Engine Summer

So, as I'm sure I've mentioned a couple of dozen times once or twice on this journal, I'm in a musical group called Sassafrass. We perform polyphonic vocal music, a cappella or with light accompaniment, with words and music by my dear friend Ada Palmer. We've been working together for more than twelve years.

And right now we're doing the largest project we've ever done: a musical retelling of the history of the world according to Norse mythology, from the creation of the cosmos through its destruction at Ragnarok, based on the original sources in the Eddas. This retelling, Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok, is going to be an album, which we are in the process of recording. It's also going to be a play, which we will be performing live and in period costume as the musical guests of honor at Balticon 2013 this upcoming weekend. We've hired a video crew to film the Balticon performance and will be making that available on DVD so that people who can't make it to the convention can still see the full performance.

The music is entirely written, the play is in rehearsal, and we've got some tracks laid down. But the members of our group live in widely scattered locations around the country, and as a group which performs primarily at conventions we don't make any money from ticket sales. In addition, producing and distributing an album has associated costs, as do the filming, production, and distribution of the DVD.

Therefore, we've put up a Kickstarter, which will be running from now until June 16th. Click through for the video of our project proposal, plus embedded audio so you can hear what the music sounds like. Samples include a duet between Odin and Loki describing their friendship and the way it fell apart, multiple versions of the Norse alphabet song, and a preview of the finale song.

The full list of reward tiers is available at the site, but I should mention that various tiers do include the CD in digital form, physical form, or both, the performance DVD, and the libretto and sheet music of the Sundown project. At higher levels, we're offering associated artwork and even the chance for a private house concert.

And if we hit $10,000, Jo Walton, Hugo and Nebula-award winning author and friend of the group, will write an Odin-themed poem set in the world of Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok and post it for the world to see for free on her Livejournal. If we hit $14,000, Jo will write a Loki-themed followup to her Odin poem, which will be sent only to backers.

This is where I urge you to back our Kickstarter for the rather selfish reason that I want to read the poetry.

So, to reiterate: the Kickstarter is here! And it runs until June 16th.

Here's the group's main website.

And thank you for reading this.

How am I?

Out from under the bed after last week but general stress levels not amazing. Rolling my eyes at having seen someone wearing an actual T-shirt reading Boston Strong because this is New England and I thought we were meant to be politely repressed about this about now, thanks. All the construction signs which flash things have started flashing Encouraging Messages Of Public Hope, too, though I am very amused that the one nearby which used to crack me up by saying ONGOING CONSTRUCTION EXPECT DELAYS NEXT 2 YEARS now says ONGOING CONSTRUCTION WE ARE ONE BOSTON EXPECT DELAYS NEXT 2 YEARS, which may even be an improvement.

What am I up to?

Costuming a musical. Voice lessons for said musical. Making sure music is memorized. Trying to internalize and/or figure out the blocking. Oh god we have only a month left before showtime. I was literally not this anxious about my first undergraduate thesis, but then that was way the hell less work. And at least Pope Innocent VIII was a topic about which I knew no one, not even me, would care after I finished the paper. Also that thesis didn't involve any spreadsheets. I have never enjoyed spreadsheets.

Tomorrow I am taking the car and nineweaving and going to Montreal for rysmiel's birthday and I am not costuming anybody for like three days at least. Also there will be a lot of people I love, and Montreal, and it should be awesome, and I will be back late Monday and I may or may not have internet in the interim just to let you know.

There is a cat on my leg. He balances very badly and keeps hitting caps lock.

What am I up to in the slightly longer term?

Well I want to finish writing this novel before Readercon because I want to read from it and I will feel much better if I have a whole draft beforehand, even though this would change nothing about the bit I want to read. Not making that a hard deadline as of yet because I do not want to make that into more stress.

B. is coming through from Turkey at some point here in the summer and then taking me to Europe for a while and then Ruth and I will visit him in Turkey, so travel writing is a thing that will happen.

