A Long and Narrow Way

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
—"It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)" 

First, some axioms. Points. Nodes. Notes. (After which, a few fragments.)

From Alfred Nobel's will: "The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: ...one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction..."

Even if every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature were universally acclaimed as worthy, there would still be more worthy people who had not won the Prize than who had. Thus, the Nobel Prize in Literature will always be disappointing. The history of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a history of constant, repeated disappointment.

The Nobel Prize in Literature's purpose is not to recognize the unrecognized, nor to provide wealth to the unwealthy, nor to celebrate literary translation, nor to bring attention to small publishers. Occasionally, it does one or more of these things, and doing so is good. It would be nice if any or all of those were its purpose. I'm not sure what purpose it does serve except as a sort of Hall of Fame thing, which reminds me of what Tom Waits said at his induction to the Rocknroll Hall of Fame: "Thank you very much. This has been very encouraging."

As with many things, Coetzee probably got it most right: "Why must our mothers be 99 and long in the grave before we can come running home with a prize that will make up for all the trouble we have been to them?"

"Bombay's Republic" Wins the Caine Prize

According to the Caine Prize on Twitter, the winner of this year's award is Rotimi Babatunde for "Bombay's Republic".

You can read the story as a PDF via the Prize website. It was the first of this year's nominees that I wrote about as part of the Caine Prize Blogathon, and my post also has links to other bloggers' (quite varied) takes on the story. It was certainly among the top of the stories for me, though I'm glad I didn't have to make the choice, as this year's group of nominees was generally impressive overall. Congratulations to everyone involved!

A Good Sign for the Caine Prize?

I've voiced my qualms about the Caine Prize for African Literature before, particularly in terms of the stories that often end up winning the award, and so I found this statement by this year's Chair of Judges, Bernardine Evaristo, encouraging:

I’m looking for stories about Africa that enlarge our concept of the continent beyond the familiar images that dominate the media: War-torn Africa, Starving Africa, Corrupt Africa — in short: The Tragic Continent. I’ve been banging on about this for years because while we are all aware of these negative realities, and some African writers have written great novels along these lines (as was necessary, crucial), isn’t it time now to move on? Or rather, for other kinds of African novels to be internationally celebrated. What other aspects of this most heterogeneous of continents are being explored through the imaginations of writers?

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with individual Tragic Continent stories — I like tragic stories! — but rather with the accumulated, repetitious weight of them, the monotony and predictability. (I wouldn't say "time to move on" — that implies we've "covered" the wars, the child soldiers, etc., and now we can read about happy things; I think it's vastly more complex than that, and I'm sure Evaristo does, too.) There have certainly been plenty of tragedies and atrocities that need to be represented and explored in fiction, but Evaristo voices my concerns exactly: why does African fiction have to be less diverse and heterogeneous than any other fiction? Is it because that's what publishers think European and American readers will read? Should the Prize really be governed by European and American stereotypes of the continent? The great potential of the Caine Prize is that it doesn't have to adhere to publishers' opinions about what Europeans and Americans think is "proper" African fiction.

Evaristo's final paragraph almost had me jump up out of my seat to exclaim, "Yes!":

For African fiction to remain more than a passing fad on the world stage it needs to diversify more than it does at present. What about crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, more history, chick lit? To be as diverse as, for example, European literature and its myriad manifestations. Imagine if the idea of ‘European Literature’ only evoked novels about the holocaust, communist gulags and twentieth century dictatorships. I’m looking forward to the time when the concept of ‘African literature’ also cannot be defined; when it equates to infinite possibilities and, as with Europe, there are thousands of disparate, published writers, with careers at every level and reaching every kind of reader.

Now that's an idea of "African literature" I can get behind.

Shirley Jackson Award Nominees

I am a juror for this year's Shirley Jackson Awards (along with Laird Barron, Maura McHugh, Kaaron Warren, and Gary K. Wolfe), for which the nominees have just been announced. It's a diverse and interesting list, I think, but then, I'm one fifth of the people responsible for it, so I'm a bit biased. The winners will be announced at Readercon in July.

NOVEL

• The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday)
• The Dracula Papers, Reggie Oliver (Chômu Press)
• The Great Lover, Michael Cisco (Chômu Press)
• Knock Knock, S. P. Miskowski (Omnium Gatherum Media)
• The Last Werewolf, Glen Duncan (Canongate Books, Ltd.)
• Witches on the Road Tonight, Sheri Holman (Grove Press)

NOVELLA

• “And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living,” Deborah Biancotti (Ishtar, Gilgamesh Press)
• “A Child’s Problem,” Reggie Oliver (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
• “Displacement,” Michael Marano (Stories from the Plague Years, Cemetery Dance Publications)
• The Men Upstairs, Tim Waggoner (Delirium Books)
• “Near Zennor,” Elizabeth Hand (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
• “Rose Street Attractors,” Lucius Shepard (Ghosts by Gaslight, Harper Voyager)

NOVELETTE

• “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine,” Peter Straub (Conjunctions 56)
• “Ditch Witch,” Lucius Shepard (Supernatural Noir, Dark Horse)
• “The Last Triangle,” Jeffrey Ford (Supernatural Noir, Dark Horse)
• “Omphalos,” Livia Llewellyn (Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, Lethe Press)
• “The Summer People,” Kelly Link (Tin House 49/Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, Candlewick Press)

SHORT FICTION

• “Absolute Zero,” Nadia Bulkin (Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters, Prime Books)
• “The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece,” M. Rickert (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sept/Oct, 2011)
• “Hair,” Joan Aiken (The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories, Small Beer Press/ The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/Aug, 2011)
• “Max,” Jason Ockert (The Iowa Review 41/1)
• “Sunbleached,” Nathan Ballingrud (Teeth, HarperCollins)
• “Things to Know About Being Dead,” Genevieve Valentine (Teeth, HarperCollins)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

