Alan Garner's Red Shift was so odd (see here), and the man possessed such a following overseas, I had to see what else he'd done, and so I ordered The Owl Service, a novel more clearly aimed at younger readers (or at least amenable to a younger reader). The book feels familiar, its structure and tropes now thoroughly dispersed into a hundred other fantasy tales in which young people unpack a mystery and find themselves to be the keys to its cause and solution.
I was never quite sure how young these young people were, which connects to my primary complaint about the book, so let's deal with that first. When he can, as evidenced in Red Shift, Garner likes to avoid narrative exposition (though his prose is dense, lovely, and full of unexpected choices). In Red Shift, this led to Garner dropping all transitions that might adequately address the passage of time or characters moving from one place to another, so dialogue chiefly carried one along. The Owl Service is much more accessible in this regard, though Garner does like to have someone react audibly to something before he tells us what it is. Nevertheless, the opening of the book introduces us to three youngish people without making clear their relationship to each other. Eventually, it gets sorted out, but I can't see a good cause for delaying such useful information, information that would provide a context for the conversations we hear.
In short, the novel, which I blew through in one day (not that I skimmed; it was an engaging story), concerns an English family staying at a place in the Welsh countryside, a house and grounds the daughter of the blended family has inherited from her late father. Her mother, often mentioned, is on the premises but does not appear in a single scene—a pleasant enough bit of narrative fun, though I waited in vain for this to figure into the larger plot. Something scratching about in the attic (which no one seems appropriately troubled by) leads the teens—the girl, her step-brother, and the housekeeper's son—to discover a "service," a set of plates decorated in a pattern that the girl traces and turns into owl stencils—which sets in motion a host of supernatural events.
The book strongly reminds me of Red Shift in its connection of landscape with plot. In Red Shift, three sets of characters are linked, across time, by geography; the landscape, one understands, is haunted both forward and backward in time. The Owl Service ties the present events to a tale from the Welsh myth cycle the Mabinogion; a set of mythic events has recurred over the centuries, and it's all happening again as a bound feminine power breaks its shackles. How this manifests itself is, in some moments, frightening and strange, though what exactly has transpired is not terribly clear (and a personal secret that seems to reveal necessary information ends up complicating things, I think).
It's funny that Garner has one of his characters complain about the "elliptical" statements of the mysterious Welsh gardener (the typical fool-who's-truly-wise, though he's portrayed well), since the novel ends up relying for much of its mystery on just such elliptical pronouncements as well as half-explained events. The story comes together quite nicely in its climactic moments, but the absolutely final scene, the true climax, falls flat, as if the narrative were simply switched off; additionally, Garner leaves no aftermath to the tale, so when the storm has passed, as it were, the book abruptly ends.
I have to read such books with an eye and ear toward what a middle-school-aged American reader might take from them. Assuming someone gets past the frustrating elisions of the opening section, the story should pull them along. Better readers, especially those who've read other English novels (The Secret Garden will utterly prepare them, given its reliance on the relationship between social class and dialect, a theme foregrounded here as well), should be able to navigate the non-American elements and language, but plenty of other readers will find themselves at a loss long before the somewhat unsatisfying end.
ADDENDUM: A friend's comment that I missed the clash of cultures and class—which I didn't—leads me to think I need to say more along those lines than that anyone who's read The Secret Garden (or Lady Chatterly's Lover) will recognize the particularly English social-sexual tensions. Once Garner makes it clear that the household contains the working-class housekeeper and her son, both of whom are Welsh, he foregrounds those issues of social division, and I think those elements are the most coherent and successful elements of the novel. The relationship between the family's daughter, Alison, and the housekeeper's son, Gwyn, which is meant to parallel the Mabinogion tale (though I thought that fit awkwardly), generates much of the book's tension. No one wants these two to be together, and it's implied that the concerns are sexual as well as social. Gwyn is trying to rescue Alison from the kind of powers he knows reside in this myth-laden landscape, but he's often prevented from doing her any good. As it turns out, the sexual history of the region is itself complicated and a source of all these unchecked (female) energies. Language, too, is a major concern, loaded as it is with social weight, and it's another check against Gwyn, who aims to speak like a non-Welsh. These elements of the narrative are so strong, the supernatural aspects get underplayed for a fair portion of the novel, but Garner does well when he makes the landscape and people conspire to keep young Gwyn from forsaking his culture and destiny.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
The Avengers and Shakespeare: The screen as stage
Anyone following Avengers star Tom Hiddleston's remarks on comic-book movies knows the respect he has for these films as a genre as well as his deep immersion in Shakespeare. Hiddleston has played Hal/Henry V in Shakespeare's sequence of Henry plays, which is fitting, because the summoning to an imaginary experience that Shakespeare implicitly—and, in one case, explicitly—engages in can be found again in modern movie-making.
Henry V famously opens with a "chorus"—a single actor who provides occasional narration—asking the audience to overlook the limitations of the Elizabethan stage: there will be no armies, no horses, nor any set to indicate whether one is in England or France. Rather, the audience itself must summon the various imaginary elements necessary to make the tale convincing. It's a clever device, with Shakespeare simultaneously acknowledging the labors of the actors, encouraging the audience to be engaged in the entertainment, and providing, through the narration, a vivid, thrilling description of the images he wants the viewer to have in mind.
How distant this is, seemingly, from the (most) popular entertainments of our day, the increasingly realistic dramas in video games and the CGI-dominated action movies such as The Avengers. Nothing, now, can be left to the imagination. Whereas a few decades ago, films still had to rely on an audience's forgiveness and willingness to accept what was clearly not real, now realism dominates, and so we've reached an age of cinematic literalism, in which fiction on film requires less and less of the viewer.
And yet. What of what's required of the actors? I recently saw, online, stills from various Avengers scenes, and what struck me is how little of what I saw on the film captured what the actors experienced. New York itself was digitally added to the film (as no actual filming took place there), and action scenes that appeared to be outdoors were instead shot on a huge sound stage, green screens backing every shot. I hadn't grasped the extent of what had been added post-production to the filming, and it made me realize that the actors, like the performers of the Elizabethan age, largely had to construct from their imaginations the scenes that audience would, later, directly behold. I think Scarlett Johansson was most effective in this, which is why director Whedon often went to her face for reaction shots: she excelled at looking completely undone by whatever she viewed, be it Banner's first transformation into the Hulk or hordes of aliens roaring from a hole in the sky. Despite the ingenuity of the people constructing a believable digital reality, were it not for the actors behaving as if they truly were these characters within these situations, the audience would not have fallen for the cinematic deceit. All the actors had to go on was what Shakespeare's troupe possessed: elaborate costumes, an entertaining script, and each other's shared imaginative enthusiasm.
The audience may no longer deserve exhortation and credit, as in Shakespeare's time, but we still rely on that "muse of fire" to enflame the actors, who must "ascend the brightest heaven of invention" to provide us with our play.
Henry V famously opens with a "chorus"—a single actor who provides occasional narration—asking the audience to overlook the limitations of the Elizabethan stage: there will be no armies, no horses, nor any set to indicate whether one is in England or France. Rather, the audience itself must summon the various imaginary elements necessary to make the tale convincing. It's a clever device, with Shakespeare simultaneously acknowledging the labors of the actors, encouraging the audience to be engaged in the entertainment, and providing, through the narration, a vivid, thrilling description of the images he wants the viewer to have in mind.
How distant this is, seemingly, from the (most) popular entertainments of our day, the increasingly realistic dramas in video games and the CGI-dominated action movies such as The Avengers. Nothing, now, can be left to the imagination. Whereas a few decades ago, films still had to rely on an audience's forgiveness and willingness to accept what was clearly not real, now realism dominates, and so we've reached an age of cinematic literalism, in which fiction on film requires less and less of the viewer.
And yet. What of what's required of the actors? I recently saw, online, stills from various Avengers scenes, and what struck me is how little of what I saw on the film captured what the actors experienced. New York itself was digitally added to the film (as no actual filming took place there), and action scenes that appeared to be outdoors were instead shot on a huge sound stage, green screens backing every shot. I hadn't grasped the extent of what had been added post-production to the filming, and it made me realize that the actors, like the performers of the Elizabethan age, largely had to construct from their imaginations the scenes that audience would, later, directly behold. I think Scarlett Johansson was most effective in this, which is why director Whedon often went to her face for reaction shots: she excelled at looking completely undone by whatever she viewed, be it Banner's first transformation into the Hulk or hordes of aliens roaring from a hole in the sky. Despite the ingenuity of the people constructing a believable digital reality, were it not for the actors behaving as if they truly were these characters within these situations, the audience would not have fallen for the cinematic deceit. All the actors had to go on was what Shakespeare's troupe possessed: elaborate costumes, an entertaining script, and each other's shared imaginative enthusiasm.
The audience may no longer deserve exhortation and credit, as in Shakespeare's time, but we still rely on that "muse of fire" to enflame the actors, who must "ascend the brightest heaven of invention" to provide us with our play.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, Gourevitch and Morris
In his brief and strange Nobel acceptance speech, William Faulkner said that humans would "endure" not simply because they wouldn't shut up (his image of a "puny inexhaustible voice" going on and on even as daylight sets forever on this world) but because they have "a soul," by which he meant something that suffered and struggled and showed compassion. Those "eternal verities," said Faulkner, gave meaning to what was otherwise a formless babble. Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris have accomplished, in Standard Operating Procedure, a virtuous act that emphasizes those same verities, by taking more than 200 hours of human talk—the interviews that form the basis of this book and the spine of Morris's film of the same name—and locating within them something like a human soul, a flawed and temporary beast that labors to know itself through its speaking.
I came to the book because of a short story I'm working on, part of my "Old Man" sequence, and the book did give me material to use (as well as a better understanding of how the terrorist prison in my fiction will not resemble the prison at Abu Ghraib). The bookflap oversells the text: "In a tradition of moral and political reckoning, and all-powerful storytelling, that runs from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor to Normal Mailer's Executioner's Song . . . " Setting aside that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor scene, part of The Brother's Karamazov, is largely about the failure of institutional Christianity, I don't think you can compare what Gourevitch has done, in distilling Morris's interviews, to the work of Conrad and Dostoevsky. But it's instructive that the publisher makes that comparison, because while the Mailer work is based on real events, the other two are fictional narratives, using broad social contexts as canvasses for imaginary tales. Gourevitch isn't building an imaginary narrative, but each person interviewed provides a different interpretive slant on what was popularly understood to be a set of incontrovertible facts. Not Gourevitch, but each soldier who entered Abu Ghraib is Marlow, the distorting witness, and our unnamed narrator, who sets the darkening scene for Marlow's account, and Conrad, a witness to a chaotic reality that he's attempting to shape into something meaningful.
Gourevitch and Morris provide the context in which these events occur, a horror for prisoner and soldier alike. Everyone is displaced from what they know, reliant on strangers, and living in unfit conditions. Even those who have power know that, in the words of Jesus, that power is given to them from above—yet what exactly that power consists of, they are uncertain, even as they wield it. It's a universe of competing moral systems, the fragile ones the soldiers have brought with them from their former lives, the supposedly rigid one the military gave them but that seems to have been voided, and the new one built of desperation and circumstance and the constant presence of death. Then the writers take us into the events themselves, the events within—and outside the frame of—the infamous photographs; they use the interviews to unpack multiple significant events, giving us, Rashomon-like, different angles from which to understand the meaning of what we've seen. No one has uncomplicated motives; no one is simply doing the wrong thing or the right thing. The soldiers know they've crossed lines, but no one corrects them, and often they're urged by military intelligence to continue or even amplify their questionable actions.
As has been often commented on, the people in the photographs, the people we can see in contact with the prisoners, were prosecuted, but higher-ups largely avoided consequence, and, most horribly, for me, the architects of the Iraq invasion—Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, many others—have gone not only unpunished for the unnecessary and ill-prosecuted war that created these scenarios, they remain, near as I can tell, unrepentant.
The book is an outstanding account of an individual, collective, and national descent into hell. Read it and be enlightened about what it really means to "endure."
I came to the book because of a short story I'm working on, part of my "Old Man" sequence, and the book did give me material to use (as well as a better understanding of how the terrorist prison in my fiction will not resemble the prison at Abu Ghraib). The bookflap oversells the text: "In a tradition of moral and political reckoning, and all-powerful storytelling, that runs from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor to Normal Mailer's Executioner's Song . . . " Setting aside that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor scene, part of The Brother's Karamazov, is largely about the failure of institutional Christianity, I don't think you can compare what Gourevitch has done, in distilling Morris's interviews, to the work of Conrad and Dostoevsky. But it's instructive that the publisher makes that comparison, because while the Mailer work is based on real events, the other two are fictional narratives, using broad social contexts as canvasses for imaginary tales. Gourevitch isn't building an imaginary narrative, but each person interviewed provides a different interpretive slant on what was popularly understood to be a set of incontrovertible facts. Not Gourevitch, but each soldier who entered Abu Ghraib is Marlow, the distorting witness, and our unnamed narrator, who sets the darkening scene for Marlow's account, and Conrad, a witness to a chaotic reality that he's attempting to shape into something meaningful.
Gourevitch and Morris provide the context in which these events occur, a horror for prisoner and soldier alike. Everyone is displaced from what they know, reliant on strangers, and living in unfit conditions. Even those who have power know that, in the words of Jesus, that power is given to them from above—yet what exactly that power consists of, they are uncertain, even as they wield it. It's a universe of competing moral systems, the fragile ones the soldiers have brought with them from their former lives, the supposedly rigid one the military gave them but that seems to have been voided, and the new one built of desperation and circumstance and the constant presence of death. Then the writers take us into the events themselves, the events within—and outside the frame of—the infamous photographs; they use the interviews to unpack multiple significant events, giving us, Rashomon-like, different angles from which to understand the meaning of what we've seen. No one has uncomplicated motives; no one is simply doing the wrong thing or the right thing. The soldiers know they've crossed lines, but no one corrects them, and often they're urged by military intelligence to continue or even amplify their questionable actions.
As has been often commented on, the people in the photographs, the people we can see in contact with the prisoners, were prosecuted, but higher-ups largely avoided consequence, and, most horribly, for me, the architects of the Iraq invasion—Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, many others—have gone not only unpunished for the unnecessary and ill-prosecuted war that created these scenarios, they remain, near as I can tell, unrepentant.
The book is an outstanding account of an individual, collective, and national descent into hell. Read it and be enlightened about what it really means to "endure."
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Rereading Ray Bradbury (Pt. 1)
It had been too long. Once a year, at most, I read a Bradbury story aloud to a class of students. Aside from that, I rarely read him, the later story collections being comprised of uncollected tales left uncollected for good reason and thin sketches that didn't pass muster as full stories. Setting aside Bradbury was one of the steps that moved me from childhood to adulthood: partly because I moved on to the "serious" writers Bradbury himself admired, partly because I gained that adult sense that the things we loved in our youth no longer sustain us. I could look back fondly on the stories that had made me buy everything the man wrote (as some early Marvel comics led me to collect nearly everything Marvel published), and what he did well had a lasting effect on me—but I could no longer pick up a new book by him in the sure and certain hope of recapturing that excitement. (The last solid collection was 1976's Long After Midnight, though it's a mix of good and bad, and contains some stories that were decades old at the time.)
When Bradbury died, my unacted-on dream of someday contacting him dying too, I wanted to return to his stories to identify just what was so fine about the best of them.
In reading Bradbury's obituary, I came across mention of "Homecoming," which I hadn't read for more than 30 years. The story is notable for being Bradbury's first sale to a "mainstream" magazine; before this, everything had run in the various genre mags, and, in fact, "Homecoming" had been rejected by a pulp mag that wanted something more horrific than what he'd produced. The story additionally appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories collection of that year. I had the story in two collections, the large Stories of Ray Bradbury that came out in 1980 and the collection October Country, which contained revised versions of some very early work from his first and eeriest collection, Dark Carnival, along with some newer stories from the early 1950s.
Drawing heavily on the work of Charles Addams (who provided the story's illustration for Mademoiselle), "Homecoming" involves a family of vampires and ghouls who would reappear in a handful of other Bradbury stories. (All of the stories would be collected years later into a fix-up novel entitled From the Dust Returned.) In this tale, the extended family is gathering for Hallowe'en, a favored Bradbury holiday; waiting anxiously throughout the tale is our point of view character, Timothy, who is decidedly unvampiric, a normal human boy in a family of supernaturally powerful people. Timothy is an outsider, unable to fly or transform himself; he's aware of his limitations, and the story ends with him unchanged, reminded of his differences. The one bright moment for Timothy comes with the arrival of his favorite relative, Uncle Einar (the title figure in another story in the collection), who loves the boy—as do all the relatives—despite his . . . disability. (Even as Bradbury draws on Addams, the normal child who is viewed as a freak is the model for another ghoulish family, the Munsters, with their one disturbingly blond-haired daughter.)
