in Life's name and for Life's sake

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I might not believe in reincarnation as such, but I do believe that all writers live on past death in the things that they've written.

"For Books are not absoltely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule whose progeny they are." --John Milton, Areopagitica

There is something about reading Austen that I can't describe. I hate it sometimes that I'm doing my senior thesis on Austen and that I can't increase my English geek cred by writing about some obscure someone-or-other that no one but me has ever heard of and therefore no one but me will ever even think themselves capable of understanding -- but then I sit down with nothing but me and Northanger Abbey and stop feeling like I need to write on something obscure. I will still get a little annoyed occasionally when people who know nothing of English as an academic discipline think they understand what I'm writing simply because they've seen a few BBC miniseries, or when professors or fellow students indulge in momentary condescension because I couldn't think of anything more creative to write about, but when this happens, I will take a few deep breaths and remind myself of two important facts.

1. I am having so much fun with this. I honestly love Austen, and not just because of that one guy Colin Firth plays in some movie. I fell in love with her way with words the first time I met them and this summer I get to immerse myself in them. AND GET PAID FOR IT.

2. What I'm thinking and writing about Austen will be creative and different and new. It'll make people see her in a whole new way (she says modestly). At the very least, it'll make me see her in a whole new way, and that way will be mine.

And did I mention I'm having fun with this? I don't even know what it is about Austen that makes me feel like this, and it's difficult to describe, because it's not terribly showy. Compared to many of my other favorite authors her prose and subject matter seem very quiet. But then someone will make a snarky comment and I'll burst out laughing and realize that maybe she's not so quiet after all. She's wily without being disingenuous, always ready for a good laugh, and behind that reserved facade there's both an observing wisewoman and a giggling teenager, working in tandem to write some of the most fantastic and understated prose I keep coming back to.

Sentence that did not make it into e-mail to professor, considering that I've only known her since September and wouldn't want to offend:

"I do love reading literary criticism (and I say this with a complete lack of sarcasm) but I also like feeling that my writing represents my ideas about the text without mediation by a third party (I would have made a terrible Catholic)."

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Well, this corresponds nicely with the following meme I was going to steal from gienahclarette. The rules are:

Day one • a song
Day two • a picture
Day three • a book
Day four • a site
Day five • a youtube clip
Day six • a quote
Day seven • whatever tickles your fancy

I'm not the kind of person who tends to follow individual artists; usually I just stumble across individual songs that set my mind on fire a little. I've only ever been to concerts for Jason Mraz and Vienna Teng, and I do like them both very much...but then there are the musicals. And I feel bad picking a single song out of context -- I feel like knowing the full ten helps. (Really you'd need to see the contents of my entire iPod to figure this out; I'm leaving out so many great songs from musicals and Disney movies that I love and adore, just to make sure all the right ones get in!) So, here goes!

10. "You Make My Dreams" by Hall & Oates
--I first fell in love with this song thanks to the movie (500) Days of Summer. It's just an upbeat little ditty that always makes me want to sing (and dance) along whenever it's played. Over the summer it was the number one song on my workout playlist; I would start my runs every morning to the bouncy, upbeat beginning chords and smile because everything was right with the world.

9. "I Can Go the Distance" from Hercules
--The thing about this song is that I have often dreamed of a far-off place where a hero's welcome will be waiting for me. And on some days, when that welcome seems further off than others, I can listen to this song and take hope. And it also has the nagging ability to remind me that there are different kinds of welcome -- the shift in the final verse from finding the hero's welcome in a crowd of people who are impressed by fame and fortune to finding it in the arms of someone who loves you for who you are, hero or not, to that person you are the world.

8. "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey
--Although the first Journey song that I ever listened to was "Running Alone" (because Nita listens to it in High Wizardry and I wanted to know what it was about it that made it a good enough song for Diane Duane to actually include in her novel), "Don't Stop Believing" (for all its popularity) strikes a stronger chord in me. It's about anguish and despair and making meaning out of the nothingness, whether there is any intrinsic meaning or not. There are days when I think about taking the midnight train "going anywhere," and on these days this song seems to speak even more loudly to me.