• After the Apocalypse: Stories, Maureen F. McHugh (Small Beer Press) 
• The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, Joyce Carol Oates (Mysterious Press)
• Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, Livia Llewellyn (Lethe Press)
• The Janus Tree, Glen Hirshberg (Subterranean Press)
• Red Gloves, Christopher Fowler (PS Publishing)
• What Wolves Know, Kit Reed (PS Publishing)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

• Blood and Other Cravings, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor)
• A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones (Jo Fletcher Books)
• Ghosts by Gaslight, edited by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers (Harper Voyager)
• Supernatural Noir, edited by Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse)
• Teeth, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (HarperCollins)
• The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Harper Voyager)

The 54th Academy Awards

The only Oscars ceremony that had a specific effect on my life happened thirty years ago, when I was six years old. It was the 54th Academy Awards, and On Golden Pond was our local hero, having mostly been filmed about ten miles away from my house. Everybody I knew seemed to have at least a little connection to it somehow, or claimed to. At six years old, I didn't really understand what any of it meant, but I knew how much the adults seemed to care, and how special the moment seemed to them. The movie immediately became an indelible part of my life.

If that had been it, I'd look back on the 1982 Oscar ceremony with the sort of gauzy nostalgia that fills the movie. But Ernest Thompson won an Oscar that night for adapting his play into a screenplay, and I've known Ernest now for an amount of years neither of us will admit to, and worked with him on numerous local projects. We have really different aesthetics, and I love that — he's been at times the ideal teacher, editor, and director for me because he would never approach a story the way I do, and vice versa. He's intimidatingly smart and articulate, and so better than anybody I've ever met at steering me away from self-indulgent flourishes. (Ernest's commentary track on the anniversary edition DVD of On Golden Pond is a gem, and gives a good sense of his tell-it-like-it-is personality.)

Golden Pond is as close to a part of my DNA as a movie can be, and it's a film that is sacred to folks around here, because Squam Lake still looks quite a bit like it did in the movie, and plenty of people remember seeing Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, and Dabney Coleman around town.

I hadn't paid much attention to what the other nominees were that year until recently. If I remembered anything, it was that Chariots of Fire won for Best Picture and Ernest beat Harold Pinter for Best Adapted Screenplay (Pinter's adaptation of The French Lieutenant's Woman verges on genius, finding cinematic/dramatic ways to replicate the novel's very novelistic complexities of narrative and structure, making an "unfilmable book" into a generally interesting film. I'm glad Ernest won, though.) But though 1981 was hardly an annus miribilis for cinema, there was some interesting work released that year. Among the movies not getting major notice from the Academy, there was Fassbinder's Lola and Lili Marleen; Blow Out; Coup de Torchon; Escape from New York; The Road Warrior; Mommie Dearest; Ms. 45; My Dinner with André; Pennies from Heaven; Polyester; Scanners; Thief; Time Bandits; and a bunch of horror movies: American Werewolf in London, The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th pt. 2, Halloween 2, The Howling, Wolfen, etc. (It was a good year for werewolves and slashers.)

The nominees for Best Picture were a fairly diverse lot: On Golden Pond, Chariots of Fire, Atlantic City, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Reds. People are saying this year is a particularly nostalgic one for the Academy, but look at that list — the only movie on there that takes place in the present in Golden Pond!* That tends to be how the Best Picture nominees go. It's not easy to find a set of Best Picture nominees where the majority are concerned with present-day realism. (I'm not saying there should be. But to be surprised that the Oscars favor nostalgic or historical films is to be surprised that the Oscars are the Oscars.)

I have great love for the great mess that is Reds, but it wasn't until I looked at the various Oscar nominees and winners that I realized it came out in the same year as Ragtime, another politically-charged film about the early 20th century. While Maureen Stapleton won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Emma Goldman in Reds, the character of Emma Goldman was cut out of the film of Ragtime (though a scene with her is available as an extra feature on the DVD). I hope in the coming weeks to revisit both films and write about them a bit here.

For now, though, I just wanted to note that 30 years have passed since On Golden Pond was at the top of the world. For me, that fact alone presents plenty to get nostalgic about.


*Update: As Patrick Murtha points out in the comments, my memory of Atlantic City (which I haven't seen in at least a decade) is faulty. Though I remember it as set in the past, it's set in my past, not the movie's past. So I was wrong. Golden Pond and Atlantic City are both set in their own present, but both are certainly concerned with the past and nostalgia, so my larger point remains.

Silly (Awards) Season

I'm a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards this year, so perhaps I'm more sensitive than normal to pundits carping about award results, but something about awards brings out people's desire to complain, and they don't usually come out looking very good by doing so.

The ones people always complain about get complaints again this year -- the Nobel and the National Book Awards. The two articles I've seen linked to most frequently are Tim Parks on the Nobel and Laura Miller on the National Book Awards.

The Parks piece isn't terrible, but I'd agree with M.A. Orthofer at The Literary Saloon that it's "somewhat careless". (Parks has written a bit more thoughtfully about the Nobel in his essay "The Nobel Individual".) I certainly agree that the Nobel is inevitably in a tough position because it's supposed to be so international and definitive, and people give it almost mystical reverence, but its track record really isn't that bad. Sure, I wish they'd give it to Chinua Achebe already, and then Ngugi wa Thiong'o (so I could say I once interviewed a Nobel winner), and not be so generally Eurocentric, but it's an award based in Europe, so, you know, whatever. And I've got no problem with it being anti-American. Michael Bourne can whine all he wants about Philip Roth not getting it, and maybe Roth will get it one of these days, but I hope not. When Bourne writes, "If Philip Roth doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize, no one does," he just flaunts his ignorance of world literature. There are plenty of other writers out there who would benefit from it more and who are equally interesting and even influential artists.

