C: Where are we?

R: Stevenage. Jane Austen was born here.

C: Who is Jane Austen?

R (mimes being stabbed in the HEART): What a cruel thing to say to your mother! Jane Austen was the best writer ever. She wrote the best books. All six of them.

C: Did she write any kid books?

R: No, she didn’t really get time. She died when she was only 38. She did write a funny history of England, which you might like. I have it at home in California.

C: Why do people die?

R: Some people get sick. Some get old. Some die in accidents. Or do you mean why do we all die? Nothing lasts forever. Not even stars. They get old and die.

C (looks EMO)

R: It’s okay really. If you’re lucky you get to die when you’re really old, and those people sometimes say it’s like going to sleep when you’re tired.

C: I can tell you one thing that lasts forever.

R: What’s that?

C: …mud.

Spike counters, brilliantly, with Patrick White. To which Alex replies:

And for that matter, Jack White:

(Uptempo)

Oh well, they gonna make me king
Oh well they gonna make me king now
I pulled a sword out of a thing
They made me kiss the bishop’s ring
And now they gonna make me king now

So Lance is sleepin’ with the queen
My Lance is sleepin’ with the queen now
And though I think it kind of mean
I just don’t wanna make a scene
Cause I do love my wife the queen now

I wish that I could talk to Merlin
I wish that I could talk to Merlin
The night is dark, the world is whirlin’
My son the traitor’s flag’s unfurlin’
And I could really use you, Merlin

Me, I am working on Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Melbourne.

Email with Alex, reposted here for Spike and Francis:

My children are endlessly hilarious. Claire saw Jeremy reading my copy of T. H. White’s The Age of Scandal and asked “Is that the same author who wrote Stuart Little?” I said “That’s E. B. White but you know what? We’re going to keep you.”

It might have been interesting had they written each other’s books..

(from ‘Charlotte’s Web’ by T.H. White):

‘But how am I to be SOME PIG, Charlotte?’ asked Wilbur. ‘I don’t even think I’m much of a pig now.’

The spider rolled up her struggling prey, a small fruit fly, and meditatively injected it with paralysing venom.

‘You must root, Wilbur,’ she answered, her voice slightly muffled, as the fruit fly thrashed with decreasing vigour. ‘Root, dig and furrow, for it is in your nature to find the deepest and the most buried things. That, at least, is the wisdom as recorded by the best authorities. Spiders kill; pigs root. Excuse me just a moment.’

Charlotte dug her fangs into the fruit fly’s abdomen and sucked the liquefying flesh into her thorax. The fruit fly’s struggles ended, and its many-faceted eyes went a dull slate colour. Charlotte extracted her mandibles and smacked her lips.

‘Delicious,’ she said. ‘I always like a little snack before Vespers. In the meantime, however, I think we need a new word for you.’

‘I wish I could do that,’ said Wilbur wistfully, watching Charlotte dispose of the brittle husk of the fruit fly…

I would do a version of The Once and Future King as if by E.B. White but he’s just not imitable enough. Not by me, anyway.

Wart spent his long afternoons in the wood with his brother Kay, where they fished and fought and listened to the goshawks crying “Cree, cree!” and the frogs in the reeds remarking “Sweet, sweet interlude; sweet interlude.” For it is in the nature of boys in the summer to seek the earth and growing things; to watch the shoots unfurl as the manhood is unfurling within those bony chests. Such summers come but once and are soon over.

‘Well,’ said Templeton, twitching his whiskers, ‘sword or no sword, I’ll be gold-darned if HE’s gonna be king of England.’

Permission to blog this exchange?

Granted.

My sense of humour has returned! The peanut gallery cries: How can you tell? It is raining in Cambridge which is far more appropriate, pathetic fallacy-wise, because I can stomp through puddles and properly enjoy my crankiness. Also my cousin has turned up after I was worried about her.

Cambridge is terribly suburban. The car rental places close at 1pm on a Saturday, for example, and the local theatre is showing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love. No link for you, hackmeister; not after the Venetian in Vegas, where Phantom of the Opera was playing in the lifts, on infinite loop.

