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.

Yesterday I read Touchstone by Melanie Rawn. I chose it at the library this way: I was having a hard time distinguishing the (very small) sea of titles and authors in their shiny library bindings. I saw The Golden Key and remembered that I liked it but lost interest because it went on and on forever and ever (note to myself: take note of this with regards to  not-Poland). I saw that there were other books by her. Touchstone wasn't a mountain-sized book and it didn't have dragons in it (I like dragons, but I have developed an allergy to dragon stories. I could probably explain that, but I also probably shouldn't). I liked it a lot. Even though I kept noticing things I thought were kind of sloppy in the world building and chafing at small details, I enjoyed it and I kept reading right till it was done. If I had been less lazy I could have exchanged it for the second book before the library closed at five. Supposedly the third book is out and the other books are written, so it's not a completely hopeless thing to be in love with.

There's ambiguous relationships which are apparently not resolved until late in the series, which is interesting. Also I like the way that brnaching possibilities are handled in the protagonist's kind-of clairvoyance.

It's set in generic late-medieval world with a jumble of sentient races each of which has their minor superpowers. Almost nobody in their country is pure anything. They spend a lot and a lot of time speculating on the mix of races that go into various people's ancestry so as to account for their looks and talents. This made me itch. The author's views, expressed quite forcefully through the characters, are all about the tolerance and the interdepence and the mutual appreciation, but it's still weird to have all this be so determined, and also to have the Dungeons and Dragons spectrum of races so neatly presented. The story has its strengths anyway.

The patriarchy is really quite miserable here: women aren't even allowed to go to the theater(but they do anyway, bless Melanie Rawn's heart). The theater tradition is four guys put on a magic show. One of them writes the "playlets" and fills up a selection of glass tubes with magic. Another manipulates these tubes to create illusions. A third one is the actor who plays all the parts, but there's usually only one or two characters. The fourth one modulates and directs the flow of the magic. So that's interesting. There's a lot of interesting business about glass craft, including a kind of anachronistic bit about lead in the glass which I was only too happy to give her slack on. There's just generally more awareness than average in fantasy books about how things are made and how work is done, and that's also nice. So I generally enjoyed the book and want more.

I also took out another Czech history book, The Coasts of Bohemia by Derek Sayer, but I don't think it's probably as interesting as the Demetz one. So I guess I'll be reading that one for a while. I was actually looking for a Polish history book but I found this first and my new rule is two books at a time because I am fighting the tendency to lose things.

On another front, on Tuesday I dribbled some money on the ground in front of the car, and Truffle targeted it with her nose before she got in. This is that thing dogs do to show you things they find meaningful. No, she wasn't telling me that money is good, she was saying she found something that smelled like me on the ground and maybe I shoujld look at it too?