pameladean

Every time Wednesday goes by with my friends posting descriptions of what they have read or are reading, I wonder vaguely, "Why am I not reading more?"

The answer, of course, is that I am reading ALL THE TIME, but it's the same thing; the not-quite-finished novel that I'm writing and revising. Very occasionally I break out wildly and read sections of the books that it is a sequel to, but mostly I just read it, the oldest stuff, the middle stuff, the newest stuff, and shove it around until it looks right or my eyes cross, whichever comes first. Guess which comes first.

I think the last books I finished were all rereads: the entire Tony Hillerman series; Nevada Barr's first Anna Pigeon novel; and Hilary McKay's Saffy's Angel, because it's always time for that book, at least in my head. I'm going very slowly through an amazing collection of essays by Harriet Walter. People reading this journal are perhaps most likely to recall her as the person who played Harriet Vane in the actually good TV adaptation of some of Dorothy Sayers's novels. But she's had a long and very distinguished career on the stage as well. The book is called Brutus and Other Heroines, and I can't wait to read about her experiences playing in all-female casts of Shakespeare.

I am only as far as her discussion of Imogen in Cymbeline, which is riveting.

Finishing the book I'm writing would go further if things didn't keep getting in the way. I lost a lot of yesterday wrestling with the pharmacy system. Everybody in it was very helpful, except for me, as I had originally ordered a refill a bit late given when I would run out of medication, and then blithely assumed that the mail-order pharmacy would come through as fast as it usually does. I don't understand the Medicare prescription-drug pricing structure at all, but it results in my paying several hundred dollars for the first and last 90-day prescription of linagliptin every year, but only $47 for the middle two. (The plan I'm on pays about $1300 before I get socked with the remainder. Yikes.) The pharmacy always calls to make sure it's okay to charge my credit card for the expensive winter supply. I surmise from this that for a lot of people, probably one day including me, it is not okay, and therefore they aren't getting the medication they need. Thanks, Republicans. In any case, this time they were so busy they never did call me, so the prescription hung fire until I noticed it hadn't arrived, and then with rising alarm that the website still listed it as "being refilled." It all got straightened out, but this will teach me not to be sanguine about, well, anything.

My youngest brother was in town for a few days, and cooked us all a magnificent dinner. He is now a professional bass player, but for some years he was a professional vegetarian cook, and anything he provides is always delicious.

I will pretend there are five things up above, and make the post. My best wishes for a salubrious end to the year and for light in the darkness for all of you.

Pamela

The cats are still fine. They have done all the cat things: scampering (both of them), tail-chasing (Saffron), getting underfoot (mostly Cassie), demanding to be fed at the wrong times (both of them).

I finally received the Evenup Shoe Balancer that I ordered, which is a kind of sandal that is more or less bungied onto the shoe of one's uninjured foot, when one is wearing a walking cast or boot on the other foot. It's not infinitely adjustable, and it isn't supposed to get wet, and one is sternly enjoined against rapid walking or walking on lumpy surfaces like grass, gravel, or, I presume, snow. But it's still a great relief that the two pieces of my current footgear are now of approximately the same height. I made an incautiously fast turn while carrying a pot of boiling water and pasta to the sink, however, and there was a distinct wobble. NO RAPID WALKING, and no sudden changes of direction. But the various bits of hip, back, and knee that were complaining about my uneven gait have subsided quite a lot.

I'm poking at Going North, trying to decide whether I want to write an introduction to the short-story collection, and trying not to be too impatient. I don't need to cook tomorrow, so I might try doing some laundry. The excitement!

I also continue rereading Anthony Price and playing tag with the bad fairies.

Pamela

Jim Hines is doing a fundraiser for Transgender Michigan, and I've donated a set of autographed books. Details below:

Originally posted by jimhines at TGM Fundraiser: Autographed Books by Pamela Dean

I've donated one first-edition hardcover copy of each of The Dubious Hills and Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary to the Con or Bust auction. Bidding opens on May 25th. Even if you don't need a copy of either book, there is the usual amazing variety of other things to bid on -- dozens of books, of course, some signed, some not yet released by publishers; and everything else from custom-made chocolates and lovely jewellery, to novel and short-story critiques by people who know what they're doing

Here are the links to my books:

http://con-or-bust.org/2016/05/pamela-deans-the-dubious-hills-signed-hardcover/

http://con-or-bust.org/2016/05/pamela-deans-juniper-gentian-and-rosemary-signed-hardcover/


