Photoshop and the Art of Letting Go

I got a request from my mother yesterday, along with enough vegetables to feed a very small army, involving Photoshop. This is a semi-regular occurrence; she will occasionally enlist my help in making door signs or coloring books pages for her students at school and I like it, because it provides me with an excuse to try to do things I would not otherwise have experimented with. But this time was different. She wanted to know if I could photoshop myself into a picture with our dog.
The short answer was, “Excellent question, give me the pictures and a week and I’ll see what I can do.”
Now, most of you are probably wondering (and the very astute of you have probably figured out) why I don’t just take the train back home and take a picture of myself with Schatzie. And, believe me, I would if I could. If I’d been thinking, I would have taken a picture of myself with him on Monday, when I went home to say goodbye for the last time.
On Tuesday afternoon, my mom took Schatzie to the vet and had him put down. He was 13 years old and dying of cancer. And, out of 26 pictures of him. I’m not in a single one.
There is a good reason for this. We got Schatzie six years ago, during my year abroad in seminary. I was so annoyed when I found out that, four months after I left home, we were looking into getting a dog. My parents had decided to go through the Guide Dog Foundation and get either a reject or a retiree. After one disastrous fortnight with a labradoodle named Misty during the winter, who did not have the temperament to live in suburbia, they found themselves waiting until April, at which point I happened to be home and the Foundation called and said that they had this dog who was being retired early, for reasons relating to his owner, and would we be interested in coming out and taking a look?
We never found out what those reasons were (and rightfully so); the Guide Dog Foundation is very good about protecting the privacy of the people it serves. Once we knew Schatzie a bit better, though, we found ourselves speculating.
We went out to meet him and were greeted by a large Labrador who was clearly very excited to be out of the kennel and taken for a walk. We tried walking him around the grounds for a while and my mom was worried, since he seemed quite strong and would pull on the leash and she wondered whether my little brother, who was then nine, would be able to walk him.
But, we decided to take him anyway, and if it didn’t work out, well, we weren’t committing to forever just yet. Famous last words.
The first thing you have to understand about Schatzie is that he would eat ANYTHING. Absolutely anything. You leave a chocolate cake on the counter – gone. Trail mix – gone. I think he drew the line at garlic, but even then I’ve seen him go for it. He had that Labradorish need to always be eating and always be gazing up at you pathetically, never begging, just suggesting that he’s sitting here suffering and would greatly appreciate it if you could see a way to transferring some of that chicken from your plate to his bowl.
He was that kind of dog—always there but never intrusive. He always came to greet visitors at the door, but never jumped up, never barked. When you enter the side door of my house, there are three steps up and then you go into the kitchen. Schatzie would stand at the top of those steps, which put his head at about the same height as a visitor’s, and if he recognized you, he would sneeze happily. If you put your face up close to him, he would offer kisses, but never without you moving in first. He was a bit of a gentleman.
But only a bit. He certainly didn’t have the table manners of one. I have never seen food disappear as quickly as it did from his bowl. I think he inhaled it. My dad used to say that he had been retired for stealing all the food out from under his previous owner’s nose.
Of course we knew that wasn’t true. But sometimes, we wondered.
He was also a bit of an idiot. Not necessarily in a bad way, but Schatzie was only able to put two and two together when the answer was food. Or so he led us to believe. Maybe he just enjoyed playing dumb. He was certainly capable of figuring out who was home and where to sit so that he could keep an eye on everyone upstairs and know when his humans woke up. He needed to know where we all were—he was that kind of dog.
He just liked people. He would go out into the back yard, and then stand pathetically by the gate until someone came out there with him. They didn’t need to play with him or anything, he just wanted to know they were there. Of course, a game of fetch wouldn’t hurt or anything...
The Guide Dog training is very rigorous and they train them out of noticing anything and going after it – cats, squirrels, balls, other dogs, people, anything. When they’re in the harness, they are at work. Supposedly, this training sticks, and some of it did. Schatzie could care less about squirrels and cats, but he slowly began to bark back at other dogs when they barked at him on walks.
