radiant fracture

(Edited as I go)

1. When The Tiger Came Down the Mountain (Singing Hills Book 2)- Nghi Vo

An excellent Scheharezadesque fable -- the Lady and the tiger. The tigers are very tigerish. The novella length is perfect. I have put more on hold.

2. The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Singing Hills Book 1) - Nghi Vo

I got this on Kindle because I was so impatient to read another book in the series. (I quite like reading books in a series out of order. A habit from growing up with network television and libraries.)

I liked this a lot. I like the convention of the objects as a means to tell the story, and they were very beautiful objects. I liked that I knew a secret was going to be revealed, but I wasn't sure exactly what it was. Feeling myself set up deftly, but also allowed to see the setup from the corner of my eye. And I cried a little at the end of the story. I'm not even sure why. Something about recognition.

As I said to yarrowkat , I think I like the tigers best so far, but that might just be because I read them first.

3. A Fine and Private Place - Peter S. Beagle

I thought this would be my first book finished of the year. It's been on my list a long time in a vague way. I liked the ghostly premise, but for me, the execution bogged down in pontification. I did like the ending; I certainly felt a kinship with Rebeck's inability to live in the world.

( older notes on A Fine and Private Place )

I also thought my first book might be Day of the Triffids, but its misogyny and its version of human nature are even more irritating than the flaws of Place. Don't know yet if it's a DNF or a FWA (Finished With Annoyance).

4. Into the Riverlands (Singing Hills Book 3) - Nghi Vo

Book 3! This was vivid and fun, full of cartoony action and immediately vivid characters. Each of the books in the series is about how stories are told and transmitted. I think this book is about stories that are fragmented, interrupted, and multiple -- and that's also how the book is structured. So that was clever! But in the end, when the stories all came together, I thought: hmm, I don't think I understand why this is supposed to have weight for me. So I went back over the book again – you can do that with novellas – and I saw most of the moving parts, but I still didn't really understand quite what the point was.

I think possibly that while the novella form was a strength for the first two books -- they used the confined space flawlessly, made it feel vast -- brevity may have been a limitation to this one. For me, this would have been a richer experience if I'd gotten more backstory and motivation for several characters (who are the sworn sisters? How did they get sworn? What is it that's driving the bandits so powerfully?)

Still, really glad to have finally encountered these books.

5. The Brides of High Hill (Singing Hills Book 5) - Nghi Vo

I started Book 4, Mammoths at the Gates, but I wasn't connecting to it, so since this came in at the library, I skipped to it and read it in a morning.

I think I liked this. The story structure was quite interesting. What happens when one story of oppression is false, but it masks a deeper story of a more complex conflict?

( spoilers )

6. Mammoths at the Gates (Singing Hills Book 4) - Nghi Vo

Do you ever use one book to help you with another? I started reading The Bear and the Nightingale, and was enjoying that quite a bit, and when I switched back to finish this I liked it better.

I liked the core idea here. It seemed like a fairly direct analogy for being trans and having that identity rejected by your family, but that's not really where Vo took it, which I liked.

I was very tired when I finished it, and rushing a little. I found the solution clever but not emotionally compelling. I thought Cleric Thien's secret was oddly generic and I'm not sure I think it was fully emotionally addressed.

There were a couple of places where I thought the copy-editor had missed a step -- a pronoun switch, and a weird timeline.

7. good woman: - Lucille Clifton

t is a quiet pleasure to watch Clifton's voice evolve, to see her refining the tools of her work. I think I can see that incredible ethical command of language that she will later show, taking shape across these early collections as she experiments with syntax, with repetition, with expanding and contracting her lines.

And these collections come bundled with a lyrical memoir, a braiding of her family's history back to her great-great-grandmother, who held in her memory their family history back to before slavery: "the woman called Caroline Donald Sale born free in Afrika in 1822, died free in America in 1910" (223).

Often telling the story in the voice of her father, Clifton layers short chapters to build up the story of her father's funeral, of his great grandmother, of his grandmother, his father, then Clifton's mother and finally herself and her two sisters.

8. The Bear and the Nightingale - Katherine Arden

I've discussed this book in more detail elsewhere. I think Arden is incredibly good at creating a setting and a cast of characters within it. The figures were as vivid to me as in the best historical novels.

The plot I found a little less sure-footed -- it never felt quite in focus. I ended up enjoying the book, but I don't feel a lot of propulsion towards the rest of the series.

9. True Grit - Charles Portis

I did think this was well-written and gripping, though I didn't fall in love with it the way many people seem to. @

10. Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

A reread. Incredibly readable and satisfying. I do have some questions about it which I may address in another post. I went over at this time and wrote down some notes about the structure, since it works so perfectly.

11. Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night - Iona Datt Sharma, Katherine Fabian

Ably written cozy fantasy, but not for me. I appreciated the focus on networks of care in queer communities. It's not these authors' fault that I dislike plot developments where the characters pretend to be somebody else to gain access to some institution. Still, I feel like some of the choices were weird. (The book spends almost no time in fairyland and quite a lot in a church. The two biggest emotional scenes happen offstage.)

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I'm writing some game text and hesitated over the spelling of the word jeopardy. Jeopardy. That's a weird-looking word. Looks kind of like leopard. And jealous. French? So I looked it up.

according to the Online Etymological Dictionary:

jupartie, ioparde, etc., "danger, risk;" earlier "a cunning plan, a stratagem" (c. 1300), from or based on Old French jeu parti "a lost game," more correctly "a divided game, game with even chances" (hence "uncertainty"). The sense perhaps developed in Anglo-French.

This is from jeu "a game" (from Latin iocus "jest;" see joke (n.)) + parti, past participle of partir "to divide, separate" (10c.), from Latin partire/partiri "to share, part, distribute, divide," from pars "a part, piece, a share" (from PIE root *pere- (2) "to grant, allot"). Jeopardous "in peril" (mid-15c.) is now obsolete.

A lost game! Very satisfying.

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This morning's work, prompted by reading Enkidu is dead and not dead by Tucker Lieberman, a gift from sabotabby .

* * * * * *


I come in from the outside of that city.
I come in; the door is unguarded.
The door is unguarded
to go in. It’s the way out that is venomous,
fanged, seething with fire.

It’s Enkidu who knows me. Knows himself not
as human, wild but not predatory,
with silky hair. I have dreamed
of Enkidu.

They threaten you, these other men
in the snake’s gullet.
There’s only room inside this great city,
Poisoned-Snake-Guts,
for real men. Your sweetness, your weakness –
this time, they swear they will drive you out.

The snake is immortal. It has eaten
their immortality. The men are searching
for their unbounded lives, here
in the bone-barred throat, smelling their freedom
in the snake's bowels.

Yet you never are expelled. Only cursed,
punished, your face shoved
into the acid sea that sloshes
around the men searching through shit
for their immortality.

That is Poisoned-Snake-Guts: unbreachable
and terrified. You can never leave,
unless you leave.

I say you and I mean you, Gilgamesh.
You are bound to your city.
Your magnificent wall holds you
like the throat of the snake.
If you run with me, no matter how far we go,
you will always turn back to Uruk. I like Uruk:
but I go where I please.
I am the man who goes between.

I say man and I mean it, and yet
I am no man of Uruk.

You shake your head. No, you say, we
tamed you. Cut your hair. Gave you
beer and bread. You liked the beer, you
smile. And the bread. And the bed.

Gilgamesh, I have travelled here, long days
and nights in their thousands, down
the road of the snake, into its stinking guts,
to bring you back to the world, which you call
wilderness.

But always when I begin to explain
your eyes return to the gleaming walls of Uruk
bright as copper, as a strand of measuring-wool
in the waning sun.

* * * * * *

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From writing group today, a very small poem sort of thing.

* * * * * *

Look
My faith
Can move
Very
Small
Rocks
               and
I will not claim
I can heap them
Into an alp

Nor that I could
Wear a mountain down
One POCK
At a time

But I promise
For the very likely nothing
That it’s worth
I will keep moving them.

I will keep
Moving them. One by one.

Happy paper post today from ursula -- a note and a bookmark for North Continent Ribbon, (which I can get in eBook!) -- in a blue envelope with a D&D stamp on the front which I believe depicts Drizzt Do'Urden. (also two rather good ones of coral, win-win).

I have actually managed a little reading -- Premee Mohamed's novella The Butcher of the Forest, which I enjoyed -- an into-the-woods fable with the dilemmas of life under colonialism woven in.

As I type out the title, though, I'm not 100% sure what it refers to. The forest I get; I'm just not sure about the butcher. But my focus is unimpressive lately.

Also about 75% through Bookshops & Bonedust, which is a) charming b) not quite my thing c) an interesting study in structural choices.

Yesterday I realized I was all out of trousers: I am down to my last pair of jeans and they are getting daring, not to say downright hazardous, in the fork, and if they give out at work that would be the third pair of Rather Inappropriate Trousers I'd worn in one term.

Tonight I set out just to walk through some of my angst in the light rain and lowering sunset, but I ended up at the thrift store picking through the jeans section. I never undertake outings on school nights, but the lack of lower articles did need to be solved before the weekend visit to Vancouver. Now three pair are in the dryer. It's a bit of a crapshoot because since Covid Value Village no longer lets you try anything on.

ETA: I have tried on the jeans. Abate your breath no further. The results are known.

