SYCORAX PINE

The Dragonfly on Privilege (and Hats)

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:02:00 +0000

Friday, January 27, 2012

The following is what this dragonfly is whispering in my ear.

Hats literalize the workings of privilege, Revelation #1:

Being fashionable can be exactly like wearing blinders...

Hats literalize the workings of privilege, Revelation #2:

...with the result that, in your cloche, the only path to self-preservation is the adoption of a sneeringly aristocratic head tilt, and a gaze that travels archly down your nose, now parallel to the floor. You think you look aloof and dashing. In fact you look myopic and contorted.

[These are corollaries to the Dorky Medievalist's first law of fashion, "I always wear heels when I teach hegemony."]

Snow White, Blood Red

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:23:00 +0000

Thursday, January 26, 2012

I hereby dub last weekend "Snow White, Blood Red," in keeping with Farfara's fairy tale theme.

Fairy tales happen here

It's so gorgeous with the snow falling that I'm beginning to regret telling everyone that winter (November-June) was a dull time to visit.

How is it that we can watch the sun set over the ocean from our house on the East Coast?
It's all about the Bay, baby.

In related news: why on earth don't we own a sled? Farfara Way has not yet realized its full potential.

This is where I read, of a sun-drenched evening when the snow turns every surface fiery.

The next morning, I tell D (in decidedly unfrigid Honolulu) how beautiful it is at Farfara, where the only things marring the snow are the prints of a bunny that made its way past in the night.

"A coyote-bunny hybrid?" D asks.

I consider this for a moment, trying to unearth its logic. I think it's that our coyotes, the Nova Scotian beasts who have taken the nearly unprecedented step of attacking human hikers, are thought to be wolf cross-breeds.

"If so," I finally say, "I'm a lot less worried about these coyotes, because they are less than a foot tall. And they hop, which, let's face it, isn't that scary."

"Clearly you have never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail," D replies.

Oh, but I have. And just like that, I've got one more thing to worry about.

Somnambulism and Vampire Coyotes

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:35:00 +0000

Saturday, Jan 21, 2012

A day or two ago I was bitching about an accident I had while washing dishes. Such was the fit of housewifely enthusiasm that took hold of me that I set to scrubbing a set of stainless steel measuring spoons with escalating (and increasingly imprecise) vigor. Finally my hand slipped, and although the spoons were not at all sharp, the edge of one made contact with the pad of my thumb so hard and fast that it gashed my skin open. The resulting wound was part bruise and part cut. In light of what happened next, I should have considered quitting my bitching.

You may also remember a somnambulist episode that I had a month and a half ago. It was the night before I was supposed to head off to Hawaii on a long trip, and my pre-travel sleep is always... erratic, at best. I gather that I'm quite an active sleeper. I talk, I walk, I've been known to instant message, and if you try to tell me that I'm just sleeping and should lie back down, I might just hit. All with only the vaguest memory left with me the next morning. On this particular night, I somehow managed to break a glass in my sleep. I woke up, on my knees next to the bed, mid-clean-up, with my hands filled with huge shards of glass. I wasn't hurt, but I can't describe it as my most soothing ever awakening.

I put the worst of the glass on the bedside table and went back to sleep, and a couple of hours later I woke at the crack of dawn and left town. For the next month, I only returned home long enough to crash for a few hours and then rush off again. During this time, I wearily picked my way around the part of the room that was still covered in shattered glass, launched myself in the vague direction of the bed, and was unconscious within seconds, sometimes before the bouncing had even calmed from my acrobatic entry.

Long story short, that glass didn't get cleaned up for five weeks. That's the kind of housekeeper I am, and why I can't have nice things, like pets or children. Or, apparently, real glasses. But although I'm slovenly, I'm also canny: in the course of this five weeks, I never once cut myself on the broken glass.

Until last night. I was collecting recycling from all over the house, and frolicked, shoeless, too close to the bag holding the shards of glass. I brushed against the edge of it with the inside of my arch, and then looked down in shock: my right sock was already soaked in blood, and it hadn't been more than a second.

Things I learned from this incident:

Feet bleed a lot, and quickly. It took me about thirty seconds to realize that this was an effect of blood pressure. "Get the cut above the level of your heart," I kept muttering to myself. Well, let me tell you, that's something of a challenge if the cut is on your foot. Yogic training notwithstanding, the next minute found me in a position devoid of dignity: turtlelike, on my back on the kitchen floor, one leg in the air with both hands clamping a paper towel to the wound.
It only takes ten seconds of bleeding to make it look like you've committed a murder in your kitchen. Seriously: it was everywhere, and it was lurid. If I had seen it as a crime scene on TV, my only comment would have been, "Pshaw. Everyone knows blood isn't that red." Well, it's bloody red. I'm here to tell you.
It's surprisingly hard to get bloodstains out of polished concrete floors, even if (in a fit of good housekeeping, because you've learned your lesson) you wash them as soon as the bleeding has stopped, and before you actually attend to cleaning and bandaging the wound. I kept thinking, "Should I be bleaching this?" and then "Who are you expecting, CSI?".
When you live alone in Nova Scotia, the monologue that follows this sort of incident goes something like this: "OK, pull it together, Sycorax. You've stopped the bleeding, now get rid of the bloody paper towels and get a bandage. Wait. So where, in the six-part garbage collection system, do the bloody paper towels go?" [I begin to feel a bit lightheaded.] "Well, they're, let's see, organic material, that's kind of a sobering way to think of your own blood, but that means... compost, great. WAIT! But they're a meat product (shudder), so I can't put them into the yard compost. They have to go in the city compost." [At this point I'm swaying, so I sit back down on the kitchen floor and look despondently at the bloodstains.] "Dammit."

You know you're living a different sort of life when you begin to contemplate the fact that composting your own blood could poison future vegetable gardens and draw coyotes to your door. Coyotes with a taste ... for Sycorax.

Degradation in Feathers: A Processional Reaction to La Dolce Vita (1960)

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:27:00 +0000

Friday, January 20, 2012

Is it possible to get a coherent sense of this film? Not for me, or not on a first viewing. It might be more appropriate to give you a series of episodes or fragments from my viewing: fractured thoughts in response to Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Not a review, but a processional, a ritual progress towards the Shrine of Our Lady of the Fragments.

I saw my first Fellini (8 ½) when I was about 20, and I hated it. Or perhaps not “hated” - rebelled against it. More than anything else, I wanted coherence at that point in my life. The world was vast, and I wanted to know it. I was reluctant to cede control in the face of what already seemed overwhelming complexity. What purpose did art serve if not to be a handhold on the unscalable mountain of life? If I couldn’t grapple with a text, it rankled. I didn’t watch another Fellini for about a decade. Alas for a misspent youth; those years I’ll never get back.

II.

Of course, if I were a character in this film, I’d spend those years in indolent driving, excruciating self-consciousness, and the purchase of infinite pairs of elliptical sunglasses. I’d be paying a prostitute not for her body, but for a frame that lends my life the meaning of taboo, of the illicit.

III.

Poor Marcello. He’s on assignment puppying after a “big doll” of an American actress, all impulse and no innards. We begin almost to pity his exhaustion in the face of rapacious nymphishness of his manic pixie dream girl Sylvia, who has the same attention span and selfish absorption in sensation as the kitten she adopts and abandons in a matter of minutes. She makes the Trevi fountain look small, a trick of scale played by her vast solipsism. (And her breasts.)

