Stuff and Moonshine

I've been trying for some time now to get a landscaper not to ghost me, so we can redo the front and back yards of my house.

Am I trying to hire a contractor, or an artist?

Yes. Both. Year Nine's discussion of how we've reshaped the land focused entirely on utilitarian aspects: draining wetlands, filling in shorelines, flattening land for agriculture and roads. We entirely skipped over the aesthetic angle -- but that matters, too! The land and what grows atop it can become a medium for art.

A fairly elite art, though. At its core, landscaping for the purpose of a garden or a park is about setting aside ground that could have been productive and using it for pleasure instead. Not to say that there can't be some overlap; vegetable gardens can be attractive, and parks might play home to game animals that will later grace the dinner table. But there's a sort of conspicuous consumption in saying, not only do I have land, but I have enough of it to devote some to aesthetic enjoyment over survival.

We don't know what the earliest gardens were like, but we know they've been with us probably about as long as stratified society has been, if not longer. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (named for their tiered structure) were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and those -- if they ever existed -- were a continuation of a well-documented Assyrian tradition of royal gardens, which included hydraulic engineering to supply them with water. So this was not a new art.

But when did it become an art? I'm not entirely sure. The boundary is fuzzy, of course; gardens can exist without being included in the discourse around Proper Art. (As we saw in Year Eight, with the shift toward recognizing textiles as a possible form of fine art.) Europe didn't really elevate gardens to that stature until the sixteenth century, as part of the Renaissance return to classical ideals. The earliest Chinese book I've been able to find on the aesthetics of gardening, as opposed to botanical studies of plants, is from the seventeenth century, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were earlier works. I think that when you start getting specific aesthetic movements and individual designers famous for their work, you're in the realm of Art instead of a functional thing that can also be pretty; I just don't know when that began.

There definitely are aesthetic movements, though! In particular, gardens-as-art swing between the poles of "nature in her most idealized form" and "intentionally artificial." Many Japanese gardens exemplify the former, while European gardens laid out in complex geometric beds demonstrate the latter. It's not entirely a regional differentiation, though; Japanese dry ("Zen") gardens, with their carefully raked seas of gravel, are obviously not trying to look natural, and Europeans have enjoyed a good meadow-style garden, too.

This is partly a question of how you're supposed to interact with these spaces. Some -- including many of those Japanese examples, dry or otherwise -- are meant to be viewed from the outside, e.g. while sitting on a veranda or looking down on it from an upstairs window. Others are meant to be walked through, so they're designed with an eye toward what new images will greet you as you follow a path or come round a corner. Meanwhile, hedge mazes may purposefully try to confuse you, which means they benefit from walls of greenery as close to identical as you can get them -- until you arrive at the center or some other node, where the intentional monotony breaks.

In pursuit of these effects, a garden can incorporate other forms of art and technology. Hydraulics may play a role not only in irrigating the garden, but in fueling fountains, waterfalls, artificial streams, and the like, which in turn may host fish, turtles, and other inhabitants. Architecture provides bridges over wet or dry courses and structures like walls, gazebos, arches, arbors, bowers, pergolas, and trellises, often supporting climbing plants. Statuary very commonly appears in pleasing spots; paintings are less common, since the weather will damage them faster, but mosaics work very well.

But the centerpiece is usually the plants themselves. As with zoos (Year Four) and the "cabinet of curiosities"-style museums (Year Nine), one purpose of a garden may be to show off plants and trees from far-distant lands, delighting the eye and possibly the nose with unfamiliar wonders. The earliest greenhouses seem to have been built to grow vegetables out of season, but later ones saw great use for cultivating tropical plants far outside their usual climes -- especially once we figured out how to heat them reliably, circa the seventeenth century. In other cases, the appeal comes from carefully pruning the plants to a desired shape, whether that's arching gracefully over a path or full-on sculpture into the shapes of animals or mythological figures.