-The faded-black ones are a little too big, but can be worn.
-The nice green ones are a little too tight, but probably workable.
-The jean-coloured jeans are also too tight, especially in the waist. I can only do up the zipper by lying down, but having done so, they're not uncomfortable. (Okay, maybe they are cutting my right kidney in half. But only the right one.) (I call these the cock jeans because they have a strategic faded area where your junk would sit if you dressed left and had the kind of tackle that caused wear and tear to denim. Does that mean they are also Inappropriate? Probably.)

What I really want is some fashionably sweeping baggy jeans suchlike the fashionable have, even though my small silvery somewhat spherical person will look very silly in them. But such trousers cannot be got anyplace I've looked yet (which is to say at Mark's, where jeans are eternally skinny and low-slung).

My job tomorrow is to print off some materials for mom and dad about how to choose a retirement home, and get a gift for the staff at the hospital. Then Friday I fly over.

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As if haunted by the worst fear,
you open doors and doors,
sinking into the deep house, its calm
featureless hallways, seeking
the perfect empty room.

You are fleeing from the rustling
bright mothwinged creature
at your back.

Despite your skin
electric with alarm,
I regret to inform you
the wings are attached.

It is true that joy is a way of being lost
in the open. It is a monster
to the carefully cached heart.

Yet here is the sky still,
burning open all the eyes of the house:
one too many doors
and it is yours.


+ + + + + +


I got Mendoza's poem "Harbinger" as a prompt in my inbox today (see next post!). Her poem made me think about my own dreams of exploring houses and interior spaces. These are joyful dreams, not like in this poem. But they also maybe are about turning to the interior when the exterior seems fearful.

Possibly this poem is a little too sentimental, but it is hard for me to claim joy. I could use all the help I can get.

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Here at the equinox
the day swings closed,
but I can open my door
and climb through
the roadwork barrier
to look at the big all-night machinery
chugging, and the column of steam
and the empty hose reels
like Ferris wheels
for raccoons.

Good art things by people I know today!

Attended a lovely afternoon poetry reading and concert by yarrowkat on the indie platform https://onlineconcertthing.com.

And a new podcast episode is out from Wizards & Spaceships! Excited to listen and make my aimless wandering more aimful.

A propos of nothing in particular except a mysterious entry on my reading list, do you have favorite readings (poems, articles, essays) on the idea of home, return, going or not being able to go home again?

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Autumn Day
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell


Lord, it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine:
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one
whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
and wander on the boulevards up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

Rain has been pouring on the house since six am. I had to turn on the heat. Through the skylights, the house is bathed in an aqua-silver twilight, though it's the middle of the morning.

The poem in the Poetry newsletter today was about Simone Weil.

I quite liked it. It is sad, a poem of loss.

Poussin

After T.J. Clark


Two underworlds, in Poussin.

The one touched by the force
of necessity, the other
remaining untouched.

Simone Weil makes her way
to the refectory
in Ashford. She walks slowly
down the corridors, with
or without help.

The hem of her gown brushes
the maculate plaster
of the long wall.

She could live forever
inside this moment,
she thinks, or begins to think
(the beginning of a thought).

She is wrong, of course.

The great hand bravely
channels the fear our mouths
have become, so suddenly.

Just the base of the thumb
illuminated, in its
flex, away from the viewer.

Two underworlds,
& the pollen settling
against the washerwoman’s
drying fabrics:

semantic parlor
in which the magic lantern
images flicker.

Weil’s elbow, akimbo
with what’s left of her body,
& Weil herself,
aware of the image
she becomes in the long hall.

It doesn't have to mean
anything, the other patients
who saw her
or whom she saw,
their depleted & depleting
forms.

Ignorance is my true labor.
The text wounds me
into a history
of belief, phrase by phrase.
(The forensics, Weil
might well have stressed.)

The chaste thirst
of the classical
running alongside its own
shadow, its double
it can’t, ultimately, know.

Two underworlds:

the foreshortening
of the prone body, & the cry
that precedes it,
genuflecting
to the fiction that it trusts.

* * * * * *

The poem sounds ekphrastic to me ("Just the base of the thumb / illuminated, in its /
flex, away from the viewer"), but I have not found such an image.

I know Weil almost exclusively through "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force," so it's that mind I listen for here, and hear whispers: "two underworlds," "The chaste thirst / of the classical / running alongside its own / shadow, its double."

(Although -- is any thirst of the classical chaste? Mine certainly isn't, though it may be pure.)

Of Weil's other philosophy and theology, I cannot really say whether or how it speaks here. If you know her work better, please chime in.

* * * * * *

You can find the poem on the Poetry Foundation website here. The page includes a recording of Waldrep reading the poem, but he uses Poet Voice, and I cannot recommend it. I turned it off because it was making me like the poem less.

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[ETA] Note: the T.J. Clark this is after seems to be the British art historian, who writes about ekphrastic poetry in the LRB here.

Oh