radiant fracture

Coast of Many Faces (1979) seems to have a startlingly modest origin story.

This is the remarkable collection of photographs and brief interviews / oral histories I quite randomly took down from the shelf one sleepy afternoon in the library of Royal Roads University, which campus resides in the northern part of lək̓ʷəŋən territory, currently known as Colwood.

I have two copies now, a paperback purchased from Russell Books, and a hardcover just arrived from a seller in California.

( Material culture notes on the two copies )

Photographer: Ulli Steltzer

Before I opened this book to a black and white photograph of octogenarians flirting in the tiny ferry terminal at Alert Bay, I had never heard of Ulli Steltzer, yet she worked all over the world for forty years as a photographer-activist. Not quite a journalist -- a photo documentarian, maybe? Is that a thing?

The jacket copy tells me that Steltzer's "powerful photographs have been commented on by reviewers around the world for their 'remarkable quality of direct engagement' and 'poignant discernment,'" which I think also reflects my own response.

The jacket also notes that Steltzer "perceptively photographed ... Adlai Stevenson, Robert Oppenheimer and Martin Buber" (!).²

Steltzer died only in 2018. She has a brief Wikipedia page, just longer than a stub. From this and some useful sources like the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative at Concordia, I have begun to get a rough sense of her life.

( Stelzer's biography will need a longer post of its own -- here is a sketch. )

Co-Interviewer: Catherine Kerr

It is more difficult to find information on Kerr, and the most I've learned about her so far comes from her eulogy for Steltzer. Kerr recalls meeting Steltzer:

My friendship with Ulli started in 1975 when I was a fledgling editor with Douglas & McIntyre and she a distinguished photographer whose project, Indian Artists at Work, the company was understandably excited to publish. While the book designer was crafting the graphic layout, my happy assignment was to review the text with a copy editor’s eye.

So at that point in their collaboration, Stelzer was the sole interviewer (unless she worked with someone else on the first book).

The arrival of my hardcover cleared up Kerr's role on Coast: she was a co-interviewer and editor, who "selected from the transcript a vital mixture of narrative, explanation and personal commentary."

I wonder if there are extant transcripts or recordings of the longer interviews in an archive somewhere. That would be amazing.

There's not much more in the book that frames its purpose; the introduction talks about their process but not the thinking behind it. Steltzer and Kerr must have taken for granted that the reader/viewer would recognize the value of these images and words on first encounter -- and also that they would share the collaborators' own readings. A book like this, created now, would do a lot of work situating the project and its intentions. I feel a little adrift without that context.

There's an odd justification for the interviews:

[E]ach of her portraits capture circumstance as well as expression, each landscape speak[s] eloquently of its people. But since people must sometimes speak of history, of fact, and of the future to explain what can be seen in a photograph, the words of today's coast people have been recorded in this book.

-- which makes the voices sound supplemental and almost unwished-for. Perhaps it is my bias towards language, but it seems to me that the voices are what elevate this book beyond a beautiful collection of photographs to -- well, to an oral and visual history, though I'd like a grander word.

Let's finish with an image, though.

Here is my very bad copy of Stelzer's photograph of oolichans at Fishery Bay (p.10):



-- what I notice is the way Steltzer has noticed that the diagonal lines of the oolichan heap and the tarp on top echo the forms of the mountains; to me, it also looks like a cutaway geological illustration, so that the oolichans become both the landscape and its underlying strata, the foundations of the world.

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Notes

1. In full, the inscription reads as follows: "for Ken – I know you appreciate the rugged coast of BC and are fascinated by the many different people who each lend their own special charm to each magical place. I hope you enjoy the stories and truly magnificent photographs. Love, Marilyn & Ken".

2. A rabbit hole opened up under my feet concerning the Oppenheimer photography: you can follow it here at this post from 2012 on Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog if you wish.