Bradbury's work here is masterful. The story is full of images freshly described, and the whole tale, in which rather little happens, is propelled forward by metaphor and a restrained power in the writing. It's Bradbury at his peak.
"The Lake" is the first story in my collected Bradbury tales; it's also in The October Country. This is one of Bradbury's pared-down stories that uses simple language and a few haunting scenes to achieve its aims. A boy loses the female companion of his youth to the lake where they both played. He revisits the scene as an adult, and we're given an inexplicable yet beautiful repetition of that loss. Bradbury could easily have ended the story with a ghostly conclusion, but he adds a physical element that makes the story more disturbing, then adds depth to the story by allowing how the power of this childhood attachment diminishes his current (married) relationship. Bradbury's using different effects here than in "Homecoming," but suffusing both stories is a sense of nostalgia and loss and how childhood necessarily involves suffering from which we never recover, another Bradbury theme that would surface throughout his work.
I'm not sure I previously read "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone," the final story in October Country. A vanished author is located, and our protagonist seeks him out to learn why he stopped writing. It's a story you can see someone imagining after the events surrounding J.D. Salinger's depature from the public eye, but Bradbury wrote this story in the '50s. It's something of a mystery, but has the tone of a tall tale, as our raconteur author regales the protagonist with the story of his non-demise, and as such, it feels less credible than the supernatural stories. The piece is further hurt by what had by then become Bradbury's standard character voice: over-excited, wordy, full of itself. It's Bradbury's own voice, and it grates, as it does when Bradbury gives it to several characters in Fahrenheit 451. That permanent-exclamation-point tone is something that drove me away from Bradbury eventually, that and the way the intelligent prose was replaced by rococo writing and a rushed approach to storytelling. I've long said, and this story reinforced, that Bradbury took the wrong lessons from his own work, that he misidentified some of its strengths, undercutting exactly what led to his best early work earning such strong accolades.
When Bradbury died, my unacted-on dream of someday contacting him dying too, I wanted to return to his stories to identify just what was so fine about the best of them.
In reading Bradbury's obituary, I came across mention of "Homecoming," which I hadn't read for more than 30 years. The story is notable for being Bradbury's first sale to a "mainstream" magazine; before this, everything had run in the various genre mags, and, in fact, "Homecoming" had been rejected by a pulp mag that wanted something more horrific than what he'd produced. The story additionally appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories collection of that year. I had the story in two collections, the large Stories of Ray Bradbury that came out in 1980 and the collection October Country, which contained revised versions of some very early work from his first and eeriest collection, Dark Carnival, along with some newer stories from the early 1950s.
Drawing heavily on the work of Charles Addams (who provided the story's illustration for Mademoiselle), "Homecoming" involves a family of vampires and ghouls who would reappear in a handful of other Bradbury stories. (All of the stories would be collected years later into a fix-up novel entitled From the Dust Returned.) In this tale, the extended family is gathering for Hallowe'en, a favored Bradbury holiday; waiting anxiously throughout the tale is our point of view character, Timothy, who is decidedly unvampiric, a normal human boy in a family of supernaturally powerful people. Timothy is an outsider, unable to fly or transform himself; he's aware of his limitations, and the story ends with him unchanged, reminded of his differences. The one bright moment for Timothy comes with the arrival of his favorite relative, Uncle Einar (the title figure in another story in the collection), who loves the boy—as do all the relatives—despite his . . . disability. (Even as Bradbury draws on Addams, the normal child who is viewed as a freak is the model for another ghoulish family, the Munsters, with their one disturbingly blond-haired daughter.)
Bradbury's work here is masterful. The story is full of images freshly described, and the whole tale, in which rather little happens, is propelled forward by metaphor and a restrained power in the writing. It's Bradbury at his peak.
"The Lake" is the first story in my collected Bradbury tales; it's also in The October Country. This is one of Bradbury's pared-down stories that uses simple language and a few haunting scenes to achieve its aims. A boy loses the female companion of his youth to the lake where they both played. He revisits the scene as an adult, and we're given an inexplicable yet beautiful repetition of that loss. Bradbury could easily have ended the story with a ghostly conclusion, but he adds a physical element that makes the story more disturbing, then adds depth to the story by allowing how the power of this childhood attachment diminishes his current (married) relationship. Bradbury's using different effects here than in "Homecoming," but suffusing both stories is a sense of nostalgia and loss and how childhood necessarily involves suffering from which we never recover, another Bradbury theme that would surface throughout his work.
I'm not sure I previously read "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone," the final story in October Country. A vanished author is located, and our protagonist seeks him out to learn why he stopped writing. It's a story you can see someone imagining after the events surrounding J.D. Salinger's depature from the public eye, but Bradbury wrote this story in the '50s. It's something of a mystery, but has the tone of a tall tale, as our raconteur author regales the protagonist with the story of his non-demise, and as such, it feels less credible than the supernatural stories. The piece is further hurt by what had by then become Bradbury's standard character voice: over-excited, wordy, full of itself. It's Bradbury's own voice, and it grates, as it does when Bradbury gives it to several characters in Fahrenheit 451. That permanent-exclamation-point tone is something that drove me away from Bradbury eventually, that and the way the intelligent prose was replaced by rococo writing and a rushed approach to storytelling. I've long said, and this story reinforced, that Bradbury took the wrong lessons from his own work, that he misidentified some of its strengths, undercutting exactly what led to his best early work earning such strong accolades.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
"Old Man" stories now for B&N's Nook as well!
Yeah, I used an exclamation point.
"Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" and "Clockworks," now formatted for the Nook (I hope), are available via the link below; any buyers (or samplers), let me know if the text looks right, because there were some funky things in the process:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/helping-them-take-the-old-man-down-and-clockworks-william-preston/1111697193?ean=2940014722285
And both stories are still available at Amazon for Kindle and the Kindle app:
http://www.amazon.com/Helping-Them-Take-Clockworks-ebook/dp/B008BC4EME
Such a deal!
"Unearthed," the next chapter, will appear in September's Asimov's, which comes out in about a month.
"Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" and "Clockworks," now formatted for the Nook (I hope), are available via the link below; any buyers (or samplers), let me know if the text looks right, because there were some funky things in the process:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/helping-them-take-the-old-man-down-and-clockworks-william-preston/1111697193?ean=2940014722285
And both stories are still available at Amazon for Kindle and the Kindle app:
http://www.amazon.com/Helping-Them-Take-Clockworks-ebook/dp/B008BC4EME
Such a deal!
"Unearthed," the next chapter, will appear in September's Asimov's, which comes out in about a month.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
I see you . . .
Whoever you are, trying to find a free copy of "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" . . . you can stop searching my website. Just buy the story (along with "Clockworks"!) at Amazon.
Sheesh. Like a buck-fifty for each story is just soooo much money.
Sheesh. Like a buck-fifty for each story is just soooo much money.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
My stories on Amazon
If you're looking for "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" or "Clockworks," you can now get them bundled together for one low low price ($2.99) at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Helping-Them-Take-Clockworks-ebook/dp/B008BC4EME
I made a few (inevitable) minor changes—a word here and there—as I went through the formatting process, but with those exceptions, the stories are identical to how they appeared when they ran in Asimov's. If you've already read the stories and opt to not purchase them, please say a few words of review at the link.
I don't have a Kindle, but I do have the Kindle app for Mac, which I recommend. On a fully keyboarded computer, the Kindle app allows for great ease in annotation (the kind of thing an English teacher appreciates).
http://www.amazon.com/Helping-Them-Take-Clockworks-ebook/dp/B008BC4EME
I made a few (inevitable) minor changes—a word here and there—as I went through the formatting process, but with those exceptions, the stories are identical to how they appeared when they ran in Asimov's. If you've already read the stories and opt to not purchase them, please say a few words of review at the link.
I don't have a Kindle, but I do have the Kindle app for Mac, which I recommend. On a fully keyboarded computer, the Kindle app allows for great ease in annotation (the kind of thing an English teacher appreciates).
Saturday, June 9, 2012
"Clockworks" gets an honorable mention
"Clockworks" (Asimov's, April/May 2011) earned an honorable mention in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection. Yeah, a few hundred other stories also received honorable mentions. Still, it's nice.
As the new story, "Unearthed," is about to come out (Asimov's, September 2012), I probably should prepare to make the other stories available as a package through Amazon. That'd be good, right? I welcome suggestions.
As the new story, "Unearthed," is about to come out (Asimov's, September 2012), I probably should prepare to make the other stories available as a package through Amazon. That'd be good, right? I welcome suggestions.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
All Bad Things Must Come to An End: Alan Garner's RED SHIFT
Alan Garner's oeuvre, according to various sources, is young adult literature (though he doesn't especially target such readers, he says), and Red Shift seems to be lumped, by these sources, with his other works of fantasy for younger readers. This is baffling. Given the sexual themes, which are quite adult, even if dealt with elliptically most of the time, the book seems more for mature readers. Additionally, there isn't a clear fantastic element in this novel. One set of murders is unexplained, but I'm not sure Garner wants us to provide a supernatural explanation; also, the faint connection between the novel's three timelines is arguably a fantastic or science fictional element, but it plays, rather, as a tying together of motifs rather than some actual connection.
The book seems to earn the appellation tour de force; like anything that gets called a tour de force, it is single-minded, single-toned, sustained . . . and, if it's like the author's other novels, not really a tour de force but just "the way this writer does things." Since I haven't read Garner's other works, I can't judge whether he's achieved something unique here or whether I'm just seeing a slice of his much larger pie. I have ordered another book of his from the library, so I'll have a better sense of where this fits in Garner's corpus later. For now, I'm also ignorant of the novel's historical placement; there's probably something online about the novel's timelines, but I'm going to review it while still steeped in ignorance.
We follow a modern couple, separated by distance for weeks at a time and, when not, given some hassles by his caravan-dwelling parents; in the distant past, maybe the fifth or sixth century, in the same English location, we come upon Roman soldiers trying to survive in the hostile country; a third narrative takes place somewhen in between—Irish invaders are approaching the church where our protagonists wait in fear. Aside from location—and geography is central to the book's structure, as well as an ancient ax-head binding the three timelines—what holds the three tales together is a focus on male-female couples. In the ancient past, the former soldiers slaughter a village but keep a woman who is some sort of goddess-conduit. Or something. In the, um, middle past, one of our hapless English folk is deeply in love with a woman who previously had a relationship with one of the invading Irish rogues. I think. Each relationship (the goddess-woman ends up connecting with the soldier who tends to flip out into a psychotic rage) takes an unexpected turn. And a graffito reminds us that this too shall pass and most of our protagonists are long dead. Despite one (and-a-half?) not-completely-tragic tale-endings, the book is pretty grim, making one feel as positive about human love as if one had instead read Chesil Beach.
However, some of the book's effectiveness is undercut by the very style that makes it compelling. There's little description, and the writer collapses the space between events, as if, until someone speaks again, nothing has happened. Dialogue drives the narrative, but it's often unattributed dialogue. This is fine on occasion, but quite often the same person speaks twice in a row in two disconnected paragraphs, and you haven't been warned; more often, more than two people are speaking, and it's impossible to tell who is who (especially, I felt, in that confounding middle time period, when a scene gets repeated and there's even less context than in the other times). The style gives the novel a propulsive quality, but it also means you miss a fair amount of what you likely aren't supposed to miss.
I enjoyed much of the novel. It largely achieved that aim that Poe pushed for, the "single effect"; additionally, while I couldn't follow events as well as I'd have liked, the emotional turn of each story was effective. I can't quite recommend the book, since I'm not sure who would enjoy it, but the novel certainly possesses power and, since it's fairly short, might be worth a look by someone who appreciates a challenging text.
The book seems to earn the appellation tour de force; like anything that gets called a tour de force, it is single-minded, single-toned, sustained . . . and, if it's like the author's other novels, not really a tour de force but just "the way this writer does things." Since I haven't read Garner's other works, I can't judge whether he's achieved something unique here or whether I'm just seeing a slice of his much larger pie. I have ordered another book of his from the library, so I'll have a better sense of where this fits in Garner's corpus later. For now, I'm also ignorant of the novel's historical placement; there's probably something online about the novel's timelines, but I'm going to review it while still steeped in ignorance.
We follow a modern couple, separated by distance for weeks at a time and, when not, given some hassles by his caravan-dwelling parents; in the distant past, maybe the fifth or sixth century, in the same English location, we come upon Roman soldiers trying to survive in the hostile country; a third narrative takes place somewhen in between—Irish invaders are approaching the church where our protagonists wait in fear. Aside from location—and geography is central to the book's structure, as well as an ancient ax-head binding the three timelines—what holds the three tales together is a focus on male-female couples. In the ancient past, the former soldiers slaughter a village but keep a woman who is some sort of goddess-conduit. Or something. In the, um, middle past, one of our hapless English folk is deeply in love with a woman who previously had a relationship with one of the invading Irish rogues. I think. Each relationship (the goddess-woman ends up connecting with the soldier who tends to flip out into a psychotic rage) takes an unexpected turn. And a graffito reminds us that this too shall pass and most of our protagonists are long dead. Despite one (and-a-half?) not-completely-tragic tale-endings, the book is pretty grim, making one feel as positive about human love as if one had instead read Chesil Beach.
However, some of the book's effectiveness is undercut by the very style that makes it compelling. There's little description, and the writer collapses the space between events, as if, until someone speaks again, nothing has happened. Dialogue drives the narrative, but it's often unattributed dialogue. This is fine on occasion, but quite often the same person speaks twice in a row in two disconnected paragraphs, and you haven't been warned; more often, more than two people are speaking, and it's impossible to tell who is who (especially, I felt, in that confounding middle time period, when a scene gets repeated and there's even less context than in the other times). The style gives the novel a propulsive quality, but it also means you miss a fair amount of what you likely aren't supposed to miss.
I enjoyed much of the novel. It largely achieved that aim that Poe pushed for, the "single effect"; additionally, while I couldn't follow events as well as I'd have liked, the emotional turn of each story was effective. I can't quite recommend the book, since I'm not sure who would enjoy it, but the novel certainly possesses power and, since it's fairly short, might be worth a look by someone who appreciates a challenging text.
Thank you, Ray Bradbury
His stories, the ones I first encountered in middle school, the ones that made me read more and then read everything of his over the next few years, more than any stories I read before or after, made me want to write. Later, I would find other writers who affected my sensibilities about fiction more and who stretched my ideas about what fiction could achieve, but the intensity, joyous and horrifying, with which Bradbury infused his best stories, formed the foundation for my understanding of how fiction could both capture the attention of a reader and express the personality of the writer.
It's those first writers we discover, those early encounters, that provide the primary sense of what fiction can and must do, just as our families provide the template for how we think human interactions function and what they can mean. For being a part of the family that formed me, thank you, Ray. You marked me.
It's those first writers we discover, those early encounters, that provide the primary sense of what fiction can and must do, just as our families provide the template for how we think human interactions function and what they can mean. For being a part of the family that formed me, thank you, Ray. You marked me.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
A Sex-Singer Chokes: John Hawkes's THE BLOOD ORANGES
Having abandoned books on which I was getting no traction, I turned to John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges—which may seem like a perverse choice, given Hawkes's famous insistence that plot, character, setting, and theme are elements he'd like to eradicate. Setting, in fact, is central for every Hawkes novel I've read, as is character, as is theme; plots tend to be pointillistically constructed, but they're still plots. (So much for relying on the writer to describe his own work, a problem I point out in my AP Literature class.)
In the mythical (Mediterranean?) town of Ilyria, Cyril, our "sex-singer" narrator, and wife Fiona construct an erotic eight-hander with another couple (who, somewhat inconveniently, have three daughters). The novel begins after everything has collapsed: the other man, Hugh, is dead, Fiona has run off with the other couple's daughters, and Cyril lives platonically with a native woman while trying to win back the affections of the traumatized Catherine, Hugh's wife. Though little happens—and, a problem for the climax, when things do happen, Hawkes has a way of writing around them, a kind of Stealth Bomber form of writing that bends light around the very object on which you're trying to focus—the prose does have a propulsive energy, partly because that's how Hawkes always writes, but partly because Cyril is so fully of positive (and broadly directed) sexual energy. Over the course of the book, we see how the couples navigate the complicated relationship, and, towards the end, we're shown, the one scene hard upon the other, the crucial moment when Hugh finally commits himself to a relationship with Fiona and the moment when Hugh's body is discovered.
