Sister blogs

I’d like to give a quick shout out for Calmgrove’s two sister blogs. MyNewShy is a photoblog, while Zenrinji has a mix of micropoetry and flash fiction, humour and seriousness.

I am planning revamps of both blogs in the next little while, both in appearance and in frequency of posts (which have been rather irregular in recent months) though not much in content.

Do feel free to visit these sites and look through the archives, but fear not — the chief virtue of the posts are their brevity. I’ll leave verbosity to Calmgrove.

Shopping malls and snow globes

Late medieval woodcut of Death with scythe and hourglass

Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
Discworld novel 11
Corgi 1992 (1991)

What happens when Death fails to claim humans who die? What happens to their bodies, their consciousness, their life force? And what are the consequences for a world in which this calamity takes place?

Terry Pratchett’s famous character Death, who only converses in small capitals, has been ‘retired’ by Azrael, “the Great Attractor, the Death of Universes, the beginning and end of time” — or the Angel of Death as our monotheistic religions see him. With his scythe and faithful mount Binky he descends on a Discworld farm; here, as Bill Door, he is taken on as a farmhand by Miss Renata Flitworth. Elsewhere on Discworld, and especially in Ankh-Morpeth, people are ceasing to die: witness Windle Poons, the oldest wizard in the world, who after death turns into a zombie. In trying to find a point to his new afterlife he joins the Fresh Start Club (other members include werewolves, vampires, a banshee and a bogeyman) and starts to note curious events unfolding — things like ovoid snow globes appearing, supermarket trollies multiplying and swear words taking physical form.

Blurred focus

March has been a bit of an unfocused month as far as the mainstay of this blog is concerned: books and reviews. A few excuses come to mind, but to be honest they’re not worth repeating. So, what have I achieved?

Alienation versus destruction

From a photograph looking north toward The Cloisters, taken a month before it opened in May 1938

Timothy B Husband “Creating the Cloisters”:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 70, no. 4 (Spring, 2013)

Published in 2013 to mark the 75th anniversary of The Cloisters in New York, “Creating the Cloisters” documents the origins, development during the 1920s and ’30s and eventual opening of this ‘landmark’ museum, its unveiling taking place the year before war ripped Europe apart for the second time in two decades. The Cloisters is the branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art “dedicated,” as it proclaims, “to the art, architecture, and gardens of medieval Europe.” Sited at the city’s highest point on the northern tip of Manhattan, the museum overlooks the Hudson River and the Palisades on the opposite bank, and is regarded as a pre-eminent jewel in New York’s crown. But a little over eighty years ago this site was largely a bare rock with a scatter of unrelated buildings.

Towards a neurodiverse world

https://openclipart.org/detail/229515/multicolored-jigsaw-puzzle-pieces

Steve Silberman: NeuroTribes:
the legacy of autism and how to think smarter
about people who think differently
Foreword by Oliver Sacks
Allen & Unwin 2016 (2015)

I have to admit that this wasn’t quite what I was expected when I began it. I was looking forward to an updated discussion of what autism actually is and how people not actually on the spectrum can learn to think about those who are on it. Instead I found I was reading a 500-page doorstop of a book which provided complex case histories and followed a rigid but discursive timeline down from the 18th century. Much of the time I felt that the promises contained in the title and subtitle (particularly on describing autism’s ‘legacy’) and a confused impression about the book’s targeted audience (was it the general public or those directly affected by autism?) were being lost in a catalogue of contradictory opinions, varying terminology and distressing detail.

But then I realised that there was method in this apparent madness. By examining the general public’s confused reactions to autism’s manifestations over the centuries and the conflicting diagnoses and prognoses offered when individuals exhibited the condition Silberman was able to build up a picture of what autism was not; how those with the condition presented in a multiplicity of ways; and how — after many years seen as passive victims who might or might not be ‘cured’ — a significant number of those on the spectrum have started to self-advocate and be proactive in proclaiming its potential.

