skygiants

For various reasons I am currently on a train to New York City to catch a mysterious unmarked van to a grocery store parking lot somewhere in the mountains, which makes this a good time I suppose to write up two recent reads that gave me strong NYC emotions even though I will only be in the city for a grand total of forty minutes.

The first was Jillian and Mariko Tamaki's Roaming, a graphic novel about three Canadian students visiting New York over winter break of their first year of college. Zoe and Dani are best friends from high school who've been planning this trip together for a year, because Dani is Extremely Invested in New York, and Zoe is fond of Dani. But Dani's glamorous new art school friend Fiona tags along for the ride, and Fiona and Zoe soon strike up a flirtation that increasingly unbalances the dynamics of the trip and Zoe and Dani's existing friendship. The book is beautifully drawn and does a really good job of conveying the hundred small cuts that snowball into an explosion -- three people sharing one small hostel room and it is SO important where all those people are in relation to each other at any given time -- but what really stood out to me is the way you sometimes get these extremely detailed pages drawn from a concierge desk or a bodega window with the girls on the other side, focusing on all the small detritus the person living in and working that job has accumulated around them. This Visit To New York City is a lifetime first for two of these three girls and a major marker in their personal histories, but the art is always taking time to show you the many people who are also moving through the same space, having their own experience that has nothing to do with that.

And then, from the flip side of the home/away divide, Letter from New York is a written collection of the radio segments that Helene Hanff (of 84 Charing Cross Road) broadcast on the BBC to tell London listeners What It's Like Living In New York. Each entry is a couple chatty little pages, describing an iconic location or New York Experience while providing a friendly update on the friends, neighbors, and many beloved dogs who live in Hanff's apartment building and form a sort of ongoing sitcom cast of characters. It's charming to read, and for me as a former New Yorker kind of a fascinating combo of historical distance and immediate recognition; yes, sitting in line for Shakespeare in the Park is still just like that, except for how it's not in the same place at all.

Anyway, what I liked about both of these very different reading experiences is the way they marry the kind of big expected tropes with small, satisfying, surprising details. I try not to subscribe to New York exceptionalism but I do have a lot of love for the city and the vast complexity of human experience that it contains, and these books both catered to me in that regard very well.

For our book club this week we read Gaywyck, the First Trad Pubbed Gay Gothic Novel [1980] [Avon books] [here is the original and IMO never-equalled cover], an experience that was like .... okay imagine a book that's like you took Jane Eyre, Flowers in the Attic, and Mercedes Lackey's The Fire Rose and threw them all in a blender, and then carefully crossed out the name of whatever Gothic love interest you got from this blender situation and gleefully wrote in GAYLORD over the top of it. That's Gaywyck.

All right, so the plot. It's the year 1899 and young Robbie Whyte, a beautiful blonde sensitive seventeen-year-old waif who's been homeschooled in near total isolation by his Strict and Repressed Father and Mentally Ill Mother, has defiantly rejected his father's intention of sending him to Harvard and as a result found himself with no future .... until he is fortunately yet inexplicably offered a POSITION as PERSONAL LIBRARIAN to the WEALTHY and MYSTERIOUS DONOUGH GAYLORD in the beautiful remote SOUTHERN GOTHIC LONG ISLAND MANOR of GAYWYCK.

(Why is there a Southern Gothic manor in Long Island? something something Southern Belle grandmother something something Civil War backstory yikes something something grandfather revenge murder but do not worry about the grandfather; in 1867, aged seventy-seven, after being thrown from a wasp-stung horse while examining his potato crop for parasites, he died. None of this will be relevant again except for loving descriptions of THE HOUSE.)

