Kreisleriana

2011-07-04T22:08:00.001-04:00

Watson went to the fireworks and remained placid. Perhaps he knew that professionals were at play.

2010-03-16T22:09:00.001-04:00

Berkeley Posts Two: Curtains open and let in light. Windows open and let in air. Screens open and let in everything .

2010-03-16T00:59:00.001-04:00

Berkeley Post One:

How did I become both less individual and more alone?

2009-12-11T07:42:00.002-05:00

Why I Am So Smart

It's the result of a severe disability, social, and is analogous to why camouflage doesn't work so well on the color blind.

Yes, it's a flip reference to Ecce Homo and was originally about Nietzsche until it occurred to me i was projecting, even though I'm not as smart as he was. Or as crippled.

2009-06-22T13:24:00.002-04:00

Naming Your World

So, lying in the backyard with my head on Watson, I put Hesse's Demian on the grass and looked at the bird feeders. Mine - a Christmas present - was placed too close to the fence, and squirrels regularly vaulted onto it and made fast work of the birdseed. Laura's, much smaller, hand assembled and painted green, hangs by a cord from the branch of the smallish pear tree on the other side of the yards. Mine tends to get the cardinals and catbirds, cowbirds and jays, as well as the dull sparrowish things that fit on Laura's. Less dedicated amateur bird watchers lump the smallish ones into one category: "LBJs" or "Little Brown Jobs."

On Saturday night Laura and I went to a Sky and Stars event at a nature center. Somehow it seems important to me to pick out and know the name the brighter stars and tell whether something is a wandering planet; to be able to see which constellations are up; to have a North Star. Important that the night sky not be an unmapped chaos, a huge dark stranger with hard glittering eyes. I like that I know many of the tree in the neighborhood, and the more obvious birds, and that Laura is learning them too.

We are placing our jar in Tennessee.

Thinking of the little bird feeder. Time to break open the bird book again and let LBJs give me another page of the dictionary of the world.

2008-03-24T08:18:00.002-04:00

DBD Is Not ADD, I Swear

Beth persuaded me I had to do something other than work. I ordered some books but they won’t be here for weeks, so I picked up a couple to see if I could repeat last week’s rare success and actually read one. If I had the stomach for it, I’d be writing about whether romantic suspense novelists were as bad at suspense as cheap other-genre writers were at romance. But I couldn’t get past chapter three on either of the comparison books.

Okay, Atlantis by David Gibbins – a archeological/geopolitical thriller. In the prologue, Solon the Lawgiver gets mugged in Egypt (don’t ask) by Egyptians disappointed by getting screwed by Greeks in a trade deal. He not only loses the priest-dictated manuscript a fragment of which will provide the vital klew about Atlantis 2500 years later, but also his memory of that particular dictation session. When our brilliant twenty-first century archeologists encounter the fragment as part of the papyrus burial shroud for a mummy, they intuit not only that it (1) was written by Solon; (2) he was mugged; (3) he lost his memory; but even (4) that the Egyptians who did it (!) were pissed about a trade deal. Not that there’s anything about that in the fragment. They’re just real Sherlocks. Elementary, my dear semi-literates.

But it’s not the general idiocy that made me stop reading. It was this passage on that third page of chapter 3:

“Jack, I don’t believe you met [female character A.]”
Her penetrating green eyes were almost level with his own and she smiled as she shook his hand. “Please call me [first name.]” Her English was accented but, a result of 10 years’ study in America and England after she had been allowed to travel from the Soviet Union. Jack knew of [character A] by reputation, but had not expected such an immediate attraction. (Audible groan for both the sentiment and the prose, but that’s still not the point.) Normally Jack was able to focus completely on the excitement of a new discovery, but this was something else. He could not take his eyes off her. (Inaudible groan only because I was getting habituated and STILL not the point.)
Her long black hair swung as as she turned to introduce her colleague, “And this is my assistant [female character B] from the Moscow Institute of Paleography.”
In contrast to [character A]’s well-dressed elegance, [character B] was distinctly in the Russian peasant mold. She looked like one of the propaganda heroines of the Great Patriotic War, thought Jack, plain and fearless. She was struggling beneath a pile of books but looked him full in the eyes as he offered his hand.”

Okay, here’s a quiz.

Which character do you suppose Davey boy named: “Katya Svetlana?”

Which character did he name “Olga Ivanovna?”

Did that hurt you as much as it hurt me? But that’s still not why I stopped reading. I’d have done ANTHING (well, not anything – I wouldn’t have paid money for the book which I found on a giveaway shelf – but I would have finished it once I started) IF Olga had gotten to be the love interest, instead of purrfect Katya and her svelte Svetlanahood. If the peasant-looking woman turns out to be fascinating and witty, an utter revelation in bed, her passion and erotic skill rendering irrelevant her peasant features (Yes! It does happen! Even in fiction! Read Fifth Business!) eclipsing the paint-by-numbers love interest – I’d have fiished the whole book, despite the rackety-clackety plot and characters and the embarrassing writing. At least it would have been different. And maybe even sexy. But beats me what happens to Olga – Katya and Jack are thoroughly bonded by the end of the book, and the bad guys dead and flipping through the book I don’t see anything about “Olga” – maybe she gets bumped off early. Yeah, read parts of the last chapter, which is about all I could manage with And Justice for All by Linda Style -, what I thought was a mystery but is in fact a Harlequin Super Romance. In “Larger print”, which is good for people with eyes as bad as mine – my peers, the late middle-aged and the elderly. Jesus God, you’d think they’d have adult reading tastes by then.

The last line of the Style (I think the pseudonym is ironic and it was written by an unemployed semiotics PhD):Super Romance:

“And when his lips met hers, she knew her heart was his forever.”

I could have lived with thought rather than knew, although the sentence would still have squicked me. Thought would be an indictment of the character rather than the author and her readers. But knew? A kiss can give you a pretty good notion of what’s in store for the next 2 minutes to12 hours (although there’s many a slip twixt the lips and the clit) but oh never mind. This isn’t even worth arguing.

A colleague with a great deal more insight than I have in relationships said in counseling the most damaged and damaging women he’s met are the forty year olds who still doodle “Ronnie and me 4-Ever” when a new man comes into their life, but fortunately for them – fortunately in the short term - many Ronnies are not all that discerning, or have damage of their own. Really, though, how do adult women read lines like that above and and get that romantical feeling? It’s like responding erotically to pornographic tentacle anime. And if some guys do that, please PLEASE don’t tell me.

2008-03-10T16:33:00.003-04:00

DBD - Happily Ever Abattoir

So my kind in-laws sent me a care package with a book (and 5 filmed Shaw plays) and I sat in my bare CHU (Containerized Housing Unit, aka the middle third of a trailer) and read it in an afternoon. Bernard Cornwall's Lords of the North, one of The Saxon Tales, an historical series set in the Year of Our (though not the pagan protagonist's) Lord 878. And so I wanted to talk about what happens when you have strong men and lovely women whom they like as more than just friends, all in a period piece, yet not a Romance. Why not?

Well, the quotation from Entertainment Weekly on the back says it is, "Soaked yet again in nasty political intrigue [and] rip-snorting battle...Glorious." As an aside, the whole idea of rip-snorting seems to me more than faintly appalling. The front cover has a quote from the Washington Post: "Superior entertainment that is both engaging and enlightening." Now that may be a pat on the cheek with a back-hand sting, but how many historical romances get a Post blurb, regardless of the author's tireless research and wealth of details placed first on 3X5 cards, then inserted edgewise into the story at regular intervals? At least I assume some authors do that.

So, what makes the manly Lords of North "superior?" It's not any more serious about the gulf between our friends of the ninth century and us - as entertainment, the last thing it should give us is a hermeneutic head-pounding double vision when we're looking through the eyes of a character about to engage in love or war. Uhtred - the Saxon raised by Vikings - does kill helpless former enemies, but manly readers know that's a necessity, this being many centuries before the indefinite incarceration of combatants. Unlike The Bad Guys, our man doesn't rape peasant women or kill innocent civilians, his Word is His Bond, and generally responds the way we would hope our own golden-scarved boy scouts would rise to the occasion if thrown up against berserkers in pointy hats. It's remarkable how he anticipates 21st century morality so presciently.

There's a love interest, Gisela, although he does have an once-and-future nun Hild around as a paramour until the book brings him together with the G-girl. So what makes this a nonromance, other than the focus on Uhtred rather than the heroine?

Well, no sex for one. He and Gisela do have a night, discreetly mentioned and never described, partly as a way to invalidate an unconsummated marriage-by-proxy. Even the rapes are always offstage and the brief allusion to newly enslaved women's tunics being pulled down so their breasts could be examined was brief and dry enough that not even an 11 year old boy would get much of it. I'm grateful I could read Kate's handy guide to sex in Romance before I wrote this, because there's none of that stuff. We like Gisela, because she's also a sardonic pagan and looks good in chainmail. But the book is narrated by a very old Uhtred, who is apparently on a third wife or so - a Christian he doesn't like nearly as much as he liked Gisela. He's also pretty rundown by that point - no happily ever after, but only the simple delights of being really, really old and infirm in the Dark Ages. At least he's still a lord, but I suppose if he weren't he'd have been dead, feeble peasants being a good not in great demand.

So, as best as I can make out this is superior entertainment because there's no boring repetitive sex. God knows the literary variety bores me. There is, of course, much bloody combat. The fight scenes are the chocolate chips in the ice cream and the longsword "Serpent-Breath" is the object of much more loving description and consequent reader-lust than the worthy Gisela and Hild put together. The chapter from the next book in the series thoughtfully placed at the end of the present volume out of sheer generosity, well "Kill them all," I shouted, "Kill every last one" should indicate which bodily fluid is of interest to Cornwell's readers, an abundance of which would convince them to plunk down another $13.95 for the trade paperback. But the climactic fight is just a tad over 2 pages, and one moves around so much more on a horse waving a sword (or two - our man also has Waspsting) than during the most strenuous session on the divan.

Yay boys! Boo girls!

2006-09-04T09:21:00.000-04:00

SBD - Irreconcilable Differences

The attraction of Regency begins and ends with Mr Darcy, of course. - Beth Kingston

And that's perhaps why neither Romance nor P&P work for most men as escape: we don't want to be Darcy, let alone to anyone's Elizabeth. Oh, we'd take the money and the looks - might even suffer to carry the fundamental decency as long as we got to sport the indeed, no improper pride utter arrogance. But, you know, being of service simply has no appeal at all, and aside from a bit of dancing that certainly doesn't sound nearly as kicky as my times in the mosh pit, Darcy doesn't do much else. In his Mr. Bingley, he has the single safest, dullest male companion I can remember - clearly chosen for him by a female creator careful to leave him not much more fun the rest of his life than another evening of his wife's lively wit. Perhaps it would be too much to give Darcy a Mercutio or Falstaff - but, gosh, I'll bet even the monosyllabic Friday would come on over on Saturdays to toss around the old coconut, after draining it of some semifermented milk.

And Elizabeth - that that that spunky thing? It's true I'd wish her on my hypothetical best friend (because glazed schadenfreude really is the tastiest Bavarian pastry), and it would amusing to have her at my dinner table, at a dinner party, being all sane and rational, and so-decorously clever. And then for her to go home with said friend (ah, how the mighty have fallen!) , chaffering him all the way home, taking those liberties he would not countenance from his younger sister. Such fun! While Becky Sharp and I roll up our sleeves to do the dishes, and really dish. Umm, not saying that's a standard male fantasy or anything, but anyway. (Aside to Rock: Not quite the manly persona I wanted here, nu? Go fold doilies or something.)

So let's be a little more pointed here: The famous Forbes article. (note the spunky official rebuttal from Elizabeth Corcoran!) about whether marriage to a career woman provides a lower return at higher risk than chosing a noncareer woman. The squeals of outrage in blogland weren't all that different from what admirers of Elizabeth would have to say: but we're worth it! And we don't really wouldn't like anyone who thought otherwise! (Would that this be true - at least it would be predictable.) And look what our husbands get:

In spite of those dangerous statistics, my husband and I are about to celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary. You'll see us snuggling at a mountain-winery concert this month, enjoying the occasion. I don't think I'm all that unusual.

