Beyond Selidor

I am practically vibrating with anxiety, these days, and it seems to be a permanent state of affairs, unfortunately. Let's try to distract me from this with a meme (via a friend on Facebook):

How many times have you moved house, and what was the reason for moving each time?

( 19 moves behind the cut )

Well, 2021 certainly was a year.

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

My living room is full of lit candles, I've broken out the sloe gin for the first time this year, and daylight saving time ended last night. I'm not really one for Halloween (although I love seeing photos of friends' small children dressed up in adorable costumes), but I am very much one for marking arbitrary turning points in the year with my own invented rituals.

And so, this year, I decided that I would not limit my annual Susan Cooper reread to The Dark Is Rising at the height of midwinter. Instead, I would add to that by reading all five books in Cooper's sequence at the times during which their action takes place. The books in this series are as grounded in time — the turning points of the seasons — as they are in place, so much so that it would be impossible to switch out one book for another (moving Over Sea, Under Stone to autumn, for example, or Greenwitch to high summer). The stories they tell wouldn't work at any other time of the year.

The Grey King, is, above all things, a ghost story. Folkloric 'Sleepers' wake at the call of a magical harp and ride the land again, driving out evil. Will Stanton, the lonely child hero of the series, chases after the ghosts of old Arthuriana, hovering at the edge of his supernatural awareness. And, at the heart of novel are the unquiet ghosts of the past — family secrets, hidden small-scale conflicts in a Welsh farming community, a lonely boy bewildered by his confusing heritage, and the pain all this causes by being left unacknowledged by all concerned. Everyone in this book is haunted, and its story could not be told at any time other than the days on either side of 31st October. The Dark Is Rising sequence is at its strongest when it weaves the personal and domestic with the supernatural, the human with the cosmic struggle between the dark and light, and it does so with particular poignancy in this book.

The Grey King is, in my opinion, the heaviest of Cooper's works in this series. It's still a children's book, and so good must triumph in the end, but here the triumph feels particularly hard won, like coming up for air for one exhausted last breath before the next onslaught, a temporary respite from the storm. There is hope, yes, but it's the hope that comes from surviving to fight another day, and the weary knowledge that each battle is getting harder, and taking more and more of a toll. It's a beautiful book, but not a restful one — the literary equivalent of the end of daylight saving time, and the knowledge that the dark of night will last a little longer every day for some months now.

I'm so glad I chose to reread this perceptive, melancholy little book today.

This post is basically me just closing some tabs on a few fanworks that have come into my orbit over the past week or so.

First up, an absolutely glorious Raven Cycle fic by likeadeuce:

Irregular and Wild (The Class Participation Remix) (2454 words) by likeadeuce
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III, Adam Parrish
Additional Tags: Remix, Shakespeare nerdery, Dead Welsh Kings, Pre-Canon, First Meetings, Meet-Cute
Summary:

“I participated in class twice this week because of you," said Ronan. "You’re gonna ruin my reputation.”

Gansey just smiled. “That’s what I do."

(I just love this so much: Gansey collecting friends through sheer earnest persistence! Shakespeare! these ridiculous teenagers and their ridiculous emotions!)

Next, a review which wandered across my Goodreads feed earlier today. When I read A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, it absolutely blew me away, but kind of left me speechless. It was so, so good, and spoke to me on so many levels that I was almost daunted at the prospect of putting how much it had resonated with me to words. Thankfully, this reviewer, bookswithchaima has done it all for me:

Through Mahit’s eyes, the novel moves us through the stark and painful internal realities of being a non-citizen, and longing to be acknowledged as a citizen. Mahit understood how much Teixcalaan demanded and how very little it gave back, just as acutely as she understood that there is danger in not belonging.

I’ve been an immigrant for three years, and it felt extraordinarily cathartic to find a story in which the narrator is stuck out here with me. Like Mahit, I’ve never been able to chase away the feeling that while this new world I’ve set up house in embraces me with one arm, it also pushes me away with the other. I’ve often felt that something essential within me has been loosened from its moorings, and it dangled outside me, always looking for a place to put down roots and always starved for light. Because, and to borrow some of Mahit’s words, I would never fully belong and I would never stop knowing it. Like Mahit, I’ve never forgotten the reasons why I left. I am a different person in every sense, and as far away from the me who left three years ago as a distant planet. I miss home, and I don’t miss it, and those two realities still chase circles inside my head. But there’s one growing certainty wedging itself inside me every day: once you leave, you can’t really go home again. Not all the way, anyway. No matter how hard you try. Once you leave, something is lost, and I don’t think you ever find it again.

I don't want to equate my own experiences of being a white Australian immigrant with the reviewer's experiences of being a north African immigrant: the European countries to which we have migrated perceive us very differently, and to pretend otherwise would be appropriative on my part. But what this review explains so perfectly is the thing I've been struggling to articulate for nearly two years since reading this book: this story just gets what it is to leave your home, to put down roots elsewhere while knowing doing so is fraught with difficulty, and to love the literature and pop culture of a hegemonic culture with the awareness that this love is tinged with a kind of complicity. Oh, what a perfect review of a perfect book! You can read the whole review here.

