Mind Your Zs and Qs

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In spite of a pretty fervent dislike of the idea of book groups, I recently decided to participate in one. In February, each of us read a different “elastic realism” book, and then we all got together to talk about the different books we read. It was great fun. My elastic realism choice was China Miéville’s The City and the City, which is essentially a murder mystery set in two fictitious cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma.

These two cities occupy the same geographical space, but are very separate and distinct places: to live in Besźel is to speak Besź, to see only Besźel, and to unsee and unhear everything and everyone living in Ul Qoma, who might be passing by on the street. Besź people dress differently than Ul Qomans, they have different postures, they walk differently, and they speak different languages. The separation between the cities is maintained by this strict code of unseeing, and for those who violate? Breach is watching, and waiting.

For a Besź citizen to visit an Ul Qoman neighbor – who might even live in the same apartment building – he would have to travel to the center of Besźel, seeing only Besź people and buildings and speaking only Besź, all the way to Copula Hall, the only official border crossing between the cities. After passing through the border into Ul Qoma, he would return over many of the same streets, differently named, seeing only Ul Qoman people, all the way back to perhaps the same building he was in before leaving Besźel to visit his neighbor. Of course, such a visit would be highly unlikely, given the tension between the two cities.

While reading this book, I found myself driving home from work and trying to “unsee” someone passing on the street, because the whole idea was so curious to me. (It didn’t really work out. The amount of thought that went into the process served rather to cement the image in my mind.) (I also found myself thinking how great it was that there were Zs and Qs on practically every page!)

When a body is found, disfigured and abandoned, on an estate in the outer reaches of Besźel, the investigating officer, Tyador, can’t find a single lead in Besźel. One day an anonymous phone call leads the investigation to Ul Qoma, and Tyador must cross into Ul Qoma to assist their police. What begins as a murder investigation soon becomes an investigation into the urban myths surrounding the beginnings of Besźel and Ul Qoma, and into the places that fall between the city and the city.

One of the things I love most about fantasy and science fiction is that it gives us a way of examining parts of our world outside the boundaries of what’s accepted and taken for granted, so expertly described in this article from the Guardian.

So, in the whole of my reading of Mr. Miéville’s book, I was thinking about what he was trying to say. I always think readers’ guides at the backs of book are kind of dorky – like you’re being told what to think about something. But I skimmed through the readers’ guide for this book to see if there were any clues, and the interviewer asked Mr. Miéville whether or not he intended the novel as an allegory. And, essentially, Miéville said no.

But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think it must be, at least partly, about the power we give to others – whether governments, or invisible cities living in the interstice, the space between; and also why we do – whether out of fear, or from an innate need for order, we sacrifice freedom.

The wonderful and generous leader of our book group, who I greatly admire, gets to interview Mr. Miéville about his new book (Embassytown, coming out in May), and she said she would ask him about this allegory question.

In the meantime, I’m still pondering.

The Month of Interminable Winter

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Why is it that February, the shortest month of the year, always feels like one of the longest?  This year, February has been the month of interminable winter.

Just this past Wednesday, we were hit with a snowstorm.  Foolishly, I chose to disbelieve the forecast and to defy the promised snow by wearing my better black flats to work.  This was a mistake.  I also chose to wear my less-warm coat and failed to include mittens in the outerwear ensemble, which made brushing the snow off my car after work even more delightful than that particular chore typically is.  By Thursday morning, we had about a foot of snow, and the temperatures had plummeted to truly frigid depths.  When I left for work on Friday morning, it was four degrees:  sunshine, blue sky, and four degrees.

I’ve been meaning to enliven the blog with photographs, and while the sunshine and the snow was quite pretty — picturesque, even — I just couldn’t bring myself to photograph snow in late February, especially not in four-degree temperatures.

One of my favorite poems by Robert Frost talks about a reluctance to yield to “the drift of things”, the inevitable passage of time and the changing of seasons; but I don’t know that he really meant it about winter.  I think maybe about the time February reached its middle, Mr. Frost might have been just as ready to see the end of winter as I am, right now.

My principle on principal.

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In my free time, I go to library school.  Since I have a full-time job, this means that my evenings and weekends (and whatever paltry social life these might have included before) are generally consumed with doing schoolwork.  But I’m not complaining.  I all-too-frequently find myself shirking responsibility with various distractions — the array of the internet (my new blog, for instance), and (of late, most popularly) sleeping.

