John Ware's I AM IN ESKEW

I love me some atmospheric audio drama to while away my painsomniac hours, the weirder the better, so after having seen it in my recommendations on my podcatcher (I use Podcast Addict), I subscribed to I am in Eskew. But it took a real live person organically recommending it to me to actually get me to listen in and get hooked almost immediately. 

I Am In Eskew tells the story of two people, David and Riyo, who find themselves in a city straight out of H.P. Lovecraft. Not that it's teeming with fish men or idol worshippers or newly risen from the sea or anything. No, it's constructed on the principles that geometry can be so warped and wrong that it can drive people slowly and subtly mad until their lives -- ordinary enough on the surface, with day jobs and apartments and soul-crushing commutes and dive bars -- basically become an MGMT video. 

And I'm not talking "Electric Feel" or "Time to Pretend," here. I'm talking "When You Die." If you've never watched that video, I've embedded it below, but I'm warning you it is Glorious Super Creepy PKD-Flavored Nightmare Fuel.

Anyway.

We start off with David, who has begun recording sound files detailing his bizarre experiences in this strange city, starting with meeting the architect of an art gallery that was poised to be the New Cool Thing in town until suddenly it wasn't and construction petered out and then halted. It is now the stuff of delicioiusly scary rumor -- so of course the architect invites David to tour the place but warns him to be careful because the building turns out to be the bastard child of the Zone from Stalker/Roadside Picnic and the Navidson house in House of Leaves. It's never quite clear how much danger they're really in, but David seems to believe it's a life or death matter to escape, with or without the architect, and finishes the episode grateful in Eskew's never-ending rain (and I do mean never-ending; it's a signature part of the show's sound design that a steady and misleadingly soothing track of constant rainfall underlies every moment of I Am in Eskew. And, friends, you need the soothing, because while only a handful of episodes begin with content warnings, potentially they all could. Body horror, gaslighting, suicidal ideation (externally imposed), child abandonment, bullying, bureaucratic nightmares, medical horror, it's all waiting for you in Eskew.

David's adventures are largely episodic with little connecting them aside from the setting, and it seems for a while like, in the manner of television of Old, consequences of his actions or what happens to him don't seem to carry over much. Monsters met in one place seem to triumph in terrible ways but are never mentioned again, for instance. And that's fine. Monster of the Week is a tried and true formula, and not everything has to be serialized to the hilt like The Wire.

But then some things do start carrying over. David gets a girlfriend, Allegra,who seems at first to be just another lost soul in Eskew (with one hell of a story of how she got there), but then she seems to be a little too plugged in to how things work, connected to what passes for movers and shakers there (always organizations, never individuals) and things get deliciously unsettling. 

It is under her auspices that my favorite single episode of I am in Eskew comes to pass. She gets David a job at Eskew's Royal Society. His tasks center around condensing long historical narratives into the kind of pithy summaries put on placards describing the background of artifacts in museum displays. Finally, he's going to get some real Intel on this crazy place -- or is he? He soon learns from his unfriendly coworker that in fact their job is to invent the history of Eskew. They are given ledgers with evocative titles that basically serve as fiction writing props: "Rituals of the Argent Basilica," "The Festival of the Weeping Duchess," etc. David and the passive-aggressive Platnik are to come up with flavor text, and if the Royal Society likes what they've written, artifacts to illustrate and prove their made-up narratives appear in the glass display cases, accompanied by exciting exhibit banners and whatnot, in the museum where they work. But nothing is, heh, written in stone. The unseen Society has the last word on how David's and Platnik's words get interpreted -- and their work can be augmented, rewritten, later declared hoaxes. And David and Platnik, delightfully, get competitive and quickly start playing dirty, with very amusing results -- until suddenly, they're not. Because Eskew.

Meanwhile, we slowly get to know the other narrator-figure, a young-sounding British-Somali woman named Riyo, whom David's mother has hired to find whatever became of him because he's been missing since he was a little boy. And realize that we never really did learn for sure how David came to be in Eskew. Riyo's adventures mostly take place in our humdrum world until she finally finds a way into Eskew, and then things really get wild.

The 30-episode series is beautifully narrated by both characters, but a word to those who like to listen to podcasts or audio dramas in bed: the combination of the endless rain sounds and both narrators' almost-too-soothing voices can make it easier than usual to doze -- only to awaken to some seriously disturbing imagery with a few minutes of missing context that one then has to rewind back to get, which can be frustrating. Atmospherically, it's perfect for that time of night, but, caveat auditor, as it were.

Isabel Allende's VIOLETA (tr by Francis Riddle)

It's not hard to make me cry these days -- one of the many reasons I've pretty much stopped watching television is that I bawl uncontrollably, even at commercials, so we won't even talk about sporting events or scripted dramas like Call the Midwife.* Or, say, The Expanse, which, we all know the last time a book made me cry; it wasn't that long ago, was it?

Sometimes our fates take turns that we don't notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight. At each crossroads or fork we must decide which direction to take. These decisions may determine the course of the rest of our lives. That's what happened to me the day I recovered Torito's cross.

So it should come as no surprise that I've spent the last few days peering at my ebook reader through a film of tears, because I've been reading Isabel Allende, a writer whom I haven't read since I had to read her debut novel for a class in college, long before my cry-at-everything problem surfaced in my life, but yeah, I cried then, too. So I should have been prepared for Violeta.