My final link is a months-old fanvid by sholio, which is essentially a love letter to the Netflix Marvel Defenders shows, but on another level a love letter to New York, or at least the kind of surreal New York which the Marvel superheroes inhabit. You can watch the vid here.

I've been wanting for a long time to start some kind of regular series of Friday open thread posts here on Dreamwidth. The idea is that I would start off each weekly post with a question, and people could interpret said question as they liked in the answers. But I kept forgetting to post prompting questions in a timely manner, another week would pass, and I would put the whole thing off again. But today — when I actually remembered — seems as good a time as any to start.

This is a bit of an experiment for me. I'm going to try it each week during August, and see how it goes.

Today's prompt gives me an opportunity to link to Amal El-Mohtar's (free) newsletter, in which she also posts regular Friday open threads. I'm not imagining I will mirror Amal's questions every week, but this week's prompt really spoke to me. And it is:

Where is your body and where is your heart? Who or what are you missing, who or what are you rejoicing in the nearness of?

( My answer behind the cut )

On this day, ten years ago, I migrated to the UK. Because I have never been capable of making any change in my life without surrounding myself in a sea of quotes from literature, at the time I quoted one of my favourite works of literature: far from my home/ is the country I have reached, and that quote has proved itself true in many senses over the past ten years.

Although when I made that initial choice to migrate, I had been terrified, in actual fact all I was committing to was nine months spent in Cambridge working on an MPhil. There was no guarantee that anything longer-term would eventuate. But I was twenty-three years old — and a very young twenty-three at that, having only lived away from the family home for a total of six months of my entire life up to that point — and the distance, and the drastic change terrified me. And I have described my decision to migrate in the past as a desperate last throw of the dice — because I had been having a terrible time of it in Australia in the five years since I turned eighteen, moving through a fog of situational depression that I couldn't see a way out of. I had spent those first five years of adulthood completely overwhelmed by the weight of this depression, which manifested in a kind of dull fear, and a fear above all that I was incapable of being happy as an adult. (As an aside, I'm always astonished that anyone who knew or met me during those years has stuck around, because I was a nightmare.) And so the decision to migrate was a kind of test for myself: if I couldn't be happy and make this work, it would never happen. You can see why I was terrified.

I don't know what sort of magic there is in the disgusting, calcified Cambridge water, but nine months and an MPhil turned into five years and a PhD, and eight years and citizenship, and suddenly here I am, and a decade has passed. During that time I gave up on two career paths, and found my calling, acquired two degrees (and, like a glutton for punishment, am literally starting the first classes for yet another degree this very day), fell in love, and out of love, and in love again, got married, found a home, and lost that home in a wave of grief in June 2016 on the very same morning that the British passport that would make my permanent home in this country possible (the document that would, quite literally, make it possible for me to remain) was delivered. Yes, the referendum destroyed my sense of home as being a physical place, a country, and I won't make that mistake again. But above all things, what I learnt in these past ten years (good years, bad years, growing years) is that home is not and cannot be a country (those let you down), but rather it is other people. It is thanks to those other people — the generous, kind and supportive friends I made almost immediately in Cambridge, the open-hearted friends and family members I'd left behind in Australia, and the vast, international community of internet people I've met along the way, whose compassion and patience is boundless — that I feel what I was not able to feel when I left Australia in 2008: safe, happy, and comfortable in my own skin as an adult human being. You are home. You brought me home.

I've added a bunch of new people as a result of st_aurafina's recent friending meme, so I thought it was high time to introduce myself.

( Feel free to skip if you've had me in your circle/flist for a while )

I'm really looking forward to getting to know you! Please feel free to ask whatever questions you like.

One of the first places I ever hung out online was obernewtyn.net, a fansite for Isobelle Carmody's longrunning Obernewtyn series. The first book was published in 1987 - I was a relatively late starter, and only began reading the series in 1999.

Most of the members of the site are Australian, as the series is not widely known elsewhere. Most of us are also no longer the teenagers we where when we began reading the series, but rather in our late twenties, early thirties, or even older, and many of us no longer actually hang out at Obernet, staying in touch through Facebook, Twitter, email or in real life. Most members live in Australia, although due to the nature of Australian immigration patterns, there's small outpost of us in the UK, almost all Australians who moved here — like me — for education or employment.

And after nearly thirty years, the last book in the series is finally out. I feel a bit ambivalent about the books now, for reasons I've laid out at length on my Wordpress blog. But my feelings about the people I met through those books remain the same: they are wonderful, they are great fun, they are a symbol of the passage of time from adolescence to adulthood.

Isobelle Carmody is well aware of the site, and is on friendly terms with many of its members, and as a sort of reward for keeping the faith during those long years of waiting (a length of time that would put fans of A Song of Ice and Fire to shame, as I never tire of pointing out), she has organised a masked ball in Melbourne for the fans. I was invited, but as I now live on the other side of the world I was resigned to missing out.

That's when some of the UK-based Obernetters popped up and started talking about hosting an alternative event in London. For about an hour I was blissfully, joyfully happy. And then the date of these events finally registered.

On the day when the Australian fans will be donning masks and hanging out with Isobelle Carmody, and when the UK-based people will be sipping cocktails in London, I will be in the air somewhere over Indonesia, en route to Sydney to visit my family. And if that doesn't sum up my immigrant existence — split between two places, belonging to neither — I don't know what does.