Off the Cliff

Hmm. What to read when you're not reading Pratchett. Glen Cook and Barry Hughart I can see. But Robin Hobb, Barbara Hambly, and CJ Cherryh? I want some of what this guy is smoking, because maybe then Hobb and Hambly wouldn't read so flat-footed. "Our main criteria selection were books that were strong in: Worldbuilding, Characterization, and Language." 'And', guys, not 'or'. And as for Cherryh: the one thing Pratchett is *not*, ever, is obscure.

Maybe it's flu, maybe it's wanhope, maybe it's a weekend spent at a cottage on the Niagara peninsula-- a flat unbeautiful stretch of land always covered in heat haze, where people watch television because there's nothing else to do but drink. Yes, yes, they grow wine there. But you'd have to be either drunk all the time or a Buddhist recluse not to go mad at the excess of nothing on all sides, which (even worse) requires a car to get you to it. Auden's estate is ferociously copy-righted so there's no online version, and the poem itself is too long for me to type, but his Plains contains the line, "I cannot see a plain without a shudder,/ 'Oh God, please, please don't ever make me live there." Yes. Yes. *This*, as the wacky mono say.

And think of growing where all elsewheres are equal!
     So long as there's a hill-ridge somewhere the dreamer
Can place his land of marvels; in poor valleys
     Orphans can head downstream to seek a million;
Here nothing points; to choose between Art and Science
     An embryo genius would have to spin a stick.

Knowing what the cottage can do to me in its worst moods (ie hot sweltering mug, shimmery grey hazed sky, stink of polluted lake, and no, that's it, sorry all but I'm never going to LRD ever) I brought a backpack of books to read, including that simple-minded White Hart novel. But wanhope/ flu/ ferocious muscle spasms ruled out anything Japanese, as they did the undistinguished Martha Wells I'd also brought. (Why do so many fantasies read like tapwater? and tapwater written on a computer, to boot.) If I must suffer, let me suffer to some purpose, so I gnawed doggedly away at The Fall of the Kings. And finished it today, finally, dragging feet and ripping nails out all the way.
( What does tFotK have in common with morphine? )

So, fannishly, as I view through my compilation tapes (yes I come from an older slower generation: I don't think I *want* to watch anime on my computer screen) I find myself becoming unreasonably fascinated with Gankutsu-oh, Cave King, ie The Count of Monte Cristo on both acid and mescaline. Yes the shifting garish computer graphics make one's eyes bleed, the more so as the characters' clothes are generally much more alive and certainly move much more than the characters themselves; but you get over that little quirk eventually, as anyone who survived 60's poster graphics learned to do, and then you realize there's a story there, and more surrealism than I've seen since Utena, and Folken's VA as the blue skinned pointy eared Count with his visual and other references to Mephistopheles. (And is he going to steal the soul of our brash young hero, the boy who ought to have been his son, or is brash young hero going to save the Count's soul, or neither? Tune in next week.) Weird and batty and burning style as it goes, the way I like 'em. And a nifty opening theme, angsty modern grafted onto 18th century minuet. Cool.

I also agree with everybody else about Meine Liebe: it exists only to be pretty and to resonate and so what? It's pretty and it resonates. How long it can go on doing so is a good question; but let us never forget, in Japan style *is* substance, so if it does nothing else but embody The Beautiful Male, what of it?

Equally I continue to plow through Fool's Errand, growing ever crosser as I do. It needs some of Meine Liebe's honesty. Madam, you are breaking no new ground in your constant hints of Deep Attachment between Fitz and the Fool, even if you think you are. That one's old; it's old enough to vote even; old enough in Japan to be married with school-aged kids. Also, if you want to work that territory you'll gain no marks by having one of the densest narrators I've ever had to deal with. Thank god I skipped the three (or is it six?) previous books with him in it.

Though such is Hobb's dogged approach that I begin to think maybe it couldn't be done any other way. Keep it all repressed or simply not noticed by our purblind hero and all's presumably well on the middle American front. But surely she's falling between two stools here? These chronic and obvious hints- I'd expect the pro-m/m people to be howling that there's not enough and the anti-m/m to be howling that it's there at all.