The passage I quoted above occurs quite late in the novel and wasn't the first bit that elicited the waterworks, but it's the most important to the plot, so I'm going to talk about it and yeah, you guys don't pay attention to the tagline on this blog anymore so spoilers except, of course, this being historical fiction, history itself is the greatest spoiler of them all.

The title character, Violeta, is a member of the same clan readers first encountered in Allende's first novel House of the Spirits(which I read for a class in college when it was still pretty new), whose life spans an entire century in her native land (a never-named Chile but come on, it's obviously Chile) with excursions to the United States and to Europe over the course of an extraordinary life that begins in the Great Depression with her family's fall from upper class splendor to living off the charity of the kindly back-of-beyond family of Violete's governess' lover Teresa, continues through a tepid marriage to a German veterinarian that brings her within a whisker of getting involved in a fictionalized Colonia Dignidad, a scorching love affair with a dashing criminal pilot with ties to all of the right-wing evil that South America and the United States have to offer (and it is he who fathers her two children and madly complicates her life for decades while she is still technically married to the German), a nice one with the guy whom she originally meets when her criminal lover hires him to keep track of their wayward daughter in 1960s Las Vegas, and finally a delightful autumnal relationship with a Norwegian diplomat and bird watcher.

The love of her life, though, as we are told early on, is someone named Camilio, whose actual relationship to her is kept secret until quite late; two other men loom large and protective and helpful in her life in the form of her brother, Jose Antonio, and the Torito mentioned in the passage I quoted above. Her brother shares his business acumen with her early on in life, allowing her to develop a powerful skill set that lets her support herself as an independent woman in a time and place when that was a unicorn; Torito is a family retainer whom she has always known, something of a father figure, not conventionally intelligent or intellecutal and huge, so commonly thought of as developmentally disabled (the novel uses the R word), who comes through for her at a desperate time and pays the ultimate price for it.

I have defined Violeta so far through her relationships with men, but there are also incredible women in her life, starting with her Irish governess, who comes to her as a nanny dressed like a flapper in the 1920s, young and pretty but already damaged by a devastating past as an orphan girl in Ireland but determined not to let that stop her; her relationship with another woman, the aforementioned Teresa, not only governs the early course of Violeta's life as the source of her family's refuge after their fall in the Great Depression, but also involves them all in radical politics from the movement for women's suffrage through the election of Chile's first Socialist president and the sweeping reforms that were utimately his downfall.

In addition to the governess are two extraordinary maiden aunts, a pair of itinerant schoolteachers who train up Violeta to maybe someday join their ranks, a cook who becomes her family's link to the indigenous population in the south of the nation, and so many more. If a character gets a name, they get a full story, relayed in intimate, chatty detail by narrator Violeta, who is recounting the whole of her life  and her evolution from spoiled only daughter of a rich family to wayward wife of a German immigrant to conservative, self-supporting savvy businesswoman to radical founder of a social justice organization that looks poised to outlive her -- all for the benefit of her beloved Camilio.

All this means that, yes, Violeta lives through the brutal military dictatorship led by Pinochet. At first she doesn't think it's going to be so bad -- she has thriving businesses, plenty of money, and government contracts that look like they're going to be honored -- and her awakening to the actual nature of the right-wing dictatorship that takes over her country, the finding of a wooden cruxifix she carved as a little girl for her big, strange friend Torito, is sudden, shocking and emotionally wrenching -- and absolutely organic. Allende was great back in the 1980s and has only gotten better, so fluid and natural now that I don't even notice her, which I can also say for translator Francis Riddle.

I mean it as a tremendous compliment to observe that I didn't notice either of them as I was absorbed completely into the story. And crying.

*To name a show that all of the women in my life love passionately and honestly, I don't know how they do it. Every damned episode I've seen has left me sobbing uncontrollably for, like, days? And I have enough to cry about in real life? But there you go. God damn that show.

Rebecca Solnit's ORWELL'S ROSES

Thinking about Orwell's roses and where they led was a meandering process and perhaps a rhizomatic one, to deploy a word that describes plants such as strawberries that send out roots or runners to spread in many directions. The word was adopted by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to describe a decentralized or nonhierarchical model of knowledge. "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be," they declared. "This is very different from the tree or root which plots a point, fixes an order."

The above passage from Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses could serve as a thesis statement for the book as a whole, for while I've seen this book described as a sort of biography of George Orwell, it's really only a tiny bit that, as I'll discuss below. 

Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, is a foundational writer for me, for all that the only fiction of his that I had ever read until unusually late in life for a lit major was Animal Farm*. For me, what I've always loved him for the most has been his essays, many of which I can quote almost word for word. I've enjoyed pseudo-biographies of him before, especially Emma Larkin's hyper-focused and fascinating Finding George Orwell in Burma, which does just what it says on the tin: locates important experiences and settings from Orwell's well-known years as a member of the British government's Indian Imperial Force as inspirations for a lot more of his work than just his first novel. Among its more interesting insights came from Larkin's conversation with a local on a visit to what is now Myanmar in which at first her conversation partner didn't know who she was talking about when she mentioned Orwell by either his pen or actual names, but then realized she was talking about "the prophet."