Some things, though, he dropped like a hot potato. Even from the beginning, he would love to play and never seemed to remember that he wasn’t supposed to go haring off after a ball, even when it sent him careening into the couch. He was that kind of idiot.
He also had some catlike tendencies. He loved to be petted and would purr when you scratched him under the chin or behind the ears. When you came over to stroke his fur, he would just fold his legs up under himself and fall over with a thump, baring his stomach for you to scratch, with his tail thudding against the floor in a steady drumbeat.
Over the last two months, he stopped doing all that. He never really wagged his tail anymore and would barely roll over for a tummy rub. And he stopped being interested in food. Well, he stopped being interested in his dried dog food. When my mom made him chicken and rice, he ate that happily and still seemed content when she switched him to the canned lamb and rice.
For the last week of his life, though, he could barely manage that. He just wanted to sit outside and rest. His back legs had neurological damage, he had cancer on his pancreas and spleen and he was dying. You could see it when you looked at him.
I don’t envy my mom the choice she had to make, especially since my siblings were both out of the country. They had known, when they left, that the dog probably wouldn’t be there when they got back. I don’t know how they did it.
By not believing, I think, the same way that when I went out to see him one last time on Monday, I don’t think I believed that he wouldn’t be there the next time I came home. He was so sad and tired, but he still came to lie down at my feet and still gave him his patented “why did you stop?” look when I ceased petting him. It still worked.
I’m sitting here, crying, and I still don’t believe he’s gone. I can’t think about going home and not seeing him standing at the door. I can’t think of family dinners without him wedging himself under the table and waiting for everyone to slip him some bread and occasionally getting kicked when someone moves their foot the wrong way because, as I said, he was a big dog. I can’t think of waking up in my old room and going out and not seeing him sitting sentry by the hall.
I never really lived at home while we had him, except during the summer, when my siblings were at camp, and he was my dog, just for a month or two. Not long enough. Certainly not long enough to remember to take pictures.
I used to joke, to get out of walking him, that I shouldn’t have to because they got him after I went away to college, so he wasn’t my dog. Who was I kidding? He was mine, alright. He had stolen my heart just as quietly and surely as he had taken everyone else’s. He was the kind of dog who people liked despite not having dogs, he was the kind of dog that inspired other people to go and get a dog. He was just that good.
And now he’s gone. There was a reason I told my mom to expect a week before I could provide anything remotely like results—I can’t sit down at the computer and stare at my pictures of him just yet. I’m lucky I learned to touch type, since half of this was written with my eyes too clouded by tears to see.
My mom has set aside a small corner of the living room picture table for him. There’s a photo of him in the backyard, and one of him with each of my siblings. And his collar, sitting empty. She wants one of him with me, too, but that means I have to put one together. Part of spending most of my time with him on Shabbat means that picture doesn’t exist.
But I want there to be a picture of us together, to remind me of all those snail-paced walks, tummy rubs, dog-breath wake-ups and scarfed-down pieces of chicken. He was my dog, too, even though I wasn’t home.
I already miss him.
~~~

Note: This post may eventually be edited for style, but writing and telling his story is how I say goodbye and I'm not always that articulate when I do so.

I Have No Idea What This Is

"Realistically," she says with a shrug, "My biggest problem with time travel is that I can never remember when I'm telling someone a joke that I've already told them in the future."

I smile again. This is the third time we have started (or will be starting or will be have started) the interview and I have already heard her say that twice before. It was funny the first time. Well, more or less. At any rate, I had laughed the first time I heard it.

"I suppose it's not that different than everyone else's life, really," she continues. "I mean, how many times have you thought that you've told your husband about that dinner party only to find out that you never actually got around to mentioning it." She grins brightly. "At least I have an excuse when it happens."

