Marie Brennan's Blog, page 195

more Hebrew!

I was going to say that I should just learn enough Hebrew to be able to read a dictionary usefully, but then it occurred to me that this request requires at least some knowledge of grammar, which is probably more Hebrew-learning than I can really spare the time for at present. (Though the main point still stands, which is that learning the alphabet would be a handy thing for me to do.)

Anyway. Point being, I need more assistance from the Hebrew-speaking members of my audience. How would you say "those sent forth"? As in (and yes, I'm getting my terminology from Wikipedia, here), the plural of the Qal passive participle for whatever the nearest verb is for "to send forth."

In other words, I'm trying to end up with a word along the lines of pĕrûshîm, but with a different verb. Any suggestions?

Poland, Day 1 (Krakow)

Breakfast was in the hotel crypt again (because it was included with the room, and also very tasty -- though wow, Polish breakfast includes a lot more in the way of savory foods than I'm used to seeing at that time of day), and then it was time to defy jet lag and set forth.

I made a miscalculation in planning this trip, though. I didn't realize that Polish museums, like theatres, are frequently closed on Mondays. As it turned out, this made very little dent in our plans (since there was enough to fill an entire day with regardless), but it was annoying.


We go first to Wawel, the fortified hill overlooking the Vistula River at the southern end of the Stare Miasto. This is home to a large number of things: Wawel Castle, Wawel Cathedral, various museum displays, and more. Of course, half of them are closed; we aren't able to go into the royal apartments, for example, or the "Oriental Art" exhibit currently there. But that's okay, because the stuff I really care about was open.

Starting with "Lost Wawel," the archaeological museum. (Kraków does very good archaeological museums, along with their hot chocolate. If it weren't for the winters, this place might be made for me.) This is small, but includes a nifty path curving above the conserved remnants of walls from earlier structures. Archaeology Geek Brain turns on immediately.

From there we go to another great love of mine: the Crown armory. !!!!! Pictures aren't allowed, so I can't show you the many, many, many, many, many pretty things in there, but let's just say that I wanted to adopt some of the rapiers and take them home with me. Several of them had piercework running the length of the forte, which I've never seen before and possibly isn't practical, but is certainly lovely. And the guns! Normally I'm not much for guns, but the inlay on their stocks was nothing short of amazing. Armor, too, and polearms, and, and, and, and . . . okay, I'm a weapons geek, I admit it. (I'm sure you're all shocked.) The Crown treasury is nothing shabby, either, but in the end, I love swords more than I love more standard-issue valuables.

Side note: I love the fact that the souvenir shops on the Wawel are not all the same. Sure, you see the same kinds of things in a number of them, but others are quite different: one sells old maps, one sells collectible coins (some of them very valuable), and a third sells music. Given how cookie-cutter souvenir shops tend to be, it makes for a refreshing change.

The different parts of the hill have different closing times, so next we cross the hill (passing by more conserved wall remnants, out in the grass) and go to the entrance of the Dragon's Den. This is a cavern underlying the Wawel Hill, which is associated with the legend of the Wawel Dragon. And here, I must pause for storytime.

The legend begins in a fairly standard-issue fashion. Livestock went missing along the river, and so did people, and King Krakus (the legendary founder of Kraków) discovered that the cause was a dragon, living in a cave beneath the hill. He offered his daughter's hand in marriage to anyone who could kill the dragon, which attracted the usual assortment of brave knights, etc, but all of them got munched. Then a cobbler's apprentice offered his assistance . . . and here is where things get less than standard.

The aforementioned apprentice took a lamb, slaughtered it, stuffed its body with sulfur, and left this tasty treat outside the cave. The dragon ate it, and developed a terrible stomach-ache. In its attempt to ease the pain, the dragon drank half the Vistula River -- and EXPLODED.

So we descend into the cave. It's not terribly large, but it's pretty nifty, and when we exit the cave at the base of the hill we find this outside. I now understand the little souvenir statues I've been seeing in various places, and also why dragon-themed memorabilia is such a Thing in this city.

The cave trip has, however, dumped us at the bottom of the hill, and we aren't quite done with the top of it yet. So we circle back around, and now we visit the Wawel Cathedral, which (being part of the general royal complex there) contains the tombs of just about everybody who's anybody in Krakovian history. (Exception: Pope John Paul II. He's got a chapel -- we have an entertaining conversation the following night with the Polish Co-Worker Crew about who got evicted from that chapel to make room for him -- but his tomb, of course, is in the Vatican.) It's an odd building; as you can see in that photo, it sort of has this glued-together look, like somebody took bits of other buildings and stacked them up. The result is hardly unattractive, but it's also a far cry from the more coherent look I'm accustomed to in cathedrals.

