Cimorene

After I ran out of CJ Cherryh's Foreigner books I went back to my current favorite series, Catriona McPherson's Dandy Gilver mysteries. I had actually waited long enough between that there were TWO new Dandy Gilver books. The sleuth is a member of the Scottish landed gentry in the 1920s (first book) - 30s (she's up to 1937 now), and they combine several of my favorite things in this way. First was The Turning Tide, a rather quirky visit to southern Scotland and a case involving a river ferrywoman going mad and then being murdered and a Roman archaeology intrigue. But the latest book, The Mirror Dance, was fantastic! It starts with the murder of a Punch and Judy puppeteer (or Punchinello man) during the puppet show in a public park while Dandy is in the audience with her lady's maid, cook, and parlor maid - a bit of a locked-room puzzle because he's murdered in a tiny tent with nowhere to hide and no escape routes. And he's been murdered on the 50-year anniversary of the murder of ANOTHER Punch and Judy puppeteer who had the same first and last name as him BUT IS NO RELATION. Absolutely delightful! Also I've tried to Google about the Commedia dell'arte roots of Punch and Judy before: it's an evolution from the stock characters of Commedia. Punch is Punchinello, and this book told me for the first time that the 'traditional' or old-style Punch and Judy shows also included Scaramouche, another of the well-known stock characters from Commedia! I guess I need to find an actual book about it to read. I've been meaning to find translations of some early modern Commedia plays to read as well, but I sort of fell out of Harlequin and Pierrot fandom before I unearthed any (I had started looking a few years ago). As always, the whole Dandy Gilver series is most highly recommended. The first one is called After the Armistice Ball.

I wanted to read some more sff after that. I tried the free sample of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie for a second time. I can't actually remember why I put it down the first time I started, but I bounced off it again. I can't put my finger on exactly why. Then I read the much-recommended The Tea Master and The Detective by Aliette de Bodard, which is, as everybody says, a clear tribute to Sherlock Holmes, but in a pan-Asian space opera setting predicated on a technology similar to the brainships of Anne McCaffrey's Ship Who Sang verse. And more importantly, with female characters: all the important characters. I did find it good reading, but I had some reservations about the narrator and the relationship between the Watson and Holmes figures (I won't say these reservations are fair, because, obviously, this isn't even a fanfic or a reboot, it's a transformative take in conversation with Holmes! But that said, I'm not exactly satisfied with the potential WHY for the specific changes that make the Watson character a lot more adversarial and hesitant to trust and build very little rapport with the Holmes figure for the bulk of the story. They look suspiciously like some of the changes you see simply in bad Holmes fanworks.) It seems this book was not the start of a series about these characters, but a side novella in a larger universe that is mostly about other characters.

I've been ambivalent about the Murderbot series by Martha Wells simply because it's so popular, and I tend to be suspicious of standout popularity. I usually don't find the things that come to my attention that way to my taste. But I read the first, All Systems Red, and enjoyed it a lot. I can also understand the runaway popularity better now. They aren't 100% unique and separate from genre history, but they do have a rather fresh angle to them. The point of view is unusually tight, and the narrator's pecularities (as a Murderbot!) make sense and are also charming. The plots of the first two books, at least, are well-judged to be a bit more bite-sized than the expected weighty sf tome - they're novels, but they're on the short side, and they're focused and well-constructed within the boundaries of their size. A bit like a nice 90-minute episode of a prestige tv miniseries with a self-contained episodic plot. Then there's the murderbot's positioning itself explicitly outside humanity and its exasperated fondness for humanity, which to me, at least, is both funny and cute - I can't help thinking it's like a herding dog, if herding dogs had that intelligence. Anyway, I also read the second one, Artificial Condition, and it was really good too. I'm not going to read them all in one gulp, because I want a bit more time to digest things as I go. I do still intend to read the rest.

