marmota_b

Otakar Batlička is, part through his own adventurousness and part through mystifications after his death he had no hand in, a figure people love to poke into.
English Wikipedia has a pretty short hard fact summary of his life, and that's probably for the best - the only hard fact I think it's a bit of a pity it leaves out is that he also tried (and I think successfully) introducing the use of radiotelegraphy for communication in (Czech) mines. Hard fact, because I found period newspaper mentions of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otakar_Batli%C4%8Dka
Whatever you think of his life, the indubitable hard fact that everyone respects is that he's a hero of anti-Nazi resistance.
When it comes to his literary legacy, it's a lot muddier, and the mystifications really didn't help.

And yes, of course, this is more of a personal confession, an English blog post won't change anything.

But, having grown up reading and loving his stories, and having now read them as an adult and being possibly even more impressed, it annoys me that the attempts to puncture the myths surrounding his life and finding the truth (admirable though that is in and of itself) have completely overshadowed his actual body of work, which I think is still just sort of lingering in the "children's literature" category that, if ever analysed, is only analysed through those lens.

Personally I think a lot of what he wrote actually isn't children's literature per se. The stories are very short and written in relatively simple language and laid out in a clear economic manner with fairly clear cut moral standards, and yes, some are playing with some typical tropes of the time (probably an inevitable result of frequent regular magazine writing)... which I guess successfully hides the fact that... well... he manages, in some very short concise stories laid out in a clear economic manner to touch upon a lot of BIG, pretty adult themes.

Like colonialism.
Economic colonialism.
Moral grey zones.
The hopes and struggles of European imigrants in the Americas.
The inevitability of death.

And it really, really fascinates me how he manages to distil these themes into short, concise, exciting stories with a clear (though rarely explicitly stated) moral code without somehow in any way taking away from their complexity.

And I bloody want to know how on Earth he does that!

(I think the only true answer is "by being a whole human being". But I would still love someone to actually take an academic stab at it instead of continuing to let the conman who stole his legacy overshadow it.)

Current Mood: contemplative

This is kind of another of those random posts.

It's a more subdued Christmas than usual - we did not even bother with Christmas decorations. But we did manage a family gathering, possibly slightly defying the current guidelines I have to admit, and seeing grandma after a year, especially after a health scare this autumn, was so nice.

(The grandma who used to visit every week when I was a child, the grandma we visit every Christmas, the grandma who would take me to exhibitions and galleries and who would go with us to the Prague Zoo. She had to undergo a cancer check. It was OK, and the doctor even told her she's in great shape for her age. But for a while there, we were all so very anxious. In my case, it was going numb, not allowing myself to think about it, and sleeping really badly; and then it hit with full force of relief when she turned out to be okay.)

Christmas! I've gone hobbity in the past couple of years: I often enjoy the giving more than the receiving, in a way. Although I still get excited about my gifts.

This Christmas was very handmade and scrounged up on my side (but then, with me it's almost always handmade). Besides, we've started often giving one another perishable gifts; we've all got so much stuff already it's actually nice to get something nice to eat or something practical we need. Grandma asked for a facemask; I ended up making her two. And two wooden sheep figurines I bought at the Liptál folklore festival last year (I did not go this year, although it did take place), because stuff to put in her glass cupboards, often animal figures, is stuff she still welcomes. And a patchwork pillowcase for my sister & brother-in-law (and a wooden spatula, also from the Liptál festival - they like cooking, and there's a man always selling them at the festival who makes fantastic handmade ones that are much nicer to use than the mass-produced ones). They gave me a jar of bio-quality blueberry jam. I let out a squeak. Heh. My family knows me well.

For the past couple of years, though, I've been asking father for various books from abroad, which kills two birds with one stone, so to speak - I get my dream books and he does not have to reck his head for gift ideas.

Sooo. This year I asked for and got Patterns of Fashion 5.

Yess.
( writerly thoughts )

I hope you're all safe and reasonably happy, too. :-)

Current Mood: satisfied

So I finally watched Paterson today.

