some snippets and short reviews

[rushthatspeaks]

Some short things I've said about various books etc. in various places recently, not necessarily edited.

From mail to Nineweaving:

I happened across a book of P.L. Travers' essays in the Cambridge Main, and remembering that you have always suspected Mary Poppins as a goddess figure, I thought I ought to tell you about it, though of course you might have read it years ago-- it is called What The Bee Knows, and a great deal of it appeared in the New Age journal Parabola, which apparently she founded (!) and which was still floating about occult shops in NYC in the early '00s, though of course under different management.

A more unrepentant Gravesian I have never, ever seen. Goes on about the architecture of Avebury and Glastonbury and all the different -burys as types of the body of the mother goddess in a way I had thought restricted to Mary Daly, and dislikes Tolkien for, as far as I can tell, being too self-consciously epic and not enough plain fairy-tale. One wants to sit her down very gently, with John Crowley (either in his proper person or in Aegypt) and say, dear lady, it is part of the human pattern to make other patterns, and just because you want to see a thing does not mean that it is there; also to send her Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer, for she has absorbed the notion of 'primitive' cultures as wiser than modernity. And yet she has a readable line, always, and a core of that hard-headed pragmatism which comes of taking the advice of fairy-tales-- as though Angela Carter had gone in for shamanism instead of deconstructed panto (and a good thing Carter didn't, but). I sit there feeling vaguely incredulous and superior at her and then wondering why I do, as it's not as though she's not acknowledging that darkness is darkness and work requires work. In fact Travers loves the Bad Fairy best in Sleeping Beauty because it is not that fairy's fault the king stupidly has no room for her; she only does what the insult requires, without expectation of redemption. Next time round, says Travers, they'll forget to invite a different one of the fairies, who will behave exactly the same way, and we all know it.

It's just that Travers is so credulous of patterns. Like Candide, insisting it is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and oh by the way Silbury Hill is really a giant vagina, and oh children really do know Everything About Heaven and then forget when they acquire awareness of themselves as persons, and. I do not know exactly where my line is between faith and flutteriness, but this has, though rather gently, crossed it.

Mary Poppins is, however, absolutely a Mother Goddess and you were completely and totally right. I thought you'd want to know.

Also, I wanted to show you the book's best paragraph.

As for the Three Fates, I recognized them immediately as my great-aunts, huge cloudy presences-- with power, it seemed, to loose and to bind-- perched watchfully, like crows on a fence, at the edge of our family circle. One of them, it was said-- or rather, it was whispered, the rumour being so hideous-- one of them lived on her capital. What was capital, I wondered, wild with conjecture, full of concern. And the dreadful answer came bubbling up-- it was herself, her substance! Each day when she disappeared to her room, it was not to rest, like anyone else, but secretly to live on her person, to gnaw, perhaps, a toe or a finger or to wolf down some inner organ. The fact that there was no visible sign of this activity did not fool me for a moment. A strange and dreadful deed was here and not to be denied. Aunt Jane, stealthily nibbling at her liver, was at once her own Prometheus and her own eagle. The myth did not need to be told me. It rose and spoke itself.

From mail to Sovay:

Naomi Mitchison's Under the Fairy Hill is incredibly strange, a memoir of the time she moved to Botswana and got thrown out of South Africa for flagrant apartheid violations and became the adoptive mother of the chief of the Kgatla tribe, one of the eight principal tribes of the country, and large portions of the book are focused over trying to get people to be sensible and send the money to irrigate some shit already, and seriously is there anything Naomi Mitchison wasn't involved in? It's a book which is mostly her talking to herself or else talking about the political conditions of the early 1960s, which all became invalid instantaneously the book was published since Botswana became independent in 1966 and this goes right up to early 1965 and was then sent to press, and it has some fascinating ruminations where she's talking to herself about the ways it is and is not appropriate for her to romanticize the concept of 'tribe' (and, I think, being reasonably good about it).