3. Steltzer also created a book about this experience, A Haida Potlatch (1985), which earned a brief review in the Atlantic. It also sounds like an extraordinary record.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulli_Steltzer

https://cwahi.concordia.ca/sources/artists/displayArtist.php?ID_artist=5651

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1985/05/a-haida-potlatch/667235/

https://celebratingullisteltzer.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/catherine-kerr/

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/obituary-ulli-steltzer-photographer-with-a-social-conscience

https://blogs.princeton.edu/manuscripts/2018/08/03/ulli-steltzer-1923-2018-photographer/

Steltzer, Ulli, and Catherine Kerr. Coast of Many Faces. U of Washington P, 1979.

But first, a brief writing update. I made two submissions in one day! I submitted a poem to The Deadlands on the advice of sovay, and another to a friend's project on craft.

My short story "Four Hauntings" is still sitting on read in Submittable -- I guess I'll leave it until I get the actual decline, but I'd like to try it someplace else.

* * * * * *
Finished this week

Ducks, by Kate Beaton

This is comics artist Beaton's graphic memoir about her time working at the oil sands. It's very good – it's Kate Beaton – and it's very bleak. The book is well-crafted. It's sometimes almost an illustrated poem in the way it sets scenes against one another. Occasionally I did wish for a little more sign-posting about how much time was passing or when a new scene had begun. The titular ducks -- maybe you remember the famous story -- are used perfectly.

Ducks is agonizingly good on the forces -- of economics, of misogyny, of small closed communities -- that constrain our actions and our speech against our own well-being and integrity. When the protagonist does speak out, it's not quite cathartic, but it's something. Ducks is generous to those who deserve it, and even to those who don't, and it's still gut-wrenching.

Beaton writes in a few almost-easter-eggs about the origins of her career as a cartoonist; there aren't quite enough of these references to make a full thread, so I think I would have included more of that or less of it -- more, for preference, as it gives the reader hope, at least for her.

Content notes for sexual violence.

Vita Nostra, by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey

This is the best book I've read in a very long time.sabotabby called this a perfect book, and I see why: it beautifully fulfills its own concept.

[ETA]I realize that my praise below is oddly peripheral to what's actually great about this book, which is the convergence of craft, style, and subject. I don't really want to spoil any story details, but here is what I wrote to sabotabby the other day, when I was about to finish Vita Nostra:


Now the secondary praise:

I've never seen the pleasures and agonies of learning a new skill, akin to music or mathematics, described so well in an only slightly allegorized way. I identified painfully with the protagonist, Sasha, except that I don't work hard.

Vita Nostra gets called dark academia; I'd call it cosmological¹ horror, but maybe that's also what dark academia is.

What is a book you consider quintessential dark academia? The Secret History? Donna Tartt is a very fine writer, and I loved that book, but I liked this more for being more ambitious.

I am fascinated by the authors' control of pacing. As I read, I would reflect that a long slow passage had been allowed to unfold without being rushed, and then realized a tremendous amount had happened in only 25 pages.

The translation seems miraculous in its richness and clarity. There are one or two places where the wording made me wonder about the choices, particularly towards the end, but otherwise this felt seamless. An incredibly absorbing experience. All the stars.

elusis , have you finished this? What did you think?

New Reading

I am excited about having downloaded yhlee 's Brain Games for Blocked Writers (cover by telophase !) -- it is just the kind of thing I like, with a lot of cross-genre and playful prompts, like
-- I find this much more congenial than the other craft book I've been reading, which in contrast offers prompts like

-- Which I understand, even appreciate, the purpose for, but which also immediately stumps me because (and I know this is precious) it seems so counter to the way my characters think, feel, and speak about themselves. I would first have to imagine a situation in which one of them felt called on to make such a strange declaration.

(But after all, that question is designed for earlier in the process than I am. That's probably the only real issue.)

Michio Kaku's The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything is, as hoped for, a very light, accessible review of string theory to help prime my ideas for the novel. I'm almost 1/4 through. Having refreshed myself with this, I can go on to something more in-depth if it's called for.

