Even if you can’t stand her writing, I would still recommend reading Bell’s
biography of Virginia Woolf. She’s such an eccentric, such an interesting
character that her story is fascinating.

First, there’s the whole madness issue. She committed suicide in 1941 after
years of periodic psychotic episodes. And the treatment then was so
primitive, almost nonexistent, that it almost seemed to make her problems
worse. She probably had some form of bipolar disorder and Bell gives some
time to tracing the mental health issues of her forbear back a few
generations. I’ve often wondered if she were alive now, with all the
therapeutic drugs available, would she have been able to write as
imaginatively as she did?. Or would the drugs have stabilized her mind and
destroyed her creative spark?.

Then, there is the whole Bohemian, Bloomsbury, lesbian thing.
After reading the book, I can’t think of anyone I know who led a more staid,
happily married lifestyle than she did. She was married for years to Leonard
Woolf and, yes, had passionate friendships with lesbians but Bell, who
happens to be her nephew and actually knew her, is highly skeptical that any
physical reaction was reciprocated by Virginia. She did have flamboyant,
creative friends. Lytton Strachey, Desmond McCarthy and Roger Fry were just
a small part of the circle she was involved in. She knew Henry James and
H.G. Wells. And later in life, she befriended Katherine Mansfield and
Elizabeth Bowen. Her sister, Vanessa Bell, was a leader in Post Modernist
painting in Britain and famous in her own right. But Virginia’s major wild
fling seems to be that she shared a house as a cooperative with unmarried
men prior to marriage.

What mostly comes thru is a highly gifted woman plagued with shyness and
insecurity and threatened by permanent madness who writes because she’s
passionate about language and words and thoughts. She isn’t highly educated;
in fact, Bell points out that neither she nor her sister were allowed to
attend school and were educated, badly, at home by their impatient and
overbearing father. She loved London and England. The war with its bombings
and threats of invasion lead indirectly to her final slow slide into another
episode of madness which she forestalls by putting rocks into her pocket and
walking into the river Ouse.

I’ve just posted Chapters 16 and 17 of my novel Through Darkest Zymurgia! Enjoy!

I just ran across a page entitled Things my girlfriend and I have argued about. Excerpt:

There is only one specific type of occasion when Margret feels I should ‘go and speak to’ one of the children, and that’s when they have done something forehead-slappingly idiotic. The implication she is making is that Idiocy is my area. That only I can speak to the children when they’ve done something comprehensively crackbrained because, unlike her, I can speak The Language Of Fools. ‘Maybe you can get through to him,’ she’s saying, ‘Because you know how the asinine mind works.’

Mirabilis has uncovered a site dedicated to a peculiar early instrument called the Serpent. Best of all, the site has instructions for how to build your own serpent sound-alike for about $30 and a weekend.

I think I first read this book when I was 12 or 13. I know I wasn’t in high
school yet because I had to borrow my father’s library card and check it
out. The library where I grew up had a rule that children were not allowed
to take out “adult” books and Dad got a card just to get around that rule.
It was the same summer I read Jane Eyre,
Rebecca by DuMaurier and
Oliver Twist. Oh, and The Robe by
Thomas Costain. The plots of all those
novels stuck in my head until adulthood but, strangely, I could remember
nothing about this one except that it fascinated me and I devoured almost in
one sitting.

The story revolves around a huge yellow diamond, the Moonstone, that was
looted sometime in the past from a Hindu shrine during a British campaign.
The Brahmin protectors of the shrine vow to recover it and thru time have
watched over the owners of the stone waiting for their chance to steal it
back.

That is all background. The stone has now been left as an inheritance to a
young woman, Rachel Verinder, for her 18th birthday by her weird old uncle
and the suggestion is that it is more of a curse than a gift. It’s brought
to her country manor home by Franklin Blake, the young man that she is
falling in love with. “Hindoo” jugglers are in the neighborhood,
coincidentally, and perform for her party. That very night the stone is
stolen from her bedchamber, and Rachel rejects the attentions of Franklin Blake
and leaves in an emotional tizzy for London, refusing to allow the police to
question her or search her possessions. No one can figure out how the stone
is stolen since no one was in her room. The Hindoo jugglers are taken into
custody but no stone is found. Hmmmm…..Oh, yes, the young housemaid, who
also happens to be in love with Franklin Blake, acts suspiciously and then
commits suicide by throwing herself into quicksand.

As a plot goes, it’s ok. There were several times I found myself wishing
that Collins would move it along just a little faster than he does. And from
a modern perspective he’s slightly racist when describing the Indians. But
the way he tells the story is the juiciest part. He fragments the Narrator
into several people by setting the book up as a memoir of the mystery told
by those involved. The first narrator is Betteredge, the house head servant
whose voice is the perfect rendition of what you might expect a butler to
use. He uses a distant cousin, Miss Clack, to tell part of the story. She’s
an ardent lover of religious tracts and her single minded desire to convert
the damned is so humorously portrayed I snickered almost against my will
thru the whole thing. Sergeant Cuff is wonderful as the objective observer
policeman and he comes closest to figuring out the crime. He’s abrupt and to
the point and reminded me a bit of Columbo in a 19th century portrayal.

