#I mean — it’s alluded to in the art book too with the phrase ‘he doesn’t exactly look Japanese’ which is always a weird line .

[byakuyasdarling]

I am reworking their backstory slightly (by that I mean I did and I’m too lazy to write it in my card as I need drawing assets) — but part of that is also at least *knowing* what Bya’s parents would look and act like.

I think I drafted a design for his mother before but I kind want to redo her as I’ve changed the role she plays in his life (instead as of being an active part, I’ve decided to kill her off when he was young, which fits much better into canon and what he says regarding his family).

I know that Byakuya literally HAS to inherit his eyes and hair colour from his mother, just by genetic predisposition — which I think is technically possible, albeit unlikely, through genetic recombination (another fandom interpretation was some kind of albinism, and although it’s a smooth explanation I don’t think it’s intended — especially as he’s intended as a dirty-blonde, not platinum). I like to think he has his father’s jaw, nose, and general body type though.

[necronomapple]

Diablo Angel Name Etymology

@mal-likes-biscuits​, I was planning on doing a post regarding the etymologies and implications of the archangel’s names but seems like you beat me to the punch. Regardless, here are some additional insights I gathered from my research that you might find interesting:

Imperius

It’s certainly logical to conclude that his name derives from the Latin imprīmīs and subsequent English derivatives, however, there is a less obvious suggestion that I believe is more compelling.

The Empyrean, which in ancient cosmology was the highest sphere of heaven and thought to be a realm beyond the physical universe made of pure fire and light.

Derives from the Medieval Latin empȳreus.

Further from the Ancient Greek ἐμπύριος (empúrios), from ἐν (en, “in”) + πῦρ (pûr, “fire”), meaning “in the fire” (from this the English pyre is derived).

In Dante's Paradiso, Dante journeys from the Primum Mobile sphere to the Empyrean which is the dwelling of God, the angels (including Gabriel), and the blessed souls of the Celestial Rose (Canto XXX - XXXIII).

Piecing this together, it seems likely that Imperius’s name is meant to evoke the image of the highest divinities, of god (Anu in this case), and of celestial eminence.

As well as the connotation of being the angel “in the fire”, not only because he wields fire magic but also because he’s nearly always depicted in the heat of battle against demons, and thus in the line of “fire” if you will. Such is his role as Valor, leader of the Heavenly Host.

Furthermore, the Ancient Greeks regarded fire (pûr) as one of the four Classical Elements posited by Empedocles.

Hippocrates of Kos (or some say Kosm) was the first to apply the Elements to the ancient medical theory of humorism, which proposed that the imbalance of four bodily fluids, or humours, (each corresponding to an Element) effected one’s health and temperament.

The bodily humour attributed to fire was yellow bile.  An excess of yellow bile was believed to generate feelings of anger, aggression, and vengeance. This was regarded as the choleric temperament.

However, stemming from Galen’s theories of temperament, choleric individuals we’re also regarded as ambitious, confident, extroverted personalities that served well as natural leaders.

So yes, Imperius has too much yellow bile and needs to chill the fuck out.

Lore Tidbit: It’s canon that the mortals of the Diablo universe apply the Theory of the Four Humours to explain shifts in behavior, or at least had done so in the past. In D3, we find a mention of this in King Leoric’s Journal, Part 2:

“A fetid, pallid malaise has fallen over the manor we now call home. Young Albrecht seems to be enjoying himself in our new home, however. Perhaps I am simply suffering from an imbalance of humours brought on by the recent change of clime.”

 Itherael

You may recall I had mentioned there being only four Classical Elements. Turns out there’s actually a fifth element, aether, introduced by Aristotle in his natural philosophy treatise, On the Heavens. It’s not too farfetched to speculate that Itherael’s name probably stems from this quintessence.

Aether, from the Anceint Greek αἰθήρ (aithēr) meaning “pure air” or “clear sky” (derived further from the root αἴθω (aíthō) meaning "to burn, to kindle"), was a substance thought to fill the upper regions of space that the gods breathed. Likewise, the Empyrean itself was alleged to be composed entirely of pure aether.

