A Dimensional Hiatus

The latest bedtime storytime jags come from Moers’s The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, a fantastic slingshot across Zamonia, equal velocity-measures zany, smart, and surprising. Tonight, Bluebear began his transition away from the Nocturnal Academy and out of life, what is it now?, six?, The Gloomberg Mountains. To leave the school, he has to make his way through an especially disorienting labyrinth. Bluebear walks on and on until walking gives out, Fitbit.

For several hours I remained lying on my back, spreadeagled with my gaze fixed on the roof of the tunnel. I had made up my mind to dematerialize, vanish without a trace, rust away like a piece of old iron, and thus become an integral part of the Gloomberg Mountains. It seems that rusty tunnel walls have an unwholesome effect on overtaxed brains. I would never had entertained such an idea under normal circumstances, but anyone who has brooded for hours will feel, in a truly physical sense, what it’s like to rust away. It’s a strange but far from unpleasant sensation. You surrender to the forces of nature, utterly serene, then slowly turn metallic. Your body becomes coated by degrees with fine, rust-red fur and starts to crumble. The rust eats into you, ever deeper. Layer after layer flakes off, and before long you’re just a little mound of red dust to be blown away by a captive puff of wind and scattered along the endless tunnels of the Gloomberg Mountains. That was as far as my dire imaginings had progressed when my shoulder was nudged by something soft and slimy but not unfamiliar. It was Qwerty Uiop.

‘What are you doing here?’ he inquired anxiously.

‘Rusting away,’ I replied. (175-176)

Rusting away, I replied. Rusting away. But his school-friend Qwerty, from the 2364th dimension, comes along, sort of glop-bumps into him, and mentions that he has found a dimensional hiatus–a portal he knows by smell will, when he plunges into it (if he can summon the courage), jump him to another dimension. But Qwerty hesitates to jump, afraid of the unknown.

I won’t spoil it. It’s enough to take a quick snapshot of this rich bedtime reading, of Bluebear’s post-Nocturnal Academy disorienteering, his will to dematerialize, to rust, and his friend, Qwerty’s, rescue-interruption, motivated by his own crisis about risking a known dimension for an unknown dimension.

Reason enough to continue reading.

The City & ytiC ehT

Late last week I finished China Mieville’s latest,
The City &
ytiC ehT
. TC & CT is a detective story,
but
it’s not just any detective story (what
Mieville calls
a "police procedural"
). In terms of theoretical richness, this one holds
even with Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Mieville creates a
pair of cities fraught with boundary in.discretions. Citizens from Beszel and Ul
Qoma pass by each other every day, but as they do so they must unsee people and
things from the other city. Even where the borders become confusing
overlaps, in cross-hatched zones likely to draw heavy traffic from autos and
pedestrians, unseeing remains a necessary tactic (sort of the opposite of
panoptic conditioning; unseeing here as deliberate, uneasy negligence).
Political, jurisdictional consequences are of course tied to this cities-wide
condition. Within this intricate third-spacious scene, Mieville works up a novel
that jets along with surprising acceleration: mystery elements, hazy figures,
and ethereal domains, also detective work that relies on the knowledge available
even while deliberately unseeing and smudge-remembering what is present
(that is, a kind of audiovisually unconfirmed felt sense).

I’d say more, but I already returned the copy to
Collin, who both recommended it and lent
it to me, and since it was a borrowed copy, no margin notes, no dog-eared pages.
But this entry is to say, pick it up. It’s a lively, quick read, very much the
sort of thing you still have time for even if you feel summer fading to fall.

The Steep Approach

I finished up Iain Banks’

The Steep Approach to Garbadale
a couple of days ago. Took me
about a week, and it felt like a faster-than-usual read, though it’s not like I
spend all that much time reading fiction for the sport of it (at least not these
days). Faster than expected, a surprisingly engaging novel, a story well
told–exactly as promised in the approbative cover matter.

The upshot: Alban Wopuld deals with a hiatus from the family circle,
resurfacing at the behest of a cousin who recruits him to stir up dissent among
family members in favor of approving the sale of their rights to a popular game,
Empire!. Alban re-emerges as an influential presence in the family, all
the while coping with two formative events from earlier in his life (and, in
different degrees, these events are at the root of his alienation): his
mother’s suicide and a cousinly love affair.

This little summary doesn’t ruin it. And I fully intend to be getting
along with other novels by Banks just as soon as…one of these days. I only had
time for this one because I am purposefully neglecting the diss for a couple of
weeks while on a back-to-back conferences jag (seriously, it must appear that I
have been shitting around for a couple of weeks now; lazing through some books
about maps, etc.). Anyhow, by this point, I sure I have done enough to pique
your interest in The Steep Approach that I should give a little bit more,
so, then, two passages from dog-eared pages:

Also, third, she tried to quantify how hopelessly, uselessly,
pathetically weak she felt. It took a long time–she was a
mathematician, after all, not a poet, so images were not normally her strong
suit–but eventually she decided on one. It involved a banana. Specifically,
the long stringy bits you find between the skin and flesh of a banana. She
felt so weak you could have tied her up with those stringy bits of banana
and she wouldn’t have been able to struggle free. That was how weak she
felt. (220)

This comes as VG–Alban’s other love interest–remembers swimming near
a reef when the disastrous tsunami welled up from the Indian Ocean in ’04.

Continue reading →