Sharon Dolin: Serious Pink

Words, words, words that keep coming back to me, that I keep returning to...

... words like butterflies en pointe over flowers in an endless meadow...

By Sharon Dolin, in her collection Serious Pink:Ekphrastic Poems:

"Let spectacled be speckled
and strips become tipples of stripes."

{from the poem "Day Dreams"}

"Robin's eggs, unhatched, fly up
orange drowns tongue blue"

{from "Writing Painting: A Ghazal"-- with a score-mark through "Painting," which the clumsy lobster cannot do on this computer}

Brillat-Savarin: Violet Flames Feeding

Brillat-Savarin, in "Meditation XIX" of Physiologie du Gout (The Physiology of Taste, published 1825, just before his death), writes:

"Dreams are singular impressions that work upon the soul without the aid of external objects."

As one example, he records awakening in the midst of a "charming tingle (une espece de fourmillement plein de charmes)running across my skin from my feet to my head, coursing in the marrow of my bones; a violet flame danced upon my brow."

Then comes the kicker: "Lambere flamma comes, et circum temporo pasci."

A quote from the Aeneid, book II, referring to the sacred fire that gently caresses the brow of Ascanius, son of Aeneas, as Aeneas resists his wife Creusa's and his father Anchises's pleas to depart Troy. Aeneas wants to fight on, but the Greeks have emerged from their horse and are sacking the city...his wife and father are calling on him to lead the survivors to safety.

The sudden appearance of cool flames "gently feeding on the temples of Ascanius" is understood to be a sign from the gods that the boy is destined for greatness, that Aeneas must leave, that doing so means no loss of honor.

What precisely do the flames tasting at his own forehead mean to Brillat-Savarin?

I like to think that the gastronomic gods are prompting Brillat-Savarin to re-found Troy yet again, this time in the bistros of Paris. That they bless his odyssey through the kitchens of France, and signal their love for his stories of culinary wonder. That they presaged for him his own apotheosis, with a shimmering but innocuous flame, a "delicious quivering" ("fremissement delicieux," as he puts it), engulfing his body like the liqueur ignited over cherries jubilee.

....and now it's time for breakfast.

Antonio Preciado: "Espantapajaros"

Deep in his watery grotto, the lobster mulls a poem by Antonio Preciado (of Ecuador). A poem called "Espantapajaros," which is "Scarecrow." It speaks of betrayal, the abyss, sin...angels bare-backed and angels with wings, and the author's fear of all angels (an echo perhaps of Rilke?)...

The poem ends this way:

"así que ¡salgan de mis pronto
el ángel desde arriba
y el ángel desde abajo!
que aquí se salva el mundo
mundo
mundo,
pues yo me quedo al pie de este poema
como un descomunal espantapájaros"

Which, in my weak Spanish, is a cry to be quit of both the angels of heaven and the angels of hell, creating the gap within which lies the world's salvation...

"Because I rest here at the foot of this poem
Like an enormous scarecrow."

There's the gap made real...salvation in our inability to understand, because understanding is larger than our mortal minds?

The lobster does not know the answer, but he savors the final sentence, imagines himself an enormous scarecrow at the foot of the poem, extraordinarily large and rag-pied at the foot of the poem.

He's been savoring that mysterious sentence for weeks now...and hopes you will too.

6 + 1 Interview: Ken Scholes

Ken Scholes is one of the best new speculative fiction talents this decade. The first two volumes of his five-book The Psalms of Isaak appeared just this year: Lamentation (February) and Canticle (October). Find out more at his website by clicking here. (Disclosure: Tor sent me a free advanced reader copy of Canticle; I bought my own copy of Lamentation.)

Lobster & Canary: You've located the missing sections of Rufello's Book of Specifications ... what might those include?

Ken Scholes: Schematics for mechoservitors, drawings of metal wings, sketches of the prototype Ship that Sailed the Moon from the Czarist Lunar Expedition.

L & C: Several reviewers have called Lamentation and Canticle a hybrid of science fiction and fantasy. The lobster and the canary won't let genre analysis get in the way of a damned good story, but we are interested in your take on literary classification. Incidentally, we applaud the references to Elric, Solomon Cane, and the Gray Mouser in Canticle's dedication... and the spirit of Jack Vance that you gently invoke.

Ken: Thank you. Oddly enough, I've read very little Vance though I suppose that makes the invocation more powerful. Since writing Lamentation I've been urged by many to tackle his Dying Earth stories...after I finish the series. But those mentioned in the dedication are certainly mighty influences, along with the characters and worlds of Cordwainer Smith and Frank Herbert.

I think literary classification is largely to help booksellers know where to place a book on a shelf so that readers can find it. With The Psalms of Isaak, I'm really not trying to write to a particular genre. I'm just telling the story of the people in that world and how their lives were changed by the unfolding events. I know that's discombobulated some because those expecting epic fantasy are surprised by the robots and those expecting science fiction are surprised by the magick.


L & C: Your plot so far is a masterwork of intricacy, bluff and double-bluff, truly a "Whymer's Maze." Like the Bene Gesserit with their breeding program in Dune and the science of psychohistory in Foundation, some power appears to be controlling the fates of individuals and destiny of nations. Even more subtle, some (like Vlad Li Tam) may be less in control than they (and the reader) originally thought. Talk to us about the role of free will and personal choice in The Psalms of Isaak.

Ken: I think it's certainly a key exploration in the series for me. Along with the intentional manipulation of both environment and people to preserve and protect the leftovers of humanity in a world that's seen cataclysm after cataclysm. In this series, I'm also exploring the duality of our propensity for self-destruction and our tenacious will to adapt and survive...and the lengths that people will go to in order to protect what they believe in or destroy what they fear.

L & C: The story after two volumes is a grim one: it starts with the destruction of an entire city, and continues through betrayal, torture, warfare, suicide and so on. Many malicious acts, yet no character is wholly or simply Malice Incarnate... unlike the "dark lords" and their ilk in countless fantasy novels. The lobster & the canary see your work as something far more nuanced and much more thought-provoking, an attempt to grapple with serious issues of morality, the nature of evil, theodicy. (As Gandalf remarks, even Sauron was not evil in the beginning.) Tell us more about motivation, morality and the use of power in The Psalms of Isaak.

Ken: I appreciate your kind words. I'm not sure that I started out intentionally grappling with these things -- it's largely been beneath the surface and surprising me as it shows up. But I think these are natural explorations for many of us in the wake of 9/11. I think villains often see themselves as guardians, patriots, messiahs and heroes...and truly, I'm not certain that the concept of villains and heroes is much more than perspective in many instances, though certainly not in all instances.

I think we're critters who like to attach labels to things and to people and that sometimes it's simpler to ascribe good to what we love and evil to what we are afraid of, disagree with or do not understand. But Real Life is more complex than that. I'm not suggesting that there isn't good and evil but I'm suggesting that often we attach that judgment without necessarily asking ourselves all of the hard questions about how our perceived enemy in turn perceives us.

Particularly in this series, I've created a society of survivors who have evolved a morality that emphasizes survival at all costs with the ends justifying the means. I think you're correct that many books in our genre have more clearly delineated lines of good and evil and I suspect that's appealing because at the core of us, we wish it were that simple and when we read for escape and entertainment, we want to escape into a world that makes more sense than the one we live in. However, I think by exploring these concepts in fiction it can give us a safe sandbox to explore different thoughts and feelings and ideally still be entertained and feel as if we're participating in a good story.


L & C: Another facet of your work's complexity is the learning the characters undergo, often quite painfully. The lobster & the canary see The Psalms as a crossing of medieval mystery plays and Pilgrim's Progress with The Sorrows of Young Werther, laced with the practical, rooted wisdom that Le Guin gives us in the Earthsea cycle. Share with us a sense of the trajectory (the path of Bildung, if you will) for the major characters in the next three novels.

Ken: I think character growth, particularly through conflict, is an important part of storytelling. The trajectory for all of the characters is that they will change, stretch, and grow as they adapt to new lives and new roles after the Desolation of Windwir. The details may shift a little but I have most of it in mind. I try to keep my characters all on the dual journey of internal conflict brought about as they stand or fall against the external conflict they encounter along the way.


L & C: Bravo for the special mention of the cover art in your introduction! We fully agree that the covers by Greg Manchess capture the somber mood and dramatic tension of the story. Will you be working with Greg on the final three covers? Hmmm, we wonder if Irene Gallo (Tor's art director) might consider a special illustrated volume or some kind of Scholes-Manchess collaboration in web format.

Ken: Irene is brilliant at what she does. And I'm deeply impressed with Greg's work in general and specifically with my covers. I really have little say in that and truly don't feel I need to. I did have some unexpected input into the second cover (which can be read about in an article at Tor.com) but that's pretty rare and I really trust Tor and Greg to figure out the best art to catch a potential reader's eye. My job is to write books.

I'd love to work with Greg on other projects if that opportunity comes up and I would love to see an illustrated edition someday. But for now, I just can't wait to see what he dreams up for Antiphon's cover.

L & C: Your turn to ask the lobster & the canary a question!

Ken: If you were going to interview one of the main characters in the series who would it be and what questions would you ask? And I'll throw in a second question: Is there a minor player in the series that you'd like to see and hear more from?

L & C: We're still pondering these two good questions...the lobster has one idea, the canary another (another two or three actually, as is his wont, being more mercurial)...we'll reconcile water and air, posting our joint response as a coda shortly.

Cindy Pon: Interview

Cindy Pon is a writer and artist, whose first novel, Silver Phoenix, was published by Greenwillow/Harper Collins in April this year. An enthralling YA fantasy, Silver Phoenix has garnered great reviews. Its sequel is due in 2010. (Disclosure: Cindy sent me a free copy of the book; I do not believe my critique was affected by the book being free.) Learn more at her site-- click here.

Lobster & Canary:

1. You enter a garden filled with azaleas, hibiscus, tall ginkgo trees swaying in a jasmine breeze...in the middle of the garden is a large koi pond....the largest koi comes up to the surface, red and black splotches on its shining white body...it speaks to you...what does it say, and how do you answer?

Cindy:

Koi : "Are you where you want to be?"

Me : "I most certainly am."

Lobster & Canary:

2. You're an artist as well as a writer. I see your visual and graphic skills evidenced throughout Silver Phoenix. Your detailed descriptions of food throughout left me hungry! The details of your settings are equally vivid-- to take one example from many, I could see the courtyard at Master Tan's with its ancestor altar and the opalescent lamps. How do you think the artist in you influences the writer in you (and perhaps vice versa)-- and what might the Silver Phoenix picture book look like?

Cindy:

This is always a very difficult question to answer--about one's own prose. I'm simply too close to it to label it anything other than it's definitely *my* prose and *my* voice? Ai Ling, as a brush artist, sees the world very much as I do (this made it easy for me to write as my first heroine!) I'm attracted to color and flowers and nature. I think this comes across in my prose? My picture book will be paintings of things I adore,critters and flowers and more color, I hope!

Lobster & Canary:

3. Ai Ling is a strong character, a real contribution to young adult literature. She may be fated, but she is very human as well-- full of doubts, remorse, jealousy, weariness, anger. She has to make real decisions in the face of very palpable enemies. When and how did Ai Ling first come into your mind?

Cindy:

I had always wanted to write a novel, but it had been some amorphous goal that I put on a "life's to do list" and never bothered to even attempt to cross out. I think my first inkling of Silver Phoenix was a few scribbled words in my journal in 2004 or so? Words like : betrothal, journey, friendship, snake demon. That was all. It wasn't until two years later that I even attempted to write the novel. I did know from the start that it would be a heroine's journey and inspired by ancient China.

Lobster & Canary:

4. You address sexuality frankly and honestly, including the potential for sexual violence against girls and women. How have your readers responded to these themes in the book?

Cindy:

Honestly, I haven't had too much straight reader responses regarding sexual elements. It was made note of by nearly all the critics, but not in a negative way. they were all quite positive reviews. The sexual elements in my book tied in so much with the expectations of a girl within xia culture. You come of age and are expected to wed and make babies. I liked that she ran away from a betrothal only to be challenged in the climax in that way. It came full circle for me.

Lobster & Canary:

5. The demons are truly frightening, the more so because so many come disguised initially. Tell us more about how you created "the red-faced Spirit Eater," "the Life Seekers," "the night-worm fiends," the serpent that was Lady Zhou," and the others.

Cindy:

All that you mentioned, with the exception of the snake demon,were formed by my own imagination. I was definitely looking to create monsters that would be more fitting to the xia culture--familiar perhaps but also not to the average fantasy reader.The snake demon is very much rooted in chinese folklore. Toward the end of the novel, when Ai Ling and Chen Yong wander through various lands, those are inspired by my reading of a very old Chinese book that most aren't familiar with any longer.

Lobster & Canary:

6. Chen Yong is heading to Jiang Dao, without Ai Ling... any hints as to what the sequel holds?

Cindy:

The sequel will have two story lines :
Ai ling and Chen Yong
Silver Phoenix and Zhong Ye (three centuries before)

The two stories will come together somehow. That is my vision for it anyway! These two stories will be much personal, now that you've already been introduced to the characters in my debut!

6 + ! with Laird Hunt

Laird Hunt is a marvelous talent who defies easy categorization, except to say that he is very good. You can find out more about him at his site here. Coffee House Press published his fourth novel, Ray of the Star, in September. (Disclosure: Coffee House Press sent me a free advanced reader copy of the novel; I don't believe my critical faculties were compromised or obscured by the book being free, but I will let readers decide that for themselves.)


1. If you could be a living statue on the boulevard that is virtually a character itself in your novel Ray of the Star, what/who would you be?

Laird:
I don’t adequately describe them in the book, but for my money the loveliest statues on the boulevard (and its actual analog, Las Ramblas in Barcelona) are the tree statues: a small grouping of oaks and maples who sway and shiver in the breeze, who drop their leaves in“autumn”, who sometimes get chopped down by errant woodcutters, who crash to the ground out of boredom or fatigue. I wouldn’t want to try to be one of these marvelous trees. I’d like to be the living statue who loses his/her way in their little forest and lies down to rest in their shade.

2. Ray of the Star is a tour-de-force, managing to be simultaneously difficult and accessible. (I thought of it as an oblique jigsaw puzzle that I nevertheless felt drawn to complete, which then rewarded with a series of revelations both painful and true.) Martin Amis's Time's Arrow is the last book I read that was similarly successful in wrapping a clever conceit around an exploration of profound questions. Let's talk first about its structure--you have said that the novel's central preoccupation with grief and loss prompted you to borrow "the formal mechanism of propulsive, single-sentence chapters from Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Assignment." Tell us more.

Laird:
I have long had an interest in unusual and effective textual structures and mechanisms: Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch with its alternate itineraries and expendable chapters; George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual with its clock stopped at a single instant in the life of a large French apartment building (stopped until the last page of the book); the chorus that animates Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. That all of these books (and the list could go on and on) put their structures and constraints at the service of the toughest questions — questions to do with madness, with being bodies that die, with being bodies that die and that nevertheless love, etc. — can not be separated for me from their highly apparent constructedness. I’ve been asked if the interest in using the mechanism of the long sentences (borrowed, yes, from Durrenmatt) preceded, say, the living statues or the great coastal city or the sense of loss that saturates the entire surround, and the answer I’m forced to give is that I can’t remember what was in place, really in place, before I began actually drafting the book. I am certain though that the long sentences, with their rather stubborn, even exasperating tendency not to go quickly and/or easily, made it easier for me to tackle the aftermath of terrible loss I had set my main man lose in. They also, perhaps oddly, required me to be highly economical and relatively moderate in my digressions the sentences are long but are meant to rush forward (not to writhe and uncoil slowly in the manner of Proust or James). I started out in writing, seriously writing, by trying to do haiku in English (I once got second prize in a contest for the following Basho mutation: “the silence/in the bamboo/of butterflies”) and my natural inclination is to be brief. Not the best disposition for a novelist, but awfully nice to get to tend to it with this book.

3. I use the jigsaw puzzle imagery advisedly...everything in Ray of the Star fits together precisely, from individual word-choice at the sentence level to the darting of the plot. And you accomplish this in less than 200 pages. Tell us something about your drafting process. Do you build back to the granular from the broad strokes, or do you start with individual words and images? Or maybe you start somewhere in the middle...?

Laird:
When I was still smoking cigarettes, wearing cut-off jeans and working on an MFA at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, I got to hear Michael Ondaatje, at the Naropa Summer Writing Program, talk about how he worked. He described the process for writing The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (laid out all the sections on the floor and walked the alleys between them seeing the whole was key) and mentioned in passing that he never built plots, etc. ahead of time, that having a sense of what was to come next/ had to come next would kill it for him. Ondaatje was and is a major writer for me. I’ve never done the laying out the whole manuscript on a barn floor thing, but until very recently I have taken that second bit of process on as my own. I’ve adhered to this on both the macro and the micro level. Meaning that, in the case of Harry Tichborne, I not only did not know that he would end up figuring in a kind of quasi-endless (well, they all wear out before long even if he at least would like to keep running) feedback loop at novel’s conclusion, I also had no idea, when I started each sentence, where it was going to lead me. I did have a sense of when it was going to lead me, as I tended to fit the sentences into the time envelope I had available. If I had an hour, then the sentence would be an hour long, so to speak, then stop. Pretty soon though it became clear to me that if I didn’t give myself a little to go on for the next session it would be difficult (read damn near impossible) to get started on the next sentence, so I took to running a little ways past the full stops and into the next set of commas. I suspect that helped my mind to chew away a little at what it wanted to tackle next as I went about my workaday life.

I don’t think I answered your question. Here is the thing for me whatever image I think I may have in my head, it’s worth nothing if I can’t build it effectively into words. When I’m working well the so-called image is actually a phrase. I see phrases. That’s what I aspire to start from.

4. Many critics have noted the cinematic qualities of your earlier novels, qualities much in evidence in Ray of the Star as well. Lynch, Bunuel, Fassbinder, Kieslowski spring to mind. Do you find the comparisons apt?