First proposed in the 1600s, luminiferous aether (“light-bearing” ether) was the theoretical medium thought to fill the vacuum of space and allow for the transmission of wave-based light.

However, the aether theory was later discredited by the results of the 1887 Michelson–Morley experiment. This led to the development of special relativity, which proposed that light traveled through a vacuum at a constant speed c (no medium necessary).

I suppose this all seems rather extraneous, however, let us consider the nature of Fate:

As the Archangel of Fate, Itherael was able to read the destinies of immortal beings of Creation and as such, the ultimate outcome of the Eternal Conflict. In this way, it could be said that Itherael had “clear” or “pure” insight into the workings of universe, unobscured by the fog of uncertainty.

However, his grasp on the future began to slip away once the nephalem entered the equation.

Talus’ar, the “medium” by which he was able to construe fates, ceased to provide a clear picture of the future when its prophecies failed to pass, unable to account for the intervention of the nephalem.

Likewise, Itherael’s predictions of the future become tenuous and insubstantial, one might even say ethereal, as his vision was forever blurred by the existence of the nephalem—beings whose fates remain ambiguous.

 Auriel

The Diablo series tends to draw heavily on the lore of the Judeo-Christian theology, particularly in the naming conventions of angels and demons.

Auriel’s name seems to be a conglomeration of two angelic names from Judeo-Christian lore: Uriel and Ariel.

1). Uriel translates from Hebrew as “fire of god” or “god is my light”.

Although he doesn’t appear in the Judeo biblical canon, Archangel Uriel is mentioned across various biblical apocrypha, gnostic texts, and Dead Sea Scrolls (including the Book of Enoch).

Uriel’s role and title seems to vary across all his mentions. However, the relevant ones boil down to the “angel of the earth” (in Heywood's Hierarchy of Blessed Angels), the “the keeper of beauty and light” (in Episcopal traditions), and “archangel of earth” linked with natural flora (in angelic mysticism of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn).

The recurring motifs of “earth” and “beauty” suggest Uriel’s prominence in protecting natural creation. It could be said that Auriel occupies a similar niche within the High Heavens as the overseer of the Gardens of Hope, a realm that is already a reflection of natural earthly beauty and resplendent with light.

2). Ariel translates from Hebrew as “lion of god”.

Canonically, Ariel was used in reference to the city of Jerusalem (Isaiah 29) however in subsequent apocryphal and gnostic texts (e.g. Pistis Sophia), Ariel is considered the name of an angel who punished sinners.

In later mysticism, Ariel is regarded as the “angel of nature” or “Earth’s great lord” (sometimes considered an archangel). Ariel is said to hold power over aspects of the natural world, Empedoclean elements, and wildlife.

In essence, Ariel acts as a guardian and healer of wild animals and protector of the environment, a role which echoes Auriel’s own in the Heavens as the keeper of the Gardens and tender to the wounded.

The implication as a “lion of god” could also be applied to Auriel, whom, as we’ve seen in the Wrath animation, is no pacifist and wields considerable power in battle. Canonically, she is also said to settle quarrels between Imperius and Tyrael which, I’d imagine, demands considerable courage and fortitude: traits befitting of a lion.

Ariel is also associated with the color pink. Likewise, Auriel’s wings are sometimes depicted as pink, although at other times blue or teal, perhaps to further allude to Auriel’s close connection with nature and flora.

 Tyrael

Drawing from Judeo-Christian tradition, Tyrael’s name seems to derive from angel Turiel, whose name means “rock of god” or “mountain of god”.

According to the Book of Enoch, Turiel had been one of the Watchers, antediluvian angels who were sent to earth to watch over humanity.

However, the Watchers fell when they took human women as wives and taught humanity the forbidden knowledge of astrology, pharmacology, weaponry, cosmetics, medical sorcery, and various other arts and sciences. Their human wives also bore hybrid offspring called the Nephilim, indubitably the major inspiration for Diablo’s Nephalem.

This draws a nice parallel with Tyrael’s story, whom, like Turiel and the Watchers, fell from grace when he became too invested in humanity, becoming a pariah among his own kind.

