A Certain Slant of Light

I have met my father in Prague! Mostly we have been eating and wandering, because my third favorite occupation in foreign climes, bookstore-haunting, will avail me little here. I can't even pretend to read Czech.

The eating has been going very well, however! We are staying in a little hotel with a restaurant downstairs, and yesterday we had duck for dinner - perfectly cooked ducked, with crispy yet succulent skin, accompanied by dumplings and laid gently on a golden bed of sauerkraut. The sauerkraut looked so luscious that I actually tried it, despite my habitual suspicion of all things cabbage, and lo! it was delicious. It was glorious. It oozed a golden sauerkraut juice which was a good as any gravy.

In fact, I was so extraordinarily taken with last night's sauerkraut that I had a hotdog with sauerkraut for lunch, and came to the same conclusion that not all sauerkrauts are created equal, and indeed that most of them are not lovingly warmed to a golden brown hue that suggests faint caramelization. But I was very hungry from getting lost in Prague, so I ate the whole thing despite the inferior sauerkraut.

Getting lost in Prague! Otherwise known as the way that I get around Prague, because even when we combined our bumps of direction, my dad and I never managed to get where we intended to go without getting two or three other places first. But the whole city is so lovely, it doesn't really matter: all the buildings are beautiful and bedecked in sculpture, and whenever you turn around there's a spire that appears to be just around the curve of the street.

It is not, of course, just around the curve of the street. When you try to track the spire down, it will disappear, and be replaced by an onion dome and a marionette store, and you will forget you meant to find the spire at all, because there's so much else to see.

(I do hope, though, that I will get my bearings enough to find my way to the Mucha museum while I'm here.)

I am particularly taken with the marionettes, and am firmly restraining myself from buying one. They're charming in shops because they exist there in marionette troupes, but if you take them out of that social environment - well, marionettes are not meant to live alone. when they have no other marionettes to play with they are apt to get up to mischief, and I just don't have enough time to keep one entertained.

So savvierthanu and I were chatting about how hard it is to come up with titles for stories, and I suggested a game of title roulette. Basically you come up with titles and write the story based around that - preferably using quotes from classic literature because the context of the quote might help spark a story, whereas if you get a title like "Starfish" or something then what do you even do with that?

(Little Mermaid ninja AU?)

- sorry, I got distracted. I gave savvy "In the Forests of the Night," from Blake's poem "Tyger Tyger," and naturally this led to weretigers and she wrote an adorable story about Chekov, who has suddenly turned into a Siberian weretiger and is snuggling with Sulu: Weretiger. Cuddly weretiger! Awww.

This left me with questions.

1. Why are cuddly weretiger stories not a thing? LET US MAKE THEM A THING, FANDOM. I am also game for cuddly werepandas and wereflying squirrels.

2. If a werecreature goes into space, do they stop being a werecreature because there's no longer a moon to put them in their animal form? Or do they just turn unpredictably whenever they're in too close proximity to a moon? What's the mechanism for were-transformations, anyway? is it something to do with the gravitational pull of the moon, or is it the quality of moonlight?

And if werecreatures do turn unpredictably in space, has Starfleet banned werebeasts from its ranks? "I'm sorry, we just can't have you suddenly turning into a tiger and eating members of the crew, it's bad for morale!" And if so, think of the dramatic possibilities! A werewombat sneaks through Starfleet training, concocting anti-were serum in secret in the science lab, only to run out at a critical moment!

...Unfortunately I do not know any of the Treks well enough to write this. I release the werebunny to the world! Go forth and propagate stories!

3. I also note that the title "In the Forests of the Night" still lies unused. But unfortunately I have no weretiger story ideas at all. If it involved either drugs or restraints (WERETIGER ENCAGED), I could totally use it for hc_bingo, too...

"Do they always put you in a cage for the full moon?"

"Always," she said, letting her striped hair fall like a curtain over her face.

"But that's horrible."

"Not as horrible as coming back to yourself and finding the 'tween maid dead," she said.

EDITH CRAWLEY, LADY WERETIGER. No wonder she thinks no one will marry her.

ALTERNATIVELY. A Little Princess fic. Sara Crewe goes walking through Miss Minchin's establishment soon after she arrives, and finds Lavinia in her cage. It would go some way to explaining Lavinia's sour temper...and why she hates Sara. She can't stand having anyone know her secret.

This one is all on asakiyume. Last entry I posted a photo of a sculpture of robot hobos and importuned the world to write the robots' story, and she said, "You should write it!

And so: here you go.


The Robot Story

Everybody hates robots. It’s on account of them that we have the Depression: ever since that man Brewster invented them, they’ve taken over most of the old factory jobs and driven just about everyone out of work. “Makin’ themselves workers who don’t need to sleep or eat! Drivin’ real flesh and blood to starvation with their heartless machines!” my uncle Max always shouts, rattling his newspaper whenever there’s another robot story. “The goddamn capitalists – ”

“Don’t use that kind of language in front of Susie,” Mama reminds him.

And then I say, “I wish you’d call me Susannah.” Usually she does, but whenever she wants Uncle Max to talk nicely she forgets, because it’s not much good telling him to think of the children when I’m going on thirteen.

( More )

If you had a time machine, where would you go? Right now, I'm gunning for Coney Island; I've been reading John Kasson's Amusing the Million and Luna Park sounds simply irresistible, the fairy tale architecture limned in electric lights at night.