Hawkes causes problems for himself, though I wasn't aware fully of the interpretive problems until I read "Who Put the Blood in the Oranges," an essay by Bertrand Gervais and Anick Bergeron. First, my own thinking prior to reading that essay: Hawkes's description of how Hugh dies is awkwardly done, though that's in large measure to, again, the standard Hawkes approach to anything you'd like to see more clearly. However, I felt clear about what Hawkes meant to say about the character's death. However, Hawkes undercuts the elements of the plot that seem pretty clear because of how he's structured the novel and because the narrator is Cyril. Though Cyril disclaims responsibility for Hugh's death, Hawkes's placement of the scene in which Cyril convinces Hugh to commit sexually to Cyril's wife makes that a hard argument to swallow. Also, given Cyril's evident narcissism and his need to see everything as part of some "tapestry" of sexual joy forces the reader to question Cyril's insistence that Hugh's death is an accident, the result of Hugh's masturbatory practices.
Still, I'm okay with that tension. The novel's seeming ambiguity as to how the events should be interpreted is no more surprising or problematic than the ambiguity we often run into when having to push past the insistences of a first-person narrator. I think that Hawkes wants us to trust Cyril and, too, wants us to find Cyril's moral code meaningful and coherent, even if it runs utterly counter to our own. But it's also easy to see that Cyril is imposing his code on others, and that the novel's disastrous setting and dark imagery indicate that, in fact, Cyril's way of life is ultimately destructive and self-serving.
The essay by Gervais and Bergeron takes the view that Hawkes has contaminated readers' and reviewers' understanding of the novel; evidently (if their facts are right), reviewers and readers missed the accidental nature of Hugh's death and thought it was a suicide, a suicide in response to Hugh's having to live like Cyril—missed, that is, until Hawkes, in interviews, explained the death scene, after which everyone saw the novel differently. Whether everyone really misread the novel initially, I don't know; I certainly can't be the first person who understood what Hawkes was getting at. However, Hawkes's approach to the death is vague as well as flawed in its details, and given that the method of death would be, for many readers, obscure, it's easy to see how people would end up concluding that Hugh's death is intentional. The essay's argument regarding how the author's "non-death" and actual interference in the reading of his text has led people to rethink the novel is, I think, not the crucial problem; rather, it's that the novel is flawed, and the writer's mistakes make it difficult for any reader to get even the literal events right.
I enjoyed the novel, but Cyril does wear out his welcome, and Hawkes's refusal to let the character slip into doubt gives us a guy with whom it's hard to sympathize. The novel could certainly be tighter, and many scenes feel redundant, especially since the back-and-forth chronology resists narrative momentum.
In the mythical (Mediterranean?) town of Ilyria, Cyril, our "sex-singer" narrator, and wife Fiona construct an erotic eight-hander with another couple (who, somewhat inconveniently, have three daughters). The novel begins after everything has collapsed: the other man, Hugh, is dead, Fiona has run off with the other couple's daughters, and Cyril lives platonically with a native woman while trying to win back the affections of the traumatized Catherine, Hugh's wife. Though little happens—and, a problem for the climax, when things do happen, Hawkes has a way of writing around them, a kind of Stealth Bomber form of writing that bends light around the very object on which you're trying to focus—the prose does have a propulsive energy, partly because that's how Hawkes always writes, but partly because Cyril is so fully of positive (and broadly directed) sexual energy. Over the course of the book, we see how the couples navigate the complicated relationship, and, towards the end, we're shown, the one scene hard upon the other, the crucial moment when Hugh finally commits himself to a relationship with Fiona and the moment when Hugh's body is discovered.
Hawkes causes problems for himself, though I wasn't aware fully of the interpretive problems until I read "Who Put the Blood in the Oranges," an essay by Bertrand Gervais and Anick Bergeron. First, my own thinking prior to reading that essay: Hawkes's description of how Hugh dies is awkwardly done, though that's in large measure to, again, the standard Hawkes approach to anything you'd like to see more clearly. However, I felt clear about what Hawkes meant to say about the character's death. However, Hawkes undercuts the elements of the plot that seem pretty clear because of how he's structured the novel and because the narrator is Cyril. Though Cyril disclaims responsibility for Hugh's death, Hawkes's placement of the scene in which Cyril convinces Hugh to commit sexually to Cyril's wife makes that a hard argument to swallow. Also, given Cyril's evident narcissism and his need to see everything as part of some "tapestry" of sexual joy forces the reader to question Cyril's insistence that Hugh's death is an accident, the result of Hugh's masturbatory practices.
Still, I'm okay with that tension. The novel's seeming ambiguity as to how the events should be interpreted is no more surprising or problematic than the ambiguity we often run into when having to push past the insistences of a first-person narrator. I think that Hawkes wants us to trust Cyril and, too, wants us to find Cyril's moral code meaningful and coherent, even if it runs utterly counter to our own. But it's also easy to see that Cyril is imposing his code on others, and that the novel's disastrous setting and dark imagery indicate that, in fact, Cyril's way of life is ultimately destructive and self-serving.
The essay by Gervais and Bergeron takes the view that Hawkes has contaminated readers' and reviewers' understanding of the novel; evidently (if their facts are right), reviewers and readers missed the accidental nature of Hugh's death and thought it was a suicide, a suicide in response to Hugh's having to live like Cyril—missed, that is, until Hawkes, in interviews, explained the death scene, after which everyone saw the novel differently. Whether everyone really misread the novel initially, I don't know; I certainly can't be the first person who understood what Hawkes was getting at. However, Hawkes's approach to the death is vague as well as flawed in its details, and given that the method of death would be, for many readers, obscure, it's easy to see how people would end up concluding that Hugh's death is intentional. The essay's argument regarding how the author's "non-death" and actual interference in the reading of his text has led people to rethink the novel is, I think, not the crucial problem; rather, it's that the novel is flawed, and the writer's mistakes make it difficult for any reader to get even the literal events right.
I enjoyed the novel, but Cyril does wear out his welcome, and Hawkes's refusal to let the character slip into doubt gives us a guy with whom it's hard to sympathize. The novel could certainly be tighter, and many scenes feel redundant, especially since the back-and-forth chronology resists narrative momentum.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Ungripped: Eco's PRAGUE CEMETERY and Groff's ARCADIA
I've set down two books that failed to grab me.
Umberto Eco's latest, The Prague Cemetery, drew me in via the jacket description, though its tale of conspiracy theories made real rang of his earlier Foucault's Pendulum (which I loved). I never had the chance to find out whether this novel followed much of the other's approach, as the endless listing of materials, a drawn-out mise-en-scène (similar to his equally unapproachable The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana), kept me at arm's length. Glancing ahead in the novel, I saw what appeared to be a narrative that would not easily admit me, and so I gave up. Really, I gave it very little chance.
I don't know why I picked up Lauren Groff's new novel, Arcadia; perhaps the praise on the jacket and its placement on the new book shelf at the library. (So many other things—that I own—that I should be reading . . . ) Told via anonymous narration through the perspective of "Bit," a little kid (early in the novel) growing up in a commune, the novel certainly contains lovely writing, even if every scent the child detects is broken down into multiple constituent parts (heck of an olfactory set on that wee one). It's an evocative style, and Groff captures the scene (and "the scene") well but, 60 pages in, that's all I'm getting from the novel, a lovely style. The story isn't gaining traction, and I feel, instead, that much of what I've read could be trimmed away with little loss. Evidently, I'd like to see more story than this novel wants to provide (at least in the early going). I will move on to something else.
I'm still reading, slowly, day-by-day, Jeffrey Cramer's annotated edition of Thoreau's Walden. I'll likely start two things, one of which will be John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges.
Umberto Eco's latest, The Prague Cemetery, drew me in via the jacket description, though its tale of conspiracy theories made real rang of his earlier Foucault's Pendulum (which I loved). I never had the chance to find out whether this novel followed much of the other's approach, as the endless listing of materials, a drawn-out mise-en-scène (similar to his equally unapproachable The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana), kept me at arm's length. Glancing ahead in the novel, I saw what appeared to be a narrative that would not easily admit me, and so I gave up. Really, I gave it very little chance.
I don't know why I picked up Lauren Groff's new novel, Arcadia; perhaps the praise on the jacket and its placement on the new book shelf at the library. (So many other things—that I own—that I should be reading . . . ) Told via anonymous narration through the perspective of "Bit," a little kid (early in the novel) growing up in a commune, the novel certainly contains lovely writing, even if every scent the child detects is broken down into multiple constituent parts (heck of an olfactory set on that wee one). It's an evocative style, and Groff captures the scene (and "the scene") well but, 60 pages in, that's all I'm getting from the novel, a lovely style. The story isn't gaining traction, and I feel, instead, that much of what I've read could be trimmed away with little loss. Evidently, I'd like to see more story than this novel wants to provide (at least in the early going). I will move on to something else.
I'm still reading, slowly, day-by-day, Jeffrey Cramer's annotated edition of Thoreau's Walden. I'll likely start two things, one of which will be John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
North Korea in fiction and fact
Just after I'd signed out The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson, I heard a piece on NPR about Blaine Harden's Escape from Camp 14; I signed that out as well, thinking the two books might complement each other, and the fictions of the one might be given grounding in the facts of the other.
The Orphan Master's Son feels like a combination of 1984 and Kafka's The Trial . . . and maybe some George Saunders and Jim Shepard thrown in for good measure. As a result of this reliance on absurdity-tinged satire, the kind of seriousness of purpose and historical horrors that ground a satire like 1984 get pushed to the background. Though Johnson uses real places and realistic actions, everything seems unreal, and even the utterly fact-based events—such as the random abductions of Japanese citizens—seem unbelievable. (In his non-fiction work, Harden mentions, in passing, these abductions, but so flatly that the air of absurdity which likely should accompany such actions is lost.)
This reader operated with the assumption that even the strangest things described were likely based in some reality, but Johnson provides no notes at the end to reinforce (or undo) such assumptions. I see that the reviewer for the NYTimes felt the absurdity undercut the book's horrors, but I understood that I'm seeing all events through the eyes of our poor maybe-not-an-orphan protagonist, who lives in a world in which he's pushed from one task to another without being consulted, and whose identity is the result of immediate external circumstances rather than an internally formed sense of oneself. Ironically, once he takes on the identity of a man he's murdered (it's like The Return of Martin Guerre, except it's clear that no one believes he's actually someone else), he begins to function with greater personal agency and find more ways to take control of his life.
The novel's structure is odd, in part because some of the novel is built of independently published shorter fiction. The seams show, but that works: the character doesn't have a traditional arc of development, but nevertheless, by the end, he has imposed a kind of continuity on his experiences and become more than the sum of what's befallen him. The sections in which the story seems to be narrated by the state radio network are the most awkward fit, as they turn the tale metafictional, but they're useful in giving the reader the sense that anyone's personal story in North Korea is merely fodder for whatever story the government wants to tell.
Toward the end—as the novel's linearity is turned inside out, the metanarrative becomes insistent, coincidences abound, and we meet a new protagonist—the story's drive becomes diffuse, and my interest lessened. But the book is quite successful, and I recommend it.
Escape from Camp 14, on the other hand, isn't terribly interesting. It's not the fault of the raw material—we're talking about a man born in a labor camp, knowing nothing of the outside world, and trained to betray everyone to the authorities, who manages to, through luck and perseverance, make an escape—but the writing, which is flat and unenergetic. Perhaps that's a consequence of dealing with the mundane, tedious nature of human evil, but the craziness of North Korean society and the Kim family in particular should have shaped this into a stranger tale than it allows itself to be. Partly it's a result of the prison-born Shin's constraints: he knows only his narrow world, which forces Harden to constantly step away from Shin's story to provide context and history. The book is pretty thin, and would have been better as a long piece in the New Yorker or The Atlantic, though the prose would have been ill-suited to either of those publications.
Johnson's novel, unlike Harden's book, manages to give one a richer sense of the madness of the Kims while also letting us enter more fully the mental processes of someone who is a victim of that madness—but then, that's in the nature of fiction, to give us access to what is otherwise inaccessible.
The Orphan Master's Son feels like a combination of 1984 and Kafka's The Trial . . . and maybe some George Saunders and Jim Shepard thrown in for good measure. As a result of this reliance on absurdity-tinged satire, the kind of seriousness of purpose and historical horrors that ground a satire like 1984 get pushed to the background. Though Johnson uses real places and realistic actions, everything seems unreal, and even the utterly fact-based events—such as the random abductions of Japanese citizens—seem unbelievable. (In his non-fiction work, Harden mentions, in passing, these abductions, but so flatly that the air of absurdity which likely should accompany such actions is lost.)
This reader operated with the assumption that even the strangest things described were likely based in some reality, but Johnson provides no notes at the end to reinforce (or undo) such assumptions. I see that the reviewer for the NYTimes felt the absurdity undercut the book's horrors, but I understood that I'm seeing all events through the eyes of our poor maybe-not-an-orphan protagonist, who lives in a world in which he's pushed from one task to another without being consulted, and whose identity is the result of immediate external circumstances rather than an internally formed sense of oneself. Ironically, once he takes on the identity of a man he's murdered (it's like The Return of Martin Guerre, except it's clear that no one believes he's actually someone else), he begins to function with greater personal agency and find more ways to take control of his life.
The novel's structure is odd, in part because some of the novel is built of independently published shorter fiction. The seams show, but that works: the character doesn't have a traditional arc of development, but nevertheless, by the end, he has imposed a kind of continuity on his experiences and become more than the sum of what's befallen him. The sections in which the story seems to be narrated by the state radio network are the most awkward fit, as they turn the tale metafictional, but they're useful in giving the reader the sense that anyone's personal story in North Korea is merely fodder for whatever story the government wants to tell.
Toward the end—as the novel's linearity is turned inside out, the metanarrative becomes insistent, coincidences abound, and we meet a new protagonist—the story's drive becomes diffuse, and my interest lessened. But the book is quite successful, and I recommend it.
Escape from Camp 14, on the other hand, isn't terribly interesting. It's not the fault of the raw material—we're talking about a man born in a labor camp, knowing nothing of the outside world, and trained to betray everyone to the authorities, who manages to, through luck and perseverance, make an escape—but the writing, which is flat and unenergetic. Perhaps that's a consequence of dealing with the mundane, tedious nature of human evil, but the craziness of North Korean society and the Kim family in particular should have shaped this into a stranger tale than it allows itself to be. Partly it's a result of the prison-born Shin's constraints: he knows only his narrow world, which forces Harden to constantly step away from Shin's story to provide context and history. The book is pretty thin, and would have been better as a long piece in the New Yorker or The Atlantic, though the prose would have been ill-suited to either of those publications.
Johnson's novel, unlike Harden's book, manages to give one a richer sense of the madness of the Kims while also letting us enter more fully the mental processes of someone who is a victim of that madness—but then, that's in the nature of fiction, to give us access to what is otherwise inaccessible.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Posted fiction
I've restored "A Crisis for Mr. Lion," the corrected version of my award-winning story from Zoetrope: All-Story, to the links at right. For now, I'm keeping my published science fiction offline.
If you enjoy "Mr. Lion," a story that's done well for me, let me know.
If you enjoy "Mr. Lion," a story that's done well for me, let me know.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Strangeness: Erpenbeck's VISITATION; Barrie's stage directions
First things first: I received today, from Asimov's, the galleys for "Unearthed." Good to see. I've got a week to return them.
Visitation, Jenny Erpenbeck (trans. from the German by Bernofsky)
I picked this up from the library due to (I think) a recommendation in the Guardian. It has some stunning moments, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The novel, in short chapters alternating between tales of individual (typically unnamed) characters and a mysterious "gardener" who tends a lakeside German property, centers around a house and grounds; while the sections on the gardener don't advance a larger narrative, are sometimes bluntly repetitive, and become increasingly fanciful, the chapters on the people who live on the property are mostly tragic or just deeply sad, the sadness heightened by the arms-length narrative, the relative absence of dialogue, the lack of names, and the blurry, run-on writing style which, at moments, is evocative and elevating but which often sets up a kind of droning noise, producing a sameness of tone. I enjoyed some sections, appreciated the idea behind the novel's structure, and was impressed by the audacity of approach, but the overall effect left me disappointed and weary.