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1. Specifically cosmological rather than cosmic.

Since the last books post, I finished Girl, Woman, Other, which I continue to admire. Evaristo's long poetic-prose line creates a clear yet rippling stream of consciousness. She handles pacing flawlessly. Each chapter immerses you completely in a character, their pain and happiness; then you move on, but this movement doesn't have the unsatisfying feel that such a device could have. Each new chapter is so absorbing that I was happy to let go of the last and be pulled along. I have put a couple more of her books on hold at the library.

Not all of the characters had the same clarity and vividness for me of the first two adult characters, Amma and Dominique, but those two are also closest to my own experience (activists, artists, theatre folk) -- and they were at the beginning, when the approach was freshest.

I liked Evaristo's affectionate skepticism about activist absolutes. I liked the way she dug into history to show Black British women with roots and ties to the land many generations deep, as well as invoking more familiar stories of immigration. I thought the non-binary character was convincingly drawn, though I think I wanted them to be more self-possessed -- which is just a want, not a flaw in the book. The book has expansive but not naive compassion.

Maybe I wanted a stronger sense of crystallization or revelation from the end of the book, something that turned the style back on itself? But, reflecting, I don't think that's the only way for this technique to resolve, or that such a moment was Evaristo's purpose. The party scene resolves the style formally, mixing perspectives and adding in further voices. I don't think Evaristo had pyrotechnic goals for that scene -- it's about connections and community, not revelation -- and it accomplishes that marking of a moment of community and change, the constant trickling of time forward, old connections shifting, new connections forming. It makes sense that there's no crest to that wave, just more waves. No particular need to climb Story Mountain; maybe more need to wash it away.

Anyway, great book.

I also read Murderbot 2 and 3. I got 5 next in the library lottery, but I think I'll wait for 4 because it felt disorienting stepping into the plot in the wrong moment. Still fun: like bingeing a great TV show, reasonably enough.

Quick book notes

• I read a book of poetry for review.
• I've not made much progress with Orwell's Roses, but I will stick it out a bit longer.
• I'm nearing the end of A Farewell to Arms.
• I have a bunch of stuff on hold that I got excited about because podcasts.

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Quotidian Quotient

We had nearly a week of hard-frost mornings with bright blue skies. Now great winds are rolling around the Beautiful Shed, I have daylight candles lit, and the sky is full of portents. Well, clouds.

I sent nine postcards for the year's turning yesterday, and was pleased with myself about it. It was an efficient day, actually -- so much so that it feels like risking a jinx to say so. (If you wanted a card but you're not sure I have your address, pls DM.) I often use "sunreturn" from Le Guin's Earthsea as the focus of my solstice cards.

Today I wrote a small letter to my friend on the Isle of Iona, who is used to such eccentricities as paper letters from me. I love writing letters. I wish I had more occasion to do so.

Friday night K. and M. had me over for dinner, and I liked it so much I went out and bought the same fish fillets and bok choy so I could make the identical dinner over again. They have a wood stove, and the smell and feeling in the house are a joy. Much talk of shop and also Barcelona, which K. & M. love and I have never visited.

Books Post Proper: Frac Visits Moominvalley for the First Time

As I think I've explained elsewhere, I find it difficult to read seriously during a heavy teaching term. I end up reading short, easy things, or the first chapter of several things while wearing a distracted frown, or, if I'm not careful, no things at all except Internet skimming. I also don't like to read material directly related to work in case I discover an error or omission that it's too late for me to fix.

I have a mind of many portcullises and trapdoors.

Are there short (or swift) and satisfying books you can suggest for such circumstances?

I follow the Backlisted podcast obsessively, and the last episode but one discussed Moominvalley in November. Consequently, I've been reading the Moomins for the first time. I didn't read the books as a child. I heard about Tove Jansson on a different books podcast (Bookfight. As an indirect result, I read The Summer Book a few years ago. I love it, but I'd never sought out the children's books until now.

