Museum of Dust: Celeste Olalquiaga

Museum of Dust: Celeste Olalquiaga
The Museum of Dust has been quiet for a while, but something stirs within. I had almost given up hope of a reawakening, but just enough hope remained that after reading Ampersand Duck's recent Wunderkammer post on Sarsaparilla I had a poke in there for old time's sake.

It's a fabulous blog to stroll around, a beautiful cyberfiction, that will lead you away and back again. There's a museum of dust flickr group too. It's one of those online things that baffles slightly, mysterious and yet utterly, curiously fascinating.

Two Thoughts on Undine's Magic

1.
Sometimes I think we are part magic, that what animates us is a kind of magic, that our psyches, our selves, points towards a kind of alchemy, both physical and ethereal in nature. What makes us who we are? What mysterious concoction of environment and genetics? What binds this stuff together? I think that's the magic in Undine really, the stuff that binds together the physical world and the world of ideas, where ideas act even more directly on the physical world. And not just ideas but our ever mysterious, ever important emotions. Perhaps all this signifies a neglect in my scientific education, but perhaps I chose on some level to neglect some aspects of physical science, in order to pursue my own wild half-baked theories about the universe.

2.
I read in the paper (the Hobart Mercury in fact, so it must be true) that the current belief is that there was not in fact a big bang in which the universe, but that our universe is actually born from the remnants of an ancient universe. I read that and thought, 'Oh, so that's where Undine's magic comes from.'

Poetry

Occasionally I like to put poetry on here, just for edification purposes - everyone needs to be extended now and then. Anyway, I was going to put The Waste Land here, by T.S. Eliot, but really who's got time for that? This version's so much better.

Waste Land Limerick

I

In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

II

She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions--
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair!

III

The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep--
A typist is laid,
A record is played--
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.

IV

A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business--the lot,
Which is no surprise,
Since he'd met his demise
And been left in the ocean to rot.

V

No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.

-- Wendy Cope

Scissored and stickered from here

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Oh it's hard coming up with those post headings sometimes.

Anyway, I'm going to fiddle around with the template over the next few days. I do like this one, because it reminds me of being in a nice old lady's wallpapered living room, with elevenses on a tiered plate and cups of tea in china cups with pictures of roses on it. But sometimes I find the very long narrow posts hard to read. And the formatting goes funny and photos sometimes look a bit odd.

So I am looking to go back to the cleaner look over Eglantine's early days. Don't be alarmed if everything seems to swing about for a while as I play with it. We will resume normal programming soon. Let's hope I don't accidently delete the whole thing.

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Edited to add:
Okay, I think this is it. I can no long be bothered fiddle-faffing around.

The loveliness that is the world

Imagine waking up to this in the morning.

I is one happy lady.

Plus there's this little Q&A from the lovely Ben Payne, all round good guy and possible part time caped crusader (it would not surprise me, oh no, not at all - he seems the type that might rescue kittens whilst wearing a rakish disguise).

And how much do I love the internet? That there are people out there, real live ones, and the thing they really want to do is write about YA. I'm feeling the love, I'm sharing the love, love is all around. Love is all you need.

Martin's favourite movies:

Love Actually
Princess Bride
Amelie
Dark Crystal
Bladerunner

I had to check and make sure it wasn't Shawshank Redemption.

Thinking about story time - the end

In stories time goes back and forth. Things that happened many years apart can be laid together as if they are (and indeed for the reader they are) occurring concurrently. That which is fractured and fragmented is presented as smooth and seamless. A while back Justine Larbalestier blogged about the hardest thing to do when you're writing a novel: transitions or as Kingsley Amis put it, 'getting your characters out of the pub and into a cab'. Attached to this, and a separate issue too (but another transitional issue) is the passage of time. Everything in Undine happened over the course of about a week, and Drift was a similarly intensely packed time period. But in Breathe I needed more time. Time time time. I needed time that seemed to flow naturally and inevitably forward, but time that behaved like time does in real life, sometimes days just pass. The circular journey of return (dinners and dinners and dinners) that marks the passage of days continues and nothing occurs to interrupt this seeming flow, if a novel was a daily account, a diary, it would be pages and pages of 'nothing to report'. When we look back on our lives we probably see it in this way, episodes of note and in between an aggregate memory of undistinguished days: dinners, breakfasts, showers, sleep.
Story time is more like memory time than real time and like memories, stories have gaping holes. Except at the same time anything you have set in motion will continue (in an implied way) until you stop it. So that if you have a character getting fat and suddenly there's a flickering of calendar pages or the winding forward of a clock (like in a movie), the implication is your character will be fatter. Or sadder or sicker or happier or more in love...
Sometimes stories are about time. Like The Time Traveler's Wife. Then story time almost becomes a metafictive element, the fabric of storytelling and timetelling begins to show, like the seams in a patchwork quilt beginning to fray so that instead of seeing the quilt as a whole, you begin to notice its parts.
Coraline is more about time than I thought it was. It's all about time. It's about time passing and time not passing, about the paradox of the endless summer, of repetition and return occurring so frequently that time almost seems to be in a continuous loop, and yet underlying the endlessness of time is the bitter note of time's perpetual end - the end of summer, the end of days, the end, the absolute end.
What does The End mean? And so it continues? And so it ceased to be? And so the story became transformed into something else, something textless, like a caterpillar becoming a lighter than air butterfly? Where is Undine now, now that I'm no longer writing about her? Where is Coraline, now that her story is finished. Perpetual cycle, the journey of return, they exist of course at the beginning again. Caught forever in their stories. Is The End an arrow back to the first line, the first moment of the story? Or does it point somewhere else, somewhere new?