Dry Ice Factory

Thanksgiving weekend was a nice break from the seasonal blahs. Thanksgiving itself was a good time, with my parents, their kids and grandkids, and my mom's youngest sister and her husband, kids, and grandkids. Nineteen in all, with my cousin's daughter the youngest at three years old. She was cutest and highest maintenance as well. My aunt, the granny, wanted us all to take note when she said "no" to her for the first time ever. My aunt teased me about my beer belly, which she only just noticed this year. I think it took that long for it to break through her image of me as a skinny little boy. My sister was shocked to learn that I use reading glasses now. Hey, the baby in the family is turning fifty next year.

Other than that, the weekend was pretty mellow, except for one intense family discussion about my eldest nephew's latest flirtation with doing something stupid. The guy really needs to learn how to button his lip, at least around his grandparents, because there's no reason they need to know this stuff. I kept far worse from them in my own day. That aside, it was mostly getting caught up on everybody's latest plans. My sister is looking for another five-month teaching assignment somewhere in the world, maybe in Chile or Rwanda. My niece's photography business is slowly building. My youngest nephew wants to go to Tunisia for two weeks to study French. My parents had a wonderful time at a fifty-year reunion at the Mennonite college in Heston, Kansas. Mom was especially reflective on how their experience there was pivotal in changing the course of their lives from farm folk to white collar workers.

I read Michael Swanwick's Hope-in-the Mist, which is a short book about Hope Mirrlees. As the title indicates, it's an answer to the question, "Who wrote Lud-in-the-Mist?" Mirrlees was the daughter of a wealthy family, and she was a dilettante who was the friend of Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot and the companion (and maybe lover, nobody really knows) of the Cambridge classics professor, Jane Harrison. Mirrlees wrote an avant garde poem called "Paris" that some think was an influence on Eliot's "The Waste Land", and two novels that Swanwick is somewhat dismissive of, along with Lud-in-the-Mist. Neil Gaiman's introduction echoes Swanwick in seeming to think that Lud-in-the-Mist is an extraordinary book that stands head-and-shoulders above her other work. After it was published in 1926, she wrote almost nothing else except a handful of poems, although she lived another fifty years. A strange life, and a strange little book about it. I read it in one sitting. I'd say it's probably mostly of interest to fans of Lud-in-the-Mist, although anyone interested in the Bloomsbury group or Jane Harrison might find it worth reading too. I always have mixed feelings about biographies, but this one does at least shed some light on a fascinating novel.

I also read some fanzines over the weekend -- the latest issues of Banana Wings and Relapse, and a fistful of year-old issues of Vanamonde. Fanzines may be a dying form, but they're not going out with a whimper. I feel itchy to do something worthy of what my friends are publishing. What the hell, I do think the new Chunga can stand with these zines, but I want to do another one in response to what I've just read. Pete Weston's article about a boxful of old fanzines, in particular, makes my latest piece for Chunga seem pretty feeble and underdeveloped. The old man has kicked sand in my face! I'd better start lifting weights.

Well, so much for getting away from it all. Now it's back to work.

I'm bereft! I didn't want this book to end! Even worse, it's a book I wish I had written. It seems like the type of book I would write if I only had the talent and gumption -- dreamy but full of precise details; homey but forlorn; arch but warm-hearted.

In a previous post I came close to pitching it as Dunsany meets Peake. More specifically, it's The King of Elfland's Daughter meets Gormenghast. Like Dunsany's equally great 1924 novel, it is about a human town on the border of Faerie, and about the place of magic and imagination in a commonsense, bourgeois world. Like Peake, it is full of eccentric, oddly tormented characters with eccentric names such as Endymion Leer and Polydore Vigil, Mumchance and Portunus. Yet of course Mirrlees is a far different writer than Dunsany or Peake, and the comparison shouldn't be taken too far.