I nod, despite having neither husband, nor wife nor significant other of any kind. I have a significant cat, who is significant in that he is the only creature in the house who notices when I am gone. The dog does not, but the dog also lacks a concept of time longer than five seconds and so always greets me as though I have been away for a millennium even when I have just been standing behind him for a minute. But neither dog nor cat nor guinea pigs (who do not so much notice me as worship me as God, great bestower of lettuce and refiller of the water-bottle) care whether I inform them about my dinner party plans.

"I find that I don't really notice it," she adds, needing no prompting from my side of the table. She is a good interviewee, lobbing all the right questions to herself and answering them with a smile and a practiced shake of the head. "It bothers other people more than it does me, you know. I always know where I am and how I got there. Lots of people don't anymore."

"But doesn't it bother you?" I press. "Missing out on ordinary life, I mean?"

She laughs, a bright sound that reminds me of ice cubes clinking together after all the scotch was gone from the glass. "Doesn't it bother you?" she turns my question neatly around. "Living the way you do, always running off towards something exciting somewhere else. The way I live, I have time to just sit back and watch the sky."

The alarm on my watch starts to ring on cue and I sigh.

"Look, I'm sorr-" I begin, but she waves a hand and cuts me off.

"It happens," she says. "Have fun whenever you're off to."

"One last question," I say. "Do you think we would all be better off like you?" I ask.

She shrugs. "I'm not one to proselytize, but I've find that this works for me. It's a more steady way of living my life and makes me feel like I have more control over my world. Living like you all do, I'd just feel a bit lost and confused. Living like this keeps me anchored."

"So you DO consider yourself an A.T.T.er, then?"

She shakes her head. "I'm not that kind of person. I don't believe in enforced choices. If you want to live like me...well, you can try. It's not as hard as it seems."

I laugh at that statement. Plenty of people have tried and none of them seem to be able to do it.

She laughs as well, acknowledging the apparent impossibility of her words.

"You should go," she says. "I know you can't be late or anything, but-"

Late. There was a word I had not heard in a while. Fitting it should come from her mouth.

"I have a meeting with the head of the A.T.T. actually," I say. "I'd invite you along but-"

She waves her hand. "Don't mention it. Will I see you again soon?"

"In about ten minutes," I tell her. "We're going to have discussed how you managed to raise your family."

"Are we?" she murmurs. "Good to know."

I stand up and shake her hand. "Nice to see you again."

"And you," she replies, taking a sip of water and settling back down on the red vinyl benches of the diner.

I walk out the door and close my eyes, walking steadily along the road with an empty mind as I wait for the time stream to overtake me and jump me six years ago to the meeting with Sandy MacPherson I have scheduled. He had died in the year before the one I was currently inhabiting, but he was so charismatic that we just kept going back to get interviews with him anyway. He still jokes that he's the only person to have ever used time travel for its intended purpose--achieving temporal immortality.

Clearing my mind is harder than I expected it to be, as my thoughts keep drifting back towards the short snippets of interviews I have been having, and will continue to have, with Melissa Rose, the woman who cannot travel through time.

Literary Travesties

But, you know, the funny kind.

So there seems to be an...infection of horror in the literary classics genre. We'll call "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" patient 0 in this epidemic, from which it spread to the rest of Austen and, from there on in, rest of the canon.

Observe -













I think Wuthering Bites might actually be worth picking up. If any character is asking for the vampire treatment it's Heathcliff.

Now, I should note, I have not read any of these, they are here because the titles made me laugh or cry or do both at the same time.

I should, because my one experience with horror mashups was P&P&Z and I was...unimpressed. Not because of the zombies, I thought they were funny. But Seth Graham Smith is merely a passable author and to hold his prose up next to Austen's makes for an uncomfortable reading experience.
A good literary mashup is the same as a good musical mashup - the material has to fit together. Not contentwise, but stylistically. And this didn't.
And while you can make the argument that pitting two completely different musical styles that simply sound terrible together is a biting observation into the realm of our preconceived auditory tastes and our inability to get beyond our own expectations (blah, blah, blah, purple monkey dishwasher) and I can't disagree with a statement like that. Well, I suppose I could (who are we kidding, I AM) and it really comes down to an assessment of what the purpose of arts are.

