Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Rush-That-Speaks' LiveJournal:

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Monday, May 21st, 2012
12:40 am	some snippets and short reviews Some short things I've said about various books etc. in various places recently, not necessarily edited. From mail to nineweaving: ( on P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins, and her other interests ) From mail to sovay: ( on Naomi Mitchison's Under the Fairy Hill ) From a different email to sovay: You'd like Frances Hardinge's Fly-By-Night-- it reminds me of the revolutionary bits of the Dalemark books. Also has a perfectly lovely homicidal goose. And a con man who is a believable con man (and whose first name is Eponymous), and a bit in which someone has to shout, with serious intent, "Follow that coffeehouse!" And everyone in it is complex and has an agenda, and no one is perfectly good or bad, and the protagonist occasionally makes really stupid political decisions because she is twelve years old, which is very refreshing to see because usually in this sort of book being twelve does not hinder a clever person much, and here she just hasn't got the experience. And all of the incredibly serious political issues are worked out in action scenes that one suddenly realizes are on a sheerly logistical level perfectly ridiculous, but the emotional weight is still there. A nice trick. And from a different different email: ( on Anne Ursu's Cronus Chronicles ) So apparently I review things in email to my girlfriend a lot: ( on the movie A Dangerous Method ) You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
12:57 am	I am not turning this into a food blog but tonight's dinner turned out really well and was unusual, so have a recipe. Roasted Tofu-Apple-Spinach Salad serves two 1/2 lb. firm tofu 3 cloves garlic 2 tablespoons olive oil 2 cooking apples 1/2 cup pulpless orange juice 1/2 cup apple cider 2 teaspoons ground ginger 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1 green onion, chopped fine 1 teaspoon butter 1 teaspoon rice vinegar 2 tablespoons strong honey 2 tablespoons maple syrup 2 teaspoons cornstarch 2 tablespoons buttermilk (or yogurt thinned by water) 2 tablespoons soy sauce 1 teaspoon mayonnaise 3/4 lb. baby spinach, washed, stemmed, and dried well Preheat oven to 350 F. Remove tofu from its liquid and put it under a weight for at least fifteen minutes to get it as dry as possible. Slice it into 1/2-inch cubes. End, but do not peel, the cloves of garlic. Roll the cubes and the cloves gently through the olive oil. Spread cubes and cloves on a foil-covered baking sheet. Salt and pepper moderately. Bake twenty-five minutes, rotating once halfway through. Combine half the orange juice and half the cider in a bowl. Peel, core, and dice the apples, adding the dice to the juice mixture and making sure to get juice on all cut surfaces so the apples will not brown. Toss with the ginger, the cinnamon, and the chopped green onion. Pour the rest of the orange juice and cider into a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the butter. When steam is rising and the butter has melted, add the apples. Peel and add the roasted garlic. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the apples are reduced in size by more than half and are tender but not mushy, at least ten minutes. Make sure to break up the garlic as much as you can as you stir, and move it from place to place in the pan if it clumps. When the apples are nearly the desired consistency, add and stir in thoroughly first the maple syrup, then the honey, then the rice vinegar. Salt to taste. Add the cornstarch in small sprinkles, slowly, stirring continuously and vigorously to prevent it from clumping. Allow the sauce to reduce and thicken until it coats a spoon. Take the pan off the heat. In a Mason jar or other tightly lidded container, shake the buttermilk, soy sauce, and mayonnaise until entirely blended. Stir the roasted tofu into the apples, giving it a good coating of sauce. Don't let it sit too long before serving or it will become soggy. Divide spinach between serving plates. Top each portion of spinach with half the glazed apple-tofu mixture. Drizzle lightly with buttermilk dressing. Serve immediately. This goes very well with pita bread and makes an amazing although rather messy wrap. It will make an entire dinner for two quite hungry people-- the tofu's crunchy and light, the apples are rescued from oversweetness by the green onion, ginger, and vinegar and from overtartness by the syrup and honey, and the buttermilk dressing makes a good contrast with the apple glaze while working to integrate the leafy fluffiness of the spinach. Ruth wanted 'something with tofu and apple' for dinner, and while it's not a very intuitive combination, I was really pleased with the results. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 14th, 2012
1:02 pm	one of the major things that determines type of cook is the question of just what you will do to avoid having to go to the store. Some people go to the store. Some people don't make that recipe. And some people substitute to the point of possible insanity. For better or for worse, I substitute, and I'm kind of starting to wish I could revise my brain. You see, it went like this: I wanted to make a carrot cake. Last night at my usual baking time (c. 2 am), I discovered we had no brown sugar, and also we had no molasses (molasses + white sugar = brown sugar to all intents and purposes). This neighborhood doesn't have an all-night supermarket. Carrot cake with only white sugar would be less complex and mellow and dark-tasting, which is not the point of carrot cake, so no. No problem. Just get up in the morning and go buy brown sugar, right? Of course in the interim I had an idea. Sigh. And this demonstrates the lengths to which I will go to avoid shopping. The recipe (from Cook's Illustrated) said: Grease and flour a 13" x 9" baking pan. I do not have such an object. I have a 9" round pan. Sit down and calculate volume of pan they want, assuming 1 1/2" depth, versus volume of pan I have of same depth, which is meant to be filled only halfway up. I will have too much batter, but not ludicrously, so okay. Preheat oven to 350 F. Easy. Done. Mix 2 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 1/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg, and 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves in medium bowl. Check. I throw in 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, too, because I can't figure out why there isn't any. Peel 6 to 7 medium carrots and use Cuisinart to grate them. This necessitates the usual struggle with the grate-y bits of the Cuisinart but works out eventually. Carrots grated and dumped into bowl, Cuisinart wiped down: check. This is where there begin to be issues. I am now meant to put into the Cuisinart four eggs, 1 1/2 cups granulated white sugar, and 1/2 cup brown sugar and whiz them together for about twenty seconds. Then, with the Cuisinart staying on, I am meant to pour 1 1/2 cups of canola oil down the feed tube slowly so it emulsifies. See above re: no brown sugar. After I side-eye the recipe for wanting me to make sugar mayonnaise, I process the eggs, white sugar, a large dash of vanilla because this is a cake, people, come on, and the oil. Yup. Sugar mayonnaise. Okay then. Then I put 1/2 cup more white sugar and about 1/4 cup water into a tiny saucepan and put it over medium-high heat, because the flavor profile of caramel is pretty similar to the flavor profile of brown sugar, only if anything even more complex and interesting, right? This is the point where, if there had been anyone around, someone should maybe have tried to talk some sense into me. So I wait and wait and wait, because I always forget how long caramel takes to stop faffing about, and then I turn the Cuisinart back on (in hopes that thorough blending will keep the eggs from curdling, on the principal of Italian meringue), forget to grab a funnel, grab a funnel, pour the very hot sugar syrup down the funnel into the feed tube, burn myself badly on the pad of my index finger, and get spun sugar all over the kitchen. Sigh. When things calm down somewhat I examine the substance in the Cuisinart, which didn't curdle. Huh. It looks familiar. I taste it. I have independently reinvented vanilla pudding. If it weren't gritty due to the portion of unmelted sugar, it would be very good vanilla pudding indeed. Well, pudding cake is a thing. I scrape it and the dry ingredients into the bowl of carrots and mix it all together as well as I can while holding a can of cold soda in my dominant hand. Which is certainly more efficiently than I can scrape the batter into the pan. Possibly because the pudding had a substantial volume increase over the mayonnaise, there is way, way more batter than necessary, instead of just a little more. I end up filling the pan to the very top, as I don't really have the motor control to stop pouring. I only hope it doesn't rise too much, but carrot cake is usually pretty dense. It's meant to bake 35-40 minutes, but my oven runs hot, so I plan on half an hour and decide to come back in fifteen minutes to turn it. Fifteen minutes later: that. That is. A carrot souffle, that's what that is. The top edge of the cake has risen at least four inches vertically from the top edge of the pan, in that beautiful classical souffle dome I can never get when I want it. I tiptoe away and try not to bang around when I swear about my finger. Fifteen minutes after that: the dome has set in place. The middle is not just liquid but raw. Gah. I am concerned about its prospects of actually setting. Half an hour after that: I have to take it out. The edges are burning. It's basically solid except this one tiny spot in the middle top. Good enough. By this point my girlfriend has turned up, so I get her to pry it out of the pan. It doesn't want to. It pretty much comes in strata. She also kindly saws off the most burnt edges. My wife gets home, so I make her frost it (a massive quantity of leftover cream cheese frosting was the entire reason for carrot cake). It will never win any beauty contests, but the frosting makes it appear edible. Verdict: tastes fine. Tender, fluffy, soft texture with spicy, complex, true carrot cake flavor. Frosting masks bitterness of burnt patches nicely. Everyone likes it. My finger really fucking hurts, and I feel as though I have wrestled an alligator. Next time I will just go buy the sugar. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 13th, 2012
