Some writer-voices or book-voices I understand. For instance, the fact that huge swaths of I, Claudius sound in my mind as if read by Derek Jacobi? Obvious! Hugh Laurie’s Wooster narrating ‘Jeeves and the Rum Cove’? Even a blithering idiot can see where that comes from! Some books generate their own voices, voices that don’t belong to actors, but to the author, the character, or the tome itself. Patrick O’Brian, I am looking at you.

But why does Virginia Woolf sound like Emma Thompson?

It tastes like rancid carrots and some of it is being illegally grown in an Indonesian national park? What next, it kicks puppies?

“In order to become a Sacred Wood, a wood must be tangled and twisted like the forests of the Druids, and not orderly like a French garden.” – Umberto Eco on ‘cult’ texts, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

“Likewise, to read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world.” – Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

“But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.” – Patrick O’Brian qua Stephen Maturin, Master and Commander

Oooh, I absolutely looooove Book Darts!

On May 29, Faerye Net turned four! In blog-years that is a long while. I declare the motto of this fourth anniversary to be: “Celebrating Four Years of Errant Nonsense.”

On May 17, Lloyd Alexander crossed the Sundering Sea.

Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles were perhaps the first truly great books I ever read. His writing was funny, simple, earnest, and beautiful. He wrote stories about growing up, sheer adventure, and (endlessly) about the fascination and splendor of the feline. Notably, he wrote heroes who were real, fallible people; moral choices which did not come with a trail of breadcrumbs; stories for children that resonate with adults.

My favorite Prydain book, Taran Wanderer, is the most obvious example. It renders the mythic true and palpable. It makes the struggle of life, of growing up and finding an identity, into a quest both adventurous and normal. I hope I will never stop finding it deeper and more true as I get older, because I feel that if I do, perhaps it means I, not it, have stopped growing. All that, my friends, from a ‘children’s book’.

The only fan letter I have ever written was to Lloyd Alexander. I still have his response, framed. I hold it in my lap now, trying not to cry on it. It is typed (with a typewriter) on personalized stationery, with a fiddling Puss-in-Boots gracing the head. I couldn’t tell you how dear this letter is to me without quoting it nearly in full, nor without explaining what I’d said in my letter. I can only say that if, as the aphorists claim, “You regret the things you don’t do more than the things you do,” this letter represents one of my spectacular avoided regrets. It’s a beautiful letter.

However dark the world may seem, there are special, unforgettable people in it with us. They and we are here so briefly. Be foolish, earnest, and heartfelt. Try to be a hero. Be kind to cats. Forgive yourself. Tell those people what they mean to you while you can.

Right now, I am not working. I am not creating, synthesizing, planning, doing anything that will help or advance the work I have to do before today. And yet, I cannot go to sleep, cannot watch a movie or take a bath, anything whole-heartedly self-serving, self-feeding. It is obvious that I feel, beneath the me that makes rational judgments, that these moments, these wasted moments on the path to work, are also work.

How so? Is it ground so thoroughly into my psyche that work is pain, that pain is holy, that self-sacrifice is holiest of all? So that when I hold myself away from the simple, ineffable pleasure of sleep, every second of that self-denial counts, somehow, on a scale I don’t even believe in? Another minute wasted, burned like an offering.

How ridiculous, this idea that work is pain. It can be, and is sometimes, even when you love your work as they tell us artists must. But when it comes to you, when you slip between the minutes and find your place, you are happy and productive and all-powerful, and you are both surprised and not when the car starts across the street and draws your eyes to the sunlit window, when you realize it is now today. Will this minute I have burned with you lure the work closer? Can I find a way to simply pull the state of work down on me, over my head like a quilt against intruding sunlight? Or must I always, as I do now, work ever closer to it, brushing away the minutes that lie between me and living?

I am getting better and better, over time, at pulling all-nighters. This seems contrary to the laws of Nature. I wonder if, when I am an old woman, I will have ceased entirely to sleep, and will wander the world with dark circles as large as my cheeks, moving imperceptibly between reality and dream?