(I seem to have gotten up on a soapbox at some point, I apologize for that, but feel free to keep reading, I'm not ready to step down. Actually, I'm just getting to the sweeping claims portion of today's events.)
There are three reasons to create art. And by art, I mean music, literature, paintings, sculptures, movies, video games, etc. For something to be good (watch me not define that term), it will usually fit into at least two of those reasons. Great things tend to be all three.

1) For the sake of the artist. The artist wants to do something and said artist is damn well going to get it out of their head and onto a page, out on an instrument, into an image, etc. Arguably, this is creative masturbation and most of us do it sooner or later (and if you don't, then you probably should be). Some of it is good. Some of it is so horrible that we've spent months tracking down every place it ever existed on the internet and deleting it. But that's neither here nor there. And sometimes you get something amazing that turns out to also include reason #2 even if the author was not doing it for any reason other than that the idea had to get out.

2) For the sake of the audience. This is what happens when the artist wants to make something that will be popular...the name Michael Bay comes to mind. A lot of video games seem to me to fall into this category, mostly those of the "Look at the high resolution of this blood spatter!" variety. Anyway, this is when the idea comes from outside of the artist and the artist attempts to create a work that fits in with this larger cultural idea.
This isn't always bad, but I would argue that it works better when coupled with #! - when the author has an idea that taps in and is expanded by the cultural millieu.

3) For the sake of the message. This is different than art for art's sake. This is when someone decides to create because they want to make a statement. A sort of "I think that stopping pollution is important, so I'm going to make statues of dying ducks out of soda cans and the ring things that hold them together." Which, again, has its place and can serve as inspiration, but without the artist's drive to create and work with the material and DO something, there's a falseness and a lifelessness to it as art.

Now, this obviously is not true of everything. I would for, example, class Twilight and Avatar as purely "author-wank" but they seem to be extremely popular. On the other hand, I would call "Lord of the Rings" the same thing (though there seems to be something oddly disrespectful about the terminology when applying it to JRR Tolkien) and, again, extremely popular. Most of fanfic is much of the same, but then you find communities based on requesting fics from authors which are based around reason #2.

So it's complicated and not every piece of art can be categorized easily. I think, though, that P&P&Z in particular is a question of reasons 2 and 3. I got no sense from reading the book that SGS cared at all about what he was writing. This wasn't a story he wanted to tell, it was a convenient vehicle for zombies. And that bothered me. Part of the reason I'm optimistic about some of these I noted here is that the authors actually seem to have chosen the classics because they care about the original stories as well as the horror portion.

Not that caring makes something art (again, Twilight), but I don't think you can have art without a certain passion for the piece you are trying to create.

A bit of talent helps - you don't need to be Shakespeare or Da Vinci, but the reason I like the authors and artists and sculptors and musicians that I do is because they combine passion with enough mastery of their art that allows the passion to come through. And, without that passion and craft, these books are nothing more than jokes. With it, though, these have potential to be brilliant.

Maybe I'll start with Jane Slayre...Bronte (any Bronte) seems to be a good choice for a gothic mashup.

Alternatively, I will sit down and write the following (online points of no discernible value if you get the references):

Northanger Abbey and Ninjas.
Middlemartians.
Our Mutual Fiend.
Oliver Twisted - A story of loss, hope and the first cyborg.
The Werewolf of Notre Dame (easiest adaptation ever - I could get away with changing almost nothing).
Les Miserables et la Zombies (the barricade is built to hold off an advancing army of the undead. Also, Javert is a vampire. Because.)
Beowerewulf (For those of you who were wondering how he REALLY defeated Grendel).

I'm open to suggestions :)

Me and Charles or Why I Dislike Dickens

I have been unreliably informed that literary theory is about going beyond the personal in literature. Theory and Criticism are not about whether you liked the book or not, but rather about what you can say critically about the book and how you can use the book in terms of literary theory.