But it must have been like reading a dispatch from aliens, in the sixties to the Average British Reader, it still is now for the opposite reasons, this white lady in her seventies who went and bought a car for the sole and express purpose of driving people in the village around wherever they needed and then did drive them around over nonexistent roads for months at a time, who finds the whole concept of race so confusing and aggravating that she declines to remember to tell you what the race is of anyone around her until they are either thrown out of a hotel dining room together or not, as the case may be. It's almost unreadable and yet completely hypnotic, it has all the boredom of books in which people never explain anything, except that she is explaining everything that matters to her, namely the political situation and how much she loves her friends and what she's intending to invest in the hospital and about the trees and the wildlife, and leaving out only the things that those of us who are not from Mars might expect in a narrative, such as how she got to Africa in the first place, what her husband and children and grandchildren are off doing and what they think of all this, what the British government is saying to her in the strongly-worded letters she mentions getting but doesn't quote, and how she has avoided dying of sunstroke when she has an actual motif of forgetting her hat. And then she rewrites 'The Flowers of the Forest' as a song of political encouragement to the Kgatla-- "Oh wae's me, my sisters, for the Flowers of the Forest, the feeders of vultures, who went out to war! Behind them their brothers, dead, dead in the kopjes, Mochudi before"-- and this woman is from Mars and I love her to pieces. As apparently did her tribe.

From a different email to Sovay:

You'd like Frances Hardinge's Fly-By-Night-- it reminds me of the revolutionary bits of the Dalemark books. Also has a perfectly lovely homicidal goose. And a con man who is a believable con man (and whose first name is Eponymous), and a bit in which someone has to shout, with serious intent, "Follow that coffeehouse!" And everyone in it is complex and has an agenda, and no one is perfectly good or bad, and the protagonist occasionally makes really stupid political decisions because she is twelve years old, which is very refreshing to see because usually in this sort of book being twelve does not hinder a clever person much, and here she just hasn't got the experience. And all of the incredibly serious political issues are worked out in action scenes that one suddenly realizes are on a sheerly logistical level perfectly ridiculous, but the emotional weight is still there. A nice trick.

And from a different different email:

Still spending large amounts of time staring into space, although I've also managed to read some (the first two books) of Anne Ursu's Cronus Chronicles trilogy, which were clearly published because the publisher wanted to cash in on the whole Percy Jackson thing but which are fairly worthy in their own right.

I first became aware of Anne Ursu earlier this year because I was recommended her book Breadcrumbs, which turns out to appear to be an entirely conventional middle-grade fairytale retelling, and then after a while with brilliant delicacy it blows its own structure entirely to hell and recoalesces into something I've never seen before. It-- it actually made me both like and consider dramatically appropriate a retelling of that fucking Little Match Girl Hans Christian Andersen story. I cannot overemphasize the impressiveness of that book.

So I thought she'd probably do well with the Greek stuff, and it's interesting, because she does, and she did all the research, but she's going after it from an angle I understand completely which will nevertheless never be the way I see the world. Namely, it's a trilogy about how, if you are a modern-day human, and you find out that the Greek gods did make the world and are the final authorities and that is it, the Greeks had it right, no other gods around, and oh, hey, the Greek afterlife is it too, then this is basically one of the worst things that could possibly happen to you and the world and the correct response is to attempt metaphysical revolution as soon as possible.

I agree, the Greeks have a terrible afterlife, if you are used to more modern concepts. And it's pretty awesome her characters notice and the narrative notices, as the sneaking under-plot under the traditional YA Must Thwart Evil Save World business; nice job there. It's just-- the past is another country, you know? Not this past, and I respect that as a narrative choice, because recognizing that a metaphysical system sucks and standing up to it is an awesome book setup and I agree entirely with defying one's gods. Just, it doesn't have much of what I actually like about Greek mythology, while nonetheless being an entirely enjoyable, good, well-done, well-researched set of books about that. I did not think that was a possible thing. Like, and I didn't think this was possible either, her Proteus is a recognizable, functional, interesting character without a lick of numinous. And it's not that she can't write numinous! It's all over Breadcrumbs, and it turns up consistently in the Cronus books in the human characters' actions, which I respect as an artistic decision. It's just... really odd, and, to some parts of my brain, moderately sacrilegious, but not in an offensive way, necessarily. If that makes any sense. I recommend these; they're very different, under the surface trappings.

(Later note: I have now finished the third, and I think she blew the ending, but not in a terrible way, just in a has-written-herself-into-a-corner-she-couldn't-quite-pull-out-of way. A writer to watch.)

So apparently I review things in email to my girlfriend a lot:

B. and I went to see A Dangerous Method, which was not the movie I would have liked it to be; it was a good movie about persons it would be possible to make a great movie about. For one thing, the film thinks its protagonist is Jung, when it is, in fact, Sabina Spielrein, and while Keira Knightley does a surprisingly good job at her-- three-dimensional, wounded, intelligence to reach past her own terrors but not to see into other peoples' if they get too close to her-- it is still her arc which should have had more space. Well. Actually all three principal arcs should have had more space. The film is an hour and a half and needs another hour to get a fair shake at all the facets of these ridiculously complicated, ridiculously entangled people. I would not have minded another hour with these writers or actors, though, and that is saying something, because seriously, when was the last time there was even a non-shitty movie about psychiatrists? And none of the cliches about the profession were used.