I read Porterhouse Blue. What a vilely sexist, not-very-funny mess that was. Better books since, notably Our Horses In Egypt with its lovely breathless vernacular prose style rather like Mitford. I was especially pleased that author Rosalind Bulben credited the Anzacs with taking Damascus, and not that idiot Lawrence. Fighting words! But you know it’s true!

It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light at night to keep away the beasts.

With its Philip K. Dickian mirror-world and paranoia, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union has been the perfect choice of book for this weird and dislocated first week in Cambridge. Jewish Sitka, that frozen metropolis, has made me appreciate for the first time how many of the places I am homesick for never really existed. It’s also the perfect book to be reading on Mother’s Day when one’s useless cellphone will not connect one with one’s mother, except via text message.

The great blessing of this trip has been spending hours and hours with the godfathers, Grant and Chris. I’ve been a bit too wrecked to talk to them very coherently, but the girls have taken possession, showed off their best kung-fu moves and pieces of stick and leaf and are now perfectly comfortable swarming all over them. I do not know whether the godfathers are equally comfortable being swarmed over, but this is what they signed up for.

Cambridge is so very pretty, the colleges all jumbled up like Examples of European Architectural Styles, green space everywhere with spreading trees and daisies, people being hilariously drunk in punts. Such beautiful weather that I have a suntan. I’m finding it all very suspicious.

Hit my deadlines. Worked about seventy hours this week. Work, dinner, bedtime, sleep, work.

Why didn’t you all tell me about Cassandra at the Wedding? Which bit did you think I wouldn’t like? The Didion-ish voice? The debt to Patricia Highsmith? The fact that it is apparently source material for The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, best book about an insane bishop EVAR??? Come on, people! What have we been talking about all this time?

Not actually a joke but honest confusion. And anosognosia, which I hadn’t realized there’s a word for. Ric’s in a steady state for now, so Jeremy is coming home.

It’s a bit hard to wrench Yatima back into its usual grooves, but I’ll try. Elizabeth Moon’s lovely, Le Guin-ish Remnant Population posits an alien society where the highest status is accorded to the nannies. A wonderful, stubborn, defiant, angry old woman of a book. When I finished it I got on the floor with the kids and we played crazy games until bedtime.

I’ve been having insanely great book luck of late, thanks to comments threads tenderly farmed by very good writers and editors. The first important find was Sarah Caudwell, who is one of those impossibly overdetermined Brits: her brothers are the journalists Alexander and Patrick Cockburn and her mother was the inspiration for Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Sarah Caudwell died in 2000 of stupid cancer. Cancer and I are not friends.

Caudwell wrote four novels. Thus Was Adonis Murdered tackles murder and tax avoidance in Venice; The Shortest Way to Hades examines the legal and tax implications of an inheritance, and a couple of consequent murders, in the Greek Isles. In The Sirens Sang of Murder a homicide investigation moves among several offshore tax havens, including the Channel Islands and the Bahamas, and The Sibyl in Her Grave… well, you get the idea. Caudwell was herself a tax lawyer and has the remarkable gift of making tax law seem almost as cozy and amusing as English murder mysteries.

Received wisdom on Caudwell is that she depends too much on letters and that her central characters are thin. I spit on received wisdom with more vehemence even than usual. Caudwell is a literary writer, as her elaborately classical titles might suggest; intertextual knowledge plays a key role in practically all of the books; and she revels in the epistolatory form almost as much as she loves a good last will and testament. As for her central characters, beautiful Ragwort, scatty Julia, honey-voiced Selena and trickster Cantrip who through no fault of his own attended Cambridge, it’s true that they do not Grow and Change and Have Epiphanies over the course of the novel in the approved American/MFA/Raymond Carver mode; in fact the women especially have lots of hot and inconsequential sex, and everyone drinks and smokes and gossips and skives off work and is just as delightful and irreverent at the end of the book as at the beginning.

The point is that they’re Greek gods, not people as such, a point underscored by the fact that the narrator Hilary Tamar, an Oxford don, is of indeterminate sex. Caudwell is perfectly capable of writing fully human characters. In fact the resolution of each of her quite fiercely difficult mysteries depends on people behaving in absolutely credible, bloody-minded and self-defeating human ways. Now not to brag or anything but I have read a lot of Golden Age detective fiction. I cut my teeth on Conan Doyle and was bored with Agatha Christie at thirteen. I didn’t stop with Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey but read all of Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh and their heirs, people like PD James and Kerry Greenwood. It’s very rare for me to get to the last third of a mystery – at least one that’s fair, with no Deus ex Machina, and Caudwell is scrupulously fair – without having solved the crime. Caudwell beat me, four for four; my best showing in the last two books was to get to her penultimate red herring. Yet she always gets there in a plausible way. It is a feat!

