Draw of the day

I'm doing Wyntercraft's 30-Day Tarot Challenge, which today was actually to read stuff that wasn't cards, but I'm going to do a draw as well just to keep the record continuous. I also need to fill our yesterday's and today's cards in my tarot notebook; they are both blank.

Today's draw card is the Star, Major Arcana XVII, which stands for Hope. She is a very positive card, which is good, and advises listening to your intuition, inner wisdom, etc. I sometimes ignore my inner wisdom because I tell myself I'm just being paranoid and pessimistic, but sometimes I am right. It looks like I have already done that at least once today, since I forgot to check if my VPN was working yesterday and told myself "Don't worry, it'll be fine" and I know that when I tell myself that it's always not fine, and now it won't connect. Ahem. Anyway, this card says good things are on their way, and it advises me to exert myself in order to achieve my ideals. I already went to the gym this morning, does that count? Perhaps this is a good day to try to take on the food processor again. I really don't know. 

Lights... camera... space whales!

 For the next BSpec book club we decided on Catherynne M. Valente's Radiance, partly on the basis that I already had a copy but largely on the basis that everyone was horrified that I hadn't read it. I've liked everything else I've read by Valente; it's always very structurally innovative and beautifully written, and always drawing seamlessly on about five thousand other things, some of which I'm familiar with and some of which I'm not, like modernist poetry except fun.

 

Radiance is an alt-history alt-universe decopunk kind of thing that takes place in an alternate Old Hollywood in ana alternate solar system made up of planets that look more like the planets as they were imagined in midcentury science fiction than they do in real life. Central to the great powers' colonization of the solar system is the lush, tropical water planet Venus, where the callowhales live. Nobody's really sure what callowhales are--they're not really whales, but they're big and live in the ocean so close enough--but the milk they produce is essential for people to live on the Moon and on all the planets that aren't Earth. The Moon is the center for moviemaking; living on it turns people blue, but that's fine because you can't see colors on film anyway. In this universe, though people live as far away as Pluto (owned by the Americans, and very much the frontier planet), movies are still mostly silent and in black and white unless hand-painted, due to some patent shenanigans by one Mr. Edison.

 

Our story revolves around one Severin Unck, daughter of famous director Percival Unck. Percy Unck makes popular, overwrought gothics and is one of those big ~showman~ type personalities; his only daughter Severin, who from a very young age had a bad case of Seriousness, ultimately REBELS against her father and becomes... a documentary filmmaker! Not being a filmmaker at all was apparently impossible when you grew up in a movie studio. But anyway, Severin and her crew gain some success doing documentary films on every planet in the solar system, until they decide to investigate a village on Venus that had mysteriously disappeared. During the investigation, there are more mysterious disappearances, this time of several crew members and of Severin herself. The survivors pick up a small boy who seems to have been trapped in some sort of mysterious limbo in the village since its destruction and take him back to the Moon; this kid quite predictably turns out to have a lot of issues later.

 

Radiance is put together not quite in epistolary form, since the texts comprising it aren't letters, but in scrapbook form. There are newspaper clippings, transcripts of chunks of Severin's movies--including the few scraps of surviving footage from the Venus shoot--the diary entries of one of Severin's stepmoms, transcripts from Percy's home movies, radio dramas, even commercials. The bulk of the book, though, is the script--written in novel form rather than as a screenplay; I guess that's just how Vince develops stories--of a movie Percy and his screenwriting partner Vince (Vince is female) are making about Severin's last trip. This story is rewritten a bunch of times, so different chunks of it are written in different genres: noir, Gothic, fairy tale, absurdist. The main character in this movie is Anchises St. John, the boy they found on Venus, now all grown up and highly dysfunctional. While the movie is obviously a hell of an unreliable narration, since Percy and Vince are openly making it up and adapting it to various genres, the whole mess of documents does pull together to tell one hell of a story. The mystery of what happened to Severin, it turns out, can't be solved without solving the mystery Severin set out to investigate--what happened to the village of Adonis?--which also cannot be solved without learning what happened to several other mysteriously disappeared colonies, which, absurdly, all cannot be solved without figuring out what the callowhales actually are. None of the blurbs and stuff I saw for this book indicated at all that it's actually largely about giant mysterious space whales, but the space whales really are the nexus of all the major non-movie themes in the book: human adventurism and hubris; the nature of reality and the multiverse; they importance of ecological balance.

 

The whole thing is just gloriously weird, and, despite being about movies, probably unfilmable, which is a pity, because the filmable parts would look fuckin' rad as hell on the big screen. Pluto covered in giant lotus flowers. Uranus full of neon lights and blue fog like a gangster movie on acid. Beautiful starlets with vintage Hollywood glamour turning blue on the Moon. And giant blobular space whales, of course.

 

Valente has at least nine books published that I haven't read yet. I guess I'd better get cracking.