way off in the distance they rang a bell

[raven]

I don't know why I have this tendency to make LJ updates at stupid places and times. I haven't written anything in a week because I keep trying to write about Hong Kong and failing; it defies glib description, and profound is beyond me. I have been back a few days now, and I am still getting up at astonishing hours of my own accord - so that's what seven am looks like, etc. - and I keep thinking I ought to write about it, but it isn't easily evoked: it's not like anywhere else, it's a distant place. My first morning there, I woke up the same way - suddenly, luminously awake at an unearthly hour, really, unearthly, with the sunrise breaking over the surface of the harbour and the moon breaking over the surface of the sun.

I admit, I didn't know. I had some vague notion of a total solar eclipse, somewhere, sometime: it turned out that there was totality most notably in Varanasi (now, that would have been worth seeing) and in the area around Shanghai; while there was a lot of excitement on television, in Hong Kong, it was the quiet edge of the penumbra. In the absence of anything more sophisticated, I poured water into a salver and watched the reflection when it stilled, and while it was partial, it was eerie to watch. People on television in India were doing what Indians do, viz., make a lot of noise and invoke our gods, but the city below the window briefly stopped, looked up, and started again. I suppose that ought to be very profound, you ought to learn something from that, but I'm still not sure I know what sort of place Hong Kong is. It's not a city for tourists. It's not a place to see, it's a place to be - to get up and wander around and eat street food and sear gently in the sun. It's an odd mixture of history, future and seascape, occasional colonial grace notes on a background of sunshine and chrome, things that are familiar from India, like bizarre juxtapositions of place names - places called Central and Causeway Bay next to places called Tsim Sha Tsui and Sheung Wan - and people who sell books in five languages on the street. And that, too, coupled with the weird feeling that I could pay some nominal amount and be on a train to Guangzhou, which I would have done in a moment had the train timetanle not been very stern about where you need to get off if your visa entitlements are not up to scratch.

I suppose, in the end, it came down to a certain sense of wistfulness. Hong Kong is a modern city, and if I can tell anything from a place, I can tell that - it has polished surfaces, smooth, silent mass transit and clean air, clean water - but it's not a Western one. The guide book - which was actually very helpful in most regards - was straight-facedly effusive about fusion and where East meets West and other such tourist-board platitudes - but I disagreed. There's a distinction between being Western and having achieved a state of modernity - and it's a distinction I've never been quite sure exists, and having found it finally, I'm going to remember it. Hong Kong is full of things to remind you that you're not in Western Europe or North America - it is emphatically not a Western city. It was like a glimpse of the world I hope to be living in when I'm old - the one where I come from is just where I come from, it has no connotations of developing and backward. I hope that one day, Delhi is like Hong Kong - full of the things it has today, the constant shouting, the noisy organised street religion, the people who can't mind their own business for a moment, the street markets, the people on the hustle - but with that clean air, clean water, without the piss and spit and betel-juice. It may happen, and it may not; but it was a treat, regardless.

Since returning I have applied for four training contracts, bringing the total up to some ludicrous number, and had my bimonthly I-am-going-to-be-unemployed-FOREVER freakout (this time, brought on by the fact that for the first time ever, I am legally unemployed); I have spent a pleasant afternoon relearning how one does not get oneself Thrown Into Tree By Angry Horse; I have resolved to take part in dogdaysofsummer; I have re-read Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, and decided that everyone else ought to. I'm surprised I didn't read the former earlier, actually - both books are set at Balliol in the 2050s, in a universe where time travel has been invented, yes, but is strictly controlled by the Oxford history faculty, i.e., dizzy academics and bureaucracy. Doomsday Book is epic and kind of gorgeous and deeply, deeply disturbing - the basic plot is so simple it ought to be trite, viz., the first mediaeval historian visits Oxford during the Black Death, and instead the author (er, Connie Willis) manages to wring real drama and tragedy out of it. I've read it twice in a month - no mean feat, considering it's 500 pages - and loved it without reservation.

