Category: Literature

career

Serendipity do dah

Through purest serendipity, there will be a conference on Germaine de Stael here in St. Louis in May.  About five years ago I started working on an alternate history set in 1923 French America.  The conceit is that Napoleon never sold Louisiana to the United States, but managed to keep it.  There are several reasons for this, a few of them historically legitimate, but it is a science fiction novel after all.  In the course of researching the whole Napoleonic era, I stumbled on this woman, de Stael, and came to regard her as a phenom.  She was one of the few people toward whom Napoleon seems to have shown actual fear and the only woman, as far as I can tell, and I became intrigued.  I found one—count it, ONE—biography, an old thing from the Fifties by a writer whose specialty was the Napoleonic period, and it gave me enough to expand my single novel into a trilogy, the last volume of which I intend to be almost entirely historical.

Needless to say, this would entail considerably more research.  The plan was to sell the trilogy as a package to a house big enough to pay me well enough that I could embark on the research and do justice to the matter.  Alas, I’m still waiting for that sale and now publishing is in something of a tailspin, etc etc etc.

Anyway, I started making notes for the second volume anyway and decided to see if there were any blogs on the subject.  Plenty, but mostly about de Stael’s views on romance—de Stael ran a salon and collected around her quite an impressive circle of intimates and there was a lot of diddling and dallying going on.  (One of her closest friends was Juliet Recamier, a great beauty and apparently one of the Major Teases of Europe.)

One blog leapt out—from an academic, Karyna Szmurlo—announcing an international conference on de Stael.  I contacted her and she responded kindly, suggesting I attend.  Since it will be held at Washington University—practically my back yard—I am going.  I have subsequently discoverd a small uptick in the popularity of Germaine de Stael, with several new biographies and at least one novel, all published pretty much since I started this project (trust me, they weren’t around when I was looking) with one or two exceptions.  Serendipity indeed.  Check the schedule.  Heavyweight academic.  I doubt I will learn as much there, on the spot, as I will if I can make a couple of good contacts.

Of course, the major work in this area won’t take place on my part for a couple years yet—the second volume is still to be set in the 1920’s, but it will inbtroduce de Stael on stage (yes, I said it was SF, didn’t I?)—but I don’t think that will be a problem.  The trilogy will sell or it won’t, no matter when I finish it.  Naturally I’d prefer that it sell.  Naturally.

Literature

Nebulas

It is a bright award, a tower of lucite with a galaxy suspended in the upper half and a gold plaque on the lower with a name a title and a year.  A Nebula Award.  I’ve held two of them in my hands and I’d like to have one of my own.

Alas, it is likely not to be.  I fly too far below the radar of those who vote on such things.

Be that as it may, as a member of SFWA, I always vote.  I do try to vote for the best piece of work on the ballot and it’s always gratifying when it turns out that I’ve read enough stories and books to have somewhat of an informed opinion.  I just now finished voting and I feel righteous.  A good friend of mine has something on the ballot and I hope she wins, I do.  The story in question is stunningly brilliant, of course—my friends tend to be better than I am and I happen to think I’m pretty good, which means they’re fucking brilliant.  And that always makes even nicer, to be able to vote for quality and sentimental reasons.

I’d like to win a Hugo Award, too, but that seems even less likely, as one must sell enough copies of one’s book to those who nominate and vote on those, and I fly even farther below their radar.  I will say this—while occasionally some titles of dubious merit have landed on the shortlists of both awards, I’ve rarely found a book or story nominated for either that was a complete waste of time.  Between them they make good recommended reading lists.

So here is a hope for good fortune to my friend.  May she get the lucite tower and the bright galaxy.  She’s earned it.

(psst!  That’s Kelley Eskridge, a novella called  Dangerous Space.  Treat yourself, go read it.)

