rymenhild

I keep complaining to people about historical lesbian romance novels with no edges and no tension. Rose Lerner's delicious The Wife in the Attic, first available on Audible and just last week available in print/e-book, doesn't have these problems. But it isn't a romance at all, really. It's textbook Gothic, more Sarah Waters than Olivia Waite, and although it's set in the world of Lerner's Lively St. Lemeston series, with crossover characters, it doesn't resemble Lerner's other books at all.

Protagonist Miss Oliver (I won't give you her first name, since she doesn't use it until a significant moment halfway through) is an educated spinster barely surviving on music lessons when she is offered a job as governess to a five-year-old girl in a manor by the sea. The food is much better than Miss Oliver was offered at her boarding house, and the master of the house offers intelligent, if uncomfortably flirtatious, conversation. On the other hand, our protagonist is locked in her rooms every night, and there's always some reason she can't leave the manor on her Friday half-holiday. And she never sees Lady Palethorp, Sir Kit's wife and the child's mother, who is supposedly ill in her own rooms. And Miss Oliver is terrified of fire, having heard too much about the time her Portuguese Jewish grandmother's family were burned by the Inquisition. And the child is afraid that her mother's soul might be destined for hell...

This setup does lead to an affair of sorts between Miss Oliver and Lady Palethorp, as advertised in the book's marketing, but I think my favorite thing about their relationship is that it in no way matches the beats I'd expect in a romance novel. Lady P is offstage through most of the first third of the book, and when she does appear, her dynamic with Miss Oliver has as much two-way jealousy, resentment, and anger as attraction, and although their relationship changes, it never does become simple.

Meanwhile, 19th-century British antisemitism, very precisely drawn according to Lerner's careful research, is one of the driving forces of both plot and characterization. So is 19th-century British Jewish immigrant culture. The interplay of ethnic identity, religious identity, and social class matters very much. Miss Oliver's mother was a Portuguese-British costermonger and the governess herself is destitute, while Lady Palethorp's equally Portuguese-British father and grandfather sold many straw hats and left her their wealth. I'm convinced by the nuances of Lerner's work on class, status, ethnicity, and religion in ways that I haven't been convinced by Lerner's prior writing.

I want to talk about the last third of the book, but I really can't until more people have read it, so if this description sounds good to you, read it and come back!

The other day, skygiants was posting fanmixes, and I thought, I used to love making fanmixes. Why don't I do that anymore?

Fortunately, one of the prompts that skygiants hadn't yet filled (suggested by vass) was Erin Bow's Prisoners of Peace duology, a wonderfully iconoclastic take on young adult dystopia that I recommend without reservation. Greta is a logical, courageous princess living in a post-apocalyptic monastery and waiting for her mother to go to war, at which point Greta will be killed, since she's a hostage for the cause of world peace. Keeping her and dozens of other royal children prisoner is the brilliant idea of Talis, immortal AI and amoral murder robot. But everything is more or less fine until a new hostage arrives... at which point Erin Bow scraps all the usual YA dystopia tropes and takes her story somewhere much more interesting. The sequel, which I can't even link to without Book 1 spoilers, is even weirder and better.

All that is to say, I made a playlist. Spotify playlisting is terrific, because there are so many songs to choose from. Somehow I still ended up with two Vienna Teng, two Indigo Girls and two Dar Williams songs on a fourteen-song playlist, though.

( The Scorpion Rules: I'm no ordinary princess / I was born in the Cold War )
( The Swan Riders: I hear the clockwork in your core / Time strips the gears till you forget what they were for )

I'll take other playlist requests, and try to come up with five songs for each.

It's time to disconnect permanently from LiveJournal, after thirteen years. I thought about deleting my LJ, but I hate leaving broken links and lost archives. Realistically, I don't have a way to remove all of my data from LJ's servers. Deleting my journal would only make the data invisible to me while still existing in backups somewhere. What I'm going to do instead is end Dreamwidth crossposting and leave the rymenhild journal static where it is. I've hardly been writing at all lately, but if I do use a journaling site again, it will be Dreamwidth only, at rymenhild.

Strength to you all in this alarming New Year.

I subscribed to the New Yorker recently, as I'd been running out of free accesses regularly and the introductory subscription price was ridiculously cheap with a .edu email address. One of the advantages (or disadvantages, depending on how much work I should be doing instead of reading articles) is that the New Yorker sends me emails with links to particularly interesting articles in their archives.

