Category: Weaving and writhing

David Hackett Fischer. Albion’s seed: four British folkways in America. A brilliant work of scholarship. Fascinating, persuasive, informative. I borrowed it from the library, but found it so valuable in both overview and detail that I had to have my own copy.

Michael Swanwick. Griffin’s egg. Haven’t started on this one yet. Part of my program to read all of his books.

Michael Swanwick. Cigar box Faust and other miniatures. I like the term miniature so much better than flash. I’m going to use it from now on.

John Dickson Carr. The case of the constant suicides. Doesn’t everybody love a good clockwork plot?

John Dickson Carr. Til death do us part. See above.

Dan Cruickshank. The secret history of Georgian London: how the wages of sin shaped the capital. That is to say, how sex (or more exactly the sex trade) influenced Georgian culture and in particular architecture.

Mark Twain. The adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Rereading. “Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”

A. Roger Ekirch. At day’s close: night in times past. We who live in the present (that is, everybody) assume that the past was in most ways mostly similar to the present. It wasn’t. Not even sleeping was the same.

Hugh Ross Williamson. Who was the man in the iron mask? and other historical mysteries. Little nooks and crannies and oddments, the sort of thing that serious historians prefer to ignore.

Iain McCalman. The last alchemist: Count Cagliostro, master of magic in the age of reason. A charismatic fraud, a type that is ever the same, especially now. Only the names have changed.

I always carry a little notebook in a pocket, whenever I leave the house, and a fountain pen clipped to my sweater’s v-neck. (When I’m home, the little notebook is poised on the corner of the desk.)

I tried making voice memos on my phone, but the user interface is awkward, I was always tapping the wrong button. And besides, I had to transcribe the notes once I got back home, so why not just write them down in the first place? And there’s all the background noise in the recording — sometimes I couldn’t make out what I’d said.

I tried Evernote and Simplenote and something else, I forget, on the phone, but plinking out text on the tiny screen keyboard was tedious and I frequently had forgotten the end of the sentence I had in mind by the time I got to it. Worse than useless! And besides, I eventually abandoned the phone as too expensive — nearly $100 a month after all those fees and taxes and surcharges and whatnot get piled on top of what seemed, a first blush, a reasonable rate. That’s a thousand dollars a year! And it’s not as if I ever use the phone to make calls.

So the issue was settled when I stopped carrying a phone. Paper it was. But this opened a whole new realm of choices.

It needed to be thin — no bulk. It needed to be small — to fit in any pocket. Or I would end up not carrying it.

I started with a little Moleskine bound in kraft paper. The price was right. (Mais le vrai Moleskine n’existe plus.) I liked the sewn binding, and the perforations on the last few pages, and the little pocket at the back. It worked well with pencil, but with a fountain pen, there was too much bleed-through, the paper was not opaque enough. And I’d grown to dislike carrying pencils. They either poke you in the fingertips, or through the bottom seam of your pocket, and in either case quickly grow too dull to write crisply, unless you carry a sharpener with you, and, for me, that was just one thing too many. I don’t like ballpoints of any kind, they write too smoothly, I need a bit of drag against the paper to write legibly — probably because I’m used to pencils. A fountain pen (a cheap one) feels just right. But then there was the bleed-through issue. I couldn’t read my own notes!

I’ve turned to Field Notes notebooks. They use staples and I hate that, but the paper is better than Moleskine’s. And I have to confess that I love their Colors series. (I’ve subscribed!) Four times a year they ship you a bunch of little notebooks with some eccentric, gimmicky design conceit. Those who have read more than one of these miniature essays may have gathered that I adore eccentricity, gimmicks, and conceits. Oh yes. Let us not be ashamed. Wood covers! Constellations! Beer! Gilt! And so on.

Still, I remain open to conversion.