7. "Come on Get Higher" by Matt Nathanson
--When I first heard this song I didn't like it that much because everyone else liked it. Then someone had it as the leading track in a fanmix for a specific Young Wizards pairing (expect to see much more of Diane Duane's Young Wizards in this seven-day meme) and listening it in that context made me realize how beautiful it is. "Everything works in your arms"? So perfect. So true. It's a song for many moods, and I never feel like I can't listen to it.

6. "City Hall" by Vienna Teng
--I couldn't believe this song the first time I heard it. It tackles the issue of gay marriage in a singular, individual manner that makes you listen: it's not general, it's specific. Again, the piano is beautiful, understated, with this great cheeriness to it, of the smile-in-the-face-of-darkness variety, that seems so appropriate given the circumstances. "You've never seen a sight so fine as the love that's gonna shine at City Hall," and "If they take it away again some day, this beautiful thing won't change."

5. "Vienna" by Billy Joel
--Sometime during junior year of high school, when everything seemed to be all too much, Stephanie Johnson told me that I needed to listen to this song, and I'm still indebted to her for the suggestion. From its first command to "slow down, you crazy child" to the sad but true injunction to "dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true," this song provides a good breather to the person I am, a reminder that I "can't be everything [I] want to be before [my] time, although it's so romantic on the borderline tonight." It tells me that I need to slow down, to put things in perspective, but it also tells me that "only fools are satisfied," that the dreaming and the inability of ever achieving everything that I want to will hurt but will in the end be part of who I am.

4. "All That's Known" from Spring Awakening
--There are a lot of blockbuster songs in this musical, but this is the one that always gets me. Melchior's questing at the boundaries of the knowledge allowed to him by traditional institutions is something I've felt before: that, and the desire "to know the world's true yearning -- the hunger that a child feels for everything they're shown" -- to feel the world in such an immediate and unfiltered way.

3. "Beauty and the Beast" from Beauty and the Beast
--"Bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong" -- I honestly think that this song charts the course of all of the great romances that I have come to know and love. And it's part of the best Disney movie in all existence, based on the best fairytale in all existence, etc. I love Angela Lansbury but I don't like the version she sings; I prefer the duet between Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson. Just the opening chords are enough to give me that feeling of warm-and-fuzzy happy.

2. "Harbor" by Vienna Teng
--I love Vienna Teng as a songwriter because she has lines like this: "Fear is the brightest of signs -- the shape of the boundary we leave behind." And she backs them up with gorgeous and emphatic piano. In this song it becomes dramatic, swelling, and yet still so personal. She takes a common metaphor -- the loved one as a safe harbor (for example, see "Wild Nights! Wild Nights!" by Emily Dickinson) -- and turns it into something unique and beautiful.

1."Brave Enough for Love" from Jane Eyre the Musical
(in a great irony, I can't listen to this track recording because I am in the UK and the service is US only -- but that means you all can listen!)
--Of course my love for Jane Eyre as a book contributes to my love of this song in the musical. Everything from the little interchanges between Jane and Rochester, taken almost verbatim from the book (R: "Am I hideous?" J: "Very, sir. (pause) You always were, you know."), to the final climactic sweep of the ending chorus, gives me hot and cold chills. And there's this idea that love is something that requires bravery -- that living in tandem with another life is difficult, a struggle -- and yet the most worthwhile struggle that mankind can engage in. The music is absolutely beautiful and backs this up wonderfully.

Item 1. I am still writing that fantasy cross-dressing story for anenko that I started drafting as my NaNoWriMo project this past November. I'm posting it one chapter at a time on its own journal, gil_and_leah, and you should check it out because the more people I know are reading it, the greater my motivation becomes to update at something approximating regular intervals.

Item 2. Overall much less important than Item 1, but I thought I would let you know that, as a strange outgrowth from wanting a simple way of watching my friend's blog while she spends the summer in Africa, I now have a tumblr entirely devoted to my love of words. It will mostly exist to catalogue quotes/stories/interesting language-related things I stumble across, and is basically being kept first and foremost for my own satisfaction. That said, who knows -- maybe it will be interesting?

