Arachne's Musings

I admit to a certain fascination with stories about magical studies, ancient deities or powerful beings with mystical powers, alchemical manipulation, and of course rare books. When I saw this book advertised and accoladed, flush with mysterious immortals and martial arts trained otherworldlings, I had to pick it up. Despite being more of a teen read than I'd expected (the main characters are just learning to drive and have their first jobs in coffee shops and bookstores), the imagery is rich and interesting and the story moves along quickly, exploring new ideas and bringing unexpected characters to life. It is a bit predictable in places, especially the drama between the two main characters (Sophie and Josh Newman, non-identical twins separated by just a few minutes) and their lack of relationship with their parents, but it kept me more engaged than I'd expected and didn't disappoint (other than not wrapping up within one book, such that I have to wait for an as yet indeterminate amount of time for a sequel, or the second in the trilogy, to appear--I don't know whether I was ready to commit to a three-parter from the outset, and now that I'm in it, I pretty much have to finish...). Of course, it's no His Dark Materials, but it will do.

The subject of Nicholas Flamel is an interesting one, and there are aspects of this legend woven throughout many a modern magical tale, from Harry Potter's sorceror's stone to the ancient texts and magicks discovered and studied in The City Of Dreaming Books. If anything, this book has made me more aware of the essences of people, the auras and flavors and energies of each of us... that and a reminder of that abiding distrust of crows... that Morrigan with her army of Dire Crows is one scary tale I don't want to get tangled with...

Overall, interesting read, probably more awe-inspiring for a younger reader who has not already been completely indoctrinated in the ways of Tolkein and Moers and Pullman and Rucker and all the rest of my favorite fantastical writers... and even if not awe, amusement and excitement for all! Now to wait for the second installment...

It's possible this is the most delectable book I've read... at least in a long, long time. "We came on the wind of the carnival..." It might be the best first line of any novel (prompting many a reading of first paragraphs to many an eager listener), followed by a story that unfolds like swirling chocolate fondant cooling and expanding and being shaped and reshaped into a delicious truffle treat that lingers in the mouth, the mind, and the heart. Vianne and Anouk come to life as wild magical creatures, full of the joy of every moment, crafting a world around them of vivid colors and tastes, flaunting their differences in the name of freedom, and weaving a spell around the small, quiet town of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. Of course every good story has conflict, and this one comes in spades, the fear and the dark disapproval of the priest and the closed-minded locals who resist change. The shifting winds that blow trouble and discontent, and that bring complications, both of pleasure and of pain. The lives that are impacted and altered by more than just the freely flowing chocolate, but by the awakening of the senses, moving them to challenge traditions and stand up for themselves and make their voices heard.

Vianne's magic of choice is handmade chocolate, seeing into the hearts of each person via their taste buds to glean their favorites, and slowly opening the door for them to find the true magic in their own lives. Her nemesis is the local cure, Francis Reynaud, and his resistance to Vianne's influenece only covers his own secrets and longings and fears for so long. Is it the religion that is wrong or is it something more? The exclusiveness? The lack of acceptance? In their own way, Vianne and Anouk revel in their spirituality and are  truer to the essence of the spirit than the doctrines and dogmas and restrictive rergimes of the church. Naturally that doesn't sit well, and with such dissent (i.e. free thinking, the evil influence of women in red dresses and river-dwelling gypsies with their communal meals and improvised music), the church can only feel its stranglehold slipping...

For all its drama, Chocolat maintains a sense of delirious wonder, innocence even, with words that melt and roll around the mouth in flavorful waves of lovely language. It's entirely devourable, and begs for indulgence. Indulgence, and chocolate, and magical totem bunnies, and mendiants, and candied oranges, and sugar mouses, and cafe au chocolat, and silky red underthings, and sheer joy of life. Try it, taste it!

I admit up front a bias, a sheer and uncontrollable infatuation with Tom Robbins' books. Jitterbug Perfume had me obsessed with beets and circular breathing. Still Life with Woodpecker made me long to die my hair and smoke Camel cigarettes while dreaming of pyramid adventures. And perhaps my favorite of all time, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, awakened the desire to travel deep into rainforests, experiment with mind-opening psychotropic substances, and walk on stilts around a desert oasis nunnery while making jokes about papayas.

Villa Incognito too has its charms, full of intriguing descriptions of Bangkok, the wiles of tanukis and foxes, the longing to expatriate to get some perspective, and the beautiful glamour of aerialists in the circus. Alas, it did not sway my stance on mayonnaise one ioda, nor did it make me want to revisit clownish obsessions or start describing seasons with cutesy emotions.

