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652. Macnas - 5/8/2006 11:35:58 AM In the land to the west, there lived a King whose name was Lir. He had 4 children named Fionnula, Aodh, Conn and Fiachra.
They lived in his castle surrounded by a deep forest, and Lir, his wife, and the children were very happy there. After falling ill, Lir’s wife died, and his children were so overcome with sorrow that Lir married hastily to give them a mother. He did not marry well, as she was a wicked woman who in time became very jealous of Lir’s children. Her name was Aoife, and she was sister to the then King of Ireland.
She took them to the lake one day and let them swim and play. She then cast a powerful spell on the children, turning them into white swans. They found they still had the power of speech and asked their step-mother why she had done such a thing, and what was to become of them.
She laughed at them and said she now had Lir to herself, and as for them, they would stay swans for 900 years. 300 years would be spent here at this lake, the next 300 years would be spent on the sea of Moyle, and for the last 300 years on the waters near Inis Gluaire.
She returned to the King and told him his children had drowned in the lake. He went there immediately and knelt at the waters edge and wept for his children. A swan approached him and to his amazement began to speak to him as a person would. He then found out that his wicked wife had tuned his children into swans and had cursed them long into the future. He could not reverse the curse, but on his return to the castle he confronted his wife with her wickedness, and ignoring her weeping and wails, turned her into a spirit of the air, to be born on the wind in torment, with no rest, for ever more.
Lir lived out the rest of his days with his children, staying with them everyday, talking and singing with them. After his time had come and passed, the children remained on the lake until 300 years had reached their end, then they flew to the sea of Moyle. The sea was never calm and it was winter always, but they stayed on the sea for another 300 years, and then it was time to fly to Inis Gluaire.
The swans were weary unto death, but no rest from death would come to them yet. They forgot time and place, and became as mute as any other white swan, and did not sing or talk to each other anymore.
Then one day, a druid came to the island looking for plant and herbs, and as he worked he sang an old song to himself, a song as old as any could remember. He heard first one, then two, then 3 and 4 voices joining him in song, and he looked around to see who was with him, but he could see nothing but 4 white swans nearby.
He then saw that it was the swans that were singing, and he knew then who they were, for the legend of the children of Lir, turned into swans so many years ago was known to all the druids. He bade them come closer, and wading out into the water to them, laid his hands on them and told them the time of the spell was near an end. With that, the swans shrieked once and turned back into the children they had been as before. The druid took them with him, and bade the local chieftain to take them back to their homeplace. That he did, and the children of Lir lived long together, happy as the time before, when they played as children in the woods that grew around the castle.
653. uzmakk - 5/8/2006 9:40:09 PM Is that yours, Macnas? I ask because it really strikes me. I like it very much. 654. uzmakk - 5/8/2006 9:41:46 PM Oops. I didn't go back far enough. Excerpt from book, right? 655. alistairConnor - 5/8/2006 10:37:17 PM I would imagine he was extemporising from oral tradition. He does that. 656. webfeet - 5/9/2006 4:21:04 AM I had to go away for a few days...Easter Island.. again with karl.
It seems karl has become increasingly out of temper with me. Today, for example. Standing in front of my closet, not knowing comme d'habitude what to wear, karl taunted me as I tried blouses on..the agnes b. blouse was unironed and I wasn't young enough to get away with it,..the unstructured sweater made my breasts look bulky..when I suggested a white blouse, something fresh and springlike, he pointed to my head and said my highlights had oxidized and made me look in sunlight like a puerto rican.....then it was the freshly cut flowers I was trying to arrange in a bowl, 'so Ikea' he sneered, watching me from the window. Then he ridiculed me for being one of those people who are too lazy to change the garbage bags...and so on until he finally went to sleep sipping verbena and listening to Tchaikovsky's piano concertos. thank god.
657. webfeet - 5/9/2006 4:33:43 AM Judith--karl is exceedingly discreet; though i did manage to make out that it's in the atelier of a young designer off the rue de Charonne, some japanese fashion students were recently chased by wild dogs trying to get there. 658. webfeet - 5/9/2006 4:45:50 AM Jen--what is trinny a nickname of? or is it simply trinny? marvelous idea for reality show: trinny and susannah as apprentices with karl. who will survive? i'd waiger trinny. she doesn't need shinpads. she does need a mouthguard, however. and why doesn't karl have his own goddamn show?
Delicate. It's because he's too delicate, an orchid that would expire under the harsh lights of tv. and particular--about too many things.
alrite, I'll buy it. i'm not sure how i feel about this book--i'd like to just get this out beforehand, i think this novel is the equivalent of jodie foster's "Nell" and i'm too lazy and tired to go into it now, but i might try tomorrow. that whole thing about is stuttering voice..the muteness..or am i just a philstine? 659. Macnas - 5/9/2006 11:40:45 AM I had to look up what extemporising meant, but yes, that is what I was doing. If you have a couple of hours to spare I could give you the story of the Tain, but maybe not.
Uz, that story, told here in a very simple form, is from pre-christian times. There are versions of it, where the children turn into ancient old creatures who die soon after, and of course there is the christian version, where the sound of a chapel bell and baptism breaks the curse.
The version I told is that which is commonly told to children.
The full version is far more complex and not as easy on young ears as this one.