(Note to self: must stop using the word 'limned' all the time.)

But the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 pioneered that use of electric lights; and it too has a strong pull on me. It would be a splendid place to take a time machine.

And if I'm going back to the 1890s, most of all I'd want take a train to Boston to visit Josephine Preston Peabody, dreamer, poet, and delightfully wry diarist. “I doubt not that the time will come when, instead of going to a Symphony, even on a stand-up, I shall derive immense spiritual joy from dusting the whole lower floor with a smile upon my face."

I'm having trouble deciding what to quote. An outburst of proto-feminist outrage? Or the overflow of joy at an accepted poem, an unexpected trip to England, even just a beautiful day? Wistful longing after companionship - or a whimsical letter outlining for a friend a lovely outing they should take - or exultation in the bliss of solitude?

Or almost all of the above?

“But how a walk on a day like this shows me that delight of – what? Dryad-life?...I only mean that, walking in the wind, over the snow, the opal wintry sky smiling at one – one cannot understand how people ever wish to fall in love – how they can ever be married. ‘Oh,’ I said to myself -- ‘Even if you loved any one enough, it would be imprisonment in a garden! How can you belong to anybody, anybody!’”

I want to make Peabody a centerpoint of my dissertation. I have no idea how to do this, or how to justify it; but damn, I really want to.

I just found the best thing ever: the epic tale a friend and I wrote together in sixth grade. At least I remembered it being epic, so it's a bit of a come-down to discover that it's a mere fifteen pages long.

I have excerpted the first couple paragraphs for your delectation.

Worm and Juniper raced after Shakespeare, closely followed by four sheep. Dorcus, the evil wizard, was in hot pursuit, shrieking curses and trying to push his red hair out of his swarthy face. Worm and Juniper sprinted forward, trying to keep out of range of Dorcus’s trident –

CRASH!

Page Perfect, the boy who bunnies followed, had knocked into the sheep and Dorcus...

This beginning may raise questions in your mind. Why is an evil wizard chasing Juniper and Worm? How did the sheep get involved? Why do bunnies follow Page Perfect? What does Shakespeare have to do with anything?

Reader, these questions will never be answered. Except the one about Shakespeare. Eight pages on, it is revealed that he is a golden retriever. And, while we will never learn why the bunnies follow Page Perfect, we will discover that there are three and they are called Leaper, Harper, and Wolf the attack bunny.

But never mind! These aren't the main characters anyway. We won't meet our heroes for another half page, when Athena turns two of the sheep into black cats by setting them on fire with her magical torch. After that Juniper and Worm lie down for a nap and the cats go on a quest.

The cats never quite manage to settle on a gender. Every few paragraphs their pronouns inexplicably switch.

But anyway. The cats meet the great and terrible Zeus, (who later changes his catch phrase to "Never fear, Zeus is here!"), a steam engine who thinks he's a sea turtle, and Zila, who looks like a panda except she can hypnotize people by rotating her puffy purple ears. Also, every few paragraphs they get transported to another world by poisonous purple puffballs (experiencing, on the way, a flipping/spinning/somersaulting/twisting (sickening) sensation).

Somewhere in between the somersaulting sensations they defeat the evil Hercules II, who lives on the Twisted Stair, who is so evil that in the end his evil wizards (Dorcus, Dimmius, and Hypocrites - pronounced Hypocriteez) abandon him en masse. But fear not! Hercules II has an evilizing machine, thus setting up the grounds for the sequel.

Which never got written. Even though we left the cats literally hanging by their paws off a cliff. But don't worry! Wolf the attack bunny was still free to save them!

...Okay, on a purely sentence level the tale is kind of awful. But I'm totally proud that we recorded our ridiculously awesome crazy for posterity.

The University of York campus is infested with ducks.

Now, I am fond of ducks. Ever since I was a tiny child I’ve liked to feed ducks, and added to that now is the peculiar pleasure of knowing that duck’s feet slap against the pavement with a sound like flip-flops when they’re out wandering.

However, there is trouble in paradise. Along with ducks, the University of York campus is infested with coots.

( The Trouble with Coots )

I’ve been very productive this morning. I have a thesis statement and a batch of cookies.

The kitchen in my dorm is in the basement, a creepy basement with tangled branching corridors, a stairway to nowhere, an elevator so ghetto that it once trapped a group for nearly an hour, and pipes that rattle and gurgle and appear generally on the verge of collapse.

Today there was this horrible high-pitched sound on the edge of hearing, like one of the hot water pipes squealing steam. So I’m standing there stirring chocolate chips into cookie dough and contemplating death by boiler explosion.

But the sound got lower and then I realized it was music, although eerie and monotone. Clearly live but totally disembodied, as if the Phantom was lurking in the basement.

So I went to check it out. In one of the back rooms tucked into the twisty corridors, there was a woman tuning a piano.

This is where shoonthree comes in. It’s pronounced “shoon-tree” and it means, in Gaelic I think, a song for sleeping. Not a lullaby but a song about sleeping, a song that is sleep. The word has captured my imagination, won’t let go, demands that it be given a foothold in my world, and now I have a sound to go with it.

If my dreams had a sound track—they don’t; do people dream in sound?—but if they did, this would be it. My own personal shoonthree: the eerie and inexplicable sound of strings being twisted back into harmony.