Overheard in the Last Few Months

Uncategorized

Sometimes I overhear odd things. I’ve been collecting these on Twitter.

  • “When the squirrel started crying his ears hurt.”

  • “…He looked exactly like me. And in a few days he was picked up by a private jet…”

  • First guy: “You’re like Superman flying backwards around the world.”

    Second guy: “You’re like…”

    First guy: “Shotgun!”

  • A mother to a whiny toddler: “You’re not being very rainbowy.”

  • In a bookstore, an older woman: “I’m looking for Farland.”

    A younger woman, maybe her daughter: “Oh, you have to go by name?”

  • In the same bookstore, someone’s opinion of Neil Gaiman: “He’s a new writer… I’m not sure I like his style. It’s very harsh and now.”

  • In a different bookstore: “It’s not just a monkey book, it’s also about conservation.”

  • Husband (enthusiastically): “Do you like fried okra?”

    Wife (sternly): “No, I do not.”

    Husband (plaintively): “Why?”

  • Kid: You wanna buy coffee table books?

    Other Kid: Let’s do it!

    Younger Kid (confused): Coffee table?

Kenneth Fearing, Clark Gifford’s Body

Books, News and Politics, Speculative Fiction, , , , , ,

Cover Art

I’m starting to write reviews again. I’m not entirely convinced by this one, but at some point I have to stop fiddling with it, so here it is.

Clark Gifford’s Body is an obvious reference to the old song about John Brown, who sparked the Civil War with his raid on Harper’s Ferry. (Which may have been a blessing in disguise; arguably, only the war could have put an end to slavery in anything like a reasonable amount of time.)

A hundred years later, in the far-flung year of 1959 (Clark Gifford’s Body was published in 1937; no explicit date is given for the raid, but, as Robert Polito points out in the introduction, it’s not hard to work out), Clark Gifford and his “Committee for Action” seize radio stations across the country–Gifford himself takes WLEX in Bonnfield–and spark a twenty-year civil war.

The New York Review Books Classics edition of Clark Gifford’s Body demonstrates the importance of typography–in this case, the importance of getting the page numbers right. The page numbers are in the same font as the text, printed at the same size, located just under the text, where the next line would be, if there were one. So on the left-hand page my subconscious was constantly interpreting the page number as part of the text, and I kept getting knocked out of the story by phrases like “The short-wave of a number 200 of local stations…”

Kenneth Fearing wrote Clark Gifford’s Body in fragments. Narrative islands, written in different styles from different points of view, form a bigger picture like the dots in a pointillist painting. The sketches are set up to thirty years before and thirty years after Gifford’s raid. It’s a history of the future.

As such, Clark Gifford’s Body is technically science fiction. It may not satisfy many SF readers: socially and technologically, the future looks a lot like 1937. I’m willing to forgive. Within the story, we have a limited view of this society, and that twenty year civil war would not have laid a smooth road for the march of progress. In more critical terms, this kind of near-future SF is really about the present. Kenneth Fearing wrote Clark Gifford’s Body about his own world.

Continue reading Kenneth Fearing, Clark Gifford’s Body →

Links to Things

Art, Books

Here are two more blog posts that I want to be able to find again:

  • Ann Leckie on writing better. It’s about writing, but much of it applies to any kind of art. I was struck by this bit down in the comments:

    You know the kind of thing, maybe–I don’t see it much in my current critting partners, but I used to, back in the day when I was beginning to write seriously–you offer criticism of a story, something the author could fix with a bit of research or thought, and the response is something like “lighten up, it’s just a story why are you taking it so seriously?” And that’s when I say to myself, “They didn’t take their work seriously.” That was low stakes for them.

    I’m just doing humor comics, but I still need to make sure they’re not low stakes.

  • Colin Marshall on heuristics to live by.

    “Can I fail at this?” It’s like Raymond Chandler said: there is no success without the possibility of failure. Therefore, something I can’t fail at is also something I can’t succeed at.

Widdershins, Black Spirits and White

Books, Horror, Speculative Fiction, , , , ,

Widdershins by Oliver Onions and Black Spirits and White by Ralph Adams Cram are collections of ghost stories available from Project Gutenberg.

Oliver Onions’s most famous story is “The Beckoning Fair One.” Oliver Onions’s only famous story is “The Beckoning Fair One.” Now that I’ve read Widdershins I think I know why. All writers have wells they go back to but in Widdershins Onions found one he couldn’t leave alone. He gives us “The Beckoning Fair One,” and then every second story is “The Beckoning Fair One” again, only less good.

Onions’s favorite subjects are writers and artists. He likes stories about artists driven to madness by dubious muses. “The Beckoning Fair One” is of course the best of these. The narrator of “Benlian” falls under the spell of a sculptor who is literally putting himself into the creation of an inept statue. The most fearsome side effect of Benlian’s domination is the narrator’s loss of his sense of aesthetics: the longer Benlian controls him, the better the crappy statue looks. In “Io,” to vary things a little, Onions writes about a young non-artist woman driven to madness by the Greek Gods. Her brother seems to have wandered in from the Drones Club. It reads like P. G. Wodehouse wrote a story confusing Keats’s “Endymion” with the Necronomicon.

Onions keeps returning to conflicts between popularity and greatness, which in his mind are incompatible. Genius is abrasive. Artists create popular crap, or see their good work go unrewarded. In “The Beckoning Fair One,” Oleron’s frustration with the latter situation may make him particularly vulnerable to the ghost. In “Hic Jacet” an Arthur Conan Doylishly self-loathing detective novelist struggles with the spirit of a deceased avant-garde colleague, and loses. I wonder whether Onions had nightmares about waking up to find his name in the bestseller list?