Here are the Moominbooks and my reading experience of them thus far.

Comet in Moominland – I haven't read this yet, as they don't seem to have it at the library.

The Moomins and the Great Flood – I read this first. This is the first Moomin book that Jansson wrote, though not the first published in English. Like many first-books-in-a-series, it doesn't have quite the voice or the feel of the later books. I like whimsy, and this contained much of it, but it didn't do that much for me.

Finn Family Moomintroll – In progress. Tonally on the lighter end of the spectrum; more a collection of set pieces so far.

Moominsummer Madness – This was fun, mildly perilous, and stuffed with delightful bits of satire on excessive park signage and the theatrical life.

Moominland Midwinter – This I read second and liked better than Great Flood, as the strangeness begins to cohere into a worldview, and large ideas lurk & loom & then quietly melt away in the thaw.

Tales from Moominvalley – Not read yet.

Moominpappa at Sea – Not read yet, but looking forward to it, as it apparently concerns Moominpappa's midlife crisis.

Moonminvalley in November – Yeah, like they said on Backlisted: an actual masterpiece. Seriously. It's wonderful.

I wouldn't skip right to it, though. If you are, like me, new to Moominvalley, I would read at least one and preferably several other Moomin books first, because the strength of this book rests partly on its relationship to, and difference from, the others in the series. Backlisted episode here if you don't want to take my word for it.


Non-Moomin-Related Books

Sjon Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was

A novella, really. This was interesting. The plot concerns a young queer man in Iceland, obsessed with cinema, trying to survive the post-World-War-One flu epidemic. It's an elliptical, spare, psychological narrative, cool and estranged.

I'd only read The Blue Fox before and found it disquieting and difficult to forget. At first I didn’t like Moonstone as much, but the final chapter – a sort of coda, really – did several things that mashed around what I thought the story was doing with fiction and nonfiction. Some of these new ingredients I liked and some I didn’t so much, but they all changed the way I read the earlier part of the book, and so I ended up liking it better. A book to re-read.

I've started another of Sjon's novellas, and am feeling doubtful about it, but since narrative disquiet seems to be his hallmark, I should probably carry on.

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I didn't do any books posts in the final quarter of 2017 because I was embarrassed by how little reading I'd done. I haven't done one yet in 2018 because yes, yes indeed, reasons.

Therefore, here are some books, working backwards from the most recently completed.

* * * * *

Mary Stewart, Ludo and the Star Horse. This is a chapter book, one of Stewart's children's novels. It was rapturously recommended on the latest episode of Backlisted. It is out of print and very hard to get cheaply even online. Challenge accepted. I found it at the Uni library. I liked Ludo, though not as overwhelmingly as the podcast host, who remembers it from childhood and finds it magnificent. I teared up at the end. I will not spoil the clever structure. The plot moves very quickly – for an adult reader, it’s more like a short story.

Simon Armitage, Translator. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Obviously I've been enjoying the hell out of this.

Barbara Comyns, The Juniper Tree. A retelling of the eponymous fairy tale, with some Bluebeard thrown in. I didn't really know the fairy tale, and this is a fully realized plot in its own right, even without knowing the references. A painful psychological study, very acute and alive, and a retelling that valorizes the stepmother character, which is a happy intervention. The main character is a white single mother of a biracial child, whom she loves but does not always adequately protect. The protagonist works in an antique shop, rebuilds her life after a disfiguring accident, and struggles gently with her hilariously awful mother and ex-boyfriend. Maybe a little slow-moving? The ending comes all in a rush, but this is appropriately overwhelming given the events.

Louise Erdrich. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. Rather wonderful. I think I'll try to use parts of this in my course. Erdrich expands the definition of book to all visually recorded material, with insightful results. Wise, full of land-based knowledge, satisfyingly daily, wry. Illustrated by sketches of a series of petroglyphs that Erdrich shows to be complex texts.