Absurdity

Catcher In The Rye

I just completed an essay for a newsletter about books we never read, but it is assumed, because we are Readers, we have.  Catcher In The Rye is such a book for me.  Never read it.  Know a lot about it, through some kind of osmosis, rubbing up against people who have read it.  You can glean a lot that way.

I made the statement in the essay that I probably don’t even own a copy.  I just checked.  I do.  It’s not actually mine, the name of the person who apparently loaned it to me is stamped inside the front cover.  But there it is, on my shelf.  Accusing me.  “You never read me, but I won’t go away until you do!”

Some books, I think, are alive.  They find their way, by many avenues, into peoples’ hands.  Some of us never seem to have to purchase these books, they just show up.  They’re always there.  This is one of them.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems to be another.  We have never been without a copy in this house, though we have never bought one.  I haven’t read it.  Read in it, sure.  Open at random, do a few pages, close and reshelve.  I’ve got a few books like that.  But I never paid for a copy.  How did it get here?  And by “it” I mean the book itself, not just one singular copy.

We used to give books away.  We’d buy them for people and hand them out.  I did that for Time Enough For Love once, I bought ten copies and just passed them to friends.

What other books just seem to follow you around?  I suppose it depends on what kind of people you hang with.  I know people who have never bought The Lord of the Rings, but they have it, and have read it.  (Yes, I bought my copies, but there was one set of them passing among my friends at one time.  Wonder where that ended up?)

For years I had a tattered copy of To Kill A Mockingbird that arrived in my collection one day from where I do not know and stayed there.  I finally bought an anniversary edition hardcover of it and the paperback has subsequently disappeared.  Moved on, I suppose, to some other needy shelf.

When I say books live, this isn’t exactly what I have in mind, but it is kind of freaky.  I’ve never actually caught my books having relations and reproducing, but several years ago I discovered four full editions of The Foundation Trilogy.  

Occasionally, I know where these copies come from, but it is also true that many of them have just shown up, like unemployed people looking for work.  “Will Tell You A Good Story For a Warm Shelf for the Night.”  I’m looking at my shelves now and I see a copy of Lost Horizons that I did not buy (or borrow).  Likewise a copy of Dr. Zhivago.  That one baffles me.  Why would they pick my library in which to seek refuge?  Who passed the word to them that they’d be safe here?

Well, it’s true, I won’t turn them out.  Who knows, I may even read them.  Maybe not Catcher In The Rye, though.  I’m kind of holding out on that one.  It’s the kind of book everyone thinks you really must read, that I’ve got my back up about it.  Obviously, it thinks I should read it, but it slipped in here on the sly, probably in company with a few others (like the volume on Chinese Philosophy that I cannot imagine the origin of) and thinks it will taunt me into cracking it open.

We’ll see about that.

culture

Reading On The Rise

According to this report, reading is on the rise in America for the first time in a quarter century.  It’s difficult for me to express how pleased this makes me.

Civilization and its discontents have been in the back of my mind since I became aware of how little reading most people do.  To go into a house—a nice house,well-furnished, a place of some affluence—and see no books at all has always given me a chill, espeically if there are children in the house.  Over the last 30 years, since I’ve been paying attention to the issue, I’ve found a bewildering array of excuses among people across all walks of life as to why they never read.  I can understand fatigue, certainly—it is easier to just flip on the tube and veg out to canned dramas—but in many of these instances, reading has simply never been important.  To someone for whom reading has been the great salvation, this is simply baffling.

Reading, I believe, is the best way we have to gain access to the world short of physically immersing ourselves in different places and cultures.  Even for those who have the opportunity and resource to travel that extensively, reading provides a necessary background for the many places that will be otherwise inaccessibly alien to our sensibilities.

A book is a significant encoding of someone’s mind.  A life, if you will, which is why I tend to see bookburning as a form of homicide (euphemistically, mind you, but that’s about how strongly I feel about it).  When you read a book—and in this instance I mean a book of fiction or memoir or essay, something written in response to a desire or need to communicate something of the self (as opposed to instruction manuels or the like)—and comprehend what is there, you are sharing something profound with another human being whom you may never—can never, sometimes—meet.  The characters live when you let them, they walk around in the imagination, they show you things and take you places and teach.

