexican restaurant, and there's nowhere else to get my 'familiar faces' barista fix.

5. Birks have been resoled for half the cost of a new pair, but resoled they are. I should simply toss my second pair, supposedly identical to the first. But they're not. They strain my legs and back, and make me feel wobbly-unsteady (even though *they've* been resoled recently too.) Had to take muscle relaxants last night for the spasms after wearing them two days, and today had recourse to the velcro ones I wear with orthotics.

6. Stopped wearing gauze bandage on rapidly uninfecting toe. Must start again, because the urge to pick at toenails- what got me into this mess to start with- is irresistible.

My acupuncturist- thirty years younger and at least sixty pound lighter than I- makes me happy by saying she frequently puts on five pounds overnight, all of it water weight.

Remains classically classic summer- warm dry sun, puffy clouds, cicadas. Needs only to be 5C lower at night. But this is why God made central AC.

I have an infected toenail which has rendered my toe various shades of puffy red and purple. It's much less dramatic after a night's sleep with Polysporin, but back to Guignol after two hours of work, what with various babies stepping on my stockinged feet and me banging my toes on high chairs and what all. Shall go to walk-in clinic tomorrow, since my doctor is on vacation and Triple-strength Polysporin doesn't seem to be working.
( Wednesday meme )

...from which rain may fall again. Though the last downpour failed to wet the ground under the cherry tree, it did sluice everything else. OTOH the rain this year has singularly failed to produce those walls of water bouncing off the car hoods that the past three summers did on a regular basis, every time the forecast said 'scattered showers.' For which I'm properly grateful.

Finished in the last week?
First three of the Dalemark quartet: The Spellcoats, Drowned Ammett, and Cart and Cwidder. They make much more sense when read together and in order because alone and separately none made much of an impression on me, back when I first read them in the 80s.

Reading now?
The Crown of Dalemark which rather requires having read the first three (and remembering what happened in each, a thing I'm very bad at.) I suppose one coul read it standalone and see if it makes any sense that way, but I'm not going to.

Benvenuto Cellini, which I started a bare ten days ago or so, and which is never-ending.

Terra Nostra, a bit. I've read this twice but not since the early 80s. Some details come back, and names which give me an oogey feeling, but the passage I've just read might as well have been for the first time.

Next?
Along with the Max Gladstone I bought a Marjorie Liu, just to see if she's as different as some people say. Patricia Briggs was quite different from the usual run, so it *can* happen. OTOH disgruntled me thinks urban fantasy reccers have very low standards: over at goodreads, Nalini Singh's cliched purple gets four and a half stars per book.

(Apparently that's supposed to be the sound hoses watering the lawns that don't grow naturally in Los Angeles. I thought it was summer insects. The cicadas have already begun here.)

1. Even though I've read several of Henry James' novels, I'd have to go back and reread, or read anew, to find out if this is satire or an injoke or a reasonable interpretation. And I still wouldn't, probably, because I had no idea what was going on in The Wings of the Dove when I first read it and wouldn't have now. A friend once casually said 'and then when Kate sleeps with Densher' and I was 'She does? Where? How can you tell"! So I doubt I'd recognize a gay man, even a dramatic one, if James presented him to me.

What amazes me is that *anyone* can tell what's happening in a James novel.

2. So, dry warm weekend, what shall I read? The plow stuff- Cellini, Murakami's Kafka, or a committed dive into Terra Nostra? Or The Dalemeark books from Spellcoats on so I can finally read The Crown of Dalemark? And get them all off the shelves because I never cared for that cycle at all. Or The Book of Life, so I can get *them* off the shelves before the end of the month.
( Cut for RICHES beyond belief )