Father’s been praising and quoting it at me for several years (he watched it with friends from church – I think maybe during one of their monthly film evenings), and several of my friends have praised it on Facebook. I downloaded / purchased it in March at the beginning of lockdown but didn’t find the time and peace of mind for it until now.

I loved it.

But also I then read the review at Roger Ebert, and the comments, and can’t help thinking...

...

Father said it’s much more like a European film than an American one.

Father can, on the whole, be a bit overwhelming; Father has Opinions (I kind of write my Frank Castle like him, in that and a couple other respects, although there’s also a lot they don’t have in common), and he can give you what I call his fifteen-minute lectures on just about any subject, often without you asking.

And somewhat annoyingly, he is often right.

But sometimes he has these more subdued moments of insight when we connect over something unexpectedly, or he off-handedly says something that shifts my perception of something. (Like that one time he gave me a blow-by blow account, the way he often needs to share as he gets excited about a topic, as he came across a Wikipedia mention of the Fridrich method of speedcubing, found out about Jessica Fridrich through that, read up on her, and then matter-of-factly corrected the Czech title of the Fridrich method in a Wikipedia article to female gender - because it does enter into it grammatically in Czech - and matter-of-factly summed up his edit as "Jessica Fridrich is a woman." Jessica Fridrich is a trans woman. We've never discussed those issues. After that, I don't think we have to.)

He also claims – and is mostly right – that he doesn’t really “get” literature and art. But he still enjoys a lot of art, much the same way he enjoys wine – i. e. not because it’s somehow sophisticated but simply because it’s enjoyable and interesting? And he still has insights.

Like that one time he read Pan Tadeusz (one of my favourite books) and immediately twigged onto the fact Mickiewicz rather mocks the character of Telimena, unjustly. Which it had taken me several readings to realise. So we’ve had an interesting conversation about Telimena and how she doesn’t conform to the worldview of the people around her (she comes from small Polish / Lithuanian nobility but is more of a cosmopolitan character herself, which was a Bad Thing in the age of Polish fight for independence) but is still essentially not doing anything wrong and for one thing definitely is doing her best for Zosia, her ward... (and the way that genuinely loving relationship in the book was downplayed in the Andrzej Wajda film is one of my few complaints about it...)

... well. Now that I’ve digressed that way: you should read Pan Tadeuz. Don’t let the facts it’s Polish Romanticism, and a novel-length poem, and a dramatic story from the time of the Napoleonic wars and Polish struggle for independence, and that it has feuding families in it, fool you. It’s surprisingly... Austenian? Surprisingly concerned with people’s innocent foibles and idiosyncracies, and oftentimes rather tongue in cheek, for one thing.

Father also immediately twigged onto the fact Mickiewicz sometimes uses rhyme to subtly laugh at his self-important characters, which I also didn’t fully realise until he pointed it out. I’m not sure how well that carries into translations, though, I have and can read the original... (I kind of have a passive understanding of written Polish.) I do like Mickiewicz best when he does his subtle sarcasm, rather than when he’s being 100% Romantic. There is, for example, also an ongoing argument two minor nobles are having about which of their two greyhounds is better... which after several repeats finally ends with the solution that neither of them is very good.

I’ve also concluded that the book is basically Romanticism for Hufflepuffs – with the things that make Romanticism seem intriguing on paper, without most of the things that make it actually annoying in practice. With a lot of focus on family and love for one’s country, and with mushroom picking and vegetable gardens and coffee brewing and stuff. And it ends with the young couple deciding to free their serfs and do their own housework because if they’re fighting for Polish freedom it should be freedom for everyone. As a Hufflepuff, what’s not to love?

...

Anyway. Paterson.

So father said Paterson was pretty European for an American film, and praised it for not having that much of a story and consisting largely of individual repetitive yet slightly different scenes...

Which is precisely the thing many commenters seem to dislike about it.

And I think somewhere in there lies the point. Some commenters were apparently feeling let down and disappointed because they could not suss out much of a meaning, and considered what they did suss out too trite to justify a 2-hour film. Others are trying hard to find some symbolism in individual motifs...