Current inhabitants of Gaywyck:

- ROBBIE, whose job is to decoratively putter around with the books, occasionally encountering a murder attempt, a dark family secret, or a woman living in the walls who looks startlingly like his mad mother, and going "wow! bizarre! well, anyway"
- TWO WEIRD OLD MEN who used to be tutors to the Gaylord family and now apparently do nothing at all except occasionally utter ominous warnings or threats. One of them [regular tutor] lost two fingers in a mysterious and tragic tutor accident and the other [music tutor] plays dramatic piano all day and is intermittently possessed by the delusion that he himself is Beethoven. ABSOLUTELY impossible to ask them to do anything about organizing the books, we MUST hire a beautiful young twink for this job
- BRIAN, the beautiful mute genius kitchen boy who also suffered a tragic past accident of which we do not speak; as it turns out, not actually mute, perfectly happy to speak to Robbie, which is meant I think as an indication of how special and beautiful Robbie is but in fact is perfectly well explained by the notion that Brian has no interest in interacting with the Weird Old Men and has come up with a reason not to do it
- CAEL, the cat, who normally only loves Donough Gaylord but sees Robbie and clearly immediately is like "this child does not have the sense God gave a grasshopper" and appoints himself his personal guardian. Victim of multiple murder attempts but don't worry, we are not killing the cat today.
- A WOMAN LIVING IN THE WALLS who looks STARTLINGLY LIKE ROBBIE'S MAD MOTHER
- AN UNKNOWN PERSON WHO KEEPS STALKING ROBBIE AND LEAVING THREATENING MAYBE-GIFTS AND ATTEMPTING TO MURDER THE CAT
- a full, totally normal 19th century household staff that Robbie is surprised 1/3 of the way through the book to learn exist because he's too busy being distracted by beautiful Brian, the weird old men, the woman living in the walls, etc. etc.

Anyway. As indicated, Robbie's time at Gaywyck is haunted by various ominous signs, portents, indications of dark family secrets, etc. Robbie, one of the most incurious protagonists of Gothic literature, does nothing about any of this except Experience it intermittently between stints of book-pottering, art-admiring, and also transformative sexual awakenings (probably not actual sex yet) (discovery of pornography mysteriously scratched into a cave, etc, plus sexual fantasies about Donough Gaylord) (unless they're not fantasies! who could say!). Every so often Donough Gaylord swoops into the mansion or invites Robbie back to Manhattan to shower him with gifts, new suits, trips to the opera, and delightful social events with his best friends, a charming interracial gay lawyer couple who fortunately have no problems being a charming interracial gay lawyer couple even though the year is 1899.

Facts about Donough Gaylord: he ALSO had a Mentally Ill Mother! he also had an IDENTICAL TWIN who was VIOLENT and did MYSTERIOUS HARMS to VARIOUS FAMILY MEMBERS and when they were children no one could tell them apart! but don't worry, the evil twin is tragically dead now, as are all the other Gaylords, and Donough now moves sadly through the Gilded Age in a haunted cloud using his vast fortune to support unions and orphans and the opera and Impressionist art, and now, also, Robbie.

To be clear, Donough is not the kind of Gothic protagonist who goes into violent rages. Donough shows no signs that he would fly into a fury if Robbie brought up the various weird things that he has experienced at Gaywyck or perhaps posed a question about the woman living in the walls who looks startlingly like his mad mother, or maybe warned Donough that someone was apparently trying to murder his cat. Robbie simply does not wish to upset the status quo: despite or perhaps because of the fact that he's constantly whiplashing between perfect romantic wish-fulfillment and ominous Gothic portents, he is happy as a clam and his only real concern is wondering why Donough hasn't actually fallen into bed with him yet despite the fact that he's constantly buying him romantic gifts and his charming gay friends think they would make a perfect couple.

Alas! then Incidents occur to upset the peace of Gaywyck! specifically, Donough in his endless urge to rescue orphans sends a streetwise fourteen-year-old urchin who has been Living Rough since he was But Five Years Old out to recover in the beautiful Southern Gothic Long Island air. Robbie hates this urchin on sight but Gaywyck's two weird old men both immediately become obsessed with him and the street urchin decides that playing them sexually against each other is his best chance to make a profit on this weird situation; Robbie, seventeen, stupid, and not a mandated reporter, watches this increasingly tortured dynamic play out like >:((( when are things gonna get back to NORMAL around here >:(((

Anyway, the disruptive energy of the street urchin sets off a chain of events that gradually brings all the dark secrets of Gaywyck to light! ( cut for more Dark Secrets than I frankly thought it possible to fit in one book; c/w child abuse, incest, the absolute whole nine yards )