After the end of summer everything fades into a haze, and the name of that haze is 'Gee, I Hope Somebody Is Pregnant At This Time', because we are trying to have a baby. When there's news on that front worth posting about, I'll probably make a baby filter, since I'm sure some of you don't want to hear about the planning process (currently slightly less complicated than the Battle of Borodino) and the various stages of wibbling (threat level: everything has little ducks on it). But I don't think we're quite there yet.

We have a basically-an-opera to stage first.

I am not as immensely grieved to hear of the death of E. L. Konigsberg as I have been to hear of other authors' deaths (still not over losing Diana Wynne Jones and that's been some time), but she was and remains one of my formative writers. She fused a no-nonsense pragmatism and practicality with the ability to let her characters dream big. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is in many ways a fantasy novel, even though nothing physically impossible happens in it. It's just so unlikely, that they go live at the Met, that no one catches them. The whole book is so unlikely as to, when all its circumstances are put together, be in essence impossible, but it's so carefully grounded in physical reality and in logistics that you can let that slide. One of Ursula Le Guin's reviews of her own novel The Beginning Place describes that book as 'for persons who need to know that the best way to get downtown is to take the bus'. I believe she meant this self-disparagingly, but I would use that phrase to describe many of Konigsberg's works, and I mean it as a compliment. If you are running away from home to go live in a museum, you may wish to start by obtaining a train schedule.

My favorite has always been Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, which is not a book about which I have ever seen much discussion, possibly because of the length of the title. I treasure it because both of the principal characters are kinds of weird kid I have also been, and because it is consistently funny without ever being comedy of embarrassment, and because it understands that a certain kind of thirteen-year-old girl, let loose in a reference library, will take up witchcraft as a hobby (well before learning about it as a religion) and then be confused when everyone around reacts... the ways they tend to react.

But I have literally never read a Konigsberg I didn't like. If she was anything like her books, she was brisk and funny and kind, and I have always wished her well, and I still do.

By the time you finish reading this review, I intend to convince you that you have seen a ghost. I believe that in the majority of cases I will be successful.

Yes, I do mean you, whoever you are, reading this now. And yes, by ghost I do mean a spectre raised from an untimely grave to torment the guilt of the living and deny the peace of the dead, and by seen I mean seen, with your eyes, or possibly in some circumstances heard with your ears; I mean these things absolutely literally.

Having said that, I will now proceed to tell you that this slender little book of literary criticism, The National Uncanny, is one of the very best books I have read in an extremely long time, one of those books which makes the inside of the reader's head a different and a better place. It is a study of the figure of the Native American as ghost in American literature, but it contains wildly impressive theoretical insights on a variety of different topics at the rate of slightly more than one insight per paragraph. I found myself trying to quote some of the better bits to my wife a while ago and discovered I was literally just reading out loud without being able to skip anything. This is not the way I am accustomed to academic criticism working, although it is the way I would always like it to work.

( This is a cut because this entry is really very long indeed. )

A link at the end of a long, good day: And believestow yn rokke and rolle?

Bye, Bye, Englisshe Jakke of Dover, drove my palfrey almoste halfwey but the tourney was over...

The problem is, it scans. I am not sure whether this is a better or worse use of human intellect than Kate Beaton's Elizabethan Songbook (at the bottom).

Earlier tonight I was sitting in a crowded shop, eating a very good amaretto almond ice cream and rereading Caitlin Kiernan's The Drowning Girl. I was somewhere around the bit of Latin sovay did.

Then I noticed I'd started paying attention to the background music in the shop, because it was doing that incredibly aggravating thing where it was a piece of music I had obviously heard many, many times before, such that I was humming bits of it before they happened, but I couldn't remember what it actually was. If I'd been able to mentally say, oh, this is x by x group, I could have cheerfully gone back to my book; but instead I found myself straining to pick out each note of it among the conversations and the general cheerful rustle, and as I mentioned humming bits, and going Matmos? no, Portishead? no, the end of an obscure Kate Bush? no, and racking my brain.

