A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea is a dollop of fantasy delight, a neat little story with tendrils sneaking out into a broader magical world, but all packaged up as a coming-of-age, coming-into-powers tale. I did not accurately remember its length --- in my mind it has the fleshed-out detail of a full novel, but it clocks in at only ~150 pages in my true-numbered ecopy. It took only two days of commuting-reading to finish, and my Magical Reading Tricorder of the Future informs me I spent less than 4 hours inhaling the book.

It's nice. It's calming. The narrator's voice sounds like a camp counselor over a fire, a voice that will comfort and lull you into sleep. The story is built around simple archetypes, foundational storytelling pillars laid firmly against bedrock. It feels dependable, and indeed, it can be relied-on to feature the nice elements of a Le Guin story. True friendships, good food, daily tasks described with love and care. A certain simple poetry in phrasings and structure. (In a moment of despair, one character muses that "at least his [own] death would put an end to the evil he had loosed by living." pg. 105) No sense of embellishment, or the science-like tricky details typical in the magical workings of, e.g., Brandon Sanderson.

A few details, roughly sketched, give a sense of the mystery and power of magic. I liked in particular that, akin to the logic of computer programming, scope must be specified and clear:

A mage can control only what is near him, what he can name exactly and wholly. (pg. 41)

I liked that, although great puissance and achievements are foretold for the protagonist Ged, he is not an overpowered, unreasonably-lucky, unkillable master. He makes mistakes, a lot of them, and he doesn't instantly recover or learn his lesson. He earns scars, not always wisely or bravely, and they are ugly, not magical or handsome. His growing power and wisdom are accompanied by a proportionate loss of ego and desire to use the power.

A lovely book. Recommended.


This post's theme word is gascon, "a braggart" or "boastful." Ged gradually matures from a gascon to a proper adult, humble at the prospect of everything he knows he does not know.

Binti

Binti is an excellent novella by Nnedi Okorafor. Her previous fiction was vicious, and incisive, and demanding, and exhilarating; in this shorter format, she captures some of those features, but mostly the story serves as a small Petri dish, a focused look at one single character, the choices she makes, the way she finds of fitting herself into a broader cultural narrative that moves palpably around her, shaping her life and influencing her choices.

The short format made for a quick read, but the subject matter --- a mathematically-gifted woman takes a scholarship, and a spaceship ride, to the biggest university (planet-sized!), and encounters warlike betentacled space aliens --- meant that I inhaled Binti. It came out yesterday, and one of my horde of automated robots reminded me, so I purchased it. Then, 24 hours later, the entire contents were embedded in my brain, with no clear discernable moment where this happened. It read so quickly. It was a delight, with tension and drama and a narrator's voice that is firmly grounded in reasonable decisions and a knowledge of herself and her (extensive, impressive, but not superpowered) abilities.

I loved it.


This post's theme word is hecatomb, "a great public sacrifice (properly of a hundred oxen)." (Brought to you by China Miéville's Kraken, p. 483.) The other students served as a hecatomb for universal peace, or at least a lessening of universal, murderous animosity.

[Update: More specific, slightly spoilery review available at the publisher's website.]

An idyllic afternoon in paradise

Whoops, typo, by "paradise" I mean "Paris". Look at those fluffy clouds. If you look long enough, you may see the cherubs poking around the edges of clouds, hedges, the ornate gate.

The Musée de l'Armée has a lovely front lawn and prospect down across the river.

This post's theme word is sprezzatura, "doing (or giving the appearance of doing) something effortlessly; effortless grace; nonchalance." Paris has a certain architectural sprezzatura.

Journée de patrimonie

On the journées de patrimoine ("heritage days"), buildings and locations in Paris that are usually closed to the public become, briefly, opened. For cultural and educational reasons, which I think we can agree are some pretty good reasons. For me, this has the sense of a city-wide, adults-included day of field trips.

First I went to a water-processing plant. The exterior of the building is adorned with a giant sculpture of a dragonlike worm, slithering through the fabric of reality.

Its transparent sections reveal a subject-matter-appropriate fountain within.

Inside, the plant has a mostly gravity-driven system to take in water from the Seine and filter out most of the solid particles, bits, and grit. Then the water is pumped through Paris' non-potable water supply, and used for non-potable water applications like washing the streets and filling the ornamental fountains.