Me neither! Oh yes, those mountain-winery concerts, and snuggling! His second choice, no doubt, but the ballet (shut UP, Rock) was sold out and the chestless ladies in tights and iron-maiden-slippers kept sliding down the snowy mountain into the grape presser anyway.

Oh sure - some omega males think this is just fine. When they have a relationship dilemma they write to Carolyn Hax, who provides a balanced, progressive perspective on how they just haven't sucked it up quite enough.

You folks know that great Marxist phrase "false consciousness?" Really stupid people (e.g. Marxists) think it means not having those great progressive views, the one that the all the good progressive people do. But what it really means is you're being conned out of what would otherwise want by thoughtlessly adopting ideological positions that disguise this. A very useful concept, both in its original economic context and as later adopted in feminist theory. Now, of course, in the stupido version, that critique only works in one direction, toward egalitarianism and Pareto-optimized social solutions and the lion laying down with the lamb, shame about the subsequent anorexic end of the carnivore.

In the smart version, women get to want Darcy and be Lilith - I mean, Elizabeth - and all that. And they can cheer each other on and tell each other how they deserve no less, which, if the concept of what people deserve wasn't a meaningless noise, could very well have been true. They can certainly say Don't Settle, which, as an imperative, is neither true nor not-true, and is at least arguably an effective strategy for reducing unhappiness. But don't expect the coconut-tossers to stop their game to join in the applause, nor to necessarily suffer the slings and arrows of your absence.

2006-02-20T06:05:00.000-05:00

SBD Day - Against Hooks

The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door. Frantically he beat his wings to gain altitude, looking like a small black electric fan. An updraft caught him and threw him into the sky. He circled twice, to get his bearings, and headed north.

Man, what a strike out of a first paragraph for a genre novel. Conflict: deli owner versus raven, over the Baloney of Power, which almost overmasters the bird before a fortunate undivine scrap of wind gives it a few dozen feet of altitude. Then, instead of raking the Dread Lord of the Air with its obsidian claws, has to circle to gain its bearings, like any raven, and heads in the utterly mundane direction of north. Not even dread or utter or aurora-ripped north. Just north.

Does it get any better?

Below, the shopkeeper stood with his hands on his hips, looking up at the diminishing cinder in the sky. Presently he shrugged and went back nto his delicatessen. He was not without philosophy, this shopkeeper, and he knew that if a raven comes into your delicatessen and steals a whole baloney it is either an act of God or it isn't, and in either case there isn't anything you can do about it."

Well, yes, quite a bit better, but for someone looking for a little genre fantasy, well. That act of God thing - that was a joke, wasn't it. Ironic. I mean, we aren't going to get a god doing anything, are we? And awfully static to boot. And if you were looking for a romance - and this is very much a romance - wellwell. Are we supposed to be looking at the shopkeeper or the raven as the likely alpha? More?

The raven flew lazily over New York, letting the early sun warm his feathers.

Okay, that's it: genre fan closes book, reshelves. Heck, there's this POV problem already. Didn't I read about tha in a how-not-to writing book?

I don't - here's why:

I like this pacing; I don't WANT to watch TV. The arch and clever second paragraph grabs me, convinces me that the author knows what he's doing, and what he's doing is likely to be congenial to me. The lightly dropped "cinder" for a rapidly diminishing black bird is exactly right. The urban immigrant feel of the syntax and diction of "He was not without philosophy, this shopkeeper..." And, okay, I like the Andrew Marvell poem that provided the title A Fine and Private Place but that particular piece has been overmined and does not serve as a recommendation in itself.

Of course a more mature Peter Beagle would have been unlikely to say a raven looks like a small electric fan or settle for "threw" as the verb in the first paragraph, but a teenage novel that's not shallow proselsss juvenile crap like Paolini's Eragon, derivative of stuff not much better, well. it is something.

The requirement for a tasty "hook" is the search for taste like McDonald's fries (Now with milk! Now with wheat! Formerly with really yucky beef tallow!). Who wants to cook for people like that?

Or to be REALLY snotty:

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme

Thanks, Uncle Ezra - you didn't see the half of it.

2006-02-19T22:36:00.000-05:00

Rare Political Post

I mean even more rare than the other kind:

J: Remember whne you used to vote Republican and our votes would cancel out?
P: Yeah. One thing I'll say about GWB - he's a uniter, not a divider.

2006-01-16T22:37:00.000-05:00

It's Not About Your Unnmentionables

In an idle sweep of blogland, I came across that old canard that the Romance genre is undervalued by literary types because it’s a largely female preserve. It must be pretty to think so.

Look, ladies:

Romance is a market driven by voracious and, for the most part, not terribly discriminating readers. The demographic calls for a pretty-low-common-denominator, hence: the literary form can’t be too demanding and postmodern and whatever raging social issues appear should be handled at the made-for-TV movie level. If you don’t score on either formal innovation or challenging ideas, the only academic attention you will get is from the same culture studies programs that do Gilligan’s Island, not from English Departments.
This is emphatically the same for the male equivalent: international thrillers. Decent writers like Frederick Forsyth – who surely has equals in the romance world - don’t rate that kind of attention, and there are Ludlums and Clancys out there long before you descend to Mack Bolan. Sure, you can range upward through Le Carre and get a few nibbles and to Graham Greene and get some chomps, but that’s because modern marketing Romance is simply decapitated (highest points removed) Love Stories, which in my view would include well-received (and terrific) books such as A.S. Byatt’s Possession.

But I also admit that I find writing about romance as dreary as listening to actual people talk endlessly about theirs. As with vacations, only the disasters amuse. I ransacked my mind for a book I like that seemed to me primarily about romantic love and came up empty. I finally settled on lyric poetry, but then discovered that from Catullus’ bitching through They Flee From Me to La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the rule still applied. Joy and successful struggle to a wonderful joining-together and all that: personal box office poison. You want Rabbie Burns, have at him.

Of course all this flies out the window for a truly great comedy, which is, after all, about the reconciled end as well as all the grins before then. But as Alec Guinness might have said, nookie is easy; comedy is hard, and, like the music that makes a happy love song somewhat more bearable, maybe it does need to be performed. But I’m game: any romance novels out there as bubbly and enchanting as Congreve or Sheridan? Or Wodehouse?

2005-12-19T17:29:00.000-05:00

SBD - Butch Heroines

- or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the Xena

Travelling swordmaster. Privateer captain. Professional assassin.

As I noted before in regards to romance, overheard conversations almost always sound stilted and stupid. I remembered my brief moment of shallow and partisan pedantry (okay, years - seventh and eighth grade, to be exact) where I was wracked by contempt for the transparent and pathetic reality-denying wish fulfillment of the deadly female protagonist. Yeah, yeah - Boadicea and Joan of Arc and Grace O'Malley and the occasional feisty eighty year old who beats the stuffing out of the teenage thug who tries to mug her: woman bites dog. I thought about the girls reading that stuff and thought: you wish. Which was also my thought when I saw the transformation of their remarkably stupid suburban housecats into semi-feral wisecracking sidekicks: empathic/telepathic Panthers O' Fury.

But then, of course, after those couple of years it occurred to me to look around at myself and the other boys reading about Mighty Hewed Bongaboom the Barbarian and his apparently pheromone-laden aphrodisiacal mansweat. None of us exactly well-muscled cheerleader-laying quarterbacks ourselves, eh? And the wizards and wild geniuses that somehow transmuted our own extraordinary mental talents (manifested in our 99th percentile scores on Iowa Test of Basic Skills - wowsers!) underrewarded by the Universe and undervalued by our peers into matters of cosmic destiny-making significance. Oh, and our social awkwardness? That ALWAYS seems to happen when you're the very first representative of the next stage in human evolution - just the (temporary) price one pays for being Homo Sapiens-er.

Look, there ARE no professional assassins, and there's no particular genius involved in murder for hire. Brilliant swordsmen or women like "martial artists" of all stripes - only have impact within a rigidly controlled artificial system of duels or tournaments, not as significant factors in war, or even domestic policing. Pirates aren't Red Sonja or Captain Blood, let alone Jack Sparrow.

And the extremes of genre fiction are the least of it. So, if a vicious nerd-gone-big Tom Clancy could fantasize into the brainless popular collective mind a virtuous ubercompetent CIA operative like Jim Ryan, with all the pernicious social implications of that particular invention, what's wrong with a little leather bustier-enhanced sword swinging?

2005-11-01T08:08:00.000-05:00

I couldn't even find your name under the Social Security death list, although I found your father's. Maybe SSI doesn't count; you would have to had entered a golden retirement before you get even your name and day of death on the web. And none of the search engines turned up a sign of you anywhere else, anywhere. That clapper on the bell curve, arcing below where a strike would make a sound.

I am grateful for those months of beauty and brittleness, for the silver and the brass beneath. Even if you hadn't lost what we were then, you still would have lost it by now, as the rest of us did more slowly, guarding our smaller stock of dreams. But I wish we could sit together sometimes on the bare stones of this slow and muted afterlife, because I do not believe we shall have any other to share.

There is no greater truth than loss.

2005-10-16T07:04:00.000-04:00

Beloved of Undergrad Lit Workshops: a Reprise of Sorts

On the Hardy Boys, Maturity, and Genre: a cheatin' Smart Bitch entry

Benjamin Hoff, the author of that oddity The Tao Of Pooh, wrote something even odder: a thoroughly authorized rewrite of the second (!) Hardy Boys adventure The House on the Cliff as his own The House of the Point. Thee blue-spined, black-numbered volumes of the original series played a role in his childhood similar to what they did in mine: pure delight in a world the written word could create. When he reread some of them as adults, he discovered just how bald they were, and in a rather Brut(us)al move, honored and tossed a handful of dirt into the hole in us where they used to drive their convertible.

As an aside, before writing this tonight I had a dinner comprising Tanq & tonic and beef jerky, with an M&M-ridden trail mix to mediate, a move whose referents to my own stages of life might seem symbolic or overly literary in itself, but is very much the factual truth. I think it's working.

I wasm tempted to rattle around the topic of fan fiction, since The House on the Point bears an odd relation to the works of offered sequel and slash, but, well - I just don't care about fanfic. It neither offends nor interests me. My take on social phenomena is that they are guilty until proven innocent, and since I'm on no university's payroll, I don't need to barf out some analysis to score another article. Like, novelizations are dull and canon, but unlike fanfic at least they're usually minimally competent, for goodness' sake, and I don't read them either.

But Benjamin Hoff's tribute to the Hardy Boys interests me a great deal, even if the tweaks - gestures toward "realism" in their relationship with the town police chief and elsewhere (including a singular lack of ANYONE getting knocked out with a blow to the head); the promotion of Callie and Iola from a narratively dry "see, the Boys also have girlfriends" status to characters, albeit still unkissed - is like waxing a car that doesn't have an engine (for us) anymore. Very curiously, however, and in support of Hoff's project: I didn't discard the book after 50 pages, which was been the fate of substantial chunk of the novels I've picked up over the last year. I doubt I'd have finished a hyperclever and literary deconstruction of the Boys. Whatever nutritional supplement I'm lacking in my mental and spiritual life, it's not Vitamin Clever. But the pay-off at the end, when the boys get a motorboat named Sleuth - well, what am I to do with that?

Transition paragraph to Smart Bitchery: the wonderful Tom Disch says that the ideal age for reading science fiction is 12, and that the most successful writers are those who who retain their childhood. It stikes me as true for both sides of the sf field: the space opera/cyberpunk hemisphere of Kool Stuff and Explosions and the continually-connected other side of the world, Heavy Ideas, all fodder for adolescents feeling their hormonal and intellectual oats. And, if anything, most genre fantasy calls for even more arrested development, and the relative prominence of female writers and readers means we get telepathic animal familiars layered on the usual loner shtick. It takes a particular simplicity to be 40 and still be able to love Trantor or Pern, let alone Barsoom. I loved a quote I read about The Lord of the Rings, "If it's your favorite book at 17, that's great. If it's stil your favorite book at 45, something has gone badly wrong with your life."