Mary Rose, J.M. Barrie
I looked into this play while on a trope-finding mission: I'm investigating stories in which people vanish. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, tells a circular story about a young woman who, twice, mysteriously disappears while on a small island in the Hebrides. Unhelpfully (for my purposes), the story gives no explanation, though clearly some supernatural forces are at work in all this (and a ghost appears in order to emphasize this element). Much of the play is taken up with pleasant dialogue between characters who have little of consequence to say, and the drama lacks both tension and satisfying resolution. Oddest are the stage directions, which provide most of the narrative content regarding the character's interior lives (the dialogue doing little work in this regard); I can't imagine how this play looked when it was staged.
Some sample stage directions/commentary:
The room is in a tremble of desire to gt started upon that nightly travail which can never be completed till this man is here to provide the end
Followed immediately by:
The figure of Harry becomes indistinct and fades from sight.
This is good:
These sounds increase rapidly until the mere loudness of them is horrible. They are not without an opponent. Struggling through them, and also calling her name, is to be heard music of an unearthly sweetness that is seeking perhaps to beat them back and put a girdle of safety round her.
How did anyone direct this play? 'Tis a puzzlement. There's also the expectation that an actor will demonstrate some accomplished knife-throwing at one point. Good luck with that.
Visitation, Jenny Erpenbeck (trans. from the German by Bernofsky)
I picked this up from the library due to (I think) a recommendation in the Guardian. It has some stunning moments, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The novel, in short chapters alternating between tales of individual (typically unnamed) characters and a mysterious "gardener" who tends a lakeside German property, centers around a house and grounds; while the sections on the gardener don't advance a larger narrative, are sometimes bluntly repetitive, and become increasingly fanciful, the chapters on the people who live on the property are mostly tragic or just deeply sad, the sadness heightened by the arms-length narrative, the relative absence of dialogue, the lack of names, and the blurry, run-on writing style which, at moments, is evocative and elevating but which often sets up a kind of droning noise, producing a sameness of tone. I enjoyed some sections, appreciated the idea behind the novel's structure, and was impressed by the audacity of approach, but the overall effect left me disappointed and weary.
Mary Rose, J.M. Barrie
I looked into this play while on a trope-finding mission: I'm investigating stories in which people vanish. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, tells a circular story about a young woman who, twice, mysteriously disappears while on a small island in the Hebrides. Unhelpfully (for my purposes), the story gives no explanation, though clearly some supernatural forces are at work in all this (and a ghost appears in order to emphasize this element). Much of the play is taken up with pleasant dialogue between characters who have little of consequence to say, and the drama lacks both tension and satisfying resolution. Oddest are the stage directions, which provide most of the narrative content regarding the character's interior lives (the dialogue doing little work in this regard); I can't imagine how this play looked when it was staged.
Some sample stage directions/commentary:
The room is in a tremble of desire to gt started upon that nightly travail which can never be completed till this man is here to provide the end
Followed immediately by:
The figure of Harry becomes indistinct and fades from sight.
This is good:
These sounds increase rapidly until the mere loudness of them is horrible. They are not without an opponent. Struggling through them, and also calling her name, is to be heard music of an unearthly sweetness that is seeking perhaps to beat them back and put a girdle of safety round her.
How did anyone direct this play? 'Tis a puzzlement. There's also the expectation that an actor will demonstrate some accomplished knife-throwing at one point. Good luck with that.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Faulkner's humane masterpiece
At least, that's how Faulkner saw it, believing that The Sound and Fury, the first in his sequence of novels that took him far beyond what he'd previously achieved, was his greatest work. It's possible. Absalom! Absalom! is more dense and far-reaching, dredging even deeper pools of Southern misery; As I Lay Dying is the more sustained (albeit briefer) performance, the breathless work that has you in a chokehold from start to finish.
The Sound and the Fury, if it is stronger, is so because it's more humane. Much as I love As I Lay Dying, it's populated by grotesqueries, with only a few folks passed along the way emerging as humans we might care to know. Though Benjamin is "an idiot," Faulkner gives him a voice that's sensitive to human activity, and when we see him from the outside, the drooling child hunched at the table, we hardly recognize in his outward form the being we've come to know from within. Quentin's journey to suicide is broken up by scenes of foolishness, humor, decency, and confusion. Faulkner doesn't simply let darkness claim Quentin; rather, we see him choose his path, despite the liveliness of the world around him, a world in which he, to the last, participates. Jason is greedy and selfish, but Faulkner lets us see how difficult such a life is for Jason. He's never at peace, but constantly at odds with everyone; his vices give him no pleasure, leading him, I think, to mistake them for virtues. Lastly, there's Dilsey, who, though the focus of the final section, is never given a point of view position, and is even allowed to step offstage while the narrator waits for her to, say, retrieve an umbrella. It's clear that there's something of Faulkner's "race problem" in this: he can't get into the head of this character. His awareness of this, though, also makes him protective of her, moving him to elevate her. In the character descriptions in the appendix, written years later, she alone is given no textual comment. (I believe the sentence "They endured" does not refer to Dilsey but to all of the black characters—or, possibly, all of the characters. Dilsey is not a "they," and the way the text is set, below her name rather than beside it, indicates further that the descriptor is not meant for her alone. Why have no commentators mentioned this?)
The story's very end (prior to the appendix) felt a bit flat; something more needed to happen there, especially given how gloriously the prose takes off in Quentin's section. Otherwise, this is an astonishing work. I failed to read it in high school and had looked at sections of it over the years, but I'd never fully attempted it. Teaching Faulkner—and successfully taking on Absalom! Absalom! last summer—prepared me, so that I didn't find the novel difficult at all. (My one confusion, straightened out by a glance at a discussion of the novel, involved the presence of two characters named Quentin. I'm not sure Faulkner needed to do that.)
The Sound and the Fury, if it is stronger, is so because it's more humane. Much as I love As I Lay Dying, it's populated by grotesqueries, with only a few folks passed along the way emerging as humans we might care to know. Though Benjamin is "an idiot," Faulkner gives him a voice that's sensitive to human activity, and when we see him from the outside, the drooling child hunched at the table, we hardly recognize in his outward form the being we've come to know from within. Quentin's journey to suicide is broken up by scenes of foolishness, humor, decency, and confusion. Faulkner doesn't simply let darkness claim Quentin; rather, we see him choose his path, despite the liveliness of the world around him, a world in which he, to the last, participates. Jason is greedy and selfish, but Faulkner lets us see how difficult such a life is for Jason. He's never at peace, but constantly at odds with everyone; his vices give him no pleasure, leading him, I think, to mistake them for virtues. Lastly, there's Dilsey, who, though the focus of the final section, is never given a point of view position, and is even allowed to step offstage while the narrator waits for her to, say, retrieve an umbrella. It's clear that there's something of Faulkner's "race problem" in this: he can't get into the head of this character. His awareness of this, though, also makes him protective of her, moving him to elevate her. In the character descriptions in the appendix, written years later, she alone is given no textual comment. (I believe the sentence "They endured" does not refer to Dilsey but to all of the black characters—or, possibly, all of the characters. Dilsey is not a "they," and the way the text is set, below her name rather than beside it, indicates further that the descriptor is not meant for her alone. Why have no commentators mentioned this?)
The story's very end (prior to the appendix) felt a bit flat; something more needed to happen there, especially given how gloriously the prose takes off in Quentin's section. Otherwise, this is an astonishing work. I failed to read it in high school and had looked at sections of it over the years, but I'd never fully attempted it. Teaching Faulkner—and successfully taking on Absalom! Absalom! last summer—prepared me, so that I didn't find the novel difficult at all. (My one confusion, straightened out by a glance at a discussion of the novel, involved the presence of two characters named Quentin. I'm not sure Faulkner needed to do that.)
Monday, April 9, 2012
More misogyny from Marvel: Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk
When I mentioned to a friend how misogynistic this six-comic volume was, he said, "Comics were always that way." But this goes beyond the standard superhero imagery to something more awful.
I read the first issue of Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, written by Damon Lindelof and illustrated by Leinil Francis Yu, when a student loaned it to me. Evidently, the comic experienced severe delays in its production; as a result, I saw no more of it until ordering this collection from the library. The first issue, in which the Wolverine from the Ultimate Marvel Universe is torn horizontally in half, seemed like a parody of a Marvel comic, since, Wolverine merely responded to this violation by going off in search of his legs (which he could smell half a mile off). The Hulk in the Ultimate Universe is a more brutal, careless version of the Hulk most of us know; in the comic The Ultimates, the Hulk was all id—including the libido left out of the standard Marvel version—and I appreciated that they'd taken the potential for harm coming from such a character more seriously. However, the Ultimates are also a more depressing team to read about, as all of the characters, including Captain America, seem damaged and unpleasant.
To the book at hand, though: As with the Ultimates books, no character fares well, male or female. Since it's established that neither Wolverine nor the Hulk can be killed, there's no sense of actual danger. The only character with whom you develop a little sympathy is Bruce Banner, but he's something of a whiner. There's one interesting moment in which a child lama suggests to Banner that it's the Hulk who turns into him, not the other way around—but rather than using that (clearly incorrect, in terms of origin) intriguing idea to explore the character, the notion is dropped, as is the wise Buddhist, as the comic jerks forward in its narrative.
There's the usual kind of objectification of the female form, which every woman portrayed voluptuously, but even this veers into parodic (or self-parodic) visuals. One woman's shirt nearly flies off when she reacts in surprise; in the next frame, she's buttoned up again. The women treat each other rather badly, as they both seem to be competing for Bruce/Hulk.
Then there's the issue of the little Tibetan town. When Wolverine arrives, he notices the women are missing. Turns out, they're all hanging with the Hulk. Rather, they're hanging on the Hulk. Whereas the men in the town all appear to be ordinary humans, all of the women are, evidently, voluptuous and of child-bearing age. For no given reason, they've all draped themselves alluringly around the room where the Hulk sits in lordliness (though doing nothing, it seems, except staying out of the way of the unconcerned Buddhist monks in the next room). There's no suggestion that the women are there against their will. Not a one of them speaks or reacts. It's hard to know who to blame more, Lindelof, the writer, for devising this sick male fantasy, or Yu, for his singularly single-minded view of Tibetan womanhood.
The book is profoundly stupid in many ways, but the outright and extreme misogyny strikes me as something Marvel shouldn't cotton to. I guess the appeal of having one of the creators of the plotless TV show Lost (whose writers never managed to write a decent episode for Kate, perhaps unsurprisingly) overwhelmed them, as well as the desire, once the book fell behind in production, to at least put out something, no matter how awful.
I read the first issue of Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, written by Damon Lindelof and illustrated by Leinil Francis Yu, when a student loaned it to me. Evidently, the comic experienced severe delays in its production; as a result, I saw no more of it until ordering this collection from the library. The first issue, in which the Wolverine from the Ultimate Marvel Universe is torn horizontally in half, seemed like a parody of a Marvel comic, since, Wolverine merely responded to this violation by going off in search of his legs (which he could smell half a mile off). The Hulk in the Ultimate Universe is a more brutal, careless version of the Hulk most of us know; in the comic The Ultimates, the Hulk was all id—including the libido left out of the standard Marvel version—and I appreciated that they'd taken the potential for harm coming from such a character more seriously. However, the Ultimates are also a more depressing team to read about, as all of the characters, including Captain America, seem damaged and unpleasant.
To the book at hand, though: As with the Ultimates books, no character fares well, male or female. Since it's established that neither Wolverine nor the Hulk can be killed, there's no sense of actual danger. The only character with whom you develop a little sympathy is Bruce Banner, but he's something of a whiner. There's one interesting moment in which a child lama suggests to Banner that it's the Hulk who turns into him, not the other way around—but rather than using that (clearly incorrect, in terms of origin) intriguing idea to explore the character, the notion is dropped, as is the wise Buddhist, as the comic jerks forward in its narrative.
There's the usual kind of objectification of the female form, which every woman portrayed voluptuously, but even this veers into parodic (or self-parodic) visuals. One woman's shirt nearly flies off when she reacts in surprise; in the next frame, she's buttoned up again. The women treat each other rather badly, as they both seem to be competing for Bruce/Hulk.
Then there's the issue of the little Tibetan town. When Wolverine arrives, he notices the women are missing. Turns out, they're all hanging with the Hulk. Rather, they're hanging on the Hulk. Whereas the men in the town all appear to be ordinary humans, all of the women are, evidently, voluptuous and of child-bearing age. For no given reason, they've all draped themselves alluringly around the room where the Hulk sits in lordliness (though doing nothing, it seems, except staying out of the way of the unconcerned Buddhist monks in the next room). There's no suggestion that the women are there against their will. Not a one of them speaks or reacts. It's hard to know who to blame more, Lindelof, the writer, for devising this sick male fantasy, or Yu, for his singularly single-minded view of Tibetan womanhood.
The book is profoundly stupid in many ways, but the outright and extreme misogyny strikes me as something Marvel shouldn't cotton to. I guess the appeal of having one of the creators of the plotless TV show Lost (whose writers never managed to write a decent episode for Kate, perhaps unsurprisingly) overwhelmed them, as well as the desire, once the book fell behind in production, to at least put out something, no matter how awful.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
"Old Man" stories
I've removed links to PDFs of my published fiction for now. Some may be restored in the near future. I figured the time will come, soon enough, when the "Old Man" stories, at least, should be collected and purchasable.
The next prequel, "Unearthed," will appear in the September 2012 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, available in late July. One more story (the fourth) will follow, a sequel to the original "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down." That should appear sometime in 2013. The working title keeps changing.
The next prequel, "Unearthed," will appear in the September 2012 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, available in late July. One more story (the fourth) will follow, a sequel to the original "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down." That should appear sometime in 2013. The working title keeps changing.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Time well spent with Graham Greene (and others)
The last Graham Greene novel I read, back in 2008, was The Heart of the Matter; featuring one of Greene's insistently dejected characters, it's saturated with sorrowful observations—to the point, I thought, of being rather absurd and self-parodying. How many ways could the character express his misery? I can't locate any notes I made on the book, so the plot is a blur. Though I've heard the novel called one of Greene's best, Orwell ripped it apart in his 1948 New Yorker review, finding the character's motivations illogical and the Catholic angle frustrating (Orwell locates in the English Catholic novelists of the time a snobbishness, a way of writing about their sins as if those, too, made them superior).
The Comedians, which I just read, is better; you still have the sense, to borrow the observation John Gardner made of Protestant John Updike, that "you know who's buttering his bread," but unlike The Heart of the Matter's Scobie, the protagonist of The Comedians, the accidental hôtelier Brown, doesn't struggle so explicitly with his faith. A rootless man, he makes Haiti, under Pap Doc Duvalier, his home because his long-absent mother bequeaths him a stake in her hotel. He prospers for a time, but by the start of the novel, Haiti has become a complete horror, there are no tourists who might stay at his hotel, and he has spent months away from his lover, a South American ambassador's wife. There's little to like about him. Every choice he makes is tainted by selfish motives. Distanced from himself, he often reflects on how his rearing by the Visitation Fathers affects his judgment and views, but he sees religious faith in much the same he views the vegetarian "programme" of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, visiting Americans: an ineffectual worldview that fails to take into account the worst of reality. While Greene doesn't give this character a crisis of faith, he makes it clear that every other character not aligned with Duvalier is Christ-like (though he avoids such description), sacrificing something, believing in the possibility of things beyond themselves or even in false ideas of themselves (the nature of being a "comedian," a performer), while Brown never locates a belief worth dying for.
Greene's writing in this one is terrific, the sardonic and weary voice of a man who observes everything as if he were, at the same time, holding a glass he's just emptied of the last of the world's whiskey. Only rather late in the novel does his affair seem to provide him with any pleasure beyond the immediately physical, and even then, it's at a point when the affair is full of arguments and sour intimations. The woman of the piece, Martha, never quite comes to life, which I think is a common problem for Greene. She's an excellent foil, tossing out the proper bits of dialogue to challenge our protagonist on a host of matters, but as a human being, she doesn't entirely emerge. I suppose one could blame the narrator rather than the author . . . As a novel, it builds slowly, but its concluding act works well, trying together the many strands effectively and dramatically.
Fables: Legends in Exile, by Bill Willingham and Lan Medina, is the first book in a lengthy, still-going series of graphic novels (well . . . comic books). Whether it inspired the current TV series Once Upon a Time, I don't know, but it shares some commonalities. Chased from the many lands of legend and fable (from every culture and time period), the survivors of a great purge now live among us, disguised as humans. The first story arc involves the disappearance and possible murder of Rose Red; Snow White, the icily tough public face of government (King Cole actually runs things), hired the Big Bad Wolf, a shabby shamus, to find out what happened. The goings-on are not for kids. The story features strong characterizations and sharp dialogue, and it has the feel of a long-running TV show.