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Heart-kin. Noun. Coined by Julie E. Czerneda, common term among Om'ray/M'hiray (also known as "the Clan"; these aliens appear in her Trade Pact Universe trilogy and in the ongoing prequel to that, the Stratification trilogy-in-progress). To be heart-kin with someone is to confer a bond as close as kinship without the physical/genetic ties of blood relationship. In Om'ray/M'hiray culture, this bond is considered to be on a level with those bonds of blood, in some cases surpassing them. I often use the term "heart-kin" when discussing the people to whom I feel most intimately and intricately bound, those with whom I share a deep and special understanding, so that our minds in meeting might discern each other. One can be kin and still be heart-kin, but not all relatives are automatically given the status of heart-kin; it must be earned.

In connection to this slightly:

Mountain troll theory of friendship. Inspired by J. K. Rowling, and the scene in Sorcerer's Stone in which Harry and Ron save Hermione from a mountain troll. The chapter ends with the sentence, "There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them." This theory explains those friendships that spring up more quickly than expected, generally between people who are thrown together under highly stressful circumstances and must get to know each other quickly in order to depend upon each other for mental/physical/moral support and continued survival.

"Writers are a curious species; the writing life even more so. We tell ourselves stories, not the way regular people do, but with word-by-word effort. Dreams become insufficient. We're compelled to lock them down, polish them, hoard them on hard drives and paper. We dare to compare them to the work of others. Worst of all, after months and years of labor, we hand our most treasured fantasies to strangers. And wait."

~Julie E. Czerneda, from her introduction to the 10th Anniversary Edition of her first novel, A Thousand Words for Stranger

I cannot agree more with this statement. My novel, for anyone interested, just underwent a 3,000-word digression about the creation of the world and the way that magic works, and the theological explanation of why it works this way (there are gods and goddesses involved--specifically, a god and a goddess, though I think they probably think of themselves as divinities instead of as gods). This was preceded by a 3,000-word theoretical discussion about the nature of magic, a "scientific" approach to its origin and a discussion of experiments to determine the difference in the texture of magic depending upon the part of the world you're in. I'm actually on track writing-wise.

The most annoying part of all this is that I've lost my voice, just when I have moderately interesting things to talk about.

This is what happens when I should be doing something worthwhile but the computer happens to be on.

1. Pick 14 of your favorite movies. (I could only actually think of 13.)
2. Go to IMDB and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them in your journal for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it.
5. NO GOOGLING!/using IMDB search functions or using social networking sites.
6. To guess, write a comment below with the number and the name of the movie.
7. If someone else has already guessed the movie, edit the quote giving the movie name and the name of the person who guessed it.

1. Beauty and the Beast
“I want adventure in the great wide somewhere. I want it more than I can tell. And for once it might be grand, to have someone understand... I want so much more than they've got planned.” (Rebecca)

2. Jane Eyre (2006)
“She saves me from an inferno and she's glad she happened to be awake.”

OR

“We're not the platonic sort, Jane.” (Rebecca)

3. Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Charlotte: “I dare say you will find him amiable.”
Elizabeth: “It would be most inconvenient since I have sworn to loathe him for all eternity.” (Rebecca)

4. Pride and Prejudice (1995)
“I shall conquer this, I shall.” (Rebecca)

5. Aladdin
“Ten thousand years will give you such a crick in the neck.” (Rebecca)

6. Casablanca
“I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.” (Rebecca)

7. Star Wars: A New Hope
“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.” (Rebecca)

8. The Lion King
“Pinned you again.” (Rebecca)

9. Down With Love
“Then, when you realized that you had finally met your match... I would have at last gained the respect that would make you want to marry me first and seduce me later.” (Rebecca)

10. Love Actually
“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport.” (Rebecca)

11. Rent
“There are times when we're dirt broke, hungry, and freezing, and I ask myself, why the hell am I still living here? And then they call. And I remember.” (Deanna)

12. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Leia: “I love you.”
Han Solo: “I know.” (Rebecca)

OR

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
Han Solo: “I love you.”
Leia: “I know.” (Luke)

13. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
Han Solo: “How we doin'?”
Luke: “Same as always.”
Han Solo: “That bad, huh?” (Rebecca)

[In retrospect, I should not have allowed Rebecca to compete in this, seeing as how sharing my brain might give her an unfair advantage.]

I am again overcome by a great love of Diane Duane. I'm sure I've told you all a million times that you should read her books because they really will change your life, but I mean it. So much of who I am and who I want to be -- not just as a writer, but as a person -- is within the pages of her books, specifically the Young Wizards series that she began more than twenty years ago.