Orwell's name is on every tongue in this dumb century of ours, usually as a shorthand way of demonizing one's political opponents. Wearing masks to contain the spread of a killer virus is somehow Orwellian (though I really doubt he'd agree). Insisting that counterfactual insanity is still somehow true despite mountains of actual evidence that the crowd wasn't that big, and that your guy is in photographs with Jeff and Ghislaine, too, is Orwellian. Vaccine requirements are Orwellian? People wishing it was maybe a little harder for unhinged teenagers or mentally ill spouse-abusers to get access to automatic weapons is Orwellian? Insisting that you can't trust anything you hear in the press is pretty Orwellian. Orwellian, Orwellian, Orwellian.**

So while I still think everybody who uses his pen name in vain should have to read Larkin's book if not re-read Orwell directly***, it's a pretty interesting time for something like Orwell's Roses to make an appearance.

Right as I started reading it, I was brought back to one of my favorite reads from last year (you know, 2020 And Some Months), Dean King's Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed, a biography of another of my favorite writers of all time that focused quite a lot on O'Brian's cozy-sounding yet strenuously laborious domestic arrangements over the years. Here, too, quite a lot of attention is paid to its subject writer's housing, focusing on his house in Wallington, Hertfordshire, England, where he lived from 1936 to 1940 when he wasn't off at the Spanish Civil War, and where he planted the roses that first captured Solni'ts imagination.

Even more attention, though, is paid to what it means to plant roses in the first place, and Orwell's Roses turns into something much more interesting than another Orwell biography could be; Solnit has let her curiosity, her knowledge and her understanding of the writer's life, the life of the politically aware, and of what industrialization has done to all life on earth, lead her to all sorts of interesting ideas and connections between the man and his roses -- and each of us. The result is a book that makes me think of W.G. Sebald more than of anyone else, except Solnit isn't content to just show us fragments; she wants to pull them together into something, if not whole, at least whole enough for us to see how the fragments might fit together, and how there might be more than one way to fit them. This is pure black magic to me, making Orwell's Roses the best example of "the kind of book I wish I could write" that I've yet found.

Orwell's Roses take Solnit to some unexpected places, such as Bogota, Columbia, a city that is now surrounded by vast greenhouses and the infrastructure to process, package and ship their sole product: scentless, immature roses on an industrial scale, destined for supermarkets, airport booths and florist's shops in the United States. The roses we give one another for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day to celebrate love and beauty are grown by overworked, underpaid, exploited workers in their thousands, who are, Solnit discovers, made into walking billboards for Orwellian slogans by the text printed on their coveralls: "Effort and passion make us feel satisfied in our work", "The attitude depends on you. The rest we want you to learn here" are some choice examples, printed in Spanish on the actual garments, of course.

And, while she doesn't travel there, her musings also lead her to Russia and the Soviet Union under Stalin, and especially to the stories of Nikolai Vavilov and Trofim Lysenko, respectively the pioneering geneticist who strove to save the world from hunger through slow and careful plant breeding and seed saving, and the Lamarckian pseudoscientist who convinced Stalin that all that plodding around with the scientific method was a waste of time and they could fake it until they made it when it came to improving crops and crop yields, which lead to years of famine and death while Stalin bragged about how well his plans were working and even famously exported grain while the people growing it starved.

But it's not just to the grim in Orwell's world or ours that Solnit points us; the man, Eric Blair, had a great love for the simple beauty of the mundane, the close at hand, the homely, and especially the English -- the countryside, the junk shops, the soil in which so much could be grown that he and his first wife, Eileen, could often feed themselves from their garden, and Solnit celebrates this side of Orwell and of life right alongside his and her accounts of his experiences in miserable coal mines, on the battle fronts in the Spanish Civil War, and suffering in tuberculosis wards as his hard, active, risk-taking way of life caught up with him and took him young. 

The result is a book that I didn't expect but also didn't know I needed: a good beginning for what's sure to be another Orwellian year. 

*A first American edition of which is still one of my most cherished possessions, one of those things they'll have to pry from my cold dead fingers.

**Late in the book one of Solnit's companions in travel and exploration for the book wonderis "whether the word Orwellian should perhaps mean something other than ominous, corrupt, sinister, deceitful, a hypocrisy or dishonesty so destructive that it is an assault on truth and thought and rights" because Orwell, the actual man, was as concerned with beauty and pleasure (Solnit embarked on a re-reading of 1984 for this project and found, to her surprise that even in his totalitarian horror story there is beauty and pleasure throughout, for Winston's entire rebellion is an effort to hold on to these, and one can't depict something being clutched at without describing what is being clutched) as with brutality and deceit, but they ultimately conclude that Orwellian has become too useful a word, and too embedded in our culture, to try to change now.

***Except even back when Animal Farm first appeared, to say nothing of 1984, right-wingers were already misunderstanding the point so hard that Orwell felt he had to issue a declaration more or less from his deathbed that no, dummies, "My novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is notintended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labour party, but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable, and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism."

Samuel R. Delaney's BABEL-17

"Sometimes worlds exist under your eyes and you never see them." 

I sometimes sleep way too long on Science Fiction Grand Masters* and end up missing out on terrific stuff. It's a bit perverse. I know part of it is a matter of "I'll decide for myself whom I think the greatest SF authors are, thank you very much" and part of it is a matter of "OK, I'm pretty much guaranteed that this is going to be good* so I'll save it for getting out of a reading slump (even though those are pretty rare for me) or when I don't feel like taking a chance on something for some reason."

This is also why I haven't read all of Philip K Dick's novels yet. 