The tiny nugget of Bitchery: like many (and it should be all) people who love books, I spent some time working in a bookstore. The category romance addicts (a healthy stack of books every couple of weeks) were never under 30, perhaps because even at 4.95 (at the time) a pop, it was costly habit, and the apprentice addicts shot up secondhand. As I see the sadly decayed state of my own fiction pleasure receptors, the pretty complete lost of hero-identification, I wonder - how did they did it? They were older than the heroines; probably had had love lives themselves; most were or had been married and (most of them) knew what a sadly inadequate formulation HEA is. Why do people grow out of sf/f, and women not (generally) out of romance, just as a taste for mysteries doesn't usually die of adulthood unless someone loses interest in popular novels entirely.

2005-08-09T20:30:00.000-04:00

Answer to A Question Nobody Would Feel A Compelling need to Ask

Q: Just how phoned-in ARE the Hardy Boys?
A: Way phoned-in. I picked up four of them off the shelf in the compound rec room/library (perverse nostalgia, my most notable perversity), and read The Crisscross Shadow. Look, even not getting to writerly things like plot, dialogue, logic, padding-to-a-set-length and all that, if Frank is the quarterback, HE throws the passes in the football game, not halfback Joe.

Also noted: The cover of The Clue of the Screeching Owl, the first Hardy Boys book I bought and read in elementary school en route to devouring about half of the series, shows the boys looking over their shoulders at head of a mile-wide owl looming over a darkened forest. Needless to say, no such owl of unearthly size appears in the actual book. Although the other elements of HB kept me reading, it's interesting that my first impulse was toward the fantastic, a taste that dominated my reading as soon as I found actual science fiction and fantasy with Andre Norton a couple of years later.

2005-08-08T07:05:00.000-04:00

SB Day - What We Talk About When We Talk About Romance

Thoughts On Laura Kinsale's For My Lady's Heart

This is a series of ruminations, disconnected and unedited. It is not a review, and will contain what people so inclined would call spoilers. It will also include wild generalizations about the romance genre, based on a single book that I understand is one of the best in the genre. Not talking about the stupidity of overheard conversations because this book was defitely not meant for me ears, but is not stupid.

First, from Rock to Beth: a grateful acknowledgement for lending the copy of Laura Kinsale's For My Lady's Heart with the cover least likely to raise eyebrows on the plane. While the golden dragonfly and spray of flowers and sweeping calligraphy of the F, L and H (the M of the possessive pronoun being relatively modest) fully revealed that the reader had crossed over to the Lavender Side, it didn't look as if he had picked it up solely for a shirtless Fabio or anything. But since everybitch is a book art critic: even if the action of a book spans more than a decade, it's probably not a a good idea to age only one character out of a paired duo in the inside cover art, especially if the non-aged male looks like he gets his coif at Supercuts. Rock's take: Melanthe's bare back is being caressed by her favorite high school basketball star, dressed in his weekend Ren Faire best.

That's all the snark you're going to see. On to the words.

First, this is an historical romance. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, there is a filigree of "archaic" language, not meant to replicate real Middle English, but to orient the reader toward a different era, removed from her experiences, and to give the characters a certain formal dignity and stature, to allow their characters to enlarge beyond what we see without provoking snorts of disbelief, or comparison with the reader herself that might be painful. Skilled, consistent, lite: the reader-orientation of the strategy seems to me part of the very core of the romance genre, and also serves to define what readers it seeks. The dialogue of FMLH in a language nearly as artificial as Tolkien's Elvish, and must have taken considerable skill, but does not explore the strangeness and variety of a language centuries away from becoming bound by rules and with an immense vocabulary.

The opening scene establishes a certain grittiness - the forests of France aren't sylvan beautiful or sundappled and enchanted, but grim. The adjective is being applied on behalf of the reader, anticipating her stance, since the characters in the scene, particularly Ruck, would regard most forests, in England or Germany, in the same light and would not consider it remarkable. The pilgrimage the group is taking is tiring, dirty, and dangerous. Like the language, the medieval
setting is not an explore to recreate a world, but to use elements and the strangeness to create a space in which to tell this particular story to particular ears, to allow a certain element of comfortable strangeness. This is not the Middle Ages of Walter Scott, but the realism is cinematic, with the grime painted on to a purpose. Physical details serve a rhetorical purpose, but the point isn't an exploration of the era (as with normal historical novels, however badly done and unsuccessful at this task), but the heightening of the emotional effects of the story.

What else do it I want to note? The grace notes, what I've called in other contexts the candy, analogous to unnecessary but thoroughly appreciated chocolate chips in vanilla ice cream, nuggets of intense flavor, and, I would say, unconnected with the plot and often a little implausible. To use another analogy: the beautiful but static and unnecessay bel canto arias in an opera, the ones you leave the theatre humming (under your breath if you're both tone-deaf and merciful.) The opulent scene of the falcon summoning would be one such, the implausible, gaudy falcon itself would be another; the fairy-kingdom of Ruck, shut away like Shangri-La and peopled by players. I suspect the nookie scene might also qualify, and might explain why they reportedly go on for a while in most contemprary romances, bereft of emerald-accessorized brocade gowns. The candy.

Romance nookie scenes don't work that way for me, and, I suspect, for most men, neither as erotica, nor as pleasuable to contemplate in any kind of an abstract way. As a plot note it's "Okay, they slept together. That means x." Done. No frisson at all. The emotion is wrong - too right. I mean, even in the locker room guys don't usually talk about how great a time they had with their wives or long time partners, especially at length. None of the other guys are interested. Good evidence, if we needed any, that this book (despite the skill) was not written for me or people like me. Having the villain die by an actionless and pathos-stripped accident instead of in a climatic fight scene was another. Maybe the unconvincing handfling of what I presume was a unbaccountably intact dinosaur fossil was the third - thats a boy pedant issue.

An odd technical note is how in this accomplished, well-paced book, that a plotline could just drag into nothingness. Is the plot beside the point in the midst of the romance, character development, and assorted candy? Much is made of Melanthe signing over her Italian holdings, an essential element of her peril and protection, to the English king - and that she has done so should have been a major turning point in a number of ways when Gian re-entered the picture - instead it was nearly nothing. the Chekovian gun on the mantle never went off, nor was the fact it didn't remarked = another possible strategy.

An odd emotional note is the treatment of Melanthe's baby, murdered by Gian. I recall on two mentions and one reference in the entire book - and no throwing it in Gian's face, or reflecting on it. I noticed something similar in the death of a child in Beth's. In a sense, the more frequent deaths of children even among the upper class in those times might provide a context where it's a side-issue, demonstrating how much Melanthe had sufgfered and how ruthless Gian was. The glancing reference keeps it from overfreighting the book - especially since many of the prospective readers are mothers. but it reminded me of my dog-loving friend John who said about horror films that once the family retriver is killed early on, it's pretty much over for him - like he could care what happens to the rest of the suburban fucks. For me (and I don't know if this is male), it didn't work in this case. The mention and reference is all it took - a baby's dead, the most tragic thing has already happened - didn't care as much about Melanthe as the infant, didn't care at all whether she and the repressed Ruckster found True Rut.

A few more notes on the audience thing: unlike my own genres, I doubt you'd find much formal (e.g. postmodern) innovation in Romance, and the content and diction experimentation is probably relatively limited as well. You do not get Samuel Delany's or Phil K. Dick or Harlan Ellison or Gene Wolfe. You do not get Paul Auster or Umberto Eco. You don't even get the freedom of the occasionally defeated Sherlock Holmes. My take on the invariable happy ending of the romance novel is not only is it important in itself, but it serves as the capstone of an unbreakable pact with the reader: no matter the terrors of the book, you can read, read the whole thing, and it will never be more than you can bear. It will not only come out all right, from page 1 you know it will come out right,and may read with your full heart - it shall not be broken in abook as perhaps it has elsewhen.

Last thing little I have to say: everybody EVERYBODY (even LK) needs an alert copy editor and doesn't always get one anymore. Example: in paragraph 2 we find the following sentence: A few yards from the sobbing female, on the high grass center of the road, a priest sat removing his sandals and swatting dust off his soles one by one."

Yo writers: "one after the other" might have worked (although there is still a sequence problem between the two actions in gerunds this sentence), suggestng alternating, but "one by one" implies a tonsured centipede - or a quadruped at the very least!

Oh my, that counts as a second snark. But if anyone needs me, here I am.

2005-06-20T21:57:00.000-04:00

Last Word on Last Words

Okay, maybe that's a false promise, since I never completely finish noodling with topics, and Candy's last comment makes me want to launch into this huge analysis of the non-happy endings of Grimms' and other non-English variants of the fairy tales (and E.T.A. Hoffmann), but instead I wanted to drop a very short note about how happy endings in a couple of Oscar Wilde plays, Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest.

In LWF, the final denouement's function, aside from giving us a brief moment of concern on the Lady's behalf that Mrs. Erlynne has spilled the beans, essentially erases nearly all of the sting from Erlynne's earlier sacrifice, which deflates the drama but makes the ending more "happy." Why would Wilde do that, besides to produce a pleasant echo of the not-miserable fate of the lovely Becky Sharp? It not only wouldn't be required in a conventional plot (Erlynne's cynical pairing is one of convenience, not the central love interest), but, as noted above, actually works against the classical balance of the plot. My tentative answer: it intentionally play against the moralism that's mocked throughout the play by making sacrifice-for-the-greater-good largely unnecessary, but also to defuse any lingering regrets the playgoer may have on Mrs. Erlynne's behalf. It eliminates the pathos.

In the same way, the "happy" ending of IBE, with both insipid-but-witty couples happily paired up is not the resolution of the "plot," such as it is, but a way to ensure nothing of any emotional note interferes with the appreciation of Wilde's wit. We don't have much invested in these people - and that's not because Wilde couldn't pluck those strings when so inclined (See: "The Happy Prince") We don't sigh, "Ahh," at the promised wedding beels at the end of IBE, we leave with a grin or a smirk. The happy ending is simply the absence of a jarring unhappy ending or an unsettling ambiguity.

Next genre noodling: against plot and why overheard conversations always sound stupid.

2005-06-13T22:02:00.000-04:00

On Fantasy Endings

Okay, because it makes me nervous, I can no longer use the b-word and Candy in the same paragraph. Reason: Candy was the name of my childhood pet, a (female) sheltie, who was sweet and dumb and it's giving me unresolved cognitive sevenths. Henceforth, Candy is Just Smart.

Anyway, hope this counts as an SB entry, since it did start back when.

Candy said, "p.s. I hereby modify my statement about fantasy/SF endings to include a caveat about some cyberpunk novels and Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury short stories.... but by and large they do require the Evil Empire to be vanquished."

Science fiction is much more wildly varied than that, of course - thinking about classics by John Brunner and Ursula Le Guin but even Space Opera - the terrific Hooded Swan series by Brian Stapleford which ended with the death of (some of) the bad guys, but there was nothing at stake other than the feelings of a race, and the resolving cadences were all about loneliness. Being able to opt for upbeat, downbeat, or ambiguous endings (despite commercial pressures - the lowest-common-denominator reason why sf movies tend to be as Candy describes, but not all the books) is a fandamental as whether Molly Bloom says "Yes" or "No."

The saving-the-world resolution in fantasy is stronger, especially on the brainless and derivative mass market side - the Terry Brooks and so on. The Harlequins of the genre. I'd say there are actually four or so common resolutions in even this: saving the world, saving the kingdom, rescuing a damsel or someone else in distress, personal attainment. But Candy is right that the Good Will Out (through marvellous gifts, or destiny (true enough, considering the author is the Fates), or just because it's Good) is as contricting and artificial and false as the required happy-pair ending of a romance. Perhpas even more so, because the Good Will Out is more sweeping and wrong than Two People Can be Happy.