2:33 pm	this is my aggravated face Oh hey the being gay-married tax this year was only three hundred dollars. That is actually better than usual, but of course we live in a state where we can file state taxes as married, meaning we're only being forced to pretend we're not married on a federal level. So we're only paying the federal being gay-married tax (by which I mean the amount of money we lose by having to file as individuals), as opposed to both federal and state. And we've lived in a state where our marriage is legal for the vast majority of our married life, so that's been extremely helpful. That said, I have a very long list of things we could have done with the three hundred dollars. And I have intentionally stopped keeping track of the amount of money we've paid in being gay-married taxes over the course of our marriage, because it is Very, Very Depressing and thinking about it too hard makes me bitter. At the moment, I'm only, you know, slow-burn bitter in a way that crosses my mind at intervals in tax season and occasionally sends me into spasms of aggravation at other moments. If I had an actual figure, it would probably intrude significantly on my quality of life. Remind me to thank the government sometime for the random-ass bureaucratic reminders that I am a second-class citizen. (We're not talking about the whole right-name-on-passport question right now, or the question of whether the Social Security Administration should or should not be paid attention to by any other branches of the government when it issues an ID, or what it's like having two completely separate legally valid surnames, which has at least become a lot easier since I started using my non-married name as a pen name, meaning it is still okay for people to write checks to it and so on. If I want the federal government to pay any attention to my married name, I must file change-of-name paperwork separate from my marriage license, because as far as my marriage license is concerned they are sticking their fingers in their ears and humming, except SocSec, who will pay attention to a driver's license, but the passport admin kind of wants to listen to SocSec except they don't really and on and on and on and on...) Anyway. Three hundred dollars. Is what it has cost us this year to be married lesbians. I know people who have had to spend a lot more for the same reason; I know this is relatively light. Damn it. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 12th, 2012
1:55 pm	365 Books: The One That Got Away Well, I think enough time has passed since this happened for me to be able to talk about it without wincing too much, so: there was a book I went into my year of book reviews with the intention of reading. I am not much on the general notion of 'classic' or the concept of The Literary Canon, because many of the finest and happiest reading experiences of my life have involved books which are totally orthogonal to those concepts, and the whole thing just seems limiting and limited and liable to cause Harold Bloom-related Oedipal issues (I am looking at you, Lev Grossman). That said, I am also a person who reads literary criticism for fun, and if you do that, there are books you wind up reading because they get mentioned so often. And there are books you wind up reading because writers you respect love them and think they are brilliant and/or entertaining. And there are books you wind up reading just to see whether you are right that they would be a total waste of your time. And so on. One of the things that had been bothering me for some years before I started my book-a-day project was my almost total lack of acquaintance with what is mostly described as classic and what I would describe as frequently-critically-referred-to Russian literature. If it comes into your mind when I say 'Russian literature', I hadn't read it. I blame the Library Lady. You see, when I was maybe eleven or twelve, I went to the library, as I did once a week when someone would drive me, and I happened to pick up a copy of Anna Karenina and began leafing through it. It had just about caught me when the Library Lady happened instead. I don't believe she worked there; I think she was some sort of volunteer, but she was there pretty frequently, and my usual practice when I saw her was to duck into the very back of the stacks and lurk out of her range of vision, because she had extremely strong beliefs as to What Young Girls Should Read, and they were not in any way related to my own beliefs on the subject. (Or, fortunately, my parents' beliefs on the subject, which meant she had no real power over me and was just extremely annoying.) So she came over, and she saw that I was holding Anna Karenina, and something happened which I had never experienced with the Library Lady before: she enthused. She talked about how she had read Anna Karenina when she was just my age, and it had changed her life, and it was the perfect book for a young girl's secret heart (or something equally nauseating), and I would just love it when-- and then she described the entire plot of the entire book, in excessive detail. Including the ending. Blow by blow. And I stood there politely nodding, and trying to look for a way out of this, but there didn't seem to be one, and then she personally marched me over to the checkout desk and had the (not insane) library lady there check the book out to me, and I put it in my bag, and when my father and I were leaving the library I put it back in through the book slot and from that day to this I have neither read Anna Karenina nor ninety-five percent of the things that could be properly and according to popular opinion called Russian Literature. That five percent is because I went into my year of a book a day intending to change that. And specifically, there was one book I meant to read, the book that critics refer to probably the most of all Russian novels, the one I had my sights on all the time I was reading and reviewing and really delighting in The Master and Margarita and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Viktor Pelevin. The book Ursula Le Guin insists is the greatest novel ever written, and I love and respect her as a writer and her critical opinions, and this statement of hers catches at me every time I reread The Language of the Night. In short, I was going to read War and Peace. I do not think this was a ridiculous ambition. I read Tristram Shandy in a day quite early on, and while it left me punchy and mentally reeling and basically high, I finished it and I was able to write about it. I finished Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear in a day a bit later on, which is pretty well brick-sized, and I have on multiple occasions at other times in my life read Les Miserables in one sitting, because there never seems to be a good stopping place. So time wore on, and all of a sudden I had about a week of reviewing a book a day left, which really crept up on me. I had a lot of books I had said I would read for one person or another or planned out in other ways, and I realized suddenly that the next day had better be War and Peace or I wasn't going to fit it in. Spent some time on the internet looking up critical opinions of translations, decided the Constance Garnett sounded like a reliable old warhorse, walked over to the library and picked it up. I got up early the next day and everything. Took the book to the nearby park which has tables-- it was a beautiful morning-- gazed at the cover in some intimidation for a moment, and. It turns out that in order to read something at the speed I am accustomed to consider normal, I need to be enjoying the book on some level. Any level. It doesn't matter what. It has nothing to do with complexity, it has nothing to do with length, but if I am to read without the sensation of walking through thick and sucking molasses there has to be something I like. As opposed to merely respect. Three hours later, at the close of the first hundred and fifty pages, I had a terrible headache, a collection of empty soda bottles, and the thought running through my mind: it's as though somebody turned Les Miserable inside out and made it horrifically misanthropic. Gah. Epic, epic levels of pervasive depression. Brilliantly written, gorgeously conceived, subtly argued epic meditation on the fate of all human vanity and the pointlessness of war and I felt as though I were hitting myself over the head with a brick. Six hours after that, I'd gone home as darkness approached, built up a truly ridiculous collection of empty soda bottles, hit something approaching