coffee & ink

• I have been taking notes in my sadly decayed handwriting and will try to type and organize them on the train home. I have been very much enjoying the panels even, or perhaps especially, when I want to argue with them.
• The train departed 20 minutes late and arrived in Boston 10 minutes early. Why are you capping your speed, Amtrak?! Is it not enough to cruelly deny me actual high-speed rail?
• This trip always fills me with nostalgia because I took the same Acela/Northeast Corridor line back and forth to college.
• Books finished on the ride up/the night before registration: Susan Casey's The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean (trying too hard for poetry but has 100% convinced me the ocean is Very Cool and We Need to Protect It from Capitalist Exploitation) and Tahsan Mehta's The Liar's Weave (smart and affecting and, though I hate to say it, probably without enough context to do well in the West without some revision; I am glad her breakthrough book here was Mad Sisters of Esi, which I think will do much better, and is also just weirder, wilder, and stronger).
• People met up with: kate_nepveu, sparkymonster, skygiants, genarti, rilina, oracne, gwynnega, ninamazing, and probably someone I've forgotten.
• Replacement copies of midlist fantasy books of the 80s and 90s acquired: 4

• Things I have recommended to con attendees and recommend to you:

  • Tanith Lee Humble bundle (26 books for $18!)
  • Trung Le Nguyen's live skeeting of Pride and Prejudice, which he has never read before
  • Interview with a Vampire/The Vampire Lestat on AMC, which I have been meaning to write up for like three years now

chestnut_pod

1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
   
   (I pulled everything from my physical TBR bookcase, in hopes that it will encourage me to read it.)


2. Book #1 -- first sentence: "Anyone can write about a large city--large cities are open to everyone--but small cities can only be portrayed by people who love them."
   
   (Already ambiguities: I skipped the preface because this line is better.)


3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty: "However, I haven't yet read V.W.'s book."


4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred: "What amazing childishness these old people were content to live in!"
   
   (Unexpected challenge: do I pick the second sentence or the second complete sentence?)


5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty: "'I know.' Verna dropped the packages. A hard, harsh sob pressed at her throat. 'I hate him.' "
   
   (Yes, I am treating one paragraph of dialog plus action as a single sentence for the purposes of the meme. Fight me!)


6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book: "Eunice picked up her bag and guitar and closed the door to the storm."


7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph:
   
   

   Anyone can write about a large city--large cities are open to everyone--but small cities can only be portrayed by people who love them. However, I haven't yet read V.W.'s book. What amazing childishness these old people were content to live in! 'I know.' Verna dropped the packages. A hard, harsh sob pressed at her throat. 'I hate him.' Eunice picked up her bag and guitar and closed the door to the storm.

   
   
   I promise it wouldn't make any more sense if I chose another option for step 5.

Sources: ISFDB, Wikipedia, my bookshelves

I collated this list for my Cherryh reread project. I didn't include magazine publications or omnibus editions, and only noted reprints where updated copyright dates or author's notes indicated substantial revision.

Italics = Probably not covering this in the reread.

( Cut for length )

Ghost Quartet is a band: Dave Malloy on keyboard, Brent Arnold on cello, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford on various instruments, and everyone providing vocals. Ghost Quartet is a song cycle, a concert album performed semi-staged, a mash-up of "Snow White, Rose Red," The One Thousand and One Nights, the Noh play Matsukaze, "Cruel Sister", "The Fall of the House of Usher", the front page photo of a fatal train accident, and a grab bag of Twilight Zone episodes. The ghost of Thelonious Monk is sometimes invoked, but does not appear; whisky is often invoked, and, if you see the show live, will most certainly appear. "I'm confused/And more than a little frightened," says (one incarnation of) the (more-or-less) protagonist. "It's okay, my dear," her sister/lover/mother/daughter/deuteragonist reassures her, "this is a circular story."

Once upon a time two sisters fell in love with an astronomer who lived in a tree. He seduced Rose, the younger, then stole her work ("for a prestigious astronomy journal"), and then abandoned her for her sister, Pearl. Rose asked a bear to maul the astronomer in revenge, but the bear first demanded a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photograph of a ghost. (The music is a direct quote of the list of spell ingredients from Into the Woods.) Rose searches for all these ingredients through multiple lifetimes; and that's the plot.

Except it is much less comprehensible than that. The songs are nested in each other like Scheherazade's stories; you can follow from one song to the next, but retracing the connections in memory is impossible; this is less a narrative than a maze. Surreal timelines crash together in atonal cacophany; one moment Dave Malloy, or a nameless astronomer played by Dave Malloy, or Dave Malloy playing Dave Malloy is trying to solve epistemology and another moment the entire house of Usher, or all the actors, are telling you about their favorite whiskies. The climax is a subway accident we have glimpsed before, in aftermath, in full, circling around it, a trauma and a terror that cannot be faced directly; the crash is the fall of a house is the failure to act is the failure to look is the failure to look away.

There are two recordings available. Ghost Quartet, recorded in a studio, has cleaner audio, but Live at the McKitterick includes more of the interstitial scenes and feels more like the performance.

In Green-Wood Cemetery, there were three slightly raised stages separated by batches of folding chairs, one for Dave Malloy, one for Brent Arnold, and one for Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, with a flat patch of grass in the center across which they sang to each other, and into which they sometimes moved; you could sit in the chairs, or on cushions in front of the first row, or with cheaper tickets you could sit in the grass on the very low hills above the staging area, among the monuments and gravestones, and, presumably, among more ghosts. The show started a little before sunset; I saw a hawk fly over, and I could hear birds singing along when the humans sang a capella. Green-Wood is in the middle of Brooklyn, so even after dark I couldn't see stars; but fireflies sparked everywhere.