Oh, yes, they teach.  They give us the opportunity to know different kinds of human being, in different ways, and while we might not embrace those ways or people or wish to emulate them, we can know them.  Deep reading opens the world for us.

Movies and television do not do this.  Not that they can’t, mind you, but because we are passive receptors to what passes pre-digested before us, our participation—our active interrogation of the text, if you will—is barely brought into play.  Where in reading we must participate by “decoding” what is on the page and partner with the author is bringing the images to life in our own imaginations, film does all that for us.

For those who are deeply read or deeply sensitive, what can be derived from film and theater can certainly be rich in its own way, but I have found over time that those who read as much as they watch have richer reactions to what passes on the screen, have better conversations about what they have just seen, have more to bring to the piece than those who do not read.

Reading builds intellectual muscle in ways that cannot be done by other media.

This is, perhaps, mere personal prejudice, but I think not.  I think the broad, multifaceted internal lives developed by the habit of reading over time makes us better able to understand more of the world around us.

Granted, one could spend one’s life reading nothing but one kind of thing, being stuck in a rut with a single strand of literature, and thus trapping the very process which reading ought to enable…

But to not read at all seems to me a self impoverishment.  A tragedy.

So for me this NEA report is nothing but excellent news. For the first time as a reader and writer and an advocate of reading, I am hopeful that I will not be continually in a shrinking minority.

It’s a good day.

Life

Attic Thoughts

Doing the Shelfari thing has been both fun and frustrating.  I always prided myself on my memory, but it amazes me to discover just how porous it really is.  Titles keep occurring to me at odd moments now that I’ve got my hard drive working on all this recall.  Plus the annoyance of remembering titles but being unable to recall having actually read the book.

For instance, there is a host of books which were required reading in high school that I may well have gotten out of reading because I had read so much other material that the extra credit book reports forgave my lapses re the syllabus.  A Separate Peace for instance.  I know there was a session on it my sophomore year, but I don’t think I actually read it.  There are others.  And many of them I do not own anymore, so I can’t browse them (at least at the moment) to see if that triggers the memory.

Then there are novels I know very well I read but don’t have a single line from them.  Most of these are in the “classics” category.  For example, I know I read Madame Bovary but…and I have that one and as I go through it, my mind is a blank.  Willa Cather is the same way.

On the one hand, this is kind of thrilling, because it means I can reread those novels as if they were brand new to my experience.  On the other hand, do I really want to?  I have read Henry James, I know I have.  Turn of the Screw to be sure, but only the wispiest traces remain in memory.  I was left with such a foul taste from him, though, that I doubt I would want to revisit him.  There are others in that category.  Gogol.  Dostoevsky.  Solzhenitzin.  The Russians are less because I found them impenetrable than simply bleak and depressing.

On still another hand, I’ve been recalling books I had totally forgotten about until I put my mind to remembering them.  The Mary Stewart Merlin trilogy, for one thing, which I remember now with great fondness, but which hadn’t crossed my mind in 25 years.

The shelf is now over 1600.  I’ll probably ardently pursue titles until I hit 2000, then lay off for a time.  Even that would leave a great deal unremarked.  I don’t find that too shabby at all.

But perusing the lists, it is so clear where my preference lay.  It is predominantly science fiction.  No surprise, really.  But there are some classics of SF that I haven’t read, either.  A Canticle For Liebowitz, Alas, Babylon, The Left Hand of Darkness…these books are now or once were on my physical book shelf, but I simply never got around to reading them.

So much to look forward to.  I can’t afford to die till I’m a hundred at this rate.

culture

Face Book

Busy morning.  I like it when I find myself working in a groove that doesn’t give me time to think about what isn’t working.  Not today.