IV.

These paparazzi (a term this film spawned), hovering and clinging and crawling into the cracks of these lives like so many fruit flies, ever multiplying as their subjects grow more and more ripe. Sweeter, more openly rotten. Marcello can barely bring himself to swat them away, so humid with boredom is the air of Rome.

And of course everyone is always acting (out) for them. Spontaneity becomes pose.

"Miracles are born in silence, not out of this confusion!" -a priest interviewed by Marcello at his next assignment: the “field of miracles.” In this long and longing scene, we get the confusion, not the miracle.

VI.

Ah, here come children in oddly nuptial attire leading Bacchic, ecstatic crowds from spot to spot in an empty field, pointing at nothing, crying 'the Madonna!" and falling to their knees, eery giggles creeping out the corners of their mouths. It’s Euripidean, the vengeance of being led down the path of your own arrogant desire.

VII.

Oh good, it’s time for a cocktail party blowhard - no, not Marcello, who confines himself at this boho do to caressing the hands of women who speak no Italian and admire his work (no, wait, his decorative qualities). No, in fact it’s this man, late into middle age, who to annoy his wife responds to an Indian singer’s performance with the comment, “The only real woman is the Oriental woman. […] The Oriental woman huddles at your feet like a little tiger in love!”

VIII.

I hoped too soon. Marcelo’s now holding forth to the blowhard about the bouquet of children, all of different colors, he’d like to have. I think his attention was caught by the idea of a little tiger in love.

IX.

“You have two loves: journalism and literature. Beware of prison.” - The eccentric poet Iris at the party. (A messenger from the gods.)

Jesus. They’re recording all the cocktail party conversation, wiping out the sounds of natural Sturm und Drang their host (Steiner) has recorded before. I’m largely pro-artifice, and even I find this unbearably bleak.

XI.

Children are here, again, puncturing the artificiality of it all. This film has the tragic structure of ancient Athens. No sooner do these angelic tots arrive then I begin looking over my shoulder for Medea.

XII.

But Marcello is mistaken in his envy for Steiner’s boho-domestic bliss: his host is the first to tell him that this is too civilized, too organized, too deadened an existence. Better to be more miserable, more free. And then he goes off to kiss his perfect children in their swathes of protective, diaphanous curtaining. “An enchanted order,” Steiner calls the feeling of an artwork completed. The ideal of love as detachment.

XIII.

The thirteenth station of this cross. The fear of tomorrow in a nuclear world. Better to destroy the world than to live with this … waiting? Longing? Passing the time?

XIV.

Marcello’s the kind of guy who wears a dark suit to work at a beachside restaurant whose busboy is a little boy wearing a speedo and a captain’s cap. He’s the kind of guy who then yells at the teenaged waitress to turn off the music and let him get some work done. (This reminds me of something my best friend said to me while visiting us in Hawaii: “You’re the only person I know who rocks a smoky eye at the beach.” It’s true: every time. It’s time to come to terms with it: I’m a Fellini sort of girl.)

XV.

Degradation. In feathers. And out of them.

A cruel (post)mistress

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:15:00 +0000

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

I came home from the holidays to find a marvelous, heartwarming backlog of Christmas cards, all of which now fondly grace our mantel. I'm now reminded, however, that I may have told some of you that the postal service wouldn't deliver the mail unless you put an exclamation point after the "Canada!". I may even have described it as a tyrannical whim of the postal beaver's.

[Cough.] Sorry about that. I'm going to try to be more honest in 2012. Thank you for delivering my eccentrically addressed mail through the snow and sleet, postal beaver.

Whom God wishes to destroy, he first gives a stationary bike

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:13:00 +0000

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

This is what comes of living in gothic solitude, after a time:

It is midnight, and I'm in that madwoman-in-the-attic space of Farfara the realtors called a "bonus room" (blech) but I sometimes call the Other Within in fits of anxious irony, an undefined, ignored subconscious of a vast upper-floor space tucked down a frigid corridor from the rest of the house. Maybe I should be calling it the Superego.

I was stationary-cycling away while reading a classicist's investigation of the origins of the phrase "Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius" [Whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad], when my eye was caught by a long, undiscovered ledge running the length of the staircase.

"Ho ho!" I cried, scuttling over to it. (Need I add that the walls, if not quite wallpapered, are a very sickly yellow up there?) "You know what you're going to be used for, don't you, my fine friend? You're going to be a bookshelf! Just you wait, Henry Higgins...."

"Wait," I thought, suddenly self-conscious, "Are you having a conversation with a ledge?"

I hurried downstairs.

Your inside is out when your outside is in

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 01:57:00 +0000

Friday, January 13, 2012

Unknown artist, c. 1665-1670
Notice that Rochester, all cool dignity, is holding the implements
of his poetic achievement in one hand, while he shows his real feelings
about hipster acclaim by crowning his pet monkey with the laurels of literary greatness.
Meanwhile, the monkey, well... everyone's a critic.

This week I introduced my students to the key ideas in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century theatre with a picture of the Earl of Rochester (pattern for all rakes) that I've subtitled, "Everybody's got something to hide, 'cept for me and my monkey."

I think they really enjoyed our little foray into the life, poetry and portraiture of Rochester, kidnapper of brides and gynecological masquerader (apparently he spent some time under the name Dr. Bendo, charismatic quack specialist in women's complaints). Except for the quarter of the class who tried to tamp down increasingly urgent expressions of alarm and disgust.

Excerpts from our conversation:

I: "So what is the difference between a a rake and a fop, really? Do you see a difference between this portrait of Colley Cibber as Lord Foppington and this picture of the Earl of Rochester?"

Colley Cibber as Lord Foppington
in Vanbrugh's The Relapse
(John Simon after Giuseppe Grisoni, c. 1700-1725)
Those sleeves are trying way too hard.

Students: "Rochester is dressed less elaborately."

"He seems more relaxed."

"Yeah, there's a confidence about Rochester."

"Lord Foppington just looks so stiff and false."

I: "Right. you can see it in the eyes, the body language. Rakes are, to use a sophisticated piece of academic jargon, cool. Fops *want* to be cool. Rochester's got it going on, Foppington's trying too hard to get it. Rochester's invested in the pose of devil-may-care effortlessness (see the "toga" above), Foppington's all obvious artifice."

There followed a not altogether brief discussion of the perfection of Johnny Depp's casting as Rochester.

I may also have referred to A School for Scandal as "The Gossip Girl of the Eighteenth Century." I'm not ashamed. (Mostly.)

Hitchcockian Drives and iPod Hauntings

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:53:00 +0000

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Last night I donned my best 40s dress and ventured forth for a party. It wasn't until I was halfway down Farfara Way (our steep and endless driveway) that I realized that the fog had rolled in. As I made my white-knuckled way along the half hour of coastal roadway, I became, really, quite a connoisseur of fog. There's the spectral mist that makes you feel like you may be driving straight through faded imprints of another time, the clinging fog that whirls around you as you flee its longing affections, and of course the pea soup fog that makes you hope you know the driveway's turns and ditches by heart, lest you become a spectral imprint before your time. What should my eerie iPod choose as the ideal accompaniment to such a wooded, murky venture, lit only by noirish sweeps of headlight?