Meanwhile father simply enjoyed it as it came, as the layered slice of life it is. Which, I think, may very well indeed be the “meaning” of it. It is perhaps far too simple; but if the number of commenters dissatisfied with that simple answer and unable to just enjoy it is anything to go by...

It probably is something worth saying and showing every now and then. Sometimes the simplest answers are the hardest to grasp.

And also it totally is one of my jams. And my praise of Pan Tadeusz has more to do with that than it originally seemed; Pan Tadeusz is in large part Mickiewicz looking back at his impetuous ideals-filled youth and realising he should have enjoyed the simple joys of everyday life in his home country more.

Which circles back to one of my insightful conversations with father, that one about Ecclesiastes.

...

That was Marmota's rambling musings post of the day.

Current Mood: contemplative

A while back I noticed @rthstewart had granted me access and I never granted access to her, which reminded me that what with my very irregular Dramwidth posting, I had completely forgotten how you do that. I've found it now, and granted access to the several fanfiction friends / acquaintances I keep in irregular touch with here. I'm not a very lively Dreamwidth user, but seeing as keeping in touch with those people is one of my reasons for having a Dreamwidth journal in the first place, that needed rectifying.

* * *

Big cleaning and room organising is underway. Kind of slowly, but underway. My room is a mess. One of the biggest reasons my room is a mess (aside from my general messiness) is that I have so many categories of things, which makes putting them away neatly a problem.

Also, loads and loads of books to read. That's what happens when the absolute majority of people in your town use the "free exchange library bookcase" in the town square primarily to dump old books.

Several years ago, I looked at pictures of Neil Gaiman's library and thought "How does he have so many books?!" and then looked around myself and thought "Well, he's older than me."

That was before the bookcase in the town square.

I'm definitely getting there.

It's kind of amazing and often puzzling to see what sort of book treasures people are getting rid of; there are a lot of old Communist-era books no one will ever be tempted to read again, but also a lot of stuff that was published around the same time but will always hold up. And new books, too. I even saw a copy of American Gods in English there once (but I already have that one; why couldn't it have been, say, Neverwhere?). Lots of books I used to borrow from the library as a child, and now I'm finally getting my own copies. So many copies of Emil and the Detectives / Emil and the Three Twins by Erich Kästner we've already given it to all the children in the family who are the right age.

Possibly the biggest treasure thus gained, though, is a cookbook - a 1940s cookbook (it already was an xth edition then, not sure when it was first published) that's kind of a touchstone of Czech cuisine and I don't know anyone who'd willingly part with theirs (which can make obtaining your own copy a bit of a problem). I can only assume that whoever had put it there had inherited it from someone and already had their own copy. Or didn't cook and had no idea what they had on their hands.

* * *

Speaking of food, in August I decided the tastiest thing in the world was a quark frgál.

Frgál is a Moravian Wallachian take on koláč. Large thin pastry - large and thin like pizza, but much richer than pizza pastry. And then something tasty and sweet on top.

I was at the folklore festival in Liptál, and bought a whole one, both for myself and to bring back home to my sister. And I have no idea how they do it, aside from definitely not skimping on ingredients, but it's delicious. Quark can get a bit dry in baking, even though it's always mixed with other things; but they must put even more other tasty things in the filling because words fail me for how delicious that frgál was.

So, as I said, in August I decided it was the tastiest thing in the world.

I had forgotten how much I love blueberries, and how delicious blueberries with sugar and cream are. Which is what I had today.

* * *

But I have a general fondness for Wallachian cooking. The sauerkraut soup, kyselica, is another thing I never want to miss when visiting Wallachia. And while I am definitely not a hard licquor kind of girl and don't go to Wallachia to drink slivovice... I have to admit that from among the hard licquors, a good plummy slivovice isn't the most unpalatable thing in the world. Just, you know, I'm really not a hard licquor person... I'm also not a beer person (so when it comes to writing Methos and all the boundaries it pushes for me as a writer, that's definitely one thing I'll never write from first-hand experience). I live in South Moravia now; as far as alcohol goes, that's the best place for me to be.

