Another Good Mail Day

.

 

Marianne and I spent the day with our friends Rosie and Demian Phillips, visiting various art museums and having a good time.  So today's post goes up a little late in the day.

But look what came in the mail!  Being a fantasist doesn't pay very well, but you get to meet some very cool people.


Above:  The packaged photographed in our garden.  Below:  Its contents.

*

Revisiting Poughkeepsie, Part 2: The Language of the Night

.

I dug out my tattered old paperback of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night and re-read "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" to see how it was holding up, thirty-seven years after it was first published.

Why would I even wonder?  Well, for one thing the central conceit, preserved in the title, that Poughkeepsie stands in for everything that fantasy is not has been, ironically enough, disproved.  In 1988, Rachel Pollack published the absolutely wonderous Unquenchable Fire, a fantasy novel set in the aftermath of an irruption of the shamanistic universe into our world.  In it, when the man comes to read the electric meter, he also builds a shrine and sacrifices a mouse to keep the power flowing.  The cheerleaders in a homecoming parade march topless and smeared with blood -- terrifying maenads normalized into everyday American life.  It's an exhilarating work and no question about it core fantasy.


The novel is set in Poughkeepsie.  As is Pollack's later Temporary Agency, which I also strongly commend to your attention.


All this proves, of course, is that fantasy has grown and changed since the essay first appeared in 1973.  But I approached the essay prepared for anything.

The first thing I noticed was how much fantasy has changed in the last third of a century and how little fantasy was available then.  Le Guin acknowledged the tremendous debt that fantasy readers owed to Lin Carter for his Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, without which (at that time) you could not have claimed to have a serious fantasy genre at all.  And she consistently referred to her subject as "heroic fantasy," which was at the time the single best term available.

If you ever doubt the power that a name has to shape our thinking, consider only the following sentence, central to Le Guin's discussion of the language of fantasy:

Nobody who says "I told you so" has ever been, or ever will be a hero.

Ged, in the Earthsea books, started out as a hero-to-be.  But over the sequence of books, he grew out of it.  As Le Guin's art matured, she more and more came to distrust the very idea of heroes.  Yet, early on, she was thinking in those terms simply because the language told her to.

This is not a criticism, however.  Le Guin's essay does open a window into an earlier literary era, when fantasy readers had to scrabble through cardboard boxes stuck behind the "Occult" and "Children's" sections of used book stores, to feed their hunger.  But it invalidates none of what she was talking about.

What she was talking about was language and the ways in which it can be properly used to create a fantasy world that lives and breathes upon the page.  On which subject her language soared!  To a young aspiring fantasist, it was a clarion call to battle.

(And in that metaphor, we see again how a simple name, "heroic fantasy," can shape our responses.)

Accompanying her discussion of the ways language can be used in a fantasy are examples of ways it should not:  Archaicisms, false feeling, fake grammar, journalistic prose . . .  To many, many gonnabe writers, these few brief pages were worth any number of writing workshops.

To answer the question I first asked yesterday:  Yes, the essay holds up extremely well.  It would still be a very good starting place for someone trying to learn how to write fantasy.  In some ways fantasy has moved beyond it . . .  But to a very large degree it was Le Guin herself who changed the genre.

Which is why Aqueduct Press published 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin (edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin and priced at a very reasonable nineteen dollars in paperback) in the first place.


And speaking of mischievous Finns . . .

Years ago, at Finncon, a fan came up with a wicked idea for a practical joke: "We should get a fan with a very strong Finnish accent to call up our next prospective guest of honor and say, 'I am calling from Helsinki to inform you that you are to receive a very great honor."

"That's a funny idea," I said.  "But what science fiction writer could conceivably think he or she has a shot at the Nobel Prize?"

The fan smirked.  "Stanislaw Lem."

Sometime after that, I told this story to Gordon Van Gelder.  He smiled gently and said, "Or Ursula K. Le Guin.  But who would be so mean?"

*

Revisiting Poughkeepsie, Part 1: 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin

.

This came in the mail the other day.  80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin is a festschrift for the woman whom I suppose we shall now have to refer to as the grande dame of fantasy.  And of course ...

But wait, I hear some of you say.  Festschrift?

Fairly asked.  A festschrift is a collection of writings, a book, celebrating a particularly valued individual and presented to him or her while said luminary is still alive.  (If the book were gathered and published posthumously, it would be a gedenkenschrift. )  Because it's so much trouble to put together, it's normally reserved for people who are both outstanding in their chosen profession and greatly beloved.

Le Guin was about to turn eighty, and her friends got together to present her with exactly such a literary beast.  It contained stories, poems, essays, and front-of-church testimonials by such luminaries as Eileen Gunn, Gwynneth Jones, Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ellen Kushner, Nancy Kress, etc., etc., etc.  In the wake of what was probably a pretty good party, it's been published by Aqueduct Press, and members of the general public are allowed to buy and read it.

Now, either you want this book (I did and now I have it) or you don't, and you already know which camp you dwell within, and no amount of descriptive analysis will budge you one way or the other.  

So I'm not going to review the book.  Why bother?

However, I was inspired by Lisa Tuttle's heartfelt contribution, "'From Elfland to Poughkeepsie' and Back Again, or, I Think We're in Poughkeepsie Now, Toto," on how important a single seminal Le Guin essay was to her, to go back and revisit said essay.

I've been meaning to reread "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" for some time now.  It came out in 1973 when genre fantasy was a new phenomenon.  I read it shortly thereafter and was blown away by it.  "Yes!" I thought.  "She gets it!"  We were all just figuring out this new (though most of the texts worth reading were half a century old by then) phenomenon, and a lot of very silly things were being said and thought and written about it.  Le Guin's essay was not silly.  She understood fantasy and why it should be valued and she said some things that were very valuable to a young, unpublished writer who aspired to write the stuff himself.