We end up rushing through this a little bit, though, because by now it's early afternoon and I'm starving. So we head back north through the Stare Miasto and get lunch at Chłopskie Jadło, a restaurant recommended to me by Chris of The King of Elfland's Second Cousin. Its name, I'm told, means "peasant's grub," and that's what they serve: I have pierogies and black currant juice for lunch, kniedzw has some kind of stew and a strong hot mead, and it's all wonderfully hearty.

After that is when trouble sets in. We try to go to one museum on the market square: it's closed. We try another, one we spotted the previous night, when I went to make friends with a black-and-white cat near the coffeeshop; it's closed, too. We do succeed at climbing the City Hall tower, which is our second demonstration (the Dragon's Den being the first) of the oft-repeated principle of our trip: Poland is not built for kniedzw s. (Ironic, given that one of his grandfathers was Polish. But his medieval ancestors did not plan for people being six foot three.) The stairs are knee-height on me in places, and narrow enough that I have to turn my foot sideways (yay ballet); the ceiling is low enough that I have to duck, let alone my husband. But the top room gives a great view of the market, including St. Mary's.

With the time we have left after that, we walk down to the main archaeological museum (passing along the way a big outdoor display of pictures dedicated to, you guessed it, John Paul II). But it is -- say it with me -- closed! Ah well. We have plans for the evening anyway. After grabbing a quick dinner on the north edge of the market (really tasty pasta with salmon and zucchini in a sort of garlicky lemon sauce), we head off to the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul for a concert of baroque chamber music. This is a thing they do every Monday, with other concerts on Tuesday and Wednesday, and they're not the only ones; several other churches seem to do the same thing. Combined with the quality of the street performers, it makes Kraków seem like a very musical city.
So we didn't make it to several things we wanted to see (like other parts of the Wawel, and various museums), but there's a day allocated at the end of the trip for catch-up, so that's fine. We had splendid weather, too -- very nearly the last day of it we were going to get.

But that is a tale for the next few posts.

Poland, Day 0.5 (Krakow)

Having done one of the labors of Hercules in culling my Poland photos from roughly 1300 down to 59, I should get around to that whole trip report thing. But it's likely to take multiple posts, so this is only the first installment.

We flew to Poland via Frankfurt, which I think may challenge Heathrow for length of odyssey from one gate to the next. Seriously, it is the most inexplicably complicated mess of hallways, stairways, escalators, elevators, slidewalks, and tunnels I've ever seen. Plus a five-minute bus ride to the plane itself -- no really, I timed it. Two minutes in, I asked Kyle if we were driving to Poland. Four minutes in, I said they were taking us to a ditch at the edge of the airport, where they would shoot us for holding up the departure. (Our flight from San Francisco took off an hour late.)

kniedzw 's Polish co-workers picks us up. The area around Kraków is quite pretty: alternating farmland and forest, which displays itself to good advantage on a sunny autumn day. (Also, it is very flat. Surprise!)

He drives us to the Stare Miasto, which is the old city that, until fairly recently, is all there was of Kraków. The defensive wall that used to guard it is largely knocked down now, except for a bit around St. Florian's Gate, but they've taken the ground once occupied by the wall and moat and turned it into a narrow ring of parkland called the Planty, which makes for an elegant boundary. Within that, the space reminds me in some ways of the City of London, and in some ways not at all. They're roughly comparable in size, and both are stuffed to the gills with churches. But the Stare Miasto hasn't been colonized by the financial industry. It's quite a congenial area: there's a sharp restriction on what vehicles are allowed to drive in, so it's a very pedestrian zone, and easy to learn your way around.

We start that process right away, because we've arrived at our hotel (about two blocks south of St. Florian's Gate) around three in the afternoon, and if we don't do something we're going to pass out and compound our jet lag. Besides, it's an absolutely gorgeous fall day, and (as the co-worker has warned us) that may not last.

So we venture out, and stumble almost immediately into some kind of street fair in the courtyard behind what we later figure out is the Church of St. Mary. There are food stalls and craftsmen, including a portable forge, with a female blacksmith pounding out something right there. (I take about eighty bazillion pictures, to net one that isn't motion-blurred to hell and gone.) My first meal in Poland, therefore, is kielbasa from a street stall, which seems appropriate. Then I have a chocolate-covered apple and some hot chocolate, and discover the thing I will love most about Kraków: they do hot chocolate right. God, that stuff was good. Wandering onward, we stumble from the street fair to a . . . Mongol archer? WTF?