And as I was doing this I was staring straight ahead of me at the plate glass window which is the front of the shop, and reflected in it at a slight angle was the entirely silent television which was playing as I guess visual interest over the counter. I could see the TV very clearly, since it was dark out already, with only a slight shimmer of angle to show it was a reflection.

Then two things happened at the same time: the first notes of 'O Superman' came over the speakers, so that I could relax and say to myself oh of course, it was an instrumental Laurie Anderson, what was I thinking; but simultaneously, on the silently reflected television-- quite distracting, so that I could not go back to my book-- Gene Kelley kissed Debbie Reynolds goodnight and set off down the street with his folded umbrella, in the immortal start of the title number of Singing in the Rain.

I know that in A Clockwork Orange Stanley Kubrick was trying to make the song (and, by associative extension, the film) Singing in the Rain disturbing, psychically displacing, by connecting it cinematically with rampaging violence. As compared to the vagaries of pure, random chance-- I looked around; no one else in the shop was paying the slightest attention, or in any way controlling the television or speaker system-- Kubrick was a fucking amateur.

so you better get ready, ready to go, sang Laurie Anderson, as Gene Kelley hopped up on the lamppost, you can come as you are, and pay as you go, and he threw his arms open in that gesture of ultimate welcome to love and life and everything in the future, here come the planes. All of this in the little, glowing, semi-transparent slightly-wobbly reflection, the kind of reflection you can see through if you squint and which is most present if you let your eyes drift slightly out of focus.

Hopping up and down in the puddle at the side of the street: 'cause when love is gone, there's always justice (this is the bit where she's neither speaking nor singing really, somewhere between the two, and she sounds so resigned), and when justice is gone there's always force and here he was whirling his umbrella in those wild circles, and when force is gone there's always Mom (hi Mom!) and Gene Kelley bowed to the advertisement girl in the shop window, who has over the years seemed to me more than a little creepy anyway, and I picked up my amaretto almond and my book and got the hell out of there. Which I maintain was completely reasonable of me.

As I've mentioned before, one of the primary artistic ideas behind surrealism is its relation to one another of things which seem unrelated, as free-associatedly far from one another as possible, and which are then demonstrated to be logically related after all, or even at the core identical. As a political movement, surrealism prided itself on taking ideas which were cherished, deep tenets, and relating them to the unloved, the bizarre, the immoral, the not sensible-- rather like satire, but a satire in which the analogies draw themselves, and the artist is not as sharply in control of the associations in the audience's minds as a satirist would generally like to be. The beauty of randomness, that's a part of surrealism, too, the things that come up from automatic writing, from throwing words cut out of a dictionary onto a piece of paper. Bibliomancy, megapolisomancy. Or, as I had tonight, restaurant background iPodomancy. The meaning is not inherent in the random things themselves, but in the mind which patterns the randomness together. What you see in a surrealist collage, or hear in a Dadaist sound poem, is what you brought to it, and the artfulness of the surrealist artist is in making a collage or a sound poem which causes you to bring the deepest, most frightening, and most beautiful parts of your capacity for making meaning. But of course those parts can also be evoked from other sources.

Which is to say, if I'd not been paying attention (as everyone else in the shop was not, and as I was mostly by luck) and if I'd not had the associations I have with the pieces of media involved (I suspect), I would not have managed to scare the bejeezus out of myself tonight in a way that I experienced as a genuinely traumatic artistic experience, along the lines of the most upsetting pieces in surrealist and dadaist exhibitions. What I am wondering now is whether I'd rather have the kind of mind that does this sort of thing to me, or not, as the case may be. I guess overall it is probably worth it? But this sort of thing can be very, very tiring.

It was beautiful and frightening and may have changed my perception of one or two pieces of art which matter to me very greatly forever, and honestly all I did was go for ice cream.