For all the blood and violence of Fables, however, The Stuff of Legend (Book 1: The Dark), written by Mike Raicht and Brian Smith and illustrated (beautifully, and all in sepia tones) by Charles Paul Wilson III, is the more serious book, even though the protagonists are children's toys (and a dog . . . and the Boogeyman). Daring to venture where Toy Story has gone, the story spends little time on its trope of "toys talk to each other when the humans are looking" before going to far darker places. The human child has been drawn by black tentacles into his closet, and a troupe of toys, plus the boy's dog, go after him. While the dog remains himself, the toys are transformed into life-sized versions of themselves. Never was there a scarier Jack-in-the-Box; this one grows legs and evinces a fondness for hatchets in dispensing with his enemies. The story feels harrowing; the writing and art work together to create a suspenseful environment in which real pain and suffering is possible.
The Comedians, which I just read, is better; you still have the sense, to borrow the observation John Gardner made of Protestant John Updike, that "you know who's buttering his bread," but unlike The Heart of the Matter's Scobie, the protagonist of The Comedians, the accidental hôtelier Brown, doesn't struggle so explicitly with his faith. A rootless man, he makes Haiti, under Pap Doc Duvalier, his home because his long-absent mother bequeaths him a stake in her hotel. He prospers for a time, but by the start of the novel, Haiti has become a complete horror, there are no tourists who might stay at his hotel, and he has spent months away from his lover, a South American ambassador's wife. There's little to like about him. Every choice he makes is tainted by selfish motives. Distanced from himself, he often reflects on how his rearing by the Visitation Fathers affects his judgment and views, but he sees religious faith in much the same he views the vegetarian "programme" of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, visiting Americans: an ineffectual worldview that fails to take into account the worst of reality. While Greene doesn't give this character a crisis of faith, he makes it clear that every other character not aligned with Duvalier is Christ-like (though he avoids such description), sacrificing something, believing in the possibility of things beyond themselves or even in false ideas of themselves (the nature of being a "comedian," a performer), while Brown never locates a belief worth dying for.
Greene's writing in this one is terrific, the sardonic and weary voice of a man who observes everything as if he were, at the same time, holding a glass he's just emptied of the last of the world's whiskey. Only rather late in the novel does his affair seem to provide him with any pleasure beyond the immediately physical, and even then, it's at a point when the affair is full of arguments and sour intimations. The woman of the piece, Martha, never quite comes to life, which I think is a common problem for Greene. She's an excellent foil, tossing out the proper bits of dialogue to challenge our protagonist on a host of matters, but as a human being, she doesn't entirely emerge. I suppose one could blame the narrator rather than the author . . . As a novel, it builds slowly, but its concluding act works well, trying together the many strands effectively and dramatically.
Fables: Legends in Exile, by Bill Willingham and Lan Medina, is the first book in a lengthy, still-going series of graphic novels (well . . . comic books). Whether it inspired the current TV series Once Upon a Time, I don't know, but it shares some commonalities. Chased from the many lands of legend and fable (from every culture and time period), the survivors of a great purge now live among us, disguised as humans. The first story arc involves the disappearance and possible murder of Rose Red; Snow White, the icily tough public face of government (King Cole actually runs things), hired the Big Bad Wolf, a shabby shamus, to find out what happened. The goings-on are not for kids. The story features strong characterizations and sharp dialogue, and it has the feel of a long-running TV show.
For all the blood and violence of Fables, however, The Stuff of Legend (Book 1: The Dark), written by Mike Raicht and Brian Smith and illustrated (beautifully, and all in sepia tones) by Charles Paul Wilson III, is the more serious book, even though the protagonists are children's toys (and a dog . . . and the Boogeyman). Daring to venture where Toy Story has gone, the story spends little time on its trope of "toys talk to each other when the humans are looking" before going to far darker places. The human child has been drawn by black tentacles into his closet, and a troupe of toys, plus the boy's dog, go after him. While the dog remains himself, the toys are transformed into life-sized versions of themselves. Never was there a scarier Jack-in-the-Box; this one grows legs and evinces a fondness for hatchets in dispensing with his enemies. The story feels harrowing; the writing and art work together to create a suspenseful environment in which real pain and suffering is possible.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Books that could have been better
Both were quickly dispensed with, so even though I realized early on that they weren't especially good, I didn't feel like I'd wasted my time.
On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda, does have the benefit of being well written. The book's major problem is how little of it is truly "about" Arthur Conan Doyle. The book tangentially discusses works by other writers Conan Doyle appreciated; this goes on much longer than seems reasonable for such a short book. A large chunk of the text is about people who enjoy Conan Doyle (the author among them) and where this takes them: into collecting (in various oft-redundant forms) his works; or in joining that select group, the Baker Street Irregulars. Dirda talks at length about meetings of the Irregulars and his own involvement with the group, finally providing for us the complete text of an essay he wrote for the organization's journal. By this time we've strayed far afield from writing "about" Conan Doyle. Though it's a slim volume, I skimmed when I felt the author filling space with things that weren't, in my mind, needed.
Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, is an attempt to provide a chronology of comic books' presence on the American landscape, using Lee as the figure through which much of this development might be viewed, but the book isn't terribly satisfying and seems amateurish. I enjoyed the long historical view of how comics arrived and how they were perceived, both inside and outside the industry, and there's some fun anecdotal material that's a pleasure for those of us who came of age during "the Marvel Age of Comics"; however, when Lee absents himself from the writing of comics around 1970, the narrative loses track of how to proceed. The story lurches forward and back confusingly, circling around the same bracket of years again and again. Lee remains the focus even when he's clearly flailing (and failing) in various ventures. There's an arbitrariness to the book's structure—"A chapter break might look good here" appears to be a driving force in its construction—that suggests the writers couldn't find a coherent way to break up the material. Subjects are revisited, and actual lines are reproduced, sometimes more than once. The issue of "what did Lee actually do" threatens to swamp the entire project: To wit, did Lee come up with the ideas for the seminal Marvel characters? How much was contributed by artists Kirby and Ditko? How much control did Lee even have over the plots of the comics? Who wrote the dialogue? (Jack Kirby somewhat unbelievably says at one point that he wrote issues of the Fantastic Four.) The authors do take their time with this issue, since it goes to the question of Lee's credibility, and there's some excellent material both in that discussion and in the connected discussion of a creator's rights, but it's a book within a book, derailing what had seemed to be the book's project. The material about Lee that follows is interesting if you care about Stan Lee, but not so useful at saying something coherent about comic books.
On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda, does have the benefit of being well written. The book's major problem is how little of it is truly "about" Arthur Conan Doyle. The book tangentially discusses works by other writers Conan Doyle appreciated; this goes on much longer than seems reasonable for such a short book. A large chunk of the text is about people who enjoy Conan Doyle (the author among them) and where this takes them: into collecting (in various oft-redundant forms) his works; or in joining that select group, the Baker Street Irregulars. Dirda talks at length about meetings of the Irregulars and his own involvement with the group, finally providing for us the complete text of an essay he wrote for the organization's journal. By this time we've strayed far afield from writing "about" Conan Doyle. Though it's a slim volume, I skimmed when I felt the author filling space with things that weren't, in my mind, needed.
Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon, is an attempt to provide a chronology of comic books' presence on the American landscape, using Lee as the figure through which much of this development might be viewed, but the book isn't terribly satisfying and seems amateurish. I enjoyed the long historical view of how comics arrived and how they were perceived, both inside and outside the industry, and there's some fun anecdotal material that's a pleasure for those of us who came of age during "the Marvel Age of Comics"; however, when Lee absents himself from the writing of comics around 1970, the narrative loses track of how to proceed. The story lurches forward and back confusingly, circling around the same bracket of years again and again. Lee remains the focus even when he's clearly flailing (and failing) in various ventures. There's an arbitrariness to the book's structure—"A chapter break might look good here" appears to be a driving force in its construction—that suggests the writers couldn't find a coherent way to break up the material. Subjects are revisited, and actual lines are reproduced, sometimes more than once. The issue of "what did Lee actually do" threatens to swamp the entire project: To wit, did Lee come up with the ideas for the seminal Marvel characters? How much was contributed by artists Kirby and Ditko? How much control did Lee even have over the plots of the comics? Who wrote the dialogue? (Jack Kirby somewhat unbelievably says at one point that he wrote issues of the Fantastic Four.) The authors do take their time with this issue, since it goes to the question of Lee's credibility, and there's some excellent material both in that discussion and in the connected discussion of a creator's rights, but it's a book within a book, derailing what had seemed to be the book's project. The material about Lee that follows is interesting if you care about Stan Lee, but not so useful at saying something coherent about comic books.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Mr. Ripley and I
According to one contemporary reviewer of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, the novel's early plot about Americans overseas is a nod to Henry James's The Ambassadors, but I think the truer reference is Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," whose homicidal narrator asks readers, "But why do you call me mad?" No, Tom Ripley, the anti-hero protagonist of Highsmith's book, never asks that of us, but the arm's-length perspective on the character, the way the omniscient narrator presents us with the facts of the plot as if, laid end to end, they'll explain themselves away through logic, provides a similar defense of a character for whom a moral defense is impossible.
The book's strengths are its weaknesses. For the first good piece of the novel, it seems to be a Waughian character study of someone stumbling (though less humorously) through interactions with people; that makes the story's turn (and it's a sudden turn, though the author has dropped hints that something is seriously wrong with Tom Ripley) effective, but, as a character study, it's thin, as we never delve deeeper—and, in fairness, there may be nowhere deeper to delve. Ripley, it seems, is a sociopath. The latter part of the book, though it takes too long to tell its tale, is suspenseful, but the author maintains the suspense by constructing unrealistic occurrences which keep our protagonist safe long after his ruse should have been discovered. So: the character study makes you forget about the "mystery," which doesn't quite work; the mystery and suspense make you forget that, for a character study, it's less literary and thoughtful than it might have been.
I enjoyed the book; now I'm curious about her earlier success, Strangers on a Train.
Writing
My story "Unearthed," the next prequel in my "Old Man" sequence, will be published by Asimov's Science Fiction, home to the other Old Man tales. It should appear late this summer.
The book's strengths are its weaknesses. For the first good piece of the novel, it seems to be a Waughian character study of someone stumbling (though less humorously) through interactions with people; that makes the story's turn (and it's a sudden turn, though the author has dropped hints that something is seriously wrong with Tom Ripley) effective, but, as a character study, it's thin, as we never delve deeeper—and, in fairness, there may be nowhere deeper to delve. Ripley, it seems, is a sociopath. The latter part of the book, though it takes too long to tell its tale, is suspenseful, but the author maintains the suspense by constructing unrealistic occurrences which keep our protagonist safe long after his ruse should have been discovered. So: the character study makes you forget about the "mystery," which doesn't quite work; the mystery and suspense make you forget that, for a character study, it's less literary and thoughtful than it might have been.
I enjoyed the book; now I'm curious about her earlier success, Strangers on a Train.
Writing
My story "Unearthed," the next prequel in my "Old Man" sequence, will be published by Asimov's Science Fiction, home to the other Old Man tales. It should appear late this summer.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk
Like Eco's The Name of the Rose, Pamuk's novel, about 16th-century illustrators ("miniaturists") in Istanbul working on a semi-secret project for the Ottoman sultan, uses a murder mystery and art to explore how religious belief shapes one's view of the world and one's role in the world—and, most importantly, how we tell stories about ourselves and others. Told in (mostly brief) first-person chapters that, like Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, even include the voices of the dead, the novel starts with a murder motivated by fear and envy. Though the murderer speaks, he doesn't identify himself; later, when he's given chapters from an identified point of view, he taunts us, afterwards, by how cleverly he's managed, even when providing his name, to conceal himself. Often, narrators directly address the reader, and the novel itself becomes a parallel to the illustrated book being constructed for the Sultan: it, too, has multiple artists; these artists, too, both conceal and reveal; the characters within are sometimes historical and sometimes invented; and perhaps the novel's actual author, too, has painted his own portrait within these pages as some sly illustrator seems to have done.
The Muslim world of the time is in a period of transition: though artists have been trained to see the world "as Allah sees it," not as they see it, the new "Frankish" style has begun to infect them, the style which is distinctly personal, which draws attention to the artist, and which incorporates, rather than established templates of portrayal, actual portraiture by which one may recognize living human beings. The issues surrounding this change drive most of the drama in the novel, though the book has another major plot that's related to all this: the return of Black, our presumptive hero, to his native city, where he hopes to finally marry the possibly widowed cousin who was, when last he was here, too young to wed. This romance, too, takes place in terms of the traditions of Islamic art, as it was initially sparked by reference to a famous tale and illustration—that of the lovely (and beloved by two men) Shirin. The twin plots of murder and marriage intertwine suspensefully, even though Pamuk often allows his characters to digress on religious and artistic matters (repetitively, it must be said). The book requires some work, but it's narratively and intellectually engaging, a great novel that raises questions any artist can appreciate, especially in our own era when one can sense the possible fading of written narrative to be replaced by the visual and filmic.
The Muslim world of the time is in a period of transition: though artists have been trained to see the world "as Allah sees it," not as they see it, the new "Frankish" style has begun to infect them, the style which is distinctly personal, which draws attention to the artist, and which incorporates, rather than established templates of portrayal, actual portraiture by which one may recognize living human beings. The issues surrounding this change drive most of the drama in the novel, though the book has another major plot that's related to all this: the return of Black, our presumptive hero, to his native city, where he hopes to finally marry the possibly widowed cousin who was, when last he was here, too young to wed. This romance, too, takes place in terms of the traditions of Islamic art, as it was initially sparked by reference to a famous tale and illustration—that of the lovely (and beloved by two men) Shirin. The twin plots of murder and marriage intertwine suspensefully, even though Pamuk often allows his characters to digress on religious and artistic matters (repetitively, it must be said). The book requires some work, but it's narratively and intellectually engaging, a great novel that raises questions any artist can appreciate, especially in our own era when one can sense the possible fading of written narrative to be replaced by the visual and filmic.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Bright's Passage, by Josh Ritter
Oh, those people of many (public) talents. Behold Josh Ritter, singer-songwriter of some fame who also shows himself, in his debut novel, possessed of literary talent. Given that his songs run on densely descriptive narrative, it should come as no surprise that the man can craft a sentence; the novel, however, is a different beast than a song, requiring a more sustained interplay of setting, plot, and character and, typically, a more complete emotional arc (or circle). Ritter gets a good bit of this right, and though the book isn't entirely satisfactory, it is rich with joys and graces that, for me, made it worthwhile. Too, it's short, rather than some shaggy-dog-tale of a whopper that trails off into nothing, so even if the book feels incomplete, at least the process of reading it doesn't take enormous effort.
What works well about the novel: its triptych of timelines. See grieving Henry Bright arguing with his angelically possessed horse in the aftermath of his wife's death in childbirth; relive with him his trials in "the vasty fields of France" during the closing days of the Great War; enter at various points his home-centered past, both his childhood and his fragmented relationship with wife-to-be Rachel. Ritter keeps the chapters short and coherent, so it's no great matter to keep separate these time periods. Slowly, he unpacks the mysteries of home, angel, and marriage. The angel is never fully explained, but it makes sense enough at an aesthetic level; however, the relationship's logic is, in the end, left too unsettled, and so, thematically, the notion of some guiding spirit never feels satisfactory. The angel's instructions are arbitrary. Ritter seems to want it both ways: the angel is an exterior force that does some good; the angel is a projection of Henry's erratic responses to the world. As a consequence, Henry himself remains an unclear creation, not just unreliable but inadequate as a character. He doesn't do a great deal, it seems to me, but rather falters from event to event. Not that one can't have such a character, but his main virtue appears to be a capacity to survive things he has no right surviving. It's like a passive superpower. As a result, neither his suffering, nor the weight Ritter wants to impart to his journey, feels substantial.
I quite enjoyed the villain of the piece, but he's more of a pulp creation than anything believably imagined, Flem Snopes without the cleverness, a purposely evil who, like Henry, gathers his purpose to himself by accident rather than with much intention. A moment near the end suggests greater depth to the character, but by then it's too late.
Still, I enjoyed reading the novel and was enormously impressed by Ritter's ability to construct solidly imagined scenes with language that's effective and lovely.