Tomas Transtörmer, this year's winner, is a safe and relatively obvious choice. Some people have complained that he's an "obscure poet", but anybody who refers to him as such doesn't know what they're talking about. He's been translated into somewhere around 50 languages, has multiple translators in English, has books in print in the U.S. For a poet, that's rockstar status. Just because you haven't heard of somebody doesn't mean they're obscure.

Laura Miller's slam of the NBA is some of the worst writing I've ever seen from her. People have a habit of complaining about the obscurity of NBA finalists, and it always makes them sound stupid. Laura Miller accuses the NBA judges in the fiction category of deliberately seeking out books that are no fun to read and are published by small presses. She accuses them of seeking out books that deserve more attention and ignoring books that are popular. "If you categorically rule out books that a lot of people like," she says, "you shouldn’t be surprised when a lot of people don’t like the books you end up with."

That's not really an argument, though. It's more like a non sequitur. At the very least, it's irrelevant.

The judges for the fiction award this year are Deirdre McNamer (Panel Chair), Jerome Charyn, John Crowley, Victor LaValle, Yiyun Li. That's an interesting panel. My interest in a book would rise if I knew those folks had thought the book was worthwhile and even impressive.

Blogging the Caine Prize: And the Winner Is...

The winner of this year's Caine Prize for African Writing is NoViolet Bulawayo for her story "Hitting Budapest", originally published by Boston Review.

"Hitting Budapest" was the first story we wrote about for the Caine Prize blogathon, and it's held up better in my memory than I expected it would. Despite my qualms about some aspects of it, there's a vividness to the language that gives it some freshness. Were I on the jury, it wouldn't have been my first choice (that would be "The Mistress's Dog"), but it might have been second, or tied for second with "In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata", though that's a story that, unlike "Hitting Budapest", has diminished in my memory.

Blogging the Caine Prize: "Hitting Budapest"

This post is part of a series initiated by Aaron Bady of Zunguzungu in which various bloggers will write about the five short stories nominated for this year's Caine Prize for African Writing. For more information, see my introductory post.

I think Aaron is right to say that NoViolet Bulawayo's "Hitting Budapest" fits into a genre of African writing (fiction and memoir): "the story of children left behind by their society, either running wild in perverse and monstrous ways (as in the child soldier narrative, in particular) or festering in horrible ignorance and social pathology" -- and genre is a pretty good word for it, because such stories vary considerably in quality and effect while displaying some common features. It's a genre the Caine Prize is particularly welcoming toward, as I noted in my review of the anniversary anthology of Caine winners. The paragraph about "Jungfrau" in that review applies pretty equally to "Hitting Budapest", though I think "Hitting Budapest" has more strengths.

Some of the other bloggers writing about "Hitting Budapest" have noted that it isn't much of an actual story -- it's a narrative of a group of impoverished, hungry kids walking from one part of a city to another, encountering the stereotypical Well Intentioned But Clueless White Woman, having some other encounters, dreaming about a better life for themselves, and then walking home. Stuff happens (they see a dead body hanging from a tree, for instance), but what happens isn't consequential for them. It's almost a "quiet epiphany" story, except the epiphany is displaced -- the readers are the ones who are, it seems, supposed to have an epiphany: the lives these children live are oppressive, unjust, painful, etc. It's the basic epiphany of social realism, or what gets called "poverty porn". Turn "How to Write about Africa" into a checklist and start ticking one item after another.

The problem for me with "Hitting Budapest" is the same as I had with a lot of the previous Caine Prize winners: not that these stories are bad, but that they don't offer us much more than the familiar tropes. I think "Hitting Budapest" is actually better than some of the past winning stories, because it has a strong voice that captures the children's perspectives in this terrible environment, and I particularly like the effect of the wealthier section of the city being known as "Budapest" and the impoverished section where the children live being "Paradise". The playfulness and bitter irony of naming is one of the story's real strengths, and it accomplishes a definite unsettling of expectations when early in the story we haven't quite figured out yet that Budapest is not referring to the city in Hungary. All of the children's words for places are then called into question, and so Darling's dreams of escape and happiness in "America" are poignant. The world shrinks into the children's frame of reference. (Little do the children know, they could write a bestseller!)

But is this enough? Get rid of the interesting effect produced by the naming, and we still have a story that doesn't add up to much, because the setting is sketchy, the characters are vague (we know them best through their interesting names), and what emotion the story produces is not created through the specificity of the situation but through our recognition that these are not isolated lives; that, in fact, many children in the world live just as badly or worse.

It is possible to write excellent stories of quiet epiphany -- some of the most renowned writers of short stories have done it. But there are all sorts of other ways to write stories, many of them much more likely to be affecting and effective. Young and inexperienced writers tend to be drawn to the quiet epiphany mode for various reasons, one being that it feels sensitive, it feels artistic. And it is, when it works. But when it doesn't work, it's empty and banal; worse, when applied to genuine human misery, it risks trivializing.

The consistency of voice in "Hitting Budapest", the ironic humor, the skill with children's point of view -- these are all strengths of the story. But they are linked to its limitations. Why, for instance, tell such a story from a child's point of view? It's an easy way to grab the reader's sympathy -- e.g., the "her grandfather made her pregnant" detail that Aaron discusses -- but it prevents there being any space for analysis or history in the story. We can't understand the forces at play in their lives, or the history of those forces, because children don't. It's possible for a writer to add clues and details to give the alert reader an impression of worlds beyond the child's consciousness, and that's a really powerful narrative strategy, but this story is too short and too vague to achieve that. Its virtues, then, seem to me wasted.