Also similarly to the Watchers, Tyrael entrusted secret knowledge and artifacts (the Soulstones) to his chosen group of mortals, the Horadrim, without the approval of the Angiris Council.

Recall, Tyrael was the founder of the Horadrim, assuming a role as guide to humanity’s affairs with demons, and subsequently, as a mentor to the New Horadrim, serving overall as a sort of moral anchor for his nephalem companions.

Considering this, it is not such a stretch to suggest that he is a “rock” or “mountain” of moral fortitude and stability among both mortals and angels.

Supposedly, there exists a manuscript called The Secret Grimoire of Turiel which contains symbols of medieval magic and rituals on how to evoke angelic spirits, including Turiel himself.

While not directly analogous, the Book of Tyrael detail’s Tyreal’s own obscure knowledge of the Heavens, the Hells, and the history of Sanctuary.

 Malthael

It was difficult to find anything substantial regarding Malthael’s etymology beyond “mal is bad”.

However, if we assume for a moment that the root of Malthael’s name is not mal- but rather malth- or maltha-, then we might be able to infer another meaning.

It’s a bit of a stretch but let us assume his name actually derives from the Ancient Greek μαλθακός (malthakós) which means “soft”.

This further derives from the Ancient Greek μαλακός (malakós, “soft”, “mild”) which is where we get the English malacology from.

This “softness” could be insinuating Malthael’s taciturn and rather soft-spoken nature as the Archangel of Wisdom, as well as his penchant for sneaking up on others with soft steps, unheard.

Alternatively, his name could derive from the Ancient Greek μάλθα (máltha) which was the name used for a mineral pitch or tar or rather any mixture serving as cement, mortar stucco, or similar mineral pastes.

Two implications here:

1). Pitch and tar are both deeply black substances (from which we get the phrase “pitch black”). Moreover, tar pits are infamous for their ability to ensnare animals that stray out too far, leading to their slow and imminent deaths as they sink and starve.

This connotation could allude to Malthael’s own decent into madness, his mind “sinking” into dark thoughts, “starved” of the wisdom he once knew. In a sense, he “strayed off” too far from the path of Wisdom. This of course led to him embracing Death.

As the angel of Death, Malthael dons far darker armor and robes than what he had worn as the aspect of Wisdom. At the height of his madness he consumes the black Soulstone, an artifact which you could say is “pitch black”. Here, he has fully sunken into the tar.

2). Cement, mortar, and the like are mineral binding agents that are used in construction to hold assemblies together and provide overall structural integrity.

By this analogy, Malthael himself was that mortar, that maltha, that bound the Angiris Council together into one cohesive structure. He was the original leader whose wisdom brought stability and surety to the angels. It’s only after he left that the Council’s unity dissolved and eventually led to the fall of Tyrael.

So you see, our resident edgelord doesn’t have to be all bad.

Hopefully I’ve been able to further shed some light on the significance of the archangels’ names. Whether or not it had been Blizzard’s intentions for us to draw these parallels, it nevertheless grant us further insight into the complex natures of these seemingly enigmatic characters.

[arodrwho]

critrole 2.23 lb

“i don’t know if it’s sma-art” o kiri

“that is a natural twenty” i love how u say that so casually like it’s not the 2nd one in a row there dude

s et the bones on fire y’all

amazing. entirely by accident the bones are now on fire

“i burn his head off” oh no

“caleb’s arms kind of just fall slack and he slumps to his knees” oh no

“let’s take a walk” “he’s not present, currently” yeah uh nah he’s gonna be highkey dissociating for sure

“i was gonna go with caleb, but seeing beau go after him i’m just gonna kinda nod and go looking through the skulls for gold” mm on the one hand okie & sweet she trusts beau w/him but on the other :( :( I Want More Handholds

[kiri stabs troll] “this means we are friends” kiri u goof. but also yes, killing a troll together does make for excellent friendships, harry potter said so

“how are you caleb?” “good, good.” “you went to, uh. you faded away there for a second. you okay?” there’s my goodgood concern

also i love the nonverbal thumbsup there

(definitely not bc that’s a very me thing to do, no sir, no way)

moss dwarf!!