Laird:
The short answer is yes. The shorter answer is no. I love film but write books. I love books more than I love film. But what wouldn’t I give to have made something like Love Is Colder Than Death or Inland Empire or the 400 Blows or The Gleaners. But the truth is I would as lief love to be able to lay claim to have written Apollinaire’s Zone, or even just one of Dickinson’s poems or Pound’s Cathay. By that I suppose I mean that to my mind there are just as apt analogs in the world of poetry to what I would like to think I am doing with my work. But we’ve become a profoundly, if not irrevocably, visual culture, and although I frequently get the old next to meaningless (and usually pejorative) “poetic prose” comment about my writing, the comparisons, say, to Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, or to Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette (both of which were huge for me as I started to get a sense of myself as a writer) just don’t happen. This is almost a propos of nothing, but I just thought of Godard’s comment — which I read somewhere some years ago — that if he could have had any other job at any other time, it would have been as something along the lines of a 2nd or 3rd assistant to Diderot as he worked at building his extraordinary Encyclopedia: the 18th century’s much more manageable and elegant answer to the internet.One wants to have one’s hand in. And to keep one’s eyes and ears open. No other way to get it done.

5. The oddities you conjure up in the novel's nameless city have the feel of Magritte's paintings, of Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte, Frisch, Calvino, Edward Gorey. Digging further back, Ray of the Star is a fairytale of sorts. Likewise, some of the other most successful literary experimenters currently writing (e.g., Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, Maureen McHugh, Karen Russell) are also updating and refining both the fairytale and the tropes of surrealism and modernism. Speaking for yourself, why the "new fabulistic turn"?

Laird:
I’m an admirer of the French novelist, Jean Echenoz, who often makes use of the engines of genre (to borrow a phrase from the writer Greg Howard) in his books. He has used aspects of both noir and ghost story to great effect, as have many other contemporary French writers (Mary Ndiaye in La Sorcière comes to mind). There is nothing terribly strange about this. I mean that contemporary French writers are interested in what genre can lend to their writing. In France, and in Europe more generally, there hasn’t been the divide between genre writing and so-called literary fiction that we’ve had, much to our detriment, in the U.S. Meaning that when Echenoz, Ndiaye and others brought the powerful tools of genre to bear on their fiction there wasn’t any collective wow about it the way there has been here about Lethem and Link and all the others who have gotten up to promising things with detectives and haunted houses and ray guns and so forth. I’m of course interested in the “discovery” of genre by writers carrying the standard of literary fiction in this country (I mean, thank god it doesn’t all have to be about quiet domestic disintegration and/or car wrecks and bar fights and/or depressions meds or whatever), and am not unhappy to imagine that I’ve written something that might stand alongside some of the work being done, but I’m far too schizophrenic a writer to imagine that I could keep regular company with the new fabulists or the Interfictions gang. In Ray, a man who has lost everything that has meant anything to him embarks on the long climb out of hell, or at least thinks he has done so: it just made deep sense to have the boundaries between life and not-life waver a bit as he climbs up through the rubble.

6. I've cited mostly European parallels and possible influences, and commentators on your first novels have largely done the same. But what first struck me reading you was: "Mark Twain! This is fantastic...Twain on speed!" For instance, in "Three Tales," your entry in the Omnidawn ParaSpheres anthology (2006): "I fell. Eyes first. Ears and mouth and whole remaining portion plummeting afterwards. I fell so far that when I woke I didn't. Not perfectly. The hole was still there." And so on. The talking, self-possessed running shoes and the paper-mache Yellow Submarine in Ray of the Star are two other quick examples. Talk to us about humor, Twainesque or otherwise, in your writing...and humor's place in the fantastical genres.

Laird:
For a time I worried that the turn toward humor in much of my work was fueled by a desire to please the crowd at the readings everyone was always doing in New York when I lived there in the 90s (so many readings that it was a little like the constant spamming of each other that happens on Facebook and Twitter). You know how this works: as an audience member you basically get two ways to demonstrate appreciation during a reading: you can let out little moans/and or nod your head or you can laugh. When you read, the moan thing coming at you is okay, but the laugh stuff is better and seems to equate to more patting on the back afterward (which young writers not only dig but probably need). So there was (I’m not being entirely fair here) an awful lot of playing it for laughs around St. Mark’s Church. Or so it seemed to me around the time my stuff started to make people laugh at fairly frequent intervals. On the one hand this bothered me and on the other my readings went better and so I was confused. Now I would like to give myself more credit and imagine that my time living as a prose writer among narrative-hating (or so many of them put it to me in those days) poets, coincided with a broadening of my interests and abilities, and that it wasn’t just about doing what I thought I had to to get a kind word. Be that as it may, it’s very hard to be really funny in writing. Twain, to me, is funniest when he is working against a determined counterpoint of fear, desperation, loss, estrangement (I’m thinking about Huck Finn). Kafka’s humor explodes against the darkest backdrops. Walser, who is often very funny, was always walking toward that bank of snow that eventually, literally, swallowed him up. One of my quibbles about some of the new fabulist writing is that the jokes and jokeiness seem never to stop, like little fake fireworks firing away from the first line to the end. I often find the work of Brian Evenson to be very funny, and this is in large part because his humor so often blooms up out of the greatest horror.

+ 1. Your turn to ask the lobster and canary a question!

Laird:
You mentioned my piece, “Three Tales,” in Omnidawn’s Paraspheres… With the exception of the regular, anonymous roughing up that my books get from certain trade publications, that story received some of the nastiest critique I’ve ever had the pleasure of receiving and it tended to come from the direction of folks who love genre writing and write regularly and passionately about it. I had an interesting exchange with the excellent Matt Cheney about this that helped shed some light on the, um, enthusiasm of the smack downs. And about some of the probably well-deserved (oh so now ghosts are okay!) suspicion on the part of seasoned genre veterans about all this encroachment from new fabulist and neo-noir, etc., dabblers. Definitely leaving aside the particularities of my experience with “Three Tales”, I wonder what you might have to say about said encroachment. Do you see it as such? Does it bother you? Any thoughts?

Lobster & Canary:

The lobster waved his claws and the canary trilled out a tiny thread of notes:

Not at all, not at all, and oh contrariwise... All streams pour forth from the same headlands and flow together in the end, no matter how widely (and wildly) they may diverge in between... we don't see the river encroaching, only merging and watering and validating... a stream that is enclosed is no longer a stream but a ditch filled with turbid water... we see it as a wonderful marriage when the engines of genre (a marvelous phrase indeed!) are wedded to new hulls... You mention Matthew Cheney: as on so many other topics, he is an astute analyst of genre and its malcontents... We also like the thoughts on genre from Umberto Eco, A.S. Byatt, Jeff VanderMeer, Michael Chabon...and many others all the way back through Pope and Dryden to Apuleius and Herodotus.

And Pliny, barks the lobster, Pliny the Elder...what genre is the Natural History ? The bedrock text of zoology for 1,500 years, sober-minded, realistic, purporting to pry the truth from obdurate myth...and it includes reports of eight-foot lobsters sunning themselves on the banks of the Ganges... oysters sipping the dew of moonlight from ocean waves and spinning it into pearl... and so on...and on...

Greenlight: A Great New Bookstore in Brooklyn

New York City-- more specifically, Fort Greene in Brooklyn-- has a wonderful new independent bookstore: the Greenlight! (Full disclosure: I am a "community lender" to the Greenlight, i.e., I have a financial interest in the bookstore's success.) Hurrah!

Yesterday the Greenlight officially opened its doors at Fulton and South Portland in Ft. Greene...and what a grand opening it was. The place was thronged, and folks waited patiently in a drenching rain outside, a testament to the community's hunger for a quality bookstore.

Well designed, airy, with a very reader friendly vibe...and a great selection of fiction. One very interesting decision by owners Jessica and Rebecca: to shelve all fiction together, Proust next to Cherie Priest, Philip K. Dick by Dickens. Well done!

The lobster and canary wish all the best to the Greenlight. Greenlight is the first NYC indie bookstore to launch in quite a while, in the midst of a recession that is utterly changing the entire publishing/bookselling sector. I guess that it is one of the very few indies to start anywhere in the country over the past few years... bucking the trend, the Greenlight is a beacon in wintry times, a return to artisanal, impassioned bookselling and the creation of a close-knit but welcoming community of readers, authors and vendors.

Soulages: "Black is the Color of Painting's Origin"

The Pompidou Centre in Paris is mounting the largest show (October 14- March 8, 2010) it has ever done for a living French artist: Pierre Soulages, who turns 90 in December.

Soulages said this to Tobias Grey in the Financial Times last week (October 10/11):

" 'A cousin of mine, who is 100 years old, told ...the curator of this exhibition, that when I was a boy I dipped my paintbrush in the ink-well and began to paint swathes of black on a white sheet of paper. When my family asked me what I was doing, apparently I replied, "Painting snow." Of course that made everyone laugh. But I was a shy child and not trying to show off. Looking back now, I think I was trying to make the white paper appear whiter by laying down the black.'

{...}

'It astounded me that for 340 centuries men have been painting in black in some of the most obscure places on earth, caves pitched in absolute darkness...I wrote once that black is the colour of painting's origin. I don't think it's possible to refute this.' "

Matthew Cheney on Plot and Story in Strange Horizons

Matthew Cheney, one of the most astute commentators on speculative fiction (and much else besides), has a good essay in Strange Horizons on the relationship between plot and story. He riffs on some recent statements by John Grisham, who apparently feels that "literature" lacks plot or at least a respect for plot. Cheney offers words from Aristotle and the Russian formalist critic Shklovsky to suggest otherwise, and then demonstrates his points nicely with a quick reading of Peter Straub's work.

Strange Horizons is a must-read... and so is Cheney in his usual haunt, The Mumpsimus.

Why Ensor Still Matters: Buffy, Dawn of the Dead, and the Werewolf of London

A friend of mine--whose views on art I respect--said she thought the James Ensor show that just closed at the MoMa in NYC (and soon to open at the Musee d'Orsay, Paris) revealed just how "old-fashioned" he now appears. Her sense was that Ensor exemplifies Modernism grown long in the tooth, dingy old ivory compared to the Ron Arad show running on the MoMA's top floor.

I beg to differ. Ensor still has bite. Most famously, Ensor brought the ravenously inhuman, the bestial, to the surface of his bourgeois subjects. Beneath the imperial splendor and self-congratulatory rituals of European society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries lurked the demonic. Precisely Ensor's portrayal of the demonic sheathed in human form or stripped down to the skeletal is what drew the crowds to his paintings at the MoMA.

Deep inside, below our own smug rituals and American splendor, is a slithering queasiness that our humanity may be a mask slipping askew. Why else our current obsession with vampires, zombies and werewolves? Buffy, Twilight , the countless "dawn of the dead" retellings, werewolves of London, Lestat, the deluge of "urban fantasies" by Butcher, Saintcrow, and their many imitators....the undead, half-living and half-beast move within us...Ensor captured them 120 years ago as surely as our authors and cineastes do today.

For a superb multimedia presentation of the MoMA show, click here.

For an excellent discussion of the show, click here to read Sanford Schwartz in the September 24th New York Review of Books.

Lobster & Canary viewed the MoMA exhibit in July. They scribbled notes: "presages Nolde," "flattened foreground," "The Frightful Musicians, one holding a skull like a clapper," "delicate lines, skeleton in the mirror," "black chalk, hippogriff, a flea layered on top," "The Devils Dzitts and Hihahox, Led by Crazon, Riding a Wild Cat, Leading Christ into Hell," "reworking the paintings," "Steinberg," "My Aunt Dreams of Monsters," "danse macabre," "skeletons warming themselves by a stove," "masques," "chalky whites, jagged blues, reds."

Cinderella by Shona Reppe at the New Victory Theater

Lobster and Canary were entranced yesterday evening by Shona Reppe performing Cinderella as part of the New Victory Theater's Scottish Festival.

In the Duke on 42nd Street's intimate black box theater, Reppe had a full house completely enthralled from the moment she walked on. Somehow she transformed one simple hand-held puppet, one pair of gloves, and an ingeniously designed counter-top (with lots of pop up drawers) into the world of the ash-girl and her nasty stepsisters. The audience-- mostly very small people aged 3-7 and their parents-- oohed and aahed, we blew on the magic handbag to produce Cinderella's dress, we clapped and laughed. When Reppe, using just phosphorescent cut-outs in the dark to depict Cinderella dancing with the prince at the ball...well, then we were all of us in fairyland.

Reppe's sly,impish performance was-- to put it shortly-- brilliant.

Her collaborators also deserve applause: Ian Cameron, Tamlin Wiltshire, and Gill Robertson (founder and artistic director of the Catherine Wheels Theatre Company, which is putting on Hansel & Gretel as part of the New Victory's Scottish Festival).

Special kudos to the New Victory Theater, the groundbreaking organization dedicated to the best in children's theater from around the world, and also to the Jim Henson Foundation for its support of the production.

Leon and the Place Between

Here's the perfect holiday gift for the youngest readers in your life, especially those who love to curl up on your lap as you read to/with them:

Leon and the Place Between, story by Angela McAlister, illustrations by Grahame Baker-Smith (designed by Mike Jolley and edited by Libby Hamilton), published earlier this year by Candlewick Press.

The story is elegant in its simplicity: Leon and his siblings go to a traveling magician's show...and Leon is transported by very real wizardry into the Place Between.

"With a ripple of gold braid...the curtains slowly parted..."

"Up jumped a barrel organ monkey, all made of wood and tiny hinges, He beckoned the moon to light the mechanical toys..."

McAllister's evocative words are embodied, brought to life, and made to sing by the wondrous art of Baker-Smith. Pages are die-cut to reveal mysteries, side pictures collide with sprouting flowers, birds and oddly fonted letters, colors leap off the page in gold, magenta, the deepest blue.

For a preview go here on the Candlewick site.

When you read (and frequently re-read) this book, you will ask as Leon's younger brother does at the end:

" 'But where did you go?' asked Little Mo.

Leon smiled.

'I went to the place that magic takes you.' "

W.H. Auden, A.S. Byatt: The Danger of Words

W.H. Auden in his foreword to Owen Barfield's History in English Words (1953):

"We can only cope with the dangers of language if we recognize that language is by nature magical and therefore highly dangerous."

A. S. Byatt in an interview with Sam Leith in The Guardian (April 25, 2009):

"I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous...People who write books are destroyers."

P.S. When Odin wanted to bring the art of poetry to the gods (and to mankind as a gift on selected occasions), he sought out its jealous guardian, the giant Suttung son of Gilling. Taking the name of "Baleful Action," Odin proceeded to cause nine serfs to slit one another's throats, tricked Suttung's brother into betrayal, slept with Suttung's daughter, and finally stole all the poetry in the world, which took the form of a pool of mead. Odin held the mead of poetry in his mouth as he flew in the shape of an eagle back to Valhalla, hotly pursued by Suttung. In short, the giants lost possession of poetry through trickery, bloodshed and theft. Of course, the giants themselves only gained poetry by coercing it from the dwarves... and so it goes.

Sunday Round-Up

The last of the cicadas in Central Park, the first of the goldenrod and asters, air so clear I think I can see the picture on the wall of the apartment over there across the East River... fall is coming...

Random leaves plucked from the air...

* Gary Go released his first album in May in the U.K.-- it's available stateside now. I've been humming "Wonderful" for two days straight...a sweet, gentle reminder that life is, in fact, wonderful: "We are miracles/Wrapped up in chemicals/We are incredible/Don't take it for granted."

*"Textural Rhythms: Constructing the Jazz Tradition -- Contemporary African American Quilts" is at the American Folk Art Museum through October 11. To quote the museum: "The sixty-four textiles....illustrate a broad range of techniques and inspirations and examine the importance of faith in the work of the fifty-five participating artists (including four men). Viewers are able to see, hear, and feel jazz through the quilts on view. Some quiltmakers pay homage to their favorite musicians, others interpret their favorite song; yet another group reflects on the role jazz has played historically in the formation of African American identity."

* Mandala: The Perfect Circle is at the Rubin Museum through January 11, 2010. Per the museum, the exhibit "explores the various manifestations of these objects, simultaneously explaining their symbolism, describing how they fulfill their intended function, and demonstrating their correlation to our physical reality. An important part of the exhibition is the focus on the complex symbolism of the number five, which plays an important role in Tantric Buddhism. This pentarchy is found in the spatial references of the five directions (the four cardinal points and the center), the five elements, the five colors, the five aggregates, the five wisdoms, and the five Transcendent (Tathagata) Buddhas."

* Photographer Richard Barnes is one of those people I wish I had as a neighbor. His first monograph, Animal Logic, was published last week by Princeton Architectural Press. I cannot wait to get it. As the book blurb notes, Barnes "has spent more than ten years documenting the way we assemble, contain, and catalog the natural world. Barnes's behind-the-scenes photographs are haunting reminders that there is nothing natural about a natural history museum. [...] Barnes peels back layers of artifice to reveal the tangle of artistry, craftsmanship, and curatorial decisions inside every lifelike diorama and meticulously arranged glass case."

6+ 1 Interview: Kate D. MacDowell

Kate D. MacDowell hand builds porcelain into figures (birds, rabbits, human hands, nests) that one is certain will move. But they won't, will they? Truncated, stripped back as if on the anatomist's table to reveal transposed organs and misplaced skeletons, these creatures are gorgeous grotesques, chimerae, small fragile renderings of death.

For more images and her resume, see Kate's website.

Here's what Kate told the lobster and the canary:

"I fell in love with clay as soon as I first started working with it about four years ago. Prior to that I taught English to high school students and produced websites for hi-tech companies. Although I had just finished a year and half working at a meditation retreat center in rural India, it wasn’t until stopping off in Italy for several weeks on the way home that it fully hit me that making artwork was not an indulgence but served a vital need. I’ve been lucky to be able to work in the studio full-time since then, and continue to collect visual imagery and ideas from travelling to Classical Greece, Nepal and Thailand, where I almost never take pictures, but just absorb".

Thanks Kate, and now for your questions.