So Hitchcockian was the moment that I began to laugh uncontrollably, by my lonesome, crouched squinting over the steering wheel of the Barge She Sat In (which is, um, the name of our new {blush, shamefaced eye aversion} SUV). Then I stopped abruptly: Pull it together, Sycorax, I told myself. This cackling isn't improving the ambiance.

On Aesthetes and Alphas: Julie James's A Lot Like Love

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:24:00 +0000

Sunday, January 8, 2012

"Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. Both are disappointed."

(Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance)

Nick McCall has just come out of a string of harsh, punishing undercover assignments. He takes a deep breath, stretches into his real persona, and thinks with relief about heading back to Brooklyn for his mother’s birthday party. He just has one more job to do before then: walking a rookie FBI colleague through the infiltration of a ritzy Chicago wine tasting, thrown by a man whose restaurant empire looks to be financed by the mob. Their in to this exclusive shindig is wealthy Jordan Rhodes, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Chicago and owner of a boutique wine store that caters to the tasting’s criminal host. But on the night of the tasting, the rookie agent is struck by explosive stomach flu (what a beautiful start to any romance!), and Nick, who feels ill-equipped to make claims to wine-knowledge and doesn’t even own a Ralph Lauren suit), has to step in as Jordan’s “date” to infiltrate the party and bug its host’s office. I think you can see where we go from here.

Slow starting and hot burning, this, like all of James’s novels, was not bad at all, and sometimes quite good. I stifled a groan when I figured out that this novel was going to be about wine geekery: Père Sycorax was a wine importer, so I spent my childhood exploring a long series of mouldering cellars, sunny vineyards, and chilly liquor stores (my mother even had a game to keep me amused in wine stores, so often were we there: Find the Animals on the Wine Labels). The result is that I know as much about wine (and more about wine people) as any teetotaler should. When I was about four, I used to ask for my milk in a wine glass, slowly swirl it round, hold it to one nostril before carefully sipping, trilling it over my tongue and declaring “rich… with a faint bouquet of, let’s see, cow.” Let’s just say that I didn’t find Sideways to be a hilarious comedy so much as a rather underwhelming bit of realism. But I feel like James does a pretty good job with the wine trade here, presenting it in detail and with interest. One or two of the names she evokes in the field are even people I’ve met.

Best of all, we get a contemporary romance that is genuinely invested in the heroine’s career, not as an obstacle to happiness, but as something that is an inalienable part of her character, a component part, an essential element in her happiness. Over and over we see her being really good at what she does, earning a reputation that is founded on her father’s fame and riches, but doesn’t rely on them. And in tandem with the hero (more of a bourbon guy) we come to admire her for this skill, this passion, this confidence. In fact, it is the hero here who must contemplate whether his career (at which he also excels) is compatible with his happiness, either familial or romantic. He is happy with the resolution to this problem, but I’m not sure I am: is love always a taming for these ferocious alpha types? Isn’t their skill (and independence) at what they do just as much a part of why we love them as the heroine’s?

Sidebar: Career sacrifice - is it an key element in contemporary romance, and must it be? Understandably the first thing that a lot of people contemplate after falling in love today is how to align their contexts [location, domicile, career] - though D and I certainly didn’t. But I want more love stories in which neither party has to sacrifice what they enjoy, what they are good at, the service they are dedicated to. These are conflicts of duty and selfhood that are fascinating, and shouldn’t be easy to resolve. This is one of the things I love about the resolution to Kristin Cashore’s impeccable Graceling, but I’ll say no more about it in case you haven’t yet read that novel. And if you haven’t, stop reading this blog immediately and go get it.

Returning to A Lot Like Love, I have to address a gender issue: I am so freaking tired of these alpha heroes who police their masculinity so ferociously: “If he were an introspective person, one of those in-touch-with-hidden-emotions types - a.k.a. a woman, he would probably take note of the fact that it was much harder to blow off her dislike of him than it had been merely six days ago” (112). Moments like these are hard to pick apart, because they contain the seeds of their own endorsement and undoing: he is clearly a chauvinist, but he is also clearly experiencing the emotions he so derides. We smile knowingly at the irony, but is this recognition the same as a critique of the chauvinism? Before anything else, there's a plausibility issue: Nick is constantly refusing to do things because “where I come from, men don’t do that,” and it's difficult to reconcile this sort of self-conscious rigidity of behavior with the fact that his great talent in life is disappearing into other identities for undercover ops.

Nick, my darling dear, come over here
and let me tell you about
a thing called aestheticism.

Jordan seems exasperated by this too (“Nick McCall had a few too many rules - it was high time he started bending them” 188), continually prodding him into fraught experiences like wine tastings and viewings of Dancing with the Stars (“‘It’s… even worse than I’d imagined,’ he whispered, ‘Is there a reason none of these men have buttons on their shirts?’ Horrified, he took in the spray tans. The sequins and feathers. The caked-on make-up and the plunging necklines. And those were the guys” 228). Even so, she is at most ambivalent about what amounts to a framing of masculinity along very narrow, implicitly homophobic lines that are inextricably imbricated with class anxiety. Even as she undermines his sexist self-conception, it’s what she really likes about him, what differentiates him from the loafer-wearers she normally dates (yes, that’s how she thinks about them, as wearers of loafers): “Maybe she needed to find more of a guy’s guy,” she thinks, “One of those men who could start a fire with two sticks, could change a flat tire with one hand tied behind his back, and wasn’t afraid that a snow shovel would scuff his cashmerelined leather Burberry gloves” (38). His difference (figured as both gender and class difference) is what she finds erotic, what she fetishizes, while her difference makes him deeply anxious. Masculinity is a matter of class (as he acknowledges when he derides the well-dressed newbie agents straight out of Ivy League educations), and class is defined scathingly (by both Nick and Jordan) along the lines of ability vs. appearance: “In Nick’s opinion, the only accessories an FBI agent should pair with a suit were a shoulder harness and gun. Maybe handcuffs, depending on the formality of the occasion” (19). It’s like a terrible inversion of the complete works of Oscar Wilde. Rather than being presented as a genuine flaw, which would have been a frankly fascinating dissection of the erotics of alphaness, his narrow idea of masculinity is tsked and then endorsed.

So, as always, I found that Julie James is a master of sexual tension and relationship-mapping, but, to a lesser extent than in her other novels, there are always small elements that rankled ideologically for me. More than this, there is always something a little … light about these novels, in a way that I don’t think is necessarily true about romance as a genre (or even non-angsty romance). Let me take this to the meta level: for me the success of a romance novel, like any other novel, is in the extent to which it uses its form to address some larger issue in an interesting way (in other words, whether it is about something) rather than in how well it executes its arc of sexual tension and its evocation of character, although the former is useless without the latter. This novel does the latter really well, but the former… I’m finding that harder to locate in contemporary romance than in historicals.

A Lot Like Love

Julie James

Finished January 8, 2012 in the wee hours of the morning

Book #2 of 2012 (!!)

5.5/10

Stray notes:

Interestingly, although it is often the alpha hero who must be coaxed into emotional honesty, here it is Jordan who has problems with true intimacy. After a particularly disastrous failure of communication with Nick, she says to her twin brother (a “cyberterrorist” who has been jailed for crashing Twitter (really? Twitter goes down all the time)), “Do you ever think we’re not … open enough?… With our feelings, I mean. I suppose we are kind of sarcastic sometimes” (206). Needless to say, this very conversation is a violation of their bond of non-openness. But even as she said it, I was thinking, “Wow. And I was just admiring her for being more mature and self-protecting with Nick than I, with my zeal for emotional intimacy and, er, histrionics, ever would have been. Is self-protection a flaw? Isn’t dignity, after all, another word for emotional restraint?