A Dangerous Method feels a little reductive to me about both Freud and Jung, and yet I can't figure out in what direction. I mean, there is sexual tension between them, acknowledged and repressed as it had to be; Jung's class position and membership in the dominant religious group are not shown as the reason that he speculates about telepathy and parapsychology, but are the things that make him free to speculate. He doesn't have the financial concerns Freud has, and he doesn't have to worry about being visibly more respectable than everyone else simply to survive. I guess my problem is that we don't see much of what motivates him; he drifts into his physical relationship with Sabina because of philosophical conversations with Otto Gauss (who is wonderfully done, an utter delight of a character and actor: 'for God's sake, man,' he says, 'just take her somewhere secluded and give her a good thrashing, like she told you to, and you'll see how much better you'll both feel in the morning'). And then he drifts out again because, while he doesn't have to be more respectable than anyone else, he does have to be respectable, and there are rumors, and his wife sending anonymous letters.

He is too passive, I guess; if there is one adjective I have never, never thought to apply to Jung from his writings, it is passive. And yet the script is very good at his intellectual curiosity, his classical geekery, the way he and his wife keep trying to communicate and never quite manage. Passive in that, if the film persists in seeing him as the protagonist, I would appreciate it if he were a motivating force in the plot. But then as I've said Sabina should be the protagonist, and the actors knew it, and I can't tell whether it's the script or the director that doesn't. We do not see Jung's hidden fires here, but then he's working so hard at keeping anyone from doing that, his personal life and his work misdirections from each other, and in the middle a scrawny, moderately handsome guy with a bemused twist of the mouth under a mustache far too grand for him. I wish I knew why I am not quite sold. Probably because I've read his German translations of Zosimus, and the man in this movie couldn't have done them, and I am not sure I should hold the movie at fault for that. But it's not like I'm a Jung geek, really? I don't know.

Freud we don't see as much of, and what we do see is very concerned with his public appearance, with knowing what people see when they look at him because what he knows they see is a Jew. He must make his field into something that cannot be brushed off by anti-Semitism alone, that must be looked at for itself, and Jung is a godsend to him because Jung's upper-class Protestantism lends instant cachet. Jung's unawareness of this cachet is what breaks the two of them, the unquestioned nature of his privilege, so that Freud must maintain authority in the relationship through more and more desperate measures, or feel himself lost against the endless double standard. And yet I don't buy that as all of the Freud I know, either, because we don't see enough in the film of Freud the family man, his complex relationship with his children. Lack of time, I think; but what I do fault them for not showing is that Freud's determined scientific facade is centered around concepts and behaviors that really were that outrageous. We don't see enough of his unembarrassed speech about sexuality in contexts where it is disapproved of; the film relies on our knowledge of anti-Semitism in Europe to prove to us that he really does have the enemies he claims. Those were not his only enemies.

And yet I feel that I'm blaming this for not being a nearly-three-hour epic, with a large subsidiary cast and richly drawn detail of world, when what it has is, for a work whose source is a three-hander play, extremely rich and vivid indeed. I think it's that while you can get a fair amount of complexity into a three-hander, I'm not sure you can get these people into one. Because this Freud wouldn't have written that insane essay on da Vinci and the homoerotic nature of vultures, either. But this film did get the complex mix of class and religion, the ambivalence between producing radical ideas and trying to live with them.

It doesn't have the lunacy, that's the problem, that's what I'm trying to articulate. What I think the film forgets is how strange the beginnings of psychotherapy were, how strange the concepts of the fin de siecle and the very early twentieth century still would be to a modern mind, how deeply, deeply odd we'd find these people. It's a very good movie where it is trying to deal with things that still make sense now, but I can follow the rationales the characters have, and having spent however many years it is reading Papa Freud I have to say I don't like being able to understand him entirely-- and the lack of that plus the lack of seeing how really strange these people were for their societies-- I mean Sabina is living by herself! in Berlin! in 1906! she has a room of her own! THE MOVIE OUGHT TO COMMENT ON THAT, not overtly, but we should know how big a deal it is that she has a room she can take Jung back to and doesn't have a maiden aunt watching her type her dissertation and that is what keeps it from being a great film instead of a good one, it's too modern, it's too much thinking about the taboos that its audience has and not enough about the intellectual history of Europe.