Question 1: You pass finally through the hedgerows, after walking the smuggler's trace between hawthorn, rowan and bramble, scrambling over the thorn-brakes and out of blind sumps, where the windle sang mockingly and iridescent flies flocked 'round your face. At last you reach the meadow, in sunlight, and hear the sound of horns off distant hillsides. A huge oak stands alone in the middle of the meadow. At its roots is a bronze box, whose key hangs from a nail driven into the tree. What do you find when you open the box? How do you share your discovery with the rest of us?

Kate answers: I'm inclined to take this question literally as my in-law’s live at the end of a Viking/Smuggler's trace on the Isle of Man. What I have found on or around that trace in the past include: a rooting hedgehog, a jogger-attacking billy goat, a tiny shrine with a Buddha and coins, the British farm odor of burning tires and fresh cow dung, and blooming gorse. In the bronze box I find some 10-shilling notes and a bottle of whiskey (galore!) found and hidden away after the wreck of the SS Politician. What do you mean share?

Question 2: I love the C.S. Lewis quote that heads the artist's statement on your website: "We do not want merely to see beauty...we want...to be united with the beauty we see...to become part of it." I think often of Lewis's use of the German concept Sehnsucht, impossible to translate fully into English, but connoting a sense of longing for places we have never seen (and that may or may not even exist), of loss, nostalgia, separation. Does Sehnsucht play a role in your creative process, and, if so, what triggers the yearning, where are you trying to take us?

Kate: Yes, I think so. I experienced this very strongly reading "Tintern Abbey" in college (and bursting into tears unexpectedly in my concrete bunker of a dorm in a noisy East Coast city) and soon after I left the US for Scotland to follow that feeling. But what I was looking for seemed always out of reach, even in the apparent wilderness of a hike in the highlands I would find myself longing to experience the primeval past.

The quality of our lives, the very way we perceive ourselves and find happiness is completely different when we are living closer to the natural world. Anyone who walks into a grocery store after a three-day backpacking trip feels the jolt. I'm trying to remind myself, and others, of feelings many of us had as children hunkered down on our bellies with the grass growing tall above our heads, pondering the world of the ants and inch-worms, or caught up in the tragedy of a dead sparrow on the sidewalk.

Question 3: Your work is self-described as in part a response to (here I paraphrase) human encroachment on and abuse of the rest of the natural world. Your work speaks deeply to me in this respect: each piece strikes a warning note, embodies a mute but eloquent admonition. I see your work as standing in (among other things) the vanitas and memento mori tradition exemplified by Dutch painters in the 17th-century, reminding viewers of our prideful folly and inescapable mortality. For instance, you "dissect" birds and animals to reveal a skeleton within...and go beyond the tradition by making the skeleton human within a non-human corpse. To what extent do you reference the Old Masters, old techniques, old tropes-- and why might you do so?

Kate: I do definitely reference old tropes and specific works. My art education has been largely experiential (wandering through museums in Rome, Paris, London, and Athens) rather than academic, except for a great art history survey course in college taught by an expert on Dutch painters of the 17th century….so I respond more to what I've seen in person and what has fascinated me. So far that has included a lot of work of the Italian Baroque, especially Bernini and Caravaggio.

I think right now I am approaching my work more as a kitsch artist might (as defined by Odd Nerdrum - not in the ironic sense), than a contemporary artist - in part because the themes you mention. The evocation of emotions such as intimate loss and grand tragedy, and the utilization of parables and myths fit more comfortably for me into pre-modern frameworks. I also study natural forms closely and attempt to sculpt them realistically by hand which for the most part has been out of fashion for the last century. I also really like contemporary environmental / land art a la Andy Goldsworthy so my approach may change.

Question 4: As you note, porcelain is strong but fragile-- the threat of shattering is ever present. In one of your signature pieces, Daphne, the nymph and tree are in fact shattered. Reminds me of the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, the imperative to repair a splintered world, glue back the shards of divinity. Tell us more about your choice of porcelain as your medium.

Kate: Fitting-- I first fell in love with it because I was carrying an elaborate finished and dry porcelain piece into the studio, and it bumped into a table and shattered into thousands of pieces on the concrete floor. I was briefly in shock and didn’t have anything better to do for several hours, so started picking up the tiny pieces and wetting the edges with a brush to stick them back to each other. You can't usually do this with dried clay, but with porcelain you can. I reassembled the piece after a day or so, and fired it with few ill effects. Porcelain still develops cracks more than any other clay body, but it also seems to offer more opportunities to patch and move on at various stages.

Esthetically, I first started working with porcelain because of its’ translucent qualities, when lit from within I could evoke the effect of an ultrasound or x-ray. I could also reference marble sculpture (classical and baroque), and draw the viewer's eye to the form rather the surface colors of the piece. A pure white piece also speaks to me of ghosts or negative space--it suggests something missing from the world.

Question 5: Your earlier works seem more explicitly narrative (for instance, Tyger, Tyger), while your current style is more lyrical. Also, you no longer paint the porcelain. Tell us about the evolution in your technique and form-making, and where you may be heading next.

Kate: My earlier body of work was a visual response to figurative language, in particular, an attempt to render into three dimensional space the imagery evoked by certain poems that had stuck with me over the years ("To his Coy Mistress" and "From the Republic of Conscience", for example) . I almost always started with a title before envisioning the piece, and I still am more comfortable with words than images. My sketchbook is full of sentences describing ideas for pieces rather than drawings. The technique change (from using color and a narrative approach) followed the change in thematic focus to environmental issues.

As I move forward I want to engage much more directly with the natural environment, either by placing and photographing groupings of work in wilderness settings (the artist Lotte Glob who lives in Scotland does some interesting things, or by doing larger multi-piece installations that create more of an immersive environment (for example, a ghost rainforest: a small room in which you are surrounded by trees, leaf mold, birds, and insects all rendered life-size from white porcelain). I'm not sure when this work will get made because of practical and financial considerations, but that's where I feel the pull.


Question 6: Your figures, both human and animal, are exquisitely rendered. What is your process? How do you structure-- or not-- your periods of observation and modeling? Do you sketch regularly, and then refer to your sketches? Do you use maquettes, make bozetti, use CAD-CAM or other digital visualization tools?

Kate: I really need to sketch out variations and make tiny maquettes more often in order to explore bringing more torsion and movement into my work (as Beth Cavener Stichner does – http://www.followtheblackrabbit.com/index_main.htm). I do sometimes make models but I usually have a very detailed mental photograph of the finished piece before I begin so I skip that step a lot.

The only modern technology I rely heavily on is the Google image search function -- I type in anything: “pigeon foot”, “dead mouse”, “frog deformity” and instantly pull up photographs from various angles. I have a dusty laptop cycling images and a pushpin covered wall of color prints whenever I'm working. I'm always looking as closely at photographic source images as possible. I work from life when I can, though a trout on a melting pile of ice in your studio is only bearable for a day or two. I rarely use or make molds although I do pick up texture by rolling clay over tiny leaves, for example. I usually build a piece solid and then hollow everything out to 1/4" thickness. The structural implications of putting together delicate and complicated natural forms are sometimes intriguing, sometimes maddening.

Lobster & Canary says: Your turn, Kate. Ask Lobster & Canary a question!

Kate: What do you recommend for the best books to listen to on mp3, disk, or tape while carving away in my basement studio for hours at a time? I love good character-driven fantasy and sci-fi (Bujold's Vorkosigan series and Song of Ice and Fire are my top choices so far primarily for cumulative length, quality, and ability to keep me sucked into the story and working through the night when necessary). But I have also had some great listens all over the map from children's books, to 18th and 19th century classics, to historical nonfiction.

Yinka Shonibare MBE

Alas, the lobster was too slow, the canary too distracted...they will miss one of the best shows in New York City this year, the Yinka Shonibare MBE exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (closing this Sunday).

Shonibare is one of the most original, thought-provoking artists at work anywhere in the world today...and his productions, while they may be "conceptual," are gorgeous.

Deeply humanistic, delving into the ethics of exchange and communication, Shonibare critiques and glosses everything from The Tempest to Dorian Gray, Fragonard to Goya. But his tableaux are utterly and unmistakably his own-- he has a signature style as sure and powerful as that of Magritte or Schwitters.

My words are weak. Listen to his instead in this interview in BOMB.

Better yet, listen to him speak on film, surrounded by some of his best work (from the "Prospero's Monsters" show at the Jas. Cohan Gallery, NYC, last year).

What Shonibare does with fabric is magic, wrapped around ideas that leave an astringent tang in one's mind. I am really sorry to miss the Brooklyn show.

Spectrum-- The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art

Last Saturday Deborah visited Spectrum-The Exhibition: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art at the Museum of American Illustration (housed at the Society of Illustrators in midtown Manhattan).

She was blown away by this incredible show, which closes October 17.

Among the many fabulous talents on display were this year's Hugo winner Donato Giancola, as well as Kinuko Craft and Tony DiTerlizzi. Deborah especially enjoyed meeting Charles Vess (who was very generous with his time) and catching up with Marc Scheff, a very warm spirit who she met at Worldcon.

Cinnamon Wakes: Blake, Arjuna, Poets House, and a Dragon by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Sunday morning musings over coffee, as the fall arts season begins:

The Morgan Library (at Madison & 36th, Manhattan) opened two days ago an exhibit I have been waiting for: William Blake's World: A New Heaven Begun . Over 100 works, including two watercolor series rarely shown: "The Book of Job," and illustrations to Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." [Ends January 3, 2010].

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art opens on October 17th an exhibit I dearly wish I could see but will most likely miss, since I live in NYC: Heroes & Villains: The Battle for Good in India's Comics. To quote the LACMA site: "This exhibition examines the legacy of India’s divine heroes and heroines in contemporary South Asian culture through the comic book genre. Indian superheroes and their archenemies are visualized from ancient archetypes that have long been depicted in traditional painting and sculpture, and are deeply ingrained in India’s historical imagination. In the twenty-first century new incarnations of ancient Indian gods and goddesses are made manifest as modern superheroes brought to Earth to vanquish the evil forces." [Closes Feb. 7, 2010]

Poets House, the world-class poetry library/center started in 1985 by Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Kray, holds the grand opening September 25/26th of its new building (in Battery Park City near Tribeca, Manhattan). Poets House has 50,000 books open to the public, and runs c. 200 poetry programs every year. An all-star roster of poets will read at the opening, including some of my favorites such as Cornelius Eady, Kimiko Hahn, and Galway Kinnell.

Which leads the lobster and the canary-- as we stir cinnamon into our coffee-- to note a good essay by Carl Phillips in the new issue of American Poet about Brigit Pegeen Kelly, "The Surreal is No Less Real." Phillips writes of Kelly (winner of the 2009 Academy of American Poets Fellowship):

"To persuade the reader, poem after poem, that the surreal is no less real than what we call the real, to argue for—successfully—something akin to spiritual vision side by side with the more common suspicion of anything but the cold hard facts—this requires a rare authority, at the level of intellect, to be sure, but also in terms of language and, especially evident in Kelly's work, sheer beauty. [...] Perhaps the best way to describe [her poems] might be these lines from Kelly's own "The Dragon," from her third book, The Orchard:

'...and the air
Was like the air after a fire, or the air before a storm,
Ungodly still, but full of dark shapes turning'. "

I gaze into my coffee cup, at the cinnamon streaks and roils, and think on Kelly's words...

Magicians Meet: Miller, Grossman in Conversation

On Thursday evening, Deborah and I enjoyed the lively, friendly and insightful exchange at Word, the independent bookstore in Greenpoint (Brooklyn), between Lev Grossman and Laura Miller. The main topic was Narnia and its influence on generations of readers, and specifically on readers-- like Grossman and Miller-- who go on to become writers.

Miller recapped and amplified her themes from The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia -- a book that captured neatly much of my own relationship to C.S. Lewis's wonderful but ultimately unsatisfying world. Miller is especially good in her discussion of how our relationship to a book or an author's work changes as we age. For instance, she referred to the trap of the adult reader "colonizing" (I think I recall her word correctly) his or her own childhood imagination. Her clear-eyed, honest approach as a critic, and as a traveler back to the texts that most influenced her as a reader, are what make her so compelling a thinker. I will be re-reading The Magician's Book very soon.

Grossman's The Magicians takes a similar tack in fictional form. I bought the book at the event, and will be reading it this fall, so cannot comment fully, but its conceit is arch. Grossman--a witty, fluid speaker--made many points on stage, each of which could fill a longish blog entry. He said, for example, that talking animals are all very well but why do we assume (as Lewis did) that they would have anything much interesting to say? A talking bear --per Grossman and who am I to disagree?--might just drone on endlessly about honey.

Tolkien and Rowling inevitably figured in their discussion, but looming much larger alongside Lewis was Ursula Le Guin. Grossman suggested that Le Guin was the first fantasy writer of note to break from a British voice and viewpoint, the first doing "reconnaissance" in worlds without a purely European premise. He said that the map of Earthsea looks to him like Narnia shattered by a hammer.

The other writer who cropped up in the conversation was Susanna Clarke, who Miller interviewed at length and who Grossman credited with re-inventing the genre altogether.

A delightful evening! Special thanks to Kelly Amabile, the events coordinator at Word, for organizing it.

6+ 1 Interview: Leslie Bartlett

Leslie Bartlett is a photographer-- or I might call him a finder of signs in the living stone, a teller of stories otherwise submerged in veins of granite. He has lived 40 years on Cape Ann in Massachusetts, the last ten of which he has devoted to exploring photographically the Cape's play of light and shadow on stone. Linger long over his work at Follow the Gleam. He has shown widely in the Northeast, including at Soho Photo in Tribeca, NYC this spring and currently at the Granite Museum in Barre, Vermont. Previously Leslie was a world-class juggler with Le Grand David And His Own Spectacular Magic Company -- Les photographed much of the amazing magic he helped create at the company.

Question 1: If you could be a weathervane, what would you be?

Leslie Bartlett:

[Leslie submitted the picture at the head of this post-- "Diana of the Tower," the 18-foot bronze statue made by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, placed atop the first Madison Square Garden in 1891, at which time it was the tallest point in Manhattan. Diana indeed moved as a weathervane on her lofty perch.]

Question 2: Your work is evocative on many levels, reminding me of the photography of Eliot Porter, the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Octavio Paz (whom you quote: "What is not stone, is light"). When you stand in the quarries, long before you raise the camera to your eye, what do you look for? More important,what feeling are you seeking to capture?

Bartlett:

"Would that it were the king
of Asine
we've been searching for so carefully on this acropolis
sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon
the stones."

George Seferis, The King of Asine

What I am looking for is the very gaze, the look before seeing, before understanding, the trace left upon the stone from centuries past. A return to fundamentals – Thomas Starr King is crucial to me, TSK wrote ‘The White Hills,’ the first annotated guide to the White Mountains, published in 1860. Not only did he identify scenic vistas, but outlined the feelings, emotions, poetry to be recited, thoughts to be entertained.

The capture is a return to a first viewing…Tristan to Isolde: ‘What, am I hearing light?

The captioning and titling of photographs in the 19th century hint at the direct , immediate experience I am looking for- such titles as

View from…., gaze across…

Re: Paz, here is a second poem which I used at the Cape Ann Museum show –

Wind and Water and Stone

"The water hollowed the stone,
the wind dispersed the water,
the stone stopped the wind.

Water and wind and stone.

The wind sculpted the stone,
the stone is a cup of water,
The water runs off and is wind.

Stone and wind and water.

The wind sings in its turnings,
the water murmurs as it goes,
the motionless stone is quiet.

Wind and water and stone.

One is the other and is neither:
among their empty names
they pass and disappear,
water and stone and wind."

("Wind and Water and Stone" by Octavio Paz, translated by Mark Strand, from The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987. Copyright 1979 by The New Yorker Magazine. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.)

One of the major influences for me has been David Jones ‘Anathemata,’ digging down below our backyards to the shared hardpan.

When I lecture these days, I often illustrate the typical SUV driver
holding a cell phone 'talking,'while 'looking' where they are driving. The conjunction of the two events does not lie in a middle,
the vague dislocation carries forward well beyond the moment and we
all suffer it.

So I've become more friendly with some of the Continental
Philosophers, especially Nancy's work, and the later works of Derrida as well. Philip Hadot comes to mind as well.

Simple proof, my show at the Cape Ann Museum 2007-2008 presented views of the Quarry walls to people who walked through the quarries daily, who grew up playing in the quarries, and they had never looked. There a ' stop to look.' Do we 'stop to see?' Not the same.

Look puts us in our place, and we see anew again.

Question 3: You have a precious talent for what I would call "reading human stories into nature," yet without anthropomorphizing your subjects. For instance, "Lady Zhao Jun Bidding Farewell over the Frontier" conjures up an entire epic rendered in granite as caught by your camera. Talk to us about how the stories emerge, how you find the fit between the rock, the light, and the narrative.

Question 4: At your recent Soho (NYC) gallery exhibition, you lectured on "A Thin Scratch of Time." We'd love to hear a short synopsis of your talk.

Bartlett: [A response to both questions 3 and 4]

I'm sitting out on the porch with the early morning salt air wafting
across my arms. The tactility of the cool ocean breeze, the slowness
of the currents hint at what it is like to dive down into deep time
deep space, "I cannot attain the intensity which is unfolded before my senses" - Cezanne. He's not talking so much about the mountain, he's talking about Bibemus Quarry. I touch my quarry walls with my hands,rake across the stone with my fingers - a rasping scrapping away, I smell the stone, the moss, the lichens ... "The immensity, the torrent of being in a single inch of stone (drop of water)" -again,Cezanne.

Our memories occupy space ("The Poetics of Space") we occupy but a thin scratch of time.

Mere pebbles left behind by the glacial moraines.

Question 5: The Impressionists often painted the same subject at many different times of day, to re-create the light in all its phases. Do you do that in your work? Tell us about the way in which light may change the surface of the rock, and how you seek to re-create each impression.

Bartlett: Yes, this coming weekend I am recreating William Gilpin’s ‘Gilpin 30,’ where he painted the same landscape 30 times over the course of a single day.