my stride although still in slow motion, had barely passed page five hundred, and was in a state of what I can only describe as hysteria. I had timed the rate at which I was reading, and the book was not going to finish until, if I read all night, about two p.m. the next day. It just kept going on and on and doing the thing Tristram Shandy had also done to me, where every time I turned around I'd miscalculated where I was and there were another hundred pages more than I thought, and I kept having way more book left than I expected. Except that Tristram Shandy, being an existential joke, is entitled to do that sort of thing, and also I hadn't minded. This, I minded. The problem was, I was hating it more every page, and I couldn't tell whether that was the book itself, or the knowledge that I had to get through the damn thing, or some combination of the two. My respect for the novel only grew with my hatred, because it just kept getting better and better and more and more dislikable. I didn't have anything else lying about to read and review that day which wouldn't require any brain. Everything I had left to read was complex and my entire brain had been swallowed by this novel which I was starting to believe actually hated me on a deeply personal level. I didn't want to fail at my project in the very last week, but what choice had I got if I couldn't just fucking finish War and Peace? It felt as though it would be an invalidation of my entire year's work. (It would not have been, but did I mention the hysteria?) By this time we had gotten to pacing, ranting, and crying while reading. At this point B., bless him, informed me that I was visibly hurting myself and this was not going to go on any longer. He removed the book from my person. I asked him what in hell I was going to read today, dammit, in that case, and he said that Thrud had left a single-volume manwha for me the last time she'd been in town, and that he didn't know whether she'd intended me to review it and he'd thought it might be a birthday present, so he hadn't given it to me yet, but here it was. After some argument, I realized that I was going to be totally impossible to be around even to myself until we had disposed of the War and Peace question one way or the other. I read the manwha. It was fine, not great. I cried a lot afterward in bitter frustration. Reviewed the manwha the next morning when I could think again, went back to the library, returned War and Peace, and got some less difficult things to read so I could cope with the next couple of days. It took a while for the crushing sense of defeat and humiliation to wear off, and it took a much longer while for the sense to wear off that the book had made some kind of existential point about the pointlessness of all human action by using me as a demonstrative device. This, from a philosophical point of view, sucked, but I am now just about reconciled to the fact that I finished the whole ridiculously huge self-imposed reading project anyway and people really liked it and it is just fine. There are many things in the world that I can do, some of which are quite amazing, even to myself. I can read and review three hundred and sixty-five books in one year. I cannot read War and Peace in one day. There is probably somebody out there who can, but it isn't me. I have not finished reading War and Peace, and I don't know whether I'm ever going to finish it. Honestly, I am pretty okay with that. Sometimes these things happen. Yes, I am still pretty bitter about the whole experience. You will notice it has taken me eight months to write about. But I did want to write it up because, well, it was a pretty major part of the whole project, in terms of emotional weight. And I wanted to remind myself: it's okay to admit that I can't do something. Even something I desperately wanted to do. It does not reflect on what I actually did. That feels important. And I guess it's one of those things one learns from a giant, year-consuming project. If I only learned the things I expected to learn, there wouldn't have been as much point, now would there? You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (23 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
10:36 pm	Emergency Biscuits As one does, I occasionally read old cookbooks with horrifically sexist yet somehow entertainingly bland vignettes of early twentieth-century life in them. My favorite of these is called A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband With Bettina's Best Recipes, by Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles Le Cron (1917). Bettina is a Home Economics Mary Sue, or possibly Mary Poppins without the sarcasm, Practically Perfect In Every Way. She is forever explaining things to her friends in a sweetly condescending fashion, has never burned toast in her life, and will only let her husband mix the salad dressing if she first provides him with a multi-step instruction manual-- after which she tells him how proud she is of him for making dinner. And yet she's a progressive, in her way; one of the chapters is about her providing a several-course luncheon for prominent suffragettes from out of town. It's an interesting mixture of unintentionally hilarious, dull, and historically revelatory. Most of the food would not work for a modern palate. Bettina puts pimento in everything, makes white sauce as a default to go over all foods, and considers something 'deviled' if it has a quarter-teaspoon of paprika and 'curried' if it has a quarter-teaspoon of curry powder (I mean a quarter-teaspoon for, say, an entire leg of lamb). The only herb she has heard of is mint, which she incessantly soaks in vinegar before using it, for reasons unknown to me. She uses one square of baking chocolate per chocolate cake, and makes peanut butter sandwiches by mixing the peanut butter with mayonnaise. But I decided I would pay more attention to the recipes after I noticed during a recent reread that the chocolate meringue pie I have been making for the last several Thanksgivings, which I got from another source and which has been greatly acclaimed, which is that magical combination of easy and delicious that means you can toss it off while also worrying about the turkey-- is Bettina's. Huh. Not what I expected. Further poking around came up with a few things that looked usable, and tonight for dinner I wanted a starch, and I didn't want bagels because we use them for lunch sandwiches, and the oatmeal bread Ruth likes wouldn't have gone with the asparagus, and I haven't made any bread lately and we haven't any rice or potatoes and I didn't want to go out to buy anything and we had a limited amount of time before Sassafrass rehearsal-- Bettina's Emergency Biscuit (as it appears in the book; this recipe is meant for the days you've had to go out and do something that prevents you from making bread, biscuits that need to rise, or cake, or in other words for modernity) 2 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons fat (butter, lard, drippings, whatever you have) 7/8 cup milk Mix the dry ingredients and cut in the fat. Add the milk, mixing with a knife. Drop by spoonfuls on a buttered pan, placing one inch apart. Bake twelve minutes in a hot oven. I halved it, because there are two of us, and that made exactly the right amount. I used butter, all-purpose flour, and whole milk, and preheated the oven to 350 F. Threw the dry ingredients into a bowl, didn't even really bother mixing them, softened the butter a very little bit in the microwave (I keep my butter in the fridge so you might not need to do this), smashed it into the dry ingredients with a butter knife and cut the knife through the mixture a few times until I felt like I couldn't see any huge chunks of butter. I didn't bother measuring the milk-- just poured it in a little at a time, kept stirring with the butter knife thoroughly between trickles, and stopped when the mixture came together in a ball with no flour left at the bowl bottom. Dropped rounds of it onto a greased cookie sheet without really shaping them and put them in the oven. After six minutes I took them out, rotated them 180 degrees, and turned the oven up to 400 F; they were done at twelve minutes on the dot. Total expenditure of my time: three minutes of mixing, a little futzing with the oven. Total expenditure of my brain: zero thought required except when halving measurements. Results: in contention for the best biscuits I've had, certainly better than any I've bought from a store and right up there among the ones from restaurants. They're crusty on the outside, but not hard to bite through, and inside they're ridiculously fluffy, flavorful, and savory. Make sure the balls of dough are at least the size of golf balls, as the one biscuit I made smaller than that was a little dry; also I could tell from the flavor and texture that they would go tough in the refrigerator and dry out on the counter, so only make as much as you need. Would go beautifully with butter and jam, especially when hot, but would also dip well into gravies or sauces, and I was perfectly content to eat them with nothing at all. It's nice to remember that baking does not have to be Hard Work. ... and okay, props to Bettina. I must try her actual baking-powder biscuits that she considers correct for the days when one has time, as I will be very impressed if they are better. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (24 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012