Pamela

In addition to the books glanced at in my last post, I have read:

Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding. This came from my tea group. Um. It's skillfully enough written, and I liked the incidental details and some of the characters. I nearly put it down at least three times. Unlike my experience with Carol Berg's Transformation, which I was glad I had stuck with, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been better off just quitting with this one. It has two parallel story lines, one set in the late 1990's and the other in 1848. Both sets of characters are looking for the same thing, and both are studying the central texts of alchemy. One of the modern characters -- a poet, for all love, who should know better -- explains that if the alchemists had just explained what they were about in clear terms, the wrong people would pervert their work; whereas if they went on and on endlessly obfuscating and writing boring, terrible prose, only people who really cared would penetrate (word used advisedly) the secrets of the universe. Later in the book, Louisa, one of the 1848 characters whom I became fond of, is thinking about her research and the conclusions to be drawn from it, and though I was passionately interested in her quest and her story, I found myself actually nodding off. Louisa's thoughts had partaken too much of the nature of her research.

There's a lot of gender essentialism in this book; some of it is undercut by events, but the importance of heterosexual sex is underlined in a way that only became more annoying as the book went on. The endings of both stories come to melodramatic climaxes (sorry) and then, oddly, fizzle out; the great promises and deeds and discoveries fade away, without any impression that I could see that that might be the point.

I was probably really the wrong audience for this one.

In stark contrast, I read Sherwood Smith's Coronets and Steel and Revenant Eve. I read them in the wrong order, which was immediately apparent from the "our story so far" passages candidly provided by the narrator of the second book. But I had misplaced Coronets and Steel, so I just went on reading.



I always have a bit of an initial struggle with Sherwood's viewpoints, whatever they are in a given work. It's not that she is doing anything wrong, but that our brains work so differently that I have to feel my way for a bit until I get used to what's happening. In Revenant Eve, she's doing a curious and fascinating thing. Kim is the narrator, but she's supernaturally stuck in the position of an observer. The story, until near the end, is happening to another girl in the early nineteenth century, who travels from the Caribbean to Napoleonic France and then into a country that doesn't exist in our universe in eastern Europe. Kim can't even see what is happening unless Aurelie, the girl in history, is paying attention to it. The only thing she can do is to try to win Aurelie's trust, and to decide how much she should reveal about what is going to happen in the near future. You can tell that she's ordinarily a very active person. She is skilled in ballet and fencing. Her modern language and ideas entwine and contrast with Aurelie's more formal and antiquated ones. The story is complicated and richly detailed, with dashes of humor. I enjoyed it enormously.

I have said that Kim is an active person, but I had no idea how active until I read Coronets and Steel. Do not kidnap Kim. She will jump out of or down from anything, however fast-moving or high, to thwart you, and she has a biting sense of humor. "The Ransom of Red Chief" is nothing by comparison. This is a less complicated, faster-paced, and lighter book, but it isn't just fluff. Kim's character sees to that.



I think that's all until I manage to hit an actual Wednesday again.

Pamela

I don't know why I'm so thoroughly out of the habit of posting. One of the things I like about reading my friends-list is the combination of homely everyday detail and really chewy intellectual posts. I am not very good at making the latter -- I start them, revise them, get bogged down in some detail of nuance or research, and eventually lose them somewhere. But I can do daily life.

The juncoes are here. I was concerned for a week or two that the Norway maples would not get a chance to turn yellow, instead dropping their leaves madly while still green; but they have managed, and if I walk to the end of my block and look back, there is the proper tunnel of gold, leaves drifting down onto the black asphalt of the street. They are not mallorns, and there is certainly no asphalt in Lothlorien, but the effect seems Tolkienesque in any case.

It was a peculiar summer in many ways. As I mentioned at the time, I cracked or bruised a rib at the end of April, and just when that was healing up nicely I got the Wiscon Death Cold and coughed for five or six weeks. While I put in basil, mint, thyme, and two tomato plants much earlier than I had managed in 2010, only the herbs thrived. I forgot about the thyme and have not used it for anything. David and Lydy kept the mint well pruned by harvesting it for their drinks, and it is probably going to take over the world next year. Eric and I were going to make spring rolls using the fresh mint and basil, but we never did. The basil is unhappy with the frost or near-freezes we've been having at night, but the mint and thyme are still looking fresh and happy. I should put some thyme in the soup this evening. We had a pot of rosemary on the front porch, too, and I did make good use of that; but I failed to bring it inside the first night temperatures threatened to go below freezing, and it gave up and died.