I’m photographing on Thacher Island off the coast of Cape Ann. The image you see on their website masthead is the focus for this effort. For imagery within the quarry I am sensitive to light temperature as it reflects on the stone, often dappled through foliage, the light becomes an equal element of the composition, no longer merely illuminating the surface but suggesting an immediacy, an immediate light without the need to edge, to define, to make comfortable, or dismissive of extended views.

Question 6: Many of the granite scapes you photograph remind me of paintings by Malevich and Klee. Which painters inspire you most?

Bartlett: Cezanne, Monet, Peter Prendergast, William Thon, Bernard Chaet

Question 7: Your turn! Ask me a question.

Bartlett: Yes your choice as weathervane?

Lobster & Canary [smiling]: Ah, well done, turn about is fair play... I shall serve up my response in my next post!

Fall Recommendations

After a late-summer hiatus, Lobster & Canary is back...eager for a fall of literary and artistic delights.

Here are some of the books we are looking forward to:

* The Other Lands, the second book in the Acacia trilogy by David Anthony Durham (due out September 15th). I heard David read a chapter from the new book at Readercon, and can only say that this effort promises to be as powerful as the first book in the series. At Worldcon, David deservedly won the John W. Campbell Award as best new author in the genre (he is, of course, already an accomplished writer of historical fiction).

* Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt, due out this month as well (Coffee House Press). I am reading the advanced reader's copy right now and it is marvelous, in all senses of the word. How to describe it? Like reading a painting by Klee, or eavesdropping on Eco's table-talk perhaps. Eerie, surreal, maybe more like a De Chirico painting now that I think about it...

* When Autumn Leaves by Amy S. Foster (out this fall from Overlook). I am reading the ARC-- if you like the work of Charles de Lint, Delia Sherman and Alice Hoffman, you will want to buy this book. Warm, funny, and sly...

* Ash by Malinda Lo.

* Silver Phoenix: Beyond the Kingdom of Xia by Cindy Pon (out April 28th, but I am backlogged!).

Plus, Canticle by Ken Scholes, and Bauchelain and Korbal Broach by Steven Erikson. Looking a little further ahead, into winter/spring 2010: Bestiary by Elise Paschen, and N.K. Jemisin's debut The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

Worldcon Report

Worldcon ("Anticipation," the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, August 6-10 in Montreal) was wonderful-- Deborah and I could not have had a better time. My parents even drove up to check out their very first con.

I do not usually talk about my own work at Lobster and Canary, but will break that rule this time (begging your indulgence!) because Chizine Publications (CZP) at the con debuted my first novel, The Choir Boats, illustrated by Deborah A. Mills.

More than that, this was CZP's coming-out party, as co-owners Sandra Kasturi and Brett Savory have extended their award-winning Chizine online magazine into book publishing. (The CZP team includes book designer extraordinaire Erik Mohr, hard-working publicist Matt Moore, and effervescent sales guru Jacques Filippi.) At Worldcon CZP also launched Horror Story and Other Horror Stories by Robert Boyczuk, Objects of Worship by Claude Lalumiere (illustrated by Robert Bottenberg), Monstrous Affections by David Nickle, The Tel Aviv Dossier by Lavie Tidhar & Nir Yaniv, and The World More Full of Weeping by Robert Wiersema. All of us CZP authors were in Montreal for the launch, and what a launch it was! We had steady traffic at the dealer's table, and our Saturday evening launch party was madly popular.

The Choir Boats and all the other CZP titles above are available for pre-order here, and will be shipped in September.

At the risk of inadvertently leaving someone out and in no particular order, let me thank the many colleagues and friends who supported the launch with kind words at the dealer's table and/or their happy attendance at the party: Delia Sherman, James and Kathy Morrow, Nora Jemisin, Matt Kressel, Ellen Kushner, Cory Doctorow, Robert Silverberg, Leah Bobet, Greer Gilman, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Ursula Pflug, David Hartwell, John Kenny, David Anthony Durham, Farah Mendlesohn, Stefan Hoegberg, Marie Bilodeau, and Daniel Duguay. For the many others I fail to name here, please forgive--the con was quite a whirlwind and my notes got sketchy already by the second day!

Other highlights included:

* Greer Gilman reading an excerpt from Cloud & Ashes; Three Winter's Tales.

* Cat Valente reading her World Fantasy Award-nominated "A Buyer's Guide to Maps of Antarctica."

* A panel moderated by Faye Ringel on "Theorizing the Roots of the Fantastic," which--among other things--demonstrated that serious academic criticism can be delivered with flair and humor as all four panelists gave us insightful papers leavened with warmth and spirit. The panelists were: Greer Gilman, Laura Wiebe Taylor, Jeri Zulli, and Neil Easterbrook.

* Neil Gaiman reading an homage to Jack Vance and then one of the creepiest love letters ever.

* "Rainbow Futures," a panel on how media SF deals (badly or not at all, for the most part) with gay and lesbian characters. A lively and thought-provoking session, with panelists including Cat Valente, Cecilia Tan, and Lila Garrott-Wejksnora.

* Nora Jemisin reading a chapter from her forthcoming debut, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

The Choir Boats official launch party on Boing Boing

How exciting! My wife Deborah and I are mentioned on Boing Boing today in connection with my novel's official launch party at Worldcon next week. ChiZine Publications is holding a shindig launching no less than five books! Come and see us there, it's going to be a swell party.

Here's the official invitation - see you there.

Jack Vance Featured in the New York Times

Check out the lovely article about master fantasist Jack Vance in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine:

"The Genre Artist," by Carlo Rotella.

Readercon 20: Greer Gilman, and More

For Lobster & Canary, the highlight of Readercon 20 was co-Guest of Honor Greer Gilman reading from her long-awaited Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales, and listening to her being interviewed by Lila Garrott. Gilman is a singular constellation, a unique voice in American letters whose attention to language rivals that of Joyce and Nabokov. I urge readers to delve into Gilman's world, savor the wine she has patiently produced for us (a rich, multi-layered Burgundy or Cahors).

Other high points included:

* David Anthony Durham reading from The Other Lands, the sequel to Acacia: The War with the Mein.

* Ellen Klages's wickedly acerbic wit on an excellent panel with Paolo Bacigalupi, Leah Bobet, Tui Sutherland, and Gayle Surrette on the prevalence of dark and downbeat endings in YA fiction.

* Mary Robinette Kowal demonstrating with verve how puppetry can serve as a model for speculative fiction (or, as Mary suggested, why use the euphemism "spec fic"? Call it science fiction or fantasy, and be proud to do so!).

* Samuel Delany and David Hartwell on an insightful panel about academic criticism ("the good, the bad, and the ugly") of fantasy/science fiction sketching the history of the genre.

* The Sybil's Garage reading organized by publisher Matt Kressel (full disclosure: I was a participant, but I enjoyed it primarily for the wonderful pieces read by the dozen fellow contributors present and the warm reception by the audience).

* The dealer's room, a.k.a. The Cave of Wonders, populated with the independent presses and specialty booksellers that are the field's backbone. The newest chapbook, the most obscure collector's item, and everything in between, all served up by and for the cognoscenti.

* As always, a fascinating souvenir book, including especially good contributions by Michael Swanwick and Michael Dirda about Hope Mirrlees, a recovery of the genius of Stanley Weinbaum, and articles on Gilman and her co-Guest of Honor Elizabeth Hand.

* Finally, but above all, the hallway conversations with so many of the authors Lobster & Canary treasures, from the veterans such as Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner to the newer voices such as Leah Bobet, Veronica Schanoes, JoSelle Vanderhooft, and K. Tempest Bradford.

Readercon

Deborah and I just got back from the glorious feast that is Readercon. More on that in the course of the week, along with an interview with gifted photographer Les Bartlett, a review of a gorgeous new children's book, and some comments on the James Ensor show at the MoMA. I hope you'll come back to us at Lobster & Canary.

6 + 1 Interview: Lisa Kaser

He Was a Bona Fide Fan - © Lisa Kaser

Artist Lisa Kaser (click on her name for her marvelous website) tells us about herself:

I was and am a fortunate person I think, and not entirely because I grew up in Oregon. My folks are of a creative disposition and introduced me to museums and imaginative people and an ample supply of paper as part of my upbringing. Constantly conjuring ideas that I had to find ways of realizing was just the way I operated. Sometimes I feel that I could have gone in many different directions and been completely happy--a cook, a farmer, a dancer, a filmmaker, an animal care-giver, a writer, a nurse, an architect but something early on steered me in the direction of the visual arts and I have been happily creating what I do for twenty-five years.

Lobster & Canary 1. You enter the forest by way of a gate (rumored to be made by goblins), and after an hour or so, you come upon the meadow in the midst of those woods. You stop and lay out a picnic, bringing forth jam and cheese, kippers and freshly baked bread from your rucksack. Then you wait for your guests to join you for lunch. Who are they, how do you know them, what do you talk about?

Tuesdays Were Reserved for Sharing Recipes -© Lisa Kaser

Lisa: What an inspired setting! I would love to be joined by my favorite architecht, Terunobu Fujimori, my maternal grandmother, Ottilie Louise Joedeke, musician, Patti Smith, author and illustrator of The Magic Pudding, Norman Lindsay, sculptor, Theo Jansen, my mother as a child, creative, Maira Kalman and if one isn't already present in this lovely imagined landscape, a 2000 year old cedar tree.

Hearing everyone tell a favorite funny story would be a nice way to start, then I would just settle in to listening to what everyone is up to, what caught their eye recently, what do they like to cook or eat, what fires their imagination, an incident they will never forget, just sitting all together, touching knees, grass between our fingers, grazing shoulders, seeing who hums first...

L & C 2. Your style is so completely your own, your figures so immediately recognizable as part of your world, that I can only compare you in your uniqueness to, say, Sempe or Tove Jansson. When did the signature elongated noses and ears, for example, first enter your graphic vocabulary?

Lisa: My early saved drawings show large round heads, large oblong noses and two teeth emerging from under the nose with a wisp of hair on a great bald crown! The ears came later. I also started tucking the arms behind because I felt I couldn't draw hands, but that stance is something I still love--it is such a thoughtful pose-though now I love to draw hands too. So, this is how I drew from around the age of four on and always characters. I never delved into realistic renderings, and when I did, they were not very interesting or good. Okay, I do draw houses and house plans. This is an obsession I have had all my life and I do straghforward renderings of these, but houses are the exception! My father is a cartoonist, so I'm sure I was influenced by all his drawings and he had an Herb Gardner, Nebbish in his studio which I openly coveted. I have very distinct memories of drawing that big circle for the head, then I would join the body-nobody got a neck-and it is basically how I assemble my characters today.

Filbert's Toothbrush and Myron's Maiden Flight - © Lisa Kaser

L & C 3. Tell us about your first children's book, published in 2008? How did working on an entire book differ from doing an individual painting or print?

Lisa: It was a bittersweet experience. It was so exciting to be finally working on a legitimate book project and "The Three Little Pigs" was a great story to be asked to do. Sadly, I reined in my style and took a more conservative approach. Drawing for an intentional audience felt very different or so I thought it was different. All of a sudden I was thinking about these little seven year old Korean children, trying to learn English and being introduced to this tale told through my pictures and it made me a little nervous! That is one huge difference about drawing for myself, it is pure fun, and doesn't hold an ounce of anxiety or doubt as I never worry about what people might think. So, kind of a night and day experience of creating illustrations. At least I will know next time that I will only feel good in the end if I keep it strange and true to what I like.

L & C 4. You work in several media: painting, prints, textiles, sculptures. What is the same, what different, as you move from one medium to another?

Lisa: All my work in college was abstract or color driven compositions, and I still maintain some of that in my felts and fabric constructions,especially the importance of color, though more and more of my emphasis is devoted to narrative driven ideas with characters as the focal point. I am also a tactile freak, I think that is why so much of what I work in is textural and why I am so attracted to felt, even the collaged drawings have a certain depth that releases it from a traditional two-dimensional format.

L & C 5. You make your own prints, using archival ink and paper. Talk to us about the artisanal aspect of what you create.

Lisa: One aspect that is consistent between mediums is that I am emphatic about the process being evident and that simple constructive means are applied. I like the cut edges of the collaged pieces to be apparent as well as some of the initial drawing and pencil work left in my illustrations. My textile pieces are handsewn because I like the mark that handstitching produces and I love the physical act of sewing-needle, thread and cloth- so simple but it can exemplify the the most subtle of nuances. This applies to my sculptural work too. The armatures are made from steel bristles I collect on my walks that the street sweepers leave behind--these I bend and form with pliers and an anvil and secure with waxed linen thread. From there, I carve, stitch or fabricate the rest, finishing with layers of beeswax which supports and enhances the materials I use. Quality workmanship and thoughtful design are what I strive for--this makes for an aesthestically successful piece.

Her Heart Remained True to Pig - © Lisa Kaser

L & C 6. I love the way you conjure an entire story with a single image and your brilliantly conceived titles: "Mouse Offers Advice as Fish Adapts," "The Passion in Her Ganache was Unprecedented," "Tuesdays were Reserved for Sharing Recipes," "Grandpa's Teeth Gave Madeline the Confidence She Needed," and so on. Your juxtaposition of image and text reminds me of the European Renaissance emblem books and 18th-century collections of aphorisms. Which comes first for you: the image or the text?

Lisa: Usually the image. The characters come together, then how they are relating to one another or how a character just relates in the space, and I keep it pretty simple. I use minimal props. From there an idea will arise, something that will jell the whole together. The thing is, there is never a hard rule. I'll hear somebody say something, or read a great passage, come across a strange word or in conversation come up with an idea I like and then the words conjure the image. So a whole different intention occurs, but the end result is the same.

Lisa asks Lobster & Canary a question:

Okay! I am fascinated by your affinity towards the fantastical. When did you develop or recognize that an other-worldly realm would occupy your imagination? When did it become significant for you and how so?

Lobster & Canary: I have always, from my beginning I think, been entranced with the other-worldly. One of my very earliest memories-- I may have been four years old, possibly five or so-- is of poring over the picture-books of Norse and Greek myths by the D'Aulaires, in the middle of the night (I was one of those kids who read until all hours), lost in the reality I found on those pages. (I am delighted that the New York Review of Books classics series has brought the D'Aulaire books back into print.) From that same time comes also the memory of reading Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. My father is a great storyteller, and used to make up all sorts of wonderful tales. My mother shared-- and continues to share-- a deep love of fairytales and folklore. So, I am one of the proverbial acorns that falls close to the tree!

That tells you "when" and "what," but nothing about "why." The attraction for me has to do with the search for what Gerald Manley Hopkins called "the inscape," the unique, authentic spirit within each thing. Susan Sontag, from another angle of approach, argued for a similar search, when she talked in "Against Interpretation" about a need to re-capture the magical, incantatory experience of art. Paul Klee knew about this, so too I believe the Mughal painters of miniatures, the West African sculptors in bronze, Mozart, Miles Davis, the Dutch still-life painters...

For me the point is reuniting with a prelapsarian state that is paradoxically forever aspirational. A place where metamorphosis is natural, hybridization the norm, and everyone (including the birds and beasts!) speaks the same tongue. A place where my "I" can ultimately rest knowing that the story will continue. A.S. Byatt discusses this theme in her superb essay, "Old Tales, New Forms," in which she highlights the evergreen power of myth and fairytale, noting its influence on the work of Rushdie, Blixen, Calvino, Bufalino, Nooteboom, Carter, Sebald and others.

Byatt puts matters so well that I can not do better than quote her to conclude my response to your question, Lisa:

"Children read stories as though they themselves are infinite and immortal. The old read tales knowing that they themselves are finite, that the tales will outlive them."

Interview 6 + 1: Zina Brown

Karsh Kale - GK2 (Director Zina Brown) from Zina Brown on Vimeo.

Zina Brown is a director and producer of music videos and short films with his production company, Thousand Names Productions. A Midwest native, he now lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he likes to dream about other worlds, make magickal elixirs, and occasionally pretend to be a pirate. (You can see his video work at www.thousandnames.com)

Lobster & Canary 1. You "discover" a new species of parrot in the Amazon, brilliant blue with red feet, sweetly whistled call, very caring of its nestlings...but carnivorous, known to swarm and strip capybaras of their flesh in minutes. What do you call the species, and why?

Zina Brown:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you: Amazona Splendens Nex: The Bird of Beautiful Death!

Careful now, not too close to the cage! Yes, you'll all get a chance to see, please be patient!! *Ahem*.. Already known to Amazon natives in legend as the "Pretty Flesh-Stealer", this is the first live specimen ever captured and brought back to display in civilization. He's quite a feisty one, as you can see! You'll first notice his astounding, almost shimmering array of coloring - it is said he uses this color to attract his mate, which he will breed with for life. Easy there, fellow! Now other species of Amazonian parrot have similar coloring, but that, ladies and gentlemen, is where the similarity ends.

If I may direct you to take notice of his unique beak.. look closely... please, keep your hands away from the cage! You'll notice the fine, razor-sharp serration on each edge of his small but powerful beak. This is used by our feathered friend here... to neatly cut through the warm flesh of its mammalian prey! No, no nuts and seeds for this bird, ladies and gentlemen - this deadly bird has a taste for blood. Native legends say the spirits of human sacrifices come back as these monstrous birds to terrify villages and satiate their thirst for revenge!

Now, if you'll all just take a step back, I'll show you the true nature of this seemingly beautiful creature. That's it, a little further.. further... thank you. Howard, the raw steak please? There now. Who's a hungry birdy? Who's a hungry birdy? Now watch what happens, ladies and gentlemen, as I open the cage just enough for out friend here to get a whiff of thisAAAAAAAAAAAGGAHHHA!!! GET IT OFF!!!!! GET IT OFF!!!!! AAAHHG!!! DON'T JUST STAND THERE!!! HELP ME!!!! HELP ME!! HELP MAAGHH***.....”

L & C 2. Your imagery is brooding, mysterious: a desolate factory-scape inhabited by what may be crippled gods and indifferent angels, ogres rising from the rubble, a monstrous hedgehog. With your typical heroine trapped and wandering through this tightly enclosed and threatening world, you capture the primal power of fairytale. Tell us about the sources of your inspiration.

