radiant fracture

In lieu of a proper post, here is another very short bit of fiction, recorded from the archive: "A Story is a Story".

I meant to come up with a really excellent post yesterday in which to nest the offering, but I was mired in the end-of-term bog. A mind of quickmud.

Today I will be in a bus and then a helicopter and then another bus and then a boat and then a motor vehicle of some kind on my way to visit the fam for the long weekend.

Finished watching Decline and Fall with LB last night. I enjoyed it -- I was afraid Waugh would be too heartless for me to do anything but cringe, but, apart from one surprisingly gory bit, the humour-of-human-cruelty was all at a bearable level of silliness. Perhaps a bit flat at the finish.

Right, well, off on my journey.

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I'm experimenting with creating audio versions of some of the journal entries here, especially fiction (and I guess poems, but I haven't done any of the poems). There are currently five tiny minipods -- podettes -- podines -- on SoundCloud.

I think this one turned out the best:

The hail story from February 24

More fictiony bits

Green and Red (from 2014)

The snowperson story from February 10

Non-fiction (as much as anything ever is)

April 5 journal entry (Reading)

March 12 journal entry (Park-hunting)

It is ok to laugh at the minimalist harmonica-based intro/outros -- it was what I had on hand when I had the inspiration.

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At a glance, people with "editing" as an interest tend to post frequently but be friends-only.

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I'm over at LB's place working while she creates DIY airlocks for her fermentation experiments. I meant to mark a paper, but I left it at home, and while that's exactly five minutes' walk from here, tonight that is too much.

A propos of nothing, one fine thing about teaching composition is that I can now outline a damn good summary. Had you said to me ten years ago, “state the author's thesis and key points using new language and sentence structures while excluding specific examples or I will press this button and destroy every copy of The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson existing in the world," we would all be living without one of the key sources texts for retellings of Norse mythology, is all I'm saying.

Concise it has not made me. Which is to say, I've been reading things I will now not even attempt to summarize properly.

I've just finished Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer, recommended by kenjari. I hadn't read it before, but, like many people, I found that Swordspoint made me feel all funny inside. I've retained a sense of goodwill towards Kushner ever since, though I've not read the other Riverside works.

It was a pleasure to recall the particular flavour of high fantasy I associate with the late 80s/early 90s, some of which quietly naturalized queerness in a way very helpful to a queer-trans-weirdo teenager in a northern BC city.

Reading Norse Mythology made me want to re-read D'aulaires' Book of Norse Myths (it was the one I had as a kid.) Those illustrations! I've never forgotten Odin with his bangs in his eyes.

Reading D'aulaires', I noticed, with gratitude to Neil Gaiman, where he had restored some of the coarseness and ribaldry of the original stories. D'aulaires' is for children, and while it happily recounts the putting out of eyes and the crushing of giants, the authors choose to tell us that Loki tied "himself" to a goat to make Skadi laugh, which is merely perplexing, rather than that he tied his genitals to the goat, which is comedy gold.

Anyway, it's a lovely telling, though I fear I may have been almost equally influenced in my youth by the Dungeons & Dragons versions of the immortals.

From D'aulaires', naturally, to The Prose Edda, which I had never read, and which the library miraculously happened to possess in a tiny scholarly edition circa 1964 (hadn't been culled yet, I expect). I am plodding through the prologue right now, which is a strange melange of Biblical-crypto-historical justification for telling the stories at all. The scholarly introduction has interesting context for why Sturluson would do this, describing the Edda as part poetic manual, part veiled hoard of old faith. I'd like him to get on to the bit with the hammer, though.

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Audio version of this entry here

East of Eden, John Steinbeck (1952)

Well, I cried at the end.

( Spoilers for East of Eden plus way too many Expressive Capital Letters )

It's very good, if not quite my cup of ethical struggle.

P.S. What are the Hamilton-Steinbecks even doing in this book? I kept expecting them to intersect more directly with the Trasks.


The Snow Ball, Brigid Brophy (1964)

This is a small book forged from dense, ravishing language. It doesn't really function like a story; it works like music, with motives and themes appearing, submerging, reappearing in new forms. (And motive, here, has a lovely double valence of character motivation and recurring image or idea – the cherub's face, the mint cream, sex and death.)

The book is like a small, ornately-carved case that, opened, reveals itself to be a music box and begins to play, with little dancers twirling inside – and then, when the music reaches its final crescendo, suddenly snaps shut, almost on your fingers.

When I arrived at the finale of the book, I thought: am I disappointed with this ending? It's abrupt and it's not what I wanted for these people, as people. Then suddenly I could see, dimly, back over the course of the novel, the way its central characters, while being wholly and recognizably human (and in fact specifically really quite 1960s British humans), each also embody Eros and Thanatos, in immortal-mortal dance. The book ends as music ends, in the meeting and resolution of themes, rather than as a narrative: and maybe there is something unsatisfying in the resolution of even the most perfect music, precisely because it works at the edge of signification but never enters in. To do this from the other side, to take the tools of narrative – image, dialogue, event – and make them function like music – is pretty astonishing.²

This is more my sort of thing than East of Eden -- scintillating, amoral, elliptical, strange.

The Snow Ball was my favorite recent encounter with art until I listened to S-Town and saw Legion, and now I think there must be so much good creative stuff in the world that my heart can’t contain it all.

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1. I guess I mean not just the archetypal murderer but also the ones who lose out through some ordinary mistake, appetite, miscalculation, and the treachery of others.

2. Partly I get this musical stuff from knowing that Brophy was inspired by Mozart's Don Juan, and was a serious scholar of his music.

Today was approximately evenly split between napping, working, and walking, which is not such a bad way to go about things when you can.