For other takes on "Hitting Budapest", see the links at the end of Aaron's post.

Blogging the Caine Prize: An Introduction

Aaron Bady has come up with a great idea: since the Caine Prize for African Writing will be awarded in five weeks, and there are five short stories nominated, why not write about one story a week until the award?

I'm going to throw myself into this, because I think the Caine Prize is important, and the exercise could be fun. I hope lots of other folks will join in.

Here are the nominated stories, all available online as PDFs:

• NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe) ‘Hitting Budapest’ from ‘The Boston Review’ Vol 35, no. 6 - Nov/Dec 2010 [or direct link to the story at Boston Review]

• Beatrice Lamwaka (Uganda) ‘Butterfly dreams’ from ‘Butterfly Dreams and Other New Short Stories from Uganda’ published by Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, Nottingham, 2010
  
  
• Tim Keegan (South Africa) ‘What Molly Knew’ from ‘Bad Company’ published by Pan Macmillan SA, 2008
  
  
• Lauri Kubuitsile (Botswana) ‘In the spirit of McPhineas Lata’ from ‘The Bed Book of Short Stories’ published by Modjaji Books, SA, 2010
  
  
• David Medalie (South Africa) ‘The Mistress’s Dog’ from ‘The Mistress’s Dog: Short stories 1996-2010’ published by Picador Africa, 2010

[Update: My contributions: On "Hitting Budapest", On "Butterfly Dreams", On "What Molly Knew", On "In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata", On "The Mistress's Dog". Then a final post after the award was announced.]

To begin, though, and as an introduction, here's a review I wrote of Ten Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing, for the winter 2010/11 print issue of Rain Taxi.

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

TEN YEARS OF THE CAINE PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING

edited by Chris Brazier

New Internationalist ($18.95)

by Matthew Cheney

The Caine Prize for African Writing was first awarded at the 2000 Zimbabwe International Book Fair.  Named for Sir Michael Caine, who for many years chaired the management committee of the Booker Prize, the prize is awarded annually to a work of English-language short fiction by an African writer (the winners have all so far been from sub-Saharan countries).  Before his death, Caine had been working on ways to bring African writing in English to a wider audience, and his family, friends, and colleagues created the prize after his death to honor him and his efforts.

            

Because of Michael Caine's connection to the Booker Prize, the Caine Prize has sometimes been called "the African Booker", and Ten Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing encourages this idea by leading with works by Booker winners Ben Okri, Nadine Gordimer, and J.M. Coetzee.  Coetzee's story, "Nietverloren", is the only one original to the anthology, and his prominence as not only a Booker winner, but, like Gordimer, a Nobel Prize laureate, in some ways overshadows the Caine Prize winners, especially since Coetzee has rarely published short fiction.  Okri contributes a sententious introduction and a story, "Incidents at the Shrine", that tells an allegorical tale of an urbanized man being purified through contact with spirits in his rural village.

            

Beginning the book with stories by the Booker winners who have African connections is understandable from a marketing point of view, but it unfortunately makes the Caine Prize seem not so much like "the African Booker" as "the lesser Booker" -- after all, the Booker is given not to short fiction, but to novels, and it has the power to make its winners into overnight international bestsellers.  On one hand, placing the Caine Prize winners alongside the work of Okri, Coetzee, and Gordimer encourages us to see them all as equals; on the other hand, it is very obvious that the differences between the prizes and their winners is substantial.

            

This is not to suggest that the Caine Prize winners are bad stories; none of them are, and many of them are more vivid and gripping than, at least, the two plodding and obvious stories by Gordimer that are included ("The Ultimate Safari" and "An Emissary"; Gordimer has written some brilliant short fiction, but you would not know that if you only read these two pieces).  Coetzee's story is minor in comparison to the accomplishments of his novels, but a minor story by one of the greatest living writers in the English language is still an impressive piece of work, and the tale has a complexity and richness lacking from all but one or two of the other pieces in the book.  In telling a story about one man's perception of the changes in pastoral South Africa during the course of his life, Coetzee offers a delicate and complicated perspective on nostalgia, change, commercialism, and authenticity.  There are ironies in the story, and the portrait of a sad, alienated man is affecting while also incisive: we do not, as readers, need to accept his admittedly bitter interpretation of life in South Africa as objective and accurate, but his view of the world as a place ineradicably commercialized is seductive.  (It makes for a particularly interesting comparison with Okri's "Incidents at the Shrine", which tells a very different story of a man returning to a changed home.)

            

The sort of complexities "Nietverloren" offers are absent from the other stories in the book, which tend to be more straightforward. Most of the prize winners are slice-of-life dramas featuring many of the problems that get sold to the non-African world as endemic to the continent: abject poverty, diseased slums, wanton political corruption, refugees, children of war.  If there are ironies in these stories, they tend toward the obvious, as in Mary Watson's "Jungfrau", the 2006 winner, wherein a character nicknamed "the Virgin Jessica" is proved to be anything but virginal.  The narrator announces from the first sentence that "It was the Virgin Jessica who taught me about wickedness," and the story goes on to show how.  There's nothing particularly wrong with such a tale, but there's also nothing exciting or innovative about it, either.  It is skilled, and that's about all.

            

Binyavanga Wainaina's "Discovering Home" is much more than skilled.  Seeming to hover in a genre divide between being a personal essay and a short story, it is an absolute masterpiece, full of both humor and pathos.  It builds on a simple concept: a man returning to his Kenyan home after time in Cape Town.  Wainaina's keen eye for meaningful details enriches this simple structure, and the abundant specificity of the narrator's observations and experiences becomes universally affecting for anyone who has ever returned home with new eyes.  There is an energy and humor to the writing that is absent from the rest of the book.

