Jesse > Recent Status Updates

“The Night-Doings at ‘Deadman’s’”

So there is a general tone of Bierce highlighting racism against the Chinese. In this one, a man desecrates the corpse of a Chinese worker and then keeps a vigil over the years as the body tries to retrieve its braid. This injustice is finally put to an end by no less than Death itself, though the connotation of the swarthy little man from San Francisco is ambiguous.

“The Haunted Valley”

A bizarre story about the Californian frontier with a man who boasts about murdering his Chinese servant. It isn’t until the narrator comes by four years later, after the man’s death, where a bizarre number of twists is revealed by the man’s former employee that recontextualizes their four-years past conversation.

“The Discomfited Demon”

Basically a goofy sketch about a dude who is prowling around a graveyard while they are reinterring bodies. He runs into the devil, who is laughing at him until the narrator reveals - which we already knew - that the dude was collecting bones in the graveyard. In a moment of satire, the devil finds the narrator as a ghoul to be more grotesque than himself.

Toad is def That Friend. You know the one.

There may be no overriding plot but I love the slice-of-life stories of the animals. The characters live solitary lives but they do enjoy seeing each other, hanging out, and look out for each other, whether it’s Rat treating Mole to a good time, the two of them finding Otter’s lost child, Badger rescuing them in the Wild Wood, or the three of them looking out for the wealthily bumbling Toad.

This world is composed of rural animal folk who live in the English countryside and are basically people whose personalities are informed by their animal traits. I mean, like how Hobbits live underground, that’s kind of how the animal folk are like, though they are capable of doing the things that animals do.

Very charming. All of Grahame’s major animals have their own particular characterizations , whether it’s Mole, Rat, Toad, or Badger.

Knowing the twist mutes the whole procedure but the POV of the nurse, no doubt informed by Christie’s previous experience, is fascinating.

Hey!! They found a dead body!

Once Poirot is on the scene the story slips into a more comfortable space. Christie is more about the human aspect of a group of people suspecting each other of being a murderer without getting into vigilante townie behavior, so the character drama as the Belgian teases out case clues is where the strength of these stories lies… or founders.

A lot of drama at an archaeological dig! The future murder victim may or may not be romancing one of the other married archaeologists but she is being frightened by some sort of plot. Unfortunately I may have kind of spoiled the big twist ending for myself looking at reviews (my own fault!). All of this is being seen through the eye of the very English, very xenophobic Nurse Leatheran. In Iraq.

Next stop on the Poirot train: Mesopotamia!!!!

The story is now living in the space where sisters live after the other’s death, which I appreciate. The Gorgon head on the aegis gets its own creation myth and Bear at this point has some fun in the retelling, conflating two different Euryales so that the immortal Gorgon becomes the mother of Orion the hunter.

It’s shocking reading this after Athena’s child, which was so maudlin in the suffering of the sisters and the depths of Medusa’s tragedy. Stheno and Euryale have way more emotional depth, here, and in contrast the sections about Perseus do less to rehabilitate him.

OHHHHH IT WASNT THALES, I mean Medusa was flinging out vibes with Semele but I had no idea we were going to a sapphic retelling of Medusa and Athena, even tho it makes the most sense of anything

Idk what is going on but Medusa is cast as a very different character in this story if she has been sexxing her boyfriend in the temple of Aphrodite. I have no idea if that is where we are going with this or if Poseidon seduced her in the guise of Thales. Doubtless I’ll find out soon.

Umm well the three sisters are starting to try to find themselves in Athens and Euryale paying a brothel so that she can see women pleasing men so that she will be Poseidon’s Best is certainly A Narrative Choice

This really is a whirlwind tour of mythological Greece, lol. The stop with Semele is an early bit of laying out what happens when the gods and mortals intersect. Euryale is the one lusting after Poseidon but these lessons fail to make an impression on her because she believes in a different fate for herself because of her immortal blood.

This is very different from the Greek retellings that I have been reading. WAAAAAAY different from Athena’s Child. These women are born before the creation of man and bear witness to important events in Greek mythology, particularly as they relate to Medusa being mortal. Stheno is conversational but sad; Euryale is argumentative and individualistic; and Medusa is Just Happy to Be Alive.

Because if I am going to seriously contemplate characters who are derived from Stheno and Euryale it would do well to know how they are currently being used in fiction

I was down for this but now that we are like up to our eyeballs in metaphysical conflict this book is cooking pretty hard. Also the bit where Ged meets back up with his old friend Vetch and his charming sister is a nice interlude now that we are so close to the end of Ged’s duel with his shadow-self.

You knew that the girl from the beginning of the book was going to come back. This section has a sort of Arthurian trial where dark powers attempt to seduce Ged for their own purpose. The girl meets a bad end but it’s hard to feel sorry for her when SHE FILLS THE BONES OF PEOPLE WITH MOLTEN LEAD GAWD like she is a nasty bitch-queen who is married to an even grosser old man, a winning combination

This is more of an action-oriented section, where Ged crosses the boundary of the spirit world, bests an ancient dragon, and is pursued across the world by his shadow-self, the gebbeth. There’s some lurking body horror here as the gebbeth appears to be shadow living inside a floppy skin suit whenever it has the opportunity to devour a human being from the inside.

The style of the book paints Ged’s life with a broad brush. It’s a great story but it isn’t quite as immersive as it could be as far as fantasy goes as Le Guin’s prose has more of the ring of a movie narration due to the fact that, over the past 100 pages, she has covered 4 years, 3 of them within the last 50!

Okay this is fun. Ged is kind of a jerk because he thinks everyone in Roke is making fun of him. He is caught between Ogion’s contemplative instruction of magic and wanting to go to a Wizard School where he will ostensibly learn to wield power at a pace that better suits him and Ogion doesn’t resent him for picking the school; it’s for his best in more ways than one.

I have no idea whether this was intended or if it is just a hallmark of this kind of story - I think it’s more of the latter - but there are some distinct parallels between Ged’s apprenticeship to Ogion and Esk’s apprenticeship to Granny Weatherwax. To be sure, Ogion represents a very different sort of wizard magic than the stuffed-up mages of Discworld’s Unseen University.

“Artificial Roses”

This is a cute character sketch between Mina, who has a secret lover who she has been writing letters to, and her Grandma, who is blind but knows vastly more about Mina’s life than her granddaughter thinks. It’s sort of a parable about ableism and you can tell that her grandma cares about her, she is just beating around the bush because she is slowly revealing just how observant she is.