It only took five years and a fatal disease scare to get me to update the site. Kris, you can stop fussing about this now.
The blog will be my primary way to keep people updated on health issues, the cat’s health issues and all the rest of the things that periodically necessitate talking to a dozen or so people about something. (Yes, at least that many people are interested in the affairs of furry spinster Motley Sue. Go figure.)
Really opinionated stuff most likely won’t show up here, simply because it would be A Bad Thing for the people I cover in Hesperia to feel like they could see my personal biases slipping into my work at the paper. A few already do think they see it, but since I’ve done my best to be a blank slate, what they see tends to be cancelled out by what other people see, and over time, most people who care about such things have grudgingly accepted that I’m trying to be fair all around. Coming out as a staunch believer in X, Y or Z would make that a lot more precarious.
I will have opinions about other stuff, but fair warning up front, it won’t be heavy duty “Economist“-inspired discussions of world issues, but more along the lines of what I felt about the last book I read (“Monstrous Regiment” by Terry Pratchett, amazingly good) and such.
I will slowly be strip-mining and then closing the old Secret Identity and Wandering Star sites, incorporating that content into the new set-up. Where appropriate, I’ll actually be backfilling in the blog with dated entries, so don’t be surprised to see past months and years fill up with entries, much like the sarcoidosis-related mass e-mails below have appeared, months before the blog actually opened.
Oh, and if you miss the old classic LBY3.com front page, I liked it too, in all its simplicity. A stripped-down version that just points to the sites that still exist can be found here.
Talk to you soon.
Six weeks later, a small knot of string, the external portion of the internal dissolving stitches, was still extruding from my body. When I sneezed or yawned or even laughed hard, I could feel material inside my neck. Maybe some of it was simply the stiff gash of scar tissue (still very red and noticeable), but at least some of it was string inside my neck.
So Anne, my nurse, took a look at it. She reached out, touching the knot.
“Does that hurt?”
“Ow, yes.”
“Huh.” She quickly grabbed the knot and yanked it, pulling out a pink string about three inches long. “That wasn’t going to dissolve.”
All that stands between me and a career in medicine is a larger streak of sadism.
Dr. Ahmed: “This is the toughest cat I’ve ever seen.”
We know what will eventually kill Motley — kidney disease — but it looks like, once again, reports of her death have been greatly exaggerated. She has severe cataracts, and had diarrhea earlier today (such fun to clean out of a cat’s tail and nether regions), but all seems pretty much normal. At this rate, she’s going to outlive both of us.
(Above: Motley Sue takes advantage of me being sick)
Motley went to the doctor earlier this week. She has been indifferent to wet food (but eating dry food, in a strange reversal of normal behavior). She’s had diarrhea and her pupils were enlarged — a sign of stress and/or pain.
The doctor confirmed that her kidney disease had advanced significantly. He gave her appetite boosting shots and fluids to flush out her kidneys, but her appetite for non-dry food has been so-so at best.
She’s home right now, with pills to take (antibiotic and appetite boosting), but if she doesn’t start eating a lot more soon, it’s bad news. Her pupils are still enlarged as I type this, but she just got home, and the stress of the hospital may still be in effect (at her age, de-stressing takes a while).
We’ll know more about where she is health-wise in early next week. But right now, she’s clearly grateful to be out of Kitty Jail and relaxing in her cat bed.
To begin with, imagine Harry Potter as written by Jane Austen. While that is an imprecise high concept version of “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
,” it embraces the two most important aspects of the book would-be readers need to reconcile themselves with. If you are uncomfortable with magic — not magic realism, not imagined magic, but actual magic done by the characters — the book is not for you. Likewise, if the notion of reading nearly 800 pages written by Susanna Clarke channeling Jane Austen sounds hard to bear, wait for the movie.
But for those who find either of those bearable — or, better yet, an exciting prospect — “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” is a strange and wonderful novel that you will live in for longer than you expect and shorter than you will end up wishing.
One of the first truly adult fantasy novels — which is to say, it emphasizes real emotions, subtle and conflicting motivations and genuine love over special effects, gore and sex — Clarke’s novel is full of characters who can be both repellent, attractive and pitiable, sometimes all in the space of one paragraph. The novel, even if one has given into temptation and read too many detailed reviews, is full of surprises, both of the large plot twist sort and or the small character moments sort. The ending, in particular, is a bittersweet wrench, perfectly in keeping with the rest of the novel, and yet slightly surprising and heartbreaking despite that.
With the love between Jonathan and Arabella Strange, the scholarly passions of Mr. Norrell and a host of “theoretical magicians,” the strange and eventually fascinating Childermass, the various cloying toadies, the sweet and in-over-their-head Greysteels, Clarke creates more delicately detailed and compelling characters than most novelists manage in a whole series of novels. And it is as much the love between Jonathan and Arabella that drives this novel as it is the love of magic of the two protagonists. But there is magic a-plenty, including spectacular magic wrought on the battlefield against Napoleon, whom one feels almost sorry for as Strange gets more and more comfortable in his role as Wellington’s magician.
But the plot is longer and more complex than that, and Napoleon is mostly a stepping stone for the magicians in their quest to return English magic to its rightful place, and their real enemy is subtle and devious, and more than a little insane. Their enemy is one of the most interesting antagonists in fiction, and Clarke successful makes him a mythic sort of villain. At the same time, she also manages to create a great deal of mystery around the ancient Raven King, creating a mystique around a totally made-up character that has the weight of real world myth and legend.
Despite the novel’s historical period and many ties to real world history, it’s not necessary to know anything about the British fighting Napoleon, the poetry and life of Lord Byron or anything else of the sort. Clarke provides more than enough to understand and enjoy the setting, although the more one knows about history, the more Clarke’s very low-key winks at it are revealed — Byron’s and the Shelleys’ legendary Swiss vacation that, in many ways, gave birth to the modern horror genre gets a dismissive reference from Strange at one point, who obviously does not yet know the historical significance of the house on the lake and those who stayed there, for instance.
I normally whip through a novel this size, particularly if I love it, as I did this one, in a weekend, or a week at most. Instead, I found myself putting the book down and not wanting to go further, wanting to savor and digest the book in small doses. Now that I’ve finished it, I only have a small short story by Clarke (on the official novel Web site) left to me of it.
If the initial description — Harry Potter as written by Jane Austen — sounds good to you, don’t hesitate. The sooner you enter the 19th century England of Strange and Norrell, the happier you’ll be. This is easily one of the best novels, of any genre or literary merit, I’ve ever read.
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