Then when I finally get around to one of them, I spend a while berating myself for having slept on him or her, as happened this month when the good old "included in your Audible subscription" bug bit and finally got me paying attention to Samuel R. Delaney and his astonishing, and astonishingly perfect for me, like so perfect for me (except for one thing in sure I'll have too much to say about a bit later) all that's missing is insects or fungi, Babel-17.

The book's title refers to the code name a multi-racial pan-galactic authority has bestowed on what it believes is an unbreakable cypher being used by its enemy, another multi-racial pan-galatic authority we only ever hear referred to as The Invaders. As our story begins, the military has hit an immovable wall as far as Babel-17 goes, but the need to finally crack it is urgent: every time it has been used, devastating acts of sabotage have occurred, and the sabotage is getting worse. 

Enter Rydra Wong, a young woman with a tragic and traumatic past, restored to functioning humanity as a child by society's greatest psychiatrist, former military cryptographer, natural polyglot and universally renowned poet (we learn later in the story, anecdotally, that her poetry is even admired by some Invaders), whom everybody figures is their last chance to crack it. I mean, if I knew someone like her (or, let's face it, could be her!) she's the one I'd want solving a problem like Babel-17.

This would be story enough for me, but Delaney seems to be a guy who doesn't want to stop with the wild ideas and over the top world building. The space-faring world of Babel-17 is one in which there are two ways to travel through space: the ordinary, plodding, mechanical/scientific way preferred by the staid and conservative Customs faction, who mostly stick to the original solar system as a result, and the artistic, intuitive-yet-counter-intuitive hyperdrive/FTL way preferred by the free-wheeling Transport faction, who visit other galaxies and go out and discover wild new things and generally muck about having a good time, mostly. Wong is, of course, a member of Transport, and on top of everything else is a qualified starship captain, which comes into play almost immediately after she gets hold of a transcription of all known samples of Babel-17 and proceeds to argue the general assigned to wrangle her into disclosing more than he'd meant to, allowing her to realize that it's not a code but a language, and lickety-split, she's figured out enough of it to have a pretty good idea as to where the next sabotage is going to take place!

Rydra then plunges into the weird and exciting world of recruitment, Transport-style, dragging the Customs guy assigned to help her acquire and crew a ship through a whole new side of the port city they've both been living in. She needs a whole lot of very peculiar people with some really unusual abilities to make a spaceship go where she needs to be in time to make a difference, and here is where audio book pro Stefan Rudnicki really gets a chance to show off a bit. I was already pleased with him for not doing the stupid "raised pitch and breathy" stereotypical "male narrators doing a female voice" for Rydra, but then he really took off depicting characters that, though human, have unusual physiognomies of various kinds --  and making me believe that's how they sound.

Next thing we know, they are off on their mission, with Rydra mostly sequestered to work on developing a dictionary and grammar of Babel-17 but occasionally dabbling in integrating her new crew, which includes two members of a former sexual and professional threesome whose third had recently died, only for Rydra to blithely pluck a recently dead (by suicide) woman with the requisite skills out of the morgue, reviving her, and declaring her their new partner, even though she doesn't speak the other two's language. Learning to communicate will be a bonding experience, she tells them a bit smugly, because of course she's right; she's Rydra Wong! But the new trio isn't even close to being the weirdest of her new crewmates. The pilot, Brass, is an extreme chimeric straight out of Alastair Reynolds' Ultranauts and was surely an inspiration for same; and then there's the Eye, the Ear, and the Nose. These are three "non-corporeals," sort of technologically enhanced ghosts who have developed just one sense for perceiving the world and who can only communicate via gadgetry, or, with Rydra only, via very intimate non-contact that is kind of like telepathy, only even that way any contact with them immediately evaporates from memory until Rydra develops a trick of quickly mentally translating what they tell her into the Basque language, which she is then able to recall.

Yeah.

Rydra is a bit Mary-Sue-ish, but what she's doing and has yet to do is so interesting and daunting that I didn't care until after this hyperspeed-paced story was over and done, and the omnicompetence of the heroine proved to be necessary for the story to work at all and the story was so good that, fine, she can do everything. Fine. Totally worth it

Except...

Alas, in the middle of the book my unmitigated delight in it was rudely interrupted and threatened to be ruined by a stark reminder that, though most of this book is so fresh and unique and fascinating it could have been written today, it was, in fact, written in the 1960s. Samuel R. Delaney was ahead of his time in every way imaginable -- handles bisexuality with aplomb, no sexism, etc. -- but wrote a minor character in the most fatphobic terms imaginable, and Rudnicki found a way to make her even worse. I was so heartbroken and dismayed by this that I came really really close to just dropping the whole thing. I'm not 100% on this and I have no desire at this point to go back and check but I believe the character, the wife of the Baron in charge of the whole society's weapon development and production facilities, was even referred to as a cow. But even if that word isn't actually in the text, it might as well have been. 

But, if POC and also Irish and Italians can get through H.P. Lovecraft, I can get through this, I finally decided after a day or so. And I was rewarded.

A new and mysterious character soon joins the narrative, a member of a space pirate crew, 6'6 and strapping, with peculiar speech patterns and no memory of his life before committing some over-the-top crimes and serving time for them. And once Rydra figures out the root of his odd speech patterns -- that his first language was one with no first or second personal pronouns -- the two of them have one of the most intricately challenging, emotionally raw and fascinating conversations I've ever read as she tries to teach him what a self is, and what it means that every other human being has one. 