ZB: My first and foremost inspiration has always been my dreams – since I was young I have always had a very active dreamlife, and the wonderous things I see and the adventures I find myself on are a continual source of creative inspiration for me. Aside from that, I’ve also always had an insatiable thirst for and actively sought out the strange, the fantastic, the beautiful, and the nightmarish my whole life - in books, in history, music, movies, visual arts, places, animals, plants… and especially my friends. So much has had a profound impact on me – but I’ve always thought that the world is overflowing with magick and wonder, hiding just beneath the surface of an ‘ordinary’ world…

L & C 3. Your work reminds me of Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, Caro & Jeunet's City of Lost Children, and Northfork by the Polish Brothers. Do you find the comparisons apt? Which other contemporary filmmakers grab your attention?

ZB. Indeed. I especially love Del Toro and Jeunet's work – their visions are so unique, so detailed in their execution – it’s amazing. I think we definitely share a love of things that can be very dark, and yet still beautiful. I’m also astounded by the work of Zhang Yimou – his brilliant visual palette and work with his actors, both with emotion and incredible physical choreography, never ceases to amaze me. Another director I’ve always loved is Miyazaki – he’s a genius, and his animated films are creative masterpieces – while still speaking to the child in all of us. And Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men completely blew me away, too..

L & C 4. Experimental filmmaker and theorist Hollis Frampton wrote: "A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know it is until we have met it face to face." Do you agree with Frampton?

ZB: I do. However, I’ve always found personally that the narrative elements of film were inevitably the most important to me – the elements of storytelling, which is arguably the oldest art form we have. I think that is what really gets to the heart of the audience the most, more than any visual flash and bang you can conjure. That’s why I always try to include a narrative element, a little story, in each of my music videos – I want the viewer to come away with something to think and wonder about..

L & C 5. I really like the fact that you create atmosphere and character through well-selected settings, bodily motion, and costumes, as opposed to computer-generated effects. Talk about how you do this. I sense that your collaboration with puppeteer and costume-maker Randy Carafagno figures in this somewhere.

ZB: I’ve always thought that no matter how perfect CG effects get, I’ll always prefer the real, live thing, be it a amazing location or a crawling demon-monster. There’s just something about seeing something you know is actually there, as opposed to a trillion 1’s and 0’s inside a computer somewhere, that I think will always be irreplaceable. Not that I dislike CG altogether, I just think we’ve gone a bit overboard with it generally. I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy especially was an amazing example of how you can combine live-action costumes, sets, and locations with CG and create a perfect balance.

I’ve so far been lucky in finding fantastic locations to shoot in, from the Badlands to run-down old churches. The Karsh Kale video, for example, was shot over 3 days in an abandoned power plant from the 1920’s. It was a crazy shoot – we had no safety gear whatsoever, crawling around on these rusty catwalks 50 ft. in the air, surrounded by asbestos and who knows what else. But it looked incredible! And my costumers, Randy Carfagno and James Vogel, worked insane hours on the costumes for that shoot to create the creature we wanted. I’ve always loved costumes – I love to transform my actors into things I see in my dreams, be it a Dark Faerie Queen, a dancing star-goddess, or a fierce fire demon...

L & C 6. What projects are you working on now?

ZB: We’re just putting the finishing touches on a new music video for the amazing Kai Altair. We made her into a kind of gypsy sorceress, dancing in a cross between an old silk route caravan ‘tent’ and a 19th century Parisian opium den, and she summons a powerful goddess in her scrying pool… It should be done and up on my site in about two weeks!

L &C 7. Your turn! Ask Lobster & Canary a question!

ZB: If you could see a film made based on an actual dream you’ve had, which would it be…? Anything goes!

L & C responds: Like you Zina I dwell partly in my dreams, in the magical place Maurice Sendak calls "The Night Kitchen." Most of my most powerful images and ideas come to me in the hours just before dawn, and I have kept a dream journal intermittently for decades. I have dreamed the following in various versions many times over the years, and would love to see it as the core of a short film.

I am standing on a stone balcony about thirty feet above the ground. Behind me is an empty, shadowed chamber with a massive, long-disused fireplace (big enough to roast a horse in), flanked by two dull black iron doors that I can never open no matter how hard I try. I must stare, like Rapunzel, out into an evening mist...a mist that slowly seeps away to reveal a dark forest of fir and beech marching down a slope that rings the (castle? fortress? temple?) from which the balcony protrudes.

No bird song, no wind, no sound at all.

As the mist pulls back, I see at the top of the slope-- which is just slightly above eye-level-- a tiger appear in the woods. Its body is elongated, lanky, ivory-colored with rusty stripes.

Another tiger appears, then another and another... until a dozen are spread out across the top of the hill, shining as Blake imagined them in the forests of the night. They stare right at me.

At the same time but without any signal that I can see, the tigers begin to descend the slope, winding through the trees with sleek and heavy grace. Slow, deliberate...stalking.

Now comes the strange part: as the tigers move through them, the trees uproot themselves and coil their trunks beneath their crowns, so that only the leaves and needles remain, floating stationary like green-black balloons behind the advancing tigers. Do you remember how the stockinged feet of the Wicked Witch of the East curl back on themselves and under the fallen house in the film version of The Wizard of Oz? That is what the trees do, only vertically...

The tigers mass at the bottom of the hill, at the wall just beneath the balcony. A dozen pairs of eyes glow up at me.

I cannot retreat. The doors behind me are forever locked.

The tigers crouch down and spring into the air as one...

The dream always ends with a dozen bone-colored tigers flying towards me, soundlessly, against a background of floating trees on the hillside.

Redefining Drawing:McKenzie gallery in Chelsea (NYC); The Drawing Center in Soho (NYC)

Umbilcumdom - © Julie Evans

McKenzie Fine Art in NYC's Chelsea has a superb group show running through August 7th called simply "Drawings," that re-frames our sense of what drawing can be. (Click here to see the entire exhibit.) Group shows are iffy matters, typically uneven in quality or disparate in theme, but in this case the works of all 22 artists on display are at the very least intriguing (many are arresting), and the overall effect is greater than the sum of its parts. Whether peering at each small piece on the wall, or surveying the room as a whole, the viewer is rewarded.

Most striking is the wide range of media, including the smoke used by Jim Dingilian on the insides of bottles (!). Little of what McKenzie has curated is figurative, most is abstract and frankly startling in its freshness...and its blurring of genre. For instance, the acrylic and gouache splatters by Julie Evans ("Umbilcomdum," "Ahmedabad") are painterly, and the same is true of "Dvitva" and "Burst" by Karen Margolis.

Dvitva - © Karen Margolis

Even when the drawing is figurative, it tends to be whimsical and impossible, such as Ruth Marten's elaboration on a 19th-century print of a "Norfolk Island Flying Squirrel," which has under her pen grown an excessively bushy tail, in which numerous other squirrels hide. Another example: Ruth Waldman's vocabulary is recognizable--fences, creepers and trumpet vines, pipes, conveyor belts and sprinklers-- but she scrambles the syntax: the main impression is more rocaille than industrial.

The Drawing Center in NYC's Soho hosts until July 23 a real rarity: a major show by the Surrealist Unica Zuern. Happily-- especially given Zuern's unhappy life, marked by institutionalization and her suicide-- the show has been widely acclaimed. See, for instance, Ken Johnson's New York Times review and Lauren O'Neill-Butler's Artforum review.

Unica Zürn, “Untitled,” 1961. © Brinkmann & Bose Publisher, Berlin.

As with most of the artists at the McKenzie show, Zuern stretches our thinking about what drawing is meant to be. Her creations are amoeboid, tendrilled, densely feathered and herringboned, punctuated with eyes, like something out of H.P. Lovecraft's universe. I think these drawings were Zuern's psychological scaffolding during her periods of mental breakdown, though they were also presentiments of her final action (the show is entitled "Dark Spring" after the illustrated novel she produced not long before she killed herself).

Beyond our speculations about the psychology of Zuern's drawings rests the concrete evidence of her craft: the flow and zip and sluicing of ink raises these above mere doodles, becoming an untrammeled and exceedingly personal form of calligraphy.

Response to Erzebet: A Coda

Erzebet's question on the continuing allure of folklore and fairy tales, and the Bacchilegga quote in the previous post about the mutual influence of the oral and literary on and through fairy tales, sent me to my bookshelves for some examples. Anderson and Hesse, Tieck and von Eichendorff, Collodi and Calvino, Marguerite Yourcenar, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Tanith Lee, Patricia McKillip, Marina Warner, Jeanette Winterson...all obvious choices as exemplars of mastery of the literary form.

I remembered Erich Fried, whose poems--dealing with very modern themes in Germany in the decades after 1945-- often include allusions to fairytales: "The Tree Princess Speaks," "The Three Questions," "The Helpful Birds," "The Elf-Hill."

Here's Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni opening her The Palace of Illusions, a luscious retelling of the Mahabharata from the princess Panchaali's perspective:

"Through the long, lonely years of my childhood, when my father's palace seemed to tighten its grip around me until I couldn't breathe, I would go to my nurse and ask for a story. And though she knew many wondrous and edifying tales, the one I made her tell me over and over was the story of my birth."

And Aminatta Forna from her Ancestor Stones, drawing on her childhood in Sierre Leone:

"Hali! What story shall I tell? The story of how it really was, or the one you want to hear? I shall start with my name, but that is not as easy as you think. I have been known by many names. [...] ...we never change the names that tell the world who we are. The names we are called by, yes. These ones may change."

And here's Rabih Alameddine, starting his tale of modern-day Lebanon The Hakawati (which means "The Storyteller"), braiding the distant past with the immediate present:

"Listen. Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.

A long, long time ago, an emir lived in a distant land, in a beautiful city, a green city with many trees and exquisite gurgling fountains whose sound lulled the citizens to sleep at night. Now, the emir had everything, except for the one thing his heart desired, a son."

"A long, long time ago..." The unspecified, translucent, cyclical time of fairy tale...I sometimes picture it as the cigar-smoke that a brandy drinker blows into the snifter, drifting slowly inside the glass, swirling within the curved sides above the sweet-stinging liquor.... sometimes I picture it the way Margaret Atwood does in the third paragraph of her novel Cat's Eye:

"But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away."

Even when an author writes a "modern, realistic" novel, the "long ago" of fairytale is the default, the foil implicated, implied and always to be defined against, as in the opening of Joyce Carol Oates's You Must Remember This:

"Not once upon a time but a few years ago. Last year. Last week. Last Thursday. On Union Street, on Cadboro, up in the Decker project, up behind the high school in that alley. In Kilbirnie Park. Out by the reservoir. In the middle of the night, at six in the morning. In broad daylight."

Oates understands the power of fairy tale, framing her novel of family life in an industrial town in 1950s upstate New York as not-a-fairy tale ("don't think of an elephant"), thus triggering for the reader all the tropes known from before you could read on your own, the tropes learned as you listened to fairy tales. The novel's next paragraph includes rumours of abortion, incest, exile, infanticide and mass murder by a modern-day Blue Beard, a runaway girl, coerced sex, torture, a "living skeleton"....

The endless, horrified fascination with fairytale in a nutshell: because werewolves really do roam the woods, Bluebeards do build and populate bloody chambers, witches test for plumpness on children's fingers, princes bleed to death on thorn-trees.

Response to Erzebet: Fairy Tales

Erzebet's Question to Lobster & Canary:


When left to my own devices, my mind will always turn to my first literary love. In this jaded day and age, one might think that fairy tales are too quaint to be much of a force in the literary world, and yet they flourish around us. What is it about fairy tales that give them their eternal allure?


Lobster & Canary's Response:

I too turn constantly back to folktales and their literary cousins-- they're the aquifer feeding the lake of story. Many elements give fairy tales their evergreen allure; let me offer comments on just two: the form's plasticity, and its focus on the need to conquer the threat of intimate violence.

The fairy tale's deceptively simplistic plots, tropes and characterizations allow for a vast array of narrative twists and turns and even diametrically opposed outcomes upon each re-telling. Ironically, it seems that the more specific the detail, the more complex the characterization, the more mimetic the narrative altogether, the smaller the range of plausible interpretations a story can bear. Like the trickster, the hame-shifter, and the hob-trot, the fairy tale straddles boundaries, appears one way at dusk and another at dawn, at home everywhere while refusing categorization (pace Aarne & Thompson, and Propp).

As Cristina Bacchilega writes in Postmodern Fairytales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (p.3, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999):

"As a 'borderline' or traditional genre, it [fairytale] bears the traces of orality, folkloric tradition, and socio-cultural performance, even when it is edited as literature for children or it is marketed with little respect for its history and materiality. And conversely, even when it claims to be folklore, the fairytale is shaped by literary traditions with different social uses and users."

Fairytales deal above all with the most primal and horrific acts of familial and sexual violence. Fairytales force us to recognize and confront the Troll Within, the Witch lurking in our hearts, the Ogre housed within our marrow. I agree with Jack Zipes, when he answers the question about the enduring popularity of Little Red Riding Hood, this way:

"Simply put, because it raises issues about gender identity, sexuality, violence, and the civilizing process in a unique and succinct symbolic form that children and adults can understand on different levels" (p. 343, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd ed., Routledge, 1993).


(See also Karen Rowe's pathbreaking essays: "Feminism and Fairy Tales," Women's Studies 6-1979, and "To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tales," in Fairy Tales and Society, ed. by R.Bottigheimer, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986).

Likewise, Maria Tatar reminds us that fairytales-- far from being sweet and harmless-- are stark in their portrayal of horror: abandonment, cannibalism, rape, mutilation, incest, murder (see her The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, 2nd. ed., Princeton University Press, 2003). Their unflinching focus on depravity, their refusal to ignore the bestial side of human behavior, are precisely what give fairy tales their moral power, is the source of their perennial appeal. That, and the fact that fairy tales show how humans can defeat our worst natures, can civilize ourselves. Yes, the fairytale insists on a happy ending but only after the hero or heroine overcomes genuine pain and danger.

Hence the power of the eerie, blade-within-velveteen beauty in Angela Carter's fairytales, and of Margo Lanagan's gruesome, viscerally demanding "The Goosle" (one of the most harrowing but authentic stories I have ever read). Hence the success of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, telling the still-raw story of Spain's Civil War through the lense of the classic three tasks to gain the fairy-throne, sparing no wrenching detail of death and torture, recalling Callot's "Miseries of War" and Goya's "Disasters of War," whose peasant victims (and perpetrators) told the folktales that in turn influenced del Toro and del Toro's audience. Hence the glamour cast by the minatory whisper of Paula Bohince's "Disappearance" in The Fairy Tale Review's Green Issue:

"Crows dissipate when I shoo them
only to reappear, in minutes,
silent and silky as children touched and lurking
at the fringe, lingering there
outside the woods' honeyed doorway.

hurt spiraling through each
bramble and leaf where the raspberries live.

Some berries are too tender
for the wrestling of crows and children, their
limitless hunger. Thus the fruit
plunges heavily downward, and the children
also, into love's rabbit hole."

6 + 1: Interview with Erzebet YellowBoy

Erzebet YellowBoy is an artist, author, editor and bookbinder who works primarily in the fantasy genre. She oversees two small presses, edits two magazines (one in print and one online) and her second novel is scheduled for release in 2010. Her work is concerned with memory and transformation, and she loves fairy tales.


Question 1: Wrapped around the well of the knowledge at the end of the world (where one can see the moon and the stars half-shining in daytime) is a dragon of ancient reputation, armed with endless scepticism about human aims and desires. How do we overcome his scepticism and earn a drink from that well?


Erzebet: Simply appearing at the dragon's side should overcome his scepticism. After all, according to him we should never have got that far in the first place. If that doesn't work, counter his attack with some scepticism of your own - tell him you don't believe in dragons and see what happens. Maybe he'll vanish! Actually, I'm a big fan of scepticism. I don't believe it dulls wonder, I believe it can add to it. How can this be? Why is this so? Very often, the answers to these questions are more marvelous than the object of the questions themselves. Perhaps if the dragon can be made to see how fabulous he is, he'll drink from the well with us.


Question 2: You are a polymath, in the tradition of Blake or Morris. How does your work as a visual artist influence your writing, and vice versa?


Erzebet: At the most basic level, I wouldn't bind books if I didn't write stories, nor would I write stories if I couldn't bind them into books. I'm not sure how this happened or which came first, they both sort of developed together and are now inseparable. On another level, my work as a visual artist gives me insight into the creative process in general, which is a theme I think one can find in most of my writing. I like to think that my characters are engaged in the process of creating themselves. It's all the same really. We start with a foundation and add to it, building it up until we have a finished piece. It is often in the process of gathering physical material to work with - leaves, bones, etc. - that I come up with things like plot and characters, and sometimes my characters reveal new ideas concerning the making of books. It is almost impossible for me to think about writing and visual art as two distinct things at this point. It's a symbiotic relationship between the visual work and the writing and sometimes I'm sure I am only a tool of my art.


Question 3: In your debut novel, The Bone Whistle (written as "Eva Swan"), you used Native American imagery and ideas. Tell us about the connections between various tale traditions and the differences, and your experience writing these into a fantasy novel.


Erzebet: First I must make it clear that I used Lakota imagery and ideas, as opposed to the more general "Native American". That novel was inspired by my years on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where if you listen closely to the stories being told, you will notice that the line between what we think of as fantasy and reality is very thin, if it exists at all. We often think of "fairy lands" as existing sort of beyond the fields we know, in another place and time, separate from our own. That idea is in opposition to a worldview in which otherworlds aren't "other" at all, they are simply an extension of this one. In The Bone Whistle, I tried to combine the two, revealing an otherworld that lies beside this world. Most Lakota stories that I know are cautionary tales, old stories designed almost solely to aid in the survival of a family or group of families. I can't say The Bone Whistle falls into this category; it is more a story about accepting yourself and your culture, issues close to the heart of what it is to be a young Lakota today. I believe stories exist for two purposes: to instruct and/or to entertain. All stories have one or both of these at their core, so in that we can find similarities between Native American and European tales. What are sources of wonder in one set are often commonplace things in the other, but both sets hold to these purposes.