Then I started to feel like I really wanted to read some high fantasy, and what I wound up with was Naomi Novik's Uprooted, which I hadn't got around to yet. It was about exactly as good and enjoyable as expected. I kept thinking, as I was reading, that it's funny and kind of charming how strong her authorial voice is. Her writing is just so... HER. It's recognizable in pretty much everything she writes, this book a bit more so than the Temeraire series, which I think is because the Temeraire series imposes a sort of Patrick O'Brien pastiche constraint on her natural style. She does retain some of those 19th-century quirks in her non-Temeraire stuff of course, particularly the old-fashioned sentence-joining with a colon, and those features were more noticeable here. As the story went along I saw reflections of Beauty and the Beast (of course), Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones), the Enchanted Forest a little bit, particularly a faint reflection of Morwen and Telemain towards the end (Patricia C. Wrede), maybe a sort of Robin McKinleyness about the scenes in the capital, Tolkien Ents, GRRM forest people (or whatever he calls them), and then... maybe a faint feel of Robin McKinley themes and ideas in the whole final part of the story, really.

Then I grabbed the ebook of Vonda McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun, which won a Nebula or a Hugo in 1997 and was one of my favorite fantasy novels in high school. I actually presented a book report about it in history class senior year (that'd be 2001). I had forgotten most of the details of the plot, and looked them up on Wikipedia yesterday when I saw Hello Tailor (Daily Dot media critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw) tweeting about the movie they've just released that was based on it. Apparently the movie had a bizarrely huge budget, but looks pretty bad. Also it's just being released now when it was filmed in 2014? I guess it's gonna be a clusterfuck there, and the movie still cover pasted on the ebook just confirms that, looking like a flashback scene from Disney's Once Upon a Time, with prom hair and makeup along with... not really a very Versailles court gown exactly, but better than the hair and makeup. So I guess I'll reread that next.

I also REALLY enjoyed this series of essays about the (non)historicity of Game of Thrones yesterday:
Collections: That Dothraki Horde (4-part series) on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. A representative sample:

But Martin has done more damage than simply watching The Mongols (1961) would today. He has taken those old, inaccurate, racially tinged stereotypes and repackaged them, with an extra dash of contemporary cynicism to lend them the feeling of ‘reality’ and then used his reputation as a writer of more historically grounded fantasy (a reputation, I think we may say at this point, which ought to be discarded; Martin is an engaging writer but a poor historian) to give those old stereotypes the air of ‘real history’ and how things ‘really were.’ And so, just as Westeros became the vision of the Middle Ages that inhabits the mind of so many people (including quite a few of my students), the Dothraki become the mental model for the Generic Nomad: brutal, sexually violent, uncreative, unartistic, uncivilized. [...] And it is a lie. And I want to be clear here, it is not a misunderstanding. It is not a regrettable implication. It is not an unfortunate spot blind-spot of ignorance. It is a lie, made repeatedly, now by many people in both the promotion of the books and the show who ought to have known better. And it is a lie that has been believed by millions of fans.

I wanted to sign up for Yuletide just specifically to request Harlequin/Pierrot from Commedia dell'Arte, which would be quite funny because I've never actually read or watched a commedia play. I did find a few, in my research, but I sort of got the feeling you had to be there. And the film quality of the filmed staged ones I saw was not really watchable. But the plus side (?) is that if anything, the popularity of Pierrot(s) and Harlequin(s) as archetypes has been so stunningly great that their roles in Commedia dell'Arte plays are probably a minority of their appearances now.

However, I'll save it for next year, hopefully. I thought last year that this year I'd surely have time, but no, probably not. There's... a lot of stuff to finish here.

I suppose the painting might be finished in the next few days and we may wall up the wall so our tenant can move in - although that's probably being optimistic again - but we've still got lots of little details to finish over here - trim and the floors in the hall and entry and the enclosed porch and all the furniture to paint ...

I have been drawing a lot and perhaps 40% or so of it has been Harlequin and Pierrot. Most of these drawings are from November and early December... it took me ages to get around to scanning them.