It's happened to every reader, at one time or another, in a bookstore or a library, at a friend's house with an eager friend awaiting an opinion or in a coffeeshop over what was intended to be a relaxing beverage. The cover was intriguing. The blurbs, solid. The premise of the book was interesting, or the friend promised it would be wonderful. The author has a good reputation, or is someone who has written enjoyable work before this. Sometimes it takes only a few pages before the bite begins to set in; sometimes entire chapters; and sometimes it's immediate, pressing, with the weight of disappointment: I cannot finish reading this book. It's too terrible for me to spend any more time with it.

As a private reader, that is the end of it. You move on to something else. As a reviewer, well. One has been sent a reviewing copy, and therefore one owes a review. But we all know there's one cardinal sin of reviewing, don't we? No matter how awful a work of art may be, it could, somehow, turn into something beautiful later. It's the reviewer's mandate to throw themselves on unexploded books, just in case, in case the last ten pages redeem the first two hundred and eighty. Thou shalt not review a book without reading it in its entirety.

And some books, for all one tries and tries with them, simply are not actually readable. I have tried time and I have tried alcohol; I have tried pacing and reading portions of the book out loud to myself in hallways in the dead of night; I have sat in a coffeeshop with my drink going cold, trying not to bang my head against the table. The Creative Fire is a badly written novel. It is poorly constructed, the prose is clunky and non-descriptive, the premise is not well treated, the characters are unappealing, and I cannot finish it.

I am as distressed at this state of affairs as you are. Probably, in fact, more so: because The Creative Fire is a rarity, a kind of book that hasn't appeared much lately, and I was hoping for its success not just on its own account and merits but because it had the potential to invigorate its entire long-neglected subgenre. The Creative Fire is a YA SF novel set on a generation starship. Those don't happen often. Genre readers are accustomed to thinking of the politics, plots, and possibilities of generation ships in the tone of the novels which formed the subgenre in the 1950s, such as Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky and Harry Harrison's Captive Universe, but more recent and less famous work such as Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day (about a ship full of Quakers) have proved that the mores and expectations of fifties SF don't have to inform a writer's goals and methods in a generation ship novel. The generation ship is out of vogue, and has never been a fixture in the young adult novel-- there have been a few recently, such as Beth Revis's Across the Universe, but they don't seem to have made much of a field-wide impact as of yet. But there is no obvious reason why this type of setting-- so artificially constrained, yet so elastic in terms of possible technology, of possible range of characters human and otherwise, of metaphorical weight-- should not adapt readily, beautifully, and in a variety of different guises to the concerns of today's YA, especially given the recent vogue for totalitarian technocratic dystopia.

Cooper is in fact attempting to bring the subgenre into dialogue with present YA; Ruby's Song, the trilogy of which this is the first book, will be when completed a retelling of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita in a technological dystopian setting, with the heroine, Ruby, rising from poverty and obscurity to prominence as a political leader and so on. This is by no means a terrible idea for a trilogy and had a great deal of potential. The problem is that none of the work required to make this plot plausible and interesting has been done. So little of it, in fact, has been done that it would be impossible to tell that the book is supposed to be a version of a version of the life of Eva Perón if the author's preliminary note did not mention it.