One particularly clever trick involves accounting for the changing conditions inherent to an art based in nature. Many gardens go dead and boring in the winter -- or in the summer, if you're in a climate where rain only comes in the winter -- but a skilled designer can create a "four seasons" garden that offers shifting sources of interest throughout the year. Similarly, they may use a combination of artificial lighting and night-blooming flowers to create a space whose experience is very different at night than during the day.

And gardens can even serve an intellectual purpose! Like a museum, its displays may be educational; you see this in botanical gardens and arboreta, with their signs identifying plants and perhaps telling you something about them. Many scholars over the centuries have also used gardens as the site of their experiments, studying their materials and tweaking how to best care for them. But this doesn't stop with plain science, either. We often refer to dry rock gardens as "Zen gardens" because of their role in encouraging meditative contemplation, and actually, it goes deeper than that: the design of such a garden is often steeped in symbolism, with rocks representing mountains in general or specific important peaks. I don't actually know, but I readily assume, that somebody in early modern Europe probably created a garden full of coded alchemical references. The design of the place can be as much a tool for the mind as it is a pleasure for the senses.

Which brings them back around to a functional purpose, I suppose. Gardens very much straddle the line between aesthetics and pragmatism!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/O7UpKN)

Beastly: An Anthology of Shapeshifting Fairy Tales, ed. Jennifer Pullen. Sent to me for blurbing purposes. This is a cross-section of fourteen largely (though not exclusively) European tales themed around the "beast bride or bridegroom" motif, some of them very well known -- "Beauty and the Beast," of course -- and others more obscure. But Pullen casts a fairly wide net, such that transformations in general wind up here, e.g. with "The Little Mermaid" making an appearance. Each comes with some introductory context from Pullen as well as footnotes throughout, many of which are overtly more about her personal thoughts on the tales than academic analysis. On the whole, I'd say this is very approachable for a layperson.

A Thousand Li: The Fourth Fall, Tao Wong.
A Thousand Li: The Fourth Wall, Tao Wong. These two were actually separated by the following title, but I might as well talk about them together. Normally I make a point of spacing out my reading of a series -- especially a long series -- because I've realized that otherwise I tend to overdose and stop enjoying them quite so much. Since these are the final two books, however, I said "screw it" and read them very nearly back to back.

(. . . mostly the final two books. They conclude their series, but Wong has begun a sequel series. Which, ironically, is even more on point for the genre research impulse that led me to pick up A Thousand Li, so I guess I'll be reading those as well?)

I do appreciate how Wong maneuvers in the back half of this series to change up exactly what kind of scenario and challenges his protagonist is facing. In The Fourth Fall, it's international diplomacy: Wu Ying has to accompany a delegation to first secure an alliance and then attempt to negotiate an end to the ongoing war with a rival land. Since Wu Ying is not a great diplomat, this is definitely a challenge, but also he's not at the forefront of it, so he feels a bit peripheral at points. On the other hand, when things (inevitably) blow up into a climactic battle, there's a delightful "when life hands you lemons, make lemonade bombs to throw at your enemy" bit of tactics, which sets the stage for the final book.

As for the final book . . . I very much liked the beginning of it, which addressed the fallout from before (including with some good pov from the secondary characters), and the ending of it, which leaned into the philosophical elements I've always found to be one of the stronger parts of this series. The middle, however, felt a bit like it was there to keep the beginning and the ending from bumping into one another. It wasn't bad, but it felt less like vital connective tissue and more like "let's put some obstacles in the way of the conclusion."