The things is that this is not what happens even in the precursors of the fantasy genre, things like the Arthurian romances, where the Arthur ends up dead and the kingdom sundered - or the legend of Robin Hood, where the hero dies from being overbled by a treacherous nun.

The two widest read fantasy classics demonstrate what happens with the save-the-world fantasy. In the last volume of Narnia, the exact opposite happens: the world is not saved; the forces of good lose the last battle. And then God rather gruesomely destroys the entire universe of Narnia, and the Good (and the heroes get killed by a freak accident in our world) get to be in Heaven. Now, it's true the C.S. Lewis had Christian eschatology on which to rely - but that's the point. Once you put in magic or wonderous creatures or alternate sword-swinging universes, you filfilled the single generic obligation of fantasy. (It's too depressing to contemplate whether the existence of this kind of wonder and what it implies about the beauty and possibilities of the world represents a more fundamentally childish lie than the romance myth, so let's not talk about that.) The point is that you don't have to go to Jurgen or Gormenghast or Silverlock to find a fundamental freedom to represent mainspring of the organization of the world in any number of ways.

Which brings us to the other classic, The Lord of the Rings, accidental progenitor of most of the Save the World extruded fantasy product. Cut and dried: the great quest is successful and Sauron is detroyed; the Rightful King restored with his elven bride at his side; and in the wake of a magic-assisted harvest, hobbits get to eat a lot.

But it's not quite like that: that's why there are two full chapters after the happy resolution (even more after the climactic battle): The Scouring of the Shire and The Grey Havens. On one level, Scouring/Shire is another battle piece, with the subtext that even the peace of the insignificant Shire must be paid for with blood. To me, though, what's significant is that ruined Shire is our world, as interpreted by the long English tradition stretching back to Blake and his "dark Satanic (Sarumanic) mills." After the destruction of the Ring, the voice of the Nazgul are never heard again in that age of the world. In ours, of course, you can pick them up on any of the major networks. This is the point - not that Aragorn won, but that we subsequently lost.

And The Grey Havens - a lesson about the aftermath of heroism as bleak but not as heartless as another fantasy precursor, the fate of Jason long after the voyage of the Argonaut - his head crushed by a timber of his rotting boat, as he sat in it contemplating his then-distant adventures.

2005-06-06T00:50:00.000-04:00

More Romance: That Loving the Hero Thing

I had originally intended to discuss fantasy and sf genre endings in response to the comment by the ever smart but perhaps not entirely bitchy Candy that they required the saving of the world, but then I intended to do that on any of the 12 non Smart Bitch days between then and now. So, instead, as a nonromance reader, I'm stretching for something more relevant.

In a long ride down from Philadelphia, the ever smart and impressively bitchy Beth explained about the centrality of the hero in Romance, and I saw from last week that wanting the hero, at least in some literary way, seemed to be the engine that made the inevitable happy and paired resolution so satisfying the romance readers. Leaving work at an ungodly hour tonight, it suddenly occurred to me that only twice do I remember feeling something like that for a female character, and in neither case was it the protagonist, and in both cases I'm probably pretty whacked.

It's so easy to skim past the usual literary "heroine," especially if you don't have ready access to insulin. All the filling-aching Dorotheas and Amelias and Sophias by male authors - man, is that what they REALLY wanted in a girl? And women writers? Another earnest bluestocking of a Dorothea? The Cathy of the Heights who seemed like yet another drama queen of the high school green room. Emma Woodhouse, god forbid?

True, I wanted Elizabeth Barrett, but I wanted her as a sister, or a roommate, or a friend's amusing wife. And I really wanted Becky Sharp around, especially if I could convince her I was thoroughly gay and therefore an ally rather than prey (and liked that she appreciated Dobbin). When I think about it, I could have loved Anne Elliot, although it didn't occur to me at the time.

But, okay, there were two and both whacked. The first was Sophie from War and Peace. Underappreciated, lost her final play for Nicholas and had the condescending Natasha remark that she really was more like a cat, attached to the family not in love, content to be the maiden aunt and general factotum. I wanted to slap Natasha - just because Sophie could do that, doesn't mean that's what she was supposed to do. Amid the monstrous egos and moral self-importance of all the other characters, she seemed so sane, so measured. However, when I let slip this sentiment among my Russian-novel-mad friends in college, it was clear this was an, ahem, unorthodox reaction. But the novel was set in traditional upper class Russian society; she was virtuous - that meant NO SEX AT ALL, EVER. Evereverever. She NEVER got to. I dunno why that seems so bad. Well, yes, I do. Anyway, lustrous dark hair and a pale complexion was appealing.

The other was even more whacked - a woman named Eluned, from a historical romance by the aforementioned Beth. Okay, get this: that's the heroine's MOTHER. A ruthless Welsh nationalist widow in a lonely castle. I just wanted to take her in my arms, tut to her that it didn't have to be all guttural consonants in her life, and, c'mon let me buy you a vowel, let's sell the depreciating real estate and move to a Marina del Ray condo. Plenty of more productive use for your ruthlessness in SoCal, although it won't be a pushover. The food's better too, sushi and guacamole and for God's sake chocolate being all undiscovered in wedieval Wales. Ah well - Eluned is fictional and all I got was inadvertantly flummoxing the author. Not that I deprecate that little benefit.

Now, it's true if I had read Tolkien when I was like 14 instead of 20, Eowyn (also underappreciated - Like Sophie and Eluned. What am I - a bargain hunter?) might have snared me, especially in the great set piece when she is facing down the Nazgul. Or Goth, from The Witches of Karres, who WAS 14, and therefore much more age appropriate for me than for the novel's protag. But, in fictional loves as in the real, timing is everything.

Do I speak for my sex on this? I dunno: it's really creepy to think of pimple-faced boys getting all moony about Dejah Thoris or something, but pimple-faced boys are creepy, speaking in the first person but past tense. However, I suspect the usual Burroughs cover, with Dejah modelling the latest in Nearly-Nonexistentwear, puts any such impulse firmly into the category that encompasses centerfolds and the heroines of Penthouse letters.

2005-05-23T14:03:00.000-04:00

Dyspepsia: Notes on Romance Formula

Well, look:

1. I don't know what annoys me more - the notion of finding a mate as the One True Purpose for every plot in the genre, or that all these romance novelists are telling this to a society so braindead with the same message from song and silver screen that it has become an unexamined article of a very boring and common faith.

2. Love talk - like sex talk, and quite unlike love and sex - is dull. Yeahyeahyeah - it hurts. yeahyeahyeah - it's wonderful. yeahyeahyeah - I don't know what to do.

3. No other literary genre insists that every meal must end with a variation on a spun-sugar dessert.

4. What's with all this love/hate conflict? A choice is either stupid or not, and don't think any complete character revelation you get partway through the relationship is going to be like Beast-into-Prince revelation rather than something Bluebeardish.

5. The heart has its reasons that the mind knows not. And you will descend rapidly into penury by placing your bets on them.

6. You think all this obsession with the bad-boy hero doesn't spill into your personal lives at all, and, not incidentally, reward us for bad behavior - at least until unexplored complications ever after? I always wanted to be a nice guy.

7. Assassin with a heart of gold and a cock of steel still translates morally out to a murderer who pleasures small pets with skillful hands.

I don't know. I was just thinking about the alternate endings of Great Expectations. And how much more there is to say in loss than gain. "Nothing fails," Stravinsky assures us. "like Success."

8.

8.

2005-03-22T04:23:00.000-05:00

Yo! Smart Bitches!

So how do you feel when the Dumb Bitches (tm) like the same books you do?

I mean, sure, they also like the heaving bodices and lacy bosoms of heroines perhaps even less bright than they, in books that leave dents in your bedroom walls, but what you think of as Romance caviar:

The room full of women went uncharacteristically silent as Mr. Gerard appeared in the door...a collective intake of feminine breath at the sight of him--a golden, slightly wind-blown Gabriel come down to earth, minus nothing but the wings.

tastes just fine to them, squished delicately into their velveeta, indistinguishable from fish-salt.

$5.95 and they're part of the club, part of the conversation, chatting with you.

O, the agony of hearing those liver-colored, toad-clumsy tongues singing tone-deaf hymns to your very own goddesses!

2005-03-13T19:11:00.000-05:00

Brief Thought

On friends and lovers: blaming a permanent rupture on a single incident would be like thinking an earthquake sundered a continent, rather than being a final violent episode of preordained tectonic drift.

2005-03-06T14:50:00.000-05:00

Cynical, But I Think I Believe It Now

I've been thinking about certain connotations of "amateur" and "professional," characterized by "amateurish" who turn in half-assed and uncaring performances and "a real professional" who goes "above and beyond." I'm currently thinking:

The professional aspects of your job are those for which you get some reward or avoid some penalty: money, advancement, job security, or reputation leading to any of those, and should be based on a cold, hard look at cost/reward probabilities, along with your own personal scale of values that sets time/effort/unpleasantness versus the size and likelihood of the return.

Everything else you do for the love of it (sense of duty or accomplishment, belief in the Cause, etc): the very core of amateurism.

So, the next time you go to the DMV and deal with an unfire-able employee who has maxed out on his/her career progression and isn't looking at any possible profit-sharing arrangement? Say hello to the face of professionalism. Okay, and the flipside (the tail of professionalism) is the near-Platonic ideal of retail service represented by Nordstom - under instruction AND on commission.

And anyone who tell you otherwise is just a shill for the bosses who would LIKE you to go "above and beyond." Those guys believe in counting up your hypothetical karmic rewards as part of your benefits package, as an offset against anything real they'd otherwise have to give you. Why don't you tell management to get professional (in their sense) - pay you "above and beyond?"

But, of course, if they DO, well, by this definition they're amateurs as well - three cheers for the reciprocal agapic love in the workplace!

2005-02-26T23:32:00.000-05:00

Another Reminder

So, a couple of weeks after a Sunday when, as a redblooded American male, I'm supposed to watch other people play a game for 2 1/2 hours on my television, we now have the Oscars. Since

(1) The qualifications for the Academy (and voting status) are simply a number of credits in the industry

(2) Most people believe that most of Hollywood's prduct is brain-dead, fake-heart; easy-trick, crap

(3) So the people whose opinion about which we're supposed to care have already demonstrated either a failure of taste, imagination or nerve in their own field - all three being possible

(4) Hence, the predictable safe, pious, mediocre choices, with an occasional bow to the box office

Whywhywhy do people sit and listen to the ghastly banter, the painful speeches, oh never mind.

Saw Musset's Lorenzaccio tonight - I'd read it back when I was reading everything, but this is new translation, and live theater still holds magic for me. And somehow making The Unworthy for whom all is sacrificed a collective seems just right. Large number of houses; insufficient cases of the pox. }avert!{

2005-02-21T21:55:00.000-05:00

Back into the Water, First Toe

What I said today I hadn't realized before: I need to seek out people whose metaphorical coordinates I once knew by heart (by heart) and find out, sextant raised, where they are now to use their new location to help me figure out my own. Works for latitude, although not for longitude. That prize remains unclaimed.

Okay, what I really said is that the changing of expectations and manner by age makes me feel like Helen Keller at home after a wholesale and random furniture rearrangment. There has got to be an easier way to remap than by barking one's shins.

2005-01-30T21:06:00.000-05:00

Two Thoughts on Qaddafi

Initial thought on the oddness of being in Libya: it must be hard to be a citizen of a country where you think the leader is (1) a buffoon and (2) scary, all at the same time.

On reflection, soemthing about that was unaccountably familiar, rather than being one of those TRUE foreign experiences. Can't quite put my finger on it. Hmm.

Refinement of initial thought: Still, having SO many pictures of the Leader everywhere, and such pictures, in so many costumes and poses. We started naming them: "There's the Loveboat Qaddafi." "Look, a Duran Duran Qaddafi!" "Hey - Bridge over the River Qaddafi!" It was kind of like Tony Randall in "The Seven faces of Dr Lao." Would have said Alex Guinness in "Kind Hearts and Coronets" but, alas, no Qaddafi-in-drag. If he ever starts crossdressing, it will be worth a trip back just for that.