Now as you can see I have written this post with Some Humor and that is because the book is absolutely and intentionally camp, but I want to be clear that it isn't parody: the writing style is in full and sincere 19th-century Gothic earnest, and the heart of the book in and amongst all the nonsense and wish fulfillment and Extremely Dramatical Plot Events is about a young gay man joyously discovering himself and being frankly thrilled to be who he is and excited to be alive about it. The fact that this is happening amidst a background of so much incest, child abuse, etc kind of just feels like an extra defiant middle finger thrown out at a world that [especially in 1980] largely associated queerness with this particular flavor of villainy: so what if the backstory of your Gothic mansion is filled with all this shit? Is this going to stop you from being delighted to discover that gay sex is real and lifetime gay partnerships are real and you absolutely get to have them if you want to? No! It will not!! So shout outs to Robbie and his overall joie de vivre, despite occasional bouts of weeping maidenly tears; the book has absolutely earned its reputation as a classic.

ETA: one of my fellow book clubbers has also now left an incredible and extremely accurate book club review although you may have to be logged in to see it

A year or so ago I dug up my old copy of Michaela Roessner's The Stars Dispose from my parents' house to reread in preparation for a panel on food in fantasy because I vaguely remembered it as a Fantasy Novel About Renaissance Culinary Arts. However I did not get around to it in time and so I set it aside and genarti picked it up and read it instead, and then we passed it on to another friend who was looking for books in the brief nineties trend of Fantasy Novels about Renaissance-ish Apprentices [a trend I am always hoping will be revived, so far in vain]. Now it has at last returned to me and I thought: well, I didn't read it for the panel on food in fantasy, but perhaps now I'll read it in time for the panel on centering the arts in alt-history --

Well, I didn't actually succeed in doing that either. But I have now reread it! What a weird and charming* book!

*with caveats

So, the fantasy premise of this book is that there are various parallel universes that all impact each other, and some bad parallel universe forces are Out to Get the City of Florence Specifically for ambiguous reasons. The fate of the Medici is all tied into this in some way so it's very important that beautiful wise clever baby Catherine de Medici (yes, that Catherine de Medici) (this isn't quite popehunk but it's not NOT that either) survive and flourish, so the city can flourish, and both the city's chief astrologer and Catherine de Medici's cook are doing different sorts of magic to ensure that happens despite the sieges and plagues and various other dangers that are constantly besetting Florence through this time.

This is the premise, and the plot, more or less, but it's not what the book actually cares about. What the book cares about is a young man named Tommaso (the son of the cook) learning how to cook beautiful Renaissance cuisine, and also then apprenticing in the art of Renaissance sculpture, and then bringing these two fields together for incredible innovations in the world of edible art. Approximately 70% of this book is rich, beautifully researched descriptions of Tommaso's coming-of-age as a young and gifted artisan in Renaissance Florence coming into his own artistically despite the plagues and the sieges and the breakdown in his parents' marriage, and then the other 30% is interstitial scenes reminding us that Tommaso's mom is very concerned about supernatural dangers from another dimension and they'll probably strike via the Pope's bad decisions for some reason.

Now, when I say coming of age, the book starts when Tommaso is eleven or twelve and covers two or three years of his life and, well -- by the end of the book, Tommaso has both graduated from his apprenticeship and is about to take over as a household head chef, and engaged in a sexual affair with Michaelangelo* which Roessner clearly wants us to see as very poignant and romantic .... great position for a promising eighteen-or-so year old food artist to be! Really charming as long as I was careful never to do any math about it whatsoever!

*Michaelangelo like Catherine de Medici is also vitally supernaturally important to the well-being of Florence

But I do think Roessner is interested in, and pretty good at, writing from within a sixteenth-century mindset rather than a modern one; she's certainly interested in and good at writing about the immediate details of carving a roast, casting a medal, baking an extremely fancy loaf of bread, and about the satisfaction of learning to do these things well. I miss this kind of fantasy. It can come back into fashion any day now.