 In a nutshell, it recounts the story of three Vietnam MIAs rebuilding a life under the radar in Laos--their bonds and rifts, their adventures and loves, and the heavy burden of trying to opt out of a political structure into which you're born without the opportunity to choose. The other underlying piece of the tale is that of the otherworldly animal spirits, a pandemonium of gods and goddesses for everything imaginable, mischief and interspecies breeding, and the love of sake.

There are still some things left unresolved... and I wouldn't expect differently from a Robbins... so much of the climax of the story feels stolen, a mix of relief and sadness and tension, and it leaves my mind to wander to possible futures (large nut-sacked badgers included). I find a reborn desire to escape and study and choose my own path instead of following the societal norm (funny, that happens a lot with these books). And maybe I want to plant a chrysanthemum seed in my palette and see if it will grow. Or, maybe not...

In any case, there are parts of this book that I found a little to trite or hollow-silly, like an impression of Robbins wit that didn't quite hit. Living in Seattle, I'm always a little excited by mentions of grounds that I do indeed stomp, and at the same time, it always feels a wee bit too contrived (then again, maybe any readers in Laos feel the same way hearing their village towns and political structure described?). There are still passages of insightful musing and interchanges that really sum up the underlying problems of humanity. Here's one of my favorites from early on in the book, where Kitsune the fox scolds Tanuki for having been truthful with humans about his appearance/journey from the Other world:

"How could you be so naive as to hell a human being the truth? Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing. If you wish to gain the favor of the two-legged ilk, you must learn to fabricate as wholeheartedly as they do. Actually, by sabotaging their static illusions, we can sometimes help turn their stale deceptions into fresh possibilities for their race, but that's probably a mission you're neither interested in nor suited for..."

Static illusions indeed. I'm going naked from now on.

I tend to read a lot of books about how to write--it's the writer's curse to be forever drawn to books about the craft... Or rather I should say that I tend to collect books about writing, begin to read them and dream of all the wondrous ways that I'll be inspired, trained, motivated, exercised, and wildly successful, and then will grow distracted by such thoughts such that said books grows into a collection of reference books for the someday wherein I become a full time writer.

 I do truly believe these books to all be useful. And it is certain I will indeed collect more such books between now and someday.

My most recent purchase in such a vein, and the most remarkable to date, is Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing--if primarily that I procured it yesterday while browsing about in the UW Bookstore and read it all in about 10 minutes last night. I don't feel cheated either. In fact, its brevity and succinctness, and its common sense and excellent caricatures, stuck with me through my dreams.

The rule I like the most: Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip... I had to think about that for a while--if we write for the sake of seeing ourselves write, drone on ad nauseum, or just throw in non-essentials to bump word count and not to move the story forward, its just not that compelling. I know this from technical marketing writing--it's too easy to just regurgitate and reiterate, but redundancy doesn't really make it interesting.

I had to think back a bit to any/all Elmore Leonard books I've read and they hold true to his rules. I don't hear the writer, I hear the story. I don't skip the dialogue, I read it feverishly. And at the end of it, I'm not thinking "wow, he's such an eloquent writer" but I remember the characters and the action and the emotion that lives in my imagination. He's achieved his goal: the writer is invisible. The story doesn't get wrapped up in hooptedoodle.

Not that I mind a little hooptedoodle from time to time.

In any case, this is a solid, small, entertaining, quickly read snapshot of the Leonard brain, brief enough to probably read it in the store while standing in line, but with good advice and interesting illustrations that make it a nice thing to snag and reread once in a while... if for no other reason than to remind you not to use adverbs with reckless abandon and not to challenge readers to choke through swill to get to the meat of the story. Because they won't. They'll just stop reading. And they may not have impulsively bought the book first.

Okay, I admit that I picked this one up because of the quote on the cover (which I assume is precisely the reason they put such quotes on the cover), which stated something akin to "Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer starring Phillip Marlowe"--and of course summoning two of my all-time favorites in one fell swoop... well that was enough to overlook the less-than-stellar impression that the SciFi show bearing the series name left on me. (okay, it wasn't a horrid show or anything, but I'm a Buffy-aholic, so my otherworldy entertainment bar is set pretty high... and also, Dresden is way taller in book life.)

