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Lev Grossman on the connections between modernist literature and fantasy, an the difference between fantasy (the genre) and fantasy (the mental state), with added background on Leonard Woolf (husband of the more famous Virginia) and his odd housemate from his days in the Ceylon Civil Service:
Magical thinking isn’t fantasy in the literary sense. It is a fantasy, in the psychoanalytic sense: a dream of a world where actions don’t have consequences, where loss is an impossibility, where wishing makes it so, where one doesn’t have to make choices, because all possible good things arrive at once, unbidden, with none of those nasty trade-offs that are so characteristic of real life. There is no either/or in a fantasy, it’s all both/and. This is the world that Dutton’s fairies evoked for Woolf, and that he was struggling so mightily to put behind him.
But fantasies aren’t literature, and fantasies aren’t fantasy. This isn’t a distinction that Woolf would have made, but Dutton might have made it. Granted, fantasy literature, broadly speaking, tends to be set in worlds where magic is real. But that doesn’t mean anything is possible. Magic doesn’t permeate those worlds completely. Magic exists, but only as a flash of vital light in a universe that is otherwise as dark and mechanical as our own—its presence casts the tragic, non-magical parts of life in higher relief. Magic tantalizes with the possibility that it might quicken the world back into life, restore the lost paradise of magical thinking, but ultimately it cannot.
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Because I want to be able to find them again, here are links to SFSignal’s lists of the most underrated science fiction series and the most underrated fantasy series.
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Jacob Lambert on Tetris as an aesthetic experience:
Floating through Tetris’ cranial hyperspace forces a natural introspection. Often, sort of insanely, I’ll dwell upon what my playing method can tell me about myself. My technique isn’t to plow through rows or shatter a score; I play Tetris for the tetris: the four-row clear that comes with the vertically-nestled “I” block. Self-denial is necessary for the maneuver, as all must be laid aside for the blessed piece’s arrival. Meanwhile, the pile mounts dangerously. When the block finally appears, this mild daring and asceticism are handsomely repaid: there’s a flash of light, a scream of sound, and the pile’s heavy fall.
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Paul Bloom, “The Pleasures of Imagination”:
The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept—and I’m sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series led to similar tears. (After her final book was published, Rowling appeared in interviews and told about the letters she got, not all of them from children, begging her to spare the lives of beloved characters such as Hagrid, Hermione, Ron, and, of course, Harry Potter himself.) A friend of mine told me that he can’t remember hating anyone the way he hated one of the characters in the movie Trainspotting, and there are many people who can’t bear to experience certain fictions because the emotions are too intense. I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant.
These emotional responses are typically muted compared with the real thing. Watching a movie in which someone is eaten by a shark is less intense than watching someone really being eaten by a shark. But at every level—physiological, neurological, psychological—the emotions are real, not pretend.
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On a less pleasant note, a truly depressing article by Tim Dickinson, from Rolling Stone, on the oil spill in the gulf and the political dysfunctions that helped to bring it about.
The tale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is, at its core, the tale of two blowout preventers: one mechanical, one regulatory. The regulatory blowout preventer failed long before BP ever started to drill — precisely because Salazar kept in place the crooked environmental guidelines the Bush administration implemented to favor the oil industry.
Monthly Archives: June 2010
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
It sounds like Alberto Manguel has a hell of a library. He rebuilt an old barn just to house his 30,000 books. It’s where he begins his book The Library at Night. The title refers to the change he experiences at the end of his reading day: “But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but this space of books remains in existence.”
The Library at Night is a book of essays about libraries. Manguel constructed most of them from a generous handful of anecdotes clustered around one or two topics on which he goes deeper. Every essay looks at one of the functions of libraries.
What do libraries do? Judging from libraries’ websites the most popular answer is the kind of banally lofty statement of purpose normally written by committee (“The UC Berkeley Library connects students and scholars to the world of information and ideas”). This is also the boring answer. Manguel isn’t writing about the day-to-day business of libraries but about their purpose.
The essays fall roughly into three categories. Sometimes Manguel writes about how libraries order information: not only how the books are ordered, but how the space works. Sometimes a library’s architecture leans over your shoulder and tells you how to feel about its books. An 18th-century concept for a library drawn by Étienne-Louis Boullée looked like a cavernous train station. A place like that would pressure you to flip through a book, scribble a couple of notes, and move on.
The other categories are about libraries as cultural institutions and libraries as expressions of individual minds. Mostly, Manguel is examining libraries as physical embodiments of ideas—public libraries reflect the aspirations and ideals of a group, a private library is an expression of a single person’s mind. It’s common to jokingly refer to modern technology as an “outboard brain.” In reality, we’ve had outboard brains as long as we’ve had books.
Manguel ends the book with “The Library as Home.” That third category of essay, about the library as a home for the mind, got me thinking about my own library. It’s a haphazard, unsystematic collection, actually. There are books I like, or want to read, that I’ve never bothered to acquire. On the other hand, I’ve bought a lot of books because they were sitting on remainder tables, looking interesting and flaunting seductively cheap price labels. (Let’s not mention used bookstores. I’ve had to stop going. I can find anything online these days, and it’s guaranteed to be what I actually wanted, and not an impulse buy…) Often these purchases turn out surprisingly well; sometimes they’re just books I might as well have borrowed from the library. I wonder, having read Manguel’s book, just what my half-random collection says about my mind.