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rushthatspeaksI am not actually bored. I am in a summer blur. You know, the kind where it might as well be last Tuesday or November, because it wouldn't be any different, and it's too damn hot to worry about the passing of time. The kind of day meant for a really good book and some kind of iced drink, and the seaside, or at least a hammock, not NYC in summer. The kind of day wherein I spend a good deal of time wondering just what the cats are doing instead of sweating anyway. Fortunately, if my nose and my eyes tell me true, the sky is determined to rain before tomorrow morning, and it will have cooled off a good bit for Syona Keleste and Eredien and Signey. If it doesn't, I can at least stock up on ice cream.
Oh, and I finished watching Trigun last night, because I had it sitting there and it was too hot to hold a book without getting little sweaty fingerprints on the pages. Parties who have seen it and are interested in philosophical discussion please email. And Hayami Sho has crept up my voice actor list from 'personal phobia' to 'person on whom I repeatedly attempt to Disbelieve Illusion'. How could the same guy have played Muraki and Wolfwood? How? HOW?
Since other people are probably lucky enough to have air conditioning,
The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. Movie, schmovie. It's all about the writing. I've noticed, over the last couple years, a tendency in academic fantasy and science fiction circles (and when did that phrase stop being oxymoronic?) to dislike Tolkien for 'not being a novelist'. Of course he wasn't a novelist, and if you look at his works as novels or an attempt at them, the pacing is all off and the characters go flat and you risk being the sort of person who thinks these are actually children's books. They are, of course, but only in the sense that they're everybody's books, because great epic poetry is for everybody, and Tolkien wrote the great epic of the modern English language. Read some Tolkien out loud-- any Tolkien-- and you'll hear what I'm talking about. His prose is consistently timeless; these books do not contain slang, aphorisms, or dated ideas. They could have been written yesterday, or tomorrow. And Middle-Earth, of course, is the world with the most depth in all of fantasy, full of its own languages and ideas and things seen and unseen and its own high, noble sadness. There is always something new to notice-- it was obvious to me as a child, for example, that the direction West was Good, and East was Evil, but it took one of Ursula LeGuin's magnificent essays on Tolkien to point out to me that North was Confusion and South was Betrayal. In my opinion, The Silmarillion is the technically better work, and 'The Tale of Luthien and Beren' is the greatest thing Tolkien ever wrote, but The Lord of the Rings is the more lovable work, the more frightening when read aloud after dark, and the more accessible.
The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison. Eric Rucker Eddison was an anachronism, and he knew it. Between World War I and World War II he devoted himself to the translation of Icelandic sagas and the perfection of his own ideals of chivalry and beauty. The gift he left us is his novel, which is both a perfect fusion of the novel and the epic poem and the only twentieth-century work to be written in absolutely perfect Elizabethan English, tenses right, vocabulary right, dances right, manners right, and the love of beauty and fantasy burning in it as it only could in the work of a man who knew he'd been mislaid from his own time. Ouroboros can be an appallingly difficult book-- it took me years of struggle to finish it; I loved it, but it just got to be too much-- but I promise it to be worth the effort. There's a conjuration scene in this book that is incredible and terrifying, and a shipwreck, and several hippogriffs, and dooms come out of clouds and omens, and albino peacocks that dance the pavane, and a king wearing an iron crown in the shape of a crab set with diamonds. It is one of my ambitions someday to read this book aloud to somebody, just to see what it would all sound like, as opposed to the bits I always recite whenever I reread it. I'll probably do it to my fiancee, if she doesn't duck fast enough. The Special Footnoted Edition also contains the most maddening quandary I have ever run into in a footnote, namely that while glossing the peculiar chemicals and instruments used in the conjuring scene, it goes along quite happily saying how this is really molten lead, and this is saltpetre, and then it gets to one substance, which doesn't sound any weirder than the others, and says 'All knowledge of this substance has been proscribed since the thirteenth century', and then stops there about it, and no digging I have done in reference libraries has gotten me any farther on the matter. Just about what I'd expect out of Ouroboros, really.
Angela Carter. I love so many things by Angela Carter that picking one out specifically as special to me is really impossible. She's an author I am careful about recommending, however, because she is absolutely drenched in sex, violence, and surreality; still, she is never gratuitous, and I read her originally at fifteen-- it's just, at fifteen I had this amazing capacity to ignore or assimilate the various sorts of sexuality I ran across in fiction, and I suspect that even though I am relatively unshockable and have the attitude that nothing consensual between human beings is definitively wrong (there are circumstantial wrongs), people who don't have that attitude might be somewhat startled. That said, I'll say that Wise Children is a cheerful and hilarious romp about vaudeville and theater and the vicissitudes of Shakespeare, and that anyone who is offended by it needs to rethink themselves somewhere. Otherwise, content-wise, all bets are off. The Passion of New Eve is the one I generally count her masterpiece, for the brilliance of the structure, the fascination of its America possibly in the process of apocalypse, and its real insight into the way women think; also, I am very fond of the protagonist. He, Evelyn, a British schoolteacher, comes to America looking for work and a movie star he is fond of, runs afoul of a goddess cult in the Mojave Desert, and soon afterwards finds himself she, Eva, on the run, terrified, very pregnant, pissed off at the universe, and still looking for that movie star. This book also contains the best use of the Tiresias myth I've ever seen in fiction. I am also fond of The Bloody Chamber, a fascinating series of retellings of fairytales, Nights at the Circus, about a carnival performer who claims that the wings she wears are real, and The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffmann, which is about exactly what it says it is about, and which startled Ruth by having its abstract-appearing cover with the centaur and the zebra-headed woman and the carnivorous flower be absolutely representational. I don't feel like I'm doing very well writng about Angela Carter here; suffice it to say that ever since I first read her, part of my struggle with my own writing has been to keep from being a mere inmitation or derivation of her brilliant original, and she's the reason I write Gothic fantasy, at that. She colonized part of my imagination. Anyone who can do that is really onto something; sadly, she is ten years dead this winter, which I still regret.