Paradox

Rainbow Rowell Kindred Spirits Macmillan 2016

“Kindred Spirits” is a novella the bestselling US author wrote especially for World Book Day 2016 in the UK and Ireland. Its sixty-odd pages tell a sweet story of how teenage Star Wars fan Elena determines to show her independence of mind by joining a queue at her local cinema, in Omaha, for a first showing of Episode VII of the franchise. She has high hopes of being part of a tribe of fellow enthusiasts, sharing the bonhomie and exuberance that she anticipates from her understanding of such occasions. But she is disappointed that, four days before doors open, she is third in a line of only three, and that it remains so for a good many days. With so many things to contend with — her mom’s disapproval, the cold December nights, and anxieties about the call of nature and what she considers her “mid-trovert” temperament (being neither introvert nor extravert) — she fears she won’t last the four days and instead yield to the lure of home comforts.

Her fellow travellers are Troy and Gabe, with whom she has to establish a working relationship where she had instead expected the anonymity of the crowd. Troy is the garrulous confident one while Gabe is taciturn and self-contained. Elena, feeling as a newbie a natural loss of confidence, is concerned that not having seen Episodes 1 to 3 will result as well in loss of face. Everything seems to be militating against her attempt at independence. But the mini-crisis that arrives is not what she expected, nor is the fallout from that what she anticipated.

This is a delightful short story, exactly catching the angst of being a teenager, especially the sense of simultaneously being different while yet wanting to conform and belong. Balancing this paradox is, for Elena, both painful and yet delicious. For readers it must also be satisfying, as they decide whether they too feel kindred spirits with Elena and her new acquaintances — perhaps just like Star Wars fans feel they’re kindred spirits with Leia, Han and Luke.

Children of Silence

The Children of Silence: map diagrammatic, not to scale

I apologise for the length of this post: do please skip it if you want, I won’t be offended! And I apologise for neglecting recent posts from blogs I follow, I’ve got a bit behind because of ‘stuff’ cropping up — nothing bad, I hasten to add.

---

In a series of posts I’ve been exploring the country of New Cumbria and its capital of Bath Regis. You won’t find these on conventional maps because they appear in one of the Wolves Chronicles, Joan Aiken’s series of alternate history novels set in a 19th century where Britain is stilled ruled by the Stuarts. The Stolen Lake places the young heroine Dido in an alternative South America, part of which is ruled by a mysterious Queen Ginevra. I’ve previously looked at the main personages (the ‘who’) and the timeline of the narrative (the ‘when’), and following three posts on New Cumbria’s geography (the ‘where’) I’d like now to examine some of the themes that permeate the novel (the ‘what’) — but that also requires us to consider a bit more of the geography of this Andean landscape.

Wales and Tolkien

Map of Middle Earth by Chris Taylor and Chris Guerette
http://www.ititches.com/middleearth/me.pdf

In ‘Where was The Shire?’ I mentioned a tradition, local to the Vale of Usk, claiming that Tolkien had not only written part of The Lord of the Rings in Talybont-on-Usk, Powys, Wales but also based his notion of The Shire — the hobbit homeland — on aspects of the Black Mountains landscape. Huge questions and objections had loomed large in my mind however, and it soon became clear that I wasn’t not alone in doubting the likelihood of this recent ‘tradition’. I then promised a follow-up post, and here it is.

Castelophiles only

Part of Cardiff Castle, its facade a mix of medieval, Georgian and Victorian Gothic Revival

Gerald Morgan Castles in Wales: A Handbook
Y Lolfa 2008

It’s often claimed that, per square mile, Wales has the largest number of castles in the world.¹ Whether it’s the Welsh bigging themselves up or one of those memes that’s just accepted, it’s certainly true that the country has over 600 examples. As Wales is over 8000 square miles — nearly 20,800 square kilometres — in area,² this means there is a castle for every 13 sq miles (35 sq km) of land. Nowadays that works out at around one castle for every 5000 head of population, whereas in the Middle Ages, when the inhabitants of Wales may have fluctuated between 150K and 300K, each castle was on average meant to overawe between 250 and 500 Welshmen and -women. That’s some comment on the fears of the mostly Norman and Plantagent overlords who built them and on the rightfully bolshie attitudes of the native peoples.