Making that conversation even weirder is that early on, this character, known only as The Butcher by the way, gets the words for "I" and "you" switched around and Rydra just decides to roll with it, so the reader/listener gets the unique experience of having to switch back all of the "I" and "you" statements in an ontological conversation about what those words even mean. 

And I thought Gene Wolfe made me work for it.

This effort to understand each other, as poetically lovely as it is confusing AF, blows the whole story open until we eventually learn the whole point of Babel-17's existence and its incredible implications. And that's pretty much it. This is a short novel (not even seven hours' listen at normal speed as an audio book), not a saga, and it's about the code/language, not the ultimate fate of the co-belligerents struggling to control the novel's universe. Girl meets code/language, girl learns code/language, girl gets her brain put through an emotional/psychological ringer and solves a bunch of mysteries along the way. That's all Delaney wanted to tell us.

But it's plenty.

Now, excuse me, Rydra gave me a bit of a complex, even though I just finished the entire Duolingo Russian course at the Legendary level the same night I finished this novel. I still have streaks to maintain and I'm not going to be much of a Duolingo polyglot if I don't take on a new course, soon.

After wrestling with the implications of Babel-17 and Babel-17, even Welsh or Hungarian sound like fun romps. If I can just finally pick one!

*Though I've been badly bitten by one or two of them. *Cough* Robert Silverberg *Cough*

David M. Perry's and Matthew Gabriele's THE BRIGHT AGES: A NEW HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE

"It's always the historian's job to say 'it's more complicated than that.'

Lots of pixels are already being spilled on behalf of and about this book by people better acquainted with its subject matter than I, so I'm just going to focus on the sheer enjoyment and the new thoughts that The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe gave me during my brief turn with our public library's copy -- brief not only because I was enjoying it and so tore through it with my usual voraciousness, but also because I knew a lot of other people were waiting for it (shakes fist at Libby app). I hope it gets very widely read after I'm done. 

Like Dan Carlin likes to say, I'm a fan of history rather than a student of it, and I'm such a wretched fan that I didn't know that my previous favorite history book about the period covered by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele was not in favor until I looked at some reviews of it prior to writing this post. I don't even recall how I got my hands on William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, but once I did, I didn't let it go for years.* I read it so many times that lines or sometimes whole passages from it intruded on my thoughts when I was reading historical fiction. William Manchester lived rent-free in my head as I first read the great Dorothy Dunnett, for instance.

I think he was maybe squatting a bit in Perry's and Gabriele's heads, too, though; I didn't think of his book at all while reading this until a sly little reference to its title showed up in The Bright Ages. It comes about halfway through, in the midst of a discussion of gothic church architecture and how its system of buttresses and other tricks allowed for walls composed as much of beautiful stained glass as of stone:

In a world made of wood, stone impressed; but for a world before electricity, more important was light. This wasn't a world lit only by fire, but more important, one illuminated by the sun. Allowing that sunlight inside, allowing an interior to gleam, was to capture something of the divine. So heavy stone walls were replaced by translucent and radiant colored glass.**

Underlining mine; italics theirs.

Really, that passage is a thesis statement for this whole book. The period between the canonical Fall of the Roman Empire (but Philip K. Dick taught me that The Empire Never Ended...) and the start of the Renaissance is still most commonly described by the loaded phrase "The Dark Ages" but culturally, intellectually, politically, materially, that period of time was no darker than our own in a lot of key respects. In the literal terms the quoted passage begs us to consider, for example, the sun shone for the same number of hours per day as it does now (and through much cleaner air); it was only at nighttime or deep indoors in windowless rooms that the visible world shrank down to what could be lit by a flame.

And if one zooms back camera (and yes, I'm totally thinking of Alejandro Jodorowsky's last line in The Holy Mountain, here) and takes in all of the then-known world, civilization and all of the ideas and traits we associate with it wasn't suddenly extinguished when Alaric sacked the city of Rome; rather, like a balloon a bunch of kids take turns batting around a room to keep it from touching the carpet, its light was passed from place to place via trade and the travels of scholars and pilgrims and on the backs of war horses and yes, even in the minds of "ignorant" tribesman types gawking at the aqueducts and roads left behind by the classical Roman empire.

And the idea of Rome didn't die, either; people like Galla Placidia, daughter of one Roman Emperor, wife of another (and before that of a Visigothic king) and mother to yet another, never thought of herself as anything but Roman even though she had witnessed the famous sack and led a tumultuous existence that could make anyone agree with Gandhi that Western Civilization was something they should maybe try sometime. Following her the rulers of the Byzantine Empire called themselves Romans and still had chariot races (boy did they have chariot races) and adopted laws and customs from the classical empire even as they embraced this newfangled Christianity. And the idea persisted in some ways even until the Hapsburgs presided over something that by axiom was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, except they themselves might have disputed it when they weren't busy keeping their subject kingdoms from trying to destroy each other and engendering cultural conflicts that are still affecting us even in this stupid 21st century that convinces me more every day that a whole lot of people who desperately cling to the idea that the Dark Ages were totally a thing because it props up their dumb culture war talking points also seem to think that it would be great if we could Make the Age Dark Again.

