and another for the list of People I Won't Be Getting To Know Better

The calls you don't want to get always come late at night.

I don't think I've ever heard Stephen sound quite so serious, or . . . restrained.

I think my end of the conversation consisted almost entirely of expletives, with the occasional "I mean" and "Well" dropped in.

I met Cat only a few times, and only twice that stick in my memory: once for games, once for Zeppoli's. Both times I felt that this was someone I'd be spending the next ten years slowly getting to know better.

Damn.

I met her at the funeral
She said I don't know what he meant to me
I just know he affected me . . .
--Dar Williams, "Mark Rothko Song"

The Merchant Princes / Kalpa Imperial / The Ice Harvest

Charles Stross, The Family Trade
Charles Stross, The Hidden Family

Evidently, when Charlie Stross sent his new manuscript off to Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden said "It's brilliant, but a bit long. Let's split it up into two books." So, what you have here is a two-volume novel. Which is why there's a godawful cliffhanger at the end of the first one, and a genuine sense of resolution after the second. I strongly disapprove of this marketing decision, but the books are good enough that I can mostly ignore it.

Comparisons to Zelazny's Amber are immediate, obvious, and superficial. Woman goes worldwalking, discovers that she's a member of the ruling family, uncovers a giant plot. This, though, does Amber several better in terms of realistic world. Amber was all about the epic, the Order vs Chaos, with the labyrinthine machinations of the family taking a slight second place to the inherent coolness of the world. Stross goes the other way: he builds a genuinely medieval world, with other kingdoms and real people instead of the one ruling family, and shows us how the worldwalking gift is powerful but not overwhelming. (Merchant princes indeed. They're all drug smugglers, if you must know.) The plots of the various family members are indeed labyrinthine, but with genuine effects that ripple outward from each. And the Hidden Family of the second volume's title makes a great deal of sense. I'm interested in seeing where this story goes from here, which is about the highest praise I can give something.

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Angelica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial (trans. Ursula K. Le Guin)

. . . wow. Subtitled "The greatest empire that never was." An empire so vast that learning its history, even in abbreviated form, would be the work of several lifetimes. A gathering of tales told by storytellers at who knows what points in the Empire's history (but clearly from several such points). And such variety: emperors rise and fall, an empress outlaws personal transportation, a city built and left empty . . . wow.

It's the voice that makes this book. If you can't stand oral history then this probably isn't for you. (If you're unsure, give it a try. It'll draw you in. One of the best of the stories, "The End of a Dynasty, or the Natural History of Ferrets," is available online.) Should someone else pick this up, I'd be interested to know whether the last story is brilliant or kitschy: I really can't tell.

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Harold Ramis (dir.), The Ice Harvest

I came into this expecting more or less another Grosse Pointe Blank (still the finest comedy of the last N years). Ice Harvest . . . isn't. It's funny: laugh-out-loud funny in a good many places. It's also very very dark. It occupies uneasy territory between black comedy and noir crime drama. I'm really not sure what I think of it: I enjoyed it an awful lot but I don't know if I'd want to see it again often. (Once more, maybe, at some point.)

time, time, time

Just finished reading Robert Penn Warren's absolutely brilliant All the King's Men, an American political novel based loosely on the life of Louisiana graftsman and governor Huey Long. Huey's become mildly fascinating to me in the last couple of weeks; I suspect I need to track down the 1970 biography. Anyway, yesterday or today it occurred to me that Pop Shackelford grew up in Louisiana, and would have been nineteen when Huey was shot. One more thing I can't ask about.

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Ten-year high school reunion on Satyrday night. I went and looked over the list of people likely to show up (the ones who've written with brief bios of what they've been doing for the last ten years), and it suddenly hit me that I just don't care about (we'll be generous and say) 80% of my classmates. I'm unsure why I spent actual money for the privilege of standing around with them. Maybe I should go to the winter guard reunion lunch after all.

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The Taylor family Thanksgiving movie this year ended up being Goblet of Fire. It was all right. About five minutes in I realised I was disliking it simply because the story wasn't self-contained; it took me another three hours to generalise that into "I dislike most stories that aren't self-contained." This just comes out most clearly in movies, where you can be utterly immersed in the world and trips to the Department of Backstory[1] stick out as the devices they clearly are. (Film for the most part hasn't gotten beyond voice-overs and "As you know, Bob.") The techniques tend to be smoother in books, somehow, or maybe I'm just more used to and accepting of them. Food for thought.

[1] Thanks to the wondrous cleolinda for that phrase.

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Mom finally got in from Arkansas yesterday; Dad and a trailerload of stuff arrived, oh, about a week ago. Maybe two. The house is filled with boxes of stuff; the garage, packed full of unfamiliar furniture. Disconcerting.

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Handed in my two-week notice at Walden's a week ago. Manager churn coupled with typical useless holiday help resulted in the store being an utter wreck, and I have no desire to be told to put it right for my measly pay. Measliness of said pay having been driven home on the discovery that said useless holiday help makes roughly 15% more than I do. This I don't need.

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Thankful? I'm thankful I'm able to write. I'm thankful I've got good friends, and family. I'm thankful I'm not outside. I'm thankful I'm not who I was ten years ago.