“[jester voice] don’t eat humans, okay?” kiri i love u. what good advice to share

“i saw you asking about the book that the lady had. d’you want me to get it for you?” :D :D more nott & yasha friendship!!

lmao they’re real obsessed w/this book aren’t they

though okay i gotta admit i’m curious too

“feathered leather” lmao

“it’s what you do when you’re--you got a group of people” m olly, were u about to say a family word? or a friend word? i feel like u we-ere, but then u backtracked

“get into trouble” “no we are not going to get into trouble” “get into trouble!!” “nein” [sad bird noises] hey for the 8 millionth time i love kiri

“you know. okay!!” “good. you are pretty cute” awww

“wrapped around his weenie” oh my g o d kiri stop

the word i hope you are looking for is “finger,” as in like he’s wrapped around your finger? or else you’re making fun of him in more ways than one here, don’t know, can’t tell, need the original context--okay so the original context is molly’s tapestry according to the google, so i didn’t actually need that necessarily it doesn’t seem super relevant. mostly i think you’re just laughing at him, either alluding back to ur joke earlier, or the wrapped-round-finger thing, or both

anyway

aw no, pls don’t send kiri away :(

i mean u make a good point abt her definitely gonna die if she stays in the thick of it for too much longer long-term but

i love her though

“you took a walk with her though, was that okay, was that awkward?” “ja that was fine. she’s probably a good egg” caleb talks like such a doof. which is bc he is a doof ofc, i know this, we all know this, but listen i gotta point it out anyway it’s just the rules

“in her weird, sort of stoic way she seems to care about you” “yeah she’s a prickly pear but she’s not a bad person” aw

“you think she was dropped on her head or something? she’s just very sort of..you know...” nott that’s rly rude. what would u do if she had been?

“i mean i think u and i are a little ‘eh’ in our own particular way” [whispers] them all nd

“right tool for the right job, right kiri?” “go fuck yourself” ok so jester told her use that for if someone says sth u don’t like, but i think here she’s using that for “yeah yeah, abrasive, has its uses, agree, that’s what i have this abrasive phrase for bc it is Useful”

“kiri knows what i’m talking about” u dang right she does

sidenote i rly appreciate how everyone acknowledges kiri’s echolalia’s communication & not jus mindless purposeless repeating

like it’s not even a question, they always know she means sth when she says sth no matter how. what’s the word. out of the box? unexpected? sth like that idk--no matter how that it seems in context

it’s good. they’re good

“earlier you said i could come talk to you whenever i want, and thank you for that. that makes me feel very good.” :D

“yeza was his name. the halfling man. before. that’s all. i just wanted to say his name out loud. it’s been a while” she trusts him so much i’m crying

“[caleb voice] she’s probably a good egg” ur very right kiri, yasha’s excellent

“[nott voice] yeza was his name, the halfling man, from before” kiri no

kiri why

don’ t

o hey it’s mentioned of that townplace where nott sent a package, i wonder if we’ll learn more sweet backstory things

“sometimes when he stares at you and doesn’t say anything he is talking to u” autistic.......

“you’re a good guy i think” “i think so too” what losers

also did fjord jus compliment hisself instead of caleb bc i think grammatically that’s what he jus did

“you get cold? yes? or no?” i love. everything about their interactions w/kiri

“[jester voice] yes?” “you get cold. okay.” : D

“how’s the new management working out?” oh my g od i didn’t realize it was them

amazing

“[cali voice] i kill people!!” fierce kiri

“we need to get rid of kiri” not in frONT OF HER NOTT WTF

“she’s nice....whyyy......let’s kill her” nott i know i just wtf’d at u but i gotta let u know i love u

“[whispers] i am crazy” “oh. i can see that about u” y’all are goofs

party tiiiiiime

[circumswoop]