We are, at this point, along the side of the Church of St. Mary, which dominates the northeastern end of the main market (haven't gotten that far yet). Every hour, on the hour, a trumpeter stands in the window of one of the towers and plays the hejnał mariacki , which I mentioned before. This used to be played at dawn and dusk, and the opening and closing of the city gates; it was also used as a warning signal in times of fire, etc. The legend (we won't talk about how old it is) tells that when the Mongol army came to assault Kraków, the trumpeter played the hejnał to warn the city, but was shot by an archer, partway through the tune. This, they say, is why the hejnał always ends abruptly, before the completion of the tune.

Since the church is going to close to visitors soon, we head in there next. The interior? Is gorgeous. This is my first introduction to the massive scale on which the Polish build altars: it's kind of like somebody transplanted bits of Luxor into the church walls, except that it's all in a beautifully harmonized shades of marble and gold. The ceiling in the choir is blue, and studded with gold stars. I would have pictures, but a) I have no tripod and the light is too low for me to get non-blurry shots, and b) when I try, I get harangued in Polish by a little old granny who apparently doesn't care that I don't speak her language; that isn't going to stop her from giving me a piece of her mind. (Upon consultation with kniedzw 's Polish co-workers, I believe my offense was taking photos in the first place. Never mind that I had paid for the photography permit.)

Back outside, we finally make our way around to the charmingly lopsided front of the church, which faces onto the main market. Because my brain has approximately two European models to compare Kraków against -- London and Rome -- I can't help but think of St. Paul's. Despite me being an American and not religious, it somehow feels right to have this kind of thing, a central church facing onto a square where people can gather. Something about the social space it creates pleases me -- I can't put it more specifically than that.

I'll have more to say about the main market in a future post, but the short version is that it's filled with a bunch of stalls selling flowers, more street performers, etc., as well as the Sukennice (Cloth Market), Church of St. Adalbert (or St. Wojciech, depending on what map you look at), and the tower that is all that remains of the old City Hall. It's a photogenic spot, and all pedestrian, so very pleasant to stroll around.

But by this point, I'm starting to tire badly enough that we wander back toward the hotel. (I got only about an hour of sleep on the plane, so I'm pretty much running on fumes.) Stopping by the front desk, we ask what the occasion was for the street fair, performers, flower stalls, etc . . . and are told there's no occasion. That's just what this place is like all the time. This turns out to not quite be true; while the performers and flower stalls are, indeed, an everyday occurrence, the little fair behind the church was specific to that weekend. On the other hand, there's another fair in the same place the following weekend, so the difference may be largely academic.

We settle in, then go downstairs to get dinner in the hotel crypt. Despite this being a shiny modern building, it's clearly been planted atop something older; the restaurant is in some kind of renovated cellar. Pricy, but the food is excellent: kniedzw promptly declares the sausage to be "the best goddamn sausage in the world -- it's amazing!" (The sausage then becomes the yardstick by which we measure everything else on the trip. "Wow, this view is amazing! Like, as good as that sausage was!")

After dinner, once more into the street, just to keep ourselves from passing out too early. And here we discover something surprising: the Stare Miasto does not go to bed at night. It isn't just a tourist area; there are lots of shops selling trendy clothing, and (as becomes obvious after dark) a number of nightclubs. This is basically the last thing I would expect out of the old part of town, the area full of churches and historical landmarks and tourists, but there you have it.

Did I mention that Kraków does hot chocolate right? The stuff I get from a coffee shop by St. Mary's isn't as good as the cup earlier that day in the street fair -- which, for my own part, I think was better than the sausage -- but it's damn good. (Strawberry flavored. Before I leave Poland, I will have also sampled their white and rum flavors. All excellent.)
. . . you know, this was supposed to be the story of days 0.5 and 1. But since I've blathered on for more than a thousand words already, I think I'll cut it short here. Until the next post!

no kitchen sinks, though

Since I just put Chekhov's hang glider into this story, I thought I would share with you guys some of the items scribbled down in my notebook, on the page designated for Cool Things What I Intend to Put Into the Second Dragons Book:


talking drums
griots
witchcraft
blacksmiths
leeches
malaria
poisons/hallucinogens
waterfall island
guard dragons
masks
iron/gold/salt/ivory
booby traps


And some other things that would be too spoilery to share.

Mind you, Isabella is looking over my metaphorical shoulder and objecting strongly to my classification of malaria as a "cool thing" (she's no happier about the prospect of me replacing it with yellow fever), but narratively speaking, it qualifies. :-) (Confidential to kurayami_hime : at least it's not the plague!)