The end and solution, which I won’t tell because it IS a mystery, is a
little outrageous. He could have done something more creative with it. But
it does introduce the character of Ezra Jennings, the solitary doctor
addicted to laudanum for some unspecified disease who finally figures it all
out and cracks the mystery.

I like 19c novels. I can usually overlook their flaws just because I enjoy
the writing so much. This one was no different. But it also could hold its
own with a modern British detective mystery.

OK, so I’m reading George R. R. Martin’s epic The Game of Thrones. I’m in the early chapters, in which Lord Eddard Stark has just left his seat of Winterfell in the far north to journey south with his King. Eddard’s oldest son has just uncovered some dreadful information which he must share with his father, and proposes to ride south. His mother says, “There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.”

Immediately I heard an old, crabbed voice crying, “There will always be Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm!”

Now maybe it’s a coincidence, but I doubt it.

Man, but Amazon.com is dangerous. I’ve bought books there, occasionally, but I hadn’t previously looked at compact discs there. We used to go to the record store regularly, but that stopped when we started having kids, and we’ve more or less stopped buying music except on rare occasions. But I’d recently noticed that an album we used to have (and really liked) had gone missing; and another disc got damaged. Since I’d already been out once today, and since I wasn’t even sure they were still in print, I decided to check Amazon.

Oh, dear.

The one that had gone missing was Parcel of Rogues, by Steeleye Span, a British folk-rock band. Amazon had it. They also had six or seven Steeleye Span albums I’d never even heard of–in addition to the eight or nine we already have. Plus a bucket of albums by Maddy Prior, one of Steeleye Span’s singers, none of which we’d been aware of. Maddy Prior has the most gorgeous voice; I think she’s Jane’s favorite vocalist.

This is going to be expensive.

Years ago, I read a delightful little fantasy novel called
The Face in the Frost. It was quirky, whimsical, and scary
all at once, and it worked. It was by a man named
John Bellairs. I never saw anything else by him until
eventually I discovered that he’d taken to writing young adult novels.
Hmm, I thought, and passed on.

One of our local bookstores has a table of books for people who have
finished reading about Harry Potter. I was glancing at it the other day,
and found a volume called The Best of John Bellairs, which
contained three juvenile novels, all of them tales of gothic horror:
The House with a Clock in its Walls,
The Figure in the Shadows, and
The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring. The three novels form
a series; whether there are other books that follow the third one, I
don’t know.

Having recently been told by numerous literary snobs that liking Harry
Potter is childish and a sign of cultural infantilism, and remembering Bellairs’ name fondly, I was caught by a fit of rebelliousness and bought it.

Orphaned Lewis Barnavelt goes to live with his eccentric Uncle Jonathon,
who happens to be a mildly-skilled wizard
of the white variety. His Uncle’s next door neighbor and best friend,
Mrs. Zimmerman, is a skilled witch. Lewis likes them both very much,
and together with his friend Rose Rita they deal with mysterious noises,
long dead wizards, plots to bring about the end of the world, angry
witches, schoolyard bullies, and how to cope with always being picked last for baseball.

Bellairs has a flair for baroque description and gothic horror, but
The House with the Clock in its Walls was his first book for
young readers, and it shows. He talks down to the reader (something
J.K. Rowling never does), and the dialogue frequently made
me cringe. Ironically, though, this first book was also the best and
most interesting of the three. He’s resolved many of his technical
difficulties in the other two books, but they aren’t as much fun. I’d
consider re-reading the first one day, but most likely not the other two.

The illustrations, though, were fascinating. Each of the three tales
were illustrated, and by three different artists. The first book, the
best of the three, and the most horrific, is illustrated by Edward Gorey. What more could you want? The second book is
illustrated by Mercer Mayer. Now, I have great respect for Mayer; but
he always draws the same little mop-haired round-faced kid, and his work
has a warmth and joy that is simply out of place in what’s supposed to be
a scary story. And then for the third book they brought in somebody I’ve
never heard of named Richard Egielski. His drawings are suitably dark,
but they are also lumpy and ugly, and none of the characters look like
quite the same people from one picture to the next. It’s funny how the
quality of the artwork parallels the quality of the tale.

Bottom line…I really like The Face in the Frost.

Like The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, which I
reviewed some time back, The Wee Free Men is a Discworld novel
slanted towards younger readers. It concerns a very young, very determined
dairy maid in oversized boots who’s the only one up to handling a bad case
of the Elves. Experienced Discworlders will know what that means, and
what kind of person it takes to handle it (and indeed, Granny Weatherwax
has brief cameo).

Terry Pratchett knows what it means to write for young readers.
The Wee Free Men is toned down a bit from his regular
Discworld books, but it isn’t dumbed down, and it doesn’t talk down. I
enjoyed it thoroughly. And in fact, it might be a remarkably good place
for you to start, if you’ve not encountered the Discworld before.

Hmmm. Reflections in d minor has been unavailable for several days now. I wonder what’s going on.

Update: Lynn Sislo’s been having trouble with her hosting service; she’ll be back up as soon as she can.