4:01 am	interesting vid link I recently stumbled across this: a fan-transformation of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, both song and video, into a history of women's suffrage in the United States. Which is not what I usually expect of my internets, but, uh. It has made me cry. Five times now. (It will probably be more interesting to those of you familiar with the original Bad Romance video, from which it is riffing a ridiculous number of shot setups.) Because to me this gets very nicely at the way that being a woman* and being engaged in politics in the U.S. can mean you're in an abusive relationship with your own country, and how there's this flawed (this video is very white) and sometimes terrifyingly conciliatory movement that has done amazing things. I mean it hits the nuances, for me, the bits where I'm like, I have had my issues with the Second Wave and also with the Third (and some of those can be extrapolated by comparing this vid to its source, which I'm sure is intentional), but also, it's worth it, rock on. Persons who are scheduling vid-party at Wiscon, this is absolutely up your alley and if I had any hope of going to the con whatsoever I might suggest it get a panel. * My current gender identification is somewhere between 'it's complicated' and 'fuck everything', with a very large dose of 'I have no idea' and some 'we don't want to get into that mess'. I have, however, definitely felt serious gender-based political frustration on numerous occasions. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 16th, 2012
3:41 pm	this is not a review of Derek Jarman's The Angelic Conversation Rhetorical question: I am going to stop being this tired sometime, right? /has spent last two days on couch. Did get out to sovay's the day before that and watch The Angelic Conversation, though; she has a spontaneously-generated copy, in that a friend, years before we knew who Jarman was, gave her what she thought was the soundtrack, and instead it turned out to be the film entire. The Angelic Conversation is Jarman going back to his roots in handheld video, specifically highly saturated Super-8. There was no synced sound and no budget for post-dubbing, so the audio is a combination of music (mostly by Coil, some Benjamin Britten), occasional sound effects, and Judi Dench reading from Shakespeare's sonnets. Now I desperately want an audiobook of Judi Dench reading all of Shakespeare's sonnets. Her readings are revelatory, the way she works with and against the meter, and the way she lets the inversions and rhymes chase each other without overwhelming the sense. It's a perfect balance between conversational speech and reading-aloud, because she's let her Received Pronunciation be tinted just enough with a more Renaissance approach to the vowels for the rhymes to work and not be overstressed, and never let anyone tell you reading poetry aloud is not an art in itself, because this is a great artistic achievement and one which awes me. I mean it makes me like the poems better. It's especially impressive because she's doing a mix of the less-famous ones (and they don't sound minor) and the more-famous ones (and they don't sound the way they did when you read them in school). Anyway, so of course the sonnets are commentary (sometimes direct, sometimes allegorical, sometimes ironic) on the imagery, and this is where we get into the territory that means I insist this is not a review of The Angelic Conversation, because I have no idea how Derek Jarman did the things he does in this movie. The experience of watching the film went something like this: ME: That young man walking through the rocky declivity is an angel. Why do I know that? There has been absolutely nothing visual that ought to suggest it to me, but I am incredibly certain. sovay: Oh, hey, those angels are working through invocations of each element in order. ME: I knew that. How did I know that? Why did that occur to me? THE GHOST OF DEREK JARMAN, LURKING SOMEWHERE BEHIND THE TELEVISION: Look! These two angels are going to summon each other, because each of them, although completely happy with the jobs they've been doing in the sense that they're doing the jobs they've been created to do and are fulfilled in their existence by carrying the jobs out correctly, is nonetheless incredibly lonely and also the jobs are really hard, so each of them just wants somebody to love! Did you know angels could summon each other, in the classical Renaissance magical sense, and that it would make them fall desperately in love with one another? Doesn't it make sense now that you think about it? ME (to sovay): ... so, is the ghost of Derek Jarman psychically communicating to you that-- sovay: YES. ME: It's a picture of a guy walking through some rocks! With smoke! In slow motion! In sepia! WHY DO I KNOW THESE THINGS ABOUT IT?! THE GHOST OF DEREK JARMAN: Look! This guy, who is just sitting there chilling on a rock with a towel wrapped around his waist, is actually God! Aren't his tattoos hilariously ironic? ME: -- yes, yes they are, WHY DO I KNOW HE IS GOD HE IS A DUDE WITH A TOWEL ON A ROCK ANGELS (IN FILM): *adore him* *cause sudden beautiful visual allusion to William Blake's Albion* SWORD THE PROTAGONIST OF THE NOVEL I AM WRITING CARRIES AROUND: *is suddenly sitting in God's lap for no apparent reason* ME: BZUH NEED SCREENSHOTS TO HANG IN MY STUDY but hey at least we have visual proof now that we were not just hallucinating the things we deduced about this film earlier from no actual evidence LAST TRUMP (IN FILM): *sounds* ANGELS (IN FILM): Yay time off! *make out* *with more numinous* *no, more numinous than that even* MY BRAIN: *breaks* sovay's BRAIN: similar, I suspect THE GHOST OF DEREK JARMAN: *serene smile* So. That happened. I have no idea how this film, which consisted mostly of beautiful young men carrying heavy things through rocky valleys, communicated any of what was going on until the ambush-via-William-Blake. That means I can't call this a review, because I have no idea whether, if anyone not me or my girlfriend watches the film, the ghost of Derek Jarman will turn up and insert into your brain also the knowledge of what is going on, or whether it will be a set of shots of beautiful young men carrying heavy things through rocky valleys. Because it could have been all in our heads, or it could have been a fiendishly visually clever set of ways of communicating information, or some mixture of the two, and I am grateful to Derek Jarman's ghost for turning up but I don't know if he works full-time? I mean maybe the next time I watch this it will make no damn sense. It's very possible. It's really pretty if you like saturated Super-8. So there's that. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 8th, 2012
12:37 pm	watch that last step, it's a doozy We have officially moved. And the move continued to be at or ahead of schedule the whole time. It has also left me so exhausted that I am spending most of the time literally sitting on the couch and staring into space. You can't have everything? So we used one of those companies which brings you a large storage container, and you pack it yourself, and then they come pick it up and put it in front of the new place and you unpack it yourself. (Of course by 'yourself' in both instances I mean 'with a bevy of everyone you can get hold of in the area'.) I am absolutely behind this as the way to do all moves ever in the future, because they didn't try to overcharge us, the container appeared and disappeared when they said it would, nothing got stolen/lost/broken, and, and this was awesome, no one had to interact with any actual human beings at the company except in over-the-phone ways. I value that so highly. Anyway, after the container Magically Disappeared from in front of the Texas house, Ruth and I threw the cats into the car (in a crate, divided down the middle, and we gave them tranquilizers) and drove across the country. The cats were, loudly, sad. On the first day they were loudly sad every five seconds, alternating with each other. I am impressed with their vocal staying power, as my throat would have gone sore sometime after the first couple of hours. On the subsequent days they only expressed their annoyance for said first couple of hours, as well as whenever we got on and off the highway or did anything else startling. Lucien has managed to achieve a degree of vocalization on the word 'NOW' which means that it is impossible to hear it as anything except 'NOW', because it begins with an N. I am very impressed. Now maybe he could learn the word QUIET. (I mean, he knows it. It just doesn't apply to him.) It turns out that the best day ever to go to New Orleans is the day after Mardi Gras. All the decorations are still up, but everyone has gone home! Completely delightful. The second night we spent in Knoxville, which wasn't as delightful, because we were in the bit full of chain restaurants and truck stops, and then we got to B.'s in D.C. and collapsed for a few days. Then put the (very annoyed) cats back in the car and-- okay, so it turns out you really, really shouldn't drive from D.C. to Boston in one day if your GPS has a setting for 'avoid tolls' but not, it turns out, a setting for 'avoid cities', and especially if you don't know the geography of south NYC well enough to avoid going right through the city because you don't realize that's what you're doing until it's too late. The 'avoid tolls' settings works-- we only paid $12 in tolls D.C-Boston, which is very good considering if you take the straight coastal route you pay ~$50 D.C.