Stuff and Moonshine

Listened to an interview with handful_ofdust this morning, on the topics of her new novel, her life and stuff in general; at one point I kept wanting to shout at the device "Darmok -- the thing you're talking about is like the TNG episode 'Darmok,'" and of course she eventually did bring up the reference. Which I suppose is kind of meta.

I've been thinking a lot about magical systems of late; I think it started with reading handful_ofdust's review of Starry Eyes (which I still haven't seen), and the plot description pinging some nigredo/albedo notions about grotesquerie and decay being a necessary underpinning for glamour and power. Magic as sheer power isn't interesting; magic as cheat codes, workarounds, making the best of a bad situation, stone soup, the weapon of the weak, *is* interesting. This isn't just in supernatural stories, either -- I'm endlessly fascinated by what Peg Bracken, in the I Hate to Cook Book calls "shabby little secrets," mid-century recipes that claim that your guests will never guess the secret ingredient in your cake is... a can of tomato soup (and nope, that probably wouldn't occur to most people.) That just impresses me more, somehow, than all the stuff about locally-grown organic cooked with either exotic or minimal seasonings. I don't really know where I'm going with this, but it seems important to keep some record of what percolates through my skull these days.

Probably unrelated story: apparently Steve Martin is the only non-Canadian to have heard of the Group of Seven, but he's trying to change that. He's a big fan of Lawrence Harris and has helped to curate an exhibit of his classic works from the 'twenties and 'thirties, now showing at a gallery in Los Angeles. Harris' stuff is the sort of thing that makes me wish I could describe art without being flippant, because it's really very striking and grounded in his Theosophist beliefs and so on, but if you've never seen it the quickest way I can convey the look is "Caspar David Friedrich meets the backgrounds from What's Opera, Doc?" which sounds less respectful than I'd like to be (I'm a great admirer of the design of What's Opera, Doc?) Maybe I have to put things this way because Harris is the sheer-power, pure gourmet cooking school of thought that I just snubbed above. He was from the Harris side of the Massey-Harris company owners, and he could afford to go out to the Real True Canadian Wilderness and paint highly spiritual works. I don't want to bring him low, though, by comparing him to a cartoon; I don't think I even want to elevate the cartoon. I want to assert the existence of the cartoon, and the Road Runners that allow it to exist because they could be churned out to keep WB happy while the animators finished their crazy masterpieces.

Hey, The Long-Lost Friend, the classic book of Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic, is online as a text. It's even weirder than I thought it wood be.