Oh no, Kate's getting political again, but Perry and Gabriele went there before I did; their whole point in writing this book is to debunk and deconstruct the hundreds of years of post-Renaissance bad history and to point out how that bad history has been used to justify everything from the 17th-19th century return to slavery as a justifiable institution despite being pretty un-Christian, to the 21st century talking head hobby of blathering about "clashes of civilizations" to justify Antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism and, of course, racism. History is written by the victors, sure, but the losers had a habit of finding ways to record their existences and leave traces for us to read as well, and we ignore those traces to our cost.

And this is where the duo really shines. For the most part, they're using the same sources as Edward Gibbons and his heirs always have, but look at them with an eye to why people like Procopius wrote what he did, rather than just taking what he did write as face value, ignoring the fact that his public and private writings frequently contradicted each other, and picking out the bits that agree with a predetermined thesis. Look at the circumstances under which the man worked and what he said and why he said it can make more sense, especially if its backed up by archeological evidence or other primary sources or just the lived experience of standing in the Hagia Sophia even after centuries of alterations... to say nothing of the fruits of hundreds of years of scientific research that has yielded all kinds of insights into the daily realities of The Little People.

The two really do zoom back, by the way, to take in, as I said, the entire known world, including the rise of Islam and the importance of its scholars to what would come to be Europe's Renaissance but also their presence as ordinary residents of the Iberian peninsula where they lived alongside Christians of many kinds (one thing I like is the emphasis in this book on the fact that right from the start there were always many Christianities, plural) and Jews, and the odd pagan hangover in varying degrees of peaceful coexistence -- though Perry and Gabriele are very careful not to fall into the trap of romanticizing this coexistence as This is the Past That Liberals Want.

The Mongols, too, get a turn in the spotlight as carriers of goods and ideas (and, most likely, according to modern archeological and genetic research, probably the Black Death) back and forth, just as the Vikings did. Remember that, famously, one in 200 men now living have some of Genghis Khan's DNA, and not all of them are in Asia.

Hard to share chromosomes without sharing a few other things.

The book ends with a return to Ravenna a thousand years after Galla Placidia built her mausoleum with its marvelous interior sky of lapis lazuli and gold-infused glass tesserae, to consider Dante Aligheri, exiled from Florence by political strife and writing The Divine Comedy's quest for divinity, imagined as light -- and then considers Petrarch, the first great populizer of the idea that the thousand or so years that preceded his personal awesomeness had been universally ignorant, violent and dark (or, as a later scholar would describe the whole of human existence, nasty, brutish and short!), inviting us first to ponder why he found it necessary so to characterize the times that spawned him, and whose interests it has served later historians to perpetuate and intensify Petrarch's errors. As the authors conclude near the end of The Bright Ages, they were "not simple or clean, but messy and human, and that's as close as we can come to the truth."

I hope someday the same kindness is employed in talking about us. 

Now excuse me; this would be a very interesting time to finally read The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, which I've owned for 20+ years but never finished. 

*And while I absolutely see how Manchester's book merits criticism for perpetuating stereotypes about the period he covers, that book us how I first learned to see Henry VIII as more than a wife devouring monster (listen to the music he composed sometime!), to appreciate Magellan, and to empathize with Lucrezia Borgia. So I'll not abandon it wholly. 

**And of course, any discussion of French cathedrals and the like always brings me around to my beloved Orson Welles and my single favorite few minutes of cinema yet created, this bit from his wonderful F for Fake in which he is moved to unparalleled eloquence as he contemplates Chartres:

 

 Go on singing.

And speaking of singing, if you're a bi-sensuous reader like I am, who likes to listen to relevant music while reading a particular book, I bring you a few selections for your listening enjoyment. The first is some of the Byzantine Secular Classical music brought to us through time by composer and musicologist Christodoulos Halaris. I first found this stuff at a used record store in Central Square, Cambridge, MA when I was living in the area in the 90s and I still love it.

 

And here's some music composed by the six-wived Henry VIII that is good enough to make me sometimes feel like forgiving him a tiny bit for some of his bullshit:

 

People are complicated, and always have been!

Leonora Carrington's THE HEARING TRUMPET

Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.

Did you dig One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but kind of wish you could read it gender-flipped? Did you adore the television series Waiting for God but wish you could actually observe all of Tom Ballard's tall tales but as directed by someone like Lindsay Anderson? Leonora Carrington, my new other favorite sculptor-turned novelist, whom I might end up loving even more than sculptor-turned-novelist B. Catling, has you covered and then some.

I do not invoke Ken Kesey's masterpiece, nor my very favorite Britcom* at all lightly, as we'll see.

The text at the beginning of this post is an early declaration from our heroine, Mrs. Marian Leatherby, who has lived some 15 years with her son, daughter-in-law, grandson, two cats and a red hen and spent her days swapping tall tales with her best friend, Carmella, and sucking violet-flavored lozenges on Carmella's porch -- until one day, the very day Carmella gives her the titular hearing trumpet as a gift, Marian learns via the eavesdropping superpowers it gives her that her family considers her not only a burden but as a disgusting one** and is plotting to send her to live in an institution.

In her beastly family's defense, Marian is given to flights of fancy, very vivid and detailed ones in which she hallucinates entire chapters of her old life that blend almost seamlessly, from her point of view, into present conflicts. She freely admits this herself, telling us early on that "Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up." This establishes right away that we're in unreliable narrator territory for what's to come. And oh, what's to come.