2005-01-29T20:51:00.000-05:00

Whiplash

Puts Hunky Dory on the Bose and first track: Changes.

"Daddy! I LOVE this song!"

Beams.

"But the version on Shrek 2 is SO much better."

2005-01-23T13:12:00.000-05:00

Faustian Bargains

Lately it occurred to me what makes a bargain uniquely Faustian is not that Faust sold his soul, but that he got a decent offer on it.

Off today to one of the loopier police states in this world. With due acknowledgement of the human misery involved, there would be something thin and poor about a world if it were all Belgium, with a tinsel-thin layer of local color.

2005-01-19T19:55:00.000-05:00

Stars

So, reading a book about an amateur astronomer who doesn't use a telescope; thinking about another book I have, called "Astronomy and the Imagination," also about what you see with bare eyes; and remembering standing out in the desert at night, beginning to learn the names of stars and the shapes of constellations, besides Orion and Ursa Major (The Big Dipper, The Wain).

Of course, these aren't names the stars call themselves. And I suppose there are Earthly cultures out there that haven't adopted the largely Arabic names and have preserved the local variations on the constellations, as in the paranthesis above. But I remember tracing the Zodiacal signs and spotting the planets among them, learning the diamond of Corvis and the smaller diamond of Crux, reflecting about baleful Al-Ghul out there in the wastes of Arabia. I was oriented, but the heavens weren't diminished or tamed. It was the difference between a book that's larger than I am because I can't read, and one that's larger because I can, a bit. So many of those dots of subtly multicolored light have names, amid the wash of the Milky Way. It amazes me how long I walked beneath those nuclear bonfires without having a name to call them any of them.

Need to get out to see them again, away from the city, at least once for every turn of the seasons.

2005-01-17T21:14:00.000-05:00

A Note on Horror Movies

In the shower I was thinking about zombies, and I know which friend-once-removed to blame. I don't like them, horror movies - the original Dawn of the Dead gave me years of idle speculation, sitting in classrooms and plazas, standing at airports and in movie lines, any time my brain was underemployed: okay, the zombies come NOW - what's my plan?

It's one of those canards of critical studies that the monster in a horror movie always represents something else. That's a shop I don't frequent often, but I do buy this. What is it we fear: the criminal, the lone and determined sociopath (Freddy, Jason), or Everybody, other people, Society - with a final betrayal by our friends (Dawn of the Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers)? Does the disembodied Evil work from within (The Exorcist, The Shining) or without (The Amityville Horror)?

Funny - I don't think of myself as especially frightened or prone to capitalized absolutes, but I hate what dreams come after, almost invariably. I've developed a new horror habit - reading all the spoilers on the internet in the event that I ever end up watching it. The innoculation won't prevent the fever, but may contain it. I hope that horrifies somebody.

2005-01-16T16:40:00.000-05:00

Disbanding of the Tribe

"He labored mightily and brought forth a Mouse."

Two months between entries and I start with acknowledging that I break my long silence only to acknowledge that I bought Boston's Greatest Hits for my own Christmas stocking, and talk about what that might mean.

Okay, no - no Kansas, no Journey, no Peter Frampton - nothing else from the mid-seventies stadium rock era, but it's still a betrayal of the Progressive-to-Glitter-to-Punk allegiance of the years when listening to music wasn't another solitary sin. What that means is that I, acting as a social atom, without reference to affiliation or ideology, consulting only my own tastes, like Boston - at least "More than a Feeling," "Peace of Mind," and "Don't Look Back." Oh, and this doesn't have the slight ironic tinge of my newly found taste for Detroit metal.

The standard take would be that this all is a step forward - autonomy and all that. Freedom to like what I like, not what I think I am supposed to enjoy. Leaving aside the question of whether that was happening (because it wasn't that I never listened to stadium rock - I just never bought any, didn't do the concerts) - it might be interesting to see whether that "follow you own bliss" is only for those who have that tendency, not for instinctive isolates, those with abnormal social-signal receptors, caustic independent analytics- just as the healthy diets of some people with unusual metabolisms may call for MORE fat, rather than the less most of us should have.

Music as a statement, a sign, a shibboleth, a badge, an emblem, a uniform - that's not a, indefensibly stupid choice, and pleasure is not yet so rare that it has to be the only consideration in aesthetics. But you can't conjure up a tribal life when the tribe has scattered all over the world. So, not only am I listening, I'm quoting:

I see what I am
is holding me down
I'll turn around

2004-11-09T14:08:00.000-05:00

Delivery

I'm used to heat being delivered to my house continually, invisibly - though wires and gas pipes. It's strange for a truck to pull up to the front of the oil and pump gallons of oil into a tank of my basement, especially when I'm in that basement and I didn't know that the oilman cometh. It's like chopping wood for a great hearth - well, like having someone else chopping wood. And no magnificent hearth. But kind of like that.

Ominous, of course, that the vendor doesn't seem anxious this year to offer to me a locked-in slightly-higher-than-market rate on this petroleum product.

2004-11-03T08:05:00.000-05:00

America:

Go fuck yourself.

(no longer) sincerely yours,

Once a moderate Republican

2004-10-19T20:26:00.000-04:00

Sign from the Next Parking Place Over

upon our return to Baltimore-Washington (poor Baltimore - needing the hyphenated legitimacy although Washington D.C. has two airports of its own) International.

The sign: an enormous, older Buick, still in good condition. The Ulimate Model for my purposes, even to its name: Roadmaster.

Deee-troit!

2004-09-06T22:36:00.000-04:00

Scrub names

When we first moved to Flight St., the scrub/desert started one house down. Tumbleweeds are green when they're still rooted; but the dead ones turn brown and do tumble. Like almost everything else picturesque, it's a reproductive strategy. They also might be the original for velcro - the stack together, latched with tangled barbs, and it was easy to build a fort. The most common type was rounnd and sort of like a scaled down, half-roofed sporting arena, when the spectators stay dry and the athletes earn their pay on the slippery plastic grass. My favorites, though, we're long and twisted - constructed like mazes, with submarine-width prickly paths, one dead-ending with construction stakes pointed outward in the direction the tract homes - a weapons port.

Hmm, I didn't really mean to type all that. What I really wanted to talk about was certain of the fauna the fauna, limited by the aridity being on the wrong side of the desert and the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains. Aside from the year when the monarchs came, the butterflies were mainly a dingy white with a small, washed out spot of blue on each wing. We called a milkweed butterfly. The others were the skipper moths. Skipper butterflies. Brown-bronze-golden, and very small on the iceplant flowers Instead of the four-parabola wing-shape, they have delta wings with little vertical vanes, kind of reminiscent of an F/A-18 (not yet invented at that point - Phantoms were still the latest thing, but war-nerd reference inserted to show you that Rock will not be coming by tonight.) Moth-shaped and fuzzy, but diurnal and with the bead-on-the-end antennae. We called them both.

Other butterflies were plates in those great nature books. The same ones I read, after seeing crows and pigeons and seagulls, and the great indistinguishable sparrow-ish, that not all birds were black-gray-white-brown tones - but I should not be ungrateful for the hummingbirds, bejeweled magicians, levitators. But those plates - Scarlet Tanagers and Purple Martins; Baltimore Orioles and chickadees and cardinals; even the blackbirds had red and yellow epaulets.

The beach and the pool, and the names of the footwear for them: flip-flops, thongs, go-aheads, zorries (a brand, no doubt) - all the same, like eskimo for snow - and just how quickly would the rubber button on the bottom of the thong snap its stem. And the couple of years where instead of rubber, they had velvet straps and woven tops of the souls - even less durable than the rubber.

Mmm, marbles next.

Or maybe Stone Reader

2004-08-15T06:23:00.000-04:00

Dreams, Waking and Sleeping

We had dinner with old friends, a teacher-turned-merchant sailor and teacher-turned-Jungian dream analyst, husband and wife. Maybe this Keats/Williams stew continues to simmer, but the question amid all my usual questions to Tony that felt to me to have weight was this: "You're a sailor on the Pacific run - aside from the layers of Earth itself and its atmosphere, that's the largest single thing on the planet. There's a long tradition of romance and awe about the sea. Do you or any of your men (he's first mate testing for captain) feel that?

"No, we have all sorts of people on the crew, from intellectuals to members of the deck crew who once complained there were too many choices on the mess menu. All of them think it of it as a job, 21 days on and 21 days off. 65% of our cargo is for Walmarts. When a 40 foot following sea gives us nothing more than a 20 second roll, when the email comes in every day and there's a satellite phone right there, it's just not Man Versus Nature anymore."
"Ah," I said, "But I would suppose there's always Man versus Management."

Tony built his own house, with a tower for the entry way, originally for his first wife (he's a widower) to use for a sewing room, perched about the great room, now an office where he's learning to Mac movies. His daughter does avant-garde textile installations and his son is a wacky musician in Hawaii organizing an "I'm ashamed I am American" theme band tour to Europe. This was his answer. Now thinking that the old theory might be right, that a sense of the sacred only comes from a sense of mortal peril. I guess that's why love still fits, that love is still romantic.

He also told a story about talking to his 91 year old father, who seemed to be shutting down. "Dad, do you still have dreams?" "Nah, I'm too old for that." Tony berated him, then was berated in turn when he revealed that his dream was to be an airline pilot, but that he had given up," "But you're so young -- 56 is nothing."

And when Marilyn talked about dreams (and I showed her an account of one of mine), I could hear the echo of a description of the Jungian mineset as swimming in a world-sea of symbols.

If she reads this far, I want to confide to Eliste (or Enkeli!) that last night one of my dreams last night was receiving a promotional video from your alma mater that proudly stated that Ron "Opie" Howard was the prototype of its students since the mid-seventies. Thank God Marilyn wasn't around this morning to archetype THAT one.

2004-08-11T09:28:00.000-04:00

"The world is ugly/and the people are sad."

Hadn't made the connection between "Gubbinal" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn" before. Anyway, having my own truth/beauty problem right now, but probably because I'm just a slave to my blood chemistry, and we're having a wee crash this morning. Thinking about pretty stories, noble characters and redemptive endings. I'm not cynical enough to think they can't happen in life, but wondering whether presenting a freak lottery winner as someone who simply made a wise investment wouldn't be a disservice. Mind candy, reader's crack, opium of the literate.

On the other hand, as John once pointed out, turning down the painkillers doesn't hurt them any.

2004-08-09T13:34:00.000-04:00

Beaglebeagle

"...never you go trailing after a Stuart, not one step. The best of them love their dreams, the worst of them love none but themselves, but no Stuart born cares for you, or for me, or for any of the poor fools who love them."

Not just the writing this time, although that's fine too. I would that this sentiment was expressed at least once in every book ever written, including math primers. Because leaders or would-be leaders - Stuarts all, in my book."

2004-08-08T00:03:00.000-04:00

More Peter Beagle Blather

So, reading Tamsin, on a day of early-spring cool and freshness. Supernatural blah-blah - and a hundred pages in before we see a ghost - and then it's only of a cat, though eerie enough. And he has to write like a teenage girl, who's trying to remember herself as an even younger teenage girl, and so doubly loses the opportunity to use all the verbal pyrotechnics he would otherwise be able to use. But no in media res - no real suspense, since there's ample evidence that things have gone well for the protagonist and all her loved ones since the events that will be related. Remember: all the calls for action immediately, for the magic to appear early, big-bang openings. These are all commercial decisions, not aethetics one. Not to say they're wrong, but nobody carried them down the mountain inscribed on stone tablets.

And a shot of description, from the first sight of the old English manor which will be the setting: "And I remember the windows. There were so many of them - round and long and square and pointy - and because the sun was slanting down behind us, all those windows were blazing up as though the house was full of fire, you couldn't look straight at it. There was one small, sharp window on the third floor that didn't reflect the sun at all. It looked absolutely black, surrounded by all those others, like a hole in the sky, with the darkness of space showing through."