-NYC alone-- but we hit NYC at about 3 p.m. and weren't clear of it till 6:30. This would also be because I had my usual NYC luck. New York hates me on a deeply personal level, always has. At one point Ruth said 'So, you know, if I were driving, we wouldn't have hit those last three construction zones,' zones which included one entirely blocking off Canal Street from the Brooklyn Bridge and one blocking the way onto the FDR northbound, 'but then, on the other hand, I've never driven in a city half this size, so it's probably just as well'. I think it was probably six of one and half a dozen of the other, because NYC loves Ruth but it is not the place to begin city driving. Then at about the time we hit the MA border it started snowing. The first and only snow of the year thus far. On Leap Day. Ruth had never driven in snow before either, so she got to start that late at night, while tired, in a heavily laden car full of cats who had now been in there like twelve hours now and were beyond annoyed and into calling maledictions and curses on our lineage. Fun! And then I got to take my last driving shift when we actually got into Boston: double fun! Oh, and our windshield wipers decided to make the windshield really dirty, so basically no visibility. Got into the new place about midnight, unloaded, set up air mattress, in bed by 1 a.m. At approximately 4 a.m., we were awakened by the sound of a cat in deep annoyance. Initially thought it was residual, so I got up and went looking for him to help him calm down. Couldn't find him anywhere. There was persistently one cat around my ankles, who was not yelling, and then there was yelling, and no other visible cat. Ruth got up to help and we stumbled around going but this place doesn't even have any furniture! where the fuck is he? The refrigerator in our new apartment sits in a nook in the kitchen wall. It is, at the moment, pushed as far back into that niche as it can go without damaging any connections. At the time we arrived, it was pulled forward in the niche so that the door was, you know, sitting directly to hand. It took the cat only three hours from the time of his arrival to get on top of the refrigerator, get behind the refrigerator, and discover that he didn't have the space or leverage to get out from behind the refrigerator. So we got to pull the refrigerator out into the middle of the room at four in the morning. I suspect this of having been his revenge on us for the entire road trip. Well played, in that case. The storage container showed up exactly on time, and a whole bunch of wonderful, helpful people came over and helped us get all our stuff out of it, and now the place is piled with some furniture and many boxes. And I have been sitting and staring off into space, because I haven't been this tired since the last time I moved to Boston, in 2004. It is not a tired that seems to be dented much by sleep, on a day-to-day basis; it is the kind of bone-deep tired where you have trouble thinking and you have trouble with things like tying your own shoes and you just have to wait for it to be over. I have no idea when it is going to be over. But we have, officially, moved. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 19th, 2012
4:34 pm	completely unprecedented (by which I mean, possibly in the history of human civilization) I have to boast now, even though the amazing thing did not have much to do with me, but rather with my wife's mad organizing skills and the impressive lifting-of-boxes by the housemates and foleyartist1. We have been actively engaged in moving since Wednesday. There has been a list of things which needed to be done each day: pack this room, pack that room, sort this, decide that. Today was 'put all the packed boxes and furniture in the mobile storage unit, which the people will come pick up and take away later'. This is now done. At no time was this move ever anything other than on or ahead of schedule. All of the boxes have sensible things in them, are sensible weights, and are labeled 'fragile' or 'valuable' or 'handle with care' if necessary. We never got to the traditional point where you find yourself having to label a box 'lampshades, miscellaneous hair objects, ham', or the later point where you find yourself labeling the box 'crap I found in the back'**. There were no floods, fires, temper tantrums, bouts of inclement weather, attempted defraudings, mechanical failures, health catastrophes, family feuds, confusions, or raised voices*. The cats went quietly into the bathroom this morning and stayed there. I got up today at about my usual time, looked around at the situation, realized that it was well under control, and baked a cake for the people who were better at hauling things. Because I HAD TIME TO DO THAT. Because it DID NOT AFFECT THE SCHEDULE. I realize we are going to be hit by a meteorite tomorrow morning-- either that, or the mobile storage unit people are going to mail everything to Dubai-- but THIS MOVE HAS BEEN A RELATIVELY PLEASANT THING and also EVERYTHING HAS GONE EXACTLY AS PLANNED IN EVERY SINGLE LITTLE DETAIL. I just had to mention this, because it is so obviously a once-in-a-lifetime experience. * all exciting highlights of actual past moves! ** Ruth would like to point out that there is a box labeled 'various' and a box labeled 'sundry', but these were intentional and labeled as such because she finds it amusing, as opposed to having been labeled at a point when nobody could manage to care any longer: a significant distinction, I think You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 18th, 2012
5:43 pm	the incident with the cat in the night-time Last night I went to bed, and the larger cat was on my wife's head, and they were both not-quite-asleep. As I petted the cat, suddenly a great revelation came to me, a revelation which made sense of all of the behavior of our two cats past, present, and future. It was dazzling. And I said "Hey, you know how our cats are tuxedo cats?" "Yes?" she said in the tones of a person who has known this for ten years. "And you know how they fight all the time, even though they're brothers?" "Yes?" "It's because they're tuxedo cats! They have spats!" At this point, the cat got up and stalked off, meaning that he has now lost any plausible deniability he ever had about not understanding English, since he left before there were any signs of retaliatory violence. "I can't believe it took me ten years to think of that," I said, reflectively. "I can," she said grimly. Then there was retaliatory violence. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 16th, 2012
11:34 pm	a new review in a new place My re-read/review of Andre Norton's Forerunner is now up at Tor.com. It's always been in my top tier of Norton, so it was nice to write about, and it holds up as well as it did when I was fifteen. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
1:33 am	Last Letters from Hav, Jan Morris Review sponsored by cyphomandra for rachelmanija's recent read-a-thon. Many thanks to lnhammer for making the book available; my library hasn't got it. Jan Morris is having us on. One knows that going in. Last Letters from Hav is a travel book about a city which does not exist, and, more than that, which never existed; not only is there discussion of the various political reasons for which the world's encyclopedists might not mention Hav too frequently, but the city bears the load of double nonexistence, as it was destroyed (and, by implication, made into an entirely different place) directly after Jan Morris left town. The question becomes, in which direction is Jan Morris having us on? and I thought for a while that it was the joke of verisimilitude, of just how well she can simulate a believable travel book. Nowhere in the book itself, on its flaps or on its back cover or in the text, is the city's nonexistence explained. You have to know. As a joke on that level, it's a pretty good one: we know exactly where Hav would be, on its southward-facing peninsula between Turkey and Syria, northernmost Arab port of the Mediterranean, terminus of the Silk Road. All the details are in place, the fifty-year stint as a British possession, the tripartite division between the Great Powers after World War I, the hill nomads who come down from the mountains for one week every spring to sell the unthinkably rare snow raspberries, the Governor's garden party, the voluble Italian landlady, the train station, the tea, the light. A book of that sort, however well-sustained, would be in essence lightweight, a charming diversion. Jan Morris does not desire to supply us with a charming diversion. Her work here goes deeper. This is in fact a novel, and a very fine and sly one it is too. In many ways the hardest sort of joke is the kind you play on yourself, and Jan Morris has constructed her authorial persona, the lady who is writing this travel book, as exactly the sort of erudite, charming, witty, purblind, drowning-in-the-right-quotation eternal-spectator innocent-abroad twit, unable to see three feet beyond the end of her own nose, who is the curse and the blessing of what is said to be 'good travel writing'. Her infinite quotations are just slightly too apropos. Her classical allusions are that one touch too classical. She is the sort of person who says, upon doing a thing twice, that she often does it, and upon doing it three times that it is a tradition with her. She is always being reminded of a holy man she met in Tibet that time, or a hospital she saw in the Crimea, or, unforgettably, of the Boer War, which one can be fairly confident she wasn't in. She would like the political demonstrators to get out of the way of the monuments. I fell over laughing