We begin with Ruby, the heroine, rescuing a member of her apparently-downtrodden apparently-colorcoded caste from officials of a higher caste. The higher caste, Reds, can apparently bully and arrest Ruby's caste, Grays. Except that for some reason Ruby is able to argue them out of doing that. We are informed that the Grays are laborers, who are looked down on and given very little in the way of privileges and amenities. Except that for some reason Ruby is a full-time vocal student, a singer, and we don't get information about whether this is exceptional and if so how it is exceptional; we also get told that the work the Grays do is actually difficult and delicate work involving robot maintenance on the ship, and it becomes increasingly implausible for them to be downtrodden and prey to bullying when the work they do is not only necessary to everyone's lives but requires a degree of societal investment in their training and their efforts. We are told that women are of lower status then men, especially women among the Greys, but Ruby is the person we immediately, right from the start, see use something that appears to be social status to get her way against armed and dangerous men without a fight. In short, not only is the worldbuilding handed over in unwieldy blocks of information, but that information is then directly contradicted by the actions we see taken in the text. If these contradictions appeared to be intentional, it might be very interesting indeed-- if the Grays believe themselves to be downtrodden when they don't really have it so badly off, or if Ruby really doesn't notice that she is behaving with social privilege when the text is perfectly aware of it. But the way the novel presents it all is very haphazard: we need to see that Ruby is a strong-minded person, so here she is being strong-minded, but then on the next page we need to have some reason why she can't just go around doing whatever she wants, so she will now remember that as a woman and a Gray she has certain disadvantages.

The book reads, basically, as though the author had a plot in mind and then manipulated the world of the book to make the incidents in the plot happen on an incident-by-incident basis, without considering the second-order or in some cases first-order consequences of the worldbuilding and the effects that this sort of world would inevitably have on the characters and plot. That is not, by itself, necessarily a book-destroying problem, but the characters themselves are shaped entirely by the plot in the same way. The only attributes we see Ruby having are the ones which are required for the plot to advance along its path. She also has whatever character traits are necessary to the plot regardless of whether those character traits are likely in her circumstances, or whether they contradict traits she's already been shown to have. And the prose all this is told in is so clunky that this all comes across as confusion rather than as layered complexity.

I also have a sense that taking the plot from an outside source and sticking faithfully to that plot may have served as an inhibiting factor on Cooper's ideas and on her sense of what was possible for the worldbuilding. Here is an excerpt from Cooper's author's note, at the beginning of the novel:

I am grateful, in advance, to all of the modern women who will forgive me for the way this story is told. I could set the story far into the future, but I could not remove the patriarchy or the story would not have felt possible. But after all, the patriarchy remains in many places on Earth today.

The assumptions behind these few sentences are staggering in their confusion and illogic. Why would no version of the story of Evita 'feel possible' without a patriarchal setting? If specifically gendered things about the ways Eva Perón came to power, held power, did not have power, and so on are what Cooper wants to explore in a story, and if these questions of gender require a patriarchal setting, why does the story have to take place in the future? If something about this specific future setting interacts with something about patriarchy in a way which produces an interesting story result-- which would be a good reason to write a novel about Eva Perón on a generation ship-- why is Cooper apologizing for having a patriarchal setting, since it is part of what for her makes this premise worth exploring? Why is Cooper apologizing for having patriarchy in a science-fictional setting anyway? Does she believe that the only purpose of feminist fiction is to give examples of non-patriarchal living situations? Isn't part of feminism, and one of the principal goals of feminist fiction, the analysis of patriarchy and its impact on human beings? For that reason, isn't it important to ask the question of whether the story of Eva Perón is one which needs a specifically patriarchal hierarchy to happen, even in the very far future when technology and living situations are different? What else about a generation ship might produce hierarchical power structures? What, in a generation ship setting, might produce a patriarchal society, or might prevent one from existing? What does the patriarchy remaining in many places on Earth today have to do with any of the above questions, beyond the evident authorial assumption that writing about a patriarchal culture, even from a position of opposition and critique, is something for which she has to apologize, and that somehow the continuing existence of patriarchy in real life means... means what for Cooper's book, exactly? That it's only all right to write about unpleasant things taking place in the future if they exist in real life? That it's more all right to write about unpleasant things in the future if they exist in real life? That it's only plausible to write about unpleasant things in the future if they exist in real life, or that the reader will be less distressed by unpleasant things in the future if those things are part of the reader's present experience?