The inside of the plant looked like the most fun, human-tube-sized toy set that I will never, ever, be allowed to tinker with or disassemble. Tant pis. Everyone who signed up for this tour was a fully-grown adult. We were issued hardhats to walk around on the catwalk. The walls were decorated with blueprints of the inner workings, with complicated color-coding and engineering shorthand. I would've happily spent time trying to decode them, but we got shuffled along and back into the dragon's welcome courtyard before I could crack the codes.

Next I proceeded to Les Invalides, where I and a bunch of prepubescent kids (and their parents) got to visit the secret ballroom section of the Musée de l'Armée.

The ballroom, apparently rentable for elite parties and fancy events, has chandeliers plentifully strewn about, and walls casually decorated with actual pieces of armor and weaponry. Authentic. It seems like the sort of high-stakes set dressing that guarantees a sword fight will break out during your soirée. (And that is why I should never be allowed to rent this venue.)

The light was plentiful --- clearly the building predates electric lighting and petty concerns like "retain heat through insulated walls and windows." The view is straight down the Esplanade des Invalides and across the Pont Alexandre III, which only heightened my conviction that fancy-dress balls held in this room would certainly be crashed by a high-speed action-movie chase, probably involving flinging someone on a cable from a helicopter as it whips across the river.

This post's theme word is plutolatry, "excessive devotion to wealth." My admiration for costume dramas derives not from plutolatry, but from an appreciation for delicate and fussy detail-work.

Coffee and a croissant, perfection

I am completely naïve and didn't realize that the perfection of sitting in a Parisian café, drinking coffee and eating a croissant, was not effortless. Apparently it requires makeup, wardrobe, several interns reflecting light onto you properly, a boom mike, and other accoutrements of visual/auditory perfection.

My guess is that the coffee wasn't even warm anymore. And that she didn't drink it. Overall, very pretty, but sensually disappointing.

This post's theme word is naff, "very unstylish or unsophisticated," or "useless, of poor quality." She would never be seen at the naff café around the corner.

Towards fluency

Further adventures in my quest towards fluency. (I have long since come to terms with the fact that I will never be as hyperbolically fluent, as precise, as witty, as referential, as in English.)

Part of my continued studies toward fluency involves studying samples of native speech taken from my ambient environment ("eavesdropping"). French-speaking adults are often so soft-spoken in public that it is impossible to hear them, even when they speak directly at one. Children, on the other hand, have not yet been inculcated in the practice of public quietness, and so are audible. Often from a considerable distance.

I was recently told that a particular colloquialism* I am using makes me sound "like a child." Huzzah! I sound like a native-speaking child! Hopefully my language skills will age faster than realtime; I've never heard a child give a presentation about the log-rank conjecture, but I subway commute twice a day so I have many opportunities to overhear such speech, if it ever happens.


This post's theme word is fomes, "an object capable of absorbing and transmitting infectious organisms from one person to another." The subway is a fomes of microbes and memes.


*The colloquialism: finishing sentences with "... ou quoi", meaning roughly "... or whatever." I'm using it as a substitute for words/phrases I don't know, so my sentences trail off but still try to convey some meaning. Sometimes the interlocutor guesses and luckily supplies the word/phrase I wanted, and then I acquire new vocabulary and expressiveness!

The Land Across (part I)

Gene Wolfe's The Land Across is a strange book, and I have mixed feelings about it on first reading.

The novel is a first-person account of travel (to a fictional European country), starting somewhere close to a travel guide and quickly degenerating into a haphazard memoir in which time  flows irregularly. Some days stretch over chapters; some chapters cover months or years.

The narrator's voice is oddly without affect, and the narrator himself is unsympathetic and unreliable. (So obviously unreliable that it seems to point to some narrative trick being pulled.) Although unsympathetic, he must come across better in person, since he beds at least 3 women in the book  (of the maybe 6 he meets; of the others, two are uninterested or unavailable [e.g., a mostly-incorporeal ghost]). Events follow each other with no real sense of cause-and-effect or consequence, although the narrator keeps narrating as if a logical chain of causes and effects exists. This substantially contributes to my sense that the reader is being misled or left uninformed about some aspects of the book.

Also contributing to the seeming-puzzle-nature of the book: the narrator leaves out details, while noting they are omitted, and adds in extraneous-seeming facts, while noting that they seem extra or even that they are entirely unnecessary. I am sure several rereads, probably with notes, are required to figure out which of these are important and which truly dismissable, as well as which actually relevant information is being purposely omitted or obscured.

