fulselden

So, I wrote a really odd little take on the Russian story of Snegurochka, or the Snow Maiden (one version;  wiki; not to be confused with the Snow-child) - as to which, I hope I haven't done anything crass. I have to admit this is not so much a reflection of any for reals knowledge about Russia on my part and more a result of flipping through two awesome books that I read a while back, and discovering another awesome book is ON THE INTERNET.

Book one: The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia, W. F. Ryan (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999). This just does what it says on the tin: it's a clear-eyed, well-written, and rather charming general survey of Russian magical practices. I can't speak at all to its accuracy, though it looks solid and has good reviews from those in the know. Ryan wisely refrains, in general, from analysis and theorising, and gives proper weight to the oral as well as the written tradition, though there's particular emphasis on divinatory texts (his area of expertise). He mostly concentrates on 'the Orthodox East Slavs of Kiev Rus' and their descendants [...] wth a heavy emphasis on Muscovite and Imperial Russia', though there's material from further afield. Do I have to say that this book is COMPLETELY FASCINATING? It doesn't have to devote time to wrestling with past anglophone witchcraft studies, because they largely ignored Russia, and it really is just an excellent overview.

The title comes from the idea that the village bathhouse, a liminal place used for pre-marriage ritual baths, for delivering babies, and of course for gettin' naked (and hence removing items of magical protection such as cross and belt), was pretty much the archetypal setting for popular magic. And also the haunt of a particularly hostile domestic sprite, the bannik or baennik, 'variously envisaged as a naked dwarf or a little old man', and thus likely to be dangerous if visited alone or after sundown. Cross-reference with Gregory the Great talking about bathhouse attendants who turn out to be penetential spirits, and with the shower scene in Psycho, I guess.

Book two: Harvest of the Cold Months: the Social History of Ice and Ices, Elizabeth David (London: Penguin, 1994). Elizabeth David was pretty much solely responsible for dragging England out of the doldrums of post war spam-n-eggs cookery with her bold new knowledge of mediterranean food and endorsement of stuff like 'pasta' and 'olive oil'. She was also an excellent writer and keen food historian who amassed a library of ye olde cookery books and produced, as her last work, this book on the human fondness for coldness out of season, which stands as an early manifestation of the kind of cultural history which keeps giving us books on spices and cod. It's less rigorous than some of these works, and bears the marks of David's age and ill-health: she never really finished it. But despite its gaps and Eurocentricity (although there are chapters on India (largely on the British in India), the Middle East, and China (people in China were using ice to transport goods like fresh fish long before Francis Bacon had his experiment with snow-stuffed chicken - a direct influence on the technique's eventual adoption in the West)), it's unfailingly, yes, COMPLETELY FASCINATING, smart and sensible and wry.

Book three: Petersburg in Bildern und Skizzen, Johann Georg Kohl (Dresden and Leipzig, 1841). This is used heavily by David in her account of ices in Russia, and the 1842 English translation, Russia and the Russians, is mostly online. Kohl was a German historian and geographer who lived for some years in Russia, and his account is lively and rather heavily picturesque, with a good eye for detail and no eye at all for social criticism (or, well, this is unfair. But he's no Henry Mayhew). He's fairly broad-minded, if often howlingly patronising, and compulsively readable.


Oh yes, fic:

Happy belated Guy Fawkes and/or Diwali, to those who are celebrating!

Though, heh, one of those festivals is SO MUCH MORE PROBLEMATIC than the other. I mean:


Thanks, Lancelot Andrewes! There is a reason why you were James I and VI's most favourite of preachers! But I'm not sure how great it is that England's big autumn festival of bright lights and blowing shit up is founded on Jacobean luxuriating in memorialisation and unseemly fondling of the skull beneath the skin. Not to mention religious intolerance, though that really goes as read in this (particular, sixteenth-century) context.

... Doubtless I will feel better once I've actually had the chance to set off some fireworks.

Talking of which, apparently I have made it my fannish business to perpetrate ANGSTY TY LEE? Whhhhy, I do not know!  Here she is, however, assisting in a jailbreak (more or less).



If, however, you prefer your Ty Lee non-angsty and sometimes upside-down (you know, the canon-approved flavour), I would recommend the fic lizbee  posted this morning (as far as my timezone goes, anyway): the very excellent Escapee.

Two more ficlets for the excellent horror comment thread over at sharp_teeth. 

One for Watchmen (why am I writing so much Watchmen fic? I certainly don't feel fannish about it, as such. But I guess there is a lot in the original that needs straightening out. Or queering up, as the case may be). Anyway, this is for a deeply creepy prompt from misachan:Characters: Dan, Rorschach, Laurie
Rating / warnings: PG. Erosion of free will, mention of violence and bigotry.

( Viscous Fluids Between Two Layers )

And one for King Lear (LOL, self), after an awesome prompt from newredshoes :

Characters: ensemble. Well, Lear and his daughters, at least. Kinda.
Rating / warnings: PG. Massive amounts of sexism; anti-Catholic bigotry. Erosion of free will and other creeping horrors.

A/N: This is SO VERY AU, and probably has a lot more to do with sixteenth-century debates about exorcism than with Lear. It does however hopefully provide a creepy Cordelia.

( Made Ripe for Death by Eld )

Ok, so. I guess I just wrote a SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNT of PG Wodehouse comment fic? THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU EXPECT WHEN YOU GO TO WRITE ON A HORROR COMMENT MEME. Which is over here at sharp_teeth, by the way, and is awesome: go, write spine-chilling stuff!