Black Movado: Frank Ocean and the Art of Time

As pseudonyms go, Frank Ocean is pretty straightforward. Right away you know this is emotive, aesthetic music: why get out of his dreams and into his car when you can do both? Take the innate politeness of a born Southerner, add the steel reserve of a bred lowlife and you get songs made from acrylic acids and fine glass powder. Ocean serenades the sea directly in “Swim Good” and “Blue Whale”. Remember the David Foster Wallace line from “Little Expressionless Animals” abt the sea looking like a big blue dog? Swimming with dolphins, incredibly, is the height of basic. But a blue whale? Years ago I read a piece of short fic, by whom I don’t remember, abt a lifeguard who saves a man from drowning and then later sees that man in public, like a restaurant or something, and he, the drowning man, does not recognize his saviour. I wish I cld run into the burning wreckage of whatever hard drive it was on and rescue that story.

More than anything, Frank Ocean’s music feels like falling thru different kinds of air. Figuring out the angles, or angels, of the artist who once asked us to imagine being thrown from a plane is trickier now than in 2011, not just because we’ll never be those kids again. 2011, year of Frank Ocean and the Weeknd, was when the Tumblr aesthetic peaked, with its treatment of visual culture as micrographic surgery, cutting away segments to freeze for a microscope, repeating until there is no more cancer. As palliative pastiche, Tumblr may never be equaled in the history of the internet. Why do you think Grimes, that bony collector of kitschy enthusiasms, still uses it (sort of)? Why do you think Frank Ocean, parachute artist, still uses it(sort of)? Why do you think I still use it (lol, sort of)? If you are a cutter but not of skin, you cut images, or text, and paste them on a blog in lieu of a body. The word “blog” doesn’t mean anything anymore but it still has exactly the trunk space for a body.

A few days after Blonde dropped, I was talking to Yes abt it on Viber, the app we use to keep in touch now that he’s moved back to Greece. Affectionately, he accused me of being too topical bc I’d heard the record and he hadn’t. Then later, he sent me a video of him hearing “Nikes” for the first time, a master shot of him reacting and lowkey crying, a video he meant for his bf in New York but one he wanted me to see, as one of his designated watchers. Once he sent me a visual of him slamming, and this was almost more wrenching. Something about the way that song switches between weary dragging and witchy sweetness recalls one of my favorite lines of literature, from Ondaatje’s The English Patient: “There are stories the man recites quietly into the room which slip from level to level like a hawk”. (Ondaatje, pastiche royale, is a cutter if there ever was one.) There are stories we tell ourselves and stories we tell our loves. We think we see, just for a minute, the wings of an angel who has temporarily turned into a pickup truck. Or maybe we just hear them.

Frank did some time in church, as attested to on Tumblr: “My grandmother was pentecostal evangelical. She brought much of that fire and brimstone back to her household.”

50 versions of “White Ferrari”

Yes thinks Frank seems pretty gay. I myself do not, while getting that he is. Something about Frank’s testimony seems more like my own, meaning that of a boy who grew up like everyone else and then woke up one day, pretty recently, really exhausted. “Nikes”, for all its gunwales-and-all authenticism, was also a deadly indictment of the ruthless transactionality that passed for straight culture in 2016. Men being power brokers, and women rewarding them, acquires a harsher light when everyone’s in on the joke, when exploitation is the same thing as askance anymore. Yes told me he saw his file from when he was in Bellevue, and honestly they couldn’t figure out his sexuality, except I know for a fact he’s had sex with exclusively men for 3 years now. We discussed it once, and we agreed sort of glibly that girls just aren’t as down, and here’s why: they’re finally as trash about sex as men have been for millennia, but in the opposite direction. Now there’s a winking runway of lights laid out before every m/f interface, and the men are landing and the women are taking off.

I’ve always felt like Frank Ocean did not come out as gay so much as he seceded from the sexual polity. I myself have done this, little by little, over the last 18 months as my years-long relationship, and then another one, wrapped. Seduction and betrayal are an exhausting form of bone remodeling and I can’t deal with that distribution of weight anymore. There’s a reason some dicks are astringent. The curve of the penis is the curve of the earth.