When we imagine castles it’s odds-on we picture something like Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle, partly modelled on the 19th-century castle at Neuschwanstein, or perhaps one of the French chateaux of the Loire. The fact is that castles come in all shapes and sizes and with varying degrees of function. Gerald Morgan makes this point very clearly in his introduction to this Welsh castle handbook: while the simplest definition could be ‘a medieval European fortified stronghold’ (thus excluding prehistoric earthworks, Roman camps and Victorian follies and fancies, for example) it can include everything from ringworks and motte-and-bailey structures to fortified manor houses and walled palaces, as well as the great military showpieces that typify the Welsh castle in the popular mind.

Scattergun execution

Alice Liddell in the 1860s

Gregory Maguire After Alice
Headline 2016 (2015)

The title is the absolute epitome of what this novel is: a kaleidoscope of conflicting contradictions. Is it a literal description of us readers following Alice and the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole? Is After Alice instead an acknowledgement that we can’t ever return to the state of innocence that was children’s literature before the world experienced Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? Or rather is it a modern retelling based on Alice, a meditation on the themes the classic suggests but rewritten for a 21st-century readership? Perhaps it is all of these things, or even none of them.

In fact, is it about Alice at all? Was the Alice of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland the historical Alice Liddell or merely a literary persona, and are any of these the same as the Alice of Maguire’s novel, whom we discover is actually one Alice Clowd? As Carroll’s Alice remarked, curiouser and curiouser. Lots of questions, then, in search of answers.

Why alternate worlds?

World map from the Ulm edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia 1482 (public domain image)

Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It’s a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it. Therefore, if you write about something, hopefully you write about something that’s better or more interesting than circumstances as they now are, and that way you hope to make a step towards it.
— Interview with Joan Aiken, Locus Magazine (May 1998)

Inverted Commas 2: The modern world viewed alternatively

In May 1998 Joan Aiken was interviewed for Locus Magazine, which now bills itself as The Magazine and Website of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field. An excerpt from that interview is available online, entitled ‘Joan Aiken: Wolves and Alternate Worlds’. Soon to be published at the time of the interview was another episode in her Wolves Chronicles, Limbo Lodge (1999), titled Dangerous Games in the US.

I quote this passage because, in times of great ferment, many people feel powerless in the face of forces larger than themselves. Certain powerful individuals do seem to have a vision of where the world is going (even if it’s only back to a past viewed through distorting spectacles) but many others, who don’t share this vision, sense themselves in a living nightmare, rushed towards some malign future where nothing is certain — except that nothing will be certain.

A celebration of true magic

This is a repost of a review first published 26th March 2014
and republished here to mark #MarchMagics and #DWJMarch,
a celebration of all things Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett

Diana Wynne Jones The Islands of Chaldea
completed by Ursula Jones
HarperCollins Children’s Books 2014

Fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones would have been 80 this year. Since her death on March 26th 2011 some fans have designated March as Diana Wynne Jones Month — by reading, reviewing and discussing her novels they felt that this would be “a way to turn mourning to celebration on the anniversary of Diana’s death”. The third #dwjmonth (also tagged #dwjmarch) is being observed as I write [March 2014].

This year was extra special: her final novel, completed by her sister Ursula (an author in her own right), was published just in time for a celebration of the woman and her work. As a result of suggesting — rather cheekily, I thought — that I was Diana’s “greatest fan”, I was lucky enough to win one of ten copies offered in a competition by her British publishers. As always with posthumous novels the worry is, will this work be up to her usual standard, or will disappointment cloud the reputation that she painstakingly established for herself?