I'm still working on stringing all this stuff together into a book, rather than a collection of things I think are neat, but hey. There are worse ways to build a novel than throwing awesome bits of setting at the page. (It's more or less how I built several of the Onyx Court books, and that seems to have worked out okay.)

Books read, October 2012

Way late, but that's because I came home with a cold and then, just as I was recovering from it, contracted a different one! Yay! Wait, not yay. Anti-yay.

Saba: Under the Hyena’s Foot, Jane Kurtz. This was a startlingly political book. It's part of the Girls of Many Lands series, which is the "rest of the world" companion to the American Girl thing, i.e. the dolls you may have seen. It takes place in Ethiopia in 1846, and features kidnappings, assassinations, and palace coups -- in other words, a lot more in the way of political intrigue than I would have expected out of an "intermediate fiction" doll tie-in book. They're all written by different authors, so the quality is undoubtedly all over the place, but I note that Laurance Yep wrote a Chinese book for the series (Spring Pearl: The Last Flower) and Chitra Banerjee Divarakuni wrote an Indian one (Neela: Victory Song), so I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're worth checking out.

Unspoken, Sarah Rees Brennan. YA update of the old "gothic" genre. I was mildly distracted by the part-Japanese protagonist being named "Kami" (though there's an explanation for it in the story), and early on I felt like the peppiness of the narrator's voice was at odds with the gothic mood. But the peppiness settled down as the story went on, and the explanation for the name came along, and I ended up quite enjoying this one. The premise -- and this comes out early enough that I don't think it's a spoiler -- is that Kami has always had an "imaginary friend" in her head, a guy named Jared that she talks to all the time. And then Jared shows up. Because he's a real person. And one of the things I liked best about the book was how this was not a Wonderful Thing, but a shocking development neither of them can quite cope with, because they're not what each other expected and yet they know each other really well and it's really traumatic to lose something that was both a deep source of comfort and a constant risk of being thought genuinely delusional by those around you.

Fair warning, though: the book, while it does resolve the central mystery, leaves a whole mess of things dangling for future plot development. So if you are looking for a nice tidy satisfying package of a book, this is not it.

Wieliczka: Historic Salt Mine, Janusz Podlecki. Very short book, mostly consisting of photographs. A souvenir of this place, which I will be reporting on soon if I ever get around to blogging about the Poland trip.

The Jews in the Time of Jesus: An Introduction, Stephen M. Wylen. A discussion of what first-century Judaism was like, and its relationship both to modern Judaism and modern Christianity. I've studied the early Church before, and that entailed a bit of talking about Judaism, but this was kind of the other side of that picture. It's not wholly focused on the first century and its aftermath, though: in order to make that part make sense, it starts with a very concise little potted history of Judaism in general, which I also needed and was grateful for. (Things like "the Babylonian Exile" are more than just phrases to me now.)

Writing-wise, I kind of wanted to smack the author. He has a tendency to write in short, declarative sentences. The sentences I'm using here are examples. This gets tedious after a while. Also, there's a very didactic tone in places, like where he patiently takes you by the hand and explains that the "pious Jewish" interpretation of X and the "pious Christian" interpretation of X are not the same as the "secular historical" interpretation of X, and I'm like, no shit, Sherlock. Occasionally I feels he fails as a historian, too, like when he says "The Pharisees were much more important when [the Mishnah and the New Testament] were being written than they were in the time of Jesus and the Temple" (okay) and then later says "The attention [the Pharisees] receive in [the New Testament] tells us that they really were important in the time of Jesus." Um. I think your editor missed something there, sir.

Despite those nitpicks, however, overall I found the book quite useful.


This was the month of Not Finishing Books, either because I quit on them or because I only needed to read pieces or because I hadn't finished them yet. (November has already featured the completion of two books I started in October.)

And now I convince myself not to go fall asleep again.

Last Day for Books

As a reminder, you have until I wake up tomorrow morning (10 a.m. PST, more or less) to buy books and raise money for the American Red Cross. Full details are at that link, for anybody who missed them before and/or needs to refresh their memory, but I'll repost the list of what's available (and what's been taken) here:

$10
A Star Shall Fall , mass market paperback (17 copies, was 19)
Warrior , mass market paperback (2 copies)
Witch , mass market paperback (1 copy)

$15
A Natural History of Dragons , unrevised Advance Bound Manuscript (1 copy)
A Star Shall Fall , Advance Uncorrected Proof (1 copy)
With Fate Conspire , Advance Uncorrected Proof (3 copies, was 4)
Hexenkrieger (German translation of Witch ) (1 copy)

$20
In Ashes Lie , UK trade paperback (2 copies)
A Star Shall Fall , trade paperback (1 copy)

$25
A Star Shall Fall , Science Fiction Book Club hardcover (1 copy)
With Fate Conspire , Science Fiction Book Club hardcover (3 copies)
With Fate Conspire , regular hardcover (11 copies, was 12)
Doppelgänger und Hexenkrieger (German omnibus of Warrior and Witch ) (3 copies, was 4)


Please, please, get more of these books off my hands. :-) Tell your friends, post to the Twitbooknets, whatever.