* * *

Seriously, though. If you want to make me happy, food-wise, give me blueberries / bilberries. I can never tire of those. I can tire of the things you mix them with, but not the berries.

My Narnian forests are definitely full of them.

... years after the fact.

It first happened to me with Lenka Reinerová, and that was bad enough; but at least she was kind of, sort of, famous so I learned in her Wikipedia entry.

Today, I was seized by a desire to find out if I can find out more about one of my favourite Czech children's/YA writers of the romantic scout-like vein of adventure stories. He wrote under a pseudonym, but one can easily find his real name.

But all I could find under his real name, besides mentions of his books, was a short notice (name and date) about funerals in Brno in 2011.

I was in Brno in 2011. That's where it hurts.

He published only three such books. I have all three. We discovered his through that radio programme I mentioned here once; the serial based on one of his books was one of our favourites. We may still gave it recorded on a casette somewhere, too.

He used language in an often playful and idiosyncratic way; definitely a bit of a Brno way. All three stories are slightly detective stories and also follow some mysterious directions through a landscape; I think that's where his background as a scout leader shows (and that's almost all I know about him). What I've always enjoyed is the humour and the sense of place, even things like food served in specific families.

Little, odd things that made the stories real, like a lady in an office whom the heroes came to ask a plot-important question, mentioning probably what's for dinner to a collegue whom she calls to ask about that plot-important question...

He definitely influenced my own writing; I don't write like him, but he taught me at a relatively young age that there's more to a story than the story, more than anyone else (even greater favourites) did.

Current Mood: sad

On account of it's being Mother's Day, I've realised that I haven't posted anything about my mother here yet, which is a serious oversight.

Since I'm being rather picky in what I post on this blog, these reminiscences are also picky, but, well...

Me & mom are very different personalities, and she told me once, recently, that she had had absolutely no idea what to think of and do with my little imaginative self; that one year, when I was about three, there she was with tiny me walking next to her talking about something imaginary and being a complete stranger to her. But I think she did a pretty good job for a clueless person. ;-)

For one thing, mother was indeed the person I came to with my very first creative efforts: I asked her to draw my imaginary animals for me, and clueless or not, she did a splendid job before I could do for myself. The first one, apparently, I asked for at that age of three or four much in the same manner the Little Prince asked for his sheep; except mine wasn't an existing species and wasn't in a box. (The Little Prince is, incidentally, one of my mom's favourite books.)

She is the person responsible for the first Ransome book entering this household, and while I'm not entirely certain, I think also for the Narnia books. (She certainly gave me some of mine, the ones I got next after my older sisters' original concession of leaving Prince Caspian to me because there was an odd number of them.)
The first Ransome book to enter this household was The Coot Club. There is a Czech publishing house specialising in children's books, and each half-year or so, it would send catalogues of its new books to schools, where the children would order books through the school. Our parents were always quite supportive of this venture, so I think every time, each of us could pick up to three books or so? I do remember usually carrying more books home on the day the order arrived than most of my classmates did. Anyway, one time, there was The Coot Club in the offer, and mom convinced one of my older sisters that it was worth ordering. And she was right, of course. :-)

This goes hand in hand with mom later convincing us to listen to a radio programme for children when The Coot Club was on as a serial. We had tried listening to the programme before and pretty much hated it, but it turned out each week in the month was under the direction of someone else, and there was this man whose direction we loved; he had conversations with travellers and natural scientists and writers and all sorts of interesting people, and played music we liked, and adapted books we liked for radio plays (through which means we also discovered other books we liked). You never felt like he was talking down to you or talking about things adults think children will like: he simply talked about things he liked. (Heh, hello, Lewis' priceless thoughts on these matters.) So that was another huge, formative thing we can be thankful to mom for.

Every now and then, she has this curious ability of digging up or stumbling upon something that's just what I needed and didn't know I needed it. One year, she sent me off (with my agreement) to a weekend children's trip organised by her employer, which sounds potentially awful and was actually awesome. The person organising it was another such enthusiast who was good with children because he did what he enjoyed, and I went with them at least three more times, visiting beautiful places around this country I never would have otherwise learned of, and taking my friends with me a couple of times, too.