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Deep Wizardry, the second book in the series and one of my favorites. This is how good it is: even listening to the audiobook made me cry, in all the right places and for all the right reasons. Maybe that's more of a reflection of my current emotional state than it is of the book itself, but I don't like to think so. I'm really mad I don't have my own copy of it here, because if I did I'd fill this entry with quotes from it that make me feel more myself. Because there are so many of those...

I read Deep Wizardry for the first time the summer after sixth grade, when I was on vacation in the Caribbean for a week. I'd read the first book in the series, So You Want to Be A Wizard, sometime before, but whenever I read Deep Wizardry I'm brought back to that catamaran that I lived on with my family for a week, the feel of sailing and the ubiquity of the sea. I took it for granted that I had these beautiful warm waters to swim through, dive in, live off of. And then I got stung by a jellyfish pretty badly at Virgin Gorda, five or six days through the week, and I was belowdecks for a while trying to ignore the pain, and reading. I picked up Deep Wizardry and it couldn't have been more appropriate. It was all about the ocean, it turned out, featuring sharks and whales as important characters. But it was -- and is! -- about so much more than that. Whenever I look at the cover of my slightly-battered copy of Deep Wizardry, I'm transported back to Virgin Gorda and Marina Cay and Tortola, reading in beach chairs that had been pulled down into a few feet of water so that I reclined within the rolling-in of small waves.

But the book is so much bigger than that. There are questions from Deep Wizardry that the series still hasn't answered -- pretty impressive considering that it's now going into its ninth book (which I of course cannot wait to get my hands on). And it's not just the questions. It's the everything. Deep Wizardry is about how friendship grows and changes, how children interact with their parents, telling the truth, sacrifice and redemption, facing your death, making mistakes, defying evil, the environment, magic, love, loss, life. It's about people and wizards and whales and a shark or two. It's got a visit to the moon -- the one that I wrote my college entrance essay for Stanford about, the one that sticks with me today so that everything I think about space travel and wizardry is informed by it.

I don't know why I'm writing this. It's not particularly eloquent. But I just love how this book -- these books, really, anything she writes -- can always make me feel alright about the universe. Her explanation of life, death, and afterlife comforts me more than any other one that I've run into. And her idea of wizardry, the purpose of which is, pure and simple, to serve Life, and make sure it keeps on going, is fundamental to my understanding of creation and the world around me. I find it hard to believe that she's an atheist; I get a greater sense of spirituality from her writing than I do from a lot of other people. Not only is there a Creator, but there is an afterlife where "what's loved, survives." This principle seems like a pretty sound one to me.

Now I'm just rambling and I've got a bunch of things I should be doing, like getting ready to go to the book signing in San Francisco later this afternoon (yes, Katherine, I am getting Jim Butcher to sign something for you). I just needed to talk about this, for whatever reason, even if it's talking to no one.

And I lied. I'm gonna leave you with some quotes after all.

***

It hurt, she said.

We know, the answer came back. We sorrow. Do you?

For what happened?

No. For who you are now--the person you weren’t a week ago.

...No.

***

“It must be a crippled life your people live up there, without magic, without what can’t be understood, only accepted--”

--Ed (he's a shark!)

***

But Nita’s mother was looking up at the sky with a look of joy so great it was pain—the completely bearable anguish of an impossible dream that suddenly comes true after years of hopeless yearning. Tears were running down her mother’s face at the sight of that sky, so pure a velvet black that the eye insisted on finding light in it where light was not—a night sky set with thousands of stars, all blazing with a cold, fierce brilliance that only astronauts ever saw; a night sky that nonetheless had a ravening sun standing noonday high in it, pooling all their shadows black and razor-sharp about their feet.

***

What they saw was part of a disk four times the size of the moon as seen from Earth; and it seemed even bigger because of the Moon’s foreshortened horizon. It was not the full Earth so familiar from pictures, but a waning crescent, streaked with cloud swirls and burning with a fierce green-blue radiance—a light with a depth, like the fire held in the heart of an opal. That light banished the idea that blue and green were “cool” colors; one could have warmed one’s hands at that crescent. The blackness to which it shaded was ever so faintly touched with silver—a disk more hinted at than seen; the new Earth in the old Earth’s arms.