What works well about the novel: its triptych of timelines. See grieving Henry Bright arguing with his angelically possessed horse in the aftermath of his wife's death in childbirth; relive with him his trials in "the vasty fields of France" during the closing days of the Great War; enter at various points his home-centered past, both his childhood and his fragmented relationship with wife-to-be Rachel. Ritter keeps the chapters short and coherent, so it's no great matter to keep separate these time periods. Slowly, he unpacks the mysteries of home, angel, and marriage. The angel is never fully explained, but it makes sense enough at an aesthetic level; however, the relationship's logic is, in the end, left too unsettled, and so, thematically, the notion of some guiding spirit never feels satisfactory. The angel's instructions are arbitrary. Ritter seems to want it both ways: the angel is an exterior force that does some good; the angel is a projection of Henry's erratic responses to the world. As a consequence, Henry himself remains an unclear creation, not just unreliable but inadequate as a character. He doesn't do a great deal, it seems to me, but rather falters from event to event. Not that one can't have such a character, but his main virtue appears to be a capacity to survive things he has no right surviving. It's like a passive superpower. As a result, neither his suffering, nor the weight Ritter wants to impart to his journey, feels substantial.
I quite enjoyed the villain of the piece, but he's more of a pulp creation than anything believably imagined, Flem Snopes without the cleverness, a purposely evil who, like Henry, gathers his purpose to himself by accident rather than with much intention. A moment near the end suggests greater depth to the character, but by then it's too late.
Still, I enjoyed reading the novel and was enormously impressed by Ritter's ability to construct solidly imagined scenes with language that's effective and lovely.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Sent
Three days ago, I sent the "shopping agreement" for "Clockworks" to my friendly L.A. lawyer; the agreement allows a certain agent based in L.A. to show my story to various Hollywood folks in an attempt to get someone interested in making it into a movie (or a snack food. Either way).
Two days ago, I sent "You Have No Idea What I've Forgot" to Ryga, a Canadian journal with a social mission.
Yesterday, I sent "Unearthed" to Asimov's.
Two days ago, I sent "You Have No Idea What I've Forgot" to Ryga, a Canadian journal with a social mission.
Yesterday, I sent "Unearthed" to Asimov's.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
New story online
"My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth" appears in the online material for the current issue of Stone Canoe, produced by Syracuse University. The story appears here. This is not a "genre" story, but (arguably) literary fiction.
My daughter's poem, "Baptist," appears in the same issue. That's here.
There's a link to the print issue, but, at present, the link still takes you to the previous issue.
My daughter's poem, "Baptist," appears in the same issue. That's here.
There's a link to the print issue, but, at present, the link still takes you to the previous issue.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Finished?
I spent all day yesterday—far too many butt-hours (though, as I was sofa'd, they were soft hours)—making final corrections and emendations to "Unearthed." I've sent it to one more reader now that it's in what looks to be its final form; perhaps he'll see something I or others have missed. I do think it's the best work I've done. Looking forward to sending it out, having it accepted, and getting it into the hands of readers. (It's rare, this confidence, but I spent a long time on this, and I think the slow process benefited the work.)
Reading some poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Brutal. How'd I never read her till this year? Incredibly smart and (for her time) startlingly frank. Also just read the "King Lear" chapter of Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language. The chapter kind of tumbles from idea to idea, but it's rich with enthusiasm for the play, which I'm glad to report my students are enjoying. Every day spent with it is, for me, a day in awe.
Reading some poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Brutal. How'd I never read her till this year? Incredibly smart and (for her time) startlingly frank. Also just read the "King Lear" chapter of Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language. The chapter kind of tumbles from idea to idea, but it's rich with enthusiasm for the play, which I'm glad to report my students are enjoying. Every day spent with it is, for me, a day in awe.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Conan Doyle and Sherlock
The final episode of the first seasons of the British Sherlock showed (in rebroadcast) this past weekend; yesterday, I finished reading A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes story (a novella).
A Study in Scarlet is certainly an odd beast. Like The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I read more than 30 years ago, it's structured like a typical Holmes story but expends much more energy and time on the backstory to the mystery (and allows Holmes himself more room to be annoyingly voluble in his explanations). For Hound, you get the tale of the Baskerville clan, which is rife with intrigue. For Scarlet, you get a story of a dying man and child in the American West, an fortuitous (at least initially) encounter with Utah-bound Latter-Day Saints, and a slow-developing story of nefarious Mormons and long-term revenge. This backstory takes up the entire second half of the tale and, likely because Conan Doyle is unmoored from his usual scenic harbor, the prose becomes forcedly poetic and unconvincing. It's not bad writing, but it draws attention to itself the way prose shouldn't, as an attempt to tell me something. The landscape is mostly believable; the way the Mormons talk seems highly unlikely (they're like unhinged Amish without a sense of humor . . . which I suppose is possible); and the story itself, though it shifts protagonists, turns out to a good one. The problem comes when one returns to the mystery itself, which feels somewhat flat.
The first Sherlock episode, "A Study in Pink," picks up on one element of the tale, the poison pill, and makes that the center of both the mystery and the murderer's thinking. The ending plays out a bit stiffly (oh, the difficulty of third acts), somewhat like a comic book conclusion in its fragile motivations, but it's held together by strong performances. The third ep, "The Great Game," actually uses other elements from A Study in Scarlet, including Watson's complaint that Holmes doesn't know the Earth revolves around the sun, but it also (confusingly, if one knows the stories) tosses in references to several other Holmes tales, which left me struggling to follow the plot. (Near as I could tell, the second episode didn't draw on any Conan Doyle stories directly.) The conclusion included an incredibly tense confrontation with Moriarty (by a pool rather than a waterfall). Actor Andrew Scott (and the writer) takes the character into the psychotic realm, his voice not tied to the content of his words, his emotions wildly meandering from context. Great great fun.
A Study in Scarlet is certainly an odd beast. Like The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I read more than 30 years ago, it's structured like a typical Holmes story but expends much more energy and time on the backstory to the mystery (and allows Holmes himself more room to be annoyingly voluble in his explanations). For Hound, you get the tale of the Baskerville clan, which is rife with intrigue. For Scarlet, you get a story of a dying man and child in the American West, an fortuitous (at least initially) encounter with Utah-bound Latter-Day Saints, and a slow-developing story of nefarious Mormons and long-term revenge. This backstory takes up the entire second half of the tale and, likely because Conan Doyle is unmoored from his usual scenic harbor, the prose becomes forcedly poetic and unconvincing. It's not bad writing, but it draws attention to itself the way prose shouldn't, as an attempt to tell me something. The landscape is mostly believable; the way the Mormons talk seems highly unlikely (they're like unhinged Amish without a sense of humor . . . which I suppose is possible); and the story itself, though it shifts protagonists, turns out to a good one. The problem comes when one returns to the mystery itself, which feels somewhat flat.
The first Sherlock episode, "A Study in Pink," picks up on one element of the tale, the poison pill, and makes that the center of both the mystery and the murderer's thinking. The ending plays out a bit stiffly (oh, the difficulty of third acts), somewhat like a comic book conclusion in its fragile motivations, but it's held together by strong performances. The third ep, "The Great Game," actually uses other elements from A Study in Scarlet, including Watson's complaint that Holmes doesn't know the Earth revolves around the sun, but it also (confusingly, if one knows the stories) tosses in references to several other Holmes tales, which left me struggling to follow the plot. (Near as I could tell, the second episode didn't draw on any Conan Doyle stories directly.) The conclusion included an incredibly tense confrontation with Moriarty (by a pool rather than a waterfall). Actor Andrew Scott (and the writer) takes the character into the psychotic realm, his voice not tied to the content of his words, his emotions wildly meandering from context. Great great fun.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
SF, Wells, Conan Doyle, storytelling
A variety of short fiction, that's what I've read.
Continuing with some stories from The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces:
"The Burning of the Brain," by Cordwainer Smith (Paul M.A. Linebarger)
A short piece with a science-fictional premise (people can travel between the stars, but it's a taxing psychic strain on the "Go-Captains" who pilot the beautiful craft) that's really about aging, love, vanity, and honor. Some fine writing, and all accomplished efficiently.
"Gehenna," by Barry N. Malzberg
The writing is certainly skillful, but the piece is more a stunt than a story—a relationship that ends badly is seen from four different perspectives, perspectives which differ profoundly—but its brief and plays with your head, so it's hard to complain. The real problem is that there's nothing science fictional about the story. Nothing.
"A Meeting with Medusa," Arthur C. Clarke
Engaging to read, the story concerns a ship commander named Falcon who, in the opening chapter, goes down with the ship—zeppelin—in a major air disaster. Following that, a reconstructed Falcon pilots a balloon-borne vessel through the atmosphere of Jupiter, where he has a strange encounter. The ending contains a twist that Clarke seems to have felt was worth concealing. I suppose it does add something to the story to delay providing information, but it feels like a cheap trick, and it's not as if the news really alters the story's larger plot in any significant way. What the story does well is give an air of breathless adventure to a tale of scientific exploration.
The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells, ed. by John Hammond
I see a pattern to the structure of these stories that doesn't fit our modern conception of a story, though I suppose it fits more what we'd call a tale: something odd happens, but there's no sense of a conclusion; the story is in the description of the odd event, and when one is done describing it, one moves on, using with some backward-looking comment on the affair.
A case in point is "The Crystal Egg," the story that inspired Borges' "The Aleph," which I recently read. At first, we wonder why the shopkeeper in this story is so bent on not selling the crystal object placed in his window; his family wonders why as well, but he keeps his reasons to himself. Eventually, everything is revealed, and it's wonderfully fantastical, creepy, and science fictional. The story ends with a frustrating search for the lost object and some reflections on its ramifications. (Has someone ever followed up on where Wells leaves the story?) The story doesn't so much conclude as back slowly away from its ending, leaving us to think, "Oh, dear . . . "
"The Empire of the Ants" is a sort of Heart of Darkness with ants standing in for the natives. Not that there aren't natives, who are fleeing the ants, but, given Wells's propensity for social and political commentary, it's easy to think he might be forming some fable about the revenge sought by the colonized—though the story doesn't really seem to push for such an interpretation. The long and short of it is that the characters make a river journey into the Amazon to investigate tales of rampant ants. The ants turn out to be far more insidious a menace than first imagined, and the story provides a host of haunting images and ideas. As with the previous story, there's no real conclusion, but more a report of the present dire situation. A terrific tale.
"The Thing in No. 7" is more of a lark than the other two. Wells still manages to disturb us, as one member of a group of friends accidentally makes his way into the wrong apartment to make a terrifying discovery. The solution is mundane, but the set-up is suspenseful and a pleasure, the whole thing less a complete story than a tale of, "Then there was the night we stumbled on . . . My, wasn't that a shock!"
The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I'm about halfway through Michael Dirda's On Conan Doyle (which dismaying has already spent far too much time talking about other writers), and the book led me to a Holmes tale I hadn't read before, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men." It's one of those woman-frightened-at-a-country-house stories which, no matter how many times I run across them, never fails to interest me. I wonder if Conan Doyle thought the mysterious images left about on house and paper—glyphs of stick figures in various states of movement—presented an impenetrable mystery to his readers. To me, they were obviously an encrypted message, with the figures stand-ins for letters. Still, the author makes the story strange and suspenseful, even though it's largely ridiculous (the messages in odd places; an almost supernatural description of the figure who leaves one message; Holmes's relative inactivity until its too late). The writing, as usual, is a model of that clean, well-phrased English style that's also so appealing in Wells.
Continuing with some stories from The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces:
"The Burning of the Brain," by Cordwainer Smith (Paul M.A. Linebarger)
A short piece with a science-fictional premise (people can travel between the stars, but it's a taxing psychic strain on the "Go-Captains" who pilot the beautiful craft) that's really about aging, love, vanity, and honor. Some fine writing, and all accomplished efficiently.
"Gehenna," by Barry N. Malzberg
The writing is certainly skillful, but the piece is more a stunt than a story—a relationship that ends badly is seen from four different perspectives, perspectives which differ profoundly—but its brief and plays with your head, so it's hard to complain. The real problem is that there's nothing science fictional about the story. Nothing.
"A Meeting with Medusa," Arthur C. Clarke
Engaging to read, the story concerns a ship commander named Falcon who, in the opening chapter, goes down with the ship—zeppelin—in a major air disaster. Following that, a reconstructed Falcon pilots a balloon-borne vessel through the atmosphere of Jupiter, where he has a strange encounter. The ending contains a twist that Clarke seems to have felt was worth concealing. I suppose it does add something to the story to delay providing information, but it feels like a cheap trick, and it's not as if the news really alters the story's larger plot in any significant way. What the story does well is give an air of breathless adventure to a tale of scientific exploration.
The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells, ed. by John Hammond
I see a pattern to the structure of these stories that doesn't fit our modern conception of a story, though I suppose it fits more what we'd call a tale: something odd happens, but there's no sense of a conclusion; the story is in the description of the odd event, and when one is done describing it, one moves on, using with some backward-looking comment on the affair.
A case in point is "The Crystal Egg," the story that inspired Borges' "The Aleph," which I recently read. At first, we wonder why the shopkeeper in this story is so bent on not selling the crystal object placed in his window; his family wonders why as well, but he keeps his reasons to himself. Eventually, everything is revealed, and it's wonderfully fantastical, creepy, and science fictional. The story ends with a frustrating search for the lost object and some reflections on its ramifications. (Has someone ever followed up on where Wells leaves the story?) The story doesn't so much conclude as back slowly away from its ending, leaving us to think, "Oh, dear . . . "
"The Empire of the Ants" is a sort of Heart of Darkness with ants standing in for the natives. Not that there aren't natives, who are fleeing the ants, but, given Wells's propensity for social and political commentary, it's easy to think he might be forming some fable about the revenge sought by the colonized—though the story doesn't really seem to push for such an interpretation. The long and short of it is that the characters make a river journey into the Amazon to investigate tales of rampant ants. The ants turn out to be far more insidious a menace than first imagined, and the story provides a host of haunting images and ideas. As with the previous story, there's no real conclusion, but more a report of the present dire situation. A terrific tale.
"The Thing in No. 7" is more of a lark than the other two. Wells still manages to disturb us, as one member of a group of friends accidentally makes his way into the wrong apartment to make a terrifying discovery. The solution is mundane, but the set-up is suspenseful and a pleasure, the whole thing less a complete story than a tale of, "Then there was the night we stumbled on . . . My, wasn't that a shock!"
The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I'm about halfway through Michael Dirda's On Conan Doyle (which dismaying has already spent far too much time talking about other writers), and the book led me to a Holmes tale I hadn't read before, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men." It's one of those woman-frightened-at-a-country-house stories which, no matter how many times I run across them, never fails to interest me. I wonder if Conan Doyle thought the mysterious images left about on house and paper—glyphs of stick figures in various states of movement—presented an impenetrable mystery to his readers. To me, they were obviously an encrypted message, with the figures stand-ins for letters. Still, the author makes the story strange and suspenseful, even though it's largely ridiculous (the messages in odd places; an almost supernatural description of the figure who leaves one message; Holmes's relative inactivity until its too late). The writing, as usual, is a model of that clean, well-phrased English style that's also so appealing in Wells.
Friday, January 13, 2012
A few more SF stories read
It's puzzling to consider what landed any given story in The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces aside from Robert Silverberg liking it. If you're going to collect "masterpieces," it seems to me that the bar ought to be pretty high.
Philip José Farmer's "The Sliced-Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World," from 1971, is one of those stories built around a punchline plot, summarizable in a single clause, that telegraphs its ending because it is all about its "shock" ending, which of course isn't a shock at all. To avoid problems related to overcrowding, individuals are awake and going about their business only one day each week; the rest of the days, they're in suspended animation, which people assigned to those other days do the necessary work. How any real work gets done is a mystery, but the story hinges on our protagonist falling in love with a woman assigned to a different day but who he can see in her sleep chamber, as she shares his house. As a result of his love, he wants to switch over to her day. His love is an adolescent thing, built on nothing but her looks, and the outcome of all this, even with a small twist tossed in, is obvious from the get-go. I have yet to read any Farmer fiction that I've liked, but I've only read a few things.
1958's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by Alfred Bester, is a lark about time travel that's both entertaining and clever; unlike the Farmer tale, it does not telegraph its ending, though it certainly could have. Bester has fun with the idea: a man finds his wife in the arms of another man, so, genius that he is, he goes to the basement, slaps together a time machine, and goes back in history to remove her from his life. For some reason, this doesn't work, so he keeps heading back, knocking off various historical figures, both major and minor, in an attempt to, finally, see something happen in his present life. The conclusion is logical enough, but, more importantly, it's aesthetically and dramatically satisfying, given some elements that at first seem unrelated to the plot.
