every fugitive hour leaves its mark

Where did September go? Whither October, for that matter? We’re staring down at November, and here in Ireland, we’re a week and change into a six-week lockdown — intended to somehow “save Christmas” from COVID-19, gods and saints have mercy on us all.

If you follow me elseweb, you may have noticed that I’m reviewing a lot less often than I was in those long-ago days of yore (before 2020?), even as late as last year. That’s partly because of this year and its discontents, and partly because I’ve reached a stage of life — and reading — where I’ve read so much that very little seems new and exciting, and few indeed are the things that rise above tiring. (Most recently I can recommend Elizabeth Bear’s Machine and Aliette de Bodard’s Seven of Infinities.)

Partly, too, it’s realising just how much reading and analysing other people’s creative work (and writing about it) has eaten the part of me that used to do creative work myself. I wrote fiction copiously — promiscuously, and often terribly — up to the time I started my PhD and even a little into it. But since then, almost nothing.

Not, at least, until I decided to stop reviewing for a month — and in that time wrote nearly 18K words of original fiction, as though they were boiling out of me, bursting. And I feel better for it: more at ease in my own skin. It’s definitely something to think on.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop talking about other people’s books entirely! Barbara Hambly’s House of the Patriarch is the latest instalment in the Benjamin January mysteries. Freshly returned to New Orleans in 1840 from his travails in Texas, surgeon, musician, and free man of colour Benjamin January finds himself solicited to travel to New York, to help investigate the disappearance of a young white woman. In the religious ferment of rural New York, in stations on the Underground Railroad — and the racist dangers of both city and countryside — January finds himself in as much peril as he’s ever been. Atmospheric as all Hambly’s work, and with an almost claustrophobic tension, House of the Patriarch proves a successful, satisfying, utterly chilling novel of mystery.

I’ve been enjoying The Mountain Goats’ new album, Getting into Knives, as well as Woodkid’s S16. I think “Harbor Me” might be one of my favourites of The Mountain Goat’s oeuvre:

Never see the day before dark
Every fugitive hour leaves its mark
Coded marks on a map
Written in my own hand
Parse it for days
Still can’t understand

As for S16, I quite like “Horizons Into Battlegrounds”:

Can reliance ease the madness
When every voice says I’m worthless?
I thought I would find the force from fighting
But if I win alone, I’m losing

How the end of autumn treating you all?