Now, I should admit I'm already a big fan of Ovid's Metamorphoses, so when I learned that there was a briefer, even This was a very pleasant surprise.
Now, I should admit I'm already a big fan of Ovid's Metamorphoses, so when I learned that there was a briefer, even distilled version of them, I got extremely enthusiastic.
The trend toward retellings of old myths has been an overall positive thing. I've read a few that weren't all that special, while some frankly blew me away. This particular one had no axe to grind except to illustrate humanity and the humanity of gods in a universal way.
Even better, this book gave us some expertly-turned evocative prose/poetry with an eye and ear toward the modern audience, neither forgiving or forgetting the faults of the past or ourselves.
In other words, it's a true rendition of the original, only distilled and sharpened.
It was truly effortless to read and what it lacks in depth for all these many personages of Greek mythology, it more than makes up for in crystal-clear windows into their souls....more
Honestly gorgeous poetry, redolent of introversion during the Blitz, trying to come to terms with the good and bad shackles of history and the distincHonestly gorgeous poetry, redolent of introversion during the Blitz, trying to come to terms with the good and bad shackles of history and the distinct possibility of annihilation.
This is one of my favorite T.S. Eliot poems and I just kept getting that "all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well" stuck in my head all day. I HAD to re-read this poem twice since then. I appreciate the points where the Mystery took over the lines but they were not the best parts for me.
The imagery for everything else was just too beautiful and scary.
The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre- To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire.
***
And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.
Poetry interpretation can be a really funky thing even at the best of times, but since having just watched the classic (Yes, I feel it really is,) 200Poetry interpretation can be a really funky thing even at the best of times, but since having just watched the classic (Yes, I feel it really is,) 2001 film AI, with it’s reference to Yeats’ The Stolen Child, I am totally and completely biased to love it, or indeed, either.
Why?
Because the world is more full of weeping than you know.
It’s pastoral, seemingly very happy and peaceful despite this particular line, but in all, it’s also about being spirited away by the little folk, never to be seen in the mortal world again.
And why is that happy? Never to see brown mice hopping or the blooms again?
Because it’s our imagination we’re running to. The one thing that saves us from a life of misery. Because it is, even though it is not real, the only thing to truly save us, in the end.
I think of the end of AI. How David’s complete and utter obsession let him die in happiness and hope despite everything that had been done to him.
Truly. There was never a better reference to a poem in a movie.
Honestly? It takes a certain mindset to enjoy Keats. Fortunately, I like mythology, and thanks to my ancient English degree, I have a certain appreciaHonestly? It takes a certain mindset to enjoy Keats. Fortunately, I like mythology, and thanks to my ancient English degree, I have a certain appreciation for flowery language.
Not my favorite, mind you. I like evocative imagery and/or scathing satire. But this isn't bad.
The one thing that drew me here to this book happened, in the final estimation, to be the least important aspect:
The fact that it is SF written as PoThe one thing that drew me here to this book happened, in the final estimation, to be the least important aspect:
The fact that it is SF written as Poetry.
I read it in audio format but after the fact, I kinda wish that I had read it as print. I'm probably going to get a copy soon.
Why?
Because even though the core story seems to rely almost entirely on a Noir mystery with an investigator who is addicted to a drug that makes a person emit light, but it comes with addictions and a rather strange murder, with some rather big consequences -- it is also deceptive.
As a fan of poetry, I'm also overly aware of the fact that there are many layers to any text. Do you think that metaphor is dead? Ha! Iambic Pentameter is also used in Shakespeare to illustrate high importance and major turning points. Anyone reading this 5 hours long Noir SF mystery should certainly enjoy it on the surface-level, but it's the heart of it that makes me RAVE about it.
In this dark world, light is a drug. Heat radiates everywhere, but it's light (and here's where the metaphor is very, very strong) that causes tremors, creates an underground market, throws people into paroxysms of drug-addled numina, and is ultimately the grand reversal of the tale.