            

Henriette Rose-Innes's "Poison" may lack "Discovering Home's" wryness and brio, but it's probably the wrong sort of tale for such things anyway, being an apocalyptic science fiction story of a massive chemical cloud causing havoc in South Africa.  What distinguishes "Poison" from the other Caine Prize winners (aside from being the only story clearly set outside a recognizable present reality) is the clarity and grace of its writing.  The situation and plot are not especially original, but the imagery is polished and affecting, the sentences impressively efficient and balanced.  It's a haunting story, bleak but not nihilistic.

The individual Caine Prize volumes include the shortlisted stories and stories from an annual African writers' workshop, and the effect is quite different from this collection only of winners.  While the quality of writing in the annual volumes is more varied, the subject matter and story types are as well.  The Caine Prize judges seem to have narrow tastes, at least when it comes to picking a winner, and this is a real limitation not only of the prize, but of its loftier goals for  spreading awareness of African fiction.  African writers are no less diverse in the types of literature they write than non-African writers, but without much publishing infrastructure for fiction outside of a few countries on the continent, African writers who seek something more than local publication are at the mercy of non-African ideas of what constitutes "African literature".           

            

Bringing attention to African fiction is a worthy endeavor, and though the winners have, overall, been narrow in scope and technique in the first decade of the Caine Prize, the second decade may offer more variety of writing as the prize brings encouragement and resources to Africa's writers.

originally published in Rain Taxi, Winter 2010/11

reprinted with permission of Rain Taxi

And Now I Have a Bird Head

When I found out I was nominated for the Last Drink Bird Head award, I thought the other folks in my category were so immensely talented and deserving that it was inconceivable -- INCONCEIVABLE! -- that I could win. Jeff VanderMeer asked me to appoint someone to accept the award in my absence should I win, and also to write an acceptance speech in case I happened to need one. I got busy and forgot about this request, and remembered a couple days ago and thought, "No, there's no way."

And then I won.

So here I am, like the occasional Oscar winner who doesn't write a speech because there's just no way in heckapalooza they could win, and then they do, and they speak extemporaneously and bizarrely, and everyone then thinks, "Wow, that person is a bird brain!"

Here, after the fact, is my extemporaneous acceptance speech upon winning the Last Drink Bird Head award in the category of "Expanding Our Vocabulary":

Oh wow. Gosh. Wow. Okay. So, uh, yikes, you know, I didn't actually, ummm, think I'd like, uh, win? The award? But here I am, so, uhhhhh, yeah! Wow! Man, these things are heavier than they look! Oh, so I should, ummm, there are -- there are people I have to thank! Right! I couldn't be here today without, of course, my parents, who made me, and ummmm, right -- and I have a dog! No, I don't have a dog. I don't even really like dogs. I've been thinking about getting another cat, because my old cats died and-- Wait, the red light's going on, that means I have to, like, wrap it up, right? But there are so many people to thank without whom I couldn't be here today! The person who invented the Internet for instance -- whoever you are -- thank you! And and and -- oh, the music, that means------ [MUSIC RISES]

When the awards were handed out, I was actually up in northern New Hampshire and Vermont with Eric Schaller, Mr. Last Drink Bird Head himself (for the whole story, you have to read the book). Little did we know that we were celebrating!

Thank you to the mysterious cabal of advisors to the award; I am really and honestly grateful -- amazed! -- that the various work I've done has found an appreciative audience.

Ultimate Libation Avian Cranium Award Nominations

Jeff VanderMeer has announced the second year of the Last Drink Bird Head Award nominations, and I was wondrous amazed to find myself listed there in the category of "Expanding Our Vocabulary: In recognition of writers whose nonfiction, through reviews, blogging, and/or essays, exposes readers to new words and, often, new ideas..."

The other nominees in the category are the sagacious Anil Menon, the acroatic Abigail Nussbaum, and the argute Adam Roberts -- lambent flames of intellect, each!

The nominees in the other categories are marvelous as well, and I do not envy the judges their judging, because I would never want to distinguish between such distinguished folks -- in all of the categories, the nominees are people I read with great pleasure and from whom I've learned a lot over the years.

Now I must go back to poring over lexical tomes, preparing to vanquish my rivals in the grand mudwrestling-while-reciting-the-OED event that will, I'm told, determine the true winner...

Drink Tank Hugo Special

Chris Garcia of the fanzine Drink Tank asked me if he could reprint my blog post on Julian Comstock in a Hugo issue, and after taking a look at some of the hundreds of back-issues, I happily said sure thing.  I'm woefully ignorant of most fanzines, but enjoyed what I read at Drink Tank, and the Hugo Special that's just been put up as a PDF is really a great read.  It's full of opinionated and not at all orthodox pieces about the Hugo Awards in general and this year's slate in particular.

At Readercon last week, I was talking with John Kessel and Brett Cox about generational differences in the science fiction world, and the fact that many young writers got into SF through movies and books of the '80s and '90s rather than classics from the "Golden Age" eras.  John said, "But you seem to know some of that work," and I said I'm a weirdo because most of the SF I read in my early, most impressionable years came from a college library that hadn't really updated its SF collection since 1980 or so.  In particular, I read the first three Hugo Winners collections that Isaac Asimov put together, and his commentaries on each story created my idea (at the time) of what science fiction is.  So the Hugo Awards are something special to me, and I'm happy to have been able to contribute to a Hugo-themed issue of a fanzine that has, in fact, been nominated for the award itself a number of times, including this year...

2010 National Book Award Judges Include Samuel Delany

Here's some fun news for the day: Samuel Delany is one of the five judges for the National Book Award in the Fiction category for 2010.

The entire panel is interesting: in addition to Delany, it includes Andrei Codrescu, Sabina Murray, Joanna Scott, and Carolyn See.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall for the discussions amongst such a group!

