vacation

Next week hplovescats and I are going on a much needed vacation to Austin (which is quickly becoming a job-hunting, house-hunting, errand-running "vacation" but will at least get me out of work for a few days). I am hoping we will have time to wedge Six Flags into the equation. The Krypto-Coaster is calling my name.

Anyway, anyone who wants a postcard should add their address into the comments (they're screened so as to protect privacy). This time I plan to actually buy postcard stamps before I go and take them in my wallet, so the odds of getting a postcard actually mailed from Austin are pretty good (as opposed to handed to you when I get home, which has been my tradition so far).

Meanwhile, I'm a little bit losing my mind here, but it's all going to be okay. Why do I have so much stuff? So much paperwork and random odds and ends? Last time we moved, I kept thinking I had finally moved all my books to the new house, and literally five or six times I opened a closet door or found another unexpected box stashed underneath something, filled with more books. I remember once I just started crying, crouched over yet another heavy box weeping bitter tears of bitterness.

I'm going to sell over half of them this time, either at Powells if they'll take them, or at the moving sale in July. And as much as I'd like to believe that I'll stuff the money into another envelope for moving expenses, I will probably buy more books. It's not my fault, though. Miranda July and A.M. Homes have both released books I've been waiting for for months. Also I need to buy all the Murakami I don't own.

But at least I'll be trading three or four boxes of books for maybe one box, which will help.

I'm so tired. All these logistics are strangling me. I just want to end all the housekeeping bullshit and get back to writing. This is good, though; when I move I'll be so relieved to write I won't remember at first just how sad I am to have left Portland.

thank you, Lloyd Alexander

This week Lloyd Alexander died at age 83.

I was ten when I first read the Chronicles of Prydain. My elementary school librarian, Ms. Simmons, recommended them, and as soon as I finished The Book of Three I returned to the library for The Black Cauldren. I read all five in a week, staying up way past my bedtime and reading by my nightlight (I'd convinced my parents I was afraid of the dark just for such a contingency).

Between the wry and self-deprecating humor (the main character starts out not just as a Pig-Keeper but as an Assistant Pig-Keeper), the strange wild Welsh-inspired magics, the gallantry and romance, and the adventure, I was obsessed. More than obsessed; for a few years, those books were the only things that kept me afloat. I was never a fully socialized child, always a little bit shy, but life took a nosedive around puberty and I learned what it was to be bullied and humiliated. Like any romantic, introverted, spacy kid, I glommed on to my most beloved escapes with fervor. When my skirt tore in front of Mrs. Templeton's entire class, or when the big girls in gym bombarded me with volleyballs just to see me duck, I summoned up thoughts of Prince Gwydion and Taran facing down the Cauldron-Born. I imagined Taran alone questing for his identity, afraid of his own insignificance. I summoned up their courage and used it for myself.

More than anything I wanted to be Eilonwy of the Red-Gold hair. I prayed to God every night that I'd wake up in Prydain. I tried to emulate her speech, her pertness and her stubbornness. I had a little glow-ball I called my "bauble." Eilonwy got to take part in the action sometimes, but sometimes she was hypnotized by evil witches and saved by heroes. She was perfect, perfectly embodied all the different things I wanted to learn to be by reading fantastic literature, at least at age ten or eleven. She was brave and strong and no sissy, and yet she was worthy of love, worthy of being saved.

I went back again and again to the library. I next read all the Vesper Holly books, the mock-pulps with their even-more-badass-than-Eilonwy heroine, and followed those up with the pseudo Les Miserables-esque Westmark trilogy, all of which I utterly adored. The Prydain books were what I always returned to, but there were other worlds to explore with Alexander, other adventures to have.

The point I'm trying to make is not that I was an obsessive little freak (which was true) or that Lloyd Alexander was wonderful because he gave me a fictive world to escape to (which is also true), but that something else important lived (and remains alive) in his work. I'm willing to accept that my escapist frenzy was excessive, that retreating from the world isn't always "healthy." What Alexander did for me, though, was to make me aware of what I already had by dramatizing it. Isn't that part of the role of a good fantasist, to take very human, very ordinary emotions and allow them to explore their own limits? To take fear and humiliation and self-doubt and let them explore a new setting, let them find some kind of expression (and maybe resolution) in a way that might reveal something interesting and humane to the reader? Lloyd Alexander gave me that, time and time again. Coded in the Welsh mythology, in the ass-kicking energy of Vesper Holly and the dirty but romantic streets of Westmark, there was a whole other world to be found: the world inside my own self, where I could be heroic just by keeping tears of shame off my cheeks, where I could stamp my foot and tell someone no if I didn't like what they were doing, where I had the power to stand up for myself and for my friends. The place where I was both a sorceress and a warrior, an adventuress, and a princess entirely deserving of love.

It was certainly not that simple. Some of those are hard lessons to learn, and some you have to learn again and again. But Alexander's work was the first truly totemic escapism I had in my life,  the first time I gathered strength and beauty to that degree from a work of fiction.

So thank you, Mr. Alexander. Godspeed wherever you are bound. I hope tonight some shy little kid shines a flashlight on your words under the covers and finds something beyond their own dreams. Or, maybe, that they find just that: dreams beyond dreams, worlds beyond worlds, all inside their own selves.