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Winged Histories

I made a tiny bit more progress. I liked this description of hope:

I know what I saw: hope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. that hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal.

Also, not quite a title drop, but:

Now often at night it seems as if there is something abroad in the wood with wings or something that breathes as it sits upon my chest. I get up in the night and go to the flap of the tent and open it ... The wind blows in my face and shakes the trees and powders me with rain. The cold rain and the warm dog by my leg. And far away in the dark the lights of the bridge. Everywhere the sound of wings.

The Souls of Black Folk

I finished chapter 2. The fine-grained-ness of the history, and the recentness, from WEB DuBois's perspective, gives me the same sensation I had reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. There's stuff there that gets flattened out in more-distant-from-the-time histories.

The beginning of these lines at the end of the chapter reminded me of the famous MLK "I have a dream" speech--only more somber:

I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there on the King's Highway sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

Consolation Songs: Optimistic Speculative Fiction for a Time of Pandemic
I'm reading this anthology in order. I've read five stories so far, and the ones I've enjoyed most have been "Girls Who Read Austen," by Tansy Rayner Roberts, which features protagonist Scylla and a succession of monstrous roommates and was very funny, and "A Hundred and Seventy Storms," by Aliette de Bodard, which was tense in a good way, as the mind portion of a mindship (the gooey human part, including brain, as opposed to the metallic ship part) has to weather a violent solar storm separated from its body. There's a great sense of family and family drama, people trying to balance the various demands put on them--it was good. Next up is a story by Adrian Tchaikovsky--looking forward to that one.

Current Music: Johnny Flynn: Queen Bee

I've done only a very little reading this week.

Long form:

I read a little more of The Winged Histories, but this may just be something I need to come back to at a later date. Will keep reading a bit more, though, because I do love the writing, so casual and graceful with insights:

I put down my things, and he noticed the swordbox. "Oh! Ha, ha! Did you bring that thing? Ha, ha!" he wheezed, leaning on a couch. "A joke," he explained to my Aunt Firvaud, who regarding me with a searing stare. "Our Tavis used to be so fond of swordplay."

"I still am," I said, though I did not feel fond of anything. I thought I would never be fond of anything again."

How Tavis feels: you know it so entirely from those last two sentences, and you know how the aunt feels, and you can sense the impotence of the uncle .... yeah, you know writing this is persuading me to read on.

I also started reading WEB DuBois's The Souls of Black Folks, which I've been meaning to read for years. I had to open up a document to store all the quotes I wanted to remember--it's going to be most of the book, I can tell already.

For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

WEB DuBois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and earlier in the chapter he shares this memory--and it feels shamefully fresh:

I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

Short form:

You can read this flash story in under five minutes, but it's both funny and profound and may lift your spirits: "Addison and Julia Tell the Truth to Pemaquid Beach"

And here's some fan art I made for This Is How You Lose the Time War. It's a moment when Blue saves the life of child-Red, though Red doesn't realize it at the time.
( it's a bit large, so it's behind a cut )

Current Music: Kittie Harlow: Fight the War

I've started reading Sofia Samatar's The Winged Histories, and it's got the same finely realized scene setting that I loved in A Stranger in Olondria, but unfortunately the first of the four sections in it focuses on a soldier, and the first part of the soldier's narrative is bloody and depressing in a way that I'm not really in the mood for. But I'm going to push on, because there's more to this section than the war part, and it's only one of four sections in the novel.

Here's what I mean by finely realized scene setting:

The chair was wrote with curious forms of dragons, dogs and rabbits and stranger creatures, goat-headed lions and winged dolphins. It stood alone beneath the trees, a little away from the house, covered with dust and dried leaves. Siski cleaned it off with the hem of her skirt.

--It's that last line: dusting it off with the hem of the skirt. Thinking to mention it, how vivid and present it makes the scene.

I also impulsively purchased the anthology

sovay mentioned, Consolations Songs: Optimistic Speculative Fiction for a Time of Pandemic, which features writing by several people on my friends list, and I promised a good friend of mine I'd read N.K. Jemison's The City We Became, which is his new favorite book of all time. Since he also really loved Ann Leckie's books and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time/Ruin, I feel like chances are good I'll like it. I also have some other things humming in the background that I keep meaning to get to--what's springing to mind as I type is Sue Burke's Interference, sequel to Semiosis, but there are many others.

A Stranger in Olondria
by Sofia Samatar
2013, Small Beer Press

Jervick, from the Tea Islands, is not only a stranger in Olondria, he’s a stranger in his homeland, too: someone educated in and besotted with the culture of a faraway land, schooled in letters in an oral society, able to recognize and make Olondrian allusions and references but bored by and ashamed of the place where he grew up. After his father dies, he travels to Olondria and briefly gets to experience the heady cosmopolitan existence he has dreamed of, in the consequence- and impact-free way strangers are both permitted and limited to. It’s kind of like being a ghost.

( Read more... )
Describing someone’s self-exile, Jervick reflects,

I see him with the sweat on his brow which has turned the color of tallow and imagine how he will flee to the ends of the earth, putting the fathomless sea between himself and this sweet, incautious girl, interring himself in a country of alien flowers.

A country of alien flowers. It’s a startling, memorable, beautiful book.

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/919286.html

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Entries tagged with sofia samatar

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