A couple of recent theatrical experiences I have not yet had the time to write up in full so I might as well write up in short:

1. ( A Khmer Swan Lake )

2. ( Spring Experience at the Boston Ballet )

3. ( The Aria of Julie D'Aubigny )

4. ( LES MISERABLES )

The Corn King and the Spring Queen is one of Naomi Mitchison's earliest books, and What A Book it is! Seven hundred and some pages of fascinated swings and roundabouts, both for the protagonists and for my feelings about what she was doing with them.

Set mostly between the years of 229 and 222 BCish, The Corn King and the Spring Queen follows two thematic plotlines, emblematized by two young women:

- in Marob, an imaginary Scythian state where magic works and is real and the good of the community is reliant on rites and rituals as performed by the semi-divine-incarnate Corn King and Spring Queen, a young woman named Erif Der becomes Spring Queen and bespells Tarrik the Corn King into marriage at the behest of her ambitious father, who is planning a coup. Erif and Tarrik both have Many Personality Problems, but despite the mutual violence of their initial relationship and the following deadly power struggles between Tarrik and Erif's family, their marriage grows into something real and important to both of them, even as it destabilizes the necessary magic of Marob.

- in Sparta, a real historical Greek state where magic does not work and is not real and the good of the community is reliant on political revolution, a young woman named Philylla, the favorite teen handmaiden of Agiatis of Sparta, enthusiastically supports the radical reforms of Kleomenes III and enters into a long patriotic engagement with Kleomenes' boyfriend in a sort of king/king's boyfriend/queen's favorite handmaiden/queen sedoretu situation. As Kleomenes attempts to bring his revolution across the Greek world, Philylla struggles to convince even her own family of the desperate necessity of persistent social change.

These characters intersect first when a stray Stoic philosopher washes up on the shore of Marob and, after some time tutoring Tarrik in philosophy, asks to be escorted back to Sparta to assist with the radical revolutionary reforms. In consequence of that first trip, Tarrik and Erif struggle to reconcile modern Greek ideas with their semi-divine roles in Marob, and Erif's artist brother Beris falls in hopeless love with Philylla in the course of attempting to convince her that art and aesthetics have value for their own sake, which unfortunately for him is a very un-Spartan point of view. (Though by the end, it's Erif's love for Philylla that is arguably truer, more romantic, and more significant.)

Then history happens, which I valiantly did not look up at any point over the course of the book despite being desperate to know how tumblr Naomi Mitchison was being in her characterization of heroic gay socialist King Kleomenes -- and the answer is, not very, actually! By which I mean, any time I started to squint at the book like 'Naomi are you sure about this heroic gay socialist king of Sparta,' Naomi would do something to remind me that she knew very well that the rules of the ancient world are neither the rules of her time nor of mine, and that there's no such thing as a bloodless revolution or a powerful man without abuses. All of her protagonists are deeply human and sympathetic and struggle relatably and love deeply and also do terrible things. All of them make decisions for the best of reasons that end up with the worst of consequences, but all of them also sometimes do something absolutely shitty just because they're having a bad day and they can. It's the year 229 BC. The Spring Queen can kill a slave if she wants. The king of Sparta can force a captive woman if he wants. Philylla ... okay Philylla is actually a pretty perfect revolutionary cinnamon roll .... no, Philylla despite her dedicated solidarity for the Spartan working class can be a Spartan supremacist if she wants.

There's a kind of fascinating double-anthropological vision in reading this book in 2025: here's Naomi, doing her best with the information she has to imagine how people living in 229 BC thought and acted as driven by their own particular social concerns and understanding of the world, and here's me, doing my best with the information I have to imagine how 1930s ardent upper-class free-love socialist Naomi Mitchison is bringing her own particular social concerns and understanding of the world to this vision of 229 BC, and how she wants me to read what's happening in it. This book is profoundly about 1930s politics. It's profoundly about her understanding of the world as a deeply unfair place, and herself as a person who's been very privileged within it; about her belief that revolution is necessary and yet cannot come without cost and it's very hard to say when the cost becomes too high to pay for the revolution, especially when it's women in particular who get crushed in the gears; about her struggles with the good of the individual versus the good of the community, about art as ideology vs art as something worth pursuing in and of itself; about her ideas on marriage and successful and unsuccessful polyamory! I could write multiple dissertations on the sexual politics of this book alone.