The Lightshome (at least that's what I think they called it; ahh, audiobooks!) Home for Senile Old Ladies is a very unusual institution, to say the least. Run by a husband and wife team very much in the Big Nurse role (though not as effective), and rejoicing in the surname of Gambit. Dr. Gambit. Mrs. Gambit. Bahahahaha!), the place has just eight residents when Marian comes to be the ninth. With two exceptions, each resident lives in her own "bungalow" but these quarters are not just cute little houses. No, they are cute little houses in very fanciful forms: a boot, meaning there is at least one Little Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe, a birthday cake, a cuckoo clock, and Marian herself comes to live in what sounds at first like a lighthouse but might actually be a watchtower, the first floor of which is a masterpiece of trompe-l'œil, appearing to be chock full of useful furniture including a bookcase full of books, but only actually offering a single plain chair. This feels like foreshadowing about something or other that will happen later, but I guess it's just there for the sake of being weird, but that's okay, Leonora Carrington, last of the original Surrealists, can be just as weird as she wants, especially when...

Especially when her story is being narrated by the great Dame Jane Elizabeth Ailwên Phillips, aka Siân Phillips, aka Livia from I, Claudius and Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim in David Lynch's Dune, that Siân Phillips and of course I had no business being surprised she could be this flat-out funny but oh my goodness, is she flat-out funny, even if the best wit has a menacing undertone that might not have been what Carrington intended but then again, Siân Phillips saw something in there that made her think of menace and I sure as hell ain't gonna argue with a lady packing a gom jabbar, are you?

Anyway. Marian is quickly embroiled in all kinds of weird little intrigues as she gets to know her fellow residents and the weird regime under which they live. Lightshome is not an expensive place in which to warehouse your unwanted elderly, and part of why is that the residents must help out with the kitchen and gardening work to keep the place going, and must also subject themselves to a weird experiment in spiritual discipline in the form of what Dr. Gambit and his wife (whose permanent strenuous yet unfriendly smile has earned her the nickname of Rachel Rictus behind her back) refer to as The Work. We don't see a lot of this, except at meals, when the ladies are required to listen to one of Dr. Gambit's bizarre lectures about the need for self-regulation and continued effort towards one's moral betterment. For instance, Marian, Dr. Gambit quickly notes, eats way too much cauliflower and this gluttony -- for a vegetable most people have to make an effort to acquire a taste for -- is a great impediment to her spiritual development, as is her tendency not to take "The Movements"*** seriously.

Quickly, Marian finds an escape from Dr. Gambit's hectoring in the form of contemplating a strange image on the wall in the dining room, of a nun who is either blind in one eye or winking at the viewer. As the story unfolds, Marian creates a whole backstory for "The Winking Abbess" only to find that it's true, down to the sonorous and elaborate Spanish name Marian dreamed up for this person. We get a full minisode in the novel's middle that is devoted to this story, which involves witchcraft, impersonation, cross dressing, attempted robbery, Templars and the Holy Grail, all delightfully and breathlessly told via a chronicle a resident smuggles to Marian, which purports to quote directly from period sources of unimpeachable accuracy and is clearly the part that Phillips best enjoyed narrating to us because WOW.

And things get even weirder. Apocalyptically so. Murders occur. Hunger strikes, too. And suddenly there's a new Ice Age?

And I haven't even gotten around to Marian's friend Carmella, who keeps coming up with hare-brained schemes to break Marian out of Lightshome, which she and Marian convinced themselves would be indistinguishable from a penitentiary complete with vicious police dogs, barred windows and hard labor. First Carmella is going to land a helicopter (which she will win in a lottery) and whisk Marian away to safety; later in letters she appears to have decided that it is best to dig a tunnel from her home to the institution's grounds and sneak Marian out that way -- and apparently actually starts digging it, because how else explain how she [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and can suddenly afford to [REDACTED] and hire a [REDACTED] to [REDACTED]?

Nor can I even begin to describe Marian's fellow residents, each of whom has her own set of quirks and pecadillos and petty grievances and delusions, all of which prove to be at least somewhat germaine to the novel's denouement which involves the Holy Grail again, with these residents being chosen not only to survive an environmental apocalypse that was predicted in a series of riddles they had to solve before getting to meet a secret extra resident but also to restore the Holy Grail to the original Mother Goddess whose earthly avatar is none other than The Winking Abbess.

All this in not quite seven hours of listening (or about 200 pages), which felt far too short; as I mentioned a few times on Twitter, this is a book I very much wanted to savor slowly but compulsively could not stop listening to and it's going to be hard to top for my favorite read of this silly second year of 2020 And Some Months and yes, I know it's only January, but really, I'm not sure that this isn't my favorite read of this stupid decade, maybe even this excreble century. Yeah. It's that great.

*Yes, I love it even more than Blackadder. Because Graham Crowden. And also Stephanie Cole.

**Not that we're shown any evidence that she is in any way disgusting, apart from sporting a bit of a little grey beard because she's stopped plucking her Old Lady Whiskers; still sound of body, of clean and regular habits, not given to outbursts or intrusions. She is given to elaborate flights of fancy involving vivid and improbable memories of her past, but her primary sin appears to be that she is old, doesn't like the television her grandson has introduced to the home, and doesn't like her daughter-in-law very much.

***These, as described, made me wonder hard whether Brit Marling or another of her co-creators of The OA is a fan of this novel. Which means yes, I kept waiting for the Movements to turn out to be intended to open some kind of portal and, honestly, given the strange way this novel ends, they could have had that effect? Or maybe something else did it? Who knows?

