New new year

Gung hay fat choi! Today marks the beginning of the Chinese lunisolar calendar and the concomitant Spring Festival (I guess they had a big celebration up in Vancouver - it was all the radio folks were on about this morning).

I sometimes kick my new year's stuff back three or six weeks from the Gregorian January 1 to the Chinese 1 zheng yue to give myself a little more time to declare, resolve, reflect, or announce, but this year I haven't done much milestoning or landmarking on either date. Things still feel pretty liminal, and the next six months could find me in any one of a number of different situations; it's hard to assert intentionality when one is pretty much in ready-response mode.

So, no big new here, but one item of note. This is the Year of the Rabbit, which is Coco's birth year. My own is the Rooster, which won't come around again for a while now. But that Rabbit-Rooster pairing is worth noting, to wit:

Hmmmm. To elaborate further:

Hmmmm. I think I prefer this vision. It looks like more fun.

Solitaire Book Club: American Gods

American Gods by Neil Gaiman. If Harry Stephen Keeler had ever written one his webwork novels that wasn't totally batshit insane, it might have come out something like American Gods. But we are lucky that Neil Gaiman did the job instead, for while it is as expansive as any Keeler story it is a lot more coherent and readable. This long sprawling novel (practically Dickensian in scope) never fails to captivate as it tells the story of a new world, old gods on the wane, new gods on the rise, and the universal feelings that lie in the breasts of gods and humans alike. Gaiman has an ear for dialogue, grounding his characters in an emotional truth all while spinning a most fantastical tale. Well worth the time.

Solitaire Book Club: Elizabeth Finch

Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes. I got this from the library because I heard a radio interview with Barnes, who theretofore had not been on my radar; it is an elegantly written exceedingly intelligent book. The first third is a study of the titular character, a professor with a distinctive intelligence and character who has a great impact on the narrator's life; the middle is a historiography of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, a figure who looms large in the Finch's intellectual work; the last third is the narrator coming to grips with her life, his relationship to her, and his own life. Like the narrator himself, I am not 100% certain of the conclusions I have drawn with regard to any of this, but the journey of understanding was mesmerizing.