Because it's Naomi Mitchison it is of course magnificantly tragic but also sometimes very funny. One of my favorite bits is when Erif and Beris go visit the Oracle at Delphi and have a very charming Ancient World Tourism experience; another is a series of letters written by a jaunty young Athenian playwright who ends up in Marob for a while having a Very Scary Adventure with Tarrik during which he almost dies multiple times and goes through several long dark nights of the soul, which does not stop him from cheerfully adding that he is getting on like a house on fire with his play: I seem to have accumulated ideas in all that time away from the manuscript. A new comic character has turned up, and the heroine has really made one or two quite smart epigrams! As a matter of fact I shall probably have to rewrite a good deal; some of the early speeches look simply childish now. And what a lovely lot of new metaphors I've picked up! (One has to suspect this is a little bit of Naomi joke on herself.)

And then there are the darker jokes, as when, for example, in the section Kings Who Die For Their People, an adolescent Spartan prince grimly girds his loins and goes to offer sexual favors to the Ptolemaic pharaoh in exchange for military assistance and it all goes embarrassingly wrong and he has to get smuggled out of the palace by snickering concubines. Kings die for their people in this book in all kinds of ways. Including, of course, the literal ones. Naomi is a socialist, of course she doesn't believe in kings, but maybe, if they're martyred, it's okay ....? Or maybe it isn't. Maybe the cost is still too high. But oh, boy, is it sexy; and oh, boy, what ideological art you can make of it --!

Anyway this post is already too long so I'll stop it here, though I haven't even touched on the half of what's interesting about the text; I really want to argue with her about really quite a lot of it but there's so much meat there to argue with. It's a book worth arguing with, and worth arguing with people about.

Earlier this week we saw new Black Swan musical, which felt so obviously necessary and important that it was only like a few days prior that I realized I had never actually seen the movie Black Swan. So! On Monday we watched Black Swan (2010) and then on Tuesday we went to see the show.

For those of you who missed Black Swan (2010), it's just under two hours of tightly-wound ballerina Natalie Portman getting cast as the lead in Swan Lake and then dramatically unraveling betwixt the combined pressures of controlling live-in stage mom, ambitious shadow-double understudy [ft. hallucinatory toxic yuri], and psychosexually exploitative artistic director Thomas Leroy.

Black Swan (the musical) (2026) is also two hours of a tightly-wound ballerina getting cast as the lead in Swan Lake and then dramatically unraveling, but there are some key differences; most significantly, there is no psychosexually exploitative artistic director! Instead, towards the beginning of the show, the company manager explains that the celebrity guest choreographer for Swan Lake has had to pull out unexpectedly ["cancelled," the corps mutter sagely to each other] and is going to be replaced by a different celebrity choreographer, Margaux LeRoy, who appears and immediately delivers a speech about how in her Swan Lake Reimagined there will be NO prince! NO evil wizard! It's ALL about the swans!

I admit I do think it's really funny that Jen Silverman and Dave Molloy were like 'please clap we've made a Black Swan musical without heterosexuality -- sorry I mean this cool feminist choreographer character who is certainly not our in-text stand-in has made a Swan Lake without heterosexuality. and you should clap for her.' But also I am really sympathetic to and interested in the project -- this adaptation is making an argument that voyeuristic sexual exploitation by domineering men is not the only kind of horror story you can tell about ballet, that you can focus the horror explicitly on a pressure-cooker of women in a toxic system fracturing against each other in various ways and have it be just as sharp and scary and powerful. I appreciate this as an adaptation tactic; I think the show gets like 75% of the way to being something that could, if successful, be better than the film.

( unfortunately I don't think the show actually manages to prove its point; that said there was some stuff I really liked )

A few weeks ago I was grimly gearing up to do the Hugos homework when suddenly I realized that Hugo voting privileges do not actually pass over year to year, only nominating privileges. I'm free! Flinging the nominations list joyously to the wind in favor of catching up on overdue library books and the massive stacks of books in my own home! However before this happy revelation I did read The Raven Scholar which had vaguely been on my list anyway, largely on a series of planes.