I should note, btw, that apparently this series will be getting a trad-pub re-release. I'll be interested to take a look at the first book, because I'm curious whether it's just getting repackaged, or whether it will have gotten a thorough editing scrub first. I stuck it out for all twelve books first because it was a useful tour of the cultivation genre, then because it manages some genuinely good moments of genre philosophy along the way, but . . . well, the writing has always fallen victim to the self-pub trap of reading like it was pounded out very fast with essentially no time for revision. (I think it was the eleventh book that used the word "stymie" over and over again, sometimes where that was not actually what the word means, and in at least one place, misspelled.) I'm hoping the trad pub version will polish that up, and maybe also address the less-than-stellar handling of female characters early on -- which, I'm glad to say, improved as the series went along.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, Nghi Vo. Novellas are interesting because sometimes they read like short novels, and sometimes they read like long short stories. This is the latter type, with the plot essentially consisting of "Chih and companions get cornered by talking tigers who want to eat them; Chih stalls for time by telling a story, during which the tigers argue with how they're telling it." The tension with the tigers was excellently done, as was all the arguing, but the result did feel a little slight for what I was expecting from a novella.

Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore, Adrienne Mayor. This is specifically a book about geomythology, a term for which -- as with Pullen above -- Mayor takes a broad definition. Sometimes it's "here's a story about these offshore rocks that clearly sounds like a mythologized record of the tsunami that likely put them there," and sometimes it's "here's a famous tree; now we'll talk about the lore surrounding that type of tree." Interesting fodder if you're the kind of person who finds such tidbits suggestive of stories!

Ausias March: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Arthur Terry. Read because March is possibly the most famous Valencian poet ever, so this was research for the Sea Beyond. I have no problem with Terry choosing to translate March's work as prose, because I understand the very great challenges inherent in trying to balance the demands of meaning and style while also making it work as poetry. However, Terry has a comment toward the end of his introduction about how he makes no pretense regarding the aesthetic merit of his translations, and boy howdy is there none. This is the kind of "just the facts, ma'am" translation that's useful for being able to look at the original text on the facing page and see how they line up . . . but it made for stultifyingly boring reading, and in no way, shape, or form helped sell you on March being a great poet.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. Would you believe I never read this before now? We read Emma in high school, but that's it for me and Austen on the page. A friend linked to an interview with Colin Firth, though, which made me want to re-watch the A&E miniseries, and then for comparison I watched the more recent film adaptation, and after that I thought, hey, maybe I should read the book while those are fresh in my mind!

And, well, surprise surprise, it is very good. I know the A&E miniseries well enough that naturally I envisioned and heard all the characters as those versions, but that was in no way jarring, because it's such a faithful adaptation. It was delightful to see the bits that didn't make it onto the screen, though, like Elizabeth opining on the power of one good sonnet to kill off a love affair.

Star*Line 49.1, ed. John Reinhart. I am technically in this, insofar as there's an interview with me. Otherwise, quite a lot of SF/F poetry packed into a tidy little volume.

You Dreamed of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue, trans. Natasha Wimmer. This novel is bonkers. It's about Cortés in Tenochtitlan, and about how Moctezuma and the people around him responded to that, but it's got the kind of meta voice that feels free to wander omnisciently around and also to comment from a modern perspective, like when it explains the difference between Nahua and Colhua and Mexica and why some Europeans in the nineteenth century looked at that tangle and said "fuck it, we're just gonna call them all Aztecs." And then it goes trippy alternate history on top of all that.

Literally trippy, because a lot here hinges on the use of indigenous hallucinogens. I don't know this history well enough to tell if Enrigue is really playing up just how stoned Moctezuma in particular was, but here it's very much presented as part of the political turmoil in Tenochtitlan, with the huey tlahtoāni retreating into drugs rather than dealing with the problems around him. But don't worry, this book is here to show you the ugly underbelly of both sides of the conflict -- and also things that aren't the ugly underbelly; I very much appreciated how much time (in a relatively slender novel) is spent on exploring the agency and complicated dynamics of the various people involved, so you understand at least one interpretation of why Cortés was allowed to get far enough in to do what he did, and what different individuals thought they might gain from it.

If I have one objection, it's that Enrigue gives a strong impression that most of his key indigenous characters didn't really believe in their own religion, just went along with it because of tradition and social pressure. That's an angle I always side-eye, because it generally feels like modern mentalities failing to understand those of the past. But it's a small quibble for a book I very much enjoyed.