I’ve yet to find the perfect pocket notebook. Perhaps it does not exist. But I do like my little Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen with Namiki cartridges (it comes with a converter for using bottled ink, but I’ve been afraid of leaks). It’s the perfect size for my hand and has just the right amount of friction against the page. It’s a delight, and one must never frown at delightful things.

 
It’s always nice to have things easily to hand. From bottom to top again:

Yogi Kondo et al. Interstellar Travel and Multi-generation Space Ships. This seems to be papers presented at an AAAS symposium with the same title as the book. In other words, some serious looks at a few of the technical issues such an undertaking raises.

Jacqueline Koyanagi. Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel. Kameron Hurley’s blurb promises us “…badass women running around doing badass things….” Both this and the book above were in the swag bag at Capclave 2014. I’ve barely glanced at either. But (hey!) free books — what’s not to like?

John Clute. Scores: Reviews 1993–2003. Speaking of Capclave, here’s the first of my loot from the dealers’ room. Clute is one of the best critics writing today, but this book’s typography is absolutely appalling: pale, spindly, too tight, and littered with errors.

George R. Stewart. Names on the Land. The classic study of American toponyms.

Henry Mayhew. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume II: The London Street-Folk (continued). Another classic study, in the Dover facsimile reprint. This is the place to go if you want to learn about, say, rag-pickers. And who doesn’t want to learn about rag-pickers?

John Clute. Canary Fever: Reviews. Further Capclave loot. More of the same from Mr. Clute: perceptive writing, rendered painful to read by incompetent typography. It’s set slightly larger than Scores — but such sloppy proofreading! such stingy margins! such horrendous spacing!

John Clute. Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews. Ah! What a pleasure this one is (yet more Capclave loot). Here the craft of the physical book is at a level with the writing in the book. Clever apercus! Proper small caps! Insightful critiques! Even typographic color! And — something amazing for a book at this price — a sewn binding!

Avram Davidson. The Island Under the Earth. The last of my Capclave purchases: a pristine Ace paperback of a fine story by a criminally neglected genius. I am making progress towards my goal of acquiring a copy of every word the man ever published.

There is after all no such thing.

There simply cannot be!

This can be proved from first principles.

Words — and therefore sentences, paragraphs, pages, books — acquire what meaning they have, termed an acceptation, by the general consensus of a language community. Words mean what we use them to mean. But we cannot use words arbitrarily, or at least not if we expect to be understood. I may call a lion a blanket but no one will understand “lion” when I say blanket; they will understand “blanket.” Such fatal slippages may occur on the lexical level (malapropisms), the syntactic level (solecisms), or the discourse level (Finnegans Wake, Dada). Originality is the enemy of comprehension. Q., as one likes to say, E. D.

But, a querulous reader might object, you are talking about innovation, not originality.  —Cliche, too, is the enemy of comprehension, this reader might point out. —Boredom is the enemy of comprehension. Titillate us, this reader might exhort, with the new, the never-before-read, the thrill of the unknown!

O hypothetical reader! So logical. So greedy.

Why not be satisfied with reiterations of what you’ve already read? Most people are, you know. Sure, it’s dressed up in fancy new duds, but it’s the same old bones and flesh underneath. Watch it dance!

Well. I concede this much: boredom is the enemy. But the stuff of story is always matter that we’ve seen before, rearranged and repainted in brighter colors. Have you never read Television Tropes & Idioms? In the truly original, in the really, actually never-seen-before, what is there for us to grasp hold of? How could we understand it? “If a lion could talk et cetera.” We should approach the rootlessly new with baby steps.

I’ve nothing against innovation, don’t misunderstand. But the fetishization of originality — “MAKE IT NEW!” — “ÉTONNEZ-MOI!” — is a disease of Modernism (note the capital M) that we need to inoculate ourselves against. It’s a recent fad, and one that we should have long since outgrown. Consider Pope:

Some to conceit alone their taste confine,
And glitt’ring thoughts struck out at ev’ry line;
Pleased with a work where nothing’s just or fit,
One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit.
Poets, like painters, thus, unskilled to trace
The naked nature and the living grace,
With gold and jewels cover every part,
And hide with ornaments their want of art.
True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed;
Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind[.]