Timothy Findley. The Wars. I thought I'd read this long ago, but it turns out what I'd done was read Findley's short story "Stones." I thought this novel was very good. It's formally playful and ethically complex. The book's conceit is that you are a researcher, piecing together the story of Robert Ross from interviews and documents -- you become the narrator. The story is, in places, perhaps a little too propelled by Findley's own fixations. There's a violent assault whose purpose I understand, yet which still reads as unnecessary and ill-fitting to me. I didn’t like Not Wanted on the Voyage (I read it twice to be sure), and I thought Spadework was on the low end of okay, but The Wars is deservedly a classic of CanLit.

Jean Rhys. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. Hmm. Very good, though it's difficult to recommend, precisely, as nothing really happens, nobody really changes, and no insights are gained by anyone. A closely drawn vignette from a painful life only growing more painful. Contains a great deal of well-observed awkwardness and many missed opportunities; the action consists mostly of doomed and half-hearted attempts at connection or salvation on the part of selfish people.

Falen Johnson. Salt Baby. A play about a young woman who's grown up on the Six Nations Reserve, solidly a part of her community but also alienated because she "looks white" – hence her nickname, Salt Baby. I read this because my colleague was teaching it. I liked it, and we had a lot of fun co-teaching a class about it. He took his students to see the production at our local theatre, and I tagged along. We all enjoyed the performance a great deal. The students were an enthusiastic and responsive audience. It's a fairly quiet play, without much obvious tension – a meditation on identity and the vexed question of authenticity. In performance, it was atmospheric and funny, and somehow very absorbing. It was much easier to see what the protagonist saw in her somewhat clueless white boyfriend when you could witness the physical affection between them – the chemistry was very well-played. The lead performer, Dakota Ray Hebert, is stellar. The music was excellent.

Timothy Snyder. On Tyrrany. Snyder identifies a series of 20 parallels between the current presidency and other tyrranies. Some of these short essays are strong, but Snyder is a historian, and I was expecting something more substantial. This read to me like a series of blog posts or online articles (but really blog posts). I'm right with Snyder on the value of the project, but the book (which is tiny – a pamphlet, really) felt as though it had been rushed out to catch a moment, to the detriment of more complex insight into the subject. I hope it proves useful.

Anita Brookner. Providence. This was another Brookner that I had to stop reading halfway through because of the profound internal agony of the central character, to pick up later when I felt stronger. As always, the casual cruelties of human relationships are exquisitely observed. The protagonist, Kitty Maule, is a university lecturer, and I laughed out loud at the dissection of academic behaviours -- awkward cocktail parties, department meetings in which everyone has their own unique doodling style. There's a pleasing parallel between the French novel the main character is teaching in her seminar and her own love affair. Providence is less redemptive than some of Brookner's other books, and the ending is a little bit too Gotcha! for me – it would work really well in pure academic farce, but this novel was more nuanced than that, so it sat oddly with me.

I get a bit tired of Brookner's passive protagonists, all wishing they could be awful and demanding and coquettish femmes fatales. I wish she had decided to write an awful, demanding, coquettish femme fatale as a protagonist just to get it out of her system, and to prove that it probably isn't actually all that great being such a person.

* * * * * *

Some books plus some books is some books.

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Wednesday after work LB and I hiked in to the lake. We took a more strenuous route than usual, over rough ground, but nothing requiring high endurance -- or so I would have thought. The moment I got home, however, I lay down on the couch and did not rise until night.

The last few days have been like days of recovery from illness -- not soreness or fatigue so much as a sort of muzzy-headedness I dislike much more than pain.

Therefore, I have not done much writing or reading.

I did manage to read Insomniac City, Bill Hayes' memoir of his relationship with Oliver Sacks. It's a lovely, gentle book, a kind of idyll of daily life in New York -- lots of drinking wine on rooftops and talking to strangers in the park. Hayes invokes the sensory detail of their life together with the attention you'd expect of someone who could properly appreciate Oliver Sacks.

