Peeking into the rock

I swallowed Thornlost in five hours after I picked it up but the next book isn't even published. Now I understand the plight of the person who normally reads series books.

Like I said for Elsewhens and Touchstone, I can't describe these books so they sound like good books. But I love them. The key questions of the books are all about the complex relationships among people who are not lovers (at least not so far). The personal, the political, the magical, class relationships, gender issues, interracial relationships in a society that believes itself to be post-racial, even environmental issues, are echoed and mediated by the frightenign possibilities of these relationships. There's a bunch of stuff about the manipulations of art and audience, too.

Notice I've been talking about the abstractions here. Would you be more likely to read it if I said it was a fantasy novel which employs Dungeons and Dragons -like "races" with inherent gifts? I was really uncomfortable with it when I first saw those things deployed, but as I've seen how Melanie Rawn tears that stuff apart and stomps on it while allowing the characters to continue to believe in different versions of it in different ways, I've started to admire her for it. Also, it's one of those fantasy worlds where people wear a lot of ribbons and velvet when they can afford it, but she's much more aware of the economic and technical-industrial questions around clothing and class than most high fantasy authors seem to be.

I may end up actually reading things from her other worlds, even though they seem to have even more high-fantasy trappings and I often get itchy when I pick up books with dragons and princes and things in them. We'll see.

I'm still slowly working my way through The Coasts of Bohemia and I'm really really glad I stuck with it. He's dealing with the Enlightenment and the early Czech nationalist movements in nuanced, fact-dense and eye-opening ways. I'm fascinated with the way he traces how particular written works travel through time and their meaning changes while their words remain faithfully the same. Derek Sayer is just a much more impressive historian than I thought he was from the introductory chapters. He's treating the various actors in history, for example the Bohemian Estates, as the complex entities they were. Yes, for example the Bohemian Estates. These are the indigenous aristocracy. They were in various times the spearhead of the push for local autonomy. Sometimes they were allied with the students and workers and sometimes not. Sometimes they were preponderantly Slavic-speaking, but for example in the late eighteenth century when the modern nationalist movement was born, they had been speaking and reading German for close to two hundred years. And their complaints about the centralizing tendencies of the Austrian government included that the new laws freed up peasants from having to give two-thirds of their labor and earnings to their lords (they still had to give them some, of course, and now they also had to give more than they used to directly to the central government, but the net effect was to leave a lot more in the hands of the peasants): and that the new laws also made lords and peasants alike answerable to the courts of law and gave the peasants the freedom to sue their masters. There was likewise generally more freedom of movement for all the working classes than before, and universal education was instituted for all classes (and yes, for girls, too). There was an immense tug-of-war over languages. Sometimes the centralizers instituted actually more diversity of language in education and official business, in order to draw everybody in better, and other times Czech (and other languages) was vigorously suppressed so that everybody would be doing business in the same language. Sound familiar? So anyway, this is fascinating stuff, and it makes me want to go looking for some of the folklore and literature that was collected, written, and published in these years. The direction that Czech intelligentsia appears to be going is from an Enlightenment "Land Patriotism" including a lot of dictionaries and museums and challenging of historical texts to a Romantic Nationalism, the kind that leads to exactly what you think it will lead to, and did, even beyond the participation of the Nazis. I'm also seeing why the Nazis thought they could fold the Czechs into their orbit without much resistance, and also why the Soviets were surprised the Czechs didn't want to do exactly as they were told. Not so much that they thought the Czechs were docile in each case, but because they thought the Czechs were one with the Program.

I'm about to read The Song of Achilles because a friend of mine has been begging me to so we can talk about it. She's a huge Iliad fan to start with. I also picked up a random Polish-Lithuanian novel that might either be really interesting or else might be repellent. We'll see.

On another front, speaking of Czechs and so on, Frank sent me this video of the most popular Moravian popular tune of like thirty-forty years ago, with English subtitles. Natually since then I've been tracking down all the videos ever made of Ivan Mladek and the Banjo Band, and it is illuminating.

The Ride of the Kings  is a folk festival of Moravia whose strangeness cannot be exaggerated.  To begin with, a bunch of young men dress up in fancy costumes and go riding horses to a house in town where they formally request the father of the house for the use of his young son (of early adolescent age) to be their king.  He accepts, the plum brandy is brought out, and everybody drinks and sings and makes jokes.  Meanwhile the boy is dressed in ancient women's costume and a rose stuck in his mouth and he's hoisted up on a horse accompanied by two guys oalso on horseback and also in ancient women's costume carrying drawn sabers.  Then they go riding all around town and the "criers" shout out verses at the people they pass making witty jokes and demanding donations for the drinking party.  The rose, by the way, is supposed to be a symbol of taciturnity.  What?  

Apparently this was once a widespread tradition but it only survives in a few towns now, and is accompanied by every kind of demonstration of folk costume, dancing, and singing.  Many tall wreathy headdresses with ribbons all over the place, and lots of tall heeled boots and embroidered vests.  Seeing as how this is a Bohemian festival, we can also expect lots of beer, probably.

It happens sometime in summer.  Some places do it in May, some do it later.

There is no explanation.  Perhaps it is better this way.