That said, it's a good film, it's genuinely well done, the physical details are right, it's not that it has no historical sense, it just-- it hasn't got enough. Because the past is another country, and we are not citizens there.

The reason Sabina should be the protagonist is she's the one who was the greatest stranger in her own country, which is our history.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

So many smart people whose tastes normally align with mine love _Fly By Night_ that I wish I knew why my reaction to it was "meh." It's weird.

If I found out that Greek mythology was the exclusively and demonstrably valid theology I'd be really upset too, though less for the afterlife than for how *petty* the deities were that I suddenly had to accept as real.

[rushthatspeaks]

Sometimes one is just allergic to an author? Might be worth trying something else of hers, as the Mosca Mye books are very different from her other stuff. Or it might not.

The thing is, the Greek deities weren't actually that petty, it was just a completely different value system working orthogonally to the things we care about now. It was before the invention of human happiness as a goal it is moral and laudable to strive for; human survival was what you strove for and individual happiness at the expense of the rules of society was ruinous. It was all right to try to be happy as long as it didn't mess things up for everybody else, but if you took the pursuit of individual pleasure too far what you got was the Trojan War.

So if you didn't follow the laws of civilization the gods would strike you down, and sometimes the gods would strike you down even if you hadn't broken a law, because Fate was not in the hands of the gods but beyond them, and some people's lives just suck because Fate said so (i.e. Oedipus-- some fascinating theological stuff in Oedipus at Colonus when Athena wants to be nice to him and needs to know if it will go against Fate, since if it would, not only would being nice to him fail to work but it would bring the Furies down on Athens). Harsh, yes, but petty is not the word I would use.

That said, if it turned out the Greeks were right I would also be upset and consider rebellion an appropriate response, because philosophically we now value human individual happiness to the point of allowing societal rule-change based on the concept of making people happier. Also we don't value glory the same way-- if you put 'glory/personal fame' into the Greek value system about where we now have happiness, and add 'the virtue of following custom and tradition wisely' right next to it, that's about right. And I entirely agree with these changes, so I don't want gods who don't understand them.

[kate_nepveu]

You have thought about this much more deeply than I have. I was going for, "we've got deities and their idea of a fun time is rape and involuntary transformations and so forth?!" =>

[kore]

Mary Poppins as Mother Goddess, AWESOME

[ladymondegreen]

There is actually a statement of P.L. Traver's where she says that Mary Poppins came to her fully formed, and she had a strong sense that she was a minor hearth goddess. I think it's in Only Connect but it might just as easily be in Jonathan Cott's interview with her in Piper At the Gates of Dawn.

[rushthatspeaks]

I am going to go around reading more Travers now, I can already tell.

[rushthatspeaks]

I KNOW, RIGHT?

[jinian]

Like Candide, insisting it is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and oh by the way Silbury Hill is really a giant vagina

This cracked me up. And I loved the "living on her capital" part, wow.

[rushthatspeaks]

That paragraph I quoted was worth reading the entire book for-- even though there is, in fact, a five-page essay on how Silbury Hill is really a giant vagina. With measurements of the hill quoted in peculiar ways to prove the point. I think I got through that bit on sheer incredulity.

[skygiants]

My expectations about Rick Riordan were completely flipped by having read Anne Ursu first -- because after that, I went into Riordan going "right, well, terrible afterlife system, general and acknowledged unfairness of the actions of the gods, these kids actually have the power to revolt against heaven so clearly that's where we're going!"

And of course obviously we weren't, and while the ending addressed some issues and overall I found it perfectly satisfying, there is a way in which I really wanted that revolt against heaven story.

I also really respect the Ursu books for the very simple reason that neither protagonist is both white and male at the same time, and because they do a really good job of balancing out the times when each kid is In Distress and the other Comes to the Rescue so it works out perfectly even. It's mathematical!

. . . I have stuff to say about Fly By Night but mostly it's just extreme-but-generalized enthusiasm and this comment is also fairly lengthy, so I'll leave it.

[rushthatspeaks]

You were one of the reasons I started reading Frances Hardinge, actually.

Oh, wow, that is a fascinating angle from which to come at the Percy Jackson books. I am sad that that does not exist now.

Have you read Ursu's Breadcrumbs? It is a serious kick in the heart but it is basically perfect.