Personally, I am distressed that Cooper finds it necessary to apologize, in the present day, for the work of her imagination in constructing a counterfactual future which is meant to be vaguely plausible but which is certainly not, in any way, intended to be predictive. Why is she asking forgiveness for her own imagination? If she spent a very long time attempting to build a generation ship scenario in which one could have a retelling of Evita without the patriarchy and failed to do this, wouldn't the likely courses of action be either to proceed unapologetically in the knowledge that she has no alternative, or to write a different book entirely?

This is what I mean by the plot serving as an inhibitor to the author. Cooper has not managed to combine her plot with her worldbuilding and her characters, but has simply allowed the plot to dictate everything except her book's science-fictional trappings. The result is total chaos.

The novel's first few lines are a great example of the confusion of the prose and the ideas. Traditionally the first line is a hook, intended to give some idea of the tone of the book, the sort of world it takes place in, the character of the narrator or narrative, and, usually, the very best of the writer's prose chops. The first line, and sometimes the whole first paragraph, is supposed to get the reader to take the book off the shelf and continue it out of sheer curiosity. Here are the first lines of The Creative Fire: "Four men in red uniforms surrounded three men wearing dirty gray work clothes. The reds muscled the less fortunate men down an orange hallway." This is a tangle of suddenly introduced numbers, colors, and concepts, with a referent whose antecedent is not necessarily immediately obvious (dirty gray work clothes does not automatically equal less fortunate, and due to the length of that clause we are more likely to remember the clothes as an attribute of these men then that they are, in one word, surrounded). It also, sadly, does give some idea of the tone of the book, the character of the narrative, and what we are to expect of the text generally.

And after a while of reading in which I continually had to refer back to previous sentences to try to make the sentence I was reading parse at all, in which I could find no consistent worldbuilding, in which character development was entirely sacrificed in the service of the overarching plot and yet in which that overarching plot was so unclear that as I have mentioned I would not have been able to figure out what it was if the author's note hadn't helpfully told me-- after a while of that, I simply could not continue reading The Creative Fire. I cannot in good conscience suggest that anyone else read it either.

I hope that more YA writers work with generation ships, in the near future. I hope that readers and publishers do not take this book as representative of its entire subgenre. I recognize that Cooper meant well and that her ideas are original and worthy of consideration. I hope that, in the future, either Cooper or other authors examine those ideas in a fully-fleshed-out and entertaining manner, in which worldbuilding and character unify with plot and premise to deliver a reading experience almost entirely different from the one I had. But, for the time being: Oh editors and readers, I have committed the cardinal sin of reviewing. For justification I offer only that, going into it, this book sounded as though it might be very good, and it was not, and in similar circumstances I would do the same thing again. There comes a time when life is too short not to trust one's own judgement on whether or not it is worth doing whatever it might take to finish reading something. And here, I trust myself that it was not, and leave the rest to you, the readers.

Well, at this precise second I am being incredibly distracted by the internet believing there will be new Gravity Falls on February 8th. I hope this is a thing that actually happens.

Anyway, the thing I finished reading most recently: Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy.

This is a book which I've heard about a lot in the context of punk rock; it came out in 1973. It is in fact Lesy's history doctoral dissertation, in which he juxtaposes the works of a commercial photographer who worked in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, between about 1880 and about 1910, with various items of local news printed in the town's newspaper over the same time frame, along with excerpts from regional novelists, case reports from the local insane asylum, and the like. It's an explicitly didactic piece, meant to force the reader to consider the historical transition between the U.S. as a place in which there was massive westward movement of white populations and a place which has, since the 'frontier' stopped, every so often recapitulated the population movements which come with industrialization: the rural poor to the cities, the urban rich to an envisioned-Arcadian countryside.

So in short it's a list of everything terrible which happened to everyone in Black River Falls for two decades, i.e. the nightmares of the rural poor in a countryside two generations after the incoming white settlers began stripping it down to rock for a quick and unsustainable profit.