There are definite moments of cheese sprinkled throughout the novel. I won’t inflict them on you, but caveat emptor.

This novel is a model of how to bring back characters from a previous volume. Cranky Agent Pallas makes numerous appearances amidst great sexual tension with both DA Cameron Lynde and (homosocially speaking) Nick. I hate it when characters abruptly fade to inconsequence after we’ve been taught to invest so much in their subjectivity in previous novels, so I really admired this. Especially fine was the moment in which Pallas, obviously ambitious, admits that he is ceding the first massive career achievement to Cameron, with obvious pride in the fact that she “got there first.” At the same time, I’d like to have gotten a greater sense of differentiation between that couple and this one: in what ways are these individual people with their own philosophical and social problems rather than an echo of types we see come together again and again in James’s work?

This is one of those novels in which the hero is entranced by the heroine’s pleasure in consumption. I’m going to call this trope a “Tom Jones” - the erotics of food and drink.

Woodsmen and Yogic Cats

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 00:18:00 +0000

Today at the most Middlemarchian yoga on earth, I came out of cat pose and into cow pose to find a little wet nose touching mine. I opened my eyes in surprise to find an equally surprised furry face a centimeter away. What were we doing, the cat wondered, and when would we realize that the only true yogic practice is sitting back on your tail with one leg raised straight in the air and the other stretched perpendicular to it along the floor (a pose known in feline circles as "Playing the cello"). If you want to add an extra challenge here, try licking your own belly.

Post-yoga conversation today featured questions of how to quell a vengeful spirit when your neighbor comes onto your land and cuts your trees in half (or, in one case, tells your own woodsman to cut down your trees, because, need I remind you, Prospect Bay does not exist wholeheartedly in the modern moment), and then, confronted by the illegality of this act, says first, "But you realize it was blocking my view?" and then, aggressively, "If they die, I don't want to have to look at ugly holes in the ground."

Namaste.

The secret language of stamps

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 03:02:00 +0000

Friday, January 6, 2012

Reader, dearest reader,

I send you this link in an envelope with a stamp in the upper right corner placed reverse diagonally, face down. I await your response with some trepidation.

-Sycorax Pine

Immigration as Romance: Gauging my Intentions

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 01:05:00 +0000

Friday, January 6, 2012

Going through passport control in Halifax feels more and more like I'm presenting myself in my tuxedo before my prom date's father. I began to think this some eight or ten months ago when a border control agent looked at my work permit and said these words, "So what are your intentions, when this expires?". He narrowed his eyes at me. "Um," I said, "I love it here. I'd like to stay, if I can." His face assumed an expression I had previously associated with unhungry cats; he all but purred. "Good, that's what I like to hear."

This time, when I crossed the border, I had a lovely chat with the border agent about how she always thought she would become an English teacher, and she didn't know how she ended up where she was.

She glanced at my work permit. "This expires soon, you know." "I know," I said with warmth, "I've just been renewed, so now I have some paperwork to do." "How long have you been here?" she asked. "Let's see, two and a half years now." She gave me a look that I'd always assumed was related to near-strangers' advice about the social imperative of marriage (a "you've had your fun, some day you have to grow up and adhere to convention" look), and then she said these words with expectant subtext, looking up at me through her lashes in a manner that was too firm too be coy: "Another few years and you'll have some *choices* to make."

Epochal Vertigo

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:02:00 +0000

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Today I went to yoga for the first time at the place in "the village." We gathered in a one-room building that sits almost directly on the Bay (it holds seven people), and while we did our precarious waverings (er, strong Warrior poses) we watched the ducks swimming amidst desultory snow and a very curious kitten peering indignantly at us through the French doors leading out to Shad Bay. After class, the cats got to join us inside while we had tea and cookies and gossiped about how to contain the neighbor across the bay who is poaching on Crown land.

Because somehow I'm now living in both an episode of Gilmore Girls and a George Eliot novel.

Peeing Dogs and Pearls of Wisdom

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I was looking at this engraving in my grandparents' dining room, and I turned to my grandmother and said, "Nonna, I remember when I was little you always told me, when I encountered these rather complex engravings, that I should always start by searching for the man with the dog. It strikes me now that you knew exactly the way to get a very small person involved in art." (You can see the dog in the bottom right corner.)

"Yes," she replied, "And the dog is always peeing, you know."

"Um, what?" I riposted, light on my conversational feet as ever, "Surely not always. This dog isn't peeing, for instance."

She dismissed this mere evidential thinking with a wave of her hand: "I used to have an engraving of a basilica with white classical columns, but they were painted black up to knee height." She gave me a saucy look.

"To disguise the fact that dogs were always peeing on them?" She twinkled at me delightedly. "But surely the puddles would still be visible. Or was it just to keep the columns from yellow stains?"

Now the look turned haughtier. "I don't attempt to defend these pearls of wisdom," she said from on high, "You may take them or leave them as you wish."

Sometimes it's like being descended from an oddly bawdy Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Say nice things about me 'cause I'm gone, southward...

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

January 1, 2012

After my exams, I took Mt. Grademore from Halifax to Washington for my family's annual Solstice festivities. You may remember that the only rule of Sycorax Solstice (besides the fact that it is firmly non-denominational and features only natural decorations) is that everyone must wear their most longed-for outfit - the one thing they most want to wear but never seem to find the opportunity for.

Utterly unintentionally, my family's outfits spanned the last century. My dad broke out his 1890s chic, complete with dashingly knotted silk cravat (tied without help of a valet, no less, and with an injured hand). My mother channelled the 60s with an asymmetrical mini-dress and go-go boots. I split the historical difference with this look.

* * *

Before the party, my grandparents (who are now too rickety to come to raucous parties) came to see the decorations, which are all inspired by nature - holly, apples, cranberries, elaborately feathered birds, and glassy drops and icicles.

While they were here, I told my grandmother (and other collected family) about a friend whose niece-that-will-be might be named Reginabelle (the first three syllables pronounced like the Canadian city). "That's a lovely name," she said. "I just worry about the nicknames," I replied. "Why?" my grandmother asked, "What am I missing?" "Um," I replied wittily, before steering the conversation in a different direction.

To no avail. "D!" she said urgently and loudly, "You have to explain to me what I'm missing about that name." "Um," D said wittily, and there was a brief pause before the braver of the Sycorax family decided to rescue him.

"VAGINA!" my father said in his crispest, loudest tones, in case his mother-in-law's poor hearing should cause any further awkwardness or confusion. "It sounds like 'VAGINA'!"

"Oh," said my grandmother, sage and unfazed.

Just another Solstice chez Sycorax.

* * *

The following day grandmother asked me about how the Solstice Party went. Then, having listened for a time: "I've thrown some good parties in my day. There was the Parisian nightlife party at the house in Baghdad [which was on the banks of the Tigris, but that's a tale for another time], where your mother played a cigarette girl. And then there was the time we threw a farewell party for someone at the embassy in London, a party that started at our house and ended at someone else's. In between, we rented an open-top, double-decker bus to transport guests across London. We even called the police and arranged to pause on Westminster Bridge, where your grandfather read a poem he had composed for the occasion. But the driver panicked and began to drive off just as we were toasting the city from the bridge. We all were flung about terribly. I, on the other hand, didn't begin to panic until our DCM leaned out the top of the bus to wave his glass of champagne in raucous greeting at a group of gathered bobbies."