when she revealed-- so casually, with just the right touch of ennui-- that she has been an habitué at Harry's Bar. And yet, so subtle, so careful-- oh, the prose is lovely, really lovely, and all the quotations are by real people and I had to look up who Pero Tafur was, the eleventh-century Spanish travel writer she hauls out at one point, but no, he is a real eleventh-century Spanish travel writer and he did in fact cross the ground that she has made into her city Hav-- and she is not what most people would call a bad sort at all, at all, she is sympathetic about the waves of empire that have washed over everything, she has a way with an evocative description and she means nothing but good to anybody. How can you not just forgive her and laugh about it? And yet-- I mean the construction of Jan Morris. Do remember that. The real one is writing in hornet's stings, and I must say some went home. She may have lurked at Harry's Bar in Venice and watched Harry sell Bellinis (just-christened) to Papa Hemingway, but I knew where she meant and what the hell she was talking about, and my mind flashed back over my own recent travel writing: dear God, please keep me from having committed this sort of subtle exclusionary elitism with, say, gelaterias in Florence, I hope devoutly I have not done so, thank you, amen. But I remember very clearly once in Florence I was walking at the back of the Accademia and there were some protesters there, from Occupy Firenze, and I thought, I should go talk with them for a little, I am too much in this city's past and nothing in its present, and I didn't, because I was tired. And I never did. And yet isn't there a place in the world for writing about a city's past, as well as its present? I know what I am good at, when I write about Florence. It is not the political concerns of modern Italy. As well as, there's the key phrase, and not instead of. 'Jan Morris' looks straight past an oncoming revolution and its equally oncoming suppression. I sometimes worry I have not lived up to my political responsibilities as a travel writer: 'Jan Morris' would not have the words cross her mind, 'the political responsibilities of the travel writer'. There is a traditional structure to the travel book, in which the writer goes through historical eras of the city architecturally, artistically etc., trying to track down any surviving people from the relevant eras if applicable and generally discussing the historical time of the city as discrete chunks, each chunk quite often corresponding to an ethnicity as well as a period. So you get 'Jan Morris' going to see the last of the city's White Russians; the last of the descendants of the first Greek fishermen who founded Hav; the Chinese quarter brings on a discussion of the Eastern trade. And there is also a tradition, in this sort of travel book, to, when you get to the time/place/people in which there was an awful war, to, well, pause for sentiment. To discuss the devastation that has of course been wrought and to interview someone who had something horrible happen. Some writers can get away with this-- Nicolas Bouvier can, on account of how recently WWII had been, so that he was in a city nine years out of Nazi occupation and would have had to be completely tone-deaf to miss it; Patrick Leigh Fermor doesn't try, being sensible, and having been that rare thing, a real hero who knew what a war was. 'Jan Morris' has, in this book, in her exquisitely careful sendup of exactly how not to deal with the aftermath of WWII, given the most beautiful demonstration I can possibly imagine of what it would be to ignore the political responsibilities of the travel writer. For in Hav there lives a man who is wanted by Israel, for war crimes. A friend of hers says that the reward is huge; she interviews the man; his guilt is indisputable. Does she consider reporting his existence and where he lives to the relevant authorities? Does she, hell! And the Nazi, at the end of her interview with him, suggests that her friend was a collaborator with the Vichy government, that he sold out members of the Resistance. Does she look into it? Of course not. Because she is a travel writer and therefore to her this is all theatrical pageantry, is the subtext. She's the observer so none of it is any of her business. And how amazingly well-calibrated the racism of the way she will reveal, or not reveal information: this is a book in which she calls the British Agent in Hav by a pseudonym, despite the fact that he has not asked for anonymity, but gives the full address and telephone number of a Muslim leader who has told her in so many words that he is under threat of assassination. She insists that there must be an artistic connection between the indigenous Havian culture and that of Wales, on extremely flimsy evidence-- both 'Jan Morris' and Jan Morris are Welsh. As an indictment of the sins of the travel writer, it's almost enough to condemn the whole profession. She makes it all so fucking plausible, and also always blink-and-you'll-miss-it. In short, Jan Morris has pulled off one of the most impressive literary sleights-of-hand I can recall seeing in recent memory: she has created a city, and an avatar of herself to walk in it, and tells you about it firsthand, using real details, and convinces you absolutely that every damn thing she says about the place is wrong. Because you know things about what Hav must be like. You know things 'Jan Morris' never will. (Although not enough to figure out, quite, which faction starts the revolution, though I know which ones went on with it.) I haven't seen a rope trick like this since Victor Pelevin's The Helmet of Horror, a book which this reminded me of strongly-- that and Jill Paton Walsh's Knowledge of Angels. And in the grand tradition of the con artist, she'll tell you what she's doing flat out. The city of Hav is obsessed with mazes, and the depiction of mazes is the great motif of their art. Here is her plot summary of the greatest work by Hav's greatest novelist, the one who died a year too soon to win the Nobel Prize: There is no doubt that Melchik was obsessed by the idea of the maze. Every one of his books is really its diagram. But in his most famous work, and the only one widely known in the West, he turns the conception inside out. Bağlilik ("Dependence") is the tale of a woman whose life, very gently and allusively described, is a perpetual search not for clarity but for complexity. She feels herself to be vapidly self-evident, her circumstances banal, and so she deliberately sets out to entangle herself. But when at last she feels she is released from her simplicities-- has reached the center of the maze in fact-- she finds to her despair that her last state is more prosaic than the first. In my critical idiom, we could call the above the sound of one hand clapping. Or possibly two: mine. I mean, one can even deduce, by careful examination, where the alternate history that produced Hav branches off from ours, and some of what its other effects were. (Let's just say, in this universe Byzantium was not much of an empire, and Constantinople, though it exists, split its trade equally with Hav, with the result that neither was as spectacularly glorious.) As travel book, too, I repeat that it is perfectly enjoyable, and has all the things for which one reads that genre, the evocations of food, buildings, clothes, sky, the conversations with interesting people, the notations of local customs, the humor, the prose. (Humor in the little things, too. She really should not have expected to enjoy the restaurant the professorial type took her to, when he had been categorically wrong about every single statement he'd been quoted as making before taking her out. When a person like that says they know a good restaurant, you're lucky not to end up in the hospital, but she never quite makes the connection.) And of course turning the joke back on herself was part of the hall of mirrors to some extent, wasn't it; because I see in Jan Morris, in her construction of this city and her writer-self, everything 'Jan Morris' isn't, the empathy, the love and courage, the acknowledgments of the ways that travel writing is never going to get to the heart of a place and the way it will always, always fail other peoples' pain. So I can feel that we are laughing together, she and I, a little ruefully. You'll never get the damn city right, I won't either, but at least it is a brilliant novel. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (28 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 29th, 2012
11:41 pm	answers to that lyrics meme, with commentary ( cut for the uninterested or those who still want to guess ) You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 28th, 2012
6:24 pm	yep, we do have an apartment The date what we can start moving in all our furniture and so on is March 1st. Probably starting the driving-the-cats-cross-country portion of our lives rather earlier. I am so glad to be done with the house-hunting. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 27th, 2012
