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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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!
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...
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"]."
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."
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."
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).
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.
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)
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.
I am Daniel A. Rabuzzi. Lobster & Canary explores fantastical/surreal fiction, poetry, and visual arts, fairy tales, oral epic, & children's lit. CZP (Toronto) published my novels *The Choir Boats* (2009) and *The Indigo Pheasant* (2012). I live in an enchanted city called New York, with my wife and soul-mate, the artist Deborah A. Mills, along with the requisite two cats. Deborah & I design & create art together; our first collaboration was shown in 2012 at The Observatory (Gowanus, Brooklyn). Learn more about me: www.danielarabuzzi.com. Contact: drabuzzi (AT) earthlink (DOT) net. "Lobster and canary" is a Norwegian expression, meaning "odds and ends, a bit of this and a bit of that." The lobster in the header is from Abraham van Beyeren's "Still Life with Lobster and Fruit" (1650s)--the original painting is at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC). The canary above is by Carl Fabritius (1654)--the original hangs in The Mauritshuis (The Hague). My understanding is that I am using the former image by virtue of fair use, and the latter because it is in the public domain.