I was under a profound misapprehension about the plot of The Raven Scholar. I spent the first several chapters, in which a young woman whose father has been executed for treason gets brought before the reigning Emperor on the occasion of her majority, peacefully thinking to myself "and I suppose from here she's going to end up going to some sort of raven school." Not the case! Very different things happen to that young woman! In case you are confused like me, The Raven Scholar is ostensibly about adults in their late twenties and thirties, although I have to say I found them extremely YAish adults -- kind of a reverse Six of Crows problem, these people extremely felt like teenagers to me -- and the actual heroine is Neema, who has already graduated from raven school and is now a full-fledged raven postgrad.

Neema's plot begins with her at the bottom of the raven postgrad pecking order due to classism and being a poor scholarship student; then she accepts a government order that everyone thinks is a bit evil and gets a big promotion out of it, so by the time the plot proper begins she's the most important raven postgrad in the Empire and also the most disliked. She has a mean girl nemesis, and a sexy chaotic ex-boyfriend from the fox monastery who hasn't spoken to her in the years since she accepted the evil order despite the fact that she's pretty convinced that he himself does government assassinations --

-- there are six important animal schools, by the way, or rather animal monasteries, and they're all associated with Characteristics. Perfect for sorting! The shadow of Harry Potter does inescapably hang over this a bit; we've got our Scholarly Ravens, our Hardworking Oxen, our Brave Bears, our Extremely Classist Evil Tigers, and then we've added to this Loyal Hounds, Artistic Monkeys, Sexy Chaotic Foxes and Weird Magical Dragons, so don't worry! there are eight kinds of people instead of the reductive four! I was also unfortunately reminded of when I had to take management training classes at work and we were taught with great seriousness how to identify our coworkers as lions, peacocks, turtles, and doves --

Anyway! Neema is having problems with her social life, is what I mean to say, and she's in charge of organizing prom, by which I mean the big festival during which representatives from each of the different types of monasteries compete in combat! and absurd little Taskmaster competitions!! to see who will next be awarded the throne now that the current Emperor has ruled the legal amount of years he's supposed to after winning the last competition and is ready to retire!!!

AND THEN ... in the MIDDLE of all of this ... someone is MURDERED.

After my initial confusion, I found the first 2/3 of the book really enjoyable to read on a plane. I think it was very clever of Antonia Hodgson to go "what do people like? well, murder mysteries. And what also do people like? When people have to compete in absurd little Taskmaster competitions." I'm people! I also like murder mysteries and absurd little competitions. ( some broad strokes plot spoilers from here )

So although I had a good time for much of this book I ended up pretty disinclined to read the next one, but I can certainly see why people liked it and it probably wouldn't have come bottom of my Hugo list, if I was voting. Which, thankfully, I'm not, so I don't have to rank anything!

I am under a kind of curse, which is that if I see a King Arthur riff that looks exceptionally strange or funny I must bring it home to experience and add to my collection [mentally, metaphorically] [the physical book does not need to stay in my physical home once I have consumed its contents].

King Arthur in the children's novel The Camelot Code: The Once and Future Geek is also under a kind of curse, which is to say, he's King Arthur. I found this novel in a used bookstore and read the back copy explaining the plot, which is that Arthur time travels to the future, self-Googles, and immediately decides to abandon his destiny and try out for the football team instead. The mirror crack'd from side to side, "the curse has come upon me," I cried, eyes fixed on Camelot, etc.

So! The Camelot Code begins with best friends Sophie and Stu, playing their favorite video game Arthurian Flavor World Of Warcraft with their buddy Melvin from California. Alas! Stu can't raid next Friday because he has recently joined the soccer team and he has to go to pizza with them. Sophie worries that their friendship, which is built around being geeks who don't have normal high school hobbies, is perhaps doomed. :((