"The Man Who Lost the Sea," by Ted Sturgeon (and, with a glace back at the proceeding story, I should mention that there's even a third "The Man Who" story in the book), from 1959, is a bit of a slog at times, though there are, in retrospect, some clever touches. Written in a sometimes-effective, sometimes-strained literary style, the story keeps you guessing for quite a while as you follow the thoughts of a man lying, evidently in a space suit, on a beach. What's he doing there? Who's the little boy who keeps bothering him? What's all this about the time it takes a satellite to circle? Once all the pieces come together, it seems like Sturgeon should have stopped, so, for me, the very end feels unnatural and forced. At the time it was published, I'm sure it had quite an impact.
Philip José Farmer's "The Sliced-Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World," from 1971, is one of those stories built around a punchline plot, summarizable in a single clause, that telegraphs its ending because it is all about its "shock" ending, which of course isn't a shock at all. To avoid problems related to overcrowding, individuals are awake and going about their business only one day each week; the rest of the days, they're in suspended animation, which people assigned to those other days do the necessary work. How any real work gets done is a mystery, but the story hinges on our protagonist falling in love with a woman assigned to a different day but who he can see in her sleep chamber, as she shares his house. As a result of his love, he wants to switch over to her day. His love is an adolescent thing, built on nothing but her looks, and the outcome of all this, even with a small twist tossed in, is obvious from the get-go. I have yet to read any Farmer fiction that I've liked, but I've only read a few things.
1958's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by Alfred Bester, is a lark about time travel that's both entertaining and clever; unlike the Farmer tale, it does not telegraph its ending, though it certainly could have. Bester has fun with the idea: a man finds his wife in the arms of another man, so, genius that he is, he goes to the basement, slaps together a time machine, and goes back in history to remove her from his life. For some reason, this doesn't work, so he keeps heading back, knocking off various historical figures, both major and minor, in an attempt to, finally, see something happen in his present life. The conclusion is logical enough, but, more importantly, it's aesthetically and dramatically satisfying, given some elements that at first seem unrelated to the plot.
"The Man Who Lost the Sea," by Ted Sturgeon (and, with a glace back at the proceeding story, I should mention that there's even a third "The Man Who" story in the book), from 1959, is a bit of a slog at times, though there are, in retrospect, some clever touches. Written in a sometimes-effective, sometimes-strained literary style, the story keeps you guessing for quite a while as you follow the thoughts of a man lying, evidently in a space suit, on a beach. What's he doing there? Who's the little boy who keeps bothering him? What's all this about the time it takes a satellite to circle? Once all the pieces come together, it seems like Sturgeon should have stopped, so, for me, the very end feels unnatural and forced. At the time it was published, I'm sure it had quite an impact.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
"Unearthed"
Astoundingly—to me, at least—I finished a readable draft, which is now out with three readers. The first reader (writer, editor) already got back to me. He seems to think the thing is pretty solid as is, with just some minor edits needed, but we're going to talk more, so maybe there's something larger that will need work. I worked on it for several hours straight last night and sent it off without a final complete read-through, feeling simply done and ready to get responses. What a long process it's been. Within a week, I should have all comments back; I can then turn it around in a day or two, I hope (assuming there are no huge issues); then it's off to Asimov's, which I hope will take this next chapter in my tale of the Old Man.
Also, the Asimov's Readers' Award ballot is up. If you enjoyed "Clockworks," please consider voting for it:
http://www.asimovs.com/2012_02/ASF_AwardSubmit_2012.html
Also, the Asimov's Readers' Award ballot is up. If you enjoyed "Clockworks," please consider voting for it:
http://www.asimovs.com/2012_02/ASF_AwardSubmit_2012.html
Friday, December 30, 2011
Books abandoned; stories read
All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Huburt Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, fell apart for me. I'm somewhat curious about where the book's thesis was headed, but the shambling structure, both narratively and philosophically, made me suspect their methods for getting there. After a lengthy analysis of why David Foster Wallace made them feel hopeless (I'm woefully shortchanging their ideas here, but in the end, it's not that important), they spend much time among Greek heroes, considering how they responded to the universe. The problem with this is that they're constructing a way to use literature to help us find meaning, but they're equating the narrative strategies of playwrights and poets with how actual Greek people responded to the sacred in their lives, and that's not an historically valid equation. The book seems to give a lot of credit to Jesus' insights into what it means to be human, but they somehow manage to not really talk about him. Great swaths of philosophical thinking a given short shrift, and then they declare that Decartes is the next great insight-provider (after Jesus). I had a hard time finding a coherent argument holding the whole thing together, and the structure of the book seemed ill–thought out. I dropped it at about the halfway point.
I'm disappointed to have stopped reading Dan Simmons's Hyperion three days in. The book started out well, and almost immediately it communicated its intention to use The Canterbury Tales as a structural method for the "pilgrimage" of the novel's seven travelers. However, the length of the first tale made me realize that the tale-telling would be the bulk of the novel, unless the other tales were radically shorter. I quite enjoyed "the priest's tale," with its gothic, grim science fiction. The next story, however, let me down rather quickly, the moment it announced we were going to be exposed to a standard suspense genre sex scene. Absolutely dreadful writing took hold, and I lost all confidence in the author's project. (I very much enjoyed Simmons's "Muse of Fire," a novella from the Dozois and Strahan–edited The New Space Opera—that is, with the exception of the ending, an awkward and unconvincing reminder of the conclusion of Star Trek: The Movie, a conclusion some wag deemed "a $40-million f**k.") Undone by the writer's misstep, I looked ahead to see whether, indeed, I wasn't going to get much of a novel out of this novel (a fact confirmed by a friend who'd read it some time ago), then elected to read the concluding 20 pages or so. Overloaded with sentiment, the book merely sets you up for the next book. No, thank you.
I also read several short stories from 1983's The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces, edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin Greenberg. (I keep seeing "Arkham" for "Arbor.")
Clifford D. Simak's "Desertion" seems like an episode of The Outer Limits, which focused at least once on turning a human into an alien. Every bit of science in the story is goofy, and there's not much to the characters, but the story is a sincere little parable that, at the end, becomes beautiful and manages to carry more weight than you'd suspect it could. The editor's note at the start that Simak wrote the story in response to first reports about Nazi death camps sets you up in a way the story doesn't deserve; it's better to know this afterwards and allow the story its own argument without tying it to some particular human atrocity.
"Warm," by Robert Sheckley, is what I'd expect from this writer I was introduced to 32 years ago by a high school friend. Either humorously grim or grimly humorous, the story doesn't go where one might expect, but gets there through a method I wasn't expecting, something more thoughtful and philosophical. I know how Bradbury would have done this story (and I'd like to see that); he'd have ended in the same place but taken a radically different route. The structure springs from the notion that one is "warm" when locating something hidden or coming closer to understanding an idea. A voice from who-knows-where tells our protagonist he's getting "warmer" to where the voice is trapped. The protagonist's attitude toward the voice is what's comic, since he treats it as real yet doesn't seem all that bothered by it, as if this sort of thing happens all the time.
Lastly I read "A Bad Day for Sales," by Fritz Leiber, another parable, this one having as its target our commercialized world. A socially awkward robot/vending machine is going through his shtick with a city crowd when disaster strikes. Leiber does a great job with the scene, switching from a vaguely threatening looniness to a nightmare scenario smoothly. That various people start picking themselves up at the end seems unlikely given the description Leiber provided, but it's a neat effect and keeps the story from stopping dead.
I'm disappointed to have stopped reading Dan Simmons's Hyperion three days in. The book started out well, and almost immediately it communicated its intention to use The Canterbury Tales as a structural method for the "pilgrimage" of the novel's seven travelers. However, the length of the first tale made me realize that the tale-telling would be the bulk of the novel, unless the other tales were radically shorter. I quite enjoyed "the priest's tale," with its gothic, grim science fiction. The next story, however, let me down rather quickly, the moment it announced we were going to be exposed to a standard suspense genre sex scene. Absolutely dreadful writing took hold, and I lost all confidence in the author's project. (I very much enjoyed Simmons's "Muse of Fire," a novella from the Dozois and Strahan–edited The New Space Opera—that is, with the exception of the ending, an awkward and unconvincing reminder of the conclusion of Star Trek: The Movie, a conclusion some wag deemed "a $40-million f**k.") Undone by the writer's misstep, I looked ahead to see whether, indeed, I wasn't going to get much of a novel out of this novel (a fact confirmed by a friend who'd read it some time ago), then elected to read the concluding 20 pages or so. Overloaded with sentiment, the book merely sets you up for the next book. No, thank you.
I also read several short stories from 1983's The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces, edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin Greenberg. (I keep seeing "Arkham" for "Arbor.")
Clifford D. Simak's "Desertion" seems like an episode of The Outer Limits, which focused at least once on turning a human into an alien. Every bit of science in the story is goofy, and there's not much to the characters, but the story is a sincere little parable that, at the end, becomes beautiful and manages to carry more weight than you'd suspect it could. The editor's note at the start that Simak wrote the story in response to first reports about Nazi death camps sets you up in a way the story doesn't deserve; it's better to know this afterwards and allow the story its own argument without tying it to some particular human atrocity.
"Warm," by Robert Sheckley, is what I'd expect from this writer I was introduced to 32 years ago by a high school friend. Either humorously grim or grimly humorous, the story doesn't go where one might expect, but gets there through a method I wasn't expecting, something more thoughtful and philosophical. I know how Bradbury would have done this story (and I'd like to see that); he'd have ended in the same place but taken a radically different route. The structure springs from the notion that one is "warm" when locating something hidden or coming closer to understanding an idea. A voice from who-knows-where tells our protagonist he's getting "warmer" to where the voice is trapped. The protagonist's attitude toward the voice is what's comic, since he treats it as real yet doesn't seem all that bothered by it, as if this sort of thing happens all the time.
Lastly I read "A Bad Day for Sales," by Fritz Leiber, another parable, this one having as its target our commercialized world. A socially awkward robot/vending machine is going through his shtick with a city crowd when disaster strikes. Leiber does a great job with the scene, switching from a vaguely threatening looniness to a nightmare scenario smoothly. That various people start picking themselves up at the end seems unlikely given the description Leiber provided, but it's a neat effect and keeps the story from stopping dead.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Love the writer, hate the editor
Mishna Wolff's I'm Down is, for much of its length, the funniest book I've ever read. Her outsider younger self—a white child being forced by her white father (a man evidently more comfortable about black folks than white folks) to fit into her black community—is a source of much self-deprecating humor and increasingly profane responses to the messed-up world(s) around her. Once she finally learns how to have cred in the black world, she's sent to a largely white school for gifted kids and once more finds herself having to navigate strange waters. Part of what makes the book work is Wolff's refusal to explore issues surrounding race; rather, she shows us how particular people of varying races live their lives, allowing us to draw our own conclusions about culture and class. The center of the book, as with many memoirs, is less the author than the parent, in this case the father. As the book moves through time, we see Wolff become more distant from her father, only to have a redemptive reconnection with him in one longer, more serious chapter at the end.
The book has problems, but I'm going to blame them all on the editor who, absurdly, Wolff singles out for thanks in the acknowledgements. Wolff has great material to draw on, and she has a gift for comedy. The challenge for the editor becomes how to turn the book into a coherent whole. For much of the book, when we're dealing with Wolff's earliest years, the material manages to do this itself. But as time passes, the book feels more fragmented; there's no strong sense of how much time she's spent somewhere or how something from a previous chapter affected the current one. The book's tone shifts, too, as Wolff's issues change, until we reach the conclusive scene with her father. My problem with the father's redemption, however, is less the shift in tone than the shift in the way we're expected to see this man. The scene, in which he joins his daughter's for a swim across a lake, seems to involve a different character than we've come to know. This is the guy who never works? Who never finishes any project? Who is tugged about emotionally because he seems to have no real certainty about himself? I'm not saying the scene didn't happen, but there's no sense from the author about how to connect this man with the character we've come to know.
There's also an unresolved undercurrent of the writer not telling people what she needs to tell them. Repeatedly, she lies about her own motives and actions in order to defuse situations. It's an interesting motif, but she never explores what it means. And that's true for a host of things. So while I appreciate the youthful-observer perspective on issues of class and race, there's some oddly unexamined material that leaves the work feeling incomplete and thin. This sense isn't helped by the prose; the youthful voice at the beginning is the same voice at the end, and it never rises much above stylistically serviceable.
I blame the editor. Again, Wolff has great source material and a good sense of how to set a scene and build a funny narrative. But the editor needed to take this book to the next place. The editor also needed to actually read the book. Increasingly as the pages go by, errors (typically homophones) pop up, along with missing words or sentences that don't parse. It's the homophones that are most jarring, for me; they announce that the writer tends to make these kinds of errors, which means that the editor, if she is doing her job, is going to watch for this kind of thing. What is the editor being paid to do?
Thursday, December 22, 2011
So Far Gone
So Far Gone, by Paul Cody, ended well. The author pulled it off, executing (oh dear, no pun intended) a beautiful ending, I thought. The protagonist of the tale, Jack Connor, will be the first person in decades to be put to death in Massachusetts, having murdered his parents and grandmother. We don't see a court case—this isn't that kind of book. Instead, we get Jack's interactions with the priest who visits him, repeated flashbacks to his early childhood (though out of chronological sequence) and later years living his parents, and the accounts of "witnesses" who contribute outsiders' perspectives on Jack and what he's done.
There's an enormous amount of repetition in the prose, and I think several chapters could have been tightened considerably with no loss. Halfway through, I didn't have any sense of the book's momentum, but then events begin to link more tightly and the noose of the narrative tightens. It's a marvelous book that doesn't settle for the standard steps one might expect to see in such a story. Cody generates sympathy for Jack by having us live through his hellish childhood. At first, I think the grandmother is overplayed, demonic, but later we get a better sense of the wildness of her moods, and eventually we sympathize with everyone in this horribly wounded family, and Cody does a nice job building that sympathy in careful stages. It's a terribly sad book, but there are redemptive and humane cracks of light showing around the sealed cellar door at its heart.
There's an enormous amount of repetition in the prose, and I think several chapters could have been tightened considerably with no loss. Halfway through, I didn't have any sense of the book's momentum, but then events begin to link more tightly and the noose of the narrative tightens. It's a marvelous book that doesn't settle for the standard steps one might expect to see in such a story. Cody generates sympathy for Jack by having us live through his hellish childhood. At first, I think the grandmother is overplayed, demonic, but later we get a better sense of the wildness of her moods, and eventually we sympathize with everyone in this horribly wounded family, and Cody does a nice job building that sympathy in careful stages. It's a terribly sad book, but there are redemptive and humane cracks of light showing around the sealed cellar door at its heart.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Plowing
About one-third of the way through the intense revision/completion of "Unearthed," a tale that has crept up to 18K words. There will be some additions, but some trimming is ahead, too, so I don't expect the total to be too far from 18K. Finally having time to work on the thing, I'm moving through line-by-line and not leaving anything for my future self to have to figure out, which means I have to solve any problems now. (I've put off quite a few decisions, I'm finding; thanks, past self!)
I am, meanwhile, reading Paul Cody's So Far Gone (which will make or break itself in its final quarter; I'm reading Cody because he was the editor who selected a story of mine for the next issue of Stone Canoe), All Things Shining by Dreyfus and Kelly (which may be moving a bit too swiftly through the history of Western thought to be completely credible), and Mishna Wolff's incredibly funny I'm Down (the true story of a poor (literally) little white girl who lacks are cred with her black neighbors, but whose father, white though he is, moves with ease in the black community).
In other quasi-news, a Los Angeles–based producer is working with me to get my story "Clockworks" attached to some people in the business of making movies; there's no money in our agreement, at this stage, but if he manages to find a buyer, I'll let you know.
I am, meanwhile, reading Paul Cody's So Far Gone (which will make or break itself in its final quarter; I'm reading Cody because he was the editor who selected a story of mine for the next issue of Stone Canoe), All Things Shining by Dreyfus and Kelly (which may be moving a bit too swiftly through the history of Western thought to be completely credible), and Mishna Wolff's incredibly funny I'm Down (the true story of a poor (literally) little white girl who lacks are cred with her black neighbors, but whose father, white though he is, moves with ease in the black community).