Oh, and I finished watching Trigun last night, because I had it sitting there and it was too hot to hold a book without getting little sweaty fingerprints on the pages. Parties who have seen it and are interested in philosophical discussion please email. And Hayami Sho has crept up my voice actor list from 'personal phobia' to 'person on whom I repeatedly attempt to Disbelieve Illusion'. How could the same guy have played Muraki and Wolfwood? How? HOW?
Since other people are probably lucky enough to have air conditioning,
The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. Movie, schmovie. It's all about the writing. I've noticed, over the last couple years, a tendency in academic fantasy and science fiction circles (and when did that phrase stop being oxymoronic?) to dislike Tolkien for 'not being a novelist'. Of course he wasn't a novelist, and if you look at his works as novels or an attempt at them, the pacing is all off and the characters go flat and you risk being the sort of person who thinks these are actually children's books. They are, of course, but only in the sense that they're everybody's books, because great epic poetry is for everybody, and Tolkien wrote the great epic of the modern English language. Read some Tolkien out loud-- any Tolkien-- and you'll hear what I'm talking about. His prose is consistently timeless; these books do not contain slang, aphorisms, or dated ideas. They could have been written yesterday, or tomorrow. And Middle-Earth, of course, is the world with the most depth in all of fantasy, full of its own languages and ideas and things seen and unseen and its own high, noble sadness. There is always something new to notice-- it was obvious to me as a child, for example, that the direction West was Good, and East was Evil, but it took one of Ursula LeGuin's magnificent essays on Tolkien to point out to me that North was Confusion and South was Betrayal. In my opinion, The Silmarillion is the technically better work, and 'The Tale of Luthien and Beren' is the greatest thing Tolkien ever wrote, but The Lord of the Rings is the more lovable work, the more frightening when read aloud after dark, and the more accessible.
The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison. Eric Rucker Eddison was an anachronism, and he knew it. Between World War I and World War II he devoted himself to the translation of Icelandic sagas and the perfection of his own ideals of chivalry and beauty. The gift he left us is his novel, which is both a perfect fusion of the novel and the epic poem and the only twentieth-century work to be written in absolutely perfect Elizabethan English, tenses right, vocabulary right, dances right, manners right, and the love of beauty and fantasy burning in it as it only could in the work of a man who knew he'd been mislaid from his own time. Ouroboros can be an appallingly difficult book-- it took me years of struggle to finish it; I loved it, but it just got to be too much-- but I promise it to be worth the effort. There's a conjuration scene in this book that is incredible and terrifying, and a shipwreck, and several hippogriffs, and dooms come out of clouds and omens, and albino peacocks that dance the pavane, and a king wearing an iron crown in the shape of a crab set with diamonds. It is one of my ambitions someday to read this book aloud to somebody, just to see what it would all sound like, as opposed to the bits I always recite whenever I reread it. I'll probably do it to my fiancee, if she doesn't duck fast enough. The Special Footnoted Edition also contains the most maddening quandary I have ever run into in a footnote, namely that while glossing the peculiar chemicals and instruments used in the conjuring scene, it goes along quite happily saying how this is really molten lead, and this is saltpetre, and then it gets to one substance, which doesn't sound any weirder than the others, and says 'All knowledge of this substance has been proscribed since the thirteenth century', and then stops there about it, and no digging I have done in reference libraries has gotten me any farther on the matter. Just about what I'd expect out of Ouroboros, really.
Angela Carter. I love so many things by Angela Carter that picking one out specifically as special to me is really impossible. She's an author I am careful about recommending, however, because she is absolutely drenched in sex, violence, and surreality; still, she is never gratuitous, and I read her originally at fifteen-- it's just, at fifteen I had this amazing capacity to ignore or assimilate the various sorts of sexuality I ran across in fiction, and I suspect that even though I am relatively unshockable and have the attitude that nothing consensual between human beings is definitively wrong (there are circumstantial wrongs), people who don't have that attitude might be somewhat startled. That said, I'll say that Wise Children is a cheerful and hilarious romp about vaudeville and theater and the vicissitudes of Shakespeare, and that anyone who is offended by it needs to rethink themselves somewhere. Otherwise, content-wise, all bets are off. The Passion of New Eve is the one I generally count her masterpiece, for the brilliance of the structure, the fascination of its America possibly in the process of apocalypse, and its real insight into the way women think; also, I am very fond of the protagonist. He, Evelyn, a British schoolteacher, comes to America looking for work and a movie star he is fond of, runs afoul of a goddess cult in the Mojave Desert, and soon afterwards finds himself she, Eva, on the run, terrified, very pregnant, pissed off at the universe, and still looking for that movie star. This book also contains the best use of the Tiresias myth I've ever seen in fiction. I am also fond of The Bloody Chamber, a fascinating series of retellings of fairytales, Nights at the Circus, about a carnival performer who claims that the wings she wears are real, and The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffmann, which is about exactly what it says it is about, and which startled Ruth by having its abstract-appearing cover with the centaur and the zebra-headed woman and the carnivorous flower be absolutely representational. I don't feel like I'm doing very well writng about Angela Carter here; suffice it to say that ever since I first read her, part of my struggle with my own writing has been to keep from being a mere inmitation or derivation of her brilliant original, and she's the reason I write Gothic fantasy, at that. She colonized part of my imagination. Anyone who can do that is really onto something; sadly, she is ten years dead this winter, which I still regret.