Ralph Adams Cram wrote exactly six ghost stories, collected in Black Spirits and White. They range in quality from treacly to terrifying. “Sister Maddalena” is the romantic treacle. “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” and “The Dead Valley” are classics, and “In Kropfsberg Keep” and “The White Villa” are decent. Four out of six isn’t a bad record.

Cram was an architect and looks at everything with an architect’s eye. In one story the narrator solves a mystery by deducing, with his architectural knowledge, that a window should exist in a wall where there is none. Most of Cram’s stories are named after their settings, almost all of which are buildings–“No. 252 Rue M. le Prince,” “The White Villa.” “The Dead Valley” is set in the wilderness, but it’s still about a vividly detailed place. Every one is meticulously imagined–just the decor of No. 252 is enough to keep you up at night.

The people who inhabit these places are sketches. The real central characters are buildings. What’s important to Cram isn’t so much what’s haunting these places–we never learn exactly what’s going on at No. 252, or in the Dead Valley–as the places themselves.

Jeff VanderMeer, Finch

Books, Mysteries, Speculative Fiction, , , , ,

Cover Art

The fantasy genre is the last redoubt of the three-volume novel. Your local Barnes and Noble contains shelves of geography-spanning tomes–most longer than they should be–split into threes. There is no sensible reason for this… but the book that inadvertently invented Fantasy as a marketing category was The Lord of the Rings, and the form passed from the first hack imitators of Tolkien into tradition. Even good fantasy writers work in the multivolume format by default1.

So I love Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris Trilogy (City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch): three different books about the same world that combine, Voltron-like, into something greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s weird that more fantasy series don’t work this way. We get few novels2 about any given fantasy world, all written by the same author and therefore sharing a family resemblance. But why are they so often slices of a single story, and almost always written in the same style? Walk over to the “Literature” section and you’ll see a near-infinite variety of novels set in the real world, about all kinds of events, starring innumerable people, written in every possible kind of prose. The world is not one thing. A city is not one thing. Why shouldn’t an invented world be seen from many perspectives, described in many styles?

So City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of literary short stories. Shriek: An Afterword chronicles the lives of two underachieving siblings, told in alternating, arguing voices, with bigger things going on in the background…

And Finch is a hard-boiled detective novel, set after the Gray Caps, the mushroomy original inhabitants of Ambergris, have taken over the city. And it’s great–Finch is everything a hard boiled detective novel involving intelligent fungus ought to be. The Gray Cap overseers send John Finch, a tired steampunk Humphrey Bogart, to solve a murder. Finch bounces from faction to faction and picks up pieces of the puzzle from various interesting people who proceed to beat him up or knock him out. Everybody wants his help. Nobody asks for it without a threat.

The prose in the first two Ambergris books was straightforwardly literary (with digressions into reference-book style for certain parts of City of Saints and Madmen). Finch is written in short, sharp sentences. Sometimes sentence fragments. Telegraphese. There are food shortages and power cuts and Finch can’t spare the resources for a coordinating conjunction.

(I get a little more into analysis after this point, and some of it is spoilery, so I’m putting the rest of the review behind a link. Just go read the book, okay?) Continue reading Jeff VanderMeer, Finch →

Links to Things

Books, Comics, Science

As sometimes happens, especially as winter is coming on, I’m exhausted. There will probably be no new comics this week. I may manage a post or two on the blog. In the meantime, here are some links. I can’t remember at this point how I found them:

  • A New York Times story from 1896 celebrated the death of the three volume novel. (To read the actual story you’ll have to download a PDF.)

    The system had a deleterious effect upon literature because it required every novelist to spread and pad out his story so that it would fill three volumes, without reference to the normal length of the story he had to tell. Anthony Trollope, in his autobiography, ackknowledges this necessity and naively explains his own methods of padding. The result was a school of fiction which was verbose on compulsion, and in which writers had to beat out their stories as thin as possible that they might spread out over the greatest space.

  • An interesting Dutch newspaper comic panel, introduced by the blog The Fabuleous Fifties. The art has a great design sense, and it’s amazing the effects the artist gets with a few simple pen lines. The tastefully colored Sunday strips put the character into a surreal environment, and then deliver a great sight gag in every panel.

  • A review of Zak Sally’s Like a Dog, which made me very interested in getting this book:

    Sally quit his band, settled down, bought his own press and has become comfortable with the process of making and publishing comics. He’s quick to deflate his own sense of self-satisfaction, along with the idea that anyone’s got it figured out. In the end, he says, “it’s the work that counts”. It’s what mattered when comics frightened him, and it’s what matters now that he’s more settled. While Sally wanted to provide the reader context and his own view on his work (because he liked that sort of thing reading other collections), his opinion about his art was no more or less valid than the reader’s.

  • Seth on cartooning:

    I often find that when I’m drawing, only half my mind is on the work — watching proportions, balancing compositions, eliminating unnecessary details.

    The other half is free to wander. Usually, it’s off in a reverie, visiting the past, picking over old hurts, or recalling that sense of being somewhere specific — at a lake during childhood, or in a nightclub years ago. These reveries are extremely important to the work, and they often find their way into whatever strip I’m working on at the time. Sometimes I wander off so far I surprise myself and laugh out loud. Once or twice, I’ve become so sad that I actually broke down and cried right there at the drawing table.

  • Peter Watts explains why scientists don’t always write happy emails:

    Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?

Useless Blurb of the Moment

Books

From the back cover of Ursula, Under:

“Indeed, the novel is a big, fearless, well-crafted narrative that should make clear to us the importance of taking the next breath.”

It has been my experience that most people work this out for themselves without needing to read a novel.