Anyway, in his fantastic pastiche comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore once wrote a Wodehouse fic by the deathless name of What Ho! Gods of the Abyss, in which Bertie and co ENCOUNTER CTHULHU.

And it was pretty fabulous, as the title suggests! Since I alas no longer have any grounds on which to criticise the finer points of Moore's attempt at Wodehousian diction (that stuff is finely calibrated, y'all), I'll confine myself to one moan, which is that Aunt Dahlia was subjected to some objectionable indignities! I like Aunt Dahlia and do not believe she would ever allow herself to become a brainwashed servant of the Great Old Ones.

She is an AUNT, Alan Moore! DO YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THAT MEANS???


So, when I saw the following most excellent prompt from pandarus, I knew I had an opportunity to rectify this parlous situation:

Jeeves and Wooster

Bertie is bitten by a vampire, as he toddles home from the Drones Club one jolly evening, a trifle the worse for wear. Since recoiling away from the first blush of rosy-fingered Dawn is perfectly normal for any chap who's spent the best part of the night imbibing unspeakable amounts of gin, he does not immediately perceive the change which has come upon him...

AT THE EXPENSE OF JEEVES, HOWEVER, dude I am so sorry! As also for calling him dude, Jeeves would not approve.

Characters: Jeeves, Wooster, Gussie Fink-Nottle
Rating: T
Warnings: character death. Decapitation. Newts. Takes a while to get properly horrific.

ETA: now podficced FABULOUSLY by pandarus : you owe it to yourself to check this out, for the closing music alone! Not to mention an absolutely spiffing rendition of Jeeves and Bertie. In mp3 or m4b.

 

( What ho, Jeeves! )

Two more prompt fills for the Bechdel test comment fic meme, both Azula/Ty Lee (this seems to be a popular request, and I am not really complaining. Although it is surprisingly difficult), both G or PG depending on your feelings on kissing.

One for myfloralbonnet, for prompt 'Found people to love, left people to drown / I'm not scared to jump, I'm not scared to fall / If there was nowhere to land I wouldn't be scared at all':

( A Reverence of the Feet )

And one for branded_irony: 'Azula/Ty Lee - I love a girl, but the girl loves royalty':

( Keep Order Among Them By Ritual )

Man, I remember when I read Ted Hughes' translation of (some of) the Metamorphoses and then went to a Chinese circus straight afterwards. Say what you will about Hughes himself, those were good times. (What? Ty Lee - circus - Ovid. Clear progression).

So, a couple of weeks ago I wrote a post which was essentially a review of an excellent comic book but which ended with a flaily plea for there to be less about Orpheus already in mainstream fiction - that is to say, less framing of the creative experience as a whole as explicitly omg ORPHIC. Not that there's anything wrong with that (though, it's worth noting, Orpheus in some versions has some problems with ladies, post Eurydice). But it is explicitly a male narrative. Very explicitly! And whileas underworld descents have become a bit of a male speciality in, y'know, Western culture post Innana, it's Persephone who gets the permanent upstairs-downstairs gig in Greek mythology, not Orpheus. She may not have a lyre or the power of ART, but it's nice to think she may have learned something along the way.

Which is a very long winded way of saying that a couple of days ago lettered wrote a fantastic Eurydice and Persephone piece: Love Like Other Things. And in the comments, stultiloquentia  linked to an excellent (and food-porn-ish) Labyrinth (!) fic which is also a take on Persephone: Dare to Bake a Peach. And then there was a prompt, courtesy of laeria, at the very awesome Bechdel Test Comment Fic-a-thon (still going strong!) over on LJ for 'Eurydice, Persephone or Eurydice/Persephone - whiplash girlchild in the dark', which combined Eurydice and Persephone with my favourite pop song based on surprisingly boring Austrian porn!

So I wrote two ficlets, both rated R (Velvet Underground, dude).

( One flavoured with FIFTIES NUCLEAR DYSTOPIA )

( And the other with QUASI-COLONIAL SEVENTIES ANOMIE )

And I also realise I wrote a ficlet a while back that was an explicit take on the Orpheus myth, though at the time I marked it as orginal fic because apparently my brain files 'Greek myth' as 'public property'.

( This one is VAGUELY OCCULT VICTORIANA (PG) )

But anyway, the take-home point here is that fandom is sometimes very shiny! Also, that Bechdel ficathon is great, go check it out.

I WROTE BUFFY! Which was only the show of my heart for the latter part of my adolescence. quinara, I blame you and Spike. Also, insomnia.Though the blame for my lol!villanelle rests with me and my reliance on esoteric stanzaic forms.

Series: Buffy (yeah).
Rating/Warnings: G. Poetry!fic.

A girl who holds her stake straight in a fight

She leaves a rim of lipstick on her glass

She moves through death and pries apart the night.

( in every generation )

Written for the prompt 'portrait of a family’ at 31_days.
Series: Avatar.
Characters: Ursa, Azula.
Rating/Warnings: G.

ALL exercises were first deuised, and so in deede serued, either for games and pastime, for warre and seruice, or for suretie of health & length of life, though somtime all the three endes did concurre in one, sometimes they could not.
Richard Mulcaster, Positions (London: 1581), sig. Gii^r.

Written for the prompt  'courage is morally neutral’ at 31_days. 
Series: Avatar.
Characters: Ursa; OC.
Rating/Warnings: T. Description of violence, character death, dead body.
... Apparently I can write firebending!Ursa. Sort of.

... ou en bas, cette indécente amazone dans son petit désert privé ...

Max Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, trans Dorothea Tanning (New York: George Braziller, 1982), p. 27.

 

( ... or, down there, that indecent Amazon in her little private desert ... )