Over a foot of snow is now lying like a serene comforter over everything outside.  Fluffly, white, very beautiful—if you don’t have to go out in it.  I am a snow humbug.  After learning to drive and struggling through a few winters way back then, I quickly lost my love of snow.  Pain in the ass.  Would be nice to look at, but go out in it?

Anyway, yesterday I had a snow day from work.  So I took care of a lot of pending stuff, including laundry.  This morning I’m finishing up the pending stuff.  I wrote a new book review and emailed it off to my editor.  And I am busily building a…

FACEBOOK PAGE!

Yes, indeed.  One more bit of distraction to make the writing of great literature a bit more difficult to get to.

Not really.  Once the shiny wears off, it’ll be much like the other online pages I now have, like my MySpace Page and my Shelfari Page and my LinkedIn Page…

I’d been told, though, that all the “serious” people were on Facebook, as opposed to MySpace, and I must admit that so far that seems to be true.  I’ve found many more of the sorts of folks I’d wanted to link to on MySpace but couldn’t, because they weren’t there, here on Facebook.  So cool.

I really should just sit back now, though, and see how many friend invites I actually get.  I’ve cast my net to many and sundry and various to at least establish a friend list, but I ought to go write some fiction and let this thing churn.

On another front, I finished a couple of new books for review.  Jack McDevitt, who is a very nice man and a reliably entertaining writer, had Ace send me his most recent, The Devil’s Eye.  It was a quick, enjoyable read, smart people’s SF, and I intend to do a few paragraphs for the Post.

I finished Ian McDonald’s collection Cyberbad Days last week.  I already wrote two reviews of it and sent one off.  I’ll add it to the one I do for Jack.  I need one more for the roundup…

Have to go to work today.  The sun in shining, it’s a tad warmer.

I’m rambling here.  But what the hell.  Last night we watched episode #2 of Lie To Me, the new series with Tim Roth as a specialist in lying.  All the scientific acumen of his cinsiderable gifts are applied each week to determine who is lying and, more importantly, what about.  I can’t help wondering how much grief this show might cause among people who, after a few episodes, will start applying some of these techniques in their own lives.  Calling someone out for a lie can be a dicey proposition.  Even when we know they’re lying, how often do we know why?  And how often would calling them on it do the slightest bit of good?

I don’t know.  I’ve wrestled with this one for decades.  But it’s an amusing show.

The thing about these new shows—and there are several of them that all rely on the heightened experience of a trained observer, like Bones, The Mentalist, Eleventh Hour, House—is that while I applaud the foregrounding of rational observation and and a hardnosed skeptical approach to life these series embody, you have to realize that the degree of observational skill these characters bring to the task is the equivalent of an expert martial artist.  Most people are not that observant.  And even when they are, how many people know how to correctly interpret what they’re observing?  It’s the thing that made Sherlock Holmes both fascinating and alienating.  Holmes explained early on in the series that he refused to remember any detail that did not directly bear on his chosen pursuit—which meant he was, in this instance, unaware that the Earth moved around the Sun and, now that Watson had told him so, he intended to forget it as quickly as possible.  It made him strange, weird, offputting, and Conan Doyle played on that skillfully.  It’s the one thing the Basil Rathbone portrayals got wrong and expunged and the thing that Jeremy Brett brought to the forefront, which makes the Brett portrayal superior.

In the case of House, who is in many ways a direct copy, it just makes him obnoxious.

And not really a very good doctor…

Literature

Shelfari Time

I’ve been wasting time over my Shelfari page.  I opened it quite some time ago,posted a few titles, gathered a few friends, and then forgot about it till recently.

Since high school I’ve kept lists of the books I read.  Silly, maybe, but my memory is weird and occasionally I need something to trigger it—like the title of the book I know I read ten years ago.  What surprises me is that once I remember the book—remember actually reading it—a good deal of the book re-emerges from the cracks into which the details have fallen over time.