In other quasi-news, a Los Angeles–based producer is working with me to get my story "Clockworks" attached to some people in the business of making movies; there's no money in our agreement, at this stage, but if he manages to find a buyer, I'll let you know.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Friday, November 25, 2011
Against obliteration
I'm in the "every sentence sounds kind of stupid" mode of revision on "Unearthed." Some of them may, indeed, be poorly done; as there's no ideal sentence, each is less than ideal; the broader problem is the usual one of voice, of making the narrator sound like one person (who isn't me) rather than like me at various times of day or states of mental with-it-ness. I keep seeing sentences that make me say, "Yeah, that's exactly how I'd write that," which makes me revise to be less-like-me, though, no surprise, that's still me because who else is there to judge how the sentence sounds?
Last night I began All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. Is that the same line drawing of a whale that was on the Philbrick Moby-Dick book? Hmm. I started this as a way to pull myself up from the obsessive thoughts of death spurred by Julian Barnes's excellent Nothing to Be Frightened Of. It may be "nothing to be frightened of," but it's also "nothing one wants to obsess over to the point of distraction," so rather than dwelling, in my reading, on my eventual obliteration, I moved on to a book more focused on the bright bonfire of storytelling and not the encircling dark.
The book moves briskly, though the culture its aiming to cure, no longer god-saturated (a process that started hundreds of years ago), isn't the whole picture. Certainly there are plenty of folks who, contra the fallout from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, still see the world as under God's command. Yes, even these "believers," of whatever religious background, approach things more independently and existentially than, say, their 14th-century peers, but they nonetheless inhabit a different reality than these writers. In any case, after an analysis of our current "nihilism," they move into a discussion of how David Foster Wallace both probed this radical uncertainty and succumbed to it. I'm only about 50 pages in.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Revision, first steps; Philbrick's Moby-Dick
Revising
How long since I'd read this opening to the draft of my story-in-progress, "Unearthed"? How long ago did I write it? It's wonderfully unfamiliar. It needs work, but there's a lot to work with, as well. Interesting. "My words are cicadas." Hm.
Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick
After reading Philbrick's book, you don't necessarily need to read Melville's novel. I read two-thirds of the book, a few years ago, before running aground on yet another digression in the narrative. Philbrick's book, wildly overpriced at $25 (it's about as long as a good-sized short story), visits many of the book's finest moments, lines I underlined when I made my own foray into the text. There's also interesting material about Melville's pushy relationship with shy Hawthorne. Less good are the attempts to force the book to make statements about the way America is heading toward the catastrophe of the Civil War; these line readings don't seem to fit, and, even if the argument felt more solid, it's clunkily done in this small space, with sudden shifts of intent in a tiny chapter's final paragraph. This seems more like an essay to have run in The Atlantic, and I can't imagine what audience would buy it. But you ought to get it from the library and fly through it.
How long since I'd read this opening to the draft of my story-in-progress, "Unearthed"? How long ago did I write it? It's wonderfully unfamiliar. It needs work, but there's a lot to work with, as well. Interesting. "My words are cicadas." Hm.
Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick
After reading Philbrick's book, you don't necessarily need to read Melville's novel. I read two-thirds of the book, a few years ago, before running aground on yet another digression in the narrative. Philbrick's book, wildly overpriced at $25 (it's about as long as a good-sized short story), visits many of the book's finest moments, lines I underlined when I made my own foray into the text. There's also interesting material about Melville's pushy relationship with shy Hawthorne. Less good are the attempts to force the book to make statements about the way America is heading toward the catastrophe of the Civil War; these line readings don't seem to fit, and, even if the argument felt more solid, it's clunkily done in this small space, with sudden shifts of intent in a tiny chapter's final paragraph. This seems more like an essay to have run in The Atlantic, and I can't imagine what audience would buy it. But you ought to get it from the library and fly through it.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
"Clockworks" posted
I considered—on the advice of some friends—creating a Kindle version of "Clockworks," my "Old Man" prequel that came out in Asimov's this year. But you know what? I feel like I already got paid for it, and at this point, I'm just happy to have more people read it. Better here than on some bit-torrent site that scanned and chopped the Asimov's issue. In addition, making a "cover" for the thing seemed like too much of a hassle.
So: Here's "Clockworks," at your right, clickable as a PDF. Yeah, I turned off the widow and orphan control when formatting it; it was simpler than the other options.
Please let me know what you think. I'm curious as to how many people download it. Today I printed out a pretty-much-completed draft of the next story, the prequel "Unearthed." I've still got a fair bit of work to do on it, but I think those of you who enjoyed the other "Old Man" stories will enjoy this next one at least as much.
So: Here's "Clockworks," at your right, clickable as a PDF. Yeah, I turned off the widow and orphan control when formatting it; it was simpler than the other options.
Please let me know what you think. I'm curious as to how many people download it. Today I printed out a pretty-much-completed draft of the next story, the prequel "Unearthed." I've still got a fair bit of work to do on it, but I think those of you who enjoyed the other "Old Man" stories will enjoy this next one at least as much.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
More about "Mote": other stuff as well
I wrote a follow-up to my review of The Mote in God's Eye, but my blog took a distinct dislike to what I'd written and, after first leaving it stranded mid-sentence, then deleted it (okay, that was my fault, but it didn't give me a chance to say, "Wait! Don't!").
I didn't talk, the first time, about the title itself, which has to do with both the world from which the "Moties" come (near the "eye" of the Coal Sack's "Face of God") and the biblical aphorism about removing an obstruction from your own eye before daring to pluck the smaller obstruction from the eye of another person. This is, I suppose, the point of the book, though it dealt with in a way that is somehow understated while also being clunky.
Niven and Pournelle set up parallels between the humans and aliens: command structure, sexuality, rising and falling civilizations. It might have helped the point had someone on the human side provided a critique of human systems in light of what they saw in the Moties, but instead everyone blunders along rather ignorantly, though a few passing comments are made to draw attention to the similarities. In a literary work, this would have surfaced as a theme; here, it's a motif that never rises beyond a surface depiction. In fact, had someone ever pointed it out, the clunkiness would have become more evident: the exact parallel of having a hidden commander about whom both sides wonder; the exact parallel of stranding three people on Mote Prime and three Moties among the humans. You can Niven and Pournelle saw this conceit as central to the novel, but it doesn't actually go anywhere interesting or take the reader deeper.
Last week I read Inside Scientology, by Janet Reitman. I've read a lot about Scientology—I find quackery and homegrown religions and hoaxes fascinating—so I already knew a fair amount of what was in the book, though Reitman's information about the current leadership and the Gold Base was new to me. The one thing I feel wasn't conveyed fully was the sense of what exactly happens in "auditing" sessions, the Scientology equivalent of the confession. Everything she said about it, I knew, but I hadn't had, previously, the sense of endless hours people put into the process, and I left without a clear sense of how exactly one spends that time. And though she may have gotten at this aspect, it's pretty clear that such a process, by itself, must do so much to make the recipient susceptible to the mindset necessary to proceed further. Of course, that's the upfront point, but it's frightening to think of how, Stockholm Syndome–like, one's mental defenses must be so reduced by the process, much like the mental defenses of someone who, grilled for hours by police, confesses to something he or she didn't do. I do recommend the book for anyone interested in the subject. Reitman is pretty fair, I have to say: she doesn't just outright say that the practices Hubbard invented are stupid or dangerous; she doesn't damn the "faith" so much as she damns the way it's been run, with Hubbard drifting into megalomania and the current show-runner demonstrating some kind of narcissistic personality disorder (at best).
I've started both Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes's personal reflection on death, and Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe's proto-novel. Both are funnier than I thought they'd be. Defoe's protagonist is sort of an idiot, so far. Barnes's voice is just so marvelously English; an American could not have written these sentences.
I did some work on the final section of "Unearthed" today. It's coming along. Now I have to decide (though it's hardly urgent) whether to post "Clockworks" here as a PDF or format it (and stick a picture of some kind on the front) for sale at Amazon.
I didn't talk, the first time, about the title itself, which has to do with both the world from which the "Moties" come (near the "eye" of the Coal Sack's "Face of God") and the biblical aphorism about removing an obstruction from your own eye before daring to pluck the smaller obstruction from the eye of another person. This is, I suppose, the point of the book, though it dealt with in a way that is somehow understated while also being clunky.
Niven and Pournelle set up parallels between the humans and aliens: command structure, sexuality, rising and falling civilizations. It might have helped the point had someone on the human side provided a critique of human systems in light of what they saw in the Moties, but instead everyone blunders along rather ignorantly, though a few passing comments are made to draw attention to the similarities. In a literary work, this would have surfaced as a theme; here, it's a motif that never rises beyond a surface depiction. In fact, had someone ever pointed it out, the clunkiness would have become more evident: the exact parallel of having a hidden commander about whom both sides wonder; the exact parallel of stranding three people on Mote Prime and three Moties among the humans. You can Niven and Pournelle saw this conceit as central to the novel, but it doesn't actually go anywhere interesting or take the reader deeper.
Last week I read Inside Scientology, by Janet Reitman. I've read a lot about Scientology—I find quackery and homegrown religions and hoaxes fascinating—so I already knew a fair amount of what was in the book, though Reitman's information about the current leadership and the Gold Base was new to me. The one thing I feel wasn't conveyed fully was the sense of what exactly happens in "auditing" sessions, the Scientology equivalent of the confession. Everything she said about it, I knew, but I hadn't had, previously, the sense of endless hours people put into the process, and I left without a clear sense of how exactly one spends that time. And though she may have gotten at this aspect, it's pretty clear that such a process, by itself, must do so much to make the recipient susceptible to the mindset necessary to proceed further. Of course, that's the upfront point, but it's frightening to think of how, Stockholm Syndome–like, one's mental defenses must be so reduced by the process, much like the mental defenses of someone who, grilled for hours by police, confesses to something he or she didn't do. I do recommend the book for anyone interested in the subject. Reitman is pretty fair, I have to say: she doesn't just outright say that the practices Hubbard invented are stupid or dangerous; she doesn't damn the "faith" so much as she damns the way it's been run, with Hubbard drifting into megalomania and the current show-runner demonstrating some kind of narcissistic personality disorder (at best).
I've started both Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes's personal reflection on death, and Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe's proto-novel. Both are funnier than I thought they'd be. Defoe's protagonist is sort of an idiot, so far. Barnes's voice is just so marvelously English; an American could not have written these sentences.
I did some work on the final section of "Unearthed" today. It's coming along. Now I have to decide (though it's hardly urgent) whether to post "Clockworks" here as a PDF or format it (and stick a picture of some kind on the front) for sale at Amazon.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Recent reading
There's little writing to report. I'm waiting to hear back about two short stories. School- and (eldest daughter) wedding-related activities have contributed to a severe slackening in my writing. I did manage to do some reading in the past week or so:
The Mote in God's Eye, the 1974 novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, turned out to be . . . I want to say "pretty good," but I'm hesitant. I'm glad I read it, but it's also, for me, one more nail in the coffin of "classic science fiction novels." I'm at somewhat of a loss to explain why I didn't read it in high school, when I went through a Larry Niven phase, reading everything I could in his Known Space–related books (except for The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, which struck me as having a dull subject), in addition to all of his short fiction collections. This novel may have seemed dauntingly long as well as less interesting due to its non-participation in the Known Space universe. It being a collaboration may also have put me off, though I enjoyed the Niven/Pournelle Inferno. Still, I doubt I'd have enjoyed it back then.
A "first contact" novel, built around the humanity's early interactions with a sentient race from another star system, the book does take the premise and problems of alien interactions seriously. While the aliens aren't all that alien (and the focus on dialogue leads you to imagine them looking pretty much like us much of the time . . . only hairier), the book does finally hinge on incompatible ideas about culture and worldviews.
It took me a while to get accustomed to the writing, which is utterly flat and colorless, though serviceable. It's not bad or clumsy writing, by any means; it's just that none of it stands out, and no passage is particularly thrilling to read. The focus, in consequence, becomes the dialogue, which again isn't compelling, but largely sounds like humans talking and is clear. The book smacks of Star Trek, unexpectedly: several characters have annoying Old Earth accents that just seem ridiculous in the distant future, despite the authors' explanations. Giving the engineer a Scottish-English dialect to speak too obviously would remind any reading of Star Trek's Scotty . . . which should in turn remind everyone that he was faking his accent, making the novel's Scot sound doubly fake.
The book is paced oddly. A dramatic sequence in the book's second act leads one to expect another exciting sequence late in the game. A host of precautions taken against alien incursions during the journey home suggest that the humans have missed something—but they haven't. The end of the book, after some delaying personal scenes that aren't interesting at all, reads like a courtroom drama, with verbal revelations from unexpected quarters standing in for any physical action. The conclusion works pretty well, in fact, but it takes an awfully long time to get there and relies on quite a few people being more thick than they really ought to be.
In addition, portions of the book on Mote Prime, the aliens' homeworld, left me feeling as if I were watching a Saturday morning cartoon. In part, that was the result of the adolescent-level writing, but it also came from the silliness of some aspects that made the proceedings feel less real.
I also read the comic book collection Messiah Complex, a recent X-Men book that crossed among the various X-titles. It was much easier to follow than many such "events," since it didn't rely on other narratives taking place in yet more titles uncollected in those pages, but one still had to know a few things about X-Men backstories. (I didn't know quite enough, in truth, but I was fairly well equipped.) The story read well and consistently, though several writers contributed; the artwork was all over the place, but I came to appreciate the varying styles, even the manga-ish one that gave everyone Japo-Bambi eyes (surely among the most annoying traits of that style). All of the artists tended to overbusy their panels, but at least you didn't think anyone was being lazy. One artist clearly felt the need to make Professor X look exactly like Patrick Stewart, which I found distracting, but the others didn't bother.
The Mote in God's Eye, the 1974 novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, turned out to be . . . I want to say "pretty good," but I'm hesitant. I'm glad I read it, but it's also, for me, one more nail in the coffin of "classic science fiction novels." I'm at somewhat of a loss to explain why I didn't read it in high school, when I went through a Larry Niven phase, reading everything I could in his Known Space–related books (except for The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, which struck me as having a dull subject), in addition to all of his short fiction collections. This novel may have seemed dauntingly long as well as less interesting due to its non-participation in the Known Space universe. It being a collaboration may also have put me off, though I enjoyed the Niven/Pournelle Inferno. Still, I doubt I'd have enjoyed it back then.
A "first contact" novel, built around the humanity's early interactions with a sentient race from another star system, the book does take the premise and problems of alien interactions seriously. While the aliens aren't all that alien (and the focus on dialogue leads you to imagine them looking pretty much like us much of the time . . . only hairier), the book does finally hinge on incompatible ideas about culture and worldviews.
It took me a while to get accustomed to the writing, which is utterly flat and colorless, though serviceable. It's not bad or clumsy writing, by any means; it's just that none of it stands out, and no passage is particularly thrilling to read. The focus, in consequence, becomes the dialogue, which again isn't compelling, but largely sounds like humans talking and is clear. The book smacks of Star Trek, unexpectedly: several characters have annoying Old Earth accents that just seem ridiculous in the distant future, despite the authors' explanations. Giving the engineer a Scottish-English dialect to speak too obviously would remind any reading of Star Trek's Scotty . . . which should in turn remind everyone that he was faking his accent, making the novel's Scot sound doubly fake.
The book is paced oddly. A dramatic sequence in the book's second act leads one to expect another exciting sequence late in the game. A host of precautions taken against alien incursions during the journey home suggest that the humans have missed something—but they haven't. The end of the book, after some delaying personal scenes that aren't interesting at all, reads like a courtroom drama, with verbal revelations from unexpected quarters standing in for any physical action. The conclusion works pretty well, in fact, but it takes an awfully long time to get there and relies on quite a few people being more thick than they really ought to be.
In addition, portions of the book on Mote Prime, the aliens' homeworld, left me feeling as if I were watching a Saturday morning cartoon. In part, that was the result of the adolescent-level writing, but it also came from the silliness of some aspects that made the proceedings feel less real.
I also read the comic book collection Messiah Complex, a recent X-Men book that crossed among the various X-titles. It was much easier to follow than many such "events," since it didn't rely on other narratives taking place in yet more titles uncollected in those pages, but one still had to know a few things about X-Men backstories. (I didn't know quite enough, in truth, but I was fairly well equipped.) The story read well and consistently, though several writers contributed; the artwork was all over the place, but I came to appreciate the varying styles, even the manga-ish one that gave everyone Japo-Bambi eyes (surely among the most annoying traits of that style). All of the artists tended to overbusy their panels, but at least you didn't think anyone was being lazy. One artist clearly felt the need to make Professor X look exactly like Patrick Stewart, which I found distracting, but the others didn't bother.
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