Mom read books to us in the evenings, and sang traditional folk songs to us, and cut Christmas cookies with us, and did other such wonderful and traditional mom things when we were little.

She likes flowers and gardening, so in a roundabout way (by planting them in the first place), she's responsible for my love of phloxes, the scent of which will forever be the scent of my childhood summers.

And she's the talkative one in the family, the one who'll strike up conversations with strangers; which is how I met my best friend at the age of three. That friend whom, these days, I won't see for months and when we meet again, we'll talk like only days or weeks have passed. How that happened I don't know, but obviously, I would not be that lucky without mom being a lot more outgoing than I am.

Her birthday's next week; sometimes, it would fall on Mother's Day, which, in a childhood logic, was only natural.

Current Mood: thankful

I've just had a thought. And maybe it's wrong and putting too much stock in Lewis and his wording (which is rather unfortunate), but what if that whole sentence actually goes to show that, look, they don't have to be only one or the other, Lucy isn't limited into either being a "lady" or "more like a boy" and Aravis can still enjoy talk of clothes with a likeminded woman?

It might stink of "Aravis arrives to her destination and instantly becomes more womanly", except that Lucy's been there for years, she's the queen of that place (well, the neighbouring place), and she's clearly both. So it's more like, Aravis arrives to her destination and finds out that, phew, it's okay to be the sort of woman she is.

Because, after all, knowing our characters we do know they aren't that one-dimensional. It's kind of like Jill who's heritage of Narnia is both taking up archery and keeping the fine clothes. Or, for that matter, Susan who's a womanly woman but also good at archery and swimming (just not in a battle context).

And maybe it's obvious, but I had to write it down. :-)

Current Mood: optimistic

Says a Czech proverb.
The little annoying and soul-searching experience from the previous post has just fed into the blasted transitional 19th chapter of The Peridan Chronicles that has been stalling my progress for over a year. Joy!
It's not finished yet, but it's much closer to finishing than it had been for over a year. I think you can expect it before Christmas. And the chapter after it soon after it, most likely, to make up for the long lack of updates to this story. Phew!

In other news, I've watched the Kenneth Brannagh / Emma Thompson version of Much Ado About Nothing, and enjoyed it very much, despite being distracted by the not-really-quite-accurate-for-any-time costumes (that's a trait of mine I'll always have to contend with, I fear) and the fact that I found the Dogberry scenes a bit lacking. In a funny way. Through being too much. I think he and his cohort are made more of a bunch of fools there than I find palatable in film form; it would probably work better on stage. Kenneth Brannagh and Emma Thompson are both a joy to watch, though.
There might be some correspondence between Shakespeare and my bout of Narnianish inspiration. It's certainly an idea that bears further exploration; I have yet to see Branagh's Henry V, which is a shortcoming I should correct as soon as possible.

Oh, and I've read, so far, about a tenth or so of Augustin's Confessions. It's a strange book. It reads weirdly, like he's approaching it all from an angle I cannot penetrate; like I would have had to live at his time to really understand what he's talking about and the issues he's wrestling with and the angle he's going at it from. Or like he has a sort of thinking personality that's very foreign to me. But at the same time, in retrospect, I find that he addresses very timeless issues, which probably accounts for the timeless appeal of the book. Like the ways we relate to fiction and live through the tragedies of fictional characters. Which he disapproves of, I think, on the basis of the pagan-based theatre at his time being immoral. I wonder what he would have made of something like Shakespeare? (Shakespeare can be such a contrary animal.) And the claim Sienkiewicz makes in Quo Vadis via Paul to Petronius that informed Christian art would reach new heights? (I think of Gothic architecture and Tolkien and Lewis and stuff and find myself in tentative agreement with Sienkiewicz.) And fanfiction! He would be horrified at the majority of it.
The way he dismisses fiction, he reminds me of a man I had a conversation with once in the street, over a book of Chesterton's short stories he found in a trash can. (He dismissed it and I snatched it up afterwards. Ha!) I still haven't figured out how to make the case for fiction since then, but I think I believe in it even more strongly now. It's an interesting experience to disagree with such a hallowed book.