Have a partner named Dante and you can figure out the rest. Is light love? Maybe God's love in the bowels of hell? If it's such an addictive substance and the whole idea of getting off the drug or fighting the crime syndicates is such a huge deal, then the whole FLAVOR of this far-future SF becomes... something else entirely.
I really don't need to spoil it. This is a book that lends itself to many different interpretations.
Just rest assured that every word is important and carefully placed, as is most good poetry. :)
As a side note, this is a very fun poem to teach my little girl. Reading CAN be fun. Especially when you PERFORM it. And Rage! Rage a lot! Ah, 7-year-olds can be a lot of fun....more
Who would have thought such a spritely dance of a poem could be so LEWD?
I totally get why this would have become a sensation in 1859. It doesn't wax Who would have thought such a spritely dance of a poem could be so LEWD?
I totally get why this would have become a sensation in 1859. It doesn't wax poetic about religion or morals, but it sure as hell tells of the underlying lust and anguish that sex brings. Socially as well as within.
To be clear, it never speaks directly of such, but reading it in any other way soon becomes a real chore and boring to boot. :)
So read away, my lovelies, but read it with a lusty heart....more
I was delighted to find out that I could read and enjoy Jo Walton's first short story (and poetry) collection on Netgalley and saving it just in time I was delighted to find out that I could read and enjoy Jo Walton's first short story (and poetry) collection on Netgalley and saving it just in time for xmas. I do that with authors I really enjoy. The fact is, Ms. Walton has taste. Granted, I've only read three of her books before now, with this one making number four, but trust has been earned.
What else should I expect from someone who reads copiously and discerns with great verve?
But then there comes the introduction. She admits to experimenting and learning the short-fic craft and some of these aren't precisely over-practiced. To that, I say, nevermind. :) I'll read and judge based on my gut reactions anyway, and while a good number of them aren't overly fantastic in my opinion, a few stand out well.
It's on these that I'm resting the weight of my enjoyment.
The Panda Coin - The moon, androids, humans, and AIs... a full slice of lives lasting only as long as the coin remains in their possession. It's a great SF twist and I had a great time piecing out the world and feeling the commentary.
Remember the Allosaur - It may be a joke piece like a number of her other smaller works, but this one works best for me. I keep thinking of my favorite Raptor memes. :)
Sleeper - A pretty awesome future dystopia from the focus of a biographer and an AI-simulation of a real person during the early-mid 20th-century heretics (of mild socialism). I think I may have had the best time with this one just because it's so seditious. If only all biographical works could be the spearhead of a revolution, right?
A Burden Shared - I think I prefer this one for its basic SF-concept over the execution, but even that did a great job. Pain-sharing seems to be just the start. I keep thinking about the possible economic slant to it. Walton's take is purely interpersonal, but a whole society that has this is bound to abuse it. Fascinating, either way. :)
Three Shouts on a Hill - This one is an all-out Irish legend turned into a wild mish-mash mythology adventure and placed firmly into a stage production. It's pretty awesome, ranging from Cromwell, the Thunderbird, the Aztecs, Golden apples and underwater dragons, and even King Arthur. It's about tricksters and overwhelming odds and payback. I'd love to see this put on! :)
The poetry in this collection is very decent, too, but beyond that, I'll not say too much. There is an ever-growing field of SF poetry, after all. It's worth browsing. :)
It took me ten days to read. 60 hours for an audiobook. Nearly 1300 pages. Still, it took me ten days to read this. I'm shocked.
I'm also quite amazed It took me ten days to read. 60 hours for an audiobook. Nearly 1300 pages. Still, it took me ten days to read this. I'm shocked.
I'm also quite amazed at the brilliance of this book.
I'm thinking of also getting a bound copy of this book to open up at random whenever I want my mind blown and just stick my finger in it and osmose the hell out of it. It's that kind of dense, crazy book.