I’ve long been locked in a quandary. Due to certain circumstances, I am often on the receiving end of the most appalling rightwing glurge. I know some of you, my friends, have a similar problem. This stuff ranges from the merely insipid to the racist, the sexist, and the appallingly regressive. And whenever I find these things in my inbox, I want to protest. But I never have.

Why don’t I? It’s partially politeness. It’s partially an unwillingness to vent the torrent of my spleen on sweet little old people, however wrong-headed. We are taught, after all, to respect our elders. They’ve lived and suffered and so on and so forth. But isn’t this just a sort of ageism? If a 30-year-old sent me this, wouldn’t I feel honor-bound to tell him or her off? Are we really respecting our elders, or are we assuming their brains are atrophied, their ideas are fixed, and they are so intractable that hearing their worldview challenged will harm them?

I don’t think older people are feeble-minded, stupid or inflexible. I know and love a woman who changed her political party in her 70s, after all. So can I in all conscience say that I am respecting these other elders by being dishonest?

It’s a hard question for me, all the harder because if I upset them, I’m not the only one who’s going to have to deal with the fallout. I have been trying to deal with it by ignoring and not reading, but occasionally I fail, or I assume something will be innocuous that actually contains a subtextual cylinder of nerve gas. The attitudes and strictures that are being so gleefully embraced and trumpeted are not new. They’re as old as fear, conformity, and the valuing of comfort over individuality and liberty. They are nestled down deep into psyches and hearts, protected by layers of religion and social convention. There is nothing I can do to budge them or fight them. But don’t I owe it to myself to protest? Wouldn’t I like someone to tell the footsoldiers of orthodoxy that we aren’t all like them? Wouldn’t I like that someone to be me?

There’s a petty little custom I was taught at Queequeg’s Qoffee Qasa to call “the poor man’s latte”. Someone comes in and orders a few shots of espresso, but over ice in a big cup. He then fills the cup the rest of the way with half-and-half from the condiment bar, usually shielding it with his body because somehow he thinks the Queequeg Qrew doesn’t get precisely what he’s doing. He thus gets an iced breve latte for significantly less money.

Some people say, “Where’s the harm?” It’s worth debating, perhaps. It cheeses off the brewed coffee and americano customers (for whom the half-and-half is provided) to find the pitcher empty constantly because some yabbo took 16 ounces of it. It creates more labor for the Qrew to constantly replenish the condiment pitchers because of this (which probably, unless the company higher-ups are very clever, will eventually result in the brewed coffee prices going up.) It also signals an amazing lack of self-awareness (“I am totally the first person to think of this, and those Queequeggers have NO idea I’ve hoodwinked them!”) and self-respect. Really, guys, you aren’t Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread. You’re not Robin Hood stickin’ it to the man. You’re trying to get a fancy-ass espresso drink for cheap. How petty.

And in case anyone thinks, “Oh, they probably really can’t afford the drink they want! Poor bebbies!” I’d like to share my amazement. The other day a guy ordered a poor man’s latte in a particularly annoying way. He asked for straight shots of espresso with flavored syrup, then asked the Qrew-member at the handoff for a cup of ice; thus an extra cup was expended so he could feel as if he’d deceived the Qrew. At the condiment bar, he hid his drink with his body as he poured the shots and syrup over the ice and filled it with half-and-half. So wily!

Then he threw out the wasted cup and carried his drink to his Hummer H3.

I weep for humanity.

I’ve always loved those strange names for animal groups with which English teems, and they were brought back to my mind by my sister, who was coming up against them in a crossword puzzle. I’ve read lists of them before, but I found a particularly nice one today at the San Diego zoo website (warning to sister sledge: contains answers to crossword clues.)

Here are a few of my new favorites:
A siege of herons
A leap of leopards
A scold of jays
A smack of jellyfish
A scurry of squirrels
An intrusion of cockroaches

Great crash of rhinoceroses, people, don’t you just love English?