The effect? The entire book seems disjointed. I picked it up on the strong, strong recommendations of internet strangers, which suggested that this was a writer's writer, and this book was complicated and required rereading and was immensely rewarding. After the first reading, I am a little bored and disgusted with the narrator character: he is callous, scattered, opaque, and unsympathetic. And that's just in his own words, carefully and deliberately chosen. But I also see the giant signal flares, writ large across the novel's sky, saying that this novel contains hidden multitudes, puzzles, and mysteries.

So here I go: back for a reread, with the novel's details and my puzzlement still fresh in my mind. I'll let you know how it goes the second time around.


This post's theme word is quisling, "a traitor, esp. one who aids an invading enemy." Whether Grafton is a quisling or not, and who or what he is betraying to which particular organization/government/religion/woman, is not particularly compelling after the first few unexpected turns and reversals.

Louvre castle

The Louvre was once a royal castle, but not fortified [citation needed]. I think this addition will not help defend against invaders.

For one, it seems a little... low? Individual soldiers could easily vault the walls without assistance. Also, there are no gates. And the interior tents look flimsy. I could probably storm this castle-lette singlehanded.


This post's theme word is enciente, which as an adjective means "pregnant" and as a noun, "the fortification around a fort, castle, or town; area so enclosed." The Louvre's enceinte is not well-distinguished from the surrounding cityscape, and regularly overrun by pacific tourist swarms.

An abbreviated list of unusual recent compliments

This summer has passed in a sleet of unusual compliments. ("A sleet" should be the collective noun for compliments. Or maybe "drizzle" or "deluge" or "cloudburst"? I like weather metaphors.) In a not-at-all-humblebrag, I inform you that I have been complimented on my powerful shoulders (oh yeah!), my hands (unspecified compliment), my "muscular arms" (great? although a stereotypically male compliment), and my knee definition. Yes, that's right, the definition and shapeliness of my knees, those gristly bits at the joint mid-leg. Cheekbone definition? What a common compliment. Collarbone definition? Passé. This season's hip look is knees.

Do you have the right number? (We asked these 10 celebrities, and they unanimously said that they'd be wearing 2 --- two! --- knees this season! Whoa!) Do you have good definition? Coming up next: youtube makeup tutorials for outlining, highlighting, lowlighting, and really making your knees pop.


This post's theme word is keloid, a descriptor of scar tissue, brought to you from Miéville's Kraken, p. 128. These comely knees carry certain keloid cicatrices!

[Update: I was also called "the first woman I've met whom I could believe is really a worthwhile top." --- a comment which incited a little flare of anger and revenge-plotting, which I guess is the whole point. I preferred the merry knee compliment.]

On marriage and land ownership

Mawwiage... is what bwings us here togefah... today.

And it also permeates my social media of late, a symptom of the pleasantness of July and August weather in the northern hemisphere, where most of my acquaintances live. If only there were a social media filter that let me elide* "wedding photos and announcements". It is an inundation, and one that makes me feel like I am falling behind in some sort of absurd life-contest, even though it's not a contest and I'm quite happy with my life. Which is successful!

Part of the overwhelmed feeling is certainly the concentration: a huge spike in the graph for August weddings, a giant plunge in the graph for November, February, and all other months. Babies are similarly-celebrated Giant Life Milestones (GLMs), but they're more evenly spread across the year. A few years ago when my entire cohort seemed to simultaneously graduate from law/business school I had similar feelings of being left behind the GLM-race while everyone else forged ahead.

I found this article satisfying just because it asked any questions about the desirability of marriage: "How we end up marrying the wrong people". I understand, of course, that outward-facing social announcements will focus on the perfection, the love, the happily-forever-after, how lucky X is to spend the rest of zis life with Y, etc. It seems... performative.** And at this point in late August, repetitive.

I think I'd be pretty ok starting my list of criteria with "how much land do they have". A grain of salt: I remain unwed. #Spinsterlife forevah! Until the sufficiently-landed suitor comes along... and we are married in January (in our volcano supervillain lair) or November (by a Pastafarian minister on a hangglider over the Sahara)  or March (witnessed by a pod of dolphins in international waters).


This post's theme word is vituperation, "bitter and abusive language." I intend no vituperation towards the happy couples; their joy is delightful, and should be duly celebrated.


*What would be much more satisfying would be a filter which restricted the feed of announcements to conform more closely to demographic trends, e.g., by showing one divorce announcement for every two wedding announcements.

**... like all social media. My own included. Cognitive dissonance acknowledged.