The year ends. Some reflection is in order. Mostly concerning writing and literature, because that’s just what I do.
Year: 2011
A Map of Prydain
I was never happy with the maps included in the hardcover editions of Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain. Evaline Ness is a fine artist, but the Prydain maps were rough affairs that changed from book to book, reshuffling locations while erasing others. My own paperback editions don’t include maps, and newer editions drop them as well.
The only other Prydain map I know of lies in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. While the descriptive text is excellent, as are all the entries in the Dictionary, the actual map is beyond awful. The cartographer places the Marshes of Morva directly west of Caer Dallben, sticks Annuvin south of the Great Avren River, and plunks the Forest of Idris there as well. These placements are completely out of whack, and it seems James Cook hadn’t even paid attention to the entry itself. The map is also, unfortunately, a full-page spread, so there really isn’t an excuse for such sloppiness.
In light of my disappointment with the Dictionary I went searching for a complete map of Prydain. Eventually I stumbled across a post concerning Prydain geography. Lotesse created a composite map from the four extent maps of Prydain to help get a better grasp on the place. After seeing that, I thought: why not draw my own map of Prydain based on Eveline Ness’s maps, Lotesse’s work and my own knowledge of the novels?
Not Quite Art Nouveau
I realized I haven’t posted a sketch for two months! This must be rectified immediately.
I tried to do something vaguely art nouveau-ish with her hair, but didn’t go far enough. Ah well, still happy with the result.
Some Issues with The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of
Thomas Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998) might have received praise from the likes of Harold Bloom and John Clute, but other scholars have been far less kind. Carl Freedman’s review “Lies, Damned Lies, and Science Fiction: Thomas M. Disch and the Culture of Mendacity” (Science Fiction Studies #78) voices many of my problems with Disch’s study, though not all of them. For one, the title is misleading; Disch never even mentions Stanislaw Lem and the Brothers Strugatsky, and thus ignores their large influence on western science fiction, nor does he pay any attention to authors outside of the United States and England except for Jules Verne and Capek. This is not about how science fiction conquered the world, just the Anglo-Saxon one, and the United States in particular.
Continue reading “Some Issues with The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of“
A Notice to Would-be Poets
A poem
Is not a sentence
Composed by
Pressing the “Enter” key
At random intervals.
Please
Remember this.
Flippant Reviews: Guy Gavriel Kay
I did it. I found and finished every single novel by Guy Gavriel Kay. A Song for Arbonne was a difficult one to locate, but I got my hands on it and this particular reading project concluded a few months ago.
I’ve talked plenty about Mr. Kay on this blog before, and it’s no secret that I think he’s one of the finest Canadian fantasy authors writing today. There’s no doubt Kay cares deeply for language and knows how to craft a sentence, and his historical bent immediately puts him in line with my own interests. However, instead of deep analysis, I thought the best way to mark the occasion was a flippant survey of Kay’s various books done with something less than literary rigour. This time, it’s all about what I thought about these books, just to make things clearer if I reference Kay’s novels in the future.
So without further ado…
Off Limits
An anecdote:
In my last year of university, I was standing with a group of folks from my Holocaust film class. One girl decided to reveal that her ex-boyfriend’s grandfather was a member of the Einsatzgruppen, and isn’t that so ironic and funny. Laughter ensued. “Ha ha, what a subversive thing to say!”
I didn’t laugh.
I didn’t say anything, either, because I already knew that would be a quick ticket to ostracism. Sure, I could explore the Second World War, the War of Extermination on the Eastern Front and the Holocaust in papers, talk with professors, speak one-on-one with others of similar background. But that particular part of the past is Off Limits in polite conversation even when the topic turns to World War Two; the west has already come to terms with what happened through a set of popular narratives that, at this point, contain trends I find rather insulting. To make things clear, I am not Jewish; and I do not want to elevate the atrocities faced by Poles to the level of genocide. However, the Occupation was still an ugly thing for Poles. Last summer I documented my grandparents’ stories in my notebook to get a better handle on What Happened. My relationship with that part of the past is necessarily complicated by personal feelings.
The Dark Heart of the American West, or Some Musings on Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Random House, 1985.
It’s not hard to argue that westerns are, in essence, the American myth. The frontier features large in the American psyche; whereas ancient Greece might have the Trojan War, the secular American state looks back to the mid-nineteenth century as its golden age of heroes and villains. The collective narrative of western settlement has little to do with the realities of frontier life. The Wild West is a construct, as much a fantasyland as Middle Earth, only that fabled land of Cowboys & Indians is much closer to ancient myth in its collective ownership by whatever author comes along to partake. In it dwell figures reduced to archetypes: Daniel Boone, the sheriff, the gunslinger, the bandit, the Indian, and the like. Westerns are a sort of fantasy, expressed in the same language—look at The Dark Tower series and how easily western tropes fall into Arthurian legend.
Continue reading “The Dark Heart of the American West, or Some Musings on Blood Meridian“
There is Only the Text
Hoo boy…
…I have always been skeptical of the whole contemporary critical scene, in which the text is regarded as some immutable miracle, to be worshipped and dissected as if it were the story itself. What anyone trained as an editor or rewriter knows is that the text is not the story—the text is merely one attempt to place the story inside the memory of the audience. The text can be replaced by an infinite amount of other attempts. Some will be better than others, but no text will be “right” for all audiences, nor will any one text be “perfect.” The story only exists in the memory of the reader, as an altered version of the story intended (consciously or unconsciously) by the author. It is possible for the audience to create for themselves a better story than the author could ever have created in the text. Thus audiences have taken to their hearts miserably-written stories like Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, because they receive transcended text; while any number of beautifully written texts have been swallowed up without a trace, because the text, however, lovely, did a miserable job of kindling a living story within readers’ memories.
(Orson Scott Card, Maps in a Mirror, 121-122)
Funny, because I find Tarzan of the Apes more engagingly written than anything I’ve read by Orson Scott Card. Seriously, though, this is the classic bad prose defence that Isaac Asimov deployed, and I just