My first, or rather second, problem with that statement is that I dislike the direction in which the statement about theory is moving. As far as I am concerned, the beginning and end of literary studies is found in literature. To the extent that theory is in any way useful, it must add to our understanding of literature. Using a text to make a theoretical point is only interesting insofar as how that point reflects back on the text. Or, to put it differently, a theory is only as good as its practical uses and over-reliance on any particular theory will effectively limit one's reading of the text. A reading of a text can be based on a theory, but to deny legitimacy to an interpretation due to the fact that it contradicts your personal theory is foolish. Biblical scholarship figured this out about fifteen hundred years ago, why can't academia wrap its head around the concept that Literature is about having a valid interpretation, not THE RIGHT interpretation.

Which means, for example, that "I liked this book" is a valid literary interpretation. It doesn't say very much, true, but it is valid. More to the point, "I was unimpressed by this great genius's for the following reasons" is equally valid, provided that the reasons you provide are present in the text you are criticizing. What do I mean by that?

Saying that you do not like Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre because it "sucks" is not acceptable criticism. Saying you do not like it because it is the delusional fantasy of a pathetic woman who could not win the man she adored and so recreated herself in fiction in order to give herself a happy ending is justified. I might want to defend the novel, but you have stated your opinion and given a reason for it, I can only agree to disagree.

Which is why I can say that I hate Dickens. Not because he "sucks", but because his "realism" has no relationship to reality. He is a heavy-handed social critic who takes potshots at everything with which he disagrees, but without the subtlety, compassion or sense of proportion that his contemporaries are perfectly capable of mixing in with their writing. All the mothers and mother-figures in his novels are horrible, cartoonish figures that say more about his own misogyny than they do about the story he is trying to tell. In fact, most of his characters are caricatures rather than developed people. Thackeray uses his caricatures to neatly skewer those in whom he finds fault. Dickens bludgeons them. He has characters like Miss Havisham which read like caricatures with no discernable antecedent. In general, most of these people are unchanging puppets in his hand. No one but the main character ever grows and changes, they are garishly painted wooden cutouts that populate a world written for the purpose of complaining about conditions in society, but unlike Gaskell or others of his day, he does not try to engage with those problems and approach them in a way that might help to offer a solution; he stands up and shouts "This is bad! Stop doing it!" And that is that.

In short, I do not enjoy Dickens because, as a person who finds the most enjoyable conflict and the most exciting stories within the confines of the character driven novel, his prose offers me nothing to grab hold of and enjoy. What I look for is not there and I am dissatisfied with what he provides instead. And while this means I am, as I always tell others NOT to do, faulting an author for telling the story he wants to tell rather than the story I want him to tell, I beg leave to do so this one time, if only because of the reputation that Dickens has as a realist writer. Realism requires more than an accurate setting; it requires a storytelling style that portrays people as people, not as gross overstatements of what the author dislikes.

In essence, there are two problems here. One is that I feel the need to defend my stance as a Dickensian detractor. And I should not. One can dislike as one chooses, so long as one knows WHY one finds the book objectionable. The second problem is that I feel Dickens is misclassified as realism and is being held up as paradigmatic of a field into which he should not be placed. And that is inexcusable.

Thank you for listening; I feel better now.

Ruining my Library

A library is not a place to store books. That might be one of the functions it is called upon to perform, but that is not what a library is in the same way that I'm not a cook, but I can still put together a pretty good meal when I choose to (i.e. when I'm hungry). But my identity is not "cook." And a library's identity is not "place where books are when they are not being read."

A library is an open door. When you walk in, all you can see is possibility.

A library is a maze with no wrong turns.

A library is a skeleton key.

A library is a home for ideas and for people. If you are smart enough to go to one, it will invite you in with open arms.

A library is the first stop on the road to knowledge.