Raphael and I did fairly well with hiking, under the circumstances -- my rib injury and the horrible virus from Wiscon weren't the half of it. June was cold and rainy; then Minnesota Republicans forced the shut-down of the government because they have an insane desire to control women and oppress poor people, so the state parks closed on July 1. Raphael and I were up on the North Shore at the time, at Temperance River State Park. The park, I think like most of the parks thereabouts, is divided by Highway 61. We started with the lake side. When we went out to the lake, there were no notices. When we came back, all over were simple printed pages saying that the park was closed. We went across the highway and up the river anyway. We were there because somebody in the 1990's had seen boreal snaketails in the powerline clearance. They did not appear, but the river and its rocky surrounds were spectacular. The powerline clearance runs over a tilted slab of basalt, broken up by water, scattered with patches of thin sand shading to soil in which hawkweed and other wildflowers grow, with here and there a juniper or an aspen sapling. A young deer with just the velvet stubs of antlers wandered out of the woods beyond the clearance and set about grazing. He knew we were there, but he did not give us any wide-eyed paranoid looks, did not freeze and think about running. He looked us in the eye, swaggered, and ignored us. His dignity was upset, however, by the fact that his antlers obviously itched. He had to stop from time to time and scratch them with a hind leg, which was both impressive and hilarious.

We had planned to stop at Gooseberry Falls and Split Rock on our way back south, on the grounds that the parks would still be in perfectly good order even though officially close. However, both parks include rest areas that had been blocked off with barricades, so we had to give up, cursing the Republicans in the legislature. Even if they had behaved like reasonable beings, the closure of St. Croix State Park would have distorted our hiking year. We did have several excellent visits to Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge.

Eric was working night shift until July, and then a classic mid-continental heat wave moved in, so we didn't do any hiking until much later in the year. We made one road trip to look at fall color, staying in LaCrosse but spending much of our time at Great River Bluffs State Park. We did also visit Perrot, avoiding any bluffs this year but hiking along the Riverview trail, where we saw an egret sitting atop a muskrat lodge; and also along the Black Walnut Trail, which was more hilly than we expected but full of goodness, including the biggest black walnut tree either of us had ever seen.

Writing has been frankly terrible. I don't even want to try to come up with the number of words I've written. I certainly don't need even the fingers of one hand to do so. I'm feeling a little cheerier since I did a reading of the new second chapter of the Amazing Expanding and Shrinking Novel at Conjecture -- many thanks to Laura Krentz for asking me. It was useful to see that the new structure actually worked rather than being a heap of disassembled incidents bunged together with semi-colons. I'm looking at my present projects with somewhat more equanimity, at least.

Aristophanes, although bony, seems to be thriving. A failed attempt to remove a mat from his belly us to the emergency vet late on the day before I was to go to Wisconsin with Eric. They were very nice to us, calling the wound a grooming injury, as if he had done it himself; I guess some cats do damage themselves yanking out mats. The vet tech who brought him back to us also exclaimed, "You guys, he's in such good shape for his age! You must take very good care of him!" He had to have ten days' worth of antibiotics, which Raphael heroically put down his throat; and he had to wear a blue cone, which he bore with great insouciance, much to my surprise. He did have epic grooming sessions when it was taken off though. He seems fine now. When I take him out for walks, he mostly patrols his yard, sniffing carefully, and then goes back in. But a few days ago he tore across the front yard to the maple on the boulevard, ran six or seven feet up its trunk, dropped down, tore through the side yard to the back and all the way to the garage, tore back to his favorite mulberry and ran up that, and then tore to the back door and pawed at it to be let in. I must have been a very funny sight, lumbering after him fast enough that the leash was never taut but quietly enough that he wouldn't take fright at the MONSTER FOLLOWING HIM.

I'm rereading the Aubrey/Maturin books, finding all much better than I remember. This is especially gratifying for the volumes after The Thirteen-Gun Salute, though I still expect to be very annoyed with O'Brien for one or two things nearer the end.

I am reading all of you, but I tend to forget that I actually can comment now, Opera's update having apparently fixed my problem with LJ. I'll try to provide more blather soon.

Pamela