[skygiants]

That is always a great thing for me to hear. >:D I love being a traveling Frances Hardinge saleswoman!

And I have not read Breadcrumbs, but I really need to; it's been on my list ever since I found out it existed.

(PS and unrelatedly: also, I am now in Boston! Something should be done about this fact at some point.)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I was going to say, have you read I Go by Sea, I Go by Land, but of course you reviewed it a year or so ago in this space -- and on that review (May 10, 2011) there is a comment by nineweaving about What the Bee Knows! So there you are, we are all circling in the dance past the same, but not quite the same, spot once again.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Sorry, not quite this space. Nine's comment was on the Livejournal version.

[rushthatspeaks]

Heh. So it goes indeed. (Basically at this point I assume that any book I want to read Nine probably owns, so I am not at all surprised.)

[starlady]

It's unreasonable how much I love Fly By Night. Almost as unreasonable as the fact that I've still never managed to read any of the rest of Hardinge's books.

I really liked A Dangerous Method. I think I agree with you, about the characters not being strange enough to us--they are strange to themselves, and psychotherapy helps them to finally grok that (though it doesn't actually make any of them happy), and that's a key insight that the film does manage to grasp, but they're not strange enough to each other in the end, either.

And yes, ditto on Spielrein actually being the protagonist. I would actually lean toward it being the director who doesn't know it, but then I haven't seen or read the play in question.

[rushthatspeaks]

The other Hardinge I've read is Well-Witched, which had a silly title change in North America from the perfectly sensible Verdigris Deep, and it was brilliant and one of the creepier YAs I've ever read. I'm saving the rest of her for a rainy day or a book drought, because she is so good that I will be sad when I've read all of her stuff.

I haven't seen or read the play either. It was an odd directorial choice for Cronenberg, and he's not exactly known for being great at female interiority, but I don't know what's going on with his interactions with the original text. (Keira Knightley was awesome. Best work I've seen out of her.)

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I've got to admit, I really did think Sabina was the protagonist. We come in with her, we leave with her; she's the person who has the most of her shit together, by the end of it. She's the one who can stand outside Jung (and Freud)'s craziness and comment on it, while still understanding and accepting enough about her own nuttery to function socially and personally. What I see coming from her is a steady stream of: "But you're the one who taught me to simply accept who I am and get on with it, so why can't you do the same?" But Jung can't, because he has too much investment in being "sane". It's sad.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I did come away from the film thinking of it as a movie about Sabina. After all, in many ways she is the only one bold enough to make most of the decisions that drive the plot.

And, of the three, it was her epigraph that hit me the hardest at the end of the film. It did not help that I saw it on a plane bound for Germany, at approximately three in the morning.

I did think that the story was lovingly depicted and well crafted, for being a fairly high profile historical film, and I agree that it probably wanted another few hour's worth of material. I honestly hadn't realized how short it was, because it was so immediately immersive. I now wonder about DVD extras, to say nothing of the book it was based on and the play.

Fascinatingly, this film also seems to exist.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I would be very interested to see the play if it ever comes around near me, because it was a piece of work where I really couldn't tell how crucial the interaction of actors with script was-- whether it's a writer's play or an interpreter's play, if that distinction makes any sense.

Agreed that she was the one who made a lot of the decisions, really self-actualized, etc., but I would have liked to see more of it. We get more of Freud and Jung fighting, more of each of them by themselves, than we get of her, and a lot of the things that are really important to her life happen offscreen-- her marriage, for instance. I wanted the film to be about her life and the impact those guys had on it, and I really felt like the throughline we got was Jung-based, that he's the one we follow in the introspective moody camera insets. I mean, it's quite possible to have a protagonist who's not the one who's most present in the text, who's not the principal character, and I would accept an argument that Spielrein is the protagonist because she's the one who really changes, but in that case she's one of the most non-present protags I've seen and I was kind of annoyed by that.

I don't know how much the film is changed by knowing her life story going in, which I did.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I would be very interested to see the play if it ever comes around near me, because it was a piece of work where I really couldn't tell how crucial the interaction of actors with script was-- whether it's a writer's play or an interpreter's play, if that distinction makes any sense.

I think the distinction makes perfect sense, but then, I write screenplays and I act, and direct, so all of the perspectives are, to me, an ever shifting grid depending on who has the clearest vision and what view they take of the text, as well as how much the author gives in the way of direction, and how much the company and the director take it to heart.

and I would accept an argument that Spielrein is the protagonist because she's the one who really changes, but in that case she's one of the most non-present protags I've seen and I was kind of annoyed by that.