It's an interesting experience for me as a Czech Protestant who's fairly recently read some texts that are kind of the basis of Czech Protestantism and found myself so much in agreement with them that they were almost... superfluous to me? My sister reported the same experience with such texts; either they are so much the basis of what we grew up in that that happens, or - or it's pretty chilling to think just how bad the Catholic church of the time must have been for them to be necessary.
I think I should read more old texts like that to figure out just how much of my thinking is present there and how much isn't, and why. It's quite illuminating to see what changes with time and place and personality, and what remains constant.

And of course, there's still things one can learn from them.

Current Mood: relieved

Some days ago, my father bought a mocca pot, obstinately ignored the instructions to wash it thoroughly and cook several cups of coffee in it without drinking first ("what a waste"), and then very happily pronounced the resulting coffee as tasting exactly the way it used to. The part that boggles me is that I agree with him.
We never had one in all my memory, and neither had anyone I know. And besides, I started drinking coffee only a few years ago and still don't do that often.
The only explanation I have is that grandma has always had this percolator thing or whatever - I'm really confused about all the manners in which coffee can be prepared and the translation - which father says is basically the same thing with different anatomy (not in those words, those are mine); and I may have occasionally tasted it as a child to see if I still hated it.
I don't hate it anymore. I actually approach it like a treat. I'm slightly puzzled by that, too.

But I'm still enjoying the Yorkshire Tea - that father used to bring from Britain years ago and now ordered online - much more. Much more often. We both have a thing for "common black tea", my father and me - that's what he calls it, with carefully put on British pronunciation. How I loved its blackness when he first brought it; back then, the choice of teas in Czech shops was very dismal indeed. It's got better (even the awful awful cheap Czech brand of tea has got slightly better since it's not Czech anymore, I think; in this particular case, being bought off by an international concern was not a bad thing, because the concern is Indian). But Yorkshire Tea is still a class unto itself which I love with all the calm fierceness I imagine English people might love their tea.

* * *

I wonder what my various not-Czech online acquaintances would think of the relish with which I devour bread with lard, salt and fresh onion these days, another blast from the past. (It started a few days ago with the need to consume vitamins in this autumnal time and being left with onions in the house, but by now it's just an excuse.) The trick is, it has to be processed lard, not that sticky soapy pressed stuff. And Czech or similar bread; it would not work with white bread or bread that is somewhat too sweet in taste.
Years ago, a visiting Irish vegetarian man was horrified by the relish with which I ate a similar combination in a pub. I'm not sure what horrified him more, the fact that it was blatantly meat-based, or the blatant amount of fat a young slip of a girl like me was eating without concern. With fresh onion.

* * *

I'm sewing a corset. It's my first properly boned Victorian-ish corset (corded Regency stays don't count in this context); I'm making it for my sister, and, partially due to my lack of experience, it's taking far too long. Also, grommets setting is proving highly unpredictable for me, and tiresome. I've made myself a tiny callus on my right thumb. Thank goodness for thimbles.
I have to keep mom updated on the progress, because she bought the materials as a gift for my sister. It's a roundabout gift and repayment in my family; my sister recently gave me money for a theatre performance as payment for the corset. I went to see one of the Cimrman plays with a cousin, who goes to their plays very, very often and this time she suddenly found herself with a spare ticket.

Anyway, I'm in the handsewing finishing stage, and I'd started (re-)reading Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, and was bemoaning the impossibility of sewing and reading at the same time. Because that would be the perfect thing to keep me going.
The obvious answer is, of course, audiobooks. There does not seem to have been a Czech audiobook of Night Watch published yet, but I found an amateur reading on a file-sharing site. The reader's doing voices and everything. It took me a while to get used to the voices and emphases being different than I imagined, but goodness it's good for an amateur job. Death's voice is run through an echo effect and it's perfect. It's so good they should just recruit the reader and make it official.
He's done Guards! Guards! and Wyrd Sisters as well; I think for a while, my reading vs sewing dilemma is solved neatly.