I have to say that any more of a comparative study is impossible for me. My experience with European tales comes primarily from written works that have a more global appeal. My experience with Lakota tales is almost entirely oral, in that I spent hours listening to family members tell me stories about (usually) other family members. In the true oral tradition, these tales were embellished with all sorts of fantasies, but only occasionally did the storyteller bring the tale out of the realm of the personal by adding in some of the more "tribal" elements. The one thing I tried very hard to do as I was writing The Bone Whistle was to treat the characters and their cultures with respect - some of those characters were modeled on my own family and the events that befell certain of the more adventurous of them. Other ideas, like the "ghosts", were removed from their cultural context and given a more European flavor, but even in that I tried to remain true to Lakota tradition.


Question 4: Prime Books is bringing out three of your novels: Sleeping Helena, Land of Dreams, and Grandmother's House. We'd love a preview!


Erzebet: Sleeping Helena is based on the tale of Sleeping Beauty, set in the Bavaria of King Ludwig II. It opens:



"Kitty was a tall woman, wide at the shoulder and heavy of thigh, who kept her white braids curled on top of her head, held in place by an army of pins. Her skin was a deep shade of sepia and she wore lipstick the color of those halfling cherries found lurking at the bottom of canned fruit-cup. She was sometimes forgiving and sometimes not. On the day of her grandniece’s christening she was not, and she knew just whom to blame for the grave insult.


The eldest of eight sisters, Kitty had been born blind. At the age of five she fell from a horse and into a coma that spanned seven long days. When she woke, Kitty could See. The spells that revealed the future to her were dreadful episodes, but none were as awful as she became as the years passed by. Kitty’s sisters often wished she’d never woken from her coma at all. Even so, none ever slighted her as they had done now. Kitty did not need an invitation to the christening, of course, but it still would have been nice to get one. It would have been right to get one. She was one of child’s grandaunts, was she not?"


Sorry, that's all you can have!


Question 5: What is your absolute dream project for Papaveria Press?


Erzebet: This is not an easy question to answer - there are so many! It would be a very selfish project in that I'd like to gather a collection of original stories from each of my favorite authors who deal in fairy tales, as well as illustrations from my favorite artists who do the same, and make a big book of fairy tales with an outrageous binding. Leather and brass and feathers and gems, medieval style, or perhaps I'd create my own style. I would like to make a book that acts as a source of wonder both outside and in. I do have a project underway, slow as snails, that is also very dear to my heart. I am working on a very limited edition of Thomas the Rhymer, with text from both the original ballads and from Ellen Kushner's book of the same name. The covers will be made of bark, the pages of leaves, and I've been gathering up the materials for this book for ages. As there is no real time in Fairyland, I can't say when this book will be done, but it certainly does qualify as a dream project - one dream that will eventually come true.


Question 6: At the end of your story "Moonstone" (in Mythic, ed. by Mike Allen), the wizard is the only one at court not shocked by the rebirth of the willow grove, since he "knew true magic when he saw it." From your vantage point as editrix of Cabinet des Fees and Jabberwocky, and a guiding light at the Interstitial Arts Foundation, what do you see as some of the "true magic" current and upcoming in fantasy and spec fic?


Erzebet: Magic can and will always be found in the stories being published. The true magic I am seeing is in the way authors today are embracing new media and using it to create methods of storytelling unheard of before the internet changed our lives. One of the reasons I fully support the work the Interstitial Art Foundation does is because it supports and encourages marginalized artists and authors and provides them with a forum which breaks the confines of genre and type. The arts, and by that I mean visual, performance, literary - all of it, are too often hindered by the more traditional methods of exposure and promotion, avenues which often remain closed to those of us whose work doesn't meet the expected criteria. Look to the Interfictions anthologies, I and II, for some of today's magic in the speculative fiction field.


Beyond all of that, another place I am seeing some real magic happen is in our authors' use of language. Writing has always, obviously, been a craft of language, but as far as I can tell most of the modern experimental writing (until recently) was happening outside of our field. I don't always agree that experimental writing equals good writing, but when it does we have something special on our hands. More speculative authors, I think, are playing with language, seeing where it can take them and their tales, and the results are some of the most interesting stories available. I'm going to show my bias now and admit that when it comes to "true magic", I see most of that happening in the realm of speculative poetry. It is there that I find the most heartening and mind-blowing works being published today.


Erzebet's Question to Lobster & Canary:


When left to my own devices, my mind will always turn to my first literary love. In this jaded day and age, one might think that fairy tales are too quaint to be much of a force in the literary world, and yet they flourish around us. What is it about fairy tales that give them their eternal allure?

Lobster & Canary is still pondering...and will answer Erzebet in tomorrow's post.

The Quarterly Conversation editorial: "Demise of Publishing"

The Quarterly Conversation produces very intelligent and wide-ranging commentary on literature--it's required reading, along with Rain Taxi and Bookslut.

TQC's issue number 16 just came out, but I am still mulling the excellent note from the editors in issue number 15: "On the Demise of Publishing, Reading and Everything Else." They offer the most succinct yet nuanced overview of The State of Letters that I have seen. Here's their conclusion:

"As with previous predictions of the demise of reading, it’s probably too early to tell. Reading on the Rise [L & C: the recent NEA survey] might be indicating a renewed interest in reading, or it might be statistical noise. Wait until 2014. Still, with Amazon, Sony, and other interested parties battling to sell you an ebook reader, with Google courting lawsuits in a headlong rush to digitize the world’s great treasure trove of books, and with American publishers churning out something on the order of 200,000 new titles in 2008, reading seems to not be in the perilous straits that some melancholics might believe."

Well said indeed!

For longer treatments of the same theme, see Geoffrey Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book and Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies. Related: Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," (Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008), Jamais Cascio, "Get Smarter (Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2009). The long view: Robert Darnton, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Roger Chartier and Alberto Manguel on the history of publishing and reading.

Answering Jessica's Questions

All day Lobster & Canary wrestled with Jessica's questions-- Lobster favored the one, and Canary the other, so of course in the end, we decided to answer both.

Jessica: 1) Someone suggested recently that literary bloggers would make great facilitators for author interviews, book clubs, or other events that could bring the virtual and physical book community together in a bookstore. Do you have any ideas or thoughts on ways that bloggers and bookstores could work together?

Lobster & C: Bloggers and bookstores are natural partners. Bookstores will, of course, blog on their own behalf, but third-party endorsement is always best. In practical terms, I think bloggers can provide the prep and the follow-up for live events at the store itself. Obviously I think the Web is wonderful...but ultimately nothing replaces an in-person reading, an in-person roundtable. We are primates: we need all the body language, the facial cues, the heat and the rhythm and intonations that only comes through in person.

Let's say that Colson Whitehead and Jhumpa Lahiri are scheduled to interview each other one evening at the Greenlight. Imagine if several bloggers were given the opportunity/right to help the two discussants prepare in advance, with input from blog readers. Imagine if the conversation then continues in cyberspace after the live event.

At the end of a year's worth of interviews, Greenlight and the bloggers could publish a book (paper and digital) of the series highlights...which could then be sold at Greenlight and other stores...which could itself become the object of blogging discussion, and so on. Literature is, after all, one endless conversation with infinite digressions.

Jessica: 2) CLOUD ATLAS is literally my favorite book, and I love all of the others you mention in question #3 [see yesterday's 6 + 1 post] -- so what have you read recently in that vein, and can you give me some reading suggestion?!?

L & Canary: Ah, why am I not surprised about your fondness for Cloud Atlas? Let me start by hoping that Greenlight will stock titles from the small presses that specialize in books that toy with, subvert, and straddle traditional genre boundries: Overlook, Coffee House, Small Beer, Archipelago, Chizine Publications, Senses Five, McPherson to name just a few. As for specific authors (some of whom I have not read recently but am prompted to re-read now that you ask): Wole Soyinka, Manohar Malgonkar, Cees Notteboom, Aminata Forna, Nalo Hopkinson, Harry Mulisch, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Nnedi Okarafor-Mbachu, Julio Cortazar, Emily Barton, Giorgio Manganelli, Jeanette Winterson, Alice Hoffman, John Crowley, Gregory Feeley, Jeffrey Ford, Jeff VanderMeer, and Kelly Link. Reaching back, I would include Angela Carter, G.K. Chesterton, Leonora Carrington, Oskar Kokoschka, Tristan Tzara. Oh, and let's make sure Ursula K. Le Guin is just about everywhere on the shelves!

6 + 1: Interview with Jessica Stockton Bagnulo

A very happy full disclosure: Lobster & Canary is proud to be a Founding Patron of and (in a very small way)a Community Lender to Greenlight Bookstore. Read on!

Preamble: Jessica Stockton Bagnulo is a big nerd about all things books and Brooklyn. She has worked in independent bookstores in NYC since 2000 and currently works as events coordinator at McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan. In September 2009 she will celebrate the long-awaited grand opening of Greenlight Bookstore, her very own bookstore (with fabulous partner Rebecca Fitting) in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She is a member of the board of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association and a founder of the ABA Emerging Leaders Project for mentoring young booksellers, and often speaks at book industry events on digital media, graphic novels, and author events. She blogs at The Written Nerd and the Greenlight Bookstore blog. She lives happily in Park Slope with an adorably literate husband.


L & C question 1. In A Voyage to Arcturus (published 1920), David Lindsay imagines and describes the colors "jale" and "ulfire." What color or colors would you discover for us, where would they fit on the spectrum?

JSB: Hmm, how about "efflorescent" (like yellow highlighter with champagne bubbles)? I should think of something greenish, for Greenlight... perhaps Greenlight itself could be a color, though I'm not sure if it's the exact quality of light through a tree's leaves at noon in full summer, or the tantalizing dark light at the end of a dock in West Egg.


2. What is the impetus behind Greenlight? What will differentiate Greenlight from other bookstores?


Greenlight is the culmination, for me, of a very long process that began when I realized that being a bookseller was the only job I would ever love, and somewhat of a calling for me. In trying to figure out how to make a living at that, I realized that I had a lot of ideas about how to make a great independent bookstore, and that I wanted to be a Proprietor someday. Since I had no capital whatsoever, I set out to learn everything I possibly could about the art and business of bookstores, about starting a business, and about the communities of Brooklyn where I wanted to open my store. Along the way, I wrote a business plan that won an award from the Brooklyn library, got in touch with the wonderful Fort Greene Association, and eventually connected with Rebecca, who had a very compatible vision of the perfect bookstore, and the nest egg and get-up-and-go to get things really going. All of these serendipitous factors, as well as my absolute certainty that this was what I was going to do with my life, were part of making it happen.

Greenlight won't be entirely different from other bookstores. Rebecca and I have 25 years of experience in the book business between us, and we're interested in bringing the best practices of the indie bookstore tradition to life in this store: well-read staff, great customer service, curated book selection, an emphasis on the local. At the same time, we intend to take advantage of every opportunity that the new retail environment offers, including smart design, e-commerce, social media, electronic books, etc. And we have the sense that the future of the bookstore is partly as a gathering place for the community of readers, whether it's around an author reading or a book club or a casual conversation. So Greenlight aims to bring together the best of the old and the best of the new, with an emphasis on community. And of course, we'll be different because of the community we serve: Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a diverse, literary, vibrant small town in the midst of the city. We love this neighborhood so much and can't wait to see how it shapes what Greenlight becomes.


3. How will you shelve the "genre books"? Conversely, where do you put fantastical tales by folks like David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas), Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish), Bharati Mukherjee (The Tree Bride), not to mention the perennial border-crossers such as Calvino, Eco, Borges, Kafka...?

I'm so glad you asked! Rebecca and I have this crazy idea that all fiction is created equal -- that it's nearly impossible (and essentially counterproductive) to separate mystery from "high literature" from science fiction from experimental fiction. There's so much good work that's being done using all kinds of conventions, fantasies, trope, and combinations that we'd rather just carry it all. So we're creating one giant fiction section that will shelve every non-nonfiction book alphabetical by author -- if Neil Gaiman ends up next to William Gaddis or David Mitchell ends up next to Margaret Mitchell, so much the better! We hope the joy of discovery (and the ease of finding things) will justify our quixotic quest to de-ghettoize genre fiction, and we'll be quick with recommendations if someone is looking for a certain type of author. We'll see how it works.


4. Any thoughts on how to make Greenlight a really great place for young readers (with or without their parents in tow)?

We've put a lot of thought into this, and are still doing so -- neither Rebecca nor I specialize in children's/young adult literature, though obviously we both grew up as readers. We're designing the store to have a large children's section, somewhat separated from the rest of the store, where parents and kids can browse together or sit and read. The young adult books will be between the regular fiction section and kids, so that teen/tween readers don't have to go into the "little kids" section to get the good stuff! We'll also have YA next to the graphic novels section, a particular favorite of mine and a great gateway drug for teen readers. Beyond that, we hope to offer young readers the same thing we do for any browser/buyer: books that are easy to find and easy to get lost in, plenty of seating for perusing at length, and a staff that can answer all their questions (we intend to hire a crackerjack children's book buyer). I'd love to work with local schools and other groups on programming for kids and teens, too -- we will most definitely have a weekly story hour, but that's just the beginning of the possibilities.


5. What sequel are you most hoping gets written?

Hands down, Susanna Clarke's sequel to JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL -- not a month goes by that I don't wish I could read that novel again for the first time, and rumor is that Clarke is at work on another novel that takes the characters from the first in a different direction and and adds others.. The short story collection THE LADIES OF GRACE ADIEU was a morsel of goodness from that imaginary England, but not nearly enough.



6. Greenlight is a project rooted in the Fort Greene community-- tell us more about that.

As I mentioned, I hooked up with the Fort Greene Association after my business plan got some media attention. As it turned out, they had recently done a survey of neighborhood residents asking what kinds of retail they thought the neighborhood needed -- and the number one choice, across all demographic lines, was a bookstore. I love this because it demonstrates not only what a bookish neighborhood Fort Greene is, but also that the neighborhood is making choices to grow in a conscious and sustainable way and avoid some of the pitfalls of gentrification. Anyway, the FGA folks threw us a party last September just to introduce the bookstore project to the community and demonstrate their support -- over 300 people came, and we made connections with architects, authors, designers, and a lot of folks that became our community lenders. Take a look at the Greenlight Bookstore blog for details on how the Community Lender Program works (http://abookstoreinbrooklyn.blogspot.com/2009/04/community-lender-update.html) -- essentially, people support the business by giving us small loans to help with startup capital. We've raised nearly $65,000 that way -- amazing!! (We got approved for a biggish small business loan, too, but we'd rather owe money to people we can thank personally.) In the meantime too, neighborhood excitement about the bookstore is fevered -- the other day Rebecca and I were in front of the store and were hailed by a passerby who enthused about how much he was looking forward to the store's opening. I've never seen nor heard of this level of support from a community for a bookstore that doesn't even exist yet -- we feel incredibly lucky to be a part of this neighborhood!


7. Jessica's turn to query Lobster & Canary:

Okay, I'm giving you a choice of questions to answer.

1) Someone suggested recently that literary bloggers would make great facilitators for author interviews, book clubs, or other events that could bring the virtual and physical book community together in a bookstore. Do you have any ideas or thoughts on ways that bloggers and bookstores could work together?

2) CLOUD ATLAS is literally my favorite book, and I love all of the others you mention in question #3 -- so what have you read recently in that vein, and can you give me some reading suggestion?!?

L & C: Oh, Jessica, great questions. Pity the poor Lobster & Canary having to choose which one to answer...stay tuned...an answer (answers?) forthcoming in tomorrow's post...

Woden's Day (post-Bloomsday, pre-Juneteenth)

Today is Wednesday.

Comes every once a week.

Wednesday.

Today happens to be one day after Bloomsday-- the 105th Bloomsday in fact. A grand celebration.

Wednesday.

Today is two days before Juneteenth this year. Another great celebration.

But not on Wednesday.

Wednesday's child is full of woe.

Wednesday. Wounds day. Wasn't day.

Which is Woden's Day.

Few remember that it is his day.

Fewer still would give what he gave for a draft of wisdom at Mimir's Well.

Woden, whose name derives from roots meaning "rage, madness, excitation," but also "melody, poetry, spiritual arousing."

Lesewut.

"Woot, woot!"

The furious wodewoses, tamed into woodhouses. Gave up their eight-legged horses for prams and bicycles.

The runes brought down by Woden-- screaming after nine days transfixed by his own spear on the spine of the world-tree -- are shrunk down now into the glyphs on the subway map.

But the poets remember: lurking under all change dwells still the original, waiting for a rent in the times or a slip in the sky to come forth again.

So Marianne Moore's "Wood-Weasel":

"The inky thing/ adaptively whited with glistening/ goat-fur is wood-warden. In his/ ermined well-cuttlefish-inked wool, he is/ determination's totem."

And even more so Ted Hughes from Wodwo:

"The bear is digging/ In his sleep/ Through the wall of the Universe/ With a man's femur/ ...[from "The Bear"]," while

"The lark begins to go up/ Like a warning/ As if the globe were uneasy...Like sacrifices set floating/ The cruel earth's offerings/ /The mad earth's missionaries./ ...[from "Skylarks"]."

Ah, Woden's Day.

Passage of Giants: John Hope Franklin, Ronald Takaki, Philip Curtin

We lost three of our most influential historians this spring: John Hope Franklin (died March 25th, aged 94), Ronald Takaki (died May 26, aged 70), and Philip Curtin (died June 4th, aged 87).

Franklin was one of our most important public intellectuals, in the mold of W.E.B. Du Bois. Franklin held an endowed professorship at Duke University, having been central to the emergence of African-American historical scholarship beginning with his landmark 1947 study, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans.

He was a key adviser to Thurgood Marshall on the Brown v. Board of Education case, and he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King at Montgomery in 1965. He headed President Clinton's national advisory board on race in 1997.

"The specter of color is apparent even when it goes unmentioned," he wrote in The Color Line: Legacy for the 21st Century (1994), "And it is all too often the unseen force that influences public policy as well as private relationships."

