Silver track, and Railsea

[asakiyume]

My best friend in the night sky right now is Jupiter, so golden there below the Pleiades.

And here's a silver track. Don't fall off! The ground is poisonous! At least in Railsea.



Railsea, where the train captains lose limbs to the giant burrowing animals, and develop philosophies:

"You know how careful are philosophies," Naphi said. "How meanings are evasive. They hate to be parsed. Here again came the cunning of unreason. I was creaking lost, knowing that the ivory-coloured beast had evaded my harpoon & continued his opaque diggery, resisting close reading & a solution to his mystery. I bellowed, & swore that one day I would submit him to a sharp & bladey interpretation . . . I've had my blood & bone ingested by that burrowing signifier," she said, waving her intricately splendid arm. "A taunt, daring me to ingest him back."
China Miéville, Railsea (New York: Del Rey Books, 2012), 104-5.

Hahaha, litcrit speak.

And now I'm going to get back to making desperance's marmalade. I had to go buy some sugar (and so I saw Jupiter, and so I got my binoculars, but I couldn't see its moons, though the Internet promised I might--but then I turned the binoculars on the Plieades and saw an explosion of stars hidden from my unaided eye).

Comments

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

I find abandoned or not-much-used railway tracks very romantic, and very resurrection-y.

Because railways are pretty toxic, and yet the woods take back their territory so readily.

Where there's woods, of course. Deserts are much more precarious and fragile.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Everything about trains I love, and yeah, the liminality and magic of train tracks--to walk on rails is really to be between.

I hadn't thought about their toxicity, but there's that too, for sure. I remember one time noticing that they'd used some kind of herbicide to kill vegetation near an intersection with a road. Since I go foraging by train tracks, that gave me pause....

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Oh, shiny train track! So pretty; so evocative.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Right? I love train tracks.

[sovay]

And here's a silver track.

That would be a great frontispiece for Railsea.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I just need some huge and mysterious bits of salvage off by the side (which I could have put in the photo if I'd taken it in a slightly different place...)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

I suppose railway tracks make a good metaphor for time stretching into the future: for one thing, they're never perfectly straight; neither are they seamless, there's a clack at each join; finally, you don't walk to fall off...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

there's a clack at each join

--that's something else that's great about Railsea, the narrator's noticing the different sounds the train makes depending on its speed and the nature of the track it's running over:

The Medes accelerated. Sham tried to listen through his feet, as he'd been taught. A shift, he decided, from shrashshaa to drag'ndragun. He was learning the clatternames. (p 8)

Pretty cool :-)

[coffeesvp.livejournal.com]

Perfectly framed and beautiful photo of the railroad tracks.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Thank you--it was fun to balance on that bright silver line.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Lovely picture, and quite inspiring, thank you!

I think I need to re-read Railsea already.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying it so much! Might post another quote soon.