Look at what you can do, even with a first person narrator with limited skills herself - look at "pointy," "full of fire," a full-on comma splice, and - the best a "sharp window" - that last with a total suspension of literal meaning of "sharp" but the hint of menace is not lost - dangerous!

2004-08-04T12:57:00.000-04:00

Cyrano de Bergerac

The American inability to honestly see and discuss power pisses me off.

Cyrano de Bergerac has two chief propulsive factors: the love triangle and great soul/fair face dichotomy; and Cyrano's struggle against the powerful. They're equally important. The loathesome Steve Martin/Daryl Hannah vehicle "Roxanne" strips out the second completely - which aesthetically reminds me of the first French edition of Anna Karenina which omitted huge sections of the Kitty/Levin story; and morally of a certain British productions of (1) Pride and Prejudice, wherein Lady Catherine really intended to push Darcy and Elizabeth together and (2) of Prince and the Pauper, which reduced Twain's commners into buffoons. Yes, those well-meaning aristocrats and their understandable allergy to the lower orders. So Americans get Cyrano as a problem for the plastic surgeons apparently - or, at most, NOT for the plastic surgeons.

That's not a blindspot for French writers. That's not how Stendhal or Balzac or Hugo worked. My favorite example is Beaumarchais - we think of the Barber of Seville if, at all, in the operatic versions . That stuff was revolutionary at the time - Figaro's class and station was the point of his victory.

It's interesting that even if the relatively faithful (but in verse!) and superbly acted version I just saw missed a couple of power points. Although it didn't completely screw with the play by conflating Ragueneau and Le Bret, as another version I saw did, there were two small changes I noted: one, it did combine Le Bret and Captain Carbon, making Cyrano's military superior also his best friend (tin ear the the power matter); and it deleted the introduction to Christian of the Cadets, with the ironic exchange. "You are all barons!" "All!" Americans don't think that was important - it was. (Unlike this versiions combination of Ragueneau and Ligniere, the only problem of which is that R. was supposed to be a rotten poet, and Ligniere presumably gifted enough to provoke attempted murder, and it is good to make that distinction rather than Cyrano rather bizarrely assuring R. that he really IS a poet. Shades of the self-esteem world!)

One of the most interesting aspects of this is that Cyrano's interesting relationship with Roxanne is completely irrelevant to the attack that causes his death - this is the denouement of his constant struggle with the Powers-That-Be., although his determination to make it to Roxanne despite the attack was the immediate cause. Anyway - two equal themes.

Other notes: dumbing down the play (making the wit/psychological points more obvious) wasn't so bad, except for the execrable (and even symbolically incomplete) rendition of the final line; "My panache!" My panache?????

I made it to the fifth act before tearing up. One of our party who will remain nameless (but to whose jeans a reference was made previously in this journal) made it only as far as "The feast of Lazarus..." in the Third. Callous me.

2004-08-01T08:16:00.000-04:00

The Glass Menagerie

I didn't think it was possible to be surprised by a Tennessee Williams play at this late date - but it is, and I need to remind myself in the future that with art of even middling ambition, it is always possible to be surprised.

We were laughing and it was cruel. So many ways to look at it: we as an audience managed to reach the proper detachment Nietzsche suggested for readers of Don Quixote - with nothing but derision for the hero: no admiration, no identification, no resonance. Of course, somehow I can't imagine good Nietzsche was imagining the well-fed crowd American at a typical Kennedy Center production, but perhaps that was his own myopia - perhaps you don't need to transit all that great Goat's Song searching to become an Ubermesch. Maybe Donald Trump really is the Blond Beast.

I think I was sandbagged by having seen it only in a television production, which - since it brought us in its typical close-up manner face-to-face with the protagonists and wasn't callous/bold enough to use a laugh track - inevitably stressed the pathos of it all, of the poor crippled girl, her longing and her blank future. Because the play is funny, and that leaves the final monologue oddly suspended - how do we connect back in through the humor, back to the odd quality of emptiness.

And maybe I'm thinking about it now. Laura, with her unicorn and music, has a new life - and Tom too, still "Shakespeare,: still unpublished - or maybe, humorously, "e-published", still scribbling. Despite her poverty and shyness, she's a blogger, and a chatter, and a surfer. Her life is simultaneously more exposed - an exemplar of these netizens, with their fibro and geekiness and financial challenges - her world is richer, and not nearly so lonely. But that tenement apartment has a big window now, through which the Paradise patrons can watch what goes on around the Glass Menagerie, in the unlikely event they are so inclined.

Derision? Pathos? Indifference? Where am I on this?

2004-07-25T13:24:00.000-04:00

The Magic Flute

I was listening to Mozart's opera and thinking about GB Shaw's famous remark about the music for Sarastro, the High Priest: "It is the only music which might be put into the mouth of God without blasphemy."

There's something comic - doubly heartbreaking - about imagining God's Song would be diatonic.

2004-07-24T11:02:00.000-04:00

Scenes from a Marriage, Parts 1 and 2

He: "You know, I've been thinking: Valentine's Day, our anniversary, Mother's Day, then your birthday. Four occasions in four months. Maybe we should decide which ones I should really do something for."

She: "Okay. What do you not feel the need to celebrate: that we fell in love; that we got married; that I gave you children; or that I was born?"

He:

-------------

She: "Okay, now say something nice about me."

He: "Okay. You look really hot in those blue jeans."

She: "No! I mean about my Inner Self."

He: "Hmm. Okay. Your Inner Self does not get in the way of you looking really hot in those blue jeans."

She:

--------------

Proof positive that you CAN watch too many screwball comedies, Thin Man marathons, and Restoration plays.

2004-07-20T21:58:00.000-04:00

Fur Eliste

Assume two dots above the u. But she's right, I need to drop something else into the well that is this journal, despite the fact that I scammed out of a dinner party and really only want to go to bed.

Conclusion on why Jane Austen and "My Best Friend's Wedding" are cool with men (insofar as we read that kind of stuff at all and I have been deputized to speak on their behalf), while the Brontes (another missing umlaut) and "Titanic" are not?

Ding-ding: and the answer is Apollonian versus Dionysian.

Question: Is this because men are afraid of the awesome majesty of women's passion unleashed?

Bzzzzzt: No, men are likely to find it annoying or inconvenient, even when it is directed in our direction, and any artistic celebration of it insufferable.

But men celebrate their own irrational obsessions!

Bzzzzzt. Only when immediate and trendy enough not to be noticed as irrational. A little distance, and men can't stand their own passions much either. Don't see nobody getting into the Young Werther or Manfred thangs anymore, at least not from the originals.

Sorry, Eliste - more of the same.

2004-07-16T12:18:00.000-04:00

This Spinoff

from noodling around mentally on gender issues in reading preferences - something I'll probably discuss incoherently this weekend. To me:

Men who worship their women seem sweet. Women who worship their men seem foul.

2004-07-14T08:59:00.000-04:00

Detroit Steel, Man

That I still accept my father's opinion: "Cars are just transportation. Even when they don't cost much, they cost too much" heartens me this morning. It suggests that whatever family traditions I've dumped, I've shed for a reason - and this one I've only slightly tweaked. I mean, we can't completely disregard semiotics. Oh, and forget the utter hair shirt of that childhood succession of rickety, uncomfortable and vaguely cool Beetles.

Having my first car, purchased with gambling winnings and a loan from my girlfriend, stolen within six weeks of purchase and without theft insurance - well, aversion therapy can certainly reinforce rational conviction. Cars still make me twitchy.

So, after renting that Ford Crown Vic in California, I now know what I want to do: Buy one. A big boat of Detroit steel, with a barcolounger ride and all negative signification: domestic = red state, redneck, nonurban; fullsize mushy suspension = middle aged or elderly (I may get a straw boater too); bottom brand make = economically challenged. As my father's son, I'll also buy it 2-3 years old, letting someone else take the off-the-cliff depreciation of American cars, but recent enough that the real improvements Detroit made to their cars will be mine. Because, y'know, the only thing worse than an expensive car is a car that doesn't work at all. Oh, but leather seats? I did mention leather seats, didn't I? No point in a cloth barcolounger.

2004-07-12T08:42:00.000-04:00

Lurching Frankenstein

Still thinking about editing, especially other-suggested editing. No problem with the analytic writer - even in an enormously complex, interrelated work (thinking about the agonies of cutting down an information-packed first paragraph, where each word had been placed for exploitation later) - since ultimately each piece is still ultimately a product of conscious intention. Wha about those organic types, where things just "feel" right. Whereas I can test suggestions, think about them, do they make sense - how do you operate when it's just a question of what feels right? I can plug a sorts of lego pieces in-and-out - but if something is "organic" - does it mean that attempting to do so results in a stitched-up monster, of unmatching dead parts and an overly obvious cranium? Or can you somehow end up with an Edward Scissorhands, poetry in spite?

2004-07-11T17:52:00.000-04:00

Composing by Committee

Something most of us don't want to do, and (I think) a problem when you have a genuinely multivocal workshop and a writer who tries to trim (or pile on sail) to every shift of the prevailing winds. So - when discussing your own writing, when to listen to your readers and when not? And what to do if you're listening?

Okay, I suppose beginning should start with ends: know/choose your purpose(s). Know what your writing (the action, secondarily the actual product) is for, while avoiding sour grapes, or fear, or false modesty, or daydreams extraneous to why you're sitting at the keyboard - why are you writing? And this may not be a static thing - you may scale back, or wildly expand, or simply shift what you want to do, and that may even come in response to comments from your readers. You might even recognize that perhaps the compatibility of a Pynchon homage and your mother loving the book exists only somewhere over the rainbow, and you'll drop one or the other. But as long as you're still writing, it's still a matter of what you want to do. After you're done, of course, readers will do whatever they want and can with it, towards their own purposes.

Your readers don't need to share your purposes, or even know them, to say something valuable - or to say something that sparks something valuable in your own mind. The odds do go up if they want what you want, or a decent reps of the audience - if any - you have in mind.

Thinking of my favorite experience of this type, with my litficky "Third Law of Thermodynamics", with three other people, two of whom had no strong interest in lit journal type writing. But they were interested in the story and prodded at an odd point - a break in the fourth wall, until I saw that I should move it, so that it not only played the essetnially moral purpose I intended, but also acted as a structural transition - like Mendelssohn decision to move the first movement (sonata-allegro form) credenza of the E minor Violin concerto from its customary place at the beginning of the coda to the joint between the development and recapitulation - where it DID something other than be pretty. (Those of you who are pretty do not need to follow Felix's example. Pretty, in the flesh, really is enough.) Anyway, a earthshattering half an hour discussing it. Never bothered to send it out afterwards, though.

What made it interesting was my original First Reader - he wanted me to get rid of that section entirely for the simple reason that we had gotten too old for public self-mutilation (and because he didn't want to break the story" "let her live", he said, refering to the narrator.) But me and Brecht, hey! While it hadn't been planned when I first wrote the story, it became the point.

Anyway, never foreclose revelations by saying that no matter what, you're not changing a word. You cannot dull the infinite surprises the universe can offer; you can only close your eyes to them.

2004-07-10T08:58:00.000-04:00

Ego, Superego and Id-eas

Take heart - the title has little to do with the post. I just wanted to see if I'm still capable of the learned stupidity of conference paper titles. And the verdict: Ay-up - I suspect that even having brain ganglions overgrown by Alzheimer kudzu wouldn't choke off that tendrilled vine.

Although I have been thinking about ego and public writing. Hmm, and it's a peculiarity of my mind that typing that qualifier makes me want to talk about private writing, partly because until this moment I hadn't yet been watching that idea chase its own tail. >SLAP< Okay, public writing - there's something peculiar in engaging in a largely solitary activity, with the intention of showing it to the world. Aside from thed humble folks who think they're just conduits for messages some higher power (humble?), people think they themselves have something worth saying, worth reading. And while I envy people who enjoy the act itself, as I admire people who really do want to feel their lungs and muscles burning from harsh and extended exercise, I imagine that most novelists can continue for day after day driven by ambition or self-display or messianic mission or some other aspect of blind rasping ego, as animal as appetite.