There’s such pleasure in being in skilled and confident hands. There’s the subversive thrill of Caudwell’s unabashed snobbery – Hilary can barely understand Cantrip, because of his impenetrable Cambridge dialect. There’s the light yet beautifully sustained humour. Yet the books never become vengeful or sadistic, as it’s so easy for even a great practitioner like Sayers to do, because Caudwell is a humanist to the bone. She is interested in people: what they do, how they behave. There’s a letter at the end of Sibyl that I won’t spoil for you, because of course you’re all going to rush out and read all four, but it is at once a complete surprise and yet absolutely right, the only possible denouement; and almost unbearably sad.

These books are perfect of their kind. I wish very much that there were more.

I was expecting a very bad time of it after Caudwell – there is not much worse than going cold turkey after the death of a beloved author – but I was lucky enough to follow her up with Bridge of Birds, Ha’penny and Bad Magic. None quite reached Caudwell’s heights – I had figured out the end of Bridge half way through – but all gave great character, especially Ha’penny with its host of crypto-Mitfords. And so to bed.

J: I read Overclocked.

R: Mmm?

J: Really liked it except for one story.

R: “When Sysadmins.”

J: Exactly.

R: I had to stop reading it after the baby died.

In unison: I wonder if he could write it now?

LATER. In a tacqueria. There are TACOS. R beats J for no apparent reason.

J: Ow.

R: My ovaries hurt.

J: And?

R: It’s your fault.

J: How?

R: You are the patriarchy. If it weren’t for you we’d all be living in the woods in a big happy lesbian commune, and my ovaries wouldn’t hurt. Isn’t that right, Jamey?

Jamey: Your ovaries would still hurt, but we’d have a drum circle about it.

WE ALL start to DRUM on the tacqueria table. JULIA stares for a moment, then DANCES.

Great newses! First up, massive man-love between my Viable Paradise crushees Cory and Leonard. Second, much-wanted and hoped-for twins, born on April Fool’s! Small siblings to big sister born on Halloween! It is all very cheering.

ETA: BABY OWLS.

I don’t know why I even make these promises when I can’t keep them. Pathetic gestures in the direction of follow-through:

• I have always greatly admired Robert Hughes for his awesome and world-shaking The Fatal Shore. Sundry folks will attest that it is the book I recommend to anyone who is curious about Australia; besides, you know you’re doing something right when Patrick O’Brien thanks you in the acknowledgements to The Nutmeg of Consolation. But Hughes wrote Shore when he was about twelve, so my adoration was greatly mixed with terror and humility. Things I Didn’t Know is the book that makes me get over that, like Hughes very much and wish I could buy him a bottle of excellent red. A recommendation from Grant, who is seldom wrong about these things.

  Things is very touching on the dilemma of Australianness; you stay or leave, and both options are awkward and involve loss.

• I read The Human Stain after having several conversations about passing, and here’s a concept I lack the sociological skillzors to be able to unpack. You have to realize that while Australia has race politics of its own, and even its own lamentable history of slave trading, it’s all very different from the African American experience so I’m coming at this stuff pretty raw. I’m not sure Roth helped much. While I greatly admire both his techniques and what he is trying to pull off, I don’t like him much as a writer.

  Stain does a lot of things I find impressive. It brings multiple voices to life and gives them all internal consistency and dignity. But they are all given these monologues that go on for pages and pages and there’s something about, I’m ashamed to say it but it’s the diction, that rings false to me. They all say plausible things but they all sound like a celebrated establishment novelist while they’re saying them. (Larry’s Party, another recommendation from Grant, has something of the same artificial, po-faced inner voice. Where’s the irreverence? Where are the jokes?)