More than anything else, a library is the kind stranger to whom I entrust my mind, my heart and my sense of self. By the time I'm ready to take it all back, I am a better person and the library has become my friend.

The Elmer J. Bobst Building at NYU, which is referred to by the great and glorious term library, is not my friend. It stands imposingly high, like a tall and distinguished gentleman in white tie and top hat who has just realized that he is hopelessly overdressed for the occasion, and glares down at you as you enter quietly into its domain in your simple yet elegant suit. Its features are angular and cold; grey eyes watching amid the stark black and white of evening dress. Those are the only three colors to be found in Bobst itself; all the hues in between are brought in by the books and those trying to read them. There are nine floors in total and, when you walk in and gaze up at the dizzying heights afforded by the floor to rooftop view in the atrium, you can see each separate story, the staircases connecting them and the pinstripe black bars in front of the stairs. The books are all hidden behind this prison-like edifice and woe-betide the poor student who has to actually venture inside to find a book.

University libraries are, much to my disappointment, rarely like public libraries. I have very little faith in any institution that requires you to know exactly what you are looking for before you find it. Public libraries are ideal for browsing. University libraries require a bit more effort but, with the help of proper signage, decent layout and the occasional lounge with armchairs, it is possible to go in and, while looking for one book, come out with another four that you did not even know you wanted to read until you saw them on the shelves.

Bobst requires an exact call number and a very detailed map of the building before you even have a chance of finding the book you were looking for, much less anything else. And if you get lost, heaven help you because the signs in the stacks most certainly will not. And the worst part of all is that there is nothing of interest to look at on the way. When I first got lost in Bobst, I was a bit perplexed, but not unduly annoyed. After all, it would just give me a chance to browse around and see if I could find an interesting collection of works along the way. I could not. It is quite possible that I walked by any number of them as they shrank away from the garish fluorescent lights and the warehouse style "decor," for lack of a better term. After turning around twice, ending up in one restricted area and generally tripping over my own feet, I finally found the book I was looking for in its hiding place about two feet above my head.

A library is a place that has the occasional step stool so that books on the upper shelves are not entirely neglected.

I finally coaxed the recalcitrant creature down with the help of Leon Edel's biography of Henry James, which extended my reach by six inches and allowed me to hit at the book I wanted until it gave in and fell over. I didn't like treating a book that way - it wasn't its fault.

Architects of the world, if anyone ever calls on you to design a library, please try and remember that a library is a wonderful little place where readers and books can unite to become something greater than either could possibly be on their own. It should be warm and friendly, like the embrace of a loved one. It should, in short, look absolutely nothing like Bobst.

Childhood Memories and a Horseshoe Crab

When my husband and I first moved into our new apartment, we would give the following directions to people who wished to find us:

"Walk most of the way down the block and stop when you see the two windows with the Horseshoe crab shell in front. That's us. If you yell up, we'll hear you and let you in."

Now that it's getting dark earlier, we've decided that it might be more useful to simply give the address and apartment number.

But the horseshoe crab shell is still there, along with another, smaller crab shell and three clam shells that sit wistfully on the window ledge like the echo of a long ago trip to the beach. The clam shells have been bleached almost white by the sun while the larger of the two crab shells has a few distinctive white patches that seem to have gotten there by means of pigeon. The smaller (and more intact) crab shell looks out at the street below and I half expect that, one day, it will finally get bored with the view from my window ledge and wander off.

Granted, if they ever left, I would be even more puzzled by where they went than by how they got there in the first place. I'd always assumed that the tenants who occupied this apartment before us had at least one small child and, one summer day, they took this child all the way out to the beaches on the Long Island Sound. And this child probably spent a little while building sand mounds and calling them castles, then finally built up the courage to dip a toe into the ever-freezing waves of the Atlantic. Half an hour of shrieking and running to and fro later, he or she would actually be far enough in the water that it would cover a pair of chubby knees.
