Running Rings Around Her

I finished Dorothy Dunnett's The Ringed Castle just before I started making dinner. (Lemon artichoke pesto with chunks of asparagus, tomato, red bell pepper, and mushroom. Served on cheese tortellini. With salads. Now you know, and aren't you glad.) It didn't end. The Ringed Castle, I mean; dinner is definitively over and done. I mean, it ended, but it didn't end end. And I have pameladean's copy of Checkmate sitting on my desk here, riiiiight here, not quite in arm's reach but close enough that if I leaned I could get it. But I did not. I picked up dd_b's copy of The Memory Trap instead (another Anthony Price), and I think Mr. Price is doing better than almost any other author I know at making the transition through glasnost from the standpoint of a western writer whose plots depend a good deal on internationl politics. I think it's that Price's characters were not static anyway, like some spy novel characters are. There is no perpetual thirtysomething in the Price books. People grow old, die, spawn, retire, wander off. The change was written into the books from the very start. It's a good thing to write in. It's why the Vorkosigan books aren't zombie versions of their former selves, I think. Although Gorbachev probably had rather little to do with it.

But that wasn't where I was going. I was going to The Ringed Castle. Can you tell I'm tired? I did not authorize it to be only 8:45. I was almost sure I'd signed off on 10:30 at the very earliest. It has been that kind of day. Week. Month. Well...yes. You get the picture. It's not just that it's that kind of life for me, either. Lately has been more so.

Ahem. The Ringed Castle. It had Dr. Dee in it, and it didn't end at all conclusively, and this is exactly what I mean by authors earning things. Dorothy Dunnett has convinced me that she will continue to tell an interesting story, so while I said some words my mom doesn't want to hear from me when I saw Dr. Dee on the page, there was no question that I would keep reading. No question at all. These books, they're very good for days when one is feeling slightly cruddy, because they're just so self-indulgent. A book like that will not get stern with one for lying propped on pillows with a mug of tea. It will not chide one to get up and take notes and think about what one is doing next with one's own work. All that can come later. It will urge one to keep reading, now, maybe one more chapter? Of course one more.

And Philippa. Ohhhhhhhh, love the Philippa.

It being not yet 9:00, I suppose I'd better do something with the rest of my evening. Notecards? Yes, probably. Sigh. Maybe some of the easier notecards. The harder ones can wait for later in the week. Except that I'm down to mostly hard ones. Well, fee.

Three notes on childhood assumptions and sea serpents

1. From talking to various people, especially yhlee: I always assumed the gods were mortal, because I remember being about 5 years old and certainly no more than 6 when I read the bit of Norse saga that says, "Men die, cattle die, even the gods themselves must someday die." And it stuck with me and warped my brain and here I am before you today.

I also assume that hacking people to bits with axes is an acceptable thing for preschoolers to read about, and to play, because, well, I did, and how else were you to slay sea serpents?

2. Along similar lines and from reading papersky, I never fussed about whether boys were doing something or girls were doing something in a book and what it meant in my life, because I knew that if I was there, I would be in charge of organizing the interesting bits. That was just...that was just how things were. It was an immense relief to run into other people who could sometimes be The Organizer and still have the activity in question be something of interest, but it was a role I was taking for granted before starting kindergarten. One of my best preschool friends was a little boy. I instructed him in the slaying of sea serpents. So there was no question about boys or girls, because boys didn't know that kind of thing and girls were also pretty much impossible. And grown-ups, too, you just couldn't count on them to know anything of value at all. You had to make do with whoever you could find who knew how to do such things or could take instruction. The world was not long enough on sea-serpent-slayers of either sex that gender really came into it much. Nor age, either.

I think this generalizes to other aspects of my friendships than merely slayings and persists to the present day.

3. I have no idea how sea serpents attained such prominence in my child brain. It can't just have been The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and D'Aulaire's Norse Gods and Giants. I think maybe it was, though.

And this doesn't mean I'm writing The Mark of the Sea Serpent at all tonight. But I am writing The Mark of the Sea Serpent eventually.