Nebula, Nebulae

Dear Nebula Voters,

I know what your real purpose is with the nominees for this year's award.  Don't think you can hide your secret, conspiratorial goals from me!  I know what you really want to do is cause me immense angst by putting some of my favorite people up against each other in your various (nefarious!) categories.  You know when it comes to awards I root for the people I know and like before I even consider anything else, because of course the people I know and like are all the greatest writer in the world, but what am I supposed to do when you, for instance, put VanderMeer up against Barzak in the novel category?!

I'm safe, at least, with the short story category.  Jim Kelly is the only writer I know well there, so obviously he should win.  Novelette is worse -- Paolo Bacigalupi is the one person whose short stories have caused me to write a long essay, and he's a really nice guy (well, as long as you don't burn lots of hydrocarbons in front of him.  I tried digging an oil well at the World Fantasy Convention in 2005, and he threatened to punch me).  Rachel Swirsky I've communicated with regarding Best American Fantasy (we reprinted her story "How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth" in BAF 2, and all of the BAF contributors feel like family to me, even if I never talk to them, which is mostly what makes them feel like family...)  And then there's Mr. Bowes, who once attacked me with a stiletto-heeled shoe when I suggested that Cats is not the greatest musical of all time.  I've forgiven him, even though Starlight Express is obviously the greatest musical of all time, and in learning forgiveness, I have learned to appreciate the man himself, and so of course I want him to win as much as I want Paolo and Rachel to win.  Maybe they all can.  (Voters!  Coordinate your efforts to please me!)

Novella is actually easy, too, because the only person there I've met is John Scalzi, and he's alright, even if I remain dead to him.

But the novel category ... it's killing me.  I'm going to have to freebase my entire collection of pill-bottle cotton tonight just to calm my aching soul.  Not only are Messrs. Barzak and VanderMeer, two of my favorite people, present there, but Paolo Bacigalupi is hanging out in that category as well, and so is China Mieville with The City & The City, a book I adored.  And though I don't know Cherie Priest, I know her editor, who is also one of my favorite people, and thus is, by definition, the greatest editor in the world.

Okay, Nebula voters -- I give up!  Uncle!  Please please please start nominating more works by mean, nasty people I don't like!  Or at least people I don't know!  I'm working hard to be a recluse, so it shouldn't be all that difficult to locate more people I don't know.  It will save me agonized nights of writhing on the floor, my loyalties pulling me in all directions, my heart torn asunder.

What's that you say?  It's not all about me?  Yes, I've heard that before, many times.  Conspirators always deny their conspiracy.  I know the truth, though, and in the immortal words of Bob Dylan: "I don't believe you!"

Meanwhile, congratulations to all!

Sincerely,
Patient #45403892, New Hampshire State Home for the Criminally Bewildered

PS
Whoever has my tinfoil hat, you'd better return it!  Bowes!  BOWES!!!!

Hooray for Hugos!

I'll admit it: I have a sentimental love of the Hugo Awards. The Hugo Winners anthologies edited by Isaac Asimov were essential to forming my early view of what science fiction is and can be (Asimov's introductions to the stories were as important as the stories themselves, painting a portrait of a community of readers and writers that I deeply wished I could join). The Hugo Winners volumes 1-5 sit proudly on my living room bookshelves -- below shelves of Chekhov and Kafka, above a shelf of Virgina Woolf and a shelf of Shakespeare.

I didn't have a problem with Adam Roberts's recent call for the Hugos to get "better", because in amidst the shouts of "elitist!" and "nuh uh!" it led to some good conversation. Criticism of the Hugos is an important tradition. Soon after I discovered the Hugo Winners anthologies in a library, I discovered in a used bookstore two anthologies edited by Richard Lupoff: What If? volumes one and two. Subtitled "Stories That Should Have Won the Hugo", the books offered their own, highly opinionated, introductions to each of the Hugo years (up through 1965, which is, alas, as far as Lupoff got). I had so internalized Asimov's presentation of the Hugo Awards that reading Lupoff's books felt more scandalous than reading porn. Lupoff taught me not to trust the Hugos as a brilliant arbiter of quality, but Asimov's fondness for them never left me -- Kelly Link let me hold hers once, and it was probably as close to a religious experience as I will ever come.

Anyway, all of this blather is prelude to my offering congratulations to this year's Hugo winners. Congratulations!

Three first-time winners, though, I want to highlight here for purely personal reasons. I'll do it alphabetically.

John Klima won a Hugo for Electric Velocipede. I'm wary of saying anything, because a few days ago I actually submitted a story to him, so I'm afraid he's going to think I'm sucking up to him now that he's Hugo-ified, but my cover letter was so sycophantic that I couldn't possibly top that. (Except to say that I think the Hugos should be renamed the Klimas. I'm going to make a motion for that for the next Worldcon.) I first encountered EV five years ago when I reviewed it for SF Site, and I am thrilled that the zine is still being published and that its quality has remained high, with only one notable lapse of taste.

Cheryl Morgan is simply one of my favorite people, and that she has now won a Best Fan Writer Hugo is -- well, the only word I can think of is perfect. When I think of smart, compassionate, and good-humored fandom, I think of Cheryl. This is not her first Hugo (she won before for Emerald City), but it is the Hugo she was, in my utterly biased and joyful opinion, born to win.

Finally, Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal for Weird Tales. Of course, I'm biased because Ann has been a great friend of mine for years, and she even had the bad sense to publish my little story "How to Play with Dolls" recently, but I think the work she and Stephen have done on WT is astounding, fantastic, and amazing. It's become a magazine that is consistently surprising and engaging, but it has not lost a sense of its important history and identity. I feel like Ann and Stephen are only beginning to show us what they can really do with it, and each issue seems to surpass the high standards set by the previous one. It's a magazine that feels coherent and vital, and that's a hard thing to accomplish.