The only book that comes close to it is Infinite Jest, and I like Jerusalem a hell of a lot more. It has an enormous sharp cast of misfits, crazies, poets, junkies, whores, and dead kids... but wait! It also has the builders of reality, demons, nagas, and a little corner of Northampton called the Burroughs that is the nexus of all freaking reality and all the dead can travel up the street to the future or back down the street to the past and have a blast.
Seriously, the first load of the novel had me wondering if I was just reading a literary fiction like Infinite Jest with a ton of outcasts and thankfully interesting normals as they screwed, did drugs, or whatnot. All the while, I learned more and more and more about this little 'burb, it's history... sooooo much history... and then we started getting characters out of our modern setting in full glorious detail and imagining. The history is starting to get applied, practically. But still, I'm not totally impressed. After all, I came at this knowing that Moore can blow my mind as with the later volumes of Swamp Thing and V for Vendetta and Watchmen. I wanted SF or Fantasy or both.
And then a funny thing happened deep into the text.
A little kid choked on a cough drop for 11 freaking chapters.
WTF? Right? Realize something here: this is an author who grew up on all the greats of literature, and I see a ton of James Joyce right here. In fact, James Joyce shows up here. So does Samuel Beckett, Thomas Beckett, Cromwell, and even William Blake! :) Tons of poets and writers who are dead, along with this little kid, show up and travel all space and time. Mostly it's just the Dead Dead Gang, a group of 7 year olds who pit themselves against eternal demons and save the newly-dead kid from a deal with a really big-deal devil, take him under their wing, and travel up and down the streets of afterlife Burroughs where we REALLY get a taste of all that history that Moore has been giving us.
Pretty awesomely, in fact. :)
And then the "normal" characters keep poking their heads in on us in strange and unusual ways as we see below the fabric of reality and see in the fourth dimension and get the idea that "crazy" on our side is really just "saint" on the other. Things get really strange in a big way.
And even crack whores can be "Innocent" and "pivotal" in the salvation of the universe. :) Which hangs on a billard game being waged by the Builders, the angels and demons in this very *differently* imagined afterlife/4th dimensional landscape that's in so many ways so much better than Christopher Priest's The Inverted World and a hell of a lot more interesting and vivid, too. After all, we get to go 3 billion years in the future with a beautiful dead baby on a man's back to see the death of stars, too. :)
But the really big question that gets raised in this tome is the nature of predestination. Is everything set in stone? It's one hell of a clunker of a theme, and we get everything from crack whores to tons of poets to dead children to angels and demons asking this same question. And if the crux of the universe is this run-down barrow of a shithole and the second coming of christ is a 3-year-old who reaches brain-death before miraculously coming back to lead a normal life, we have to ask ourselves a lot of deep questions that's not strictly religious in nature.
And the language? Oh my god. Alan Moore writes a huge tract of poetry here. Think pre-dictionary middle-English poetry firmly ensconced in modern day sex scenes, science, and art, written floridly and gorgeously even when we're talking about flying sperm. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is certainly cray-cray and ambitious and we as readers can't take ANYTHING for granted. Are these characters simply well-drawn vehicles for an enormous showdown between the builders of the universe? Or is this also a subtle and not-so-subtle satire on literature, too? Both, I think.
I know one thing for sure. It's an amazing feat of literature. It's not easy and it's not meant to be, either, but it flows and everything is drawn to amazing limits and it's DEFINITELY NOT NORMAL. You want a challenge? You want ENORMOUS traditional literature, poetry, religious thinking, epic space/time travels, ghosts, historical persons, gritty neo-realism, and a major discourse on WHAT IS ART? Look no further. :)
Let's say we could write a book on this book. Or perhaps, someday, there will be whole courses on this massive tome like there is for James Joyce's Ulysses. You can plumb these depths for years and still find hidden gems. I'm certain of it. One read is definitely not enough. And if you publish your dissertation on his novel and get your PHD on his coattails, then congratulations! :)
I can totally understand if it daunts most people. I'm also intimidated. And I actually KNOW most of the artists and *some* of the history. And yet, I remain DAUNTED, too. :)
I was expecting this classic Finnish mythos, this fantasy epic, to be kinda dense and worldly and weighty, buOh my goodness, this is a real treasure!