6:52 pm	well then So I have filled out all the paperwork I can possibly fill out for an apartment that, while not the epitome of perfection, is completely fine (it has only three problems: available March 1 instead of in February, farther from T than I would like in an ideal world, bathroom very very small; on the other hand the rooms are sized such that I think it is the only two-bedroom I've ever seen where we can shelve all our books because it is that roomy, and it's in one of those lovely old Victorians which, contrary to all human expectation, has actually been adequately maintained forever). Therefore we probably have an apartment, but it's not up to me anymore, it's up to other people to fill out paperwork and the landlord to approve stuff and whatnot, and so I am on a train back to B.'s. Train boring. Too sleep-deprived to read, and man, if I am too tired for Clark Ashton Smith I am impressively tired. In quiet car, as I hoped I'd sleep, but train too jouncy to sleep. Internet veeeeeeeeeeeery sloooooooow. (Though extant.) Experiencing bizarre combination of fear of not getting apartment and fear of potential renter's remorse. (It's probably fine! I know this!) So yeah have a music guessing meme, One of those first-line-of-song ones, the first twenty that come up at random on my tiny alien control device, and I'll leave out the foreign-language ones and elide any instances of the song title in the quoted lyrics. And doing this should get me through the rest of New Jersey, even if New Jersey seems infinite. My wife did this recently and it will probably be illustrative of the difference in our tastes, though I expect she'll still know all of them. ( cut for those of you who aren't interested ) You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (31 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
4:51 pm	Medea, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1969) I'd been wanting to see a film by Pasolini for some time, but the only one that's been widely available is the Criterion disc of Salò, which, no, I did not want to begin my acquaintance with a director by watching his adaptation of 120 Days of Sodom, thank you. But his Medea is out on DVD now, and sovay and I watched it. It stars Maria Callas as Medea (she does not sing). This is the only film dealing with a classical Greek myth I have ever seen which gets the period right, by which I mean that it is not set in the classical period. It is set in the Archaic period-- it takes place when the myth is said to have happened, instead of when the most widely known versions of the myth were written. Pasolini filmed in Turkey, in Cappadocia in fact, i.e. very close to where Colchis, Medea's homeland, is actually supposed to have been. So it's the correct period and filmed on location, and it distinguishes in dress, customs, religion, and (possibly*) language between the inhabitants of Colchis and the culture of the Argonauts from mainland Greece, and these things alone would be enough to make me love the movie and treasure it forever. However, it's also just the best Medea I have ever encountered. It's not a version of Euripides, it keeps none of the language; it's a pragmatic retelling, with long stretches containing no dialogue at all. (For the first hour of the movie I thought that Jason and Medea were literally never going to speak to each other. It's better: they only speak after they are estranged, and every word each directs at the other is a lie.) The film is concerned with Medea's position as a foreigner, with the way her origins make her dangerous to her husband's people because they do not understand her, with the way that is both her strength and her weakness. The great question hanging over the story is not one of moral justification, or of bringing us comprehension of a set of unjustifiable crimes, which are the usual emphases, but the question of whether the gods and magic are real, and what interaction this has with the clash of two cultures. Medea's people, early in the film, sacrifice a year-king (the only ritual sparagmos I've seen on film) and, looking out over the fields they have painstakingly smeared with his blood, she tells him to die for the seed and be reborn when it returns. She is the priestess of the Golden Fleece (an avatar of Helios, hung on the structure they also use to hold the dying year-king) and the granddaughter of Helios, but when she leaves her people she can no longer hear the sun speak to her and starts to wonder whether her gods are real. Her reputation as a witch in her husband's city is caused by fear of the foreigner and she does not know herself whether she is fulfilling that reputation or only using it, if her crimes are ones that can be offered to the undying sun, if there will be rebirth after them. There are conflicting textual versions of the death of Glauce, Jason's promised new bride, one magical and one not: the film shows both, one after the other, with no bias as to which one actually happened. But there is only one version of the death of her sons, for killing a child, as she realizes too late, shuts down possibilities in the world. Many of the actors, as was apparently Pasolini's way, are not professionals. The one who played Jason, Giuseppe Gentile, is most famous as an Olympic bronze medalist in the triple jump. And yet they produce the kind of performance that embodies a character. Most of the Argonauts never speak, but we can tell instantly which ones are which by looking at them, the twins, Heracles who is neither unusually tall nor wearing a lionskin but who just exudes being Heracles at the camera, the lyre-player who seems young for Orpheus but then Orpheus hadn't grown into his own tragedy yet... Callas, of course, is and must be the center of the movie. Her performance is the hieratic, large-gestured drama of the opera heroine, which is appropriate, as there are ways in which the film lets us see inside her head and there are ways in which we are forced to share the perspective of the ones who can never quite tell what she is thinking. The audience knows more about her than Jason does, and more about Jason than she does, but would knowing more have been enough for either of them? She is also beautiful and striking, with a shockingly deep and harsh speaking voice, wrenching in its power when it is raised. There is a magnificent scene where she paces back and forth, trailed by a gaggle of attendants, cursing her husband and begging the gods for revenge: by the fifth round of it they've all learned the words of her rant, and I get the sense that if any of these attendants, in a later time, require revenge on someone, the words of their panting queen will be their spell. She holds the eye both because of and despite the costuming, for as I said this film is set in the Archaic period and it makes no compromise whatsoever with the aesthetics of modern clothing or jewelry. This has the undyed wool and goatskin and other leather and the beads of a time so remote from now that the very visual look of the film itself is alienating and awe-inspiring because the habits of mind indicated by the construction of the clothing are so very, very different than modernity. For one thing, Jason's is a society in which gender roles are indicated so entirely by clothing that woman is distinguishable across far hillsides at a glance, by the veil or half-hood which does not go across the face but drops from the forehead at the sides and makes the silhouette a perfect triangle down into the gown. So thoroughly does that say woman that Pasolini plays with it a little: some of Medea's attendants, dressed this way, are clearly male, which can be told only by face shape and wrist structure, and which holds no relevance to their social roles at all. And the erotics of the clothing in this culture are different from nowadays; women are not objects of erotic gaze (being after all triangular); that is the province of young men, who habitually wear almost nothing. Medea knows she has lost her Jason when she sees him whirling through a young man's dance, circling and meeting again with her children's tutor-- nothing is ever said about this, nor does it need to be, and it has no relevance to his remarriage at all. In the place she comes from, women are both erotic subject and object (though they dress in a way which appears outwardly very similar) and this displacement is one reason why in her husband's home she will always be a stranger. And this is how the erotics of Greek clothing worked at the time and I really thought no one would ever film it. I am not sure I would recommend the film to people who do not already know the story fairly well. Much of the point is how little explanation there is, how this is the stuff of myth compressed into daily life compressed into an almost ethnographical depiction of a long time ago (at least, a long time ago as seen through the eyes of the Cambridge ritualists). Knowing who you are looking for in the crowd of Argonauts will help you be able to see them; the foreshadowing of future violences is subtle; one of the film's great emotional moments is when Medea sends her own garb as priestess of Helios to Glauce and it kills her, an interpretation which gains its strength from both the fact that I have never seen it before and that it makes so much sense, more sense than any ordinary poisoned dress could. (For of course, if there are gods, that dress worn by the wrong person will strike its wearer down with fire, and, if there are not, the view of herself garbed as irreconcilably other and the knowledge of what her husband's wife has really lived through is too much for Glauce and she jumps off the battlements.) But if you know this story, love this story, love the stories around it, are aggravated by the vast majority of film dealing with related subjects, you will love this. And also, oddly enough, it is as close as we will ever come, I think, in mood, tone, manner, and color, in costume, small politenesses, and way of being in a country, to a film of Naomi Mitchison's The Corn King and the Spring Queen. * I say possibly language because the direction is so clever that there's no way to tell. Everyone in the film speaks Italian, but it's entirely likely that they don't understand each other's Italian-- Medea and the Argonauts do not speak to one another in the period just after she leaves with them, except for a moment where she breaks with culture shock and screams at them, and you can't tell whether their responses indicate politely ignoring her tantrum, mockingly ignoring her tantrum, or just having no idea what she's screaming about. Jason's response to the situation is to take her to bed, which doesn't involve them talking. And then there's a time-jump and after it they are all clearly speaking the same language, but you don't know whether she's had to learn a new one. Probably. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 21st, 2012