The great thing about these stories is that they are mine, a gift to me from long ago, and indeed, they belong to anyone who cares to remember them and pass them on to others. 660. PelleNilsson - 5/9/2006 12:55:40 PM That last paragraph, Macnas, remnds me, in some unspecific way, of Tolkien's world. 661. Macnas - 5/9/2006 1:09:01 PM All old world story telling traditions have things in common, Tolkien invented a lot of his own, but, in my opinion, utilised Nordic styles much more than Celtic.
I'd never consider myself a seanachai (story teller/bard), but I do love to tell my children these stories when they care to listen. 662. Jenerator - 5/9/2006 8:24:04 PM Webbie,
He [David Mitchell] isn't speaking a different language in Black Swan Green. And if was like anything like Nell, I wouldn't have bought it. Now, Cloud Atlas is a different story. Maybe I'm lazy or uncultured, but deciphering linguistic code isn't my idea of fun fiction. High brow Esperanto? No thanks.
BSG seems like a much easier and natural read. 663. webfeet - 5/11/2006 7:32:57 PM Things are getting curioser and curioser...today at Barnes and Noble, shopping for Black Swan Green which-- and this is sad news for New York--was not displayed *anywhere* in the store, unlike Texas apparently--I encountered SuperVitamin Man, in gym shorts, fresh from his work-out, at the in-store Starbucks. He was with a chick, who was also in some kind of spandex. I suppose you could say she's his 'work-out' partner.
Serendipitously positioned behind him in front of the smorgasbord of unappealing, pasty cookies and cakes, I stood with Juliette, fresh from Baby Swim, on line where i could get a true-close up without seeming like a pervert, of the back of his neck. Hirsute and compact, Vitamin Man has the girth of a small, Italian sportscar. Perhaps he's just a little too au naturel in the neck hair department, with a few strange ones sprouting like tubers in odd places. He needed to be taken to, I don't know, one of those barber shops at Grand Central Station and get properly groomed.
I've always wanted to get picked up in a bookstore. But this wasn't one of those moments. And, I'm not sure SuperVitamin Man really enjoys literature. Although he does enjoy a certain type of round-the-year tanning salon gym bunny who looks like the seventh grade definition of 'slut'.
As I stood there checking him out, while he and spandex chick ordered their lattes, my daughter kept on shouting, "Darfish! Darfish!"
I didn't know what she was saying. And she kept on screaming it again. "Darfish! Darfish!" pointing excitedly at the cookies and cakes.
Head started to turn in our direction. And still, I didn't get it. Then, it hit me. Starfish! There was a cookie with yellow icing shaped like a starfish.
After ordering our darfish and a mint tea, we snagged a dirty table with a copy of the Village Voice on it. Then as SuperVitamin man and his spandex bunny, walked past us, I had to move the stroller which was blocking their passage.
664. webfeet - 5/11/2006 7:39:19 PM The other bizarre part, which I can't even get into today or ever maybe, was that after leaving Starbucks, there was a dad wearing some kind of plaid cap standing in front of the book check-out, pushing a double stroller.
It wasn't clear whether he was actually on line, getting on line, thinking about getting in line--or what.
So I turn to him and ask, "Are you on line?"
He's about to answer, when I notice his beautiful green eyes and then I realize, desperately, madly, psychotically--all these emotions rising--that I made-out with him, stoned, in the women's room at the grimy sailor's tavern in our hometown when I was twenty! Then a second later, he realizes the same thing and we both kind of scattered as if someone sprayed napalm, in opposite directions.
I would have drunk supermarket sherry when I got home, but I took an advil instead. 665. webfeet - 5/12/2006 4:39:43 PM Having endured all that to get Black Swan Green, it was worth it. I began a few pages last night--and was relieved that I didn't have to wade through strange dialects and tongues as in Sloosha's Crossin'--one of the chapters in 'Cloud Atlas' that is an exhaustive but mind-bendingly brilliant read.
The style in BSG is similar, even if it's the slang of british teenagers in the 80s instead of Hawaiian islanders in the post-nuclear age.
For example, "Moron grinny-zitty as ever. His bumfluff's getting thicker, mind." Or, "He pongs of gravy" --which I take it means he (Moron) is poor. Anyway, I like it. Mitchell is incredibly funny. 666. webfeet - 5/16/2006 5:31:18 AM This is sort of feeling like vaudeville...now is this a book club, jen? Look me square in the eye: or, have you abandoned Black Swan Green for The Prada Murder Mysteries?
Since living inside Black Swan Green, and Mitchell's poetic, pastoral Lord of the Flies adolescence, I am starting to feel like an adolescent reading it. L'oreal hair gel, Thatcher, the Faulklands War, Reagan and Haig, the "dusty flute" from that Men at Work song..today I read it on the subway en route to my doctor's office while I ate from a bag of cinnamon hearts, like a seventh grader discovering Judy Blume. Oblivious.
667. Jenerator - 5/16/2006 7:24:23 PM Don't be so gay~! 668. Jenerator - 5/16/2006 7:26:41 PM We are a bookclub - a ya ya sisterhood of the Mote. I, too, am having flashbacks to parachute pants and Human League and am having fun with it. Just wish I could have more interruption free time and less screaming children! 669. arkymalarky - 5/17/2006 12:12:08 AM Jen are you teaching now or are you still home? 670. webfeet - 5/17/2006 2:56:37 AM Here, you wanker :Interview with David Mitchell
671. alistairconnor - 5/17/2006 10:12:28 AM I'm not sure who the "wanker" is for, but I'll take it. (I can take it.) I'll take the Mitchell anyway. Next time I order some books.
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