( Pierrots: )

( Harlequins: )

And ( Harlequin/Pierrot: )

Executive dysfunction strikes again: I've been waiting for 13 days thinking my new winter boots had not arrived yet, deeply sad and worried, and then last night I discovered that in fact they have arrived but I missed the arrival of two separate arrival notice emails that had been automatically sorted out of my 'Inbox' into the autocreated 'Updates' tab (thanks Google). But, I mean, it's happened before with the tabs and when previously in possession of more executive function, I've managed to remember to check the tabs. This is just more Disaster.

The funeral is over. I guess it went well, as funerals go, but it was a funeral. I've been to oodles of funerals in my time, or at least what felt like plenty of them, but somehow I failed to anticipate that when my spouse was the eldest child of the deceased the funeral would be a lot more taxing. To be fair, the funeral was mostly taxing for waxjism (any time she had to go into or out of a room she was basically running a gauntlet of well-wishers and she had to talk to all of them and hug many of them, which included a good handful of people she didn't remember and had to pretend to know), and there was no law preventing me from parking at a table which I did a bit, but I wanted to support her and I know she frequently feels less alarmed when accompanied, so I went through perhaps 70% of these gauntlets with her even though she did most of the talking. I'm definitely never wearing shoes with any sort of heel to a funeral again in case of prolonged standing (they were her mom's dressy winter boots and mainly picked so that I wouldn't have to go shoe shopping or change shoes to go outside. But in retrospect, wearing rain boots and switching to ballet flats inside would've been more comfortable). She also perhaps got the brunt of well-wishers because for people who hadn't seen the family in a long time, they could pick her out immediately because she "looks just like her mom" (not EXACTLY, but yeah, it's there), whereas spotting her brothers in a sea of Swedish Finn men of their generation in dark suits (if you don't remember them clearly that is) who are all likely their 4th or 5th cousins in terms of genetic similarity given the small size of the Swedish Finn gene pool... much more challenging (I overheard them being pointed out to people several times, but everybody seemed to make a beeline for Wax).

It's also snowed a few times and the yard is coated in a fine layer of white frost, which in the sunlight is as sparkly as a coat of white glitter. Yesterday Wax got winter tires put on her mom's car, so we won't be using Bernie the ancient white van (it's named after Bernie Taupin) much until spring. Kind of inconvenient because we still have a lot of trash to get rid of, but the builders will remove it (eventually) for a fee, at least. Speaking of the builders, the apprentice who is doing our downstairs bathroom as his final exam is still plugging away in spite of going to school all week, but he had a cold a while ago and has been here a bit less often lately. Still, there's tile on the floor with the mortar curing, so perhaps it won't be too long until we can hook our washing machine back up and stop paying 40€ every time we have to do the wash at the laundromat at Prisma Piispanristi in Kaarina.

That sketchbook I cracked open on October 10th only has 20 pages or 10 sheets unused still, which means I've used up to page 173. About 90 pages of that is primarily Commedia dell'arte, including 24 Harlequin/Pierrot pairing drawings. waxjism is baffled and amused (listen, outfit designs for Pierrots and Harlequins are both really fun to draw and they both have such a rich history and visual tradition to draw on...!) and suggested the other day that I've drawn enough for a gallery show (it'd have to be a pretty tiny gallery though, and not too formal, given that my sketchbook isn't large and most of the sketches in it don't ever get made into finished pieces. But the quantity is there). ... If you were placing bets about what the worst part of falling into Commedia dell'arte fandom would be, you might point to the lack of currently active fiction, or the aforementioned fact that my pairing of choice is underrepresented. But I bet it wouldn't have occurred to you that it would, in fact, be that browsing images of Pierrot would bring up multiple Sexy Pennywise Halloween costumes in the related images. Thanks Pinterest! I won't share because in this case, they're probably worse than what you're imagining.