And then there's To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is a sequel only in the sense that it happens after, and has two of the same characters. It's also wonderful - from the blurb, it's a romantic comedy with time travel, but it's more than that - it's deeper and denser, meticulously plotted and paced, but it is also a delicate pastiche of Three Men In a Boat, and a delicate little love story, besides. (I wrote fic for it for yuletide last year, in fact: Yes, Virginia.) Another one that rewards a re-read, I think.

Anyway, I was talking about making LJ entries at odd times and places. I'm on a train between Liverpool and London Euston, which is tilting kind of dizzily across the landscape. (I love this journey, usually; I love how you can just sit on a train for two hours watching patchwork fields and sleepy sheep drift by, and then arrive, but it all looks very vivid-light gloomy today, lots of clouds boiling indecisively above the horizon.) This week I have a job of sorts - a one-week placement with a tiny law firm somewhere in London, doing a lot of criminal defence work, so should be fun, and also should get it straight in my head whether I really want to spend my whole life doing this - and next week I am in Edinburgh with shimgray.

The first prompt for dogdaysofsummer is The enigma of August / Season of dust and teenage arson. I may not write it, but, how lovely, how aptly mysterious for this Sunday-afternoon journey into a month of something new. They are about to bring me coffee. In a lot of regards, life is good.

Comments

[tau_sigma]

I must note down these books to read (as if I really need MOAR BOOKS right now; I acquired ten books in three days this week, crazy).

Also, just, you write so beautifully. And it sounds like you enjoyed Hong Kong; good.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, oh, you will LOVE THEM. Really, you must read them if you get the chance.

(Thank you, my dear!)

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

There's a distinction between being Western and having achieved a state of modernity
I think this is very important, and should probably be lit up in 20-ft LEDs somewhere.

*loves*

Can I borrow these books? I don't actually have THAT many of your books on the to-read pile at the moment. *cough*

[petronelle.livejournal.com]

Doomsday Book and Passage both made me cry for, quite literally, hundreds of pages, and were therefore impossible to put down, as I was certain I'd never pick them up again.

To Say Nothing of the Dog, on the other hand, I read the week after I discovered Dorothy Sayers, and it benefited immensely from that.

[tau_sigma]

They have been added to my bookmooch save-for-later list, which is now at a shocking 71 books long.

(I do love reading your journal. *hearts you*)

[fyrdrakken]

Connie Willis' short story collection Fire Watch is worth reading also -- the title story is another of those time-travelling historians, taking his "final exam" trip to WWII as part of a fire control team. And her book Bellwether is my other favorite of hers, after To Say Nothing of the Dog. Passage and Lincoln's Dreams were too depressing for me.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Firewatch, among other things, is what got me into Connie Willis in the first place, but on reflection, it doesn't work for me as well as the time travel novels. (For one thing, it seems to exist in a slightly different continuity - what happened to Kivrin isn't quite the same - and for another, it does odd things to Balliol that jar with me in a way that again, the novels don't.) Not that it isn't great, because everything of hers is, yes. But still.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*grins* Oh, I hear you. Passage kills me too. And I had a similar congruity with my discovering of Dorothy L. Sayers. It was very apt.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

:P To Say Nothing of the Dog, yes of course, remind me. Doomsday Book is Shim's, but somehow I don't think he'll mind. :)

[petronelle.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that I would *trust* anybody who could read that book without weeping.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

Indeed, that would imply that he had opinions, and personal autonomy.

[fyrdrakken]

"Fire Watch" was so short I didn't really notice the discrepancies, at least as compared to the larger issues between Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog as to the rules the department works under and the safety features in the actual apparatus (which I wound up fanwanking as indicating a number of years between the two books and as things having been amended in that time). And given that my sole exposure to Oxford consisted of a weekend trip, I would pretty much have missed anything odd happening to one of the colleges.