Over a third of a century has passed, and there have been some remarkable changes.  I wondered how well the essay held up.

Unfortunately, I'm currently all on fire to work on "The Stone of Loneliness," a story I began several years ago and which suddenly and unexpectedly exploded back into life yesterday.  So I haven't the time to write down what I found out today.  I'll have to tell you tomorrow.

In the meantime, allow me to leave you with the three most terrifying words ever found at the end of a fantasy novel or, indeed, a blog post:

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

*

Stations of the Tide

.

For some reason, I've been having extraordinarily good luck with covers lately.  Just take a gander at what Tor commissioned for the upcoming reissue of Stations of the Tide.  Moody, evocative, romantic, and -- not that this matters half so much to readers as it does to authors -- accurately based on a scene in the novel.

So I am grateful to Tor's director Irene Gallo for commissioning it, and to cover designer Jamie Stafford-Hill for putting it all together.  But most especially to the artist, Thom Tenery, for the kind of creation that makes you pick up a book and read the first page, hoping against hope that it will be as good as the cover promises.

You can check out Tenery's website here.  Terrific stuff.  You'll forgive me, I hope, for thinking I got the best of the lot.

*

My Weekend in Rhinebeck

.

I had one heck of a great four days wandering up to Rhinebeck, New York, and back.  Marianne and I toured Storm King.  We dropped in on Opus 40.  We tromped through Dia: Beacon, staring at challenging art until our brains hurt.

And, oh yeah, we attended the wedding of my favorite goddaughter in all the universe.

Alicia Ma is my niece.  I've known her since she was an infant and thought I was the wittiest man in the world because I knew how to play peek-a-boo.  Now she's a grown woman and married.  It makes me feel old -- but in a good way.  I've known this beautiful and talented woman all her life.  That's an extraordinary privilege.


And over at the Commie bar . . .

The hosts of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series (held in the KGB Bar in NYC, which is decorated with vintage communist posters and statuettes) are holding their annual fund-raiser.  It takes the form of a raffle.  Dozens of writers contribute prizes and you can buy one-dollar raffle tickets for the specific prize you want.

Let's say you really, really, really want the pre-submission draft printout of the first chapter of William Gibson's new novel, Zero History, signed and inscribed to you personally.  You can buy a chance specifically for that prize, rather than for the story critique by Nancy Kress.  (Nancy is, incidentally, so extremely acute on the mechanics of fiction as to leave me aghast with admiration.  And I am not an easy man to impress in such matters.)  Or, if you absolutely need Neil Gaiman's used keyboard, to infuse magic into your computer, you can improved the odds by buying lots and lots of chances.

Or you might look for something cool by a writer who's not terribly well-known yet but will later turn out to be the new Robert Heinlein.  That way, your chances of winning go way up, as do your bragging rights later on.

I myself have contributed three pieces of unpublished flash fiction.  This includes the original manuscripts, autographed, and also the right to publish -- under my name --  "Fish Story," "The Last Astronauts," and "Your Dream Book WIth Lucky Numbers" on your blog or Webpage or Facebook page or fanzine or whatever.  Or keep them to yourself, if you prefer.  I pledge not to publish the stories myself before 2015, so you'll have exclusive use of them for years.  The stories are 196, 281, and 407 words long respectively.

Click here for the Fantastic Fiction at KGB site.  Or here for the list of prizes.  I guarantee you that there's something there you want.


Above:  My brother-in-law Shieh-ya Ma, Alicia, my sister Pat.  Not shown in the picture is Alicia's husband, Kevin Bolz.  He's an impressive young man and I like him.  

*

Something I Will NEVER Have In My House

.

Greetings from Rhinebeck, New York!  Yes, Marianne and I are on the road yet again.  Our next-door neighbor Pat refers to us as "the gallivanters."

On the way here we stopped in at Opus 40 to enjoy October's bright blue weather and clamber all over that wonderful frog-nurturing and quarry-filling sculpture.  Before his premature death in 1976, accidentally crushed by a slab of stone, sculptor Harvey Fite created many stone statues, one enduring work of what would later come to be known as landscape art, and a number of minor whimsies.   Two of which are shown above.

I love those things!  But, as you've observed yourself if you've ever visited my house, there are no swan-shaped anythings  anywhere to be seen.  That's because with a name like mine, if you break discipline once, you'll put it into people's heads that you're a collector and you'll be given more and more swan-shaped trash until the house is entirely full and there's nothing to be done but to move to a foreign land and change your name.

Still.  Clever bit of found art, eh?

*

Storm King

.

On the road again!  Tonight I'm in Saugertes, which inevitably means that I stopped at Storm King along the way.  Storm King is located in Mountainville, New York, and is an outdoor museum of modern and postmodern sculpture.  If you ever have the chance to miss it, by all means don't.

My favorite sculpture is Andy Goldsworthy's Wall That Went for a Walk.  Sauntering from the information center, guided by their site map, you notice along one side of the path an old and fallen stone wall of the sort that is ubiquitous through that part of the country.  Then, slowly, it raises itself up and becomes a sturdy, five-foot-tall dry stone wall.  As it progresses, it begins to wander, curving gracefully one way and then the other.  Then it plunges downslope through the woods.  As it does, it begins curving back and forth, to one side of trees and then the other, more and more wildly, more and more tightly, like a boy running down the hill.

At the bottom of the hill, the wall plunges into the water of a pond and disappears.

At the far side of the pond, the wall reappears again and runs straight as a rule up a meadowed slope and then across the fields.

The speed of the thing is dizzying.

Above:  You can't see it, but at the very last bit of the wall before it disappeared underwater were two turtles, sunning themselves.

*