For more, click here.

Takaki pioneered ethnic studies, starting with his 1972 course at the University of California-Berkeley. Two of his books are especially widely used in college courses and have had great impact: Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-century America (1979), and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993).

Don T. Nakanishi (Director of UCLA's Asian American Studies Center) is quoted in the Los Angeles Times obituary of Takaki: "Ron Takaki elevated and popularized the study of America's multiracial past and present like no other scholar, and in doing so had an indelible impact on a generation of students and researchers across the nation and around the world."

For more, click here.

Curtin helped create the modern field of African studies in the U.S.A., with his colleague Jan Vansina at the University of Wisconsin. His The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969) is one of the most important books in this field.

Moving to the Johns Hopkins University, Curtin became (in the words of Hopkins history department chair William Rowe) "a proselytizer for a kind of world history that treated every human society with equal dignity and equal weight."

I had the privilege of listening to Professor Curtin around the seminar table on many occasions and can vouch for Professor Rowe's characterization. One of the books in my personal library to which I return most often is Curtin's Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (1984). He called it "somewhat unorthodox...historical economic anthropology is as convenient a label as any." He insisted that the "world" in "world history" avoid Western ethnocentric approaches.

He captured the world's complexities and independencies of culture, as well as its underlying similarities, with a vast but succinct erudition. For instance, from Cross-Cultural Trade:

"...the office of wakil al-tujjar [in Cairo]...Some wakil also owned and operated funduq or lodging houses for foreign merchants, recalling the combined functions of the landlord-brokers of West Africa" (page 113).

"As early as 1519, the Ethiopian court at Gondar sent an Armenian envoy to Portugal, by way of the Portuguese posts in India" (page 130).

For more, click here.

Playlist for Emily Dickinson: Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Fiona Apple, Erykah Badu, P.J. Harvey

A playlist for the week.

Mos Def honors the memories of others who have held the power of the word, coming to us through "the speakerbox (freaky radio everywhere on the dial)".

As Kweli says, "The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage."

Erykah: "If you look at all the cultures in America, this is a great opportunity for us to really get acquainted with the rest of the world."

Fiona wants to be the "patron saint of reality."

I think Emily Dickinson (see previous post) would have listened carefully to Badu, Harvey, Kweli, Mos Def and Apple, if there had been a radio or the Internet up in that room of hers in the house in Amherst.

Mos Def: "Champion Requiem"

Talib Kweli with Hi Tek: "The Blast"

P.J. Harvey: "Down by the Water"

Fiona Apple: "Paper Bag"

Erykah Badu: "On and On"

6 + 1: Interview with Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan is an anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material.  Her short stories have sold to more than a dozen venues.  Her Onyx Court series of historical London fantasies includes Midnight Never Come and the recently-released In Ashes Lie, with two more to come.  More information can be found on her website, www.swantower.com.

Question 1:  I am silent and then I'm not/ You fear me but I feed you/ I am everywhere but always scarce: what am I?

. . . I have no idea.  I think I left my brain somewhere during this past month, when I was traveling, but I was in so many places that I have no clue where it might be.


Question 2:  The new Onyx Court novel, In Ashes Lie, comes out now, in June.  Tell us about the novel and about the two new ones you are writing.

More backstabbing faerie politics beneath London, this time with bonus explosions!

Ashes covers the period of the English Civil War, leading up to the Great Fire of London in 1666.  Like its predecessor, it concerns itself with the Onyx Court (the faerie court hidden beneath London) and the ways in which the fae interfere with mortal history, but each book shifts its focus a bit, as the world changes around them.  Midnight was in many ways about the royal court, whereas Ashes has more to do with Parliament and the City itself, and that trend toward more ordinary people is going to continue.

They're all set roughly a century apart, so the upcoming two are in the 18th and 19th centuries, respectively.  I'm starting work on the first of those right now, mashing together alchemy and the Enlightenment and the first predicted return of Halley's comet.  Next year, it'll be steampunk faeries in the later Victorian period.


Question 3:  In your essay "Frazier's Goddamned Golden Bough," you forcefully reject the notion that fantasy writing is an exercise in nostalgia or avoidance of the future.  I agree strongly and would like to see your essay read more widely.  Any thoughts on updating/expanding the essay, and/or bringing it to a broader audience?

Well, it helps when people like you bring it up!  I've posted it on my website, of course, but haven't really made any plans for pushing it further; I'd republish it if someone offered an appropriate circumstance, but that depends more on other people than on me.  And I'm not sure if I could expand it, though I might polish it a bit -- the whole thing was very much an explosive reaction that I flung out in one go, and having said my piece, I was done.  There are related issues I could talk about, but they seem more the kind of thing I'm going to unleash on some poor fellow panelist at a con someday, rather than anything I could formulate into an essay, at least right now.


Question 4:  One of your strengths is your focus on craftsmanship, e.g.,  your study trip to London for In Ashes Lie, your essays on grammar and narrative devices.  Tell us more about how you attend to the details of creating great stories and the worlds they portray.

It goes in cycles.  At the moment, I'm thinking a lot about characterization; the next Onyx Court book features an honest-to-god extrovert, a guy who wears his passions on his sleeve and doesn't think as much as he should before opening his mouth.  That's very difficult for me to write, so I'm having to be very conscious of how it works.  For another book, it might be a more complicated plot, or a specific prose style.  You can't think about everything at once, but you can pick specific things to focus on at specific times.

It's mostly an issue of awareness: instead of letting things be invisible to you, passing under your radar, you have to stop and think about them.  Sometimes it also helps to look at books or stories which do that thing particularly well, *or* particularly badly -- you might think you should only look at good models, but the odd truth is that you can often understand something much better when you see it break down.  A successful example can be harder to pick apart.


Question 5:  Thinking of the fight and dance scenes in Warrior, for instance, I characterize your descriptions as "kinetic, gracefully flowing."  Do you have dance or music training?  Do you storyboard the sequences before you write them?

I have both, actually -- thirteen years of ballet (plus assorted years of jazz and modern lyrical during that same period), piano from the age of six, French horn starting in junior high.  I've also done some fencing and dabbled in martial arts, though I didn't really commit to learning karate until long after those novels were written.  It always pleases me when readers say they really liked those scenes, because I think conveying movement is quite hard to do in prose.

I don't storyboard them per se; that's really a film technique (or, in a different sense, a comic-book one), and while I'd be happy to see that book turned into a movie, I'm not writing with film in mind.  You've got to craft everything for the medium you're working in *now*.  I do, however, often sketch out a rough map of the space the fight is happening in, and label it with stage directions -- stage left, upstage, etc -- so that I can map out the flow of movement and keep track of where everyone is.  (Because if the writer can't keep it straight, the reader doesn't stand a chance.)


Question 6:  Yoon Ha Lee has written a lovely theme song for Onyx Court.  How did the collaboration come about?  Any thoughts about working together on an entire suite, perhaps you writing the libretto for her score?

It was a pretty simple thing, actually.  There was an online charity auction called Live Long and Marry, raising money to fight Prop 8 (a ban on gay marriage) in California, and Yoon offered an original composition to the buyer's prompt.  I leapt on the Buy It Now price the instant the auction opened, and sent her a copy of Midnight Never Come as my prompt.  There was a bit of back-and-forth about what kind of piece I was looking for, and a tweaking of a certain passage in her first draft, but mostly she just went with what the book inspired in her.  As to whether we'd ever do more, I hadn't really thought about it -- though I can tell you I'm unlikely to write a libretto.  I was not born under a rhyming planet.


Question 7:  Your turn!

If "forty-two" is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, what is the answer to death, the void, and nothing?

I am just back from my trek to Helicon, where I put your question to those who dwell there. The nine could give me no distinct answer, disagreeing gently amongst themselves. Urania spoke of Hubble's Constant and the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter theory. Thalia, laughing as she wandered the heather-clad mountainside, tossed back over her shoulder in reply: "goodbye and thanks for all the fish!" Dear Clio expostulated with her sisters, citing the Olmec Long Count Calendar and the origins of the Jain Lokavibhaga.

Erato, strumming on the lyre, said nothing 'til all the others had opined. Then, at last, she sang forth the best answer I can offer:

"Great streets of silence led away
To neighborhoods of pause;
Here was no notice, no dissent,
No universe, no laws.

By clocks 't was morning, and for night
The bells at distance called,
But epoch had no basis here,
For period exhaled."

(--Emily Dickinson, "Void," XXXVII in Time & Eternity)

Interstitial Arts Foundation: First Salon

The Interstitial Arts Foundation held its first salon on Thursday evening (see my May 16th post)--what a great idea, perfectly executed. Deborah and I were very glad we participated, and look forward to the salon becoming a regular happening.

K. Tempest Bradford organized the event, held on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman co-hosting. The space was completely packed with interstitial creatives of all stripes, conversation was suitably imbricated with admiring reviews of artist portfolios, good live music, and references to all sorts of liminal and slipstream works.

Authors from the IAF's first anthology, Interfictions I, did short readings and then we got the "world debut" of Interfictions II, with readings from several of the contributors. Interfictions II comes out in November-- buy it.

The IAF is emerging as an important nexus of imaginative, inter- and trans-disciplinary thinking. Plus, the members are warm-spirited, the discussions jargon-free, and a current of humor and whimsy runs through the proceedings. Serious play. Reminds me of the cat in Gaiman's Coraline, slipping effortlessly from one world to another, native to both, archly observing the goings-on around it.

Huge props to Tempest for making this happen, hats off to Ellen and Delia as well. Too many fine folk in attendance to mention them all, but I do want to single out Matt Kressel and the many colleagues from his Sybil's Garage/Senses Five Press universe.

The Libraries of Timbuktu

We are in danger of losing one of the world's great storehouses of knowledge, as the medieval libraries in and around Timbuktu suffer from encroaching desertification, termite infestations, and high humidity during the short but intense Malian rainy season. UNESCO designated the libraries of Timbuktu the first site within its Memory of the World Program.

Some one million manuscripts--up to five hundred pages each--are threatened. The manuscripts, most stemming from the 12th to 16th centuries (Western reckoning), include copies of the Koran, sermons, explications of Islamic law, other Muslim religious texts, treatises on mathematics, medicine, optics, geography and astronomy-- many of the latter predating Galileo and Kepler.

An international preservation and cataloging effort is underway, led by universities in Norway and the Ford Foundation, working closely with Malian organizations and scholars. Click here for the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project and here for a report from the Ford Foundation. Both sites include a great deal of documentation plus several videos.

Grotesque in Antwerp; Manu Katche

I suppose most art lovers wish they could be in Venice for the Bienniale right now or at Art Basel, but if I could I would hurry to Antwerp to catch the last days of the Ensor/Goya/Redon show at the Royal Museum of Fine Art.

Then I'd head off across the Old Continent on trains and trams, inspired by Manu Katche's pensive song "Number One," chasing an ever-receding horizon into lilac-grey space. (For some reason the link is not working right now, but if you go to YouTube, type in "Manu Katche," you'll get the video for "Number One," and then you'll hear and see what I mean. Bon voyage a toi!)

MoCCA Festival, Part II

So many great things at the MoCCA Festival--I have space to mention only a few:

* Sara Antoinette Martin: Welcome to Sara-Land, you know, where skulls abound.

* Templar, Arizona: "This is a slightly irregular Arizona that fell off the back of a truck somewhere, and now all the power outlets are a weird shape and a couple of wars never happened."

* Is It Justus?: A very worthy successor to the Boondocks (taken from us far too soon!), this series combines great graphics with trenchant social analysis. Reginald "RNB" Butler is the creator. This should be required reading in schools.

* Zuda Comics: Lots and lots of stuff here, created by users, voted on by readers.

* Stef Lenk: Get her graphic novel The Details . I especially like the "Teatime" segments: eerie, moving, wordless, echoes of Alice down the rabbit hole.

* Theo Ellsworth: Another favorite. "He has a miniature city inside of his head that is overrun with funny monsters..." This appears to be true, judging from the overgrown, densely populated pictures he produces, vaguely reminiscent of the seas through which the Yellow Submarine floats.

* Matt Kindt: Atmospheric backgrounds, very individual characters, and check out the 3-D glasses. Kindt is widely recognized for his work (Harvey winner, etc.), deservedly so.

* Sho Murase: Elegant, stylish, delicious use of color, lines like the bold tracings of a feather.

* The Bazaarium: "Your Victorian inspired emporium." A fabulous conceit, superbly well executed.

*David Mack: Mack is one of the giants of the field. And there he was taking all the time in the world with each and every one of us at his booth, animated, warm, enthusiastic about being with the fans. Mack is a mensch on top of being one of the best draftsmen and designers around!

* Tara McPherson: Another one of the giants in the field, and, yep, there she was conversing with each of us. I bought doubles of several of her postcards ("How They Fly Away So Easily"), to give away to friends.

Special mention to two great comix stores who were present: Desert Island in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) and Jim Hanley's Universe in midtown Manhattan.

Super-special kudos to two art schools training up the next generation, whose students and professors were represented in force: School of Visual Arts, and Parsons The New School for Design.

MoCCA Festival, Part I

Visited the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) Festival at the 25th Street Armory in Manhattan on Saturday.

The armory was transformed into a caravanserai for pictorial merchants from all over the globe, including Romania, Japan, Israel, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, Canada and more. Every sort of purveyor was on hand at the bazaar, from DC and other sleek and classic superhero houses to DIY self-proclaimed alternative indies, from manga in wild profusion and grrl series to the Katzenjammer Kids and Where the Wild Things Are. Comix, the funnies, graphic novels, zombie-romance-biker stories, sequential art...it was all here, along with a large, enthusiastic crowd and a line to buy tickets running out the door and down the block.

Kudos to MoCCA for hosting the event. Special plaudits for the festival guide, which had a whimsical cover by Molly Crabapple. Also in the guide: an excellent, succinct essay by Kent Worcester ("Academy Embraces Comics") in which he notes that "the number of cartoonists who have written with insight on comics history and theory is mind-boggling... [T]he last thing academics should assume is that the comics world is an isolated tribe that has no awareness of itself as an object of inquiry."

In my MoCCA Festival part II tomorrow, I will report on some individual favorites, a few choice dishes from the great feast.

Music New and Old: Etkin and Hancock

Music to take us to realms beyond, dance like dolphins in the inner sea:

Oran Etkin's album Kelenia drops this month. Check out this live performance of his group, a sort of klezmer-Malian blues fusion, with Makane Kouyate on percussion, Joe Sanders on bass, and Lionel Loueke sitting in on guitar (I saw Loueke a year ago at the Jazz Standard-- no one can imitate his spare and quirky style).

Some classic Herbie Hancock: "Hang Up Your Hang Ups," originally on Man-Child (1975), here in a superb live version from Tokyo Jazz 2005, with an incomparable line-up including Marcus Miller on bass, Roy Hargrove on trumpet, Lionel Loueke (again!) on guitar and --most tasty--Wah Wah Watson back again with that insinuating rhythm guitar. Hancock is such a protean force in modern American and global music!

Toni Morrison: A Bench by the Road

Last July Toni Morrison led the way to memorializing the enslaved Africans who entered the North American colonies and the U.S.A. by establishing a site for remembrance at Sullivan's Island at the entrance of the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. (Here is Felicia R. Lee's New York Times article on the event, "Bench of Memory at Slavery's Gateway").

"It is never too late to honor the dead," Morrison is quoted as saying. "It's never too late to applaud the living who do them honor."

An estimated 40% of all enslaved Africans who entered the U.S. were landed at Sullivan's Island.

Our standard high school history textbooks tell us about Ellis Island (you can find my great-grandfather's name in the records there), and latterly have included mention of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay (which was used primarily as a detention center, given the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882--so Angel was a kind of mirror-opposite of Ellis). Now we need to be sure Sullivan Island is included too. Ellis, Angel, Sullivan: three points on a compass, with the fourth along the country's broad southern tier, all while we continue to seek our True North.

6 + 1: Interview with Timothy Green

I introduce a new feature, the "6 + 1" interview. I ask my guests six questions, and they get to ask me one question in return.

My first interview is with Timothy Green (blog and full bio here), editor of the poetry journal RATTLE. Thank you Tim! His poems have appeared in The Connecticut Review, The Florida Review, Fugue, Mid-American Review, and Nimrod International Journal, among others. Green has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and is winner of the 2006 Phi Kappa Phi award from the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the poet Megan O’Reilly Green.

American Fractal is his first book-length collection, just out from Red Hen Press.

RATTLE is a biannual print journal, based in Studio City, CA. Founded in 1994, its simple premise is that poetry is something everyone can enjoy—it doesn’t take a scholar to be moved by the written word. Lawyers and landscapers, nurses and professors all share the pages in what’s become one of the most-read literary journals in the U.S.

Lobster & Canary: What is your favorite cloud formation, and why?

Timothy Green: Definitely cumulonimbus. Since moving to Los Angeles five years ago, I haven't felt a good rainstorm. I'd love to see a nice angry anvil looming in the distance, and then the electric in the air and the subsequent burst of rain. All this sunlight is getting boring.

L & C: Paul Muldoon starts his study of the relationship between Plath, Hughes and Moore ("The Literary Life" in his The End of the Poem) this way: "In my discussion of W.B. Yeats's 'All Souls' Night,' a poem written in Oxford in 'Autumn 1920,' I tried to suggest that it was difficult to read it without a proper regard for its intertextual relations, in particular the links between it and a series of poems by John Keats, including 'To Autumn,' published one hundred years earlier, in 1820." Do you think poets and poetry readers are as intensely aware of (and familiar with) our literary antecedents as Muldoon argues we need to be? Should they be?