One difference from Dunsany's book, for example, is that we barely see Fairyland (as it is called in Lud-in-the-Mist), while Dunsany takes us across the border a number of times. Mirrlees instead creates a geography in which a river from Fairyland, the Dapple, runs through the town, and the mischievous inhabitants of the land beyond the Debatable Hills try to sneak their magical influence past the bans placed on them by the burghers who have displaced the fairy-friendly aristocracy of old. The Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, Nathaniel Chanticleer, is haunted by a strange, magical-musical Note that he heard in his youth, and the plot of the novel is driven by the threat that Fairyland magic poses to his family, particularly his son. (His daughter, too, but one of the odd structural aspects of the book is that her experience is mostly treated as secondary until the very end, where it suddenly erupts into a heart-wrenching resolution.) There is a murder mystery at the heart of the book as well -- a cold case that happened thirty years in the past. The various plot elements intersect at a cozy farm on the border of Fairyland where the murder happened and where Master Nathaniel's son is taken to rehabilitate after ingesting fairy fruit.

Another difference from The King of Elfland's Daughter (and a lot of other great fantasy novels, including Lord of the Rings and Little, Big) is that it's not about the dying away of magic. It's almost the opposite, in fact, and this may reflect a slightly sardonic take on magic on Mirrlees' part. It is explicitly called a form of delusion many times in the book (possibly playing off the common etymology for "fairy"), and her bourgeois characters are nothing if not deluded. Thus their very attempt to banish magic is a delusion, or form of magic, itself. But Mirrlees also compares magic to narcotics, dreams, and to the imagination, and she does not see modernity making an end of those things, far from it. So while she (the daughter of a wealthy sugar merchant) has a slightly wicked love of the banished aristocracy, she does not share Tolkien's yearning for a return of the old order. Duke Aubrey, the last aristocratic ruler of Lud-in-the-Mist, who is said to have vanished into Fairyland, is a complex figure, both noble and rapacious. The burghers who replaced him are more magical themselves than they care to recognize.

Well, I guess that's enough for now. I do, however, want to comment on the edition of the book that I read, which is from Cold Springs Press. I thought it was an incredibly poor production. Not only are there far more typos than is acceptable, but there were at least two places where a paragraph break came in the middle of a sentence. That's just embarrassingly shoddy work. The introduction by Douglas A. Anderson also contains at least one questionable statement, when he says that Mirrlees lived to see the 1970 reprint of her previously neglected book in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. While it's true that she was still alive, from what I've read elsewhere Lin Carter only made a perfunctory attempt to contact her, since the book was in the public domain. It's very possible, therefore, that the British Mirrlees was unaware that her magical novel had found new life and a new audience in America.

Another quiet weekend. Yesterday the weather was nice enough that I got out in the yard and raked leaves and transplanted some daisies. (A fitting coda to Experiment Perilous, which begins and ends in a field of daisies.) Once again it felt good to do something physical. There was a recent study that argued that getting dirt on your skin is actually good for your mental health, although I don't remember why. Anyway, it works for me, so there's your proof.

I'm reading Hope Mirrlees 1926 fantasy novel, Lud-in-the-Mist. It appears to be an answer to the question I had after my first reading of Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter back in the '90s: What are the other great novels about Elfland? Although it's called Fairyland in Mirrlees' novel, and we haven't actually entered the perilous realm directly yet. But the town of Lud-in-the-Mist is set on the border, and a river from Fairyland runs through it. The mercantile townfolk are trying to suppress the cross-border influence. Wonderfully eccentric and vivid, full of characters with names like Moonlove Honeysuckle. Reminiscent of Mervyn Peake as well as Dunsany.

I watched a 1980 BBC production of The Tempest, thanks to ron_drummond. The actors were much more comfortable with the language than those I saw last Wednesday, which made what they said more comprehensible. Prospero was not such an imperious jerk in this version, and Ariel was feyer and less important. Miranda and Ferdinand were more vivid, Caliban less so. I'm not sure what I took away from this production. It seemed less fantastical than the UW's current version. It felt less eventful, yet precisely detailed. I think I actually preferred the UW production, despite the fact that the acting wasn't as good.

I didn't get to watch the UO football game on Saturday, which ended up being a good thing as they crashed back to earth, losing to Stanford 51-42. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted, and they're still in pretty good shape.