A vague miasma of misery

Jackson was surprised that more women hadn't simply killed their husbands. Maybe they had, maybe women were better at covering up murder than people knew.

What a joy to spend a recent sunny, snowbound day ensconced in my chair with a coffee and my cat, devouring Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson. Coincidence abounds ("A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen"). From "the maw of oblivion" and through "a vague miasma of misery," there is warmth and kindness, and also snow.

Jackson Brodie continues to age, but then, so do I. Thankfully, he has a chorus (jury) of women in his head to keep him in check.

Set in modern day, Atkinson pays homage to Agatha Christie and the detective novels of that era and ilk (fittingly, I spend the evening watching The Seven Dials, which is charming and light while alluding to larger things than our small lives).

You went to bed one night, in a happy daze because you had waltzed all night with eligible young men, and you woke up the next day and found yourself living on a bleak planet inhabited by alien creatures.

The novel's central mystery involves a stolen work of art. Art is not something Brodie knows a lot about, but he won't turn away from a bit of research if it means catching his crook, or at least uncovering the truth.

Brodie's reading leads him to the story of Jerry and Rita Alter, who stole a de Kooning and hung it on the back of their bedroom door. Admirable, no? Crazy. Through Brodie, I learn about Montreal's own 1972 Skylight Caper.

I love me a good art heist as much as the next person. A couple years ago I read Michael Finkel's The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession; for months afterwards I would "case" every museum and gallery I walked into, checking for cameras, exits, sightlines, security guard routines. (I want to steal the art, get away with it, and have it.) Who steals art, anyway? How do you unload a stolen Rembrandt? Who buys it? (I recall reading Trevanian when I was 16, an assassin gazing upon his treasured canvasses in his private quarters.) I recently watched The Mastermind, a unique art heist film that provides a dismal reality check (and an extraordinary soundtrack). I'm thinking I may be better suited to a career in art forgery.

"Without faith, there is no refuge," she repeated, and rang her small bell several times. The Full Auras saw the signs in the sky. The Diaphanous Spirits heard them in the buzzing of the insects, in the slightest shift of the clouds, in the plants' growth. The Minor Saints warned us with celestial song, and the Enlightened, the emissaries of the light, declared it to be acid rain.

The House of the Sacred Sisterhood was founded by Him (who only the Chosen and the Enlightened have the privilege of seeing) and the Superior Sister (they say she fought in the water wars).

A climate catastrophe has left the outside unlivable: contaminated water, toxins carried by the wind, extreme temperatures, the thick haze that lasts for days on end. Occasionally a hare is trapped but it's often a deformed abomination. The relentless chirp of crickets betrays their main source of protein.

There are three orders of the Chosen (mutilated).

The Minor Saints have ethereal voices:

After a dramatic silence, the Minor Saints resumed their song. I saw thousands of white petals leave their mouths, filling the air, lily petals that glimmered until they disappeared. Their voices can reach the universal notes, vibrate with the light of the stars. (That's why their eyes are sewn shut, so they're not distracted by the mundane, so they capture the reverberations of our God.)

The Diaphanous Spirits have perfect pitch. Their tongues are cut out when they are chosen, so they communicate in writing to the Superior Sister. 

They can perceive the bitter, lurking sound of sickness, the slow absorption of bone tissue; they've heard the soft swell of the dark where our organs reside; they can tell by our pulse whether our heart seeks only possession or wants to redeem itself, whether it seeks to wound or to dissolve into another heartbeat; they can discern the damp movement of the bacteria that inhabit us, the microcosm we carry around without feeling it. Sometimes they spend long hours in the field trying to detect human words in the wind, messages from God. It's common to see them turning in circles, the palms of their right hands open to the sky and the left to the earth. But no one knows why they do this.

With perforated eardrums, the Full Auras can orate purely. "God's messages leave traces on their bodies"; they have the gift of prophetic vision.

The Enlightened embody all the virtues of the three orders of Chosen. They are the mediators with the ancestral, hidden God, the one before those that men created.  

The rest are unworthy. Their continuous sacrifices are necessary for God to protect their small world. It is forbidden to invoke "the erroneous God, the false son, the negative mother."

There is a lower class still, the nameless servants:

They whisper poison because their bodies carry the marks, the signs, of contamination, and though they can no longer infect us, they have to work to clean our filth and the filth that runs through their veins. They hate us because they have to serve us. The marks are the remnants of the pustules, wounds, infections. The rashes are the filth of evil, the filth of collapse, the filth of failure. This filth absorbed from the sick earth has blighted them permanently, lest we forget that corruption lurks and the Enlightened are the only ones who can quell it. This filth, nesting in the servants' skin, in their cells, is the anger of the sea, the fury of the air, the violence of the mountains, the outrage of the trees. It's the sadness of the world.

The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica, is an unsettling account of a sheltered postapocalyptic community. The unnamed, unworthy narrator secretly keeps a journal of the goings on while struggling to recall the path that brought her to this (un?)holy place.