Me: "Um, DCM?"

Nonna: "The Deputy Chief of Mission." (She purses her lips.) "He was a very uptight man. Well, normally."

* * *

After Solstice, D and I headed south to North Carolina, to his family and the land of our meeting. Mostly (as in Hawaii at the beginning of the month) I was holed up with Mt. Grademore for the whole visit, but I finished my grapple with the Mount just in time to go to see my beloved alma mater's holiday game in Chapel Hill.

God, is there anything more beautiful than the game of college basketball? Earth hath not anything to show more fair than Harrison Barnes, suspended on his way to the basket in defiance of gravity.

The skyey dome, live, filled to bursting with fervent Tar Heel faithful, who adored our team slavishly, ferociously. Until, that is, the standing Bojangles offer to give out free biscuits if UNC reaches the 100-point threshold transformed the crowd into frenzied Bacchae, shrieking "BISCUITS!!!" in a crisis of violent desire. I worried that if the bench players didn't fulfill the crazed demands of these volatile worshippers, they risked being torn limb from limb.

Of course, I did learn a series of fascinating new usages for the verb "to biscuit." For instance, delivered as a frantic banshee wail: "NOOOO!!!! Don't you DARE biscuit us out on free throws!!!!". There's a honour to biscuiting, you see, and it reaches Spanish Golden Age levels of labyrinthine intensity.

I unashamedly aestheticize this sport. For me, basketball is either poetry, or farce, or ritual worship, but it's always a formalist encounter.

* * *

Then, the road trip back. A handful of fragments to give you the flavor of it:

Bojangles refuses us our biscuits, saying that they stopped honoring the offer 45 minutes earlier. We look at them with hazy incomprehension, the giddiness leaching from our faces.

They are dead to us. They're lucky we didn't go into a Bacchic frenzy. Ask Pentheus how that worked out for him.

So we moved out, sad in the vast offing, having our precious lives, but not our biscuits.

II.

Driving along, we see two very sinister vultures sitting gloomily atop a McDonald's sign.

Mom: (In her best vulturish tones) "The end is nigh!"

Me: (lugubriously) "Come in, have a Big Mac." (Unctuous grin.) "We'll meet you on the way out."

III.

I: "Here's what I don't understand about the central conceit of 'The Gambler.' If death is 'when the dealin's done,' and you're not supposed to count your money while you're sittin' at the table,' does that mean that you shouldn't reflect on the ethics of your actions until the final Day of Judgement?"

My mother: "Um. I hadn't really been thinking about it on the level of allegory."

Fast away the old year passes

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 02:56:00 +0000

December 31, 2011

Here's how we celebrate the New Year en famille Sycoraxienne: D is with his family in NC, I'm with mine in DC, and we're watching the first season of Friday Night Lights again and weeping over Tim Riggins's emotional repression. Seriously: it's one of the finest, deftest television series ever made, one of the canniest critiques and romances of American self-conception, and it makes me want to reread this enthralling oral history of the series:

"I want to build up this all-American quarterback, this hero. This wonderful, beautiful kid with his entire future ahead of him. His biggest decision in life was whether he was going to take a full ride to UT or Notre Dame. He's got the hot girlfriend. He's got the loving parents. And he's going to break his neck in the first game. We're going to create this iconic American hero, and we're going to demolish him."

Here's what strikes me about Friday Night Lights after several trips through it (it's endlessly rewatchable): this is a show that actually respects production and process. This is a show that admires its set dressers and the work they do, that dwells on the details of costume and object to build a richly layered world of ironies and motivations, that gives its cameramen (and -women?) the freedom of improvisation and its actors the latitude to practice their craft with spontaneity and nuance. Not to mention the fact that it presents masculinity as a state of emotional complexity and depth, teenagers as beings of tremendous and harried ethical responsibility, and marriage as a matter of negotiation and conflict, mistakes and respect.

So, FNL with the parents, champagne at ten, and then an evening of syllabus work and blogging. That's how we send the year out chez Sycorax. Bring it, 2012.

'Tis the season for social allegory

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:16:00 +0000

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Last night while sitting interminably on the tarmac in Baltimore after a terrifying aborted landing at foggy National Airport I came to know my fellow passengers quite well, a social microcosm à la John Ford's Stagecoach: a federal marshall, a man who organizes off-shore call centers, a soldier just returning from deployment in Afghanistan, a nice couple from Fredericton who were delighted to encounter another Maritimer, an enraged solipsist who kept belittling the staff for not letting him off in the middle of the runway, a flight attendant who sang "Twinkle twinkle little star to us" over the course of what was supposed to be a 20 minute flight from Philly and finally declared firmly, "We have to get to DC. I BELONG in DC."

As the hours wore on and we encountered diversion after diversion, mechanical failure after mechanical failure, I did think, "Wow, it's not a good sign that we are now explicitly discussing how we will divide up the labor when we have to form a new desert-island society in the style of LOST."

When we briefly deplaned in Baltimore, the enraged solipsist left our little band of brothers/proto-society in a cloud of luggage-oriented recrimination. But before he did, he got the number of the woman sitting next to him, who had been parroting his every gripe like Echo and Narcissus for the last three hours. "Should I give you my number or my email?" she asked anxiously. He shrugged, and began grinding his teeth in the general direction of the gate agent. "Which would you *like*?" she persisted. "Whatever," he replied, focusing his glare on a pilot who was emerging from the gate, "This is insane. UNACCEPTABLE!"

"Are you kidding me?" I thought, "Who picks up women while behaving like a tool? Who consents to be picked up in these circumstances? What about this experience made you think, Now THERE's a guy I want to spend more time with. Maybe even the rest of my life"?

Happy Solstice. They're all getting longer from here.

On the Holy Family, Domestic Labor, and Losing One's Pants

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:47:00 +0000

Fragments from holidays with my nonna, who, at 91, is the most entertaining person I know.

Taking my grandparents home from Thanksgiving involves painstaking choreography to establish everyone safely in the car. "Watch your head, Watch your head, WATCH YOUR HEAD, ok, wow, very deftly handled," I say to my grandmother as she lowers herself into the passenger seat. "Yes," she replies, "but now I appear to be losing my pants." "That's just the sign of a successful Thanksgiving," I say confidently. We're nearly home by the time we stop laughing.

* * *

And my grandfather's no slouch in the hilarity department, although somewhat less intentionally than my nonna. The other day, I got this report from my mother: 'Tried to explain Occupy Wall Street (Nova Scotia, DC, St. Paul's London, Oakland, Portland, etc. etc.) to my nonagenarian parents. Finally, my father said, "wait, was this during the Depression?".'

* * *

In this holiday season of creches and carols, I always think of my grandmother's quest to find a single painting of the Holy Family in any of the world's major galleries depicting Joseph engaged in domestic labor or, more pointedly, childcare.

"Oh sure," she would say, "he'll do a bit of carpentry or tend the donkey. But meanwhile Mary's got her arms full of books and Jesus and sometimes John the Baptist for good measure. Do we ever see him change a diaper, read a story, or play with the baby?".

She was indescribably delighted when she finally found a late Renaissance image of Joseph making what appeared to be an omelet.

