Witch Week is coming!

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Hi All,

As Halloween is coming, and with it all things magical and scary, it’s high time for some Samhain-related content! Lizzie at lizzierosswriter.com and Chris at Calmgrove were so kind to invite us to participate in a yearly blogging event, Witch Week – many thanks to both of you! This year the event runs from 30th October to 6th November and thus, besides Halloween, includes also Guy Fawkes Day :).

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This year’s theme is Fantasy and Feminism, and we at Re-enchantment decided that it’s a wonderful opportunity to take a closer look at the female characters in the world of Witcher. As you know, we’re both fans of Sapkowski’s saga, and we’re eagerly awaiting Netflix’s adaptation of his books to the small screen, hoping it to be more along the lines of HBO’s The Game of Thrones or the universally acclaimed games than the previous, horrible Polish adaptation.

Cool posts will be appearing throughout the week on both Chris’s and Lizzie’s sites, so don’t forget to visit 🙂 Our own discussion is scheduled to appear on November 2nd, and will be re-posted here on Re-enchantment a few days later in a director’s cut 😉 It shouldn’t come as a surprise, really, that our post was originally too long to appear in its entirety during the Witch Week event – we always write loooooooooong posts, especially the results of our discussions are lengthy, as each of us wants to have the last word 😉 But if after Witch Week you still are interested in the full effects of our collaboration, you’ll be able to read them here :).

Kler / Clergy (2018)

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There is now a Polish movie being played in cinemas, in my country and throughout Europe. There are over 200 screenings planned in the UK alone (beginning today!), and that’s a lot for a Polish movie, our pictures rarely go beyond niche festivals. Tickets are mostly bought out by my compatriots living abroad, but they are not its whole audience.

Why? 7856555.6

Well, the title is Kler (our word for ‘the clergy’). Specifically, in the Polish context, the catholic clergy. Catholicism is the default option here. Not just as a religion. To a large extent, especially outside large cities, it’s the foundation of social life and a powerful political and economic force.

In the days when diocese after diocese goes bankrupt trying to pay off the victims of their functionaries’ abuse and, in Chile, the entire bishopry episcopate submits resignations, there are not enough movies about the issue. Spotlight was very good, and certainly educational, Calvary show how a catholic country might look after the problem is largely processed. Clergy is about Church militant, unapologetic and intertwined with the state as close, as the Irish one during the heights of its power.

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My Dixit Board

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Dixit is one of my family’s favorite tabletop games – especially when the crew for a Legendary session is unavailable 😉

Unfortunately, we left our old Dixit board at home (a pretty heavy thing it became with all the cards!). Faced with an unequivocally expressed need to play Dixit we decided to buy only those extensions we weren’t familiar with yet – and came short of the board.

And so I painted one 🙂

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Game board © AGruszczyk

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Gateway drugs to genre fiction

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Quite a big part of the enjoyment I get from genre fiction, books, movies and often even music, is when I discover the connections and inspiration. It’ a very rewarding experience, and the motivation behind my ongoing project to familiarise myself with the great classics of fantasy and s/f. It’s great, but it is also quite hermetic. It’s hard to discuss such things with the uninitiated. I find it easier to devise long term plans to hook my nieces on genre than to recommend something to a mature reader/viewer who might be open to some light genre.

Lets make make it purely technical, not about the importance of keeping an open mind and appreciating people with other hobbies, different cultural needs etc. 😉 It’s going to be strictly about the titles and techniques helpful to hook people on our stuff!

We’re also talking strictly adults here (and I mean mature readers, not necessarily readers over 18). Getting kids to enjoy genre is a different topic, something easier in my experience, and quite wonderful, but not what I want to explore today.

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Leigh Bardugo, The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic (2017)

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Author: Leigh Bardugo

Title: The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic

Pages: 288

Format: Hardcover

A collection of fables set in Bardugo’s Grishaverse, The Language of Thorns first came to my attention through Trang’s review on Bookidote. As a novice to Bardugo’s writing, without any reading experience in Grishaverse, but with rather better knowledge in the areas of myth, fairy tale and fable, I can conclude that Language of Thorns is an inventive, pleasurable read, which pleases the eye as much as the mind, owing that to wonderful illustrations by Sara Kipin. Though it would certainly do better without the lengthy and slightly cheesy subtitle, I think I understand the sentiment, especially that this book is advertised to an audience slightly younger than me ;).

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William Golding, The Inheritors (1955)

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I’ve read Sapiens by Harari recently, and it rekindled my interest in the earliest history of our species. Shortly after that, a review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Shaman on Weighing a pig doesn’t fatten it led to me reading that novel and I was very happy it did. Robinson managed to create a believable impression of the culture of people who lived long before anything could be written down. Scientists use the pieces they find to speculate and search the furthest corners of the world for tribes that continue to live the lives of hunter-gatherers… but only a novelist can make me feel a sense of connection with people from so long ago!

In the discussion below his review, Bart mentioned William Golding’s The Inheritors as one of the sources of Robinson’s inspiration, and I was curious. Golding is one of my favourite writers, Lord of the Flies one of the books that influenced me the most. He left his mark on how I think about the nature of evil, its presence in society and individual, the fragility of civilization, and of religion. I’m slightly less pessimistic on these issues now, but I hold Golding in high esteem.

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Tim Powers, Declare (2001)

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Author: Tim Powers

Title: Declare

Pages: 517

Format: Hardcover

Thy story is a marvelous one! If it were graven with needles on the corners of the eye, it would serve as a warning to those that can profit by example.

A Cold War era spy thriller/horror/love story, centered around the life of the infamous Soviet spy Kim Philby, where French, American, British and Soviet secret services are viciously fighting for access to a supernatural power – djinn, or nephilim, or fallen angles, residing in remote wildness of Arabian deserts. And the famous Mount Ararat. So, in short, if you want to know why USSR fell in 1991, read Declare ;).

Tim Powers did it again. He found a nexus of happenstance, coincidence, inexplicable historical facts, and, diligently digging around through archives and his own subconscious, created an improbable, but inherently logical explanation to it all. One that involves Thousand Nights and One Night, T.E Lawrence, British Secret Service, Mount Ararat and Dead Sea scrolls, as well as baptism in Jordan River, a disgraced nun, an inhabited fox, the vagaries of Heaviside Layer and a colony of djinn.

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