For those of you who have made purchases, thank you, and I'll be shipping things out soon. (My plans on that front have been derailed by one cold segueing into another, with the result that I haven't exactly been getting out of the house lately.)

Go. Vote.

This year, voting is more than just the core responsibility of citizenship; it is an act of defiance against malicious political forces determined to reduce access to democracy.

It sounds like an exaggeration, but after the litany of attempts this year to suppress the vote -- ID requirements, shortened or eliminated voting hours, changes in polling places and the number of machines there, striking voters from the rolls -- I really don't think it is. If you're an eligible voter in the U.S., please go vote.

Nobody here will be surprised to find that I think you should vote for Obama. Of the two candidates, he's the one who stands for economic fairness, women's equality, QUILTBAG rights, corporate oversight, and not just bombing the snot out of any country we decide we don't like. But fundamentally, I care most about us having a functioning democracy. Go vote. Even if you live in a state that's guaranteed to go red or blue in the presidential election, there are state legislative positions, local offices, ballot initiatives, and more in which your opinion really does matter. Go vote. Please.

one more thing: techie help needed

I need some technical assistance from a person familiar with Wordpress (specifically, WP themes and how they work), and also CSS. Anybody willing and able to volunteer? Comment here or e-mail me at marie{dot}brennan[at]gmail{dot}com.

five things are all the post my brain can manage right now

1) As a reminder, the book sale will be running until next Thursday morning. I should mention that my goal is to downsize my stock until it actually fits once more in the official Box of Author Copies. And, um. We're not there yet. <gives stacks of books the side-eye>

2) Pati Nagle is donating $2 per sale from her book Dead Man's Hand to the Food Bank of South Jersey for the remainder of this month.

3) On a different charitable front, the Strange Horizons fund drive is in its last few days. All donors get entered into a draw for these prizes, which include a full-color ARC of A Natural History of Dragons.

4) Speaking of ANHoD, mrissa has a lovely advance review of it up on her blog. (I think this is perhaps slightly less of a tailored-for-mrissas book than A Star Shall Fall was, but apparently not by much.) Also, a review of Lies and Prophecy, which I've been meaning to link to for a while.

5) Finally, I'm blogging at BVC again today, on what makes a folktale. Go there to guess what makes some fantasy seem fairy-tale-like, even when it isn't actually retelling a fairy tale.

The perils of bad translation

(I really ought to have a classics-related icon for posts like this. Any suggestions from the audience?)

There's a scene in Diana Wynne Jones' novel A Tale of Time City wherein Vivian, who is an ordinary girl from WWII England, is assigned to translate a text written in the "universal symbols" of Time City. She does an entertainingly bad job of it, and gets mocked by her tutor.

I probably wasn't supposed to take that as inspiration, was I?

See, years ago, when kurayami_hime and I were taking Latin in high school, we were given Catullus 3 to translate, along with a vocabulary list to look up before we began. The first word on that list was passer, which, according to my dictionary, meant "sparrow" (the poem being a mock-eulogy for his girlfriend's dead bird) . . . and also "flounder."

Inspired by this, and also by the number of our classmates who had mis-translated a line of Ovid's about "small things capture the minds of young girls" as "girls like to capture small animals" (they mistook anima for animal), kurayami_hime and I produced the following travesty, which our Latin teacher promptly stole, posted on the board, and only gave us photocopies of several years later; the original remains in her possession.

Wear mourning clothes, oh highest toss of the dice and greedy ones,
and how many there are of men who are endowed like Venus: my girl has killed her fish,
that fish, the crime of my girl, which loved her more than her flower buds --
for there was honey for her and the mother knew herself so well that she was a girl,
neither that one moving himself from the center, but running around how this how that,
to the sun of the house and chirping: which now plows again through Tenebricus,
where waves decline as they return there, and you are a bad apple, evil pigs of low birth,
where everyone loves war, so war to me seems like a fish.
O apple fact! O evil fish! Now you sing an opera so that my girl is crying
and swollen because there is rhubarb in her eyes.

Ahem.

And but so anyway, I read that to some people last night, and was told I should post it here for the entertainment of others. Thus I give it to you. My apologies to all the Latinists who are now bleeding from the eyeballs.