  Bound to be more my fault than Roth’s. Stain did have one very striking effect on me: I read Flash For Freedom! shortly after it; it’s the Flash book about slaving. The stuff about the crossing is well-researched and accurate and didn’t upset me too badly except, you know, in its substance, but when Flashy starts mucking about with a woman trying to escape up the Underground Railroad it made me physically ill, and I had to skim ahead to make sure she escaped. I always start Flashy books loving him for his, yes, irreverence and wit, and loathing him at the end for being, well, Flashy.

• Shadow Unit is what the plain people of fandom like to call cracktastic: that is, a completely addictive treat, with chewy well-realized characters and thoroughly angstig, wholly-believable jeopardy. It’s a sort of made-up fandom that skips the boring TV series part and cuts straight to the brilliant stuff people make up about it on the Net. It’s gotten me hooked on a fictional Livejournal, for the love of ponies. Mad props to evil genii Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, Sarah Monette and Will Shetterly.

Okay, I guess that wasn’t as half-hearted as I thought it was going to be. No more promises though, I’ll just come out and SAY that Connie Willis and Sarah Caudwell are now on my all-time top ten list, and that I am very very annoyed with Sarah Caudwell for dying young. I guess I get to read the rest of her books in heaven, too.

Passages from Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World that made me want to scrawl in the margin of the library book the words “IT’S SO TRUE!” (but I did not):

“He cared (though not crucially) about the opinion of his colleagues and acquaintances, and would send out a stream of self-castigation in order, he hoped, to nip their condemnation in the bud. His intention was to arrive at his own condemnation fast and first. It was a kind of exculpation. No one condemned him; no one paid much attention. My father had, as far as I could see, no friends.”

(Oh and Dad, that’s true of me, not you.)

“I had dreamt of Gothic arches and the worn flagstones of old libraries – where such a grand yearning came from, I hardly knew. Unaccountably, my heart was set on Smith or Vassar or Bryn Mawr; I imagined afternoon teas, and white gloves, and burning lips (mine, perhaps) murmuring out of a book. But that was all wistfulness – there was no money for such romantic hopes…”

(Me again…)

“My suitcases held only the sparest handful of the books I valued, since it had always been my habit – privately I felt it to be an ecstasy – to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself … had cradled and cherished. In my mind – I suppose in my isolation – I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me – as phantom companions and secret friends.”

(Aaand me.)

Our beloved Bernal branch of the San Francisco Public Library has closed for renovation, so I redirected my hold requests to the Mission branch. It’s half a block from BART, and it’s open till 9pm every weeknight.

I dropped by on my way home from work this evening, picked my books off the open shelves, checked myself out and caught the next bus home. The whole process could not possibly be any cooler or more convenient. Hurrah!

Dear Robert Smith,

I don’t normally write to celebrities; I’m not big with the fangirl, unless the object of fandom is a friend or friend-of-friend who writes excellent SF or fantasy and has a LiveJournal. It’s nothing personal – quite the opposite: I soured on corporate rock after waking up from a bad infatuation with an Irish rock quartet I won’t name here, out of pocket for five albums I haven’t listened to voluntarily in fifteen years and with a nasty taste in my mouth. And that was years before I covered the Napster trial and got to know the record labels and their business practices better than anyone ever should. These days I listen to lots of mashups and nerdcore. I hope you understand.

My point is, I got the shiny new Sandman collection from Jeremy for my birthday, and it’s hard to write an interesting review of something that everyone else already read ages ago, and loved, and told me that I would love. I mean, what: Newsflash! Sandman genuinely terrific! Major influence on all the other graphic novels I love! Stop the frickin’ presses. No.

So I got thinking instead about how Morpheus reminds me of you, dancin’ around in those early Cure videos, Lovecats and Why Can’t I Be You (the sideways lips! So funny and wicked) and my favourite, Just Like Heaven. You with your spiky black hair and eyeliner and white high tops. How iconic you were! And how well those old songs have aged, how well they evoke those confused and crazy and complicated years. And I remembered the story about you, and realized that would make a way better blog post than Yet Another Sandman Endorsement, Yawn.

I bet you don’t even remember that particular concert in Sydney, Australia, sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, I don’t even remember exactly when. You came out of the stage door and signed programs for everyone, and at the end there were three young Australian men left, and you. You chatted for a while – it must have been close to midnight – and then you said “Wanna go for a drink?” Now THEY were diehard fans. They’d loved you and dressed like you since they were twelve. You blew them away.

