in which I write about things other than books

[rushthatspeaks]

despite the fact that Nicolas Bouvier's The Way of the World is a magnificent travelogue, seriously, he took a friend and a car in the year 1953 and they drove from Belgrade over the Khyber Pass by way of Tabriz and Isfahan. And they didn't have any money, they were supporting themselves by Being Artists, so they never quite starved to death but. And they happened to hit the window when you could be in Afghanistan without people shooting at you much, and it's just this humane funny gentle book in which people happen to do things like push a car for five hundred miles over a desert. There are all these old officers from the British Raj floating around Pakistan and western Iran trying to figure out what to do with themselves because they don't want to go back to Britain, and you know, that was not something I'd considered, much, how a lot of them just... stayed and started running bars and things. Seriously recommended.

ANYWAY THINGS NOT ABOUT BOOKS.

B. and I saw a sign on the side of the road for a Labor Day Middle Eastern Food Festival, and went to it. I'd been expecting it to be at a cultural center, but no, it was much cooler, it was at a Melkite Greek-Catholic church. The Melkites were founded in Antioch in Syria before St. Peter went to Rome, and so they consider themselves Roman Catholics, but they have a patriarch who runs things and think of the pope as the first among equals (the other equals being the patriarchs of the Armenian and Ruthenian churches and people like that). Which means imagine Catholics who look and act a heck of a lot like Greek Orthodox, except for how they aren't. I had no idea that sect existed in America, and the church itself is extremely beautiful-- I urge you to click through, and to look at some of the paintings in the links under the top photo, because those are icons in the correct neo-Byzantine style, but painted in 1979. The baptistery is particularly impressive-- it has about every Bible story you can think of that has to do with water in there somewhere. I was proud that I noticed that as is traditional, in the painting of the baptism of Christ the people who paid for the paintings have had portraits of themselves inserted. I think this is the most recent art where I've seen that. Also the doorway from the baptistery into the church has a great icon of the angel with the flaming sword who stands at the gateway of Eden, because the door from baptism into the sanctuary is supposed to be symbolically the door to paradise. You have to love people who paint angels with flaming swords and eyes in their wings on the doorways. One of the nicest churches I've seen on this continent, and (I don't think this comes through in the photos) covered in calligraphy in English, Greek, and Arabic, the three languages of the services.

The food was pretty good, too.

Apart from that, B. has been playing video games. El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron now takes it for the best savepoint concept I've ever seen. You're playing Enoch, who's been asked to return some fallen angels to heaven-- yes I know this post is full of theology, I'm free-associating-- and your savepoint is Lucifel, the unfallen version of Lucifer, who turns up standing around every so often talking to God on his cellphone. And if you say hi to him he'll say hi to God for you and the game is saved.

This leads to the prospect (DO NOT TELL ME WHETHER THIS HAPPENS) that if Lucifel falls the player will have to beat up Lucifer and steal his cellphone. I would pay so much money to see that you do not even know. The rest of the game is very pretty, but this just makes me conceptually happy.

Also B. has been playing Catherine, and I think, unless it throws the dismount which I am sadly kind of expecting, that this may be the first video game I've ever seen not fuck up how it treats a trans character. It's... it's being fairly realistic about it! And her friends are mostly dudebro types so they're kind of assholes, but they're not assholes about that to her! They don't out her, they respect her identity, and the one thing that's causing her problems is the Big Bad Evil Thing, which is fertility-and-gender-role-obsessed in a way the game clearly thinks is crazy and wrong.

*blinks*

It's like Atlus made this game this year or something. As opposed to in 1993, which is what I tend to expect from most games that came out this year.

So that is some of what has been going on here. Not a great last while for health, and I think I am in post-book slump, too, though I am taking Jo's good advice on the reviews and not trying to edit them into any kind of manuscript shape before I have an actual editor, a thought which saves me immense stress. Need to get up the brain to pull an agent packet out of them, but that's a different matter.

Comments

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

I'm just here to say that I've never played even a single video game, and wouldn't even know where to start, and have never before wished it were otherwise. But this -- your savepoint is Lucifel, the unfallen version of Lucifer, who turns up standing around every so often talking to God on his cellphone. And if you say hi to him he'll say hi to God for you and the game is saved. -- makes me want to try this video game thing out, for the first time ever.

And that's even before we get to the possibility of beating up Lucifer and stealing his cell phone, which makes me utterly giddy with sheer glee.

[dorothean]

This has nothing to do with your post, but I am about halfway through Rosemary Sutcliff's memoir, Blue Remembered Hills, and struck by how much her writing (in this book, not in those of her novels I've read) reminds me of yours.

Maybe it's the interwar setting, which is a period you seem to have read many memoirs from. In any case I wonder if you have read this one. I think you would like it.

[sovay]

the Big Bad Evil Thing, which is fertility-and-gender-role-obsessed in a way the game clearly thinks is crazy and wrong.

ina ūmê ^dDumuzi ellanni GI.GÍD uqnî šemer sāmti ittišu ellanni
ittišu ellanni bakkû u bakkātu
ša mītū lilūnimma qutrīn liṣṣinū . . .

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

You have to love people who paint angels with flaming swords and eyes in their wings on the doorways.

O my.

Thank you for the travel.

Nine

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You must not have read Paul Scott's Staying On which is a book about some British people staying on in India. It's beautiful and funny and touching and sad, and the people it is about are kind of comic relief in the Raj Quartet but they're real and three dimensional and sympathetic despite everything here. It's a book that's potentially kind of problematic in some directions but I love it anyway.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

It appears that the Melkite Greek Catholic church, while a Catholic church and in communion with the Pope, is not a *Roman* Catholic church. They're the other kind.

Don't ask why an atheist Jewish guy knows about this sort of distinction. It's a long weird story and ends poorly.

(And I intend to play both Catherine and El Shaddai, but maybe after they show up on discount.)

[marith.livejournal.com]

I just learned of the existence of Catherine and am wibbling about playing it; the concept doesn't sound tremendously appealing (watch guy screw up his life and be miserable! it's like Literature!) but it is Atlus. And nobody else seems to make games remotely like Persona 3 and 4.

Also must check out this Metatron game now. Thank you!