The thing is, I come to this book having spent a fair portion of my adolescence wrestling with these issues already. Which is to say I come originally from the middle of nowhere in Ohio, and have never had the artistic or historical temptation to romanticize the country or the whitewashed version of The American Frontier. This means that, as the choir Lesey is preaching to, I have a bit of leeway to poke at his methodology, since the fact that the life of the rural poor is bad now and was way the hell worse then is something I already knew and therefore his book does not gobsmack me on the emotional level as much as I believe he means it to. (The reason one hears about this book is that it really does gobsmack a lot of people. To this day. And, for managing that, I do consider Lesey to have achieved something. The reason I hear about this book in the theoretical context of punk is its use of planned and accidental juxtapositions to produce an effect in some viewers of significant alienation from their previous received ideas.)

His methodology... could be a tad more subtle. The photographs are amazing, they are of a world that has basically entirely vanished; I do not think it was necessary for him to mirror-image some of them on facing pages, or zoom in on specific facial expressions, or do other photographic manipulations. And there are a couple of pieces of text he cites as 'town gossip' which I am fairly certain are mood-setting and entirely fictitious. He had enough material not to need to do that either.

That said, after one gets through the Obvious Message, there is a thread of incredible strangeness here which makes the book still very compelling. The local paper, for instance, would announce whenever anyone had been committed to the local insane asylum, and give the reason why. Over the twenty years, more than five separate and unrelated people were declared legally insane when they became frustrated over their failure to make perpetual motion machines work. In at least two of these cases, the committal was brought on when the person petitioned the town for financial support for a machine they wished to build and for which they could not afford parts. Why perpetual motion? The paper does not say, and I for one haven't the foggiest. Or there's the window-breaking lady. During these two decades, she appears to have roamed Wisconsin breaking every plate-glass window she came near, until the police of whatever town she was in would round her up, hold her in jail for a few days, and then release her onto a train out of town. Whereupon she would repeat the cycle wherever her ticket let her off. There was never any effort to get her declared insane; the paper treats of her in a way that suggests that everyone just understood that sometimes somebody thinks the windows have it coming. She also clearly wasn't using the jails as a way out of homelessness, either, as she broke jail windows whenever left in a room with one.

This sort of thing can be very absorbing. But, for me personally, not sufficient to carry out Lesey's purpose, which was, as far as I can tell, to revolutionize historiography. Then again, how often does that happen anyway?

What I am reading right now: Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany.

Okay, you know what's really weird? Reading Dhalgren for the first time after having read a fair amount of Delany's erotica, that's what. And also knowing his memoir very well. Because a surprising amount of the small incidents in this book are stories you can also find in his memoir, and as for having read the erotica, I keep thinking I will know when there will be sex scenes in this novel and then there aren't but if you have been tracking the signals he uses for when there should be in his other stuff there so should be. And when you read Delany's erotica, there's a set of things in it you're pretty sure are in it because pornography as a genre requires them, and a set of things you're pretty sure are in it because they relate to whatever point Delany is specifically trying to make in that book, and then there are the set of things which turn up, not necessarily because they are Delany's actual real-life kinks, but because they are clearly things which mean something to him on a very deep level, which involves sex in some way, sometimes symbolically and sometimes not. And that last set turns up all over Dhalgren. And then when there are sex scenes in Dhalgren they involve completely different symbols from that set, except the sex scenes which are lightly-disguised bits from his memoir. Oh, my aching head.

In short, having trouble seeing book for layers of reader-brought context. Sigh.

Also, as of about halfway through I am liking it the least of his novels I have read, as it has left the efficiency of his early work behind and not yet achieved the clobber-you-over-the-head intensity of the later work. But it definitely could still change my mind; it has a lot of things going on, and I will need to see what he does with them.

Not making it to Arisia today. Serious health crash.

This is the first time I've had to miss panels I am on at a con because of illness. I really hope it never happens again, and I'm sad it has this time.