* * *

This recalls to me some summertime tales of my grandmother that I don't believe I ever told here. It all started with brunch at Great Falls with my grandparents. A drink arrives for me.

Grandmother: "What *is* that?" [She's having a mimosa.] "Did you order it?"

Me: "Er, yes. It's a Coca Cola."

Grandmother: "That's amazing. It looks extraordinarily like a *Coca Cola*."

Me: "It's extraordinary, yes."

Grandmother, with quiet disgust: "I just couldn't imagine any daughter or granddaughter of mine ordering such a thing."

Conversation, needless to say, unfolds naturally from that point.

My grandmother: "I so admire how you keep up with friends from all different times of your life."

Me: "Oh, well, I'm not that good. It's just easier in the age of Facebook."

My nonna, darkly: "Maybe TOO easy."

Me: "Uh, what do you mean by that?"

My nonna, who's never been on Facebook except to be shown pictures by my mother: "People feel free to post the minute details of their day, and its nothing but trivia."

Me: "Well, but there's..."

Nonna: "Trivia!" [Now she's really yelling.] "TRIVIA!!!"

Me: "I had no idea you felt so strongly...."

(We've had this same conversation several times since then. "How do you know this?" I ask her. She gives me a knowing smile and a sidelong glance: "People tell me things.")

On the way home from brunch, my grandmother doesn't care for the way another driver honks at us. So, naturally, this is what she says: "I don't know any rude hand signals. I must learn some. I think receiving a rude hand signal from a nonagenarian woman would be a very effective deterrent in situations like this, don't you?"

She immediately transitioned from this to telling me about witnessing her father have a heart attack (from which he shortly died) when she was a teenager. I'd never heard this story before.

It was a roller-coaster drive back from brunch.

An Affection Altogether Ignorant of Our Faults: The Canine Romance

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:20:00 +0000

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Waikiki, HI

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

(Groucho Marx)

Often I find myself buying romances on the strength of a recommendation from someone I really trust. As with all other genres and art forms, my taste doesn't run so much towards particular sub-genres, tropes, and tones as it does towards innovation, quality, and complexity within a particular form. (This is how I got looped into romance reading as a literary scholar at all, not to mention comics, horror films, anime, reality dance competitions, curling, etc.) So from time to time I just take the risk and buy while thinking that the less I know about what I am about to read the better.

And then I open up the ebook, and it has an adorable puppy on the cover, and I think, "Oh Jesus. What have I done." (I can't even make this last a question, so heavy is the weight of dread upon my soul at the sight of that cheerful furball.)

Jean-Honore Fragonard "Girl with a Dog" (c. 1770)
Dogs and erotics
Seriously: what's this about?

I don't know why I have such an entrenched bias against dog-themed romances, but I encountered it again when I cracked (clicked?) the e-spine of Nikki and the Lone Wolf*. I think it is the feeling that the text I'm reading has been so heavily engineered to fit within a marketable trope. ("Banksia Bay," goes the tag-line for this series, "where lost dogs heal lonely hearts.") I feel the burden of the commodification of literature particularly heavily when I see that I'm being manipulated by an adorable mammal. But also, as an inveterate cat-person, I feel alienated by this creaky, ubiquitous association between dog ownership and romantic healing: why dogs, I find myself asking? Why associate dogs, of all creatures, with romantic (or, more unsettlingly, erotic) triumph? Why not cats? Too on the nose? I suppose the same must be true of snakes. When are we going to see a rash of romances (a phrase that I should really put on my "never use again" list) about people brought together by their mutual love of ferrets? Judith Ivory's already laid out the seminal text for that movement in The Proposition, a Pygmalion tale about a rat catcher and his linguist love. [And see Laura Vivanco's excellent note below on the continuing role ferrets have had to play in the scandals of romancelandia.]

I'm troubled by the idea that dogs have an entrenched role to play in a certain genre of romance because they set out a silent, adorable and adoring model for love as faith. What the routinely skittish protagonists of a dog romance see in their canine companions is love that is patient and kind, love that does not envy, does not boast, and is not proud, love that does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking or easily angered, and that keep no record of wrongs. Love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Beautiful, Biblical stuff - the love of dog as a model for romantic love, which itself becomes a model for love of god.

But, curb the canine and call me Darcy, I myself prefer romantic love with a touch of pride about it. Not love as self-abnegating devotion.

There's a certain irony here: despite my initial stomach-churning sense of dread, I often quite enjoy a good dog-themed romance. One of my favorite authors, Jennifer Crusie, frequently features dogs in her books, and they are fully-fledged characters, with as much personality and autonomy as any of the human players in the drama. And certainly I am a sucker for the sentimentalization of animal-owner relationships, and perhaps this is why I so resent being manipulated by them when they are in less skillful hands (or more blatantly mobilized by publishers) - I will snuffle into my drink about an ill-treated animal, but I'll also resent you for exploiting this empathy cheaply.

In Nikki and the Lone Wolf, Marion Lennox draws a vivid portrait of Horse, a massive and mistreated wolfhound who draws the hero and heroine from their homes one gothic night by howling inconsolably at the ocean. His owner threw him overboard to drown, but still he's faithfully waiting for this abusive scoundrel, and will be until the hero can persuade the heroine to take a dominant tone with the poor misguided soul (and thereby provide a new home, a new bond of love). Horse is a great character, as are his owners, but the resolution [SPOILER], which comes by way of a massive community-wide oceanic search for the beast, after he goes swimming off into the ocean like he's Edna Pontellier, desperate to find his mistress (who has herself, with irksome parallelism, stormed off in a fit of romantic pique), seems not just implausible but also exasperating. Is this the model of love we're looking at, I found myself asking, suicidal, irrational devotion that takes a village to soothe? If so, the hero and heroine are right to resist it.

*Is it piling on to talk about these silly titles? Admittedly this one is less egregious than the previous two in the series, Misty and the Single Dad and Abby and the Bachelor Cop, but it's the formula that gets me. Heroines get a name - a diminutive, early 90s identity - while heroes get a social role.

Mink in the Woodpile, Mongoose in the Engine

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 02:28:00 +0000

Monday, December 5, 2011

Honolulu, HI

Right: so.

The term is finally over, and Mt. Grademore and I have cast conniving, sidelong looks at one another, packed our weighty selves into suitcases, and left for Hawaii. No kidding: Mt. Grademore on parade takes up half my freaking luggage. But now, after only four flights and a total of 27 hours of travel, here we are in sunny Oahu. And within 24 hours of arriving in Honolulu, I could already cross "hug a cylon" off my to-do list. Such is the benefit of having a partner who works on Hawai'i Five-0.

Best story to come into our lives recently as a result of D's time in Hawaii?

When D was last with me at Farfara (our new house in Nova Scotia), he got a message from the friend who'd been his replacement on the show for the previous three weeks. "I came back from a hike and started your car," it read, "but it was making a terrible squealing noise. When I lifted the hood, I discovered that there was a mongoose in your engine."

"In Halifax, do you occasionally find a moose under your hood?" asked one witty friend of ours, upon hearing this story.

"No," I replied, "but D did find a mink in the woodpile the other day."

"Mink in the Woodpile," chimed in another, "Best lesbian bar name ever."

I couldn't help it: "'Mink in the Woodpile, Mongoose in the Engine' sounds like the title of a conference paper I'd write." I paused to reflect. "It's subtitle would be 'Constru/icting Sexualities from Atlantic to Pacific."