---

But true expression, like th’ unchanging sun,
Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon,
It gilds all objects, but it alters none.
Expression is the dress of thought, and still
Appears more decent as more suitable;

---

And but so mimic ancient wits at best,
As apes our grandsires, in their doublets dressed.
In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old;
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

This is the rational impulse of humanism, refusing to bow to either Apollo or Dionysus, rejecting both extremes. Boredom is indeed the enemy (“We cannot blame indeed — but we may sleep”). Let us chart, then, a middle course, between the Scylla of the artist-as-divinity and the Charybdis of the artist-as-drudge; and let our craft be called Artifice (with its sails of labor filled with the winds of inspiration), and let us navigate across all the infinite seas (because all the seas are one) to another world, a new one, a better one. A little at a time.

Is of course Joanna Russ.

Where did I first encounter her work?

It may have been her book reviews in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the late seventies (of the previous century, I mean; I was a teenager, I’m not that old). Certainly they have formed my view as science fiction as a literature; how much so I did not appreciate until rereading them earlier this year in The Country You Have Never Seen.

Or maybe a story I read there? “The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand” is a splendid pastiche of Verne, with not a sting in its tail but a caress.

Or did the essay in Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw make me go out and buy up everything of hers in print?

Because I did. It took a while, but I have every book of hers as listed in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. I am a completist for only a few writers—Russ, Davenport, Yourcenar, Crowley (John, not Aleister), Shaw, Disch, this is not an exhaustive list—but Wow! I must read them all! I must have my own copy so that I can read it again and again! This was my reaction to encountering Joanna Russ.

What prose, what intelligence, what beauty and compassion. What humanity. I like books that make me feel more intelligent than I actually am. (It’s a vice, perhaps.) Joanna Russ’s books make you feel more humane that you actually are. They’re a view—like peering through a knot-hole in a barricade—onto a larger, a wider, a better world.

Example:

A real mermaid in a real river, twenty knights on bay horses, Charles le Magne ceding to the Duke of Anjou, a bridge built on one side of the stage while on the other swarms of workmen methodically erect and demolish a miniature castle twenty-five feet high, the invasion of the north by the pagans, Eleanor the Fair brought with a train of horsemen, bridesmaids, nobles, counts, and servants to wed Louis the Pious “who never showed his white teeth in a smile” and through it all, here, there, everywhere, now cajoling, now laughing, now pointing, making faces, preternaturally active, skipping, calling on the music—the Satyr, the genius loci of the beech woods, whose gray, smooth, straight trunks surrounded the entire natural amphitheater, producing at the top a half-canopy of new leaves: limp, half-extended, like umbrellas with the skeleton showing through the early-spring substance and just the color of new lettuce.

Example:

She was a soft-spoken, dark-haired, small-boned woman, not even coming up to their shoulders, like a kind of dwarf or miniature—but that was normal for a Mediterranean Greek of nearly four millennia ago, before super-diets and hybridization from seventy colonized planets had turned humanity (so she had been told) into Scandinavian giants. The young lieutenant, who was two meters and third tall, or three heads more than herself, very handsome and ebony-skinned, said “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I cannot believe you’re the proper Trans-Temporal Agent; I think—” and he finished his thought on the floor, his head under one of her ankles and this slight young woman (or was she young? Trans-Temp did such strange things sometimes!) somehow holding him down in a position he could not get out of without hurting himself to excruciation. She let him go. She sat down on the balloon-inflated thing they provided for sitting on in these strange times, looking curiously at the super-men and super-women, and said, “I am the Agent. My name is Alyx,” and smiled. She was in a rather good humor. It still amused her to watch this whole place, the transparent columns the women wore instead of clothing, the parts of the walls that pulsated in and out and changed color, the strange floor that waved like grass, the three-dimensional vortices that kept springing to life on what would have been the ceiling if it had only stayed in one place (but it never did) and the general air of unhappy, dogged, insistent, sad restlessness. “A little bit of home,” the lieutenant had called it. He had seemed to find particular cause for nostalgia in a lime-green coil that sprang out of the floor whenever anybody dropped anything, to eat it up, but it was “not in proper order” and sometimes you had to fight it for something you wanted to keep. The people moved her a little closer to laughter. One of them leaned toward her now.