Meanwhile, in The Indeterminate Past, best friends Serving Boy Arthur and Princess Guinevere (a plucky warrior princess who can absolutely use a sword but is also at risk of being Sold Off Like A Mule to the Highest Bidder in Marriage) are hanging out secretly distributing largesse to oppressed peasants. Alas! They can't distribute any more largesse because evil Agravaine and Kay have shown up to bully them and oppress the peasants even more. Arthur worries that their friendship, which is built around being compassionate heroes who are not married off to evil knights, is perhaps doomed. :((

These two worlds connect when, during a visit to Merlin's Crystal Cave [it's very sparkly] [Merlin distributes Ray-Bans to all visitors], Gwen and Arthur accidentally drop Uther's magical scabbard down a time portal to Massachusetts, which Merlin keeps open for the wi-fi. Through a series of chaotic events, Arthur ends up at Sophie and Stu's school, while Stu under a shape-changing spell has to sub in for him at Camelot to pull the sword out of the stone and get the legend off on the right track.

Merlin is able to recruit Sophie and Stu specifically because! it turns out! he's their raid buddy Melvin! To be clear, this is not part of some Merlin master plan. Merlin just enjoys Arthurian-flavor WoW and it is NOT weird for him that everyone in Arthurian-flavor WoW greets each other by going "May the Merlin be with you."

( The rest is under a cut because I do feel compelled to describe the entire plot in detail )

Okay, that's all. It's in the mental collection. My curse has been lifted, and the book can now leave my house again.

So the Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network, where I volunteer, is scraping the bottom of their bond fund. If you have a few pennies to toss, now would be a really exceptional time.

(I personally have been scratching my head trying to figure out what kind of best talent show this town has ever seen might be helpful to the overall cause, so I guess if there's anything you've ever wanted to see me do or post about particularly that might work as a fundraising incentive, let me know???)

I do think there is a particular charm, a particular interest, in a biographer who is really visibly in love with their subject. Like, you probably wouldn't want it in every biography. But it's nice to know that the author really extremely wants to be there. It gives an enjoyable sort of tension to the reading experience: at what point is the book going to go off-the-rails because the author has spontaneously transmigrated back to 1931 in a doomed attempt to alter the course of history and fix Buster Keaton's Hollywood career with the power of her passion alone? It could happen! It feels like everything has been foreshadowing it!

Obviously Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the of the Twentieth Century does not in fact go off the rails in this way, it does actually remain an interesting and readable biography that uses Keaton's life and career as a jumping-off point to explore the times in which he lived. In the book's introduction, Stevens explains that her fascination with Keaton is such that whenever I heard about something that took place between 1895 and 1966, I found myself trying to fit that event or phenomenon into the puzzle of his life and work. (She also uses the introduction to share a poem she wrote about Keaton. It's not bad!) Anyway, this is a pretty fruitful methodology that leads her to down various side paths to explore not just the history of early cinema but other twentieth-century touchstones such as changing child labor laws, vaudeville and minstrel shows, the rise of Alcoholics' Anonymous, and the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald.*

Often these aren't things that directly impacted Keaton -- Keaton never participated in AA, for example; by the time the program started to gain popularity, Keaton had already hit his rock bottom and come out the other side -- but they run along parallel tracks, such that Keaton's life casts a mirror on the phenomenon or vice versa, or there's an interesting alternate pathway to be imagined where they did indeed intersect. Keaton and Chaplin only worked together once, but you can't help but compare/contrast their trajectories; Keaton and Fitzgerald may never even have met at all, but the downward arcs of their careers were both intertwined with MGM executive Irving Thalberg, on whom Fitzgerald based his last novel.

(Also, it can't have helped with Fitzgerald's fascination, says Stevens, that Thalberg was also extraordinarily good-looking, slight-framed and serious-faced, with large, liquid brown eyes and wavy black hair -- an appearance not unlike that of a certain slapstick comedian whose contract his company had just acquired. We DON'T know they met but we DO know that if they did, Fitzgerald would CERTAINLY have thought Keaton was hot!)

It feels, in other words, like exactly what it is -- a book written by a person whose obsession with one individual has led them down a number of other interesting rabbitholes, to fruitful if not entirely cohesive results. If Keaton had been a fictional character, this might have been a 120K fanfic with a number of beautifully researched, oddly specific chapters. Because Keaton is a real person, we got this book. I had a great time!