Another Green World

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This was one of my favorite books as a child – I had a hardcover copy that had been my mom’s – and it was fun to reread it. There were two things I hadn’t noticed or known then. First, the robin, who is a major character, is of course a European robin, not an American robin. As a child I naturally pictured the bird I knew as a “robin,” but the European robins are actually cute and delightful, as they’re more like sparrows or finches than like our American robin, which is really a thrush. Second, it was mentioned a few times that the brown winter grass was greening up for spring, and as a child this didn’t make sense, because our grass here in Oregon is lush and green year-round. However, I have since learned that in places like North Carolina the grass is also brown and dormant in the winter; Oregon is just an exception to these things (as is California, of course, where the grass is only green in winter but brown all summer). This time I also noticed the adult cousin who is Colin’s doctor, and who hopes to inherit if Colin dies. I was pleased that he wasn’t actually malevolent and was properly delighted when Colin’s health improved. As a modern reader, I was relieved to see that when the people referred to the “blacks” of India they were never actually derogatory toward them. Another thing I noticed was that the various Yorkshire folk always referred to daffodils as “daffydowndillys,” but Mary knows them as “daffodils” despite having only interacted previously with the servants in India. Maybe???

I wondered if, in the last chapter, there would be hints of the children’s future. Mary obviously loved Dickon and was attracted to him physically, but their social class differences would presumably preclude an eventual marriage, most likely? In the book, though, there’s no talk of the future except for Colin’s plan to become a scientist (and an athlete), and I see on Wikipedia that at least one modern commentator sees this emphasis on Colin as serving the patriarchy. Of course, too, when the book was published they had no idea that war was coming in the next few years. The boys were technically too young to serve in 1914, but Dickon would have been old enough later, so that’s sad. I hope he would have made it home again and that the natural world would have healed him too, as it did the other two children.

Today was not tremendously interesting, but it was fun. J and I worked on cleaning his gambeson (the very padded jacket he wears when doing swords), then we watched an episode of The Count of Monte Cristo, then we played some Slay the Spire 2, then watched three episodes of One Piece. He registered for Worldcon too.

Tonight was the symphony – I’m kind of surprised I even went, since my sleep had been messed up and I wasn’t especially interested. We had a reorchestration of Handel’s “Water Music,” a trumpet concerto by a Russian composer I hadn’t heard of named Böhme, and Schumann’s third symphony. Well! The trumpet concerto surprised me by being beautiful, the Schumann piece surprised me by being slightly familiar, and the “Water Music” – well, it was almost entirely unrecognizable. Instead, it was bizarre and goofy! Fortunately it was first, so it wasn’t my final impression of the concert. I was glad I went.

Today was my book club meeting online – we discussed the new Solnit book, then I suggested we choose something from the new Hugo nominees. After considering all the books, we ended up deciding to read last year’s winner (of which the sequel was nominated this year). I’ll be happy to read it again: The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett.

The Lost Years of Merlin, by T.A. Barron. Merlin Saga #1. My friend lent me this book, one of his childhood favorites, which I hadn’t heard of before. The premise is that Merlin’s life was very interesting before he met Arthur, and our author is filling in the blanks. Merlin (called “Emrys”) is mysteriously cast ashore in Wales as a small child and then lives there for years. Then, on the verge of adolescence, he causes a fire that (apparently) kills a bully and blinds himself, although he develops an alternate form of seeing, and comes to realize that he should set out to sea to visit a mysterious magical land. Most of the book takes place there, where he gradually learns more about himself through helping others. The descriptions are beautiful, and the story is interesting, although much of it is set up as just a long series of encounters. Merlin is a bit frustrating because he gets these ideas in his head and I suppose we’re to assume that they’re part of some magical intuition, although some of his ideas are clearly false.

Also – having read most of John Muir’s books, I was surprised when an early scene was clearly borrowed from Muir’s adventures in the Sierra Nevada. I wondered if the author had come up with this independently, or had read Muir at some point and forgotten, or what… but I learned that the author considers himself a great fan of Muir’s work, and when I discussed it with others over dinner we concluded that the scene was an “homage.”

I was still too sleepy today to do much, and my attempt to nap didn’t work, so I didn’t go to the concert I’d heard about a week ago. They were going to play my favorite Beethoven symphony (#7) and that beautiful “Hebrides Overture” by Mendelssohn. And they even had plenty of tickets available this afternoon. Oh well.

Later I went for a walk to the track by the middle school. It was dusk, and a bare sliver of the moon and Venus were setting together so prettily.

Meanwhile, J went to the prerelease for the new Magic set with DG and D. J was also sleepy, so DG was driving. They did the afternoon event, then got lunch together downtown, then started the evening event. But for the first match, J and DG were paired up. After two games, they agreed to a draw and went for a walk, because the weather was so nice. As they headed out the door, they told the staff, “We’re drawing.” The staff heard “we’re dropping” and told poor D that J and DG had left without him. The walk wasn’t very long, and when they returned the store staff realized their mistake and told them. But they couldn’t find D and were worried he had given up on the event too and was walking home. Eventually they found him and all was fine; they played the three other rounds and finally got home around 11:30 pm.