Funny, haunting the fringes of writing sites - the you-go-girlism of it all, makes me wonder - do people really think the "talent' they're praising is really there, or that well-wishing will make it so, or whether that's not the point anyway. But, really, it's beneath argument in most cases, like worrying about whether someone is destroying the elegant asceticism of a pig by slopping it. I think there's bad writing that does harm, but by content and dishonesty, not by the coarsening of ineptitude. Anyway, no one so lame that they cannot find affirmation of their swiftness somewhere.

But this is still not what's been rattling through my head - and, fact, that rumination above taken the wrong way would be a deadly insult. I want to talk about writing and response and ego and perfection and all that. Later this afternoon, I guess.

2004-07-03T22:21:00.000-04:00

A sadness while listening to Roxy Music

At those times when I, like some cultural conservatives, think that America has lost itself to decadence, what strikes me is what a joyless, tired, commercial, and styleless decadence it has chosen.

2004-06-27T21:55:00.000-04:00

Starts like Rock, but It's Me

When I was sitting in the box at the Kennedy Center, glum from a split of Korbel champagne, listening to the bright young apprentice conductors do, in turn, Brahms, Debussy, Barber, and Tchaikovsky, I thought how odd the brackets around "classical" music are. The gap between the size of its audience compared to popular music is huge - and despite the best efforts of Leonard Bernstein working from one direction and classically-trained Rock Progressos on the other - these are not two voices in the same conversation. And then subtract out what I think may be the majority of the audience - those whose tastes begin with Vivaldi and end with, oh, maybe Mahler, along with a few outliers like the Early Music Movement, some Stravinsky and other tonic Russians like Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, Camina Burana, a few works that have made it into film, like Barber's Adagio for Strings. Maybe there's more - literate people know who John Cage is, and Philip Glass. But still.

But it's not dead - many composers work within the tradition, the conversation, even now. Like contemporary poetry in America, its economics lie almost solely within a framework of foundations and universities, and in the hearts of a few amateurs like my friend Steven, who decamped to Berlin permanently because he could hear something new every day. And, of course, if you need a full orchestra and and airplane motor before your marks on the paper becomes sound - well, this is fascinating to me. The gap in theater - something requiring similar resources - between successful theater like Cats and Les Miserables on one hand, and Stoppard and Shepard is nothing like the gap between Madonna and Glass. But theater itself is no longer a mass art, beyond school Christmas pageants.

There something important here, apart from the usual blah-blah about state support of the arts, but I'm not there yet. Back later on this topic.

What?

2004-06-25T08:51:00.000-04:00

Rock Suggests

A fully successful wardrobe choice should always direct the viewers' attention - and concommitant compliments - to the wearer rather than the garment.

Not:
"What a slutty dress!"

But:
"What a slut!"

2004-06-21T21:56:00.000-04:00

For My Single Friends

If one shouldn't get entangled with someone more screwed-up than oneself, then should one be as screwed up as possible to maximize the possible delightful and dramatic encounters in one's life?

2004-06-20T22:00:00.000-04:00

Father's Day

Nothing like some kind of officially ordained theme day to provide a deadline for a post I had been considering for a couple of weeks.

Hmm, thinking about my last post, on Courtly Love. The Church alternately condemned and tried to commandeer the Courtly Love philosophy - it's idolatrous, of course, even leaving aside the inevitable painfully lame evocations of Greek/Roman love deities, the adored and all-commanding love object makes a fleshy sort of idol. So the clergy could either try to hit with a rolled up newspaper its best (meaning: richest and most likely to execute inconvenient priestlings) clients, or try to convince them that they really meant the Blessed Virgin Mary all along. So much easier to rhyme than Hortensia anyway.

So the Sacred and the Profane - all these hungers for More or Other or Metasomething of Transomething else seem related, and as the hunger sharpens, the differences seem even smaller - like one would eat any edible. So this is why my father believed in all the modern versions: ESP, the Loch Ness monster, flying saucers, Bigfoot. All of them. The world HAD to be wonderful; we had to be something other than alone together. And when he went to some seance when I was 17 he asked where I would go to college.

I guess it's a hunger I share, but with my more corrosively cynical and analytic, more conventionally educated mind. There's that other kind of mysticism, that looks at, oh, I don't know, a flower or a cow - or a child - and wonders at the wonder of it all. I don't have that. Joy, yes, great joy - but if the child isn't a changeling (and consider the flipside of wonder, the terror of THAT possibility), well, wonder's not in it. But maybe that these things aren't real is the only reason there's wonder. After the initial freebase moment of the First Contact - maybe sharing a smelly office restroom with Mr. Spock would take all the Otherness out of it.

And there's something about what my father didn't want - the reason why he supported George Wallace and other rightwingers, before disappearing for a while into an invisible libertarianism. There was a great "no" there to things as they were to go along with the "yes" to things that weren't. And the sense of loss, or betrayal, of things being less than they should have been, of being lied to.

So after talking about retirement for years, of fishing and traveling. Why did he give all his fishing equipment away the day he and and Mom moved to sad Mohave Valley, at the border of Arizona and Nevada and on the Colorado River. After being for so long the only one of us who was genuinely warm and loved people, why did he constantly turn down social (and fishing!) invitations? The three hours daily of listening to bitter, hypocritical dishonesty from Rush Limbaugh, well - that I knew. The $10,000 on a scheme I could tell was fraudulent from the first paragraph of the come-on letter? Yes, familiar too - we'd had a number of those missteps throughout all our years as a family - and superficial; it wasn't going to make a difference. And - heartbreakingly - the electronic emissions machine to cure cancer he got from somewhere so he could set up a clinic with his neighbor - that he ended up using on himself - and all of us helped him use - as he was dying from it. He knew what I thought about it and all the rest, as part of our core family morality - the morality that meant it took me a decade and hundreds of games before I finally beat him. He never let me. We don't. Because it wouldn't be real.

But I remember something else about imagination and my father. In the evenings when my sisters and I were very young, in the evenings we used to visit with Snakey - Dad's four fingers and thumb talking at us in the persona of a clever snake who lived in the heating vents of our Southern California tract home, who knew many things. So, did we believe it? I mean, that thing was pretty clearly a hand there and my father's attempt to keep his lips from moving was for the sake of honor - not effectiveness. But it didn't have that airy feeling of our own various make-believes. It was solid and a benevolent snake cruised the heating ducts of that house - I still can't picture one of the grills without picturing a pair of bright eyes peeking out.

Wonder if that's how my daughters felt that way about Spidey, the spider I made with my hand when they were young?

2004-06-19T20:35:00.000-04:00

Courtly Love

So if you're sort of clueless and read history, ideas that any sane individual would have thought long dead, you wonder - what's in there? Does it work? Huzzah for Flat Earth types, I guess. Shouldn't feel so bad since a bazillion people still believe that the Alpha and the Omega, the Eschatological Ground Meal of the Total Tortilla, put on a pair of badly made sandals and wandered around the Judean hills some 2000 years ago.

Jeez, I sure hope a long throat-clearing means a short post. Anyway, Courtly Love, (conflating all sorts of stuff below, but the inaccuracies are useful) a term from the late Middle Ages, referring to a set of principles for Romance among the noble classes. Most common elements: the woman is elevated far above the man, and at the very least begins with a stance anywhere from cruel and disdainful to simply unwilling; this acts as a spur for the man to be nobler, more virtuous, more accomplished in all things and utterly devoted, so as to better deserve his lover; there is some seemingly insuperable obstacle (other than the man's unworthiness) - most commonly the woman is married and virtuous.

Of course, like the contrary spirit of Carnival, this only works because Courtly Love reverses the real power relationships between the sexes in the Middle Ages, anomalies like Eleanor of Aquitaine's court notwithstanding.

So why am I talking about it? C'mon - this model doesn't have ANY attractions for you, gender role not specified? Oh, maybe not - maybe it's me that's nuts, or, more accurately, I was when I was younger, listening to a lot of Machaut and Dufay, and ready to be devoted. Serially devoted, I think. Besides, there is that element of self-improving calisthenics - using the desired as some sort of all-in-one exercise machine to buff up all your metaphorical muscles, ready to cough up tortured love poetry and be champagne-witty and gallant in conversation in turn. Something here about all the world loves (this kind of) a lover.

Funny, though, my most intense experience of the three elements was after a demise of a relationship, during which the entirely absent woman became a guiding spirit for a couple of years, quite unaware. Genuine lack of interest; earnest and completely unobserved self-improvement; utterly without hope of it ever being influential.

But the sheer ironic perfection of that modern version of Courtly Love isn't why I drifted away. It ultimately was narcissistic as mirrors on a bedroom ceiling, and if such a thing did become consummated, and leaving aside what the chapter is AFTER that, well, even at the moment, the desideratum, all I can think of is two people, each alone with his or her own ecstasies.

2004-06-12T20:48:00.000-04:00

GN/BN

On the bright side, this time it really is a chardonnay.

However:

1) It is Australian.
2) There is only about a glass and half left - say two inches.
3) I am drinking it straight from the bottle (Rock recommends I end that statement
with a hearty "Me mateys!")

2004-06-11T13:34:00.000-04:00

Cuisine Art

Salad: hearts of palm, artichoke bottoms, kalamata olives (nicoise would be even better), feta cheese: why doesn't anyone serve this? Bliss. Oh, hold it...

...back. With pinot gririo. K. 543 on the speakers. No crusty bread, drat - next time.

True civilization is not attainable in the workplace. Or at least not MY workplace.

Side note: giving Federal employees the day off to observe the death of Ronald Reagan did not promote a mournful attitude.

2004-06-11T09:41:00.000-04:00

Copyright: Against Self-Righteousness

It's so cute the way many writers get all fuschia-faced over the subject of copyright, over their property, their God-given Natural Law right to the exclusive use of their ideas, their effort, their talent. I mean, your writing is your property, you own it, just as your house is your property and your favorite blouse and your car and your cellphone and childhood stuffed animal and all the rest.

Right stick, wrong end. Copyright is an interesting example of the evolution of a very practical license into a right. Anyone here mind if we wuote the U.S. Constitution on the subject of Congressional power to issue patents and copyright?:

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries

Guys - that's where our Sacred Right originates - even in terms of the U.S. Constitution, which is fairly generous in assuming the independent basis of many rights. The Government will grant and protect temporarily an exclusive license to authors and inventors get to use their stuff exclusively only an an incentive to create and discover, not because there is any "natural" right to an abstraction like the way a given set of words is arranged. Of course now that there are photographic and recording devices, in what Benjamin called the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the same thing applies to the plastic and musical arts.

Okay, wrong end. Why the right stick? Well, consider the very interesting evolution (if I have this right) of a forthright affirmation of the inalienable rights of "life, liberty, and property" into the Declaration of Independence's "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Consider also that one of the responses to Tom Paine's historical analysis in Common Sense of the rise of the actual lines claiming the British throne and the "divine right" to rule noted in a melancholy fashion, that if we were to think like that, the foundations of property may equally come into question.

Exactly. "Property of" is not some sort of apriori condition - it's a government patent - an affirmation of call and a promise to protect, for the practical advancement of society. It's simply been around for so much longer than intellectual property rights that property "rights" seem natural, beyond question, fundamental, and occasion great fury and self-righteousness when violated - as intellectual property begins to do for people who have it. So, why not permit this evolution? Becuase we then lose sight of what the authority, established less thna 250 years ago was meant to do. Well, also, I have to admit to an allergy to hysterical copyright rhetoric too.

Example: the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act can be be called an act of theft from the community in one case; and a lie in another. It extends the copyrights of works created decades ago - almost exclusively to benefit corporate-owned intellectual "property", and, above all on behalf of Disney. Read the line from the Constitution again - you cannot encourage the production of a piece of intellectual property by retroactively extending the term of protection. The Supreme Court decided this aspect wasn't actually unconstitutional. While I appreciate the judicial restraint in refusing to invalidate an properly passed law for which you can provide at least some kind of argument (e.g. that allowing companies with intellectual property to retain more of the potential profit from works with expiring copyrights makes more capital available for subsequent productions), the whole legislative history makes it clear that this was simply the transfer of public "rights" into private hands at the cost of a few lobbyist fees and campaign contributions.