Assuming, of course, that this child was anything like me the first time I went to the beach. And I'm assuming he or she was...because of the clam shells; three large, unchipped, almost pure white clam shells of the sort that I (and my sister and my friends) would spend hour after hour combing the beaches to find. We usually discovered about two really fine ones per week. The rest were either broken or tiny or stained black.

We used to paint the shells too, with our little watercolor sets that, like play-doh, started out as a rainbow of colors and ended up varying shades of mud. We painted stars and butterflies and suns and anything else that required very little in the way of artistic ability and then begged our parents to be allowed to sell them on the boardwalk. Our parents, wise as they are, recognized that our work had much in the way of sentimental value, though little of any other sort, and so offered to buy the biggest and prettiest ones themselves for the princely sum of an ice cream cone or a few quarters to spend in the arcade playing foos-ball with as much energy and skill as we had devoted to painting shells.

I wonder what happened to all those badly painted butterflies.

I wonder what happened to the shells outside my window to have brought them here. Were they the biggest and nicest of all the shells found that day, the special three allowed to come home as mementos of an exciting excursion and left out on the window ledge to keep sand and seawater out of the house?

How long have they been out there? Clearly long enough for them to have been forgotten and given to a new owner, along with the apartment. I'm tempted to leave them out there when we move, assuming they survive that long, but what if the next tenants don't appreciate having a horseshoe colony at their window? What if they don't understand how important the size and purity of the shells are?

There is, however, an alternative. A Michael's Craft Store just opened down the street from me and I rather think that the time has come for me to have a new set of watercolors.

Umm, New Directions

A few weeks after starting this blog the first time, I learned of two distinct websites - Goodreads and Shelfari. Both of them are excellent ways to keep track of what you've read, rate the books and review them. Basically, they're this blog with many more people, a much easier interface and I'm not the only one doing it.

So there has to be some other use for this thing, now that I've ignored it for so long.

For now, I think I will use this to post bits of my writing. This is not for my novels or anything, but just for short little...things that come to me and demand to be written down. I might as well have them here as anywhere else.

B-log: The Hero and the Crown

Every year, it seems, I find another author with whose corpus I feel the need to reaquaint myself. Last year it was Diana Wynne Jones, this year it is Robin McKinley.

The Hero and the Crown is her second book in the Damar series (however long that will be), though it is the prequel to The Blue Sword. I like this one just a bit better. Aerin is first sol (which roughly translates to Princess) of Damar and, unlike the rest of her family, seems entirely devoid of a magical gift. So she is searching for some way to prove herself and, due to a well aimed taunt and some interesting recipes, becomes a dragon slayer. Of course, that means the dragons start showing up in full force, the kingdom of Damar is under threat from the Northern Demons and Aerin is the only one who can do anything about it. After nearly getting herself killed, twice, Aerin fulfilled her role and finds out that her life is far more complicated and magical than she could have known.

As I've said before, McKinley's strength lies in her characters. Damar is one of the few places where she sets her stories that has its own history and existence and such; usually they're just in a kingdom somewhere. But Aerin is a marvelous heroine, with whom it is impossible not to identify. She is a twist on the usual princess, not just because she is an outcast, but because she is proactive. Women were never proactive in fantasy novels until McKinley and Tamora Pierce started writing. Aerin, in particular, is so lovable because her problems are real. I could actually sympathize with her position as first sol, which is a change from my usual scoff of "I wish I had your problems".

McKinley also does her readers the great service of making the romantic aspect of the story surprising. Having a painfully obvious romantic trajectory is acceptable for Jane Austen, but it is nice to see a bit of creativity in the more modern folk and McKinley provides just that. I thought I knew how the romance was going to turn out, but I was pleasantly surprised (especially as this was not the first time I had read this book. The first time in about seven years, though.) And the bittersweetness of Aerin's life is pretty much encapsulated in that.

I am, I'll admit, biased when reviewing my favorite authors. I've always been a littls suspicious of McKinley's heroines as the same sort keep popping up in vastly different stories. Still, they are excellent heroines and we could use more like them.