The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, ed. Roger Dutcher and Mike Allen. This anthology collected the short and long form winners of the Rhysling Award (the biggest SFF poetry award) up through 2004. What's interesting about that is how it lets you see the trends come and go: there's a stretch of time where a lot of the poetry was very science-y (sometimes more that than science fiction-y), or the bit in the early 2000s which I can best sum up as "my kind of thing." I did skip a few that just got too experimental and weird for me to get anything out of them, but otherwise, good cross-section.

Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance: The Forgotten Founding Mothers of the Fairy Tale and the Stories That They Spun, Jane Harrington, ill. Khoa Le. This is about the French salon writers of the late seventeenth century, Madame d'Aulnoy and her ilk -- emphasis on "her ilk," because half the point of this book is to talk about the ones who aren't as famous. Harrington's general thesis here is that the fairy tales they wrote were their way of expressing the troubles they faced and/or imagining better worlds, e.g. where women could choose the husbands they wanted. Each chapter gives a short biography of one of the writers, including connecting her to the others who were perhaps relatives or friends, then retells one or more of their stories.

I did like getting to read tales less familiar than "The White Cat" (which also shows up in Pullen's book), but I wish Harrington had gone more for translation than retelling, or at least had tried to adhere to a more period tone. I feel like her "yay early feminism, so relatable" mission statement led her to modernize the language more than I would have preferred, and in the cases of the stories I don't already know, that leads me to question whether the plots have also been presented in a more "updated" fashion. And while she does have an extensive bibliography at the end, the way she talks about "rescuing" these writers from obscurity does give a self-aggrandizing whiff to the whole thing, as if Harrington is the first person to pay attention to this topic. Wound up feeling like a bit of a mixed bag.

The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, Stephen Fry. Yes, that Stephen Fry, the actor. Didn't know he wrote poetry? That's because he writes it purely for his own enjoyment, not for publication. (He mentions toward the end of the book that, among other things, he knows his celebrity status would warp how those poems are received, and he'd rather just not deal with that.)

His comedic skills shine through here, as this is a highly readable introduction to formal poetry -- meaning not "poetry always about serious subjects," but "poetry that adheres to a particular form." The introduction is not shallow, though: when he leads you by the hand through meter, he doesn't stop at showing you the different feet and explaining how to count them. Instead he talks about things like the different ways you can futz around with iambic pentameter, where a trochaic substitution will sound okay vs. weird, and what effect it has if you put a pyrrhic substitution in the third foot vs. the fourth. (Though right after reading this, I came across a blog post that characterized what Fry considers a pyrrhic substitution very differently: same phenomenon in the end, but a good demonstration of how there's no One True Answer for a lot of this stuff.)

Be warned that this book is unabashedly opinionated. Fry says there are free verse poems he likes, but on the whole he has a very poor opinion of modern poetry being just about the only art where people are told "Don't worry about rules or technique! All that matters is that you ~*express yourself*~!" He thinks that acquiring a solid handle on meter and rhyme is equivalent to a visual artist learning the rules of perspective: they're vital skills even if you wind up breaking those rules later. When he gets to the section discussing particular forms, he's also unafraid to bag on the ones he doesn't think very highly of -- mostly modern syllable-counting forms like the tetractys or nonet, but also elaborate stunts like the sonnet redoublé, where you'd better be damn good at what you're doing for it to seem like anything more than a stupid flex.

The guidance, though, is very thorough and I think very accessible -- though admittedly I come at this as someone who's never had trouble figuring out how meter or rhyme work, so I'm not the best judge of that. He gives copious examples from literature, and also practice exercises for which he provides his own demonstrations: the exception to him not making his poetry public, but only a quasi-exception, because he says outright that these are pieces meant to practice the basic skills, with no expectation of them turning out good. And that is useful in its own way, because it helps chip away at the notion that poetry is some mystical, elevated thing, rather than an art whose basics you can drill without worrying about whether you've produced immortal verse.

Highly recommended for anybody who would like a solid entry point into writing poetry!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/VdjDrK)