Beyond Selidor

I had one day of leave left to use up by the end of September, and so I decided to make this a long weekend, and take Friday off. I'm glad I did, because it allowed me to go to London with Matthias to celebrate a friend's birthday at a party that had been organised in a very last-minute manner.

We made a London day trip of it, catching the train down in the late morning in order to have lunch at one of my favourite restaurants — a Malaysian one in north London — enjoying laksa and various shared snacks while watching the world go by. We then travelled out to an exhibition of contemporary African photography at Tate Modern, walking across and along the river in the afternoon sunshine, before heading over to the birthday party in the evening.

On Saturday I had to go into Cambridge for a couple of errands, which was made more complicated by a total rail strike (meaning no trains at all), which necessitated going in and out by bus. The buses between Ely and Cambridge only go about once an hour (sometimes only every two hours), and my past experience has been that if they're having to cope with rail commuters as well, they quickly become extremely crowded and delayed — so I was dreading the journey. In the end, I needn't have worried — both bus trips were on time, and I sped through the fields, watching the landscape unfold through the bus's top floor front window. Normally when I need to go into Cambridge on the weekend, Matthias comes with me and we go out for a meal at one of our old favourite restaurants or new places that have sprung up since we left, but because of the public transport complications we were too anxious to do that (and in any case the last bus leaves at 6.30pm), so instead we went out for dinner at the Turkish restaurant here. The meals at that restaurant are always massive, meaning I have lots of leftovers!

Today was my typical Sunday — swimming, cooking, yoga, household chores, and lots of reading. I've been working my way through a series of books I loved with fierce intensity when I was in my early twenties but haven't revisited since then (the arrival of all my childhood/teenage/undergrad library from Sydney after fifteen years apart has sparked a desire for endless rereads of old favourites) — Sara Douglass's epic fantasy Troy Game series. This four-part series has an amazing premise — the legendary settlement of Britain by Trojan refugees fleeing the catastrophic consequences of the Trojan War, interwoven with the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur, magical labyrinths whose colossal power can be harnessed by trained individuals to protect (and destroy) cities, and the history of London from Iron Age times to the twentieth century. Each book features the same characters reborn at crucial periods of British history (the mythological founding of London in the wake of the Trojan war, the Norman invasion of England, the restoration of the monarchy after the Civil War, and the first years of World War II), locked in an endless cycle of shifting alliances and betrayals of each other, the labyrinthine power, the city of London, and the elemental powers of the land, doomed to be reborn until they've managed to settle their differences and make common cause. This central premise, and Douglass's seamless weaving of it with weird and forgotten corners of London's history, architecture and landscape, still hold up really well, but I hesitate to recommend the series due to the characters themselves. I used to think — when I read the books for the first time — that Sara Douglass was a bit of a misogynist, but now I honestly just think she was a misanthrope. The books are a ridiculous soap opera of murder, sexual violence, incest, and abuse: Game of Thrones has nothing on them! I kind of treat this like I treat mythology in general — it's stories of non-human and inhumane supernatural beings who are so detached from human morality that it seems pointless to try and apply it to them (the characters in the books start off human, but have become something very different as time goes by, picking up vast and varying supernatural abilities and identities as they go). But if you need characters who behave in a compassionate and admirable way in order to connect with a story (or if you just have a — perfectly reasonable — problem with endless fictional depictions of abuse and sexual violence and women falling in love with their abusers) I would urge you to stay away from these books!

I'll wrap up this post by linking to the five old newspaper book reviews I've managed to transcribe/back up on my long-form reviews blog this past month:

Reading war's unsung songs

Humour behind the absurd

Cruising through a sea of history

Seeing life in inspired ride on the wild side

Telling the stories of survivors before it's too late

I'm making fairly good progress with these, which is pleasing.

Half the entries on fandomsecrets (besides the ubiquitous 'God help me, I ship it!') are not really secrets at all. Instead, they're indirect and cutesy requests from the secret-makers, pleading to be told if any communities exist for their supposedly obscure fandoms: 'X is so brilliant and awesome! So where's the fandom?'

These secrets always struck me as pretty pathetic. If you want a fandom, and it doesn't exist, you'd better go out and create it for yourself. But guess who's just spent the past two hours searching Livejournal, Google, and, God help me, Fanfiction.net, for Troy Game-related...anything. I do this from time to time, hoping that somehow a fandom will have miraculously formed without my knowledge, and every time, it's the same old story. A few snarky reviews on Amazon, scattered reviews on Livejournal and a few other blogs, and wiki articles that don't cite any sources. I feel like slamming my head against a wall. The problem is that everyone except me is obsessed with Sara Douglass' other series, The Axis Trilogy and The Wayfarer Redemption (and, to a certain extend, her latest series, which has characters from these earlier series in it). The only Livejournal comm, tencendor, is, as the name suggests, focused on these series. I, perversely, am utterly indifferent to these series.

I have the same problem when it comes to Romanitas. No one I know has heard of it. It's kind of why I'm attempting to start up a Romanitas-related blog over on Wordpress. But shouting into an empty room is no fun. Where's the fandom?

'Pathetic OP is pathetic.' :D

On the plus side, I came across this link to the excellent Jorge Luis Borges story 'The House of Asterion' as I was searching for stuff on Asterion-from-the-Troy-Game.