I'd read Hayes' description of a piece of music -- Beethoven's Op. 133, say (The Great Big Fugue) -- then cue it up on YouTube and listen -- or look up a meal they ate or an artist Hayes admired. In this way, the book became a delightful multi-sensory experience.

Reading or writing for work and other projects, though, did not seem to be on.

When writing is too difficult, I draw. One of my comfort activities is attempting loose copies of the exquisitely strange radial creatures from Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. Listening to Beethoven' bright, angular notes, I thought -- why not try to draw this as well?¹

Under the cut are a few creatures drawn out of the music, though they are not perfect synaesthetic renderings of these pieces or anything -- more a fusion of what I was looking at, what I was hearing, and what I could actually draw.


( Musical Drawings )

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1. I do see a little colour to music, but it's a very limited palette, shading from blue-white through golden brown to dark brown, and probably has more to do with the colour of the piano whereon I failed to learn to play music as a child, rather than any intricacy of brain connections.

Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Black Panther #1

I thought this was really well-written: morally intricate and self-critical about its own backstory, without collapsing into postmodern cliche. I enjoyed it. I hadn't really followed the character previously, so I can't compare him to previous incarnations.

Barbara Comyns -- Sisters by a River, The Vet's Daughter

I'd like to read more Comyns. She turns over a deep weirdness you want to dig further into, but she's also a little forbidding -- to keep with the gardening metaphor, there's something stony about her writing. I don't see loving her books, but I definitely appreciate them.

Sisters by a River does a clever thing with the voice which I won't spoil here, except to say that it's quiet and tragic. I don't think I've seen an author do something so specifically narratively interesting with the character's diction. River is Comyns' first novel, and the structure has problems -- the story just sort of wanders off until it's out of sight -- but you can see an original mind at work. I'd quite like to read Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's next.

Jane Gardham -- The Hollow Land, Bilgewater, Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat

(A Long Way from Verona was technically April.) Gardham is very good on Being at School in various incarnations. Old Filth might be the best of these books in being about old age rather than youth, and thereby being both wryer and more sobering, but I found that novel less warm than the other books. Filth is the only masculine protagonist -- I don't know whether that's a factor or not, as my sample size is too small.

The Man in the Wooden Hat is the same story as Old Filth, told from the wife's perspective. The warmth was there, but not quite the same depth, and for whatever reason the device of repeating the same scenes (I think verbatim) from Old Filth didn't work for me. They did not feel newly illuminated: just repeated.

Gardham was a pleasure to discover -- not quite the revelation I had with Penelope Fitzgerald or Elizabeth Taylor, but good company.

Gardham has some distinctive structural habits -- the story proper is often contained in a brief framing device. Old Filth, for example, is bracketed with brief faux playscripts of characters discussing the dozing Filth within his earshot.

Oh, I liked what Gardham did with time in The Hollow Land -- it was unexpected, and, though the details are not quite right, plausible.

(I'm not being mysterious to be annoying -- I'm just too tired to write a proper spoilery review.)

G. Willow Wilson -- Ms. Marvel #1 & 2

As comics, these were less my thing than Black Panther, being goofier in tone and especially in visual style, but I liked the stuff about millennials responding to being unvalued.

Other bits

The Prose Edda had to go back -- who, I would like to know, had an urgent need to consult Snorri Sturluson? I wish they told you where your books were going when they got recalled.

Better news: Lincoln in the Bardo came in. I've heard some people say the novel's structure is brilliant and experimental, and some that it's "like a party trick" (Lissa Evans) -- a form put on for show, without being integral to the story.

It's early to say, but I think I may come out somewhere in the middle on the question. Which is to say -- so far I like it.

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Coughing and/or sleeping

Sick again all this past week. It seems to be lifting.

For two nights I couldn't sleep. After the first night, I was strangely energized; after the second, I was all in ruins.

