Bridge to the Stars

I survived the busiest time of the year at work! All of my timetabled start-of-the-academic-year classes are done, I've reassured the first round of stressed out postgraduate students that they are capable of the research skills expected of them, and after this week, the remainder of the busyness is no longer my responsibility. It's felt easier than it has done in years, due to the fact that I actually have a full complement of colleagues to share the load.

Although I don't tend to do much in the way of Halloween, this weekend ended up being one of dust and echoes, haunting and memory, and light and warmth against the turn towards winter almost unintentionally. We didn't get any trick-or-treaters, but I've had candles lit almost constantly since Friday night, and I spent a pleasant half-hour last night watching the fireworks (in advance of 5 November) from the guest bedroom window. This annual event has a whole capitalistic carnival apparatus around it — the hill (usually a public park) from which the fireworks can be viewed is cordoned off, accessible only with a fee, there are fairground-type stalls, and so on. The fact that you have to pay to get in, and that it's cold, always puts me off, and this year I felt more smug than usual at this decision, as it also rained heavily for about an hour before the fireworks began. Far better to watch for free from my warm house!

I've been doing all the normal maintenance activities of the weekend — two hours at classes in the gym yesterday, followed by market lunch, 1km in the pool this morning, coffee and bookshop browsing and a drink in the courtyard garden of the best bar in town today — plus trying to get the garden ready to hibernate over winter. The fact that half the plants are still flowering in November is impeding this somewhat, but I can hardly be annoyed at raised beds still filled with a riot of cornflowers, hollyhocks, nasturtiums, marigolds and dahlias.

In addition to all that, I worked on this year's Yuletide assignment, and made good progress.

Other cool things: goodbyebird has set up a new comm, rec_cember. As per the description of the comm, it involves:

[a] month long reccing event for December. Let's recommend some fanworks! Let's appreciate and comment on those fanworks!

This weekend's (re)reading was deliberately seasonal: the annual The Grey King (Susan Cooper) reread on Friday, and A Lane to the Land of the Dead (Adèle Geras) yesterday. The former remains as exquisite and devastating as ever, the latter was a reminder to me of Geras's versatility as an author: an accomplished collection of ghost stories, set in various parts of Manchester in the mid-1990s (contemporary to the time at which she was writing), with an incredible sense of place. I first visited the city in the 2020s, so never encountered it in the decaying, collapsing, impoverished state that Geras depicts, but she makes it come alive. This after I first encountered Geras as a writer of historical children's fiction, and of YA fairytale retellings set in a British girls' boarding school in the 1960s. Both books, in very different ways, understand haunting not only as the supernatural (although of course this is a strong presence) but also in land, and the built environment, and the memories they retain and transmit, and the bitterness people carry and refuse to let go. I'm glad I chose to read both at the time I did.

It's been a nice, cosy, relaxing weekend, after a long run of weeks packed with activities. I've currently got chicken stock bubbling away on the stove in the next room over, ready to be used in tonight's soup for dinner. Both the sound and smell of stock are the epitome of warmth to me.

The extra hour of sleep was extremely welcome, and it was glorious to wake up in full sunlight after weeks of dark mornings (although the months of darkness at 4pm is always going to hit me like a hammer), walk out to the pool in the freezing sunlit air (all the neighbourhood cats were sitting in their respective windows, looking out at pedestrians as if we were crazy for being outside), swim my regular 1km in an uncharacteristically empty pool, and then walk along the river and through the market with Matthias. The sun disappeared at virtually the exact moment we walked back through the door of our house, which was unintentionally impeccable timing on our part.

Other good things: the pottery taster class last week was lovely. I was spectacularly bad at it — there are just so many things to keep track of, and the smallest, most subtle hand movement or shift in the body's position can cause a pot to collapse beyond repair on the wheel — but the setting was great, the instructor was patient, and the activity was meditative. I definitely want to do more, but it will probably need to wait until next year, due to various upcoming travels and other activities. It was good to try it out, though.