One day, a new wanderer happens upon the Sisterhood. Her presence, her very being, seems miraculous, and she is instrumental in helping the narrator tap into her past (including a poignant, tear-inducing relationship with the enchantress Circe).

The beauty of the language masks something sinister (I'm reminded of Piranesi). The Sisterhood is built atop the destruction of the world and the violence of men. 

While Bazterrica's previous novel, Tender Is the Flesh, verged on the ridiculous, The Unworthy creeps toward the sublime.

Something nearly nothing

The empty house had the floor of one of its rooms strewn with flowers and a smell of earth and greenness all through its downstairs all night. Each morning for the next few days I scraped them up together, carried them into the garden and left them on the paving in the corner where they dried away to something nearly nothing and blew nothingly around in the paved yard for the rest of our time in that house.

Two teen siblings live off-grid, navigating difficult circumstances, with a slow reveal of the nature of the society they’re on the fringes of — a near-future dystopian surveillance state.

They don’t see the world the same way, and they come to exercise resistance very differently. 

Gliff, by Ali Smith, depicts a tender sibling relationship. It's also a love letter to language. (Because. Words are knowledge. And knowledge is power.) "It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean." Very Alice in Wonderland. Naïve, to surreal effect. "You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said."

One of the epigraphs (from Valeria Luiselli) appears to apply less to the characters than to Smith's motivation: "it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity." Smith demonstrates a lot of clarity regarding the state of the world today — surveillance, data collection, real estate economics, manufacturing and warehouse practices, consumerization of education (and the devaluing of knowledge) — and there's good reason to be angry about it, as the gap widens between the haves and the have-nots. The privileged "were smoothed as if airbrushed, as if you really could digitally alter real people."

But Gliff clearly takes some inspiration from Aldous Huxley. Beyond the permutations of the words "Brave new world" heading the later chapters, there are nods to that dystopia's indoctrination methods and soma. 

She's still speaking: all took stuff. We had to, we all had body shit and we loved Patchay, best of the painkillers, just zapped it, blanked it out, blanked us out too. We all took it except her and she had this word for us, for it. She'd sit against the wall and watch out for us while we were on it, and she'd always say what we were was gliffed. We reckoned she was riffing on the old word spliff. So we all started calling it, whatever we took after that, gliff.

I love that Patchay is also a play on pace, Latin for "peace." 

[I hate that I can't google a confirmation that Smith intended this, as the AI that generates overviews is clueless, and Google expects me to articulate searches in natural language, and I resent that our natural language has changed to be something that machines can recognize, why in my job search do I need to build a machine-readable CV shouldn't you build a machine that reads what I actually need to say. I remember when I first searched terms on internet and they were boolean and unnatural in a different way, often my queries were simplified, broadened, but it was mostly using an artificial system of operators to frame my natural thought, I don't know what my natural thought is anymore, maybe I modified my search practices to conform to the principles of the technology in play, but before the internet I could walk into a library and would have to consider how my question, if I had one, might be categorized, what subjects it encompassed, what ideas intersected, and if I had a specific question, I could ask a librarian, or an expert, they might know, but more likely I would engage them in a discussion about the subject, and new information might come to light, and new associations would spawn, facts may be confirmed but ideas could be explored and pursued rather than shut down, our current "natural language" machine searches anticipate a certain kind of answer, the answer is already contained in the question. I wonder how our grammar is changing, you'd think it would be more careful, to formulate searches with more precision, how sensitive is AI to our grammar, surely it knows the rules of grammar but does it understand how sloppy we are and under what circumstances we tend to get it wrong, we're so dumb we won't even notice when AI misreads our question to answer something else entirely. When I'm searching for something, it does not necessarily mean I have a specific question in mind, I have what Edward de Bono termed a "fuzzy situation," a kind of (pre-?)word cloud in my brain, and I'm looking for associations more than answers, even if problem-solving strategies typically involve distilling a specific question from all the fuzziness. I guess my issue is that I don't have a problem to solve, a question to answer, I'm interested in exploring, and it occurs to me that this is, broadly speaking, a male-female divide (or it used to be, in an earlier version of studies on gender dynamics, fuck, how old am I, oh how angry am I, how much clarity do I have now), men fix things, women want to talk about them, and this is what happens when men fix the internet. For the sake of this rant, I reformulated my search as "is the naming of patchay in Ali Smith's gliff a play on the latin word pace and what evidence is there for this" and AI returned: There is no evidence in the provided literary analyses or reviews of Ali Smith's novel Gliff to suggest that the naming of "patchay" is a play on the Latin word pace. In fact, the name "patchay" does not appear in any of the search results, which extensively discuss the wordplay surrounding the novel's title, "gliff." I wonder if the search result will have evolved after this post is published to acknowledge my original thought, I wonder also about the comprehensiveness of the "provided literary analyses or reviews," who provided them, what do you know anyway.]

A lot is left unanswered. Was the siblings' abandonment deliberate or accidental? What's the other sibling's story when they part ways? Who's running this world? How did we let this happen?

Why would people do that? she said.

People are people, Leif said, people are mysterious, why does anybody do anything?

Excerpt.