I begin this just after Memorial Day weekend, my new hometown's Hometown Holidays, where the Gin Blossoms played amidst the buzzing of Brood X cicadas, to an appallingly slobby crowd largely doing other things. My daughters were excited on my behalf, "Dad! It's your band."

I do play their first CD, and have - or had, I'm not sure - a cassette of their second, the purchase of both marked me as a declared noncombatant in the never-ending rock wars, because the Gin Blossoms sounded like the last 25 years of music had never happened, and all quite without an ironic wink-and-a-nod. No wonder my fellow 40ish friends thought the CD sounded "Uh-huh. Pretty good!" But even at that I didn't think I'd see the Blossoms six years after "Until I Fall Away" as the opening act at a concert given by civic boosters in a city they didn't know from Poughkeepsie. I mean, in a world of band divorces when members actually had something to lose, staying together for small paydays, singing about alcoholism. And the last, sad, telling joke by the lead singer: "We're not the Gin Blossoms. We're a Gin Blossoms cover band."

On a roll, I rented - no, I bought - Ladyhawke on DVD for the family, and we watched it that night, reveling in cheddary cheesiness. Like the Gin Blossoms, not precisely bad, not empty, not worthless, not contemptible, not dull, not even overly worn and polished formula - and still carrying its own weight commercially (on DVD!). And with Rutger Hauer and eerie Michelle Pfeiffer and wee mugging Matthew Broderick as Andy Rooney, all three poised to grow out of that type of film, as Arnold Schwarzneggar left Conan behind. "Enough talk!"

I hit a day where I just didn't care about "good," either in the tribal (antitribal)/moral sense of the stance mah peepul assumed, or as some kind of abstract hierarchical aesthetics. But then I picked up (okay, yes, kind of a shopping weekend) an anniversary trade paperback of Peter Beagle's Last Unicorn, and read.

Look, Bright Young Things and utter dolts - this popular art versus high art, this genre versus literary, commercial versus artistic. the boiled egg's Big End vs. the Small - aside from all that, some stuff is just better. Platonically. God loves it more. Self-fulfilling artifact. Whatever. Charles Newman made the following point (quote may be off, from memory): "Nothing kills an emerging artistic movement more quickly that the unwillingness to distinguish what's good from what's second rate." That's true, if slower, in established genres - and when unwillingness becomes the principle that there is no difference beyond the commercial threshold - well, I ask the jury to consider the difference between malign neglect and out-and-out murder.

Read this (Second paragraph, what I general use for illustration to finesse the artificially compressed rhetorical strategies of an opening):

She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed, and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in dancing mockery. Her neck was long and slender, making her head seem smaller than it was, and the mane that fell almost to the middle of her back was as soft as dandelion fluff and as fine as cirrus. She had pointed ears and thin legs, with feathers of white hair at the ankles; and the long horn above her eyes shone and shivered with its own seashell light even in the deepest midnight. She had killed dragons with it, and healed a king whose poisoned wound would not close, and knocked down ripe chestnuts for bear cubs.

Do you understand why it's good? Do you understand why this static, description is like a handful of pure, spring water on a steep mountain slope, compared to the tap-water Kool-Aid mixed in Tupperware of the typical fantasy brick? Read it again and feel the iambs and anapests, prose as song. Now can you stand a little old fashioned close analysis of a paragraph from children's book?

Beagle takes the overused, baldly symbolic unicorn, and starts with a stark denial of the most basic stock image: She did not look anything like a horned horse as unicorns are often pictured Already, a note of difference (compare J.K. Rowling's conventional use of the unicorn as a flat pathos object, stipulated as beautiful).

He continues with "cloven-hoofed" which DOES have classical roots, but instead of leaving it lie as a simple, dead fact, it is reinforced in the same sentence with a contrast to both deer and goats - "that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in dancing mockery." And the words to describe the difference in grace - shy, thin for deer, mockery for goats - further jibes with the general aspects of those creatures, not just their "grace."

Okay, okay - look at the similes in the sentences that follow yourself. Fine, delicate, quick. I want to skip to the final sentence, a catalog of what the unicorn did with her horn. The first two are, respectively, obvious and conventional - the horn as a mighty weapon, and as a magic source of healing referencing to the Grail myth. But look again at the completely original third item: and knocked down ripe chestnuts for bear cubs. Note first the sudden drop from dragons and kings to animals, and the suggestion of the forest, and the wonderful combination of the to-be-formidable "bear" and disarming "cub." And then notice the wonderful character building on the unicorn in just the phrase, not saving the cubs, but simply giving them an out-of-reach treat and all this in summary, not scene, but alive because of the specificity: the nuts are chestnuts and they are ripe.

I unpacked all this density, but the reader (or the readee - begs to be read aloud!)
gleaning what they can, unhindered, from Beagle according to his talent, to each according to his or her awareness, skates over it without a pause. And the plot junkies are soon on their merry way, and there are a load of grown-up jokes and little acts of deconstruction throughout the book - but not ultimately sacrificing feeling. And, of course the bottom line for some is that Peter Beagle made a spitload of money from the book.

But is it any wonder that Ursula Le Guin gets quoted on the back cover - because this is Elfland; this is not Poughkeepsie. Damn it - listen to Le Guin - she's not only way smarter than you are, she's way smarter than most of the idiots to whom you do listen. Listen first, disagree later, listen again to make sure you didn't miss something.

In keeping with the blog title, circling back to me. I live in a city to which I returned, in defiance of REM's heartfelt plea not to come back to here. It is a Poughkeepsie, and that's where all my stories are set also. I don't have the purity of heart to write of Elfland (always, always unicorns and the other creatures are looking for the pure of heart), so my characters are just people and their magic is no more wondrous than a TV remote. And I don't have Peter Beagle's ear. But I know enough to revere them, pure heart and musician's ear. And I hope to learn something I can use.