"Mieux vaut un mangouste dans son moteur qu'un tigre (Proverbe Chinois du 3eme Millenaire BC)," intoned a French friend, who then sent me this video:

In the face of that brilliance, what was there really left to say?

Just this: "When I form my mongoose conference panel, the second paper is going to be titled 'Mongeese: Allegories of Collectivism.'"

Gunpowder, Lego, and Snowth

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:41:00 +0000

Friday, November 11, 2011 (11.11.11)

Farfara

Remember, remember the sixth of November. It's the day-old residue of gunpowder, treason, and plot, but also my traditionally undercelebrated anniversary. D called, somewhat late in the day, since he's in Hawaii and I'm in Nova Scotia, and these places might as well be on the opposite sides of the world.

"So," he says, by way of an opener, "Happy Day After Guy Fawkes Day."

"Yup," I reply with caution, thinking (foolhardily) that I can wait him out.

"Can't imagine there's much else worth celebrating today."

I frown at the phone, but he can't see that, and I refuse to reward him with any audible sign of frustration.

Sometime later, he breaks the silence with a carefully wrought ponder: "Why is it," he asks me weightily, "that Lego people always look so evil?"

Since this does move me from my taciturn stoniness, he expands on the point: "Have you heard about the giant Lego people who have been washing ashore? Google it. As someone who lives in a coastal community, it's important that you be prepared."

Still nothing from me. He moves on: "So today I ate the new Mango Guanabana [Doo DOO doo-doo-doo**] yoghurt... it was kinda hard work. Greek yoghurt is so thick."

**This is when D paused, mid-sentence, to sing the Snowths' back-up part from the Muppet Show under his breath, as I can only presume that he does every time he names the guanabana fruit.

Twelve years, people. Twelve years.

Pain and its Lack: Resenting the Hero

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:04:00 +0000

There was a period of time, between the ages of about 11 and 14, when I read Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet dozens of time. I knew those books backwards and forwards, and their pleasure never waned upon rereading (although I certainly had least favorites in the series). Coming back to Pierce's books as an adult, I find there's more that makes me wince and wonder, but I'll never shake that sense that her characters *lived* for me at a particularly dramatic period of my life, underscoring the sense I had that my whole life was one of agonizing, awkward heroic possibility. Warrior possibility.

This feeling, this thrill of narrative possibility right in the pit of my stomach, is one I've never grown too cynical for, no matter how much time I spend reading Beckett nowadays. And I've spent the whole day in the grips of it after reading Moira J. Moore's brilliantly titled, atrociously covered Resenting the Hero. I took it to work with me and read it over lunch, hiding the very silly cover under a copy of Harold Pinter's collected works every time I heard footsteps outside my door. Then when people actually did come into my office, I couldn't stop myself from giddily pressing the book and its merits on them. When I finished the novel this morning, all I wanted was to pick up the next one. But I had ordered the hard copy, and it wouldn't be here 'til next week at the earliest. So I spent an hour painstakingly mowing another sixth of the yard. (I've been back since August and I've almost finished the damn thing.) The whole hour all I could think about was going inside to buy the sequel as an ebook, rather than spend a moment without these characters. "Pull yourself together, Sycorax," I kept muttering, grass flying around me, "There are other books in the sea. Several thousand in your own library, in fact." The muttering's been a constant mantra throughout the day. I don't know how I'm going to last until next week.*

What we have here is sprightly, absorbing, deftly characterized and affectionately rendered fantasy. It's rich and warm and friendly, but I don't find it to be, as many readers do, as fluffy as the rep this section of the genre has acquired. Instead it feels lightly like Terry Pratchett, like laughter shot through with thought.

So much of the pleasure of the book is in the warmth of its characters' interactions that I almost feel like a plot summary does it a disservice. But I'll succumb: Dunleavy Mallorough is finally emerging from a lifetime of training to be a Shield, a graduation that comes only if she is chosen at a formal ceremony that feels like nothing so much as a middle school dance. The Shields have been kept apart from their future partners, the Sources, for the entirety of their training, to ensure that the moment they match (forming an unbreakable bond that can only end in death) comes only after both Shield and Source have sufficient training to do right by one another. So she finds herself in a long line of Shields, breathlessly awaiting the much smaller number of Sources, who move slowly down their ranks, waiting for the bond to snap into place like a minor earthquake.

From that moment, the Shield will be charged with the protection of the rare and precious Source, who is the odd individual who can channel natural forces through his (or her) body and mind, averting potential natural disasters and preserving the precarious societies of their land. In order to channel these forces, the Sources must drop all defenses, and in these moments the Shields step in to extend their own and regulate their Sources' bodily function. It's an intimate act: it demands minute attention to the habits and physiology of the partner. And its compensations have a sensual edge: pairs are sensitive to each other's touch, finding it soothing even if they can't stand each other. In turn, the Source is supposed to protect the Shield from one key area of vulnerability: a profound emotional sensitivity to music, which renders all the Shield's vaunted self-control almost completely moot. Sources are eccentric, given to bits of Shakespearean oddity in everyday speech, so being a Shield comes with a host of other caretaking responsibilities: writing up reports about channeling activity, defusing social awkwardness caused by the unworldly Sources, making the practical arrangements of travel. It's almost like being a servant. Or, in a old-fashioned, elaborately gendered sense of the term, a wife.

But not in any way that allows us to accept a genial stereotype of housewifery. Dunleavy (she prefers "Lee" with her friends, which is to say not with her Source) takes cranky pride in her duty, finding in the labor of a Source a sense of accomplishment and paradoxical self-sufficiency. Where the source can be flippant and thoughtless, the Shield must be serious, vigilant, practical, strong. Lee patrols the borders of her duties ferociously, and when she finds, to her dismay, that her bond snaps into place not with a sensible, earnest sort of person like her, but with a grinning, flirting hero like Lord Shintaro Karish, she's not convinced she will ever be able to trust the too pretty nobleman to do his duty by her. The more he tries to charm her (plain, fiercely accomplished old her), the less she likes him. The less she likes him, the less charming he becomes. And so we get a series of sparrings: screwball fantasy at its best.

The fact that it is so much fun shouldn't take away from the fact that it deals slowly and carefully with uncomfortable issues. The position of Source is lauded and privileged; the Shields, by contrast, are largely forgotten. They are enablers, always giving the necessary assist, never getting the glory. The entire legal and procedural structure of their jobs gives the Source power over the Shield. The Source determines their course, but isn't responsible for any of its practical execution. In fact, the Source's only responsibility is to restrain the Shield's excessive sensuality during encounters with music. Touch of the Cullen there.

So you can see that the relationship (in which, I hasten to note, either party can be any gender and sexuality is quite fluid) reads as both gendered and classed. Karish (who spends much of the novel trying to get Lee to call him Taro, since he despises his family name) is defined by privilege, both masculine and aristocratic, and the mercantile Lee has to work through the uncomfortable sense that she is endlessly vulnerable to exploitation, should he ever choose to exercise his power over her. In fact, the central conflict of the novel is generated by a villain who does a very convincing reading of the Source/Shield relationship as one of exploitation and oppression. If something goes wrong between a Source and a Shield, there is no possibility of divorce: the Shield in particular has no legal recourse in cases of negligence and abuse. The sinister nature of the mouthpiece doesn't mean that the critique of the system is any less valid; in fact, the political appeal of his argument (however cravenly he uses it to manipulate) is what makes him such a uneasy, Miltonian villain. (One of my rare complaints about the novel is how swiftly this plot line is resolved, and the extent to which the resolution occurs offstage, so to speak.)

