Pinewoods 4: among us

[jere7my]

For curiophilia, a wild curiosity and a love of exotic treasure, a fascination with complex architecture, a taste for the strangeness in the apparently ordinary, is what drives him on...

My Pinewoods reading was perfectly chosen this year—City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer. It's a weighty collection of novella-sized chunks, each one a journey into the city of Ambergris, with a focus on startling architecture, tattooed dwarves, unsettling paintings, and fungus cults. Vandermeer has a lot of Miéville and Gaiman and Powers in him, with occasional glints of Pratchett; I think many of you would take to him. The book is presented in ways that blur the corners of reality, with a Works By The Author of questionable legitimacy, an in-character introduction from Michael Moorcock, and copious footnotes; there is nothing to suggest that Ambergris is unreal (except that it must be), or indeed that Vandermeer himself hails from anywhere else. It gave me a warm glow to know it was waiting for me on the bedside table in my little cabin; it joins Perfect Circle, American Gods, and A Deepness in the Sky in my pantheon of Perfect Pinewoods Reads.

It was doubly appropriate this year, since the book is very...fungal, and so was Pinewoods, damp as it was. Mushrooms of every color pushed flat and bulbous and knobbly heads up through the orange carpet of needles, appearing suddenly and startlingly overnight. I spent much of Friday afternoon lying flat on my belly in the paths, dirtying up my new slate-blue Pinewoods shirt, taking photos. And because heyyitstheresa asked so nicely:

(Indian pipes aren't fungus, actually; they are rare chlorophyll-free plants, deriving their nourishment not from the sun but from things decaying underground.)

I also saw salamanders, which scurried down into the humus before I could snap their picture. I dug down after one, and found her in a moist, cozy little burrow, curled around a half-dozen eggs like lemon-yellow peas.

I took to the pond in a canoe after dinner, seeking turtles and whatnot, but found only a Spongebob Squarepants bobber tangled in the reeds. My only turtle encounter of the week was with a red-eared slider the size of a dinner plate, who slipped off the end of the dock and into the water when I approached; later that night, while skinnydipping 'round midnight, I am fairly certain that majestic motherfucker bit my toe.

Comments

[andele.livejournal.com]

Great pics. When we were there, there were also some startlingly bright orange ones the same size and shape as the yellow ones. Plus, supposedly edible guys called either Black Trumpet mushrooms or Poor Man's Truffles, depending who you believed. They all got picked and either eaten or dried by folks a whole lot braver than me.