Oh, and I suppose I should add: In honor of John Scalzi's win, I will not use the word "alright" for at least one day...

How to Be Proved Wrong

Now and then, those of us who write book reviews let our guard down and make generalized statements that could be proved wrong with a single exception. Sometimes we buffer such statements with qualifiers that technically relieve them of being pure generalizations, but I doubt many readers are fooled.

For instance, last year I wrote a somewhat less than positive review of Nisi Shawl's short story collection Filter House. I even said this:

While I find it easy to believe readers will experience Shawl's stories in different ways -- such is the case with any basically competent fiction -- I cannot imagine how a reader who is sensitive to literature's capabilities and possibilities could possibly say these stories offer much of a performance.

I certainly made a point of highlighting my subjectivity here: "I cannot imagine how...", but still. The intent is clear. I spent most of the review saying, in one way or another, that this book seemed to me the epitome of mediocre, and I tried to imply that it's inconceivable (INCONCEIVABLE!) that anyone would passionately disagree with such a rational perspective.

The greater the claims, the harder they fall... Within days, I had learned that Samuel Delany thought Filter House one of the best collections of science fiction stories published in the last decade or so. Delany and I have fairly different taste in fiction, but I deeply respect his readings of things, and even if I can't share his enthusiasm for a certain text, I've never felt like I couldn't understand what sparked and fueled that enthusiasm.

And now Filter House has been listed as one of the 7 best SF/Fantasy/Horror books of the year by Publisher's Weekly, and it has won a Tiptree Award.

While I will admit I still don't understand the acclaim, I have to say I was completely and utterly wrong -- dramatically, astoundingly, INCONCEIVABLY! wrong -- in thinking that it was an impossible book to see as an example of excellence. Plenty of very smart and sensitive readers have found it to be exactly that.

Nebula Nominees

Okay, now the world feels small. For the first time, I know someone in all the fiction categories of the Nebula nominees. And not just like encountered on Facebook once (though there is that...) -- but was roommates at the World Fantasy Convention with (Dave Schwartz), wrote a story with (Jeff Ford), have known since I was in the 7th grade (Jim Kelly). Rick Bowes keeps my first child in a basement in Hell's Kitchen. Kelley Eskridge I know the least of the group, but she's among the awesomest people on Earth, so I have to claim her anyway. (She's teaching my second child to dance.) John Kessel I met for the first time this summer, but I think he was the one who convinced Rick that my first child needed a basement and some electrodes.

It's a good thing I'm not a SFWA member, because my approach to awards is to root for my friends, and I would have trouble voting with so many good people nominated. I think I'd advocate for mud wrestling to determine the winners. That would certainly liven up the Nebula banquets!

Congrats to all the nominees, including the folks I don't know.

Congratulations to Matt Bell

Matt Bell has won the StorySouth Million Writers Award for his story "Alex Trebek Never Eats Fried Chicken" from Storyglossia. (Galleycat has a good write-up about the award and Matt here.)

I'm noting this not because I'm a big fan of awards, but because I had not noticed Matt's name before Jeff and Ann VanderMeer picked his story "Mario's Three Lives" for Best American Fantasy 2008, and it's fun to see someone whose work we read without any knowledge of his background or abilities now achieving some recognition. So congrats to Matt, and let's hope this is just the beginning of many more accomplishments in the future!

Some Harmless Fun

It's the time of year for me to be utterly torn -- torn by my knowledge that the Oscars are a ridiculous ritual and by my fascination with them. They are, as somebody (I don't remember who) once said, the Superbowl for gay people, and I have often dreamed of tailgating the ceremony whilst wearing my pink feather boa. (Or maybe Tayari Jones's coat. Except I think I somehow look like Rudy Giuliani in that picture.) And yet I also agree with a lot of what A.O. Scott said about them: "The Oscars themselves may be harmless fun, but the idea that they matter is as dangerous as it is ridiculous."

So I'm going to give up on matter for the moment, and instead indulge in harmless fun by offering unsolicited and utterly useless opinions on films I have seen and not seen. (Do note, though, that last year I lost on Oscar betting to Ms. McCarron.)

Here we go, with the help of the official list:

Actor: Consensus seems to be that Daniel Day-Lewis will win, and that seems deserved to me. Some people have carped that his acting was showy or external or something like that, but such criticisms seem to me to come from a limited view of what acting is and can be, the sort of view that privileges the most Method of Method Acting (bleccch) over everything else. Day-Lewis's performance made me think of Meyerhold's biomechanics and of some of Grotowski's ideas about acting. My other favorite male performance of the year was not nominated: Tony Leung Chiu Wai in Lust, Caution, a performance that is brilliant in exactly the opposite way that Day-Lewis's is: its power comes from Leung's restraint, from how much he is able to convey with a glance, from how masterfully he uses stillness and silence, and how stunning it is when he breaks the stillness and silence. I thought the movie itself fell flat, but his performance was entrancing.

Supporting Actor: I'm rooting for Hal Holbrook or Casey Affleck here. I didn't much like Into the Wild, but Holbrook did a lot with the little he was given. It's strange that Casey Affleck, who is pretty much the protagonist of Jesse James, was put forth in the supporting category, but that's probably how they thought he had the best shot to be noticed, given the number of attention-getting lead roles there were this year. He deserves the award for making an otherwise vapid movie at least somewhat interesting and for his flawlessly focused performance.

Actress: Of these films, I've only seen Away from Her, and Julie Christie, was, indeed, marvelous in a role that could easily have been sentimental. That it was not is a testament to Christie's performance, as well as the writing and editing of the film.

