Upon request: Intro post!

Okay, so who am I?

A flouncy coquette?

One half of a majestic team of San-X buus?

A pixellated badass?

ALL EQUALLY CORRECT! But in addition, I’m also Peter’s girl, studying arts at the ANU until I get to jump on a plane and commune with the forest creatures in Ludwigsburg. Things that make me happy are my boy, writing, poetry, painting, folk music, old school snes roms, amazing history, weird comics, baking colourful cupcakes and raising generations of snails in hermetically sealed glass jars. But enough about me – I think it’s time for me to create some content by burbling about the books I’m reading right now. (Well, it was going to be books, plural, but I think I’ve taken up too much space burbling here, so the rest can go in another entry.)

1. Engine Summer

Crowley is a vastly underread author considering the amount of critical attention he receives – ie. Le Guin wants to have his babies, Harold Bloom put him in his Western Canon and gave him a job at Yale – and I think all that love, and the awesome style that attracts it, is actually his problem. He writes weird, haunting stories in a very beautiful, but slow and demanding way, layering symbols and ideas endlessly through winding narratives riddled with snake’s hands and quiet moments; so though he gets lumped in the scifi/fantasy section of the bookshop, there’s nothing really that identifies him with the tropes of those genres other than the fact that his work is both speculative and fantastic. Before I get jumped upon, there’s no genre-snobbery here. I love SF, but I’m willing to admit that ninety percent of what sells (and this can apply to almost anything) is rather awful. It’s pretty much a testament to the inability of people to read outside comfortable cliches that half of Crowley’s amazing stuff is currently OUT OF PRINT, while authors like David goddamn Eddings continue to roll around in the vast piles of money they receive for vomiting out whatever random sequence of narrative clip-art they can think of. SORRY, WAS THAT TOO MEAN? Engine Summer is great, if you couldn’t tell I thought so. It’s the most original take on the post-apocalyptic scenario I’ve ever encountered. The book was written in the 1980s (era of cyberpunk) but it reads like the very best New Wave stuff you can imagine, especially in its conception of non-lame and intriguingly plausible feminist communities (which are SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING than boring old masculine dystopias, and much harder to pull off, too.) My sister apparently wrote an essay comparing Crowley’s organic lyricism to the hard, cold, Neuromancer-y coming out in the same period, which I need to read some time, because while I read Gibson at the height of my cyberpunk phase and totally thought it was the best, I can acknowledge now I’m older that the whole thing hinges on this kind of… not-very-thought-through idea of the mind and the body being totally separate, “pure” consciousness, “disgust for the meat” kind of thing – whereas pretty much what Engine Summer is about is the idea of experience as embodied, lived, physical, and how it’s possible to convey that to another person. There’s no epic battles in Crowley’s novel. Despite a plot that drives you on and a twist that took my breath away, there’s virtually no violence. Instead, what Rush-that-Speaks wants to do is become a saint; and a saint is someone who tells the story of themselves so with such truthful feeling that they become part of whoever hears them, living forever in other lives, mirroring a connected humanity.