This is definitely my favorite of the two Damar books and it comes highly recommended, especially for any girl (such as myself) who spent her childhood searching for female leads who were not pathetic. As you might note, that search means that said female leads take up a disproportionate numer of entries in this blog.

B-log: Angel Isle

So yesterday was spent at a movie marathon and, as such, left me no time to blog. So we'll let the laxness slide and pretend it never happened. Right, anyway, the most recent book I've finished is Angel Isle, by Peter Dickinson. It is a sequel of sorts to The Ropemaker, in the sense that it is the continuation of that story, if not the lives of those characters.

I picked up Dickinson because he married Robin McKinley, which I thought said a lot about the man. One of these days, I will devote a full post to McKinley and explain my love for her work, my grudging respect bordering on annoyance with her personality and my adoration of her dogs. For those in need of more details, her blog. Somewhere on there is the story of how they met, which I really enjoyed reading. So it made sense, as far as I was concerned, to read Dickinson's work because his wife wrote well. I do like being right about things.

Maja and Saranja come from a family in charge of "Singing to the Unicorns" who protect the Southern border of their valley, while Ribek speaks to water and, through his gift, protects the Northern border. For two hundred generations (ever since the events chronicled in The Ropemaker) these protections have stood strong. But the magic's time is up and now they have set forth, some rather reluctantly, to find the Ropemaker and ask him to renew the spell. The Empire into which they venture is a dangerous place, ruled by Watchers who zealously guard all magic and who are displeased, to say the least, when they catch anyone using it. Which means that, naturally, our heroes team up with a mage, Benayu, and his inter-dimensional lizard, Jex. To complicate matters, Maja discovers that she has a special sense for magic and, when too much of it is used around her, she blacks out. Between the five of them, they need to reach the Ropemaker without bringing destruction down on themselves and hope that he has the power to do something before the Watchers drag the world down into total chaos.

Dickinson, first of all, is a delightful author. Despite writing for children, he never talks down to his readers, nor does he ever do them the disservice of assuming they are too young for complex material. Like L'Engel, he merely searches for a way to present it so that his audience can understand his topic of choice. Angel Isle is a rare find, for it combines fantasy and science fiction in a way I have never run into before. Dickinson creates a typical fantasy world, but instead of throwing up his hands and saying "It's magic, suspend your disbelief", he takes the lawful relationships and equations that we use to understand our universe and applies it to his. I was eagerly awaiting his description of a Universe different than our own and he did not disappoint me.

Having finished the book, I'm still not entirely sure who the main character was. I think it was Maja, who certainly got the plurality of the spotlight and who grew the most, but I found myself equally drawn to everyone in the book...which is to say not very much. I enjoyed reading about them and the book kept me hooked from the first word to the last, but I never really identified with the characters. I felt as though I was exploring someone else's world and following along as they told me about it, but the adventure was never really mine. Still, that might just be a testament to Dickinson's ability to create very real characters, who are so well defined on their own that they don't need my input. Either way, I was more than happy to hear about what happens to them, even though they has to share the spotlight.

Dickinson's world building abilities are truly stunning - his Empire and the universe it inhabits is incredibly well delineated even for a young adult book (and certainly for an adult novel) and he manages to capture the long journey taken by the characters without adding in the tedium they, no doubt, felt. I have no problem with the characters feeling the effects of a long journey, but reading a book should not replicate the experience (which is one of several reasons why I no longer read Goodkind or Jordan). Dickinson strikes the right balance between realism and entertaining the reader and if they ate liver-kebab a few more times than I thought necessary...well, there are worse sins.

As noted earlier, this book is a wonderful specimen of genre-defying fantasy, both in its insertion of "real" science and in its ability to suprise me with the ending. Having slowly read my way through an appreciable amount of YA fantasy, I tend to assume that a certain number of events are possible as methods of resolution and so it's always nice to see an unexpected one handled well. Despite five hundred pages, Angel Isle never dragged, and my only regret, at the end, was that it did not continue. One can always hope for another sequel.