But there are gaps in the lists.  Like other things of the sort, I’m inconsistent, and in some cases I’ve lost the lists.  So I’ve been painstakingly reconstructing my reading history.  I decided that Shelfari is as good a place as any to keep these lists. Who knows?  They may be of interest to others.

But it has been kind of fun tripping through all these old memories.

What I’ve decided to do, though, just to keep me honest, is to list only those books I do in fact have a clear memory about.

See, part of my mis-spent youth was my senior year in high school.  I managed to cut two-thirds of it.  I was so utterly bored with school.  The thing was, instead of the usual adolescent running around looking for trouble, most of those days I spent at the local library.  (I was so totally a nerd and didn’t really acknowledge it—after all, I played keyboard in a band, I had cool friends, I dressed…well, let’s not go there.)  I’d enter the building, find a corner where I fell least observed, and read abook.  It really did get to a point where I was reading a whole book every time I sat down there.  I ran through those titles we all have come to know and love as Classics.

I do not remember vast swathes of those books.  I read them, sure.  But.

Partly, despite the fact that I had a post graduate vocabulary, most of those books were over my head.  I mean, I read Ulysses during that time, but I didn’t remember much when we entered the reading group for it a few years ago.  It was like an entirely new book.

So I’m being selective what I put in my Shelfari shelf.  If I remember the story, the characters, good parts of the experience, I list it.  If I draw a blank, even though I know I read it, I’m leaving it off.  For now.  So while I knkw I read most of Charles Dickens (acquiring my first major burn-out on an author) I only clearly recall some of them.

So I will have to reread Dickens.

And Conrad.  And DeFoe and Fielding and Galsworthy and Wharton and…

Not a bad prospect, actually, but I may not get through it all.  There are other books.  I have a stack on the floor of my office I ought to read to review.

Such problems!

What has emerged, making this list, is the major divide.  A lot of science fiction.  No surprise there.  I’ve always drifted toward it by preference, I’ve always gotten more out of it than most other forms of literature.  But then there’s history.  A lot of history.  Some science.

Zero poetry.  Never been a big one for that.  I’ve tried, but frankly, with one or two exceptions, most poetry just leaves me flat.

Anyway, I have been wasting time with this.  There are things I need to do.  I’m doing them.  But not as quickly as I should.

But dip in to my “library” and take a gander.  It’s instructive.  Of what, I don’t know.

All in all, I’m estimating that to date I’ve probably read maybe 4,000 books.  I’ve got about that many in my personal collection.  Could be more.  Don’t know how many of them are going to end up on the list.  But it is a way of organizing my memory.

Kind of fun.

culture

Cadigan, Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan is a masterful storyteller.  One of her strengths is background nuance.  You know, filling in the bits and pieces of a world so that it stands up on its own and walks convincingly?  Layered on top of that are plots and characters that are among the most idiosyncratic and memorable in science fiction.

Besides which, she can be so damn funny, which science fiction sorely lacks.

Anyway, rather than post another blistering bit about the soon-to-over Bush presidency (and yes, I did watch his farewell speech and all I can say is, “Wasn’t that mercifully short?”) I thought I’d put out this link to an interview with the estimable Ms. Cadigan.

culture

The End of Hell

Yesterday, our reading group did the last canto of Dante’s Inferno.  We reached the center, climbed the hairy haunch of Satan, and emerged to a place where above could be seen stars.  I’m told each volume of the Commedia ends with stars.

There is in this final fabrication a very science-fictional scenario which can easily be read as a depiction of a singularity.  All motion has ceased except for the flapping of Satan’s wings and the gnawing of his three mouths on the bodies of the ultimate betrayers, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.  (As in most other places in the Inferno, Dante mixed post Christian Era figures with Classical forms.  He is talking about Reality, not denominations.)  Ice is everywhere, there is a brief description of the center of the earth being the point where all weight is drawn equally.  Time stops.