Frank’s Tumblr, last fall: “Consciously though, I don’t want straight—a little bent is good.” Frank on “Siegfried”: I can’t relate to my peers/I’d rather live outside.

Think of another line from “Nikes”--“but if you need dick I got u”--as essentially a somnolent invite, shd sex ever come up. The paradigm of a man too busy for his woman may still be an eye-rolly turn-on, but if that usage slowly morphed into a kind of IOU--not a booty call, but sex on call--then that song accomplishes another mission. If it majors in telling leeches to unstick (these bitches want Nikes/they lookin for a check/tell em it ain’t likely), it minors in motivating the favorably unhorny to speak up for themselves. One of Frank’s most valuable adds has been this exhaustion--if he is in awe of Prince, he’s totally his inverse.

China, Japan, Oceania, France, just around. Casual.

Ocean is, incredibly, both world-spanning and alone. In last year’s NYT feature hosted by Jon Caramanica, he alluded to going on dates in London, keeping the hard drives of his music in a backpack, and skipping Blonde media to tool around anyplace that suited him. These revelations, or postcards, sealed Frank’s fate as patron saint of the voluntarily solitary, which may or may not be the same as the voluntarily committed. In the interview, Frank alludes to the “luxury of choice” which is pretty loaded but the expression of preference is the one thing they shd never take away from you, all the way down to the grout in your cell. Even if you never had it.

In his germinal book The Aesthetics of Disappearance, the writer and artist Paul Virilio famously offered a riffy, razzle-dazzle definition of “picnolepsy” as a kind of allergic reaction to speed--worldspeed or brainspeed, “a montage of temporalities”. This turning of what is essentially epilepsy into just a stunningly inept relationship with reality would seem glib or banal, even though Virilio credits Ambrose Pare’s qualification of epilepsy as “retention of feelings.” Except it also applies to time as a long passage, like a train tunnel, broken up by flashes of light or gleams of steel from above. Obviously this is me getting into Philo101 thru really overqualified means, but picnolepsy is more fun when you make it modular, rather than metabolic. It explains one of the highest functions of pop music: to mark time. Pop is the ceiling fan above you as you lie on your bed. What’s keeping it from falling and slicing you to smithereens?

Frank Ocean Music, with its eroded-coast elisions, nostalgia as a kind of ultraviolence, and polyrhythmic, difficult-to-replicate-at-karoake vocal patterns, is Memory Music. Plenty of artists do this, if not all of them to some extent. Ocean is the rare one who looks sideways, not back to the source of the old memory or forward to the source of a new one. Virilio compares this oscillation to a sort of trackable loss of interest, a loss you can steadily mourn, as simply as looking at old photographs. There’s probably no other songwriter of Ocean’s stature who is so fascinated by the broken image, or the art of the slant, and who breaks that down into pure romance--all while looking so effortlessly out over his life from the slashlike lull of what Virilio called “paradoxical wakefulness.” Which is odd or slightly berserk, since listening to Blond or Endless or even, retrospectively, Channel Orange occasionally elicits symptoms of paradoxical wokeness.

Stare at the monitors and come up with nothing

In the 2016 film Arrival, aliens land in egg-like avatars that also look for all the world like blue whales--especially toward the end of the film, when they levitate with the same impossible elegance. 

The purpose of this film is to talk about time and language, about how they agree and disagree. The aliens, or heptapods, have a written language that uses center embedding and presents visually as witchy-looking spells or smoke. 

As soon as Louise Banks, the Amy Adams character, cracks the language, she cracks time, or at least the heptapods’ expression or experience of it, and is able to, for all intents and purposes and excusing the crudely inadequate phrase, “see the future”. A heptapod sentence can’t really be translated except by effect, because the inkblotty figures they emanate are constructed palindrome-like--the same forward and backward. 

Except it takes several minutes with a legal pad or an app for humans to work out even the flimsiest palindromes, while heptapods intuit or assay the maximum meaning from such recursion with no consideration for time or expelled work, because the time it took to write this sentence would be already inflected in the characters like markers on a motion capture suit. Erase the layer of knowledge or “meaning” and time is able to be visualized, in both directions, and if you can visualize it you can manipulate it. Or erase it.