Supporting Actress: I want Cate Blanchett to win just because I'm annoyed that my favorite film of the year, I'm Not There, didn't get more nominations. Stupid Academy people! Bah!

Animated Feature: I only saw Persepolis, but I liked it quite a bit -- the animation was engaging from beginning to end, and the wonder of it, I thought, was that it made every frame of the film feel like a blank page, a place where any sort of movement might happen. That's the virtue of animation in general, but I've rarely encountered animated films that so vividly exploit this virtue.

Art Direction: Hmmm. I find this category completely uninspiring. I want to be excited at the idea of Sweeney Todd winning (will it? I don't know), but in retrospect, there's something too monotone to that movie's art direction for my taste -- I wanted it to be somehow both livelier and grittier. Or maybe I just think Across the Universe deserved to be here and I'm bitter. Yes, that's probably it. Stupid Academy people! Bah!

Cinematography: In some way or another, all of these films deserve to win (well, I haven't seen Atonement yet, but I'm feeling generous). My last choice would probably be Jesse James, because it felt too pleased with its own cinematography to me, and self-satisfaction annoys me. Which could just be a product of my own self-satisfaction. Still, it was a better movie visually than most of what was out there. I liked other aspects of No Country for Old Men better than the cinematography, but it was certainly excellent. There Will Be Blood would probably be my second choice in this category, because there was something organic and messy about the photography and lighting, and in the couple of moments when I wasn't thinking about how much I liked Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, I was thinking about the cinematography. But my choice for winner would be Diving Bell and the Butterfly, because I think cinematography is the film's greatest strength. There was a lot I didn't like about the movie after the first half hour, but cinematographically it's a masterpiece. The most deserving movie I know of for this category, though, isn't here: Zodiac. (See this American Cinematographer article for an explanation of some of what went into filming Zodiac.)

Costume Design: Across the Universe! Yay! If anything else wins, I will go to Fifth Avenue and burn all my boas in the street!

Directing: No Country stands out for me here, more so than in any other category, really. There Will Be Blood is just too much of a mess in its second half for me to find it deserving of this award, even though I generally found the mess fascinating. Anderson's great movie is still to come. No Country displayed some gutsy directorial choices, and felt to me like a summation and apotheosis of so many of the Coens's obsessions and proclivities that it stands out here for me.

Documentaries: I didn't see any of the nominated documentary features or shorts. I didn't get excited by documentaries in 2007 because, whether justifiably or not, I felt that most were the sorts of things you only needed to read a summary of and look at the poster for to know most of what you'd get from them. I'm prejudiced against documentaries in general, though, because for most subjects, I'd rather just read a book.

Editing: I kind of want Bourne Ultimatum to win here, even though it was my least favorite of the Bourne movies -- the editing kept the movie moving at such a pace that it was occasionally difficult to realize how limp the thing was at its core, and this, in its own weird way, is a triumph. No Country may deserve the award, too, because the Coens (pseudonymously) did their own editing; in some ways, though, I think of it as being an extension of their directing, which I've already said is the award I think they most deserve. The editing category is another one where I miss the presence of Zodiac -- I don't know if it's the movie I would have chosen for a winner, but it certainly belongs in this company.

Foreign Language Film: The absence of Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days here is so glaring that I have trouble taking this category seriously, which is a shame, because last year I thought the Foreign Language category was the strongest one in the lineup.

Makeup and Music: Not categories I have any opinion about, amazingly enough. Except I think there should be more music about makeup.

Best Picture: I'm Not There. And it's not.

Short Films: I have a weird prejudice against short films, a complete resistance to them.

Sound Editing: No Country is a good choice here, because it does what few American films do: eschews music. Well-placed music can be wonderful in a movie, of course, but I do wish American movies weren't so beholden to it. That No Country created as powerful an atmosphere and mood as it did is in no small part the result of the sound editing, and so it deserves, methinks, notice.

Sound Mixing: I am generally unqualified to judge all of the categories for the Oscar, but in this one I am particularly unqualified, knowing nothing whatsoever about sound mixing. If you're in desperate need of my opinion here (in which case you are desperate in ways I don't even want to imagine), then here it is: Sound mixing? I am in favor of it.

Visual Effects: Didn't see the films.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay): I think Away from Her deserves this one, though No Country will probably win. There were a number of things that made Away from Her as effective as it was, but the element that most impressed me was the writing -- Sarah Polley's script (PDF), based on Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" is masterfully understated -- what could have easily been a disease-of-the-week weepie became so much more through the intelligent and restrained construction of scenes.

Writing (Original Screenplay): This is a strange collection, and not a particularly strong one. (I'm Not There deserved this award, too.) The only worthwhile thing about Lars and the Real Girl is that it contains a sex doll as a main character and yet could have received a G rating. Otherwise, it's just about as insipid as the average Hallmark Hall of Fame movie.

Whew! That's enough bloviating for me for quite some time!

Strange Horizons, WFC, Etc.

The latest issue of Strange Horizons has been posted and includes a column in which I blather on a bit and then recommend some literary journals that adventurous readers might enjoy.

While I'm here, I'd like to offer congratulations to the World Fantasy Award winners for this year -- especially to such friends, supporters, and critics of The Mumpsimus as Mary Rickert, Jeff Ford, and Ellen Datlow.

I was not at the World Fantasy Convention, for various reasons, but I had a little mini-convention all of my own. Friday's highlight was a panel on laundry. On Saturday, I participated in a kaffeeklatch with a writer I admire, Richard Larson, then continued on with him to see the associational (because its title invokes a fantastic creature) movie Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which he liked overall a bit more than I did, but which I nonetheless thought was certainly worth seeing. And then on Sunday, to finish it all up, I moderated a special session of the SATs, which was similar to the World Fantasy Awards banquet, I'm sure, except quieter and without any joy or happiness.