Stage Mothers by Elif Batuman (December 2012) may be the best thing I've read all year, and I just want to talk about it with all of you. Ümmiye Koçak, a peasant woman from Southern Turkey with a middle-school education, saw a school play for the first time when she was in her forties:

Ümmiye had never seen a play before, and it seeped into her thoughts. For a long time, she had been puzzling over the situation of village women—the many roles they had to play. In the fields, they worked like men; in villas, they became housekeepers; at home, they were wives and mothers. "I kept turning it over in my head, how is it that I do all these things," she later recalled. "Then I saw Hüseyin’s theatre. That’s when I decided that the thing I’d been turning over in my head was theatre."

So, naturally, Ümmiye founded a theater group made up entirely of village women, and put on plays about marriage and poverty and domestic abuse inspired by the actors' lives, and performed these plays in front of the village. Then she founded another theater group. She went to Cannes with a documentary about one play. She adapted Hamlet for a Turkish audience, and put on a goatskin mustache so she could be Hamlet herself. I mean, naturally, right?

Batuman's article itself is a magnificent work about what it takes to make art, and the way art comes out of struggle.

Anyway, read the article yourself and then come talk to me about it. You won't regret it.

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen - Lois McMaster Bujold: 3/5 stars (enjoyable but slight)

I read Bujold's latest (and last?) Vorkosigan novel last night and this morning, while nursing a sore throat. The reading experience was peaceful and pleasant, like a warm cup of chamomile tea with honey. It distracted me from my throat without raising any anxiety or tension. If I hadn't been sick, I would have been bored.

( Spoilers, although there's little to spoil )

Since I got a supporting membership to last year's Worldcon, even though I never got around to voting for the 2014 Hugos, I have nomination powers this year. I intend to use these powers for good. Here are my nominations as they stand currently. Does anyone have additional suggestions? What have I forgotten? Which fan writers were on fire this year?

Best Novel:

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor (Tor)
Jo Walton, My Real Children (Tor)
Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, Stranger (Viking)
Seanan McGuire, The Winter Long (DAW)

Best Short Story:

A. Merc Rustad, How To Become A Robot in 12 Easy Steps (Scigentasy)
Mikki Kendall, If God Is Watching (The Revelator)
Ruthanna Emrys, Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land (tor.com)
(per ladybird97's excellent suggestion) Saladin Ahmed, Without Faith, Without Joy, Without Love (medium.com)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

Legend of Korra: Season 4, Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino (Nickelodeon)
Welcome to Night Vale, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor (Commonplace Books)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

Welcome to Night Vale, "Old Oak Doors", Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor (Commonplace Books)

Best Fan Writer

(per agonistes's excellent suggestion) skygiants (Confidential to skygiants: How do you want to be identified on the Hugo ballot? Is there a post from last year you're especially proud of?)

I have been trying to write a review of Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette)'s new novel, The Goblin Emperor, and it's coming out in clichés: A beautiful book, a moving book, a book about loyalty and building cross-cultural bridges and making a place for oneself in a terrifying world, a book I did not want to end.

( More detailed comments behind the cut. Some general, unspecific spoilers for Goblin Emperor; some references to plot and character developments in Doctrine of Labyrinths. )

Today I've been reading assorted seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature in order to plan a class. This is always entertaining and educational. I shall present, for your entertainment, one of the poems I found in my search. I give you "Nestor", or "Upon the Drinking of a Bowl," by the notorious seventeenth-century drunkard and libertine John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. (In the edition I found this morning, some of the language had been expurgated. I of course have posted the non-expurgated version.)

Nestor (ca. 1670, as far as I can tell; I haven't seen a precise date)

Vulcan contrive me such a Cupp
As Nestor us'd of old:
Show all thy skill to trim it up
Damask it round with gold.

( How big is that cup, my lord? You might well ask... )

In the traditional ballad of Tam Lin, as you know, Janet goes out into the wood of Carterhaugh, the terrain of the fairy knight Tam Lin, and Tam Lin impregnates her. Later, on Hallowe'en, Tam Lin is cursed to be the Fairy Court's tithe to hell, and only Janet can save him because of her power as Tam Lin's lover and as the mother of his unborn child.

I have recently unearthed evidence suggesting that there is a lost text of the Tam Lin tradition, a missing link, if you will, connecting the Tam Lin ballads and a more recent and better-known popular narrative, also associated with the discovery of sexuality, the gates between worlds, and the day of All Hallows’ Eve. Allow me to show you my argument.

( Evidence for the missing link )