The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley. In a world rather like that of our own, Harry has had to move from her green and comfortable home (think, “Victorian Britain”) to a desert land, where her people are the colonizers, eager to extract the land’s resources (think, “Iran, but with hardly any people”). She finds herself kidnapped by an otherwise honorable local man and ends up having adventures, which sometimes involve some magic. I’ve read this book a few times before, and its prequel, and I like them very much. There are two quirks to the writing style that I remember well – Harry’s horse has names in two languages, so the author more or less alternates, such that the horse can be “Sungold” and “Tsornin” in the same paragraph. The other is that from time to time another character’s point of view appears, just for a paragraph or two, but it’s not jarring.

One element that reminds me that this is very much a fantasy world is that Harry often finds herself sleeping in proximity to a man – or living and working with a man for weeks on end – and there is NO suggestion that this is in any way uncomfortable for her or him. The men always treat her with the same respect they would treat another man, and there is zero innuendo or even any physical awareness at all, beyond how one would see a friend or peer. Amazing.

Okay, I have made a principled decision not to read my self-assigned book for April, Sometimes a Great Notion by local author Ken Kesey. I started the other night, got to page 43 out of 600-some, and was becoming uncomfortable for an unusual reason. Having given it some thought, here’s what I’ve concluded.

The other day, I was watching a Nova episode I’d seen before, and I was reminded that whenever we remember our memories, they become unsettled and open to influence. Also, from the book manuscript I’ve written about how concepts work in our minds, I know that how we think about any given topic can be influenced by taking in new related information.

Sometimes a Great Notion, which is considered a powerful work of fiction, was set within 10 miles or so of my birthplace, in a small town on the Oregon coast, on a river used for logging (but given a different name). There’s a house we used to drive past whenever we came inland that was widely considered to be an inspiration for the house that features so prominently in the story. Also, the book was published when I was about two years old. So, as I read those first pages of the book, whenever pretty much anything was described – the house, the roads, the forests, the café, the river – I had a mental image to draw on from my childhood. And that means that the more of the book I read, the more my mental images of my childhood community would be changed by the book. And the book has a lot of violence in it. And there are no other great works of literature – possibly no other novels at all – set in that time and place, that I could read to balance things out.

So if I want to keep my childhood memories intact… well, even though they’re by no means idealized, they’re mine. And I shouldn’t read the book.

Now, I could make a case that I should do it anyway if my memories were somehow slighting an important perspective and would benefit from the correction. In this case, though, I don’t think I would gain much from learning about the world and thoughts of a logger who took individualism to a pathological extreme…

Another idea is, if I really think I need to read the book someday, then I should watch the movie first. It came out 7 years after the book and starred Paul Newman. It was filmed about 40 miles north of my hometown, on another coastal river. Then, if I read the book, in theory my brain would call up images from the movie, rather than images from my own early memories. And that might be fine? We’ll see. Probably not this year, though.

This afternoon I went to a concert called “Music of Arabian Spain” – the guitarist David Rogers played a variety of works by the Valencian composer Luis Milan as well as some traditional North African-style music from Andalusia and a work by Alonso Mudarra. The composers lived in the 1500-1580 range. Rather than playing a guitar, he actually played a vihuela, which is a very guitar-like instrument. On two of the pieces he was accompanied by my neighbor RP, who played two sizes of viol.

The music was lovely, and the audience of about 30 people definitely enjoyed it, but I was distracted by the five women sitting in front of me, who were at least as interested in each other as they were in the concert. Another woman asked them to please stop talking, and that helped, but there were still a lot of gestures. Eventually I decided to mostly close my eyes.

Later I spent an hour with Momo. DG and AA aren’t returning until Tuesday, but Momo is getting lots of attention because another friend is spending time with him in the mornings, too. He is a very affectionate cat – almost 16 years old.

Yesterday I finally went to look at the wildflowers in the woods near the school, the place where I had that photography project a few years ago. J was about to go for a walk with DG, and it was the last good chance to do that for a while since we’re about to get lots of rain, and I abruptly realized that meant the last chance for the current wildflowers, too, so off I went. They were about a month early! I guess all the warm weather triggered their growth. The irises were basically done, and the fawn lilies were fading, but the shooting stars were doing exceptionally well, and some had even moved to the west side of the trail. I was glad not to miss the hound’s tongue, because I do love blue flowers. The camas flowers were busy in the grass beyond the woods, next to the playground. I didn’t see any cat’s ears – maybe they’re on the normal schedule. It started to sprinkle as I was driving home, but J and DG did their walk anyway and got rather wet.

I hoped that would take care of the pollen for today, but no – it was sunny much of the day today, and I was so stuffy that my sleep was cut short. But then we had a dramatic thunderstorm in the late afternoon, and finally some proper rain. I watched the Friday movie with J - The Last Starfighter - then took a nap, then went to spend some time with Momo, as his “parents” have now gone to Philadelphia for the weekend. He was glad to see me, and there was much purring.