TG: I think I’d argue against the words “should” and “need” wherever they’re applied to poetry. “Should” and “need” have driven what is really a fundamentally human art form to the fringes of society over the last 100 years. Poetry doesn’t have to do anything other than move you – “you” being anyone who happens to pick up and enjoy a poem. Of course the vast majority of poetry readers are much less familiar with the literary canon than Paul Muldoon – I know I certainly am, and that’s probably why I find Muldoon’s work to be a little dry. (And why he’d probably find my work to be pedestrian.) But the knife swings back to defend his opinion, too – I’d never say a poet or reader shouldn’t be aware of history. As it happens, I’ve read and enjoyed “All Souls’ Night,” but I’ve never read its corollary Keats. Would I get more out of Yeats if I was familiar with “To Autumn”? And would I then recommend the poems be read of together? Very likely. But I think almost any citizen of the modern world would recognize the absurdity in a mandate that I must. Exclusivism leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and it’s very unfortunate that it’s become the primary flavor of poetry for most people. How often have you heard someone dismissively say they “just don’t get” poetry, as if poetry is something that needs to be gotten? Suddenly we’re talking about a puzzle instead of what it really is – a pleasure. Who is Paul Muldoon (who am I? who are you?) to dictate how someone else should find their own pleasure? If Muldoon finds his in literary allusion, I’m happy for him. Personally, I find too much emphasis on the past to distract from the experience of a poem – and when I’m writing on my own or selecting poems for Rattle, I tend to keep the admission price relatively low; if there’s somewhere specific to go I want to guide you there. The only way I think either of us could be wrong would be to say that either of us are right.

L & C: You studied not only English but also biochemistry, psychology and philosophy. Do you feel the rift between "the two cultures" famously identified by C.P. Snow, or is the rift overstated and/or superseded?

TG: If I’m being honest about my experience, and am sure to make the appropriate disclaimers about biases and a small and non-random sample, I’d have to say that there is a rift, but that it’s one-sided. There’s a wall between arts and sciences, but poets tend to pass through it easily. Poets, I think, just tend to be interested in things, and one of those things is often science. Given my background and some coincidence, I’m still in touch with many active researchers, mostly molecular biologists, but it’s always the poets who I find talking about The Elegant Universe and Michio Kaku and particle physics. It’s the poets and painters who ask for my back issues of New Scientist. Few engineers have ever asked for copies of Rattle, and when I showed a postdoc on my softball team a copy of my book, he didn’t know what to say. There are plenty of poets who are scientists, but no matter how irrational, it doesn’t seem to follow that there are as many scientists who are poets. We could speculate on reasons for the division – the overblown pop-science of left brain vs. right brain, or hyper-specialization as a response to modern life’s increasing complexity. Or maybe, since only 14% of the population reads poetry anymore, it’s just the odds. So there’s a gap, but poets cross it easily as they use imagination to explore the world. Poe solved the dark sky paradox and presaged the big bang theory by 80 years – that should tell you something.


L & C: Rattle's stated interest is in "accessible" poems that "have heart." Delve into these descriptors for us--how does a particular poem show its heart, how do you feel the language to be accessible?

TG: Accessibility mostly refers to what we talked about before – Muldoon and the admission price. We tend to avoid poems that rely too heavily on allusion, and if they refer something from the past, then at least they point you in the right direction to research, maybe with an epigram or just by spelling it out. We never publish those poems that are so unmoored from reality that you feel lost within them. Of course the word “accessible” immediately becomes a slippery slope – accessible to who? The college-educated middle-class? Speakers of English? Nell? Basically, we want the average person to be able to pick up a copy of Rattle and find something in it that they’d like to take with them. That has more to do with clarity than any restrictions on language, but I suppose if we have to look up an inkhorn word, we want to be happy that we did. Heart is harder to place, but like Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it. Some poems are technically strong, intellectually interesting, linguistically pleasing, but lack a sense of purpose, or the feeling that the poet is really engaged in the subject matter. The goal is always to provide a transformative experience, and to do that the poet has to be transformed.


L & C: Each issue of Rattle has a "tribute theme." The June issue, for instance, has an African American theme, including interviews with Terrance Hayes and Cave Canem co-founder Toi Derricotte. How do you select the themes...or do they somehow select you?

TG: The sources are as varied as you’d expect. We more or less chose the African American theme, to fill in a gap after Filipino, Chicano and other similar issues found us. But it also had to do with Barack Obama’s presidential run, with Cave Canem appearing in a lot of bios, and specific requests that we interview Terrance Hayes. There was a confluence of reasons that it seemed to fit. With the Greatest Generation issue, we just happened to notice that we’d accepted work from a half-dozen poets in their 80s, so it seemed like it’d be interesting to find a dozen more and try to listen to their collective voice. Other times themes come directly from reader suggestions – we work hard to be an approachable journal, and listen closely to the feedback we receive. So if you have any ideas, send me a note.

L & C: Rattle's tagline is "poetry for the 21st century." What will Rattle look like, how will it sound and read, in five years, in fifteen years?

TG: We always strive to be eclectic, and in a way, diversity is slow to change. We’ll keep publishing poems that are readable and moving, in as wide a range of styles and subjects as we can find. That won’t be any different in 15 years – though I think we publish a bit too much narrative free verse, as a result of the kinds of submissions we tend to receive. Hopefully we’ll print a little more formal poetry, and a little more experimentation. As far as production goes, I think we’ve hit our stride – 200-page issues twice a year, beautifully constructed to be saved, plus a strong and free online component that continues to expand. More people will have e-readers and maybe we’ll end up print-on-demand, but otherwise I’m not going to predict any flying cars. Books have plenty of shelf-life left, and so do we.

The Seventh Question. TG: You write speculative fiction, and your novel is coming out with a spec fic press. I’ve always felt like there’s a deep affinity between poetry and speculative fiction – poets who write novels tend to dive into the surreal, personally it’s the main genre of prose I read, and prose poetry has become such a natural hybrid of the two. What do you think that link is? What are the differences, and what do they have in common as artistic works?

L & C: Great question, Tim, one we should explore with colleagues on a panel sometime. Due to limited space here, allow me to focus on the links and come back to differences in another posting.

In the beginning, poetry was the language of speculative fiction, and the fantastic was the heart of poetry. The mimetic mode intervened in the West, but, nevertheless, the best speculative prose embeds within it the poetry that is our birthright. (I am not surprised that our New Stylists, e.g., Valente, Goss, Taaffe, are accomplished poets as well as writers of prose.) Our common ancestor is the Singer of Tales, whose stories and images were-- and are!--isometric with the language he or she used.

The Singer of Tales and his/her audience viscerally understood--and understand!-- the magic inherent in the power of words. (Interesting: the singer is called the "jeli" in the Mande languages of West Africa, i.e., their own word for what the French called "griot"--my understanding is that "jeli" is etymologically related to the Mande word for "blood.") To pick just one from many, many examples: in the Finnish epic Kalevala, Vainamoinen defeats Joukahainen in a duel of song-spells, the power of words both the point of the action and the means by which the action is sung by the teller. "I find my power in a chant," sings the singer as Vainamoinen, sings Vainamoinen through the singer, "I win my magic from a song."

And so our modern poets do the same.

"The stone had skidded arc'd and bloomed into islands/...curved stone hissed into reef/ wave teeth fanged into clay/ white splash flashed into spray/ Bathsheba Montego Bay/ /bloom of the arcing summers..." (Kamau Brathwaite, "Calypso").

"An unseen rivulet,/ thick as tar distilled/ [...]/ ...and it joins the oily stream/ from the elephants' graveyard-/ / the secret of whose map-defying location/is that it's everywhere./Slower than oblivion,/the river winds past/buckled roots of mountains,/..." (Sarah Lindsay, "From the Elephants' Graveyard").

"Nothing is in my own voice because I have not/ Any. Nothing in my own name/ Here inscribed on water, nothing but flow/A ripple, outwards. Standing beside the Usk/You flow like truth, river, I will get in/Over me, through me perhaps, river let me be crystalline/ As I shall not be, shivering upon the bank./ A swan passed. So is it, the surface, sometimes/ Benign like a mirror, but not I passing, the bird." (C.H. Sisson, "The Usk").

"A field, a sea-flower, three stones, a stile./ Not one thing close to another/ throughout the air. The cliff's uplifted lawns./You and I walk light as wicker in virtual contact./ / Prepositions lie exposed.../" (Alice Oswald, "Sea Sonnet").

"I am the hunted king/ Of the frost and big icicles/ And the bogey cold/ With its wind boots.//I am the uncrowned/Of the rainworld/Hunted by lightning and thunder/ And rivers./ [...]/I am the maker/Of the world/That rolls to crush/And silence my knowledge." (Ted Hughes, "Robin Song").

Coda: The relationship of poetry to fiction and of reality to fantasy are, of course, not simply matters of concern to the spec fic community. Nabokov started his Lectures in Literature by stating that "Mansfield Park is a fairy tale, but then all novels are, in a sense, fairy tales." Borges, Calvino and Eco, to name just three others, devote enormous energy both in their fiction and in their literary criticism to exploring, and playing with, the nature of language poetical and otherwise. But further conversation about their project(s) will have to await another posting.

References:

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (orig. 1946).

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights" (trans. Esther Allen), in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (2000, orig. 1935).

Italo Calvino, "Levels of Reality in Literature," in Calvino, The Uses of Literature (1978).

Umberto Eco, "Languages in Paradise," in Serendipities: Language & Lunacy (1998).

John Miles Foley, Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (1991).

Thos. Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Word & Music (1999).

Lauri Honko, with Chinnappa Gowda, Anneli Honko & Viveka Rai, The Siri Epic, as Performed by Gopala Naika (1992).

Kathryn Hume, Fantasy & Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (1985).

John W. Johnson & Fa Digi Sisoko, The Epic of Son-Jara: A West African Tradition (1986).

Ursula Le Guin, "Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose," and "Rhythmic Pattern in The Lord of the Rings," in Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind (2004).

Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (orig. 1960; 2nd ed., 2000, ed. by Stephen Mitchell & Gregory Nagy).

Michael Moorcock, Wizardry & Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (2004, with intro by China Mieville, afterword by Jeff VanderMeer).

Vladimir Nabokov, "Jane Austen: Mansfield Park," in Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (1980).

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (orig. 1970).

BEA, part III

One of the many things I love about the BEA is that it brings together all members of our far-flung, disparate literary family: the giant publishing houses-cum-media conglomerates, the one-person presses held together by passion and a willingness to disbelieve in gravity, and everything in between.

So, at BEA we had a banner covering the better part of an entire wall-- which at the Javits Center are not small-- announcing Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves: "a novel of historical intrigue with a secret at its heart...a story of obsession, history's losses, and the power of art to preserve human hope." I loved The Historian, so eagerly await Kostova's sophomore effort.

And we had large kiosks at the Little, Brown booth proclaiming "the BIGGEST new series launch EVER" for Witch & Wizard by James Patterson.

I have a note scrawled to the effect that Scholastic had something in their (tastefully understated) booth about the sequel to The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins...but I cannot find anything about that on their site or elsewhere. Perhaps I am just trying to wish the sequel into quicker appearance, since I devoured the first of this trilogy in one gulp.

HarperCollins imprint Greenwillow Books gives us Silver Phoenix: Beyond the Kingdom of Xia, the debut by painter Cindy Pon. "Seventeen-year-old Ai Ling becomes aware of a strange power within her as she goes in search of her parent." The circumstances under which so many of our best stories begin--given the vivacity of her paintings, I imagine we are in for a treat with her prose.

Orca issues Salt, the first of a trilogy that has won an award in New Zealand for Maurice Gee. "The Whips, as silent as hunting cats, surrounded Blood Burrow in the hour before sun-up and began their sweep as the morning dogs began to howl." We may have a new member of the predatory tribe that includes the Ringwraiths, the Terminators, and Randall Flagg the Walkin' Dude.

London-based Capuchin Classics is devoted to bringing back lost gems, such as Shirley's Guild by David Pryce-Jones. Originally published in 1979, the novel takes place "in an otherwise quiet village, [where] a little girl with red hair and freckles named Shirley inspires a chain of events that cannot be explained by reason or scientific enquiry...becomes responsible for scenes unimaginable since the Dark Ages."

Finally, I want to read Finding Creatures and Other Stories by C. June Wolf, brought out by Canadian publisher Wattle and Daub Books. I say this because I enjoy her blog--her thoughts are round, warm, and witty--there is a humane and gentle strength that runs just below the surface of her sure words. For their part, Wattle and Daub is apparently a one-woman labor of love, with a goal of putting out three books a year.

This then is our miracle: superb books can emanate from the steely matrices of the corporations or be found nestled in the felt weft of the tiny independent. Who cares the provenance, so long as the tale is a good one!

BEA, part II

Fairy tales! Timeless themes retold and rewoven to meet our current needs--the pulse of our common humanity.

Little, Brown (Hachette) is bringing out Malinda Lo's debut novel, Ash, a lesbian retelling of Cinderella. "'I have a favorite tale,' Kaisa said, and she did not seem to think it was anything to be embarrassed about. 'Do you wish to hear it?' Once again Ash was surprised, and the paring knife slipped and nicked her finger, leaving behind a thin line of blood. 'Be careful," said Kaisa..." I am putting Ash at the top of my reading list for fall.

Arthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic) gives us Heartsinger by Karlijn Stoffels, translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson. "The spare, lyrical fairy tale revolves around Mee, a singer of sorrows, and Mitou, a merrymaker. ... The novel not only chronicles Mee and Mitou's travels, it also threads together the tales of the various characters they heal with their music."

Inner City Fairy Tales publishes its first book, The Three Princesses and the Lud-Dud Tree, by Lee Leavy, with illustrations by Sarah Carlson. Judging from this first effort, Inner City Fairy Tales will do well--I will follow their progress with interest.

Tin House Books offers The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, a seemingly H.C. Andersen-esque adventure by Matthea Harvey with illustrations by Elizabeth Zechel. "Meet a little general who is so fastidious he has different slippers for different days..." Got me right there. Can't wait.

Simply Read Books has some of the most sumptuous books I know. This fall from them we get Dragons Love by Stephen Parlato (breathtaking illustrations, like burnished metals set with gems), and a "unique boxed set of wordless picture books captur[ing] the magic of dreams" entitled Three Little Dreams by Thomas Aquinas Maguire.

New York Review of Books Classics deserves high marks for reissuing classic picture books of Norse myths and trolls by the D'Aulaires. A five-year-old boy bearing my name fell in love with those books, and through them the world of myth and fairytale...I wish the same happy fate on many other young readers today. Thank you NYRB.

Part III of my BEA report on Tuesday.

BEA, part I

Yesterday I visited Book Expo America here in Manhattan. With so much distress in the economy generally, and within the publishing industry specifically, I was pleased to find BEA relatively crowded and the mood fairly upbeat. As several industry veterans told me, this year "it's all about the books," meaning less focus on gimmicky giveaways and over-the-top hype. I felt this as well, having attended or worked several BEAs, and many other trade shows.

Some quick, initial impressions, wholly idiosyncratic of course, and broken into three posts for your convenience (and mine!):

The Overlook Press can be counted on to deliver very smart writing by authors with very distinctive personalities--their backlist includes Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, Barthelme, Sitwell, Freya Stark, James Branch Cabell, Mervyn Peake, Philip Jose Farmer, Norman Spinrad, among others (plus Wodehouse!). So I anticipate good things when Overlook in October publishes When Autumn Leaves by Amy Foster. Ms. Foster was on hand to sign my advanced reading copy. Judging from her badinage as she signed and from the pages I read last night in the ARC, this novel will be one you'll want to buy.

Candlewick Press has its usual strong line-up, featuring combos of magical prose and lush graphics. Three titles coming out in August and September grabbed me particularly: Leon and the Place Between, a picture book for young readers by Angela McAllister with illustrations by Grahame Baker-Smith; photographer David Ellwand's second Fairie-Ality book, A Sourcebook of Inspirations from Nature; and Kate DiCamillo's The Magician's Elephant, with illustrations by Yoko Tanaka. The latter opens with orphan Peter Augustus Dechene visiting a fortune-teller in the city of Baltese "at the end of the century before last," to ask about his sister's fate--only to be told that, while his sister lives, he must follow the elephant to find her. "'You are having fun with me,' he said. "There are no elephants here.'" Ah, but there are, as we learn at the end of the sample chapter...I cannot wait to follow the rest of the story.

David R. Godine, Publisher scooped everyone by bringing out J.M.G. Le Clezio long before the French author won last year's Nobel for Literature. In September 2009, Godine publishes C. Dickson's English translation of Le Clezio's 1980 novel, Desert. I lapped up the first two chapters of the ARC this morning.

Coffee House Press celebrates its 25th birthday this year by publishing in September, among others, Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt. "Set in a dream-like European city reminiscent of Barcelona, along a boulevard teeming with artists who perform as living statues, comes the beautiful and frightening story of a man running from his past, a woman consumed by grief, and the forces that pursue them both." The blurb hooks me. Just out in their spring list is Brian Evenson's story collection Fugue State, with a fabulous cover by Zak Sally. From Evenson's story "Mudder Tongue": "Language was starting to slip in his mouth, words substituting themselves for each other, and while his own thoughts remained as lucid as ever, sometimes they could be made manifest on his tongue only if they were wrung out or twisted or set with false eyes. False eyes? Something like that." Few capture gnawing, cat-footed fear the way Evenson does. Zombies and vampires we can defeat, but words that mutiny on your tongue...?

Tor, as one of the heavyweights in spec fic, has a large catalogue for the fall. I look forward to two in particular: Steven Erikson's Bauchelain and Korbal Broach: Three Short Novels of the Malazan Empire (a diabolical killer in the port of Lamentable Moll, an unseemly terror in the hold of the ship Suncurl, catastrophe in the city of Quaint...all in a day's work for the two wizards and their ill-fortuned servant Emancipor Reese), and Canticle by Ken Scholes(the second in his series about the Named Lands).

Orbit has two debut novels coming out that intrigue me: in November, The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington ("the pious yet ignoble and grave robbing twins attempt to keep their faith...[in] a world of living saints and livelier demons--and of monsters and madmen...profane...funny...horrifying"); and in February, 2010, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin ("...the truth about her mother's death and her family's bloody history--as well as unsettling truths within herself....the story of humans who are subject to the whims of the gods, of a young woman thrown into a world of politics that she can barely understand...and of a love that transcends death").

Part II of my BEA report tomorrow, Part III on Tuesday.