However, I find that my patience for lectures, and schoolwork in general, is increasingly diminished by the presence of grammatical or spelling errors in professors’ lectures, or other class materials.

For example.  In one of my classes this quarter, we have been discussing the foundational principles of cataloging.  One of these principles is the Principle of Principal Responsibility.  In the lecture materials, this has been alternately referred to as:  the principal of principal responsibility, the principal of principle responsibility, and the principle of principal responsibility.

Really.

In the interest of venting my intolerance in a medium more appropriate than class discussion, a primer:

principal: 1) noun, person who has controlling authority or is in a leading position; 2) adjective, most important, consequential, or influential

principle: 1) noun, a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption

Definitions from http://www.merriam-webster.com

In other words, principal, which can be either a noun or an adjective, and thus modifies responsibility, indicating chief responsibility; and principle, referring to a fundamental assumption, in this context a fundamental assumption of cataloging related to chief responsibility.

I’m not a freak.

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The other day, I was chatting with my sister while the two of us perused stuff on the Internet.  My sister chanced upon this button, which says “I am gone forever. [Exit, pursued by a bear.]”

And then, because it was just the two of us, I felt completely free to unleash the full force of my enthusiasm upon her, and immediately replied, rather incoherently (for such is my joy at stumbling upon bits of things that I love in real life), “That’s a famous stage direction!  And Mary Stewart uses it as the chapter-heading quote in one of the chapters of Madam, Will You Talk? It’s Shakespeare; from The Winter’s Tale!”

Immediately after my enthusiastic outburst, however, I teetered on an edge of the abyss of insecurity, primarily because people often find my memory disconcerting, not to say downright creepy.  Not knowing me, you are perhaps even at this moment making the face I encounter so often, one of disbelief, mingled with fear, at the things that I remember.

I always used to think of remembering things about people as being a courtesy – confirmation that I was, in fact, listening.  For the purposes of avoiding that face, though, I’ve adopted a strategy (false as it is) where I pretend that I don’t remember various details about other people’s lives.  Most people don’t realize that a good memory can be a kind of curse, and you find yourself wishing that you didn’t remember – or at least not with quite so much clarity.

I said, “Do you think I’m a creep because I remember things?”

My sister laughed.

I said, “As in, ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’?”  (I didn’t say, “And that I remembered an obscure usage of the quote?” but it was implied.)

She said, “No,” and then said, “You have a good memory.  Embrace it.  Celebrate it.”  She said I should say, “Yo, I gots a good memory.  You gotta problem wit’ dat?”

Perhaps next time I am confronted by the disconcerted face, I will break that one out.  But I doubt it.  Ye olde “popular vernacular” tends not to roll off my tongue in a very convincing manner.

Unbirthday for Lord Peter

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My heart belongs to Lord Peter Wimsey.  That is, more accurately, it is occupied in approximately equal parts by Messrs. Darcy, Knightley, and Tilney, and Lord Peter Wimsey.  The only ordering of that list, I caution, is alphabetical.

Unlike Jane Austen’s heroes, with perhaps the exception of Henry Tilney, whose conversation equals Lord Peter’s, Lord Peter was entirely pleasing from the first moment that I met him, swearing in a taxi, on his way to a sale of rare manuscripts.  Every inch the gentleman, Lord Peter is all charm and manners, cleverly artificing a great depth of feeling behind urbane inanity, with admirable capacity to maintain a steady stream of circuitous conversational nonsense.

Maybe because I’m finally getting old enough that I feel it’s time I start embracing the things that I love, instead of apologizing for them (or for the fervor with which I hold them dear), I decided that this is the year I will start celebrating Lord Peter Wimsey’s birthday.  I looked through my books, and I scoured the internet, only to discover that Dorothy Sayers never gave Lord Peter a birthday, only a year (1890).  I feel certain, however, that it must have been a merry hour, in which a star danced: perhaps a day in June.

Since the birthdays of other people are considerably more enjoyable than one’s own birthday, why not celebrate Lord Peter’s?  Preferably while clad in period costume, with fine wine, and above all else, while wearing a monocle.