I was annoyed by it too. I wanted to see more of this interesting, smart, kinky, self-actualized woman who clearly was butting heads with some of the most brilliant men of her generation, and frequently influencing their thought patterns. That I had never heard of her before the film is not just surprising, it's actually shocking. At least she's getting some mainstream press now.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Jung's the one we follow around when he's Moodily Introspective-- the one where we get scenes of him by himself doing things and thinking things through, which we don't really get for Spielrein or Freud. I agree that in terms of dramatic function Spielrein may be the protagonist, in that she's the one who changes over the course of the film, but I'm not sure the narrative knows it, because a lot of those changes take place offscreen-- the establishment of her career, her marriage, the publications of her important work. I kept thinking that if the narrative was using her as a counterpoint to the ways in which Jung and Freud couldn't get their shit together, it needed to show more of how she'd managed it in order to bring out the irony of how much that goes against the societal expectations of the time and the historical way people think about it now (her achievements are a matter of public record, but she gets remembered most as a patient, damn it all).

[sovay]

So apparently I review things in email to my girlfriend a lot

I like it.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Somehow I suspect I shall go on doing it.

Love you so.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think the publisher wanted to cash in on Percy Jackson, but I'm not the least bit sure Anne Ursu did, and that's because of the location of the door to hell. I know where that cheese shop is. I sit and watch it sometimes while I am eating sushi, because there is actually credible sushi in Bigdale and it's close, and also if one has something mallish one has to do--try on ten million bras in Nordstrom's in hopes that two of them fit, for example, or buy a necklace to one's grandmother's taste--sometimes this requires fueling. So I sit and watch the door, in case, and the thing is--the thing is I don't think you get that from "let's cash in on Percy Jackson," I think you get that from a rather more personal place. I don't know Anne personally, but there are several things that make me think she was starting that series from somewhere personal and was just enough of a beginner not to be able to make it go.

And now Breadcrumbs has enough under its belt that she can make it go, and--oh, that book. The thing that that book does with how mobile modern culture is so different from village culture. I get so frustrated with children's books that do the thing, you know the thing? The thing where everybody marries somebody they knew when they were 12. But for the Victorians, that was a lot more true than it is now. It was at least not staggeringly unlikely. And I love how--oh God how I love how--the people in Breadcrumbs have to deal with it just not being true, the people around them not being likely to be eternally in their lives, and being worth saving anyway. I respect that so much. It made me feel like I, personally, was taking one on the chin sometimes. But in a way I could really respect.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Oh, I absolutely agree that Ursu had non-Percy-Jackson-related plans when she wrote the Cronus books! They're too good for that not to be the case. They're just also very clearly a writer who's not quite where she wants to be yet. (I figured that door had to exist. It was too specific not to.)

Breadcrumbs, yes, everything you said about it. And for me personally there kept being this thing where the stories that are the most important to me are the ones she'd use to really kick me in the heart, and then the stories I don't usually like so much are the ones that are actually affirming, which adds another level of admiration and surreality. So good.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen A Dangerous Method, but your comments about it remind me of Copenhagen, which seems somewhat similar in how it shows a large-scale conflict as a personal one between three people, two of whom become public figures. (And manages to focus on Heisenberg's controversial new ideas with NO MATH AT ALL.)

The Mitchison sounds fascinating. Where did you find it? When Oursin refers to her work, and I can't find it, I sort of shrug because I expect her to have access to planets-full of books I don't. But you're just down the street, so I have hope.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The Minuteman library system has a fair quantity of Mitchison, though you will almost certainly have to do between-branches requesting for it; that's how I got this one. The Boston Public system has a different although overlapping fair quantity, and one can use a Minuteman card there. I think there's also some non-circulating Mitchison at the main BPL branch at Copley. Her most readily findable books are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, which even turns up in bookstores, and Travel Light, which is in print from Small Beer Press. The ones I like best, The Delicate Fire and Memoirs of a Spacewoman, are not terribly findable, not in the local library systems, and very high on my list of books I Really Really Want. That said, I've never read a thing by her that wasn't fascinating, so whatever the library will cough up for you is worthwhile.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the P. L. Travers.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

You are quite welcome. There's a bit in the book where she mentions Mary Poppins in the same breath as Kali, which was one of the more disorienting moments I've had while reading lately.