Last weekend, Matthias and I also went down to London on Sunday to attend, of all things, a sumo tournament (the first outside Japan in nearly 35 years) in the Royal Albert Hall. Matthias, who's never met a sport he doesn't like (except for golf), got massively into sumo a few years back, and the serendipitous existence of this exhibition tournament in London was too good to miss. As with many of his interests, I was just happy to be along for the ride, but I ended up having a great time. I love the Albert Hall as an events venue, and it worked brilliantly here. It was packed to the rafters, including with lots of groups of youngish children who were clearly massive fans (with banners, etc).

Work has been exhausting, and my choice of reading material (mostly rereads of childhood favourites) has reflected that, although I did finally get to The Voyage Home, the concluding book in Pat Barker's trilogy of books retelling events in and around the Iliad from various female characters' perspectives. The first two books are the Briseis-centric retelling of my heart — the versions of these stories for which I'd been searching for decades, trudging through a lot of dross to get to — and I'd been a bit sad to see that Barker had decided Briseis's story was done in the second book, and moved on to other characters. Did the world really need yet another retelling of the tragedy of Cassandra, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and was Barker actually going to add anything to this well-trodden ground with her contribution? Even after finishing the book, I'm not sure I know the answer — I found it excellent and compelling, but unlike Barker's take on Briseis (which I talk about in more detail here), it didn't dig itself into the spaces around my heart, with truths at once obvious and devastating. Violent patriarchal honour culture is awful, and will destroy everyone, including violent patriarchs? Life goes on, and people will find a way to survive, in spite of incredible devastation, carving out their own little spaces of safety wherever they can? These are interesting enough as animating ideas, but do they justify yet another retelling?

In my wanderings yesterday, I went past the independent bookshop and bought my own copy of The Rose Field, the concluding brick of a tome in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials sequel/prequel trilogy, The Book of Dust. I've only read 150 of 600+ pages, so I'll make no firm conclusions here, other than to state I feel quite bittersweet about the whole thing. His Dark Materials was utterly formative for me (I read it at exactly the right ages, while having to wait for the second two books to be published), and it is no exaggeration to say that if not for picking up Northern Lights/The Golden Compass as a thirteen-year-old, I would not be living in this country, have done the PhD that I did, be working in the line of work that I do, nor be married to the person that I am. The message boards of a fan forum for HDM were my first experience of online fandom, and remain my gold standard for fannish community. I'm still good friends with most of the people I met through the forum, though our days of dissecting Pullman's books and speculating about future directions of the series are long gone. They've all been posting photos of their own copies of The Rose Field and seem for the most part hugely excited to see how Lyra's story concludes. I myself feel quite alienated by all this, and hesitant to raise my ambivalence. I loved the prequel of this new trilogy, but found the second book (chronologically, the first half of the 'sequel' component of the trilogy) not just a let down, but actively enraging (there's a whole vanished Twitter DM conversation between me and sophia.mcdougall consisting of me ranting in real time as I read my way further through the book), and apparently laying the groundwork for one of my few massive character dynamic squicks. It didn't change how I felt about the original trilogy, because that's so embedded in me that there's no extracting it, but it did cause a major shift in my overall thinking about Pullman as a writer. So far, I don't have such a strong Do Not Want reaction to The Rose Field, but it's early days, and my overall assessment hinges on how all the various threads are pulled together.

Rather than leaving this post on such a grumbling note, I will close with a link to a Substack post by Marie Le Conte that's been bringing me a lot of joy. In it, she talks about the rather surreal experience of her teenage years, when she and a couple of other friends had the enormous chutzpah to create and run a somewhat successful internet music fanzine. I won't go into more detail than that, except to say that the specific combination of teenage certainty and intellectual arrogance is extremely recognisable to me, although my own context was different. It's a fun read, even if there were a lot of moments of 'I'm in this picture and I don't like it.'