I was expecting this classic Finnish mythos, this fantasy epic, to be kinda dense and worldly and weighty, but I didn't expect it to be totally readable, droll, classy, and exciting. I also didn't expect to see it as the source material for so many classics I adore, including most of the stories behind Tolkien's The Silmarillion and a good portion of his LoTR.
It reads like a fantastically mythical adventure from start to Finnish and it's no wonder, even in the English translation and the narrator I got for this audiobook, a ton of love was put into it. I see now exactly how well-beloved it is and why it is so. :) :) :)
I'm blown away. By epic poetry. Hmmmm Maybe this means I need to do a poetry kick, next. :)
And no, I didn't do a line by line analysis of this text, but I did pick up some really awesome beauties in it, such as procession of the equinoxes, Rosy-Cross alchemical transformations, World-Tree as Sampo, and the most huge current of the mythical Singer and Smith.
Orpheus? Hell yeah. And the Master Forger? Another hell yeah. The later adventure actually just brought tears to my eyes. :) Totally had me dancing in my seat with joy. :)
My only complaint was the Guides For New Brides and Guides For New Husbands. lol, that stuff was a riot of wtf. Maybe it would have gone down better if I was a brawny anachronism. :) But no, I'm a modern man and none of that shit flew. :)
Everything else, though? I was really impressed that women still refused to lay down and take it, but still a lot of that still happened in the text. And no matter my personal opinions on a lot of what happened, I cannot help but see this epic as totally brilliant. I could see myself memorizing it and doing a cant and impressing all the drunks. :) ...more
OKAY. For as much as I generally love Campbell for his scholarship and his breadth and depth of knowledge on all things religious, mythical, and anthrOKAY. For as much as I generally love Campbell for his scholarship and his breadth and depth of knowledge on all things religious, mythical, and anthropological, I have to say he goes rather overboard in a DIFFERENT direction for this book.
What direction, you ask?
Living culture. And I'm not really talking about modern culture so much as I'm referring to the scope of the Dark Ages through Thomas Mann and James Joyce. He does the literary analysis thing. In spades. Want Beowulf? Check. Want tons of Parcival, Gawain, and even the tragic love story of Adelard and Heloise? Check. Want the erudite traditions, influences, mythological connections and cultural transformations laid out? You got it.
But wait, that's not all! We get some of the best and fully explained nastiness of the truth behind chastity in Christianity and the best visceral descriptions I've ever read that makes me UNDERSTAND why the whole Romantic Love thing took off so HARD back at the opening days of the Rennaisance. Grail Legend? Chivalry? The whole love thing was bucking the Church and Society HARD. Trubadors were the punk bands of the day. :)
We get the influence of Alchemy and Science in poetry, music, and opera. We get dozens of traditions, a great analysis that shows just how much Islamic thought is slathered throughout the Divine Comedy, and so much more.
So what's my problem?
It feels like half the book was devoted to fanboying over Thomas Mann and James Joyce.
I mean, sure, these guys were like a wet dream for mythographers and sociologists and Jungian analysts and they wrote some fine fiction, too, but I would have been JUST FINE with... a slightly abbreviated analysis.
Don't get me wrong! I'm now interested as hell in reading more of Thomas Mann and I may go ahead and revisit Joyce soon, but BY NO MEANS is this very good reading if you're not at least slightly interested in either author.
Of course, if you're prepping yourself in College for writing one hell of a great essay on Joyce (or 14 of them), then DO YOURSELF A BIG FAVOR and read this book or the relevant sections. Some of it rather blew me away. :)
Is this the best stuff Campbell ever wrote? Hell, no. It's very learned and I learned TONS, but it was almost nothing like what I had come to expect from him. More like he had been sitting around doing a lot of reading and his brilliant mind came up with fantastic random crap that sooner or later coalesced into a huge coherent literary epiphany. I think that's great and all but damn... I wanted the world, not fiction, THIS TIME. :) ...more
This one is extremely difficult to review, mainly because I'm tempted more to appreciate it from afar rather than enjoy it up close. But there are pasThis one is extremely difficult to review, mainly because I'm tempted more to appreciate it from afar rather than enjoy it up close. But there are passages where the reverse is entirely as true.
