Barn Pixie

Well - we have I have now reached the part of my calendar where the things that were going to happen are. The last two weeks felt like an endless parade of cancellations and postponements and additional cancellations; now we are into the territory of things that would have happened. Like an alternate pants-leg of time. Old me is finishing up the Small Engine Repair class, and getting ready for a printmaking class. Old Alice is in New Zealand, and will be joining her ship tomorrow. I am fine here and now doing my isolation/plague/social distancing thing until I think about it too hard, or look at the calendar and see the things I forgot to delete from it and I get this hideous pang of emotion that trips me up every time. It is a different kind of misery sorrow sadness feeling, and I am working on thinking about it.


I think I need to reread some Pratchett. Jingo leaps to mind. As do most of the rest of the City Watch books. Good reading for troubled times. That should all be capitalized, you know.

Well, the little one is better and no one else is puking, yet.

I have been rereading Sayers' Peter and Harriet books, just skipping the non-Harriet narratives, and this time I could see some of the apparatus at work. I 've read all of them often enough that I know the details of the mystery, and really I am just reading it for the piffle and the characters. I am starting to understand fanfic, because if anyone was writing decent Vane/Wimsey fanfic I'd read it and even buy it in a heartbeat because there simply are not enough of them.

The unexpected reading for me this time was Busman's Honeymoon. I could see which pieces were part of a play, and which had been layered on to lend versimilitude. There were some sections that were extremely staged, or that felt like stage directions translated into descriptive prose. I hadn't seen them so clearly before, and it startled me. I still love best the letters and journal entries that go before the wedding. All the different points of view that go into our seeing the wedding make me so Happy!

Finally I found a copy of Jilll Paton Walsh's Thrones, Dominations which is written from notes Sayers left for a follow-on book. This felt like another place where I could tell the difference between the notes from Sayers and Walsh's interpolations. The book is much more stylized (?) than previous books - there has to be a better word but I can't think of it. The book contrasts two married couples; Peter and Harriet and another couple where the woman was "rescued" from poverty and a working life by a wealthy man. It almost feels like a polemic on the topic of How Marriages Should Work. Clearly Peter and Harriet are Doing It Right because they are happy. Clearly they are happy because they treat eachother as fully human and reasoning, rather than as handy but limited types.(I may have that backwards - they could be happy because they are doing it right) The other couple looks like a fairytale but they are Unhappy, and short pieces of their internal monologues reveal that they are Doing it Wrong. Somehow the failure to let each couple be happy in their own way is what distracts and distresses me the most. If there had been room for different pairs to have mutually mysterious or even unappealing ways of interacting I would have had a much easier time of it. While it was nice to spend time with Harriet and Peter, it is not a very satisfying read for me.

Walsh wrote another Wimsey/Vane book on her own, with fewer notes and even more interpolation and I like it even less. I don't think it is the fault of the author, at least not entirely. I think, after reading all the Lord Peter short stories this afternoon followed by an essay by Carolyn Heilbrun (who wrote the Amanda Cross mysteries) that Sayers lost interest in Peter, and I'm not sure anyone else can animate him. I feel the same way about Kermit - without Henson, it is merely a Kermit impersonator, sometimes getting it right, more often getting it wrong just slightly off. Which leads me to think that fanfic probably wouldn't work after all. Which is a gigantic bummer, but at lelast I have these books I can revisit when the going gets dark.

I was reading Jo Walton's LJ, and she mentioned a long post on Truepenny's (which I read for the Due South commentary as much as anything) which had a coherent critique of Bujold among others. After some determined rooting about, I found it, and realized in following the long comments that I had a lovely reading list. So I have been working my way down it, revisiting DSayers (Strong Poison) and trying Eleanor Arnason's Ring of Swords and Maureen F. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang.

OK, I just went back and reread the post, which, while awesome, did not mention any of the books I thought I had read about. So now I have to go find the post, somewhere.

I hate losing stuff.

ETA: further digging about found me THIS (Hurrah!) and you should pore over that as well. Genre Conventions. And Why Women's Work Must Be Done. aaaand enough of the Significant Caps, thank you.

'K guys. Fess up. I know one of you on my flist is responsible.

Someone, some where, mentioned ebear's Kit and Dunnett's Lymond in the same breath, and I followed up on it like the avid reader I am, and Holy Crap Roman Empire... I have been head down in the end of the reign of Queen Mary in England and the young Mary, Queen of Scots, and swept across the landscape from Scotland to France and down to Malta and Turkey and Stamboul (was Constantinople) for the last week. It is making me short with my family and very unhappy unless I am reading the Lymond chronicles except when I have to stop because another of my favorite characters is dying in a hideous and 16th century fashion.

Whoever it was, thank you, I think. There are some wonderful parts, but most are scary and ugly and nasty brutish and short. But the writing... I am smitten, and kept at arm's length at the same time, a joyful and uncomfortable place to be.

You'll excuse me, I have to go see if they're really dead.

Gah.