That would have been kind enough – beers and a couple of hours chewing the fat with these guys. They were nobody really, just fans; no one would have blamed you if you’d shrugged them off. But when the bar on Oxford Street closed, you said “Hey, I have keys to a studio near here – wanna come listen to me lay down some tracks?” Could they have jumped at the offer any more eagerly? When the sun rose they were still there listening to you noodling around on your guitar.

Two of those guys were friends of mine, and the third is my big brother Al. He’s a fantastic brother and I love him to the moon and back, and he’s never in his life had one quarter of the luck he deserved. I wish I could say that night changed his luck for ever. It didn’t. But it was an incontrovertible good thing, a shining adventure, something he can still look back on and grin. Thank you for that. It was extraordinarily decent of you.

I was going to say that under the circumstances I could make an exception for you, and sign myself your undying fangirl in spite of the whole unfortunate corporate rock thing. And then I realized I don’t even have to do that. I already outlined the personal acquaintance exemption above, and so I can go ahead and be the undying fangirl of your great songs and human kindness, because you are, after all, a friend of my brother’s.

Lots of love,
R

When my brilliant and beloved mother-in-law discovered to her astonishment that I hadn’t already read Pat Barker’s WW1 novels, she promptly gave me all three for my birthday. I started reading them on the flight back from Australia and about three sentences in, made myself slow down so that the experience of reading these books for the first time would last longer. That’s exactly how to-my-taste they are.

Light from the window behind Rivers’s desk fell directly on to Sassoon’s face. Pale skin, purple shadows under the eye. Apart from that, no obvious signs of nervous disorder. No twitches, jerks, blinks, no repeated ducking to avoid a long-exploded shell. His hands, doing complicated things with cup, saucer, plate, sandwiches, cake, sugar tongs and spoon, were perfectly steady. Rivers raised his own cup to his lips and smiled. One of the nice things about serving an afternoon tea to newly arrived patients was that it made so many neurological tests redundant.

Note that I didn’t particularly remember this passage, and when I went back to Regeneration to find something to quote, I just flipped over a page or two before I found this. And now look how much work this paragraph is doing. It sets two scenes – not only the cozy tea-time, but also the hell from which Sassoon has recently arrived. It begins to stage what will be an immensely complicated and morally charged relationship between Sassoon and his doctor, and in doing so it indicates the extent to which Rivers is already unusual, preferring informal exchanges with his patients to tests that reinforce the hierarchical distance between tester and subject. Rivers is exceptionally humane – he is, we’ll discover, a very good anthropologist as well as a psychoanalyst. And Sassoon is, in fact, a deathless poet. The power distance between doctor and patient is unusually small; and it’s only going to get smaller.

And if that reference to sugar tongs is not a deliberate evocation of Wilde, I will eat my hat.

Cecily. [Sweetly.] Sugar?

Gwendolen. [Superciliously.] No, thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more. [Cecily looks angrily at her, takes up the tongs and puts four lumps of sugar into the cup.]

I could have picked any paragraph. They’re all that good. And the prose is all that translucent: simple, beautiful declarative sentences, layered each on the next until you are no longer reading but hovering over Rivers’s shoulder, watching. And Barker respects the intelligence of her characters, and gives them room to breathe and think.

There’s a lot of thematic overlap between this trilogy and my last two reviews, as it happens. (Well, it’s not exactly startling, since I make several fairly strict demands of narrative and can’t be bothered with it otherwise. Anyway.) Regeneration tackles madness – Sassoon isn’t, as it happens. Book two, The Eye in the Door, examines sex and class and will make you grieve for its innocent monster. The last book in the series, The Ghost Road, looks into the face of death, and it includes some of Barker’s finest use of the source materials, Rivers’s books on the societies of the Solomon Islands. (The heat and singing reminded me of Ten Canoes.) I keep going back to Google Books to read the originals and try to figure it out. That was awesome. How did she make that work? How can I do that?

“Tobias Smollet thus became Europe’s tubercule; the infectious agent coursing the continental arteries.”

This, in case you were wondering, was the money shot for an essay I wrote for my English honours exams in 1992. My brain finally presented it, thus polished… this morning.