And the lie? That even for work not created at the time of the bill - that anyone creates work for the monetary profit it may bring to their heirs 49 years after their death. Even the roughly immortal corporations (including reverse mitosis in the difinition and the purchase of intellectual copyright from the creditors of the bankrupt) don't have a profit horizon that extends nearly that far into the future. In fact, I'd argue that this consequence of the act was just an inadvertant side-effect of trying to secure things the corporations want to hold on to NOW; they don't know how to value whatever their creating now in terms of future worth. It's just a lie to say the extension act promotes the progress of the arts, the constitutional reason this license exists.

Heirs? Hey, look at Stephen Joyce, current heir to the estate of James Joyce - basically a parasitic, obstructionist asshole who is keeping work form being created by threatening lawsuits anytime someone wants to DO something with some of the central works of the 20th Century. Do you think Ulysses was written for him, or that new Ulysses are being created by the incentive to pass money and control down two generations? I can just imagine the heirs of Lorris suing Meung (or perhaps challeging him to a conbat d'honneur) for daring to extend The Romance of the Rose.

Okay, enough here. Think I'll talk about getting credit in the next entry, unless my dearly beloved commenters - named and anonymous - tell me Jesus Christ, move on already.

2004-06-09T20:14:00.000-04:00

Ah, dear and sadly wrong friends

Anonymous commenting is not only permitted, but positively lusted after.

2004-06-07T21:40:00.000-04:00

In Which Rock Makes His First Appearance

Shameful to have missed a day on this chronicle, so soon after it was begun and on a weekend day at that. Perhpas it occurred to someone that I've run out of things upon which I may carry on at uninteresting length (i.e. four figure blog entries). Nope - I fell asleep, under the Italian light fixture the previous owners installed over their martial bed, with the three hand-blown and disturbingly vulvar light shields. A fertility thing, no doubt. Hmm, wish there were another place to put the bed.

I had a toddler drowsy then asleep on my chest (conceived without strega photonic assistance, I might add), rescued from what I think must have been a nightmare, with frantic and still asleep yells. I just could not move, despite not having showered that night, or that day, or the previous night (at this point mothers with young children or good memeories can start waving their hands in recognition). I was, as Rock deRien might say if he were feebly attempting to be one of a people that went away a couple of decades ago: "Oh my, grody!" Not whiffy, mind you, because my body is largely hairless and my pheromones are more like pherosighs - very subtle - and I really don't smell much like anything at all. I hear in Africa they call overly scrubbed white guys "dead men" because the lack the health odor of the living, not unlike the newly dead. And, unlike Rock, I don't feel the crying need to drip any foo-foo on my clavicle with my little fingertips.

But - I had just spent four hours out the yard; I was in greenstained tube socks and green-kneed blue jeans, and I ewas certainly covered with finely minced cicada parts mixed in with the many wisps of mowed grass. Anyway, baby and I slept way until morning, although since no one crept into the bedchamber in bare feet and bad intentions, I'm beginning to think Rock was right. Grody. Grody, indeed.

2004-06-05T21:03:00.000-04:00

De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum

Not that I've ever believed that, but I did promise no more than one political post a week and would in fact have some notes bonum et dulce et mea culpa. Well, IHO, I will repeat my all-time favorite joke from that era.

Q: Why did Menachem Begin order the Sabra/Shatilla massacres?
A: He wanted to impress Jodie Foster.

These things lose most of their zing over time. Still makes me smile, though, although that may be just the weakened echo from when I first heard it, in the fourth booth at the Ratskellar, three beers and a coke on the table, and the joke was Susan's. That night she either slept with me or slept with Doug. Some things you remember and some things you just don't.

So, a note about wit. Not as fine as Peter Beagle's, perhaps, but still a fine exchange, Sabatini level:

Audry, leaning back, surveyed Sit Tristano through half-closed eyes. "Sir, I must say that for a mission of this importance I would have expected a person of somewhat more august wisdom and experience."

Sir Tristano smiled, "Sir, I admit that I am only three years older than King Aillas, who perhaps for this reason regards me in the light you mention. Still, if you are dissatisfied, I will withdraw instantly to Troicenet and there express your views to King Aillas. I am sure he can find a qualified emissary: sage, elderly, of your own generation..."

- Jack Vance The Green Pearl

Tristano's first line is fine, but, again, it's the final catalog that does it. The rhythm is important: "sage" [beat] "elderly" [beat] and the quick flurry of the real attack: "of your own generation."

Like most wit in books, the exchange is brittle and artificial, stage dialogue, mock formal - not meant to mimic normal speech at all. Even the sense is wrong: an emissary like Tristano would not go that far with a king already inclined to neutrality on his mission. It doesn't advance the plot; it is a tiny bit out of character; it's just fun. But what do I know? I smile at mass-murder jokes.

2004-06-03T21:33:00.000-04:00

Using My Name in Vain

It's time to stop telling me that I should be thankful, that I owe my freedom to our brave boys in green. Or white. Or blue. The real lesson of Vietnam wasn't about winning hearts and minds, or fighting without popular support, or No Land War in Asia, it was this: we lost, we left, we were still free. Still? More free. When I turned draft age in 1976, my liberty wasn't taken away - I wasn't drafted, into servile rank-ridden involuntary servitude, the least democratic mass organization I can imagine this side of organized religion with its despicable clergy, even apart from what grows clearer as the Vietnam generation begins to assume power: the get-out-of-Vietnam-free cards granted to the least scrupulous of upper class youth.

So 1976: no draft, the FBI no longer felt it had to keep dissident youth organizations under close surveillance. Carter was elected - a smaller percentage of what few taxes were extracted from me went to the national security apparatus (and the Russians unaccountably failed to take advante of this); the deficit - another involuntary debt - began to decline. Whatever we lost in Vietnam, it wasn't a sliver of any freedom I cherished. Who defended my freedoms? Well, lawyers, reporters and opposing politicians had rid us of a leader clearly guilty of felonious obstruction of justice.
Not the boys.

As a complete sidenote: in 1976 the greatest literal threat to my freedom was the war -the war on drugs. But the same law that keeps my family safe from depraved murderers kept me out of jail - the law of averages, schooling fishes. The psychopaths only get a few hundred of us. And the State couldn't - didn't even want to - catch and lock up every felony drug offender in college.

And look, at least there was some kind of plausible excuse for Vietnam: we were facing a military power that looked like it could challenge us; a manifestly unfree, hostile, arguably expansionistic Soviet Union. We lost. And unless somebody wants to resurrect the rotted rump of the domino theory - that we fought long enough to save Thailand, and and and. Desperation time. So, my country continued to be free, and as we moved away from what war does to a country, we were more free. And in all the dozens of military actions, large and small, for more than half a century - the boys dying - but more often killing, weren't doing it for my freedom. So long and thanks for all the deterrence, though, cold war buddies.

And yes, it was Roosevelt who showed how to twist the notion of freedom out of recognition by collapsing issues of liberty with other matters in the Four Freedoms, just as conservatives offered up the epithet of "license" to describe liberties of which they did not approve. Why not? Why not argue for sanctity of power -- when it is yours.

And now - what are they for? To keep the Mexicans and Central Americans from crossing the border and sapping my will to cut my own grass? They're not doing that.

So, now. That's not my freedom there in Iraq. I'd say it wasn't even my freedom in Afghanistan, although I support the war there, as a matter of collective security. But even then: Bin Laden says that they organized 9/11 because of three U.S. acts: supporting Israel; maintaining sanctions on Iraq; having troops in Saudi Arabia. When I think about it - none of those things is for me, none of them is for my freedom, or any other American's freedom Yes, a terrorist organization that attacks the United States should be flattened, and any regime that provides it refuge overthrown. Of course.

But then - I look at those acts and think - this isn't about me converting to Islam, or the bars closing, or even Baptist churches closing or Wiccans being burned at the stake (hold it - I don't want to convert myself to Wahabi Islam by playing up things that really MIGHT be appealing.) It was about projecting economic, diplomatic, and especially military power far from my home - projecting it right onto the pointy little heads of some nonAmericans. And I'd feel freer if we weren't doing those things - so why am I getting wanded going to work everyday - why is Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House permanently closed to vehicular traffic? Why is are Americans being held without their (our) constituitonal rights, based on a dubious Supreme Court decision made, not surprisingly, during wartime - albeit an actual formal, declared war, with a pretty clear terminal point, Remember the warning about standing armies? It's not the direct oppression, or not always. It's the cost and the mindset.

Why is traveling an ordeal; why are private citizens directing torture in POW camps; why are my library records and a thousand other things government business, simply when the government - not a jury of my peers - says so? Why does Justice Scalia think the Fifth Amendment is mighty inconvenient sometimes. It's not Al Qaeda that cares whether I'm free or not, not now. And it's not the military fighting to keep me that way.

Maybe I don't have the bad conscience that others seem to have. I don't even need to get into the discussion of whether someone who joins for pay and benefits is a mercenary; whether someone who joins because he listens to people in power tell him it's a patriotic things to do is a lackey. Maybe those people who feel guilty about the sacrifices these working class people are making so that those in power can have even more say - maybe they'd like to say thank you. Maybe they'd like to show their gratitude by awarding this medal og good intentions. I am from the class that produces these soldiers. But all the pain and fear of military families; all the bravery and sacrifice of the soldiers themselves - that's not for me. You're not much less likely to torture me than an Iraqi, if you are told to do so, because NONE of us are. But some of us don't put ourselves in a position to do what we're told. I don't owe you. That's not my freedom. Fuck you for saying it is - you self-promoting liars. I do not support your troops.

2004-06-02T23:30:00.000-04:00

I remember going to a modern art show in DC years ago. Something thematic, probably a bit political. All of these fascinating shapes on the walls, the floor, hanging from the ceiling - one into which you could crawl; something you could touch or stroke. One whole room arrayed with thousands of identical toy-sized somethings. A new surprise around every corner.

And then I started to read the white paper rectangles, with the artists' names and the titles of the works. I had nothing against the artists, nothing I knew, so that part was fine.

But the titles - what these things were. The "ideas." They were just so...stupid, labored, trite and they blighted the previously wonderful objects with that triteness. Except the little toy shapes, each of which represented a Warsaw pact tank and the total was supposedly in line with the latest Western military estimates. I think it was meant to mock the seriousness of the threat by reducing all those huge clanky high explose hurling behemoths to tiny nothings, but my companion looked at the installation and said what I thought: "Jeez, the Russians sure have a shitload of tanks."

Visual artists are, for the most part, shallow, parroting thinkers and their virtues lie elsewhere. Ye novelists and poets,how do you think it is with you?

The observations, the insights, the suspended irony and all that - yes, great fun, occasionally enlightening, thought provoking. But what if you were judged by what your stuff is about, as I was forced to do about all that well-intentioned art by those excruciatingly well-intentioned titles? What you're tryin a say? I mean, think about those Russian greats, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (even before he repudiated his great work as, in my interpretation of "What is Art" as insufficiently stupid) - have to twist them a fair way around (or be a remarkably interesting anachronistic lunatic) to assent to what they was tryin a say. At least the positive aspects of their message - the great thing about ripping something is not only is the vocabulary of condemnation WAY more extensive than praise, but the law of averages and the Fall of Man, you're going to be right most of the time. Somehow I don't think, oh, Christian Slavophilism makes anybody's list anymore. Oh, Alexander S is still around?

Not too many novelists as sensible as Jane Austin, who simply says in several narrow but sharp ways: "Put up your hands. Back away from the Stupid Button of Self-Immolation. Slowly." Because I don't think she even bothers to talk to the real life analogues of selfish shits that also propel her plots.

2004-06-01T20:52:00.000-04:00

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.