So the real pleasure of the novel is in the rockiness of Lee and Taro's start, the slow and organic quality of their growing friendship (they truly have nothing in common besides mutual talent), and the way it is shot through with disruptive mistrust. Lee feels a wonderful ambivalence about the intimacy of the Shield/Source relationship, and the heroic charm of Taro specifically:

He looked at me, frowning. And then the frown turned into a smile that I didn't trust at all.

"You're staring," I pointed out tartly.
His response was to sweep up my free hand and kiss the back of it. In an instant every ache I'd been feeling was gone, so swift and so complete that the lack itself was almost painful.
I jerked my hand away, and the discomfort flooded back. (34)

This bit of affect(at)ion is a gesture that we respond to as readers, even as we see that it's something he does with many, many women he encounters. Lee doesn't know what makes her more uncomfortable: the idea that she could fall prey to Taro's indiscriminate charms (and be a romance stereotype rather than an individual worthy of his, and her own, respect), or the idea that she's been forced into a fated bond whose intimacies are beyond her control (another sort of romance stereotype, another sort of wiping away of individuality and free will). So her experience is a double ache: the pain of separation posed against the loss of selfhood that attends their pain-obliterating intimacy. An absence of pain that is itself an ache. A lack.

So... it's good. Perfect, engrossing thrill. But not mindless fun: as the title declares, it's going to take up a lot of conventions of the form, wring them by the neck a bit, embrace them, and send them on their merry way. And if you're wondering where I am at any point in the next week, I'm probably lying in wait by the mail-box, hopping up and down with nervous energy and trying not to reach for the Nook.

*The only thing bolstering my resolve is the revelation that, six books into the series, the publisher has abruptly dropped it. As if it weren't traumatizing enough that a series I love would end (NO!!!), now I hear that it's embattled. But Moore, who sounds like one of the most generous authors ever to walk the earth, has said she'll finish it and distribute it herself. Greater love hath no author. But knowing it is coming to an end, and that that final installment won't be available 'til next year, is helping me moderate my book gluttony.

On Tramps and Tyson

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:18:00 +0000

There are regular outbreaks of oddity in my Gender and Irish Drama class. (Let's be honest: in all my classes.) Today, for reasons that defy logic, I began class with a lengthy disquisition on Mike Tyson seen through the lens of Oscar Wilde. (If you've seen the documentary "Tyson," you know why.)

And then we discussed Synge's The Shadow of the Glen, in which an elderly husband fakes his own death to test his young wife's fidelity.

I: "So he waits for her to begin inviting men to the house during his own wake. Who comes along first?"

Student 1: "Well, there's the shepherd, but first there's the tramp."

Student 2: "I thought that character was a woman for most of the play."

Students, as a group: "Yeah, me too."

I: "So you're saying that rather than imagining this as a play about hospitality and the impoverished wanderer, you read this as a commentary on the sexual politics of a young widow inviting a skanky woman to her husband's wake."

Students: "Pretty much."

Apocalypse and Falling Silence

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:42:00 +0000

I'm nipping back in to Sycorax Pine (although there's a huge pile of grading and course prep giving me a very cynical look out of the corner of its collective eye while I do so) to say a few words about last night's season finale of Doctor Who, to which I'm now totally devoted. If you don't watch the show, you should (start with the newest Doctor, Matt Smith, and then go back to watch from the beginning of this contemporary reboot, with Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant.). But you probably will find what follows to be too elliptical to be truly spoilery. If you do watch the show, let me know what you think. (Be as spoilery as you want in the comments, and avoid them if you're spoiler averse.)

I thought this was a solid, if unextraordinary finale. Unextraordinary, of course, only compared to the episodes the prodigiously clever Steven Moffat used to craft back in the days when he had all the time in the world to work on a double-ep. The characterization's what's paying the price for this current pace of apocalyptic plotting (the end is nigh! Silence will fall when the question is asked!), with less time than necessary spent on the Doctor's relationship with River, and the companions being shunted off to the side more and more as the season develops. The companionate relationship with River is now wholly perplexing (for us as for them, I think, but their perplexity could be a lot more interesting than it is right now). And Amy was right to call shenanigans on the whole "luckily it all happened in an alternate time stream, so it carries no ethical consequences" line that the show has often taken. Alternate timelines are a cheap out, and forgetting about them does the characters and audience a disservice.

I do love the Silence, though. Love 'em to death. (Love who to death?)

What happened in last night's ep of Dr. Who does remind me of a structural problem I have with seasons of True Blood, in which an interesting premise is often established in the premiere, but then pushed to the point of aporia by the finale. The problem is that (for me) the chaotic disintegration of a world (apocalypse) is much less narratively interesting than the character studies of real, detailed lives placed under pressure by the insupportable inciting incident. After all, apocalypse in these two shows is often an emptying out of detail, place and character. A collapse of history.

I begin to worry that this means I've been reading too much nineteenth-century drama.

Covered in silk and brambles, waving my stake...

noreply@blogger.com (Sycorax Pine) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 01:20:00 +0000

Ten days ago, I arrived home at Farfara from three months in London, Washington, and Honolulu (no pity's forthcoming, I know).

These shenanigans don't sound like anything I would have been party to. I am a very dignified homeowner.

Nine days ago exactly, I thought about the coming tropical storm, and forced my jet-lagged, befuddled self into the car to go grocery shopping in the now-distant town. It was a process, and I didn't make it home to unpack the groceries until 9 p.m. that night.

When I opened the fridge to discover the celery that D had left there three months earlier, I thought, "I'll just nip out to the composter with this!". I'm very excited about the composter. This is one of the ways I can tell middle age is bearing down upon me. It was only on the walk back that I realized my garden door had locked automatically behind me. And there was no key anywhere closer than Washington, DC, where I had left a spare with my parents. Less than twenty-four hours back, and I had locked myself out of the new house, in the dark, with the coyotes.

No keys, no phone, no car, no D, and it's now about 9:30 p.m. on a Saturday. What's more, I didn't have a lighting source to help me navigate out of our pitch-black 12 acres to the nearest neighbors.

So what should I do, like the intrepid adventurer I am, but pluck a solar-charged light-on-a-stake from the garden and flip-flop my way precariously down rocky, crumbling Farfara Way (as we punningly call my excessive driveway). It took about ten minutes of panicked stumbling in my minute silk dress before I was knocking on the neighbors' door. No answer. Panic rising.

I hear voices from across the street, by the ocean. Covered in dirt and brambles, I finally barge in on a large group of my neighbors (only two of whom I'd ever met), having a seaside bonfire party. (It's a weekly event in summer, I gather.) They turn to me, blinking into the shadows after the brightness of the fire.

"Hi, everyone!" I say, waving my glowing stake as non-threateningly as I can, "I'm your new neighbor from up the hill! I seem to have, er, locked myself out of the house...."

The next thing I know, my neighbors have broken out their ladders and are coming en masse in a line of vehicles to scale the sides of my house and break in through the screen windows on the second floor. (Forget that you ever heard me say that this was possible.)

And then they invited me back to the bonfire party, where they told me about the family of otters that have just moved in to our section of shoreline. I was there 'til after midnight.

Long story short: I love my neighbors.