Whereas the first novel was a straightforward love of literature and myth made up out of whole cloth and full of love of the act of writing, itself, among so many who refuse to read, the sequel is nothing less than a shattered land following the events that led to war in the first, and not only shattered by war, but also as shattered in prose.
You see? I can appreciate the book's structure, it's sheer reliance on poetry and despair and song, (oh, especially song,) to convey a feeling, or a string of many layered and complex feelings and subjects, in the face of kings and monsters, family and one's love-life, of which there is quite a bit of LGBT, and quite beautifully done.
So much is either dense world-building in terms of myth, historical rumination, straight stream-of-consciousness. Only occasionally do we have a bit of traditional storytelling, and more often than not, there's stories within stories.
That's what I love.
What I didn't love so much was the lack of attention-grabbing plot among the wonderful prose, or, as the case may be, the sad fact that I lost interest. Multiple times. That's not to say that certain characters keep showing up to provide threads I can hold on to, or to see how each of them change and develop over time, or how their perceptions of love or singing give them perspective on their identities, but these gems were buried fairly deep in the labyrinth of the prose and often it was a real chore to pay attention.
I sometimes like to work for my read, it's true. But I want to feel like I'm going to get something really wonderful out of the challenge, too, and while this was all pretty wonderful poetry, I'm not sure it spoke to me as a whole.
There were certain parts, such as the love story and the songs that really got me, but the rest of the book was kind of a let down
At least in comparison to the previous one....more
Sparse and perfect prose as poetry. Old tales piled upon myth and returning back to tale. If your bones could tell the tale through the aCrowd of Bone
Sparse and perfect prose as poetry. Old tales piled upon myth and returning back to tale. If your bones could tell the tale through the ashes, they would step through the seasons. You would run in the clouds.
This is poetry. There's no other description for it. If anyone had been able to report on the days of the old Celts and extrapolate a real and magical landscape of both thought and being, then Ms. Gilman is the transplant from time. Not only is the fantasy world deep and complex, but I could feel the love between Kit and Thea, the bittersweet and beautiful, the tragedy and the delight. It was short, but so jam packed with information and gorgeous phrases that I was forced to taste every word and slow down to a point that I wanted to tear my hair out.
Of course, that just meant that the text was worth it, and I was suddenly in a different depth, requiring me to swim to a far underground shore.
Sure, I could sum up the plot in a few easy sentences, but that would rob the richness of the magical world in these pages. And certainly, I could point to the recurring imagery drawn out of old civilizations and myth and cultures, but it was done in such a smart way that I could never unravel just what was cribbed or imagined.
If this weren't a modern work of fiction, I probably would have assumed it had come out of one of the past masters, like Spenser or Pope. It's certainly thick enough to be the punchlines in Shakespeare's plays or sonnets.
Do I think this work is amazing? Yes. Do I think that you, the reader, needs to be willing and able to fly slow through the clouds? Yes.
This is not an easy work, but it is fantastically delicious and subtle. ...more
Well, apparently, the universe doesn't want me to write a review, so let's try this a third time. :)
I wanted to like this re-read a lotRe-Read 8/17/16
Well, apparently, the universe doesn't want me to write a review, so let's try this a third time. :)
I wanted to like this re-read a lot more than the first, but unfortunately, the things I thought were uninteresting the first time around, like the Egypt expedition, were still uninteresting, but I stuck around because all the run-ins with the egyptian magicians was still pretty damn wonderful.