“Pardon me,” said this one effusively—it was one of the ladies—”but is that face yours? I’ve heard that Trans-Temp does all sorts of cosmetic work and I thought they might—”

“Why yes,” said Alyx, hoping against hope to be impolite. “Are those breasts yours? I can’t help noticing—”

“Not at all!” cried the lady happily. “Aren’t they wonderful? They’re Adrian’s. I mean they’re by Andrian.”

“I think that’s enough,” said the lieutenant.

Example:

And the whisper comes again, but louder this time—Shall these bones live!—and it stirs the edge of Zubeydeh’s veil where she sits brooding over the abyss. And a little, errant breeze without the power of a fingernail goes down into the valley and breathes over the dry bones, a little breeze not even as alive as the real Aunt Dunya’s voice, which now passes from wall to wall over the dead watercourse and the barren rocks. It is nothing living but only the memory of another voice, the voice of Dunyazad, Shahrazad’s sister, that mad, dead, haunted woman who could not tell stories, who could not save herself. It is the voicelessness of Dunyazad that passes like a sigh from wall to wall of the valley of dry bones and shivers faintly over the multitude of the dead. It has no Word. It has nothing to say. It whispers its crazy nonsense thoughtlessly and hopelessly to nothing at all, but where it passes, throughout the length of that still, grey place, there is the barest shiver, the faintest stir, the dimmest, most imperceptible rustling. You can barely see it. You can barely hear it. From autumn leaf to autumn leaf goes the message: something, nothing, everything. Something is coming out of nothing. For the first time, something will be created out of nothing. There is not a drop of water, not a blade of grass, not a single word.

But they move.

And they rise.

 
It’s not really a nightstand, it’s a vintage child’s chair, but it’s usually stacked with books. This week (from bottom to top):

Homeport Collections wholesale catalog. Why is this still here? Never mind.

Michael Wood. The Road to Delphi: The life and afterlife of oracles. What do we know and how do we know it? The ancients, I think, did not so much believe in oracles as they simply understood what they were good for: demonstrating the futility of foreknowledge (because foreknowledge — like any kind of knowledge, only more so — is always incomplete).

Donald D. Hall. Worlds of wonder, days of judgment: Popular religious belief in early New England. The puritans and pilgrims were of course nothing at all like the people we were taught about in grade school.

G.B. Shaw. Complete plays and prefaces, volume III. Rereading Arms and the Man, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman. All of his plays are funny, especially the serious ones. Nothing is so Terribly Important that it can’t do with a little mockery.

Marianne Moore. The complete poems. I had forgotten how really really good she is!

Kai T. Erikson. Wayward puritans: A study in the sociology of deviance. New England culture was very far from being monolithic. Outsiders thus serve to remind the insiders of who they are, and where no outsiders exist they must be created (much like Voltaire’s God).

John Putnam Demos. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the culture of early New England. A statistical, sociological, and biographical account of the seventeenth-century Connecticut witch prosecutions.

Walter W. Woodward. Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., alchemy, and the creation of New England culture 1606–1676. Our emigrant ancestors were much stranger than we generally give them credit for. But then the past is always strange.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg. The throne of Labdacus. Rereading again. A book-length meditation on Oedipus, free will, guilt, redemption, art. I was reminded of it by Road to Delphi, above.