(I wonder how it works when I do have those books, just not in audio form. Okay, and Guards! Guards! is just barely glued back into book form by now.)

* * *

My father came to my room to share the excitement over the Latvian writing he's found on batteries he bought earlier today:
"'Nemest uguni.' Isn't it beautiful?"
I agreed that it was, and he left to look up the case of "uguns" used in a Latvian grammar.

It is beautiful, in an ordinary beautiful language way.

(It means "Do not throw into a fire." The case seems to be mixed up. Father still doesn't realise just how good with language he is.)

Current Mood: contemplative

So I signed up for the Narnia Fic Exchange proper this year, and have received my assignment, and now pondering commences.

Elizabeth Culmer has the problem of obviously her worldbuilding and characters threatening to give her away as the writer. I don't have that problem; I've barely published anything and most of my worldbuilding is happening in the background so far (although I did already have to drop Twinkletop from my remix). My problem is that I almost immediately got a vague idea of a direction to pursue which would have spoiled one of many future plot points for The Peridan Chronicles.

The good news is, trying to come up with a way to write around that seems to have started a flurry of ideas including a hint of a plot (always the greatest problem for me!), so, yay.

Also, some hopefully interesting female characters (as of now, still nameless) have walked in, and some potentially interesting discussions and a theme are forming, so, more yay.

Now I'm becoming worried if I'll have enough time to write the beast this idea is quickly growing into.

-------------------------------------------------------

During my annual attempt to bring some order to my mess of stuff, I found some old, old pictures I made inspired by Narnia. Maybe. Because through them, I remembered one of the sources for my version of Narnia, the cozy country of small Talking Beasts and Birds and the undertaking of practical projects: a series of lavishly illustrated books by Tony Wolf.

We used to borrow them from the library; I only have the third one, which also has the dwarfs/gnomes and introduces giants. I feel like it's the last one that might pass for Narnianish; the next one has fairies and the sort of magic wand magic that I never truly liked in a deep liking way. Even then, while definitely daydreaming about both, I instinctively liked the Deep Magic of worldbuilding more than the willful magic of power, I guess? It was the former that found its way into pictures. And I was more fascinated by the clever things the animals and the gnomes built and made than the things the fairies could conjure.
Seeing as Czech fairies are more like the Narnian Naiads and Dryads than these wee magical beings, I guess it's no wonder I related to the Narnian sort more... and in the Tony Wolf books, to the three mouse sisters. They sewed and wove, and wasn't that just fabulous, making things with their... paws?
Also, there's the weird genderised thing going on between the all-male gnomes and the all-female fairies; I never gave it much thought, but I liked the mixed up animals better than either. The Czech default genders may have had a hand in it again, because I'm finding the venerable Rat was definitely meant to be male, and who knows about the turtle or otter.

Even the first three books don't quite fit in with Narnia: the animals tend to be smaller rather than larger, the dwarfs are different... But in introducing a number of various fairly realistic-looking species beyond what Lewis bothered with, and thinking about a different sort of implications for such a world, I think the books jumpstarted my interest in the lives of the smaller inhabitants of Narnia - and, for that matter, Spare Oom as well. :-)

Current Mood: anxious

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marmota_b

June 2024

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I'd love to see more serious LITERARY criticism of Otakar Batlička
Just came back from grandma
Thoughts on Paterson (2016), my father and Pan Tadeusz (the latter sneaked in)
Randomness
That moment when you find out one of your favourite authors died...
Mother's Day
"... and all the sort of things girls do talk about on such an occasion."
All bad things are good for something
Isn't it beautiful? (various reminisces and stuff going on)
NFE '15: Take 1 + Thoughts on my request

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I'd love to see more serious LITERARY criticism of Otakar Batlička

Just came back from grandma

Thoughts on Paterson (2016), my father and Pan Tadeusz (the latter sneaked in)

Randomness

That moment when you find out one of your favourite authors died...

Mother's Day

"... and all the sort of things girls do talk about on such an occasion."

All bad things are good for something

Isn't it beautiful? (various reminisces and stuff going on)

NFE '15: Take 1 + Thoughts on my request

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June 2024

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