Michael Shea's MR CANNYHARME: A NOVEL OF LOVECRAFTIAN TERROR

"If he's sinking to hell, it's definitely to a poet's inferno."

I first encountered the weird fiction stylings of Michael Shea in an anthology, which included his short story "Fat Face" - but that tale is probably my least favorite entry in Cthulhu 2000 and my least favorite Michael Shea as well. While it contains most of the elements of Shea's oeuvre that people love -- seedy downtown life, inexplicable horrors, bizarre monsters and lots of moisture -- there was something about it that just made me say "eh," and move on.

Enter the venerable, the wonderful H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, in which Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey have been conducting their "Strange Studies of Strange Stories" for over a decade (and it took them most of it to come up with that tagline, bless them), one of the few shows out there of which I never skip an episode, teamed up with Patton Oswalt to evangelize the hell out of Michael Shea's explicitly Cthulhu Mythos fiction, collected now in a terrific volume called Demiurge: The Complete Mythos Tales of Michael Shea and I became a believer!

And yeah, "Fat Face" is not a good example of this stuff. 

With Mr. Cannyharme, we get to see if the combination of Michael Shea and the Cthulhu Mythos can sustain a whole novel. Spoiler: it totally, totally can.

The novel is written as an homage to one of Lovecraft's own stories, "The Hound." You know the one. The one in which the characters are terrified to discover that "the apparently disembodied chatter was in the Dutch language" (Italics very much HPL's). Mr. Cannyharme isn't just "The Hound but 1960s San Francisco," though. He employs "The Hound" as inspiration, as a springboard rather than a model to slavishly copy.

If anything, Mr. Cannyharme makes me think more of Fritz Leiber* than of Lovecraft, specifically Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, which pits a moderately successful but down-on-his-luck writer of novelizations of TV shows against a dead wizard whose magic was woven from the very geography of the city of San Francisco. 

Mr. Cannyharme takes place in that same city, several social classes down from the beautiful art deco apartment building of Leiber's tale. Shea's characters inhabit an old-fashioned transient hotel. Most of them are closer to death than they are to life with a few dazzling exceptions -- a pimp, Razz and especially his employee DeeAnn, who considers sex work to be the best work and has a good "tight five" of witticisms about it to break the ice and change the mind of anyone who thinks otherwise, are particularly fun to read about -- and none more so than the title character, a little old man bent almost double who shuffles around the city during the day handing out weird little tracts to people of his choosing, but otherwise keeps to himself. Or does he?

Pitted against the horrors, along with Razz and DeeAnn, are Jack, the hotel's graveyard shift desk clerk who is pounding out a novel on an old Olympic typewriter and pining for his ex-wife between calls to buzz in the hotel's residents after hours and to supply them with illegal drugs; a very haunted and lost young woman named Brittany who trades sexual favors for her rent (but only with Jack) and is in turn one of Jack's best customers for her comforting "blankie" of drugs that let her hide for a little while from the horrors of her abused childhood and her growing awareness that something really, really isn't right about their building; and a few side characters, such as the barely teenaged daughter of the hotel's perpetually bickering husband and wife managers, the Patels, who run the place on behalf of some richer Patels and turn a blind eye to the rest of the goings-on in the building.

Shea loved San Francisco, lovee especially its seedy underbelly, and it shows on every page. Street scenes full of hustlers and junkies and every other kind of low-life bring out the lyric poet in him for paragraph after paragraph of rhapsodies that are as intoxicating as the contents of Jack's little baggies.

But the drugs Jack is slinging these days are mostly uppers, so even when we're just enjoying the scenery, it's energetic and invigorating:

Down in the street outside the Hyperion, Jack just stands there a moment, taking in the early evening. The candy- colored neons are coming on, the signals blaze, all the tail-lights and headlights river and roar, and above it all a first shy star or two gleams in the purple sky. The sidewalks throng, the working stiffs -- many Latins and Easterners -- threading through the low-lifes... He's right where he should be.

But this is no Visit Beautiful San Francisco tourist copy. Zoom in on individuals and it's even more, ah, vivid:

Below the man's gaping mouth a second bloody mouth gapes still more widely. Sliced meat its lips, and gore its pendant spittle, hanging in crusty drapes down both the man's shoulders.

I mean, yuck, but I've also got to admire the craft, here. And it's this craft that is at the heart of the novel; Cannyharme first ensnares his victim-accomplices by means of poetry, possibly tailored to each reader, and some of those he so ensnares, if they've artistic pretensions already, themselves reach new heights of expression. And Shea doesn't just settle for telling us that their output has improved; he shows us exactly what they've written, indulging in even crazier word-lust and imagery in whole passages of demented verse that would be the best thing about this novel of everything else weren't so good.

And yes, I cried happy little tears for the little world of resistance the novel's handful of survivors build for themselves in the last chapter. Their victory is hard-won and temporary, but as in the denouement of almost all of Shea's Mythos stories, they know they have a fighting chance if they stick together. And keep an eye out for a being in a wildly patterned Hawaiian shirt. Oops, that last bit didn't age super duper well, but c'est la guerre. 

So yeah, Shea gives good novel. And my resolve is redoubled to keep seeking him out. I hear good things about this fella Nifft, for instance.

*But,  of course, Leiber was inspired by Lovecraft. He just hated the world a lot less than cranky, prejudiced misanthrope Howard did.