I have been enjoying the landscapes I've seen in others' posts, have been feeling even a little envious of their moss-banked waterfalls and rugged declivities -- which envy is mad, given where I live, but the sphagnum is always greener, etc.

Therefore, here are a few photos from today's scramble along the rocks in Beacon Hill Park. The path is a bit dodgy at the best of times, and today it was muddy and the rocks were wet, but I find if I'm willing to lower my centre of gravity more than dignity strictly allows, I can achieve some fair progress.

The rocks are something remarkable -- huge rounded whalebacks banded, veined, and streaked with surprising colour.

In the spirit of shared beauty, then: ( Photos from today's walk )

As I cried out through the wind to S and LB, in my gamin enthusiasm, "This is a downtown park." That's a slight exaggeration, but only a slight one.

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The things I do when I can do little else include doodling pictures on my phone; lately, pictures of monsters uttering wordless speech. They seem to belong.

( Cut for vaguely disturbing rectangular images )

On Sushi

Another day of heavy rain. I made it out to pick up meds and some probably unnecessary groceries. I did a little marking, for which future me will thank me, though he'll wish I did more. I did some doodling and watched art videos on YouTube. I worked on the cover of my next journal until I didn't like it and then I worked on it some more until I liked it a lot.

Tonight we the default triumvirate are meeting at S's house to celebrate his job interview. It's for the job he's already doing provisionally, but to do it like for real this time. He says he feels good about the interview, so we're celebrating, despite having no formal news of the outcome. Toby Ziegler would yell at us, but we live out on the wild edge of magical thinking, taunting the void.

LB has been sick with the spiralling virus that has been hacking such deep grooves through this winter. Now S. thinks he may be sick, though it doesn't seem to take the same way with him. I think I'm over my second round, but my energy is still low and it's left me in a classic old-fashioned depressive state, which is, you know, inconvenient. Also it's aggravated my asthma and dairy sensitivities.

Then, it is grotty old March, and we are in the wrong timeline, so how should one feel?

Yet -- shortly there will be spider roll!

On Steinbeck

I'm about 1/3 of the way through East of Eden. The prose is like a river of the purest water. The Salinas Valley is imprinted on my mind like a place I've known since birth.

However, a number of people I know and trust have told me that the book is one of the most humane books they've ever read -- and so far I have not seen that; I am still waiting for that to kick in.

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If you happen to find yourself in that beautiful bit of the continent's edge, here are some events I've been asked to mention:

LGBTQ2 All-Ages Drop-In
Thursday, March 16, 6-8:30 pm
Rockwood Lodge in Sechelt
Wheelchair accessible
Contact editor@prideguide.ca

A monthly “drop-in community centre,” this is open to all LGBTQ2 and questioning people of all ages and backgrounds.


Trans Mentorship and Support Network Drop-In
Thursday, March 23, 6-8:30 pm
Rockwood Lodge in Sechelt
Wheelchair accessible
Contact editor@prideguide.ca


This drop-in offers folk of all ages a place to connect with peers for friendship and support, and occasionally presents guest speakers.

I've been running a D&D campaign for the last... well, I mean, we met four? five? times, but the whole process has lasted more than three months. Various members of the group¹ kept getting sick, and then we're maybe also just the kind of people whose default response to life is often "keep very still and hope it won't notice you".

This was a tendency we struggled with early in the game: the players wanted to do a lot of watching and waiting and careful avoiding of danger. They declined to pick up the fallen jewels and become infected with a potentially deadly plague; they declined to enter the stricken city or even explore its walls. Instead, they sensibly wandered off to find a farmhouse to sleep in.

I had to fight the impulse to hiss please stop exploring the window dressing.

All this was very educational for me about trying to provide opportunities for character motivation within a given scenario. Each week thereafter, I sat down beforehand and thought: ok, what would each of these characters want? How can I put that into the encounters? I meant to do this from the start, but I got to sink deeper into it each time.

By this final session, it was fantastic how much the players had grown into working as a team. They were playful and inventive and came up with all kinds of things I hadn't expected -- but the scenario was flexible enough to accommodate that. So we've seen growth on both sides of the screen.

No one in the party was really a warrior, since we ignored party balance in creating the characters. I liked the idea of a party made up of noncombatants. Our enforcer was a ranger, and we had a druid, a bard, a healer and a rogue. This meant that any conflict demanded much creativity both on their parts and on mine. In the first session, they spent an incredibly long time trying to defeat a large cat. (The cat won.)

Flash forward to the present.

In today's final battle, the bard exorcised an evil spirit from the healer by casting a minor spell to make her laugh hysterically until she fainted. The druid enhanced the spell effect by making fart noises.

This kind of brilliant collaboration has the side effect of making it very difficult to break up XP. (How much XP do you get for effective fart sounds?) so I just divided most of it evenly amongst them, except for the person who was missing today.

(We decided that her dragonborn rogue started shedding her skin and went into a semi-hibernation state. Because the characters' alliance is still... imperfect... she will wake up alone in the middle of the forest next to a dead body. Good place to start a story, anyway.)

I didn't come up with a Friday story this week. This might be the closest thing I did:

( Account sent to dragonborn rogue's player of the character's experience upon waking )

I haven't DMed in decades. I started to get too much stage fright about gaming in general, and I gave it up entirely around the age of 20. I never got into online RPGs. I liked the tactility of the paper and the dice and looking things up in the tomes. Mostly I loved poring over all the lists and tables.

It's been a pretty loose, freewheeling game -- I made some dice do some rolling, but play was more intuitive than anything else. A purist would shudder. I made up a lot on the fly.

Really, It was good just to play again, to have people over, and to feel well enough to want to be social. And get my dishes done in advance.

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1. (Me)