[stevepotterwrites]

A GLORIOUS THOUGHT EXCURSION: On John Olson’s Novel In Advance of the Broken Justy

https://bookshop.org/a/8227/9781935835172

John Olson's thoughtful and often humorous new novel, In Advance of the Broken Justy, opens with a somewhat Kafkaesque quest to find medical attention for the narrator's wife's infected eye late at night in Paris during a doctor's strike and ends on January 8th, 2015 with news of the previous day's terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices playing on the television in their hotel room as they prepare to leave for home.

In the pages between the personal crisis and the international one, we are introduced to the oddball mix of neighbors in the narrator's thin-walled building who are driving him and his wife, Ronnie, crazy with noise from construction projects, stomping feet, and rather explicitly audible sounds of digestive functions from a neighboring bathroom. Noisy neighbors are enough to drive any introverted, bookish homebody nuts, but our unnamed protagonist tells us, during a seemingly obsessive and often hilariously aggrieved section of narration reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, that he additionally suffers from hyperacusia — a heightened sensitivity to noise, and tinnitus — ringing in the ears, as well as Generalized Anxiety Disorder for which he has been prescribed a variety of antidepressants through the years.

It's not only their immediate living situation that is cause for aggravation, the couple are also dealing more generally with a growing dissatisfaction with life in rapidly-changing Seattle. Olson writes that his dislike of Seattle, “evolved over a period of time, like an allergy that starts out with a minor rash and then grows into strange secretions and the constant application of topical ointments.” As their disaffection with Seattle grows, so does their love of Paris. “...we each felt an attachment that had become deeply emotional, like a drug. We had become addicted to this city. It inhabited us, as Ronnie put it.”

The love of Paris among certain artistically-inclined Americans has a longstanding literary and cinematic history, of course. Mr. Olson's novel continues a lineage tracing back at least as far as Ernest Hemingway's A Movable Feast and F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Babylon Revisited” through Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road to Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. Unlike Gil Pender, the protagonist of Mr. Allen's film, who is mostly enthralled with fantasies of Cole Porter, Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein and other American ex-pats in Paris during the Jazz Age, Olson's two protagonists are most interested in actual French poets, writers and artists such as; Rimbaud, Georges Perec, Michel Tournier, Gaston Bachelard, Raymond Queneau and Pierre Michon. And while their yearning for Paris is similar to that of the couple at the center of Revolutionary Road, it is a rather more grown-up and grounded love of the City of Lights. Olson's protagonists are a pair of older, working-class poets not young, upper-middle-class, suburban dilettantes like Yates's Frank and April Wheeler.

In addition to their dissatisfaction with home and city, the couple are also dealing with the loss of their beloved car, the broken Subaru Justy of the novel's title. After attempting to adapt to a car-less life, including several comic misadventures with public transit and Car2Go, the narrator takes some money out of savings to buy another used Subaru but somewhat spontaneously decides he'd rather take a trip to Paris than own a car again. Ronnie agrees. Plans are made, tickets are purchased, and their ongoing study of French is kicked into a higher gear. Away they go.

The narrator alludes to dark and outrageous moments in his past, back when he was still drinking and taking drugs. “At the age of eighteen, I left my father's house and struck out for California, following the scent of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. I was into Dylan and the Rolling Stones. I liked the Beatles, but they remained a bit too wholesome for my rebel-without-a-cause setup. And after reading Aldous Huxley's seminal essay, The Doors of Perception, I had a raging desire to experiment with psychedelic drugs.”

He tells briefly of getting beaten up at a New Years Eve party in Burien, attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and three failed marriages. One suspects Olson could write some fine fiction of wild times, drunkenness, heartache and despair in a Kerouacian or Carveresque vein if he felt the urge to mine his past, but part of what I love about this novel is that it doesn't do that. The image of the artist as a young wild man is a popular one and there have certainly been more than enough misbehaving poets, musicians, painters, novelists and so forth to give that cliché some weight, but what makes an artist an artist is serious, longstanding dedication to one's art. It's refreshing to read a novel that dispenses with the youthful misbehavior in a few short sentences and instead depicts the couple at its center as actual grown-up artists.