The gist: Chicago's leading wizard-slash-private dick Harry Dresden is trying to unravel the mystery behind the string of apparent suicides of seemingly unrelated women, who it turns out are all murdered by one kind of vampire or another (apparently there are three kinds in the White Court, plus the warring Red Court, and who knows what else) and all belong to the same Wiccan support group... and wait, there's more... Harry's brother, the ravishing (I have to say that, it's kind of chicklit-ish) Thomas--a White Court vamp of the Raith family who has been growing ever more mysterious and out of touch--not only has a collection of illegal firearms and pre-police crime scene photos of the victims, but has been seen escorting young women about only to find they go "missing" soon thereafter. Harry smells lots of rats, says a bunch of smart-ass things (as he says, everyone likes a wiseass, so long as they're talking to someone else), nearly loses control of his temper multiple times, summons hellfire, blows up buildings, pretends to be Thomas' uber exasperated lover to get out of a sticky situation, gets shot, stabbed, exploded, and otherwise magicified, passes out a few times and dreams about New Mexico, eviscerates beastly ghouls, glares intensely at bad guys and insolently at good ones, faces off with gangsters, lusts inappropriately over his apprentice, slightly more appropriately over his ex, and definitely ill-advisedly over a seduction-prone vampire and a seduction-prone demon shade living in his brain... and has time for playing with his pets and ribbing his buddy about being inexperienced in the ways of love.

The next day... (ha! you snort, but the timeline is pretty short for the amount of stuff that gets utterly demolished). Enjoyable? Yes. Heart-pounding? Once or twice. Humor-filled? Indubitably. Wildly inappropriate? Only on occasion. This was a relaxing read, gripping enough to be captivating, funny enough to keep me guessing, laughing from time to time, and every so often re-reading sections to make sure I was catching all of the joke. I probably wouldn't read it twice, but it was fun, and I'd likely read something else in the series. Good characters (though with the sense that this was not the first book and much of the history was spelled out elsewhere... like there's no introduction of Bob the Skull other than that his name is Bob and he's a skull, and apparently a disembodied horndog), good twists (or at least some "oh right, we have magic so we can do this" deux a machina moments), and a good pace--though near the end, even I could see that sometimes it's okay not to be a wiseass, but that some people can't seem to control themselves no matter the oh-so-obvious consequences. Lesson learned: Sometimes being lippy and witty just sounds immature, even if it feels fun and/or justified. (And there's that whole lesson about how power corrupts and you shouldn't play with power unless you're doing it for the right reasons and you're afraid of it, respectfully, or you might burn holes in people's psyches, or end up in a really big cave full of really angry ghouls without your zombie dinosaur.)

Since I've long been such an avid reader (luster after books-er), it's time I start writing about them, perhaps sharing what I've learned, or at least spoiling a good thing or two (or not) for anyone else who cares (or doesn't). In any case, I'll start with the best--and coincidentally latest--book I've finished this month: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, former editor of the French version of Elle.

The gist: Famous editor of famous French magazine suffers a sudden stroke in his early 40s and ends up in a coma, then in a condition known as "locked-in" where he is still fully mentally functional but is nearly completely paralyzed... all he can move, in fact (at least at first), is one eye, with which he develops a means of communication with friends, family, and any doctors patient enough to learn and participate... and through this communication, he dictates a beautiful memoir of his life, his thoughts and dreams, and his reaction to his sudden and inevitably fatal condition.

Beyond just looking at this as a remarkable piece of observatory writing, full of longing, resignation, frustration, sadness, and humor, I was struck by the sheer expression of will that creating this book entailed, the capacity of the human mind to solidify thoughts, structure, emotion, phrasing, to dwell in memories and extract life from them, the patience in transcribing such rich detail from just the blink of an eye to capture the world of a man whose world has locked him inside his own body. I admit it, I cried more than once... both from experiencing the sadness of being misunderstood, the frustration of not being able to express oneself, the pain of watching others react in varying levels of discomfort, anger, and fear, and from the realization of how this story came to be.

Inspiring, yes--would I in the same situation be able to handle it in the same way? Would I give up and expire without attempting to reach outside of myself? How many other people are withering away in silence because the outside world doesn't view them as capable or responsive anymore? What opportunities have I missed in assuming someone wouldn't understand me? I remember someone (maybe my grandma?) once telling me that her mind didn't change or feel different than it had when she was a youth--it was just the body that became limited, and the mind was just as active and eager as ever, only frustrated at not being able to act on its own whims in the same way.

