An invitation...

... to go here and wonder at the sheer awesomeness that is steepholm/Charles/Charlie Butler! Just a few Spenserian stanzas he tossed off...

(All I know of The Faerie Queene is the bit I learned from DWJ's 'The Heroic Ideal' essay in The Lion and the Unicorn, but that told me of her discovery of Britomart as a proper female hero. Sulis is of course the goddess in Charlie's Death of a Ghost and Wodwose (brief pause while I try to stop sniggering again )... Well, have a rather teddy-bear-like image from the Canterbury Green Man page. )

More on Criss Cross

I remembered after posting the little I managed to say about Criss Cross (Lynne Rae Perkins) and what I loved about it, that I'd completely forgotten to mention the Midsummer Night's Dream theme in it (though perhaps theme is too strong a word). I don't think I even saw the epigraph when I read the book, but noticed it when I was checking publisher (as I didn't want to grumble about the fact it had never been published This Side only to find it was). It's 'What thou seest when thou dost wake, Do it for thy true-love take...'

I really want to reread this book anyway, as I read it in interrupted doses and when pretty exhausted and stressed, but I've caught some of the AMND tracings and was retrospectively extremely impressed by how this was worked in. It's not at all a simple one-to-one pairing of any character, but the shifting seeing as these kids start to wake up to romantic possibilities in old and new friends. There's even a little touch of magic, as for example, when a necklace which has moved around the town through various different characters' hands fails to achieve anything when finally reunited with its owner. I loved this part. (I'll take out the characters' names, as it's fairly near the end. Not that there's any kind of spoiler really, but still.)

**********(in lieu of the indenting)

X did look at Y, and he saw her, really saw her for a moment. Y looked at X and she saw him, really saw him, for a moment. If it had been the same moment, something might have happened. But their moments were separated by about a second. Maybe only half a second. Their paths crossed, but they missed each other.

The hardworking necklace couldn't believe it. It let out an inaudible, exasperated gasp.

************

The more I think about what is rather broad comedy in the play when it's about adults under enchantment, and how it becomes a perfect description of kids just coming into adolescence, the more I like this. I even wrote down who likes whom and who whom likes in return and the criss-crossing patterns of this through the book for myself! And okay, perhaps this isn't going to be as good an image of a 14-year-old now, raised on a heavy diet of TV soaps and reality shows, but neither is it confined to adolescence in biological years. I've seen people even older than I am who are 'waking' and 'seeing' and 'loving' people in dizzyingly rapid succession.

It occurred to me early this morning that there's even a character who plays the role of the 'rude mechanical'. And it's glorious because he's anything BUT 'rude' or crude or stupid. This is Lenny, for those who've read the book, and I already thought he was yet another wonderful character. His 'metamorphosis from bookworm to gearhead' is seen to be likely to separate him from his friends - though it's not clear 'just how far apart the paths would eventually veer'. And 'maybe it was some kind of tragedy that no one spotted who Lenny could be. Or maybe it wasn't. Lenny didn't need someone to tell him who he was.' How amazing to get so much of character, and so much awareness of social pressures and their effects (and sometimes the limits of their effects) in such a short and simple bit of writing. Wow.

(Yes, I did choose 'How we Quit the Forest' from my playlist for the title!)