Just checking in; Peter Dickenson; Giant Bugs

[pameladean]

Still here, still writing trip report. It's taking forever. I cannot do it except in strict chronological order. I'm glad I don't write my books like that.

I have copies of all three Secret Country reprints, and they are a completely beautiful set.

I mowed the lawn. I read a bunch of the Peter Dickenson books kindly provided by Papersky a long time ago. I began to have the vague feeling that I had read them already, but I had not; it's just that the ones I happened to light on have similar structures and concerns, and I think I started several of them and then put them down. In any case, I read Death of a Unicorn, which I liked very much; The Yellow Room Conspiracy, which had a lot of good moments but was not as pleasing; and Hindsight, which was very clever but very unpleasant in its total effect, though I enjoyed reading it while I was doing so. I am generally finding Dickenson in these books to be way too Freudian, but if I can persuade myself that I am reading about an alternate universe I get on all right with that. I also cannot stand his female characters when they are being looked at by a male character, though if they tell their own stories I like them much better; this is true even of something like The Lively Dead, my current favorite of his "mainstream" books.

I have mown the lawn and am about to start on weeding. Today my mother and I had lunch at her house and then went to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, mostly to see the Giant Bugs. This is a travelling exhibit of much, much larger-than-life insects made of wood. The first dragonfly, in a fountain, and the three giant ants, made of willow wands with polished wooden eyes, were the best; the praying mantis was extremely creepy, especially when you could see its head rearing over the steep slope it was on the downside of. These objects were about 12 feel long or high and very beautiful in the sunlight. There was a butterfly too (wings made of forest fungi for the mosaic effect) and a ladybug that, looking as it did like a giant turtle, was not entirely persuasive.

I am trying to let my fictional works in progress percolate while I write my trip report. I am extremely depressed about the prospects of ever having anything else published again by anybody at all, but this is mere foolishness and self-indulgence. It has to have its day, however, or I won't be able to get on with anything.

My cat is still dusty. Or rather, dusty again.

Pamela

Comments

Re: Last Unicorn kind of horrified spoilers

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten that - I was remembering the end but not everything that led up to it. Longer than I thought since I last read it. But although she was writing, wasn't it very deliberately money-making stuff? (I thought there was some sadness over the encounter at the end with the woman who had been so affected by her early columns.) But I may be misremembering.