What impressed me sharply about this book, other than wanting to make the most of every day and fill it with learning and memories and life, was the depth of the characters surrounding Bauby, how they changed (or didn't change) in reaction to him, how his inability to respond to them changed their perception of him, and how he both fought and agonized over it and came to find peace with his inability to do more. Acceptance of others' reactions, acceptance of their fear, understanding.

This is a beautiful book, a quick read sure, but one that can be lingered over thoughtfully. Highly recommended.

It has arrived.

And dare I say, it's perfect. (Well, as perfect as I can tell in the unlaced, softly-lit, giddy that it's here kind of way...)

It has beads. ("Ooooo-hoo-hooo! Beads!" I too can make a lovely dress for Cinderelly.) Not awful clumpy beads, but nicely placed scattering of glassy bits, interesting details, lots of wrinkles (but of course, it came in a wee box) and it will steam nicely... Now to get some SHOES! I think I will be alteration-free at this point (hurrah!) and I can get by with a low heel (all the better for walking on the grass with ha. ha. ha.). I just have to find some that aren't entirely showgirlish.

Also, I'm thinking that Pilates, every day, maybe thrice a day, will be critical for this dressy adventure... well okay, it's not super poofy and I didn't have the corset part laced up, but it is certainly good motivation to work off the overbite and the shadow of the chublet... these things can only be amplified by the white, right? And it is rather mermaidy too, so anything that makes the hips less hippy? Oh the gym is my favorite plaaaace to beeeee...

In any case, after looking at mules and slides and pumps galore, I've (hopefully) settled on some fun slide-mule-pumps (or slumlumps as I like to think of them) from kenneth cole unlisted... they have big satin flowers on them and they don't look like they'll ever grace the slippery side of a pole, so I think they'll do the job appropriately (provided they fit of course). my mom will love them. she will ooo and ahhh. Sold.

Now to start obsessing about pedicures...

So a few months back, I happened upon this lovely little soap shop in Seattle (well, okay, "happened upon" sounds more serendipitous, when in fact I work right upstairs and it's been there forever and I've doubtless walked by it hundreds of times by now). In any case, I was drawn in by the allure of the window display with the Betty Boop figurine bending "innocently" in front of the really jolly Buddha candle, and entered a world of perfumes and lotions and candles and soapy goodness. Not the eye-watering, can't make it down the aisle without sneezing kind of goodness, but the honestly delightful I want to put all of it on me kind of stock of goodies.

So my eye is caught by magical serum in a little blue bottle, Viozena, amazingly potent and healthy wonder-juice for skin repair. I get the demo and the spritz and can see the difference on the shop-keeper's hands (well one, which he has donated to the cause, and the other, which for comparison's sake remains envious). I snatch it up for my hunny thinking he'll be super stoked about it (true), and then I can't stop using it myself--proactive skin repair I say... a little spray and I'm moist for the day! My skin keeps thanking me by being all shiny and compliant and pleasant to be around.

Since he likes it so much, we have become a 2 viozena household (well, three if you count the almost empty bottle)--now we have the super heavy-duty serum and the lighter spray. The serum worked some overnight delight on my cracked lip the other day, and a nasty burn evaporated into no scar tissue after light application. I'd say I'm sold, but I was already sold. I just keep winning!

Check it out: http://www.vashonorganics.com/CategoryProductList.jsp?cat=Shop+By+Brand%3AViozena 

Thing #1 to be ecstatic about today: the dress has shipped. AND it should be here tomorrow. AND it of course will be divinely perfect. A swath of ambrosia with a smattering of joyful deity tears, and/or corset lacing and inventive ruching. I am hopeful its sure glory will outshine the dark haze of panic surrounding the traumatic imprisonment episode that was the last dress. I still shudder at the thought of it, sweat and tears streaming over everything, the scissors menacingly sweet in their temptation to aid... all was overcome in the end with no lasting harm to merchandise or victim, but it does leave one open to trepidation and self-doubt.

Thing #2 that fills me with glee: I have acquired a new (old) red stapler. Saddened that it means the departure of the almost-always amusing PKK, but confident that the wear and tear will live on happily in new surroundings. MY surroundings. I love my stapler.

Thing #3: I had the best sleep of the week, passed out blissfully on the cool bamboo floor of the just-heated-enough yoga room at the gym, even after a slightly odd and judgmental class (teacher, thus the oddity). So sated. I feel om-ified. I could sleep again.