5:26 pm	more reviews roundup from last year The Worst Books I Reviewed, Where I Mean Worst In The Bad Way -- David Lindsay, Devil's Tor. Oh, David Lindsay. I will always love and respect you. EXCEPT FOR THIS BOOK GAH. Surprise!unintentional!Nazis are never a good thing. -- Loretta Chase, Don't Tempt Me. Horrific Orientalist fiddle-faddle. I could have been much nastier to this than I was. The Worst Books I Reviewed, Where By Worst I Mean Most Hilarious -- Lauren Baratz-Logsted, Crazy Beautiful. Thinking about this book will never not be funny. Never. ALL THE ANGST! Mahogany and topaz are the same color! -- John Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden. I was not expecting the alien orchid tentacle porn. Because honestly, I am never expecting that. -- Louis Rodrigues, A Long Time Waiting. If I ever have to fight a duel with bad poetry, this is the book I'm bringing to use as a weapon. -- Frank Miller, 300. ... sometimes you just need to break out the caps-lock. I Am Still So Blazingly Ambivalent About This Book, Seriously -- Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. The Reviews I Enjoyed Writing The Most Well, I mean, I desperately enjoyed everything in the hilariously bad category, but also: -- Opal Whiteley ed. Benjamin Hoff, The Singing Creek Where The Willows Grow. You don't get material like this to work with every day. A confusing joy of an experience. -- Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander, + Lady Sarashina, Sarashina Nikki: the numerical mixup which caused me to read an extra book was perfectly real, and I still think this was a good way of dealing with it. -- Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate. From about halfway through the book it was obvious how the review needed to work, and I took a while to become reconciled to it, but then it was fun. -- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy. A liberation. I had stayed up so late and read so hard that I was basically high-- incredibly loopy, randomly giggly-- and for some reason the book makes me think in French, so I was having to translate every sentence into English as I wrote it down, and that was when I realized that I had no particular obligation to go into details on the plot, historical background, etc., and what's more the review would be better if I didn't. This improved later reviews immensely both for me and for everyone else. -- Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. This is a case of me talking to myself about a book and figuring it out as I go, and I'm happy with where it ended up because the vast majority of other reviews I'd seen didn't have much to do with the text as I read it. -- Pat Conroy, Prince of Tides. The Review I Just Kind Of Wrote Down And Then Everyone Told Me It Was Really Good And Okay, I Do See It Now You Mention -- T.H. White, The Goshawk. The Reviews I Wish I'd Done Better: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes; both Patrick Rothfuss reviews; M. John Harrison, Light. Did not adequately express the goodness of the books involved. Michele Jaffe, The Story of 0; was having one of those days where you forget information you know perfectly well and then people have to remind you of it in comments; can't imagine where I put my brain. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 19th, 2012
1:53 am	Strange Horizons End of Year Summary I probably should have mentioned by now that I have a paragraph in the Strange Horizons 2011-in-review post. In that paragraph, I restricted myself to 2011 as a calendar year, but even if I'd been including my entire year of daily reviews Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes would have come out as the best. As for the rest of it, I probably ought to write more about Locke and Key at some point, as it is at the moment the only originally-English-language comic I follow. And film-wise, I can't recommend Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates highly enough, especially if you don't need your brain this week. I've been meaning to do a 365-Books-In-Summary post, too. Top Ten Books I Read For This (except for the de Waal, these are in no particular order; links are to my reviews): 1) Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes. I wish I could write about this brilliant book in the way it deserves. 2) Stella Benson, Living Alone. This is my vote for Book That Needs Rediscovery By The F/SF Community Stat. If you like Naomi Mitchison, Sylvia Townsend Warner, or Georgette Heyer, this is for you, and it's up on Project Gutenberg. 3) M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart. My favorite work by a writer who has become one of my great sources of the sheer joy of reading. I really need to write that essay on Why M. John Harrison Is Comfort Reading No I Actually Mean It. 4) Tove Jansson, The Summer Book. I have been reading this to my wife intermittently and somehow it is even better read aloud. 5) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough. 6) Pingali Suranna, The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India. NINJA GOOSE. 7) Naomi Mitchison, The Delicate Fire. This is one of those books that grows on you-- I knew it was good at the time, but months later I discover it has taken up an amazing amount of space in my head, and that's a good thing. 8) Derek Jarman, Modern Nature. The most painful book of probably my last several years. Worth it. 9) Maggie Helwig, Girls Fall Down. 10) Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. And two works I am so unable to be objective about, both because they hit very, very deep things in my brain and because the authors are dear friends, that I cannot possibly say anything about their quality but only hope that other people love them as much as I do: Jo Walton, Among Others, and Gemma Files, the Hexslinger series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns). I'll do a worst of the year post later on, probably with a list of the reviews I enjoyed writing most, as being enjoyable to write about is orthogonal to a book's quality. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
3:59 pm	read-a-thon My dear friend rachelmanija is having a read-a-thon to raise money so she can go to Japan on an academic trip which sounds, frankly, awesome. Since I don't have any money, I'm offering to read and review books if you donate to her trip fund. The rules: 1) If you want to sign up for Rachel to read a book, sign up on her journal. If you want to sign up for me to read a book, sign up on my journal in the comments of this entry (either LJ or DW). SIGNUPS FOR ME AND FOR RACHEL ARE SEPARATE. 2) I will read up to four books for this-- the first two signups on LJ and the first two signups on DW. This is my maximum due to current life circumstances. This means-- note that this is different from Rachel's rules-- one book per person, first-come first-served. I will then review the book in question here on my blog after I read it. You can either request a specific book, or do a more general request such as 'I want you to read a silly YA AU of Shakespeare' or 'review a good book about flower-arranging'. If you request a book and it turns out to be impossible for me to find, I reserve the right to ask you to pick something else-- I don't have an e-reader and I'm working with a good but by no means omnipotent library system. (If you have something you want to mail to me, either on a permanent or a temporary basis, we can talk about that.) If I've already read something and reviewed it, I'll point you to the review and you can pick something else; if I've already read it but not reviewed, I'm fine with writing up a reread. 3) Sign up by commenting with the amount of money you're donating and your book suggestion, e.g. '$25, and read a Heinlein juvenile'. Please note that all money goes to Rachel and you will be paying her via Paypal. 4) Timeframe-- Rachel will be doing a two-day or so actual read-a-thon; I will be doing this a little differently, in that I will read my books immediately upon obtaining them and hearing from Rachel that the donation's gone through. I'll write them up immediately after reading them. This means you could get a review tomorrow, if you want-- or in six weeks if you're mailing me something from Uzbekistan. Since I am not doing this in a two-day marathon, I do not have a restriction as to the length or density of the books involved, although seriously, if you want me to read War and Peace or Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics or something like that please consider having your donation reflect the difficulty/annoyance value. Thank you, and I think this should be a lot of fun for everybody. You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there. (Comment on this)