As for the first half of the novel, I'd easily give it 5 stars. I mean, where else can you see some unknown poet scholar of Coleridge and an even more unknown poet by the name of Ashbless turn into a time-travelling, swashbuckling hero able to make mortal enemies of near-immortal Egyptian wizards, and do it all the while in 1810 London for 35 more years?
The details and the plot and the funny bits are absolutely great. I like Doyle before and after his transformation into an orange ape, too. :) Perhaps more after his transformation. I love Dog-Face Joe, the body-switching werewolf, all the dirty streets of London, and practically every single enemy in the book. So many of them had other sides to them and evil is not absolute. :)
I still regard this book very highly, especially for the ideas, the wonderful ideas, the surprising magic system, the awesome time travel problems and its clever solutions. Even the writing is clear and interesting well past the middle part, and there was nothing in it to really turn me off about it except, perhaps, that it was too light and too action-y? I don't know. I didn't feel very invested. It turned around again, of course, and the ending was very satisfying, but not enough to knock this book up to a 5 where my *mind* thinks it should be, but my *heart* refuses to budge.
Old Review:
I was surprised to find a novel that was much more complicated and rich than I might have otherwise expected. I knew this was a time travel book, and I knew there would be magic in it. I didn't expect it to be forerunner of the steampunk movement or to be so literary. Mr. Powers put a lot of consideration into the lives portrayed here, and while Doyle was hard to truly love, he grew on me as he grew as a character. I really liked him by the end. There are many twists and turns to the story, and the plot is both intricate and complex. The novel is in third-persion limited omniscience, which allows for a great deal of variety, while sacrificing the immediacy and the feeling of being in the character's skin. I almost wish it was written in first-person, because the sheer amount of detail and description in 1810 London was astounding and beautiful in the horrible way those grubby English types can be, and feeling what he felt would have been an extraordinary treat. This is no urban fantasy novel. The magic was strange and had some very curious aspects to it, and pitting a magical viewpoint with a time-traveler in a closed-loop system felt like a stroke a of genius.
I have to say that the novel, while sometimes slow, was well thought-out and complex. I think it succeeded as a traditional fantasy novel, a traditional science-fiction novel, and also as a traditional horror novel in equal parts. I may be jaded by modern fiction that throws together whichever genres you like to make a goulash that's tasty and strange, or even some science fiction or fantasy that simply draws from the tradition of horror. This novel balances all three and even spares a tithe to mystery, romance, action-adventure, social-commentary a-la Dickens, and poetry. The fact that Mr. Powers pulls it all off is a testament to skill as a writer....more
Maybe it's just the ancient studies of that far-off teenage years that was calling out to me, but I had this insane urge to reread this classic poem oMaybe it's just the ancient studies of that far-off teenage years that was calling out to me, but I had this insane urge to reread this classic poem of lust. It contrasts nicely with the recent romance novels that I've had the dubious enjoyment of reading. It's particularly nice to see a strong-headed woman who feels no issue with chasing after a man who would rather spear a boar than her. I wonder if Adonis was actually Scottish? Maybe West-Virginian? Alas, alak, would he rather swive a swine than appeal to Aphrodite? Wait. Am I talking about romance novels or Shakespeare? Damn... nothing is ever clear-cut....more
Well, one lousy review can't do Blake's poems any justice, not unless you're flush with time and the soul of a poet, yourself. :)
I can say, however, tWell, one lousy review can't do Blake's poems any justice, not unless you're flush with time and the soul of a poet, yourself. :)
I can say, however, that the title kinda gives the whole gig away. :) The first section is rife with allusions to Jesus and the second is full of wry and rather sarcastic religious revolutionary insights that I *clearly* appreciate much more than the innocent ones. :)
Yes, love should be shown! No, life should not be this dreary and repressed thing. :)
I particularly love how Blake uses limited PoV narrations, from a little child or an old bard. The mirroring of both characters and themes really does a big number on both types of poetry. I only wish I was reading it with the engravings. :)
Such classics! Well worth the Experience. Everyone should Experience it. :)...more
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