In Advance of the Broken Justy is not a novel which glorifies the wild kicks of youth or wallows in the despair of drunkenness and divorce, but rather one which celebrates more mature, quiet kicks like the contemplation of works of art in the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, and the Georges Pompidou Centre. It is a celebration of bookstores not barrooms. The narrator and Ronnie go on a sort of literary safari, with guidance provided by a list of the best bookstores in Paris received via email from the French poet Claude Royet-Journoud, and enjoy a cafe visit with the poet and translator Michel Deguy.

“One of the main reasons I wanted to go to Paris was so I could stand in a real bookstore once again before I die,” Olson writes. “The bookstores in the United States have deteriorated into something little better than a gift shop, or those book and magazine shops you sometimes see at the airport. Trashy titles. Nothing of any real interest.” He's not grown so jaded that he's lost all perspective, however, and can still see quality on those rare occasions it may be found. He goes on later in that passage to praise Elliott Bay Books and Open Books and elsewhere declares Magus Books in the University District to be one of the best, if not the best, used bookstores he's ever been to.

While at certain points it's clear that the author's imagination is at play, much of In Advance of the Broken Justy reads close to straight autobiography. That, of course, does not necessarily mean that it is, but the pleasures of reading the novel, for me, were often more akin to those of nonfiction. David Shields, among others, would argue that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is meaningless. Whiile there is some validity to that stance in that in either case the author is working with a blend of memory and imagination, I think it is a bit of an overstatement. Phillip Lopate writes in a section of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction in which he compares and contrasts the tendencies of nonfiction versus those of fiction that, “What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself.... None of these examples read like short stories or screenplays; they read like what they are: glorious thought excursions.”

It is Olson's surprising, well-stocked mind which is of the greatest interest here, the consciousness which regards what happens more so than the particulars of what happens, that takes interesting digressions into considerations of the work of Bob Dylan, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and organic chemist August Kekulé among others. Of the other books I've read recently, it is Patti Smith's second memoir, M Train, I find it most similar to in both tone and content. Smith, the poet-rocker legend, and Olson, the poet's poet who can count luminaries such as Michael McClure, Clayton Eshleman and the late, great Philip Lamantia among his fans, are exact contemporaries, Ms. Smith being the elder by only a matter of months. Their influences overlap to a considerable degree. Both books weave together narratives of domesticity and travel. Both books present the day-to-day lives of practicing artists and consider the lives of their artistic influences. Both books recount journeys to literary sacred ground in search of a sort of spiritual contact high with forebears and idols.

Mr. Lopate's phrase, “glorious thought excursions,” seems like the perfect description of much of Olson's output. Fans of his prose poetry will find moments replete with the reeling riffs of surrealistic, hallucinatory lyricism familiar from his books such as Oxbow Kazoo, Echo Regime, Logo Lagoon and Eggs & Mirrors in the pages of In Advance of the Broken Justy. Preparations for the sale of their 500 square foot condo and a move away from their infuriatingly noisy building (preparations for naught, as it turns out, for neither sale nor move ever transpire within the pages of the novel) instigates a stream of thoughts on the nature of reality leading eventually to the following passage:  

“When consciousness meets reality the result is milk. Traffic lights blossom into prayer wheels. Laundry folds itself into armies of tide pool angst and marches around like generalities of floral chambray. Rain falls up instead of down. The acceptance of frogs liberates bubbles of pulp. Time sags with basement ping pong tournaments. Garrets ovulate glass bagatelles. Realism percolates prizefight sweat. Details sparkle like crawling kingsnakes in the mouth of a Mississippi attorney.”

In Advance of the Broken Justy is a thoughtful, grown-up novel for the sort of thoughtful, grown-up readers who seek out real bookstores and is not likely to have much appeal to fans of those trashy, escapist titles found in the sad, little book and magazine shops in airports Olson derides.  

Review by Steve Potter. Previously appeared in A Screw in the Shoe from Golden Handcuffs Review Publications.