tavie.com

I'm in the middle of three books that I'm really enjoying now. This puts me in a generally improved attitude toward life, as long as the books last. I can make books last pretty long these days, because I get so distracted by the mind-mushifying internet.

I'm going somewhere with this. One of the books is Peter Beagle's The Folk of the Air. I'd tried to read this a couple of times before and it didn't take, but I guess third time's the charm because I'm now lapping up this book like a cat with cream. It's just so full of the kind of yummy, descriptive prose that I adore:

"The Bay took up half the horizon, rumpled and dingy as a motel bedspread, with a few sails frozen under the bridge and San Francisco behind, slipping like soap through a dishwater mist."

and

"Outside, beyond their borders, the honey-slow twilight was thinning and quickening to a cold, dusty lavender."

The book was written in 1977 and is about a bunch of hippies in a northern Californian college town (not called Berkeley) who are in club where people romanticize and "selectively recreate the culture of" the Middle Ages (not called the SCA.)

We knew this day would come, didn't we, we knew this day would come for a daughter of His Baronship Lord Frederic the Silent - like, if I were one of those dorks, what role would I end up with? Of course I'm gonna wonder for a fleeting moment; Beagle writes about it so well.

Obviously my first thought is that I'd be a scullion or spinster - I'd be swabbing the kitchen or spinning yarn, right? (Actually I'd be dead of the plague or madness or something.) But then I wouldn't get to live at court and that's no fun. The whole point of selective recreation of a romanticized past is that the filth, pestilence, lack of medical technology and fact that women are chattel are all completely beside the point: I don't think they let people play peasants in the SCA. So I think the best I could get to would be lady-in-waiting. I can't imagine that I'd actually get to be a titled noblewoman, but maybe a noblewoman's best friend.

Even in my fleetingest fantasies about playing pretend-- meta-fantasies-- I'm pretending as a supporting character.

Yeah.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:02 PM

1 Comments:

Kirsten said...: You'd be a hermit witch at your age, dude. Or a nun in a nunnery. No such thing as single ladies back in the day.; 1:26 AM

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