The next night, I worked out I could sleep if I sat on the futon (which sits on the floor), then propped my torso up on the bed with pillows and quilts. This way, I could lie upright but completely supported. I listened to the soundtrack of West Wing episodes all night and finally slept, not heavily but at least for a reasonable duration. Last night I slept in a more usual position and it seemed all right.

I've had these happy dreams the last few days, jumbles of community and confusion, with Mild Peril but a general sense of positive action.

News in noises and images

I'm starting new courses on Monday. I'm running an online course for the first time, and tonight I finished a super goofy little audio intro for the course website. I open with the distinctive harmonica line from "The Times They are A-Changin" -- distinctive in this case for being almost unrecognizeable when played breathlessly upon my bent harmonica. This, because the long text for the course will be Alan Moore's Watchmen, and the Dylan song is, of course, played over the opening credits of the film version.

I want to watch the new MST3K, but I don't want to re-sub to NetFlix. LB & S & I are contemplating American Gods as our next group viewing project. Also, there are two episodes of John Oliver to watch.

Booking

Because of Backlisted podcast, I'm reading Jane Gardam's A Long Way from Verona, and it's really pretty wonderful. I've never read anything by Gardam, but I like her voice and I'm already seeking out more.

( Mild spoilers and peril )

Money and planning and grimacing adulthood

I have been making a budget, a proper one, for the first time, well, probably ever. It shows me I am terrible with money, which I knew, and yet it grieves me. However, it also offers me scope for reform.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I was so committed to procrastination that I actually wrote two poems and sent them out, thus doubling my submission rate as compared to 2016. So I did *something* for poetry month.

Next up: meal planning.

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(Edited to correct spelling of Gardam's name and the title of her book -- I keep muddling it up with A Far Cry from Kensington, which I own -- somewhere -- but have not finished.)

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.

Early in the year, I vowed (or heavily implied) that I would read only books that, at the end of the year, I'd be glad to have read. Then I got sick, and I guess inasmuch as I'm now glad I've read anything at all that vow is still in force.

Plans of the best-laid varietals.

( Here are the top 11 book recommendations I received )

Audiobooks

I’ve been listening to the recent Shirley Jackson biography, A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin, using my local library’s Hoopla subscription. It's grand to have effortless access to such a recent audiobook. This doesn't quite count as reading the book since I use it to fall asleep and so have dreamed through many months of Jackson's life. I know the skeleton of her story well enough to be able to pick up wherever I start in again, at least so far. I'm having a little trouble with the voice of the reader; she seems skilled, but a bit mechanical. That could be my brain fog, though.

Books of the paper variety

After Loving, I finished another of the three Henry Green novels in the collection, Party Going. (They are very short novels.) The Howards End re-read is finished in time for book group, but I may not actually go, depending on my health by Sunday. Last time my most insightful contribution was a sporadic hacking cough.

Next, I went on a bit of an Alan Garner bender, reading Red Shift, The Owl Service, and Thursbitch, all of which I liked – probably Red Shift most. It was the most difficult, and had I not already listened to the Backlisted conversation about the book, I would have had quite a lot more work to untangle the threads.

The three books are all roughly the same kind of spell of deep time and sentient landscape (a term I've just learnt by reading reviews), but each through a different myth.

( Some spoilers for Red Shift and Owl Service )

I did have a go at puzzling out the message at the end of Red Shift, and by rights should have got it, since I could see what the first sentence had to be and I had the cipher block, but somehow I became hopelessly muddled. I love puzzles, and books that are puzzles, but I am not that perfect reader who actually works the whole business out. I do, though, enjoy a Mystery as much as a Puzzle, so that’s all right.

{rf}

Notes

I don't think I get to use "equivalenced" as a transitive verb, but I wish I could.

Here's a link to some discussions of / with Garner. I have not listened to them yet.


Unlinked References

Butler, Catherine (as Charles). “Alan Garner's Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of ‘Tam Lin’”. Children's Literature Association Quarterly. Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 2001. Web.

(I am delighted to discover Catherine Butler whilst down this rabbit hole.)