Dante seems to have grasped the notion that Absolutes embody extreme conditions, that the core of absolute evil will be a thing where the normal laws of motion, of sight and sound, of behavior all exhibit impossible manifestations.  All is in suspension.

Imagine cutting your finger.  Imagine the razor edge of a blade sliding through the flesh.  Now imagine that moment, frozen in time, always being the single sensation you experience, constantly, without beginning or end.  Eternity.  Pretty bad.  Now imagine being constantly eaten.

Now consider:  Dante’s theme is that all these people have done this to themselves.  Satan didn’t put them here, hasn’t manufactured these punishments.  The inhabits did it all on their own.  They are trapped in their own constructions.

To escape, all they have to do is imagine a way out of their own concepts and then accept it.

They can’t.

That is the blade through the flesh, tautologically locked into a continuous feedback loop.

Dante was not, furthermore, positing that the “truth” these folks turned their back on has much of anything to do with god or ecclesiastical law.  It is entirely to do with their concepts of what constitutes Reality.  By Reality, we mean that which we do in the world.

What has become clear through 34 cantos is that Dante was concerned not with the tropes of his poem, but with the realities of the denizens he introduces as he and Virgil descend toward Malebolgia.  This is not a religious work.  In this sense, it more closely approaches science fiction than fantasy.  The ghost in the machine which dominated the lives and decision-making of all these souls permeates the narrative like a Turing Test, set to determine which are aware, which are not, and which are aware of the alternatives and refuse to accept them.  Like some pernicious form of nano technology, these people have built their own torments.  Inferno is a parody of the Earth, of life, stripped down and fine-tuned to give the inhabitants what they have acted like they’ve wanted.  Traps, cul-de-sacs, isolation chambers, pain generators…

And the curious element that recurs throughout is how little they pay attention to anything outside their own small place in the pit.  Many resent Dante coming into their midst, seeing them, but then seem to forget about them as soon as Virgil takes Dante onward.

Inferno is a piece of psychology.  And the lowest pit is reserved for betrayers who used the excuse of the greater good in order to turn on a friend or leader.

Dante was a believer in self-retribution.  No matter what fate these folks suffered in life—and many landed in prison or were murdered or otherwise brought to ugly ends—the ultimate punishment is always the damnation of their own inability to see past their own corruption.  It is that which condemns them, which sequesters them.  You get the deep feeling that any of them could leave if they could just see.  But they can’t.  They are morally blind.

Some seem to prefer where they are.  They do not want to be “saved.”

Extending this, it would seem that Dante was of the (then heretical) opinion that achieving Paradise was something within our own grasp simply by making a choice.

Choice.  The ultimate punishment exhibited in Hell is Satan’s own.  He had questioned god’s decision to give humanity free will.  He argued that if given the authority he could guarantee humanity’s worship of god, that he would make the ideal boss.  He apparently didn’t get the whole notion of free will.  And in the end he reins over (or under) a realm occupied by people incapable of choosing any other path than the utterly solipsistic one  that brought them here.  He is stuck in the hole, plugging the way between what is now Hell and Purgatory, eternally in the presence of people who are there because they simply lack the capacity to be anywhere else.  They are chained to their devotions.

It is now January 5th.  2009.  We have witnessed the meltdown of everything we thought was a successful business model in this country—in the world—and there are no doubt people who have lost everything who don’t understand what brought them to this hill.  They had choices along the way to stop taking profits and invest in something real, but they couldn’t get off the ride.  Someone else, they assumed, would pay the price.  Well, someone else did.  But so did they.

Metaphorically, I find the parallels fascinating.  It’s almost tempting enough for me to attempt a fantasy to take advantage of the insight.  But then again, it’s not that deep of an insight.

What I will be interested in is what lies ahead, in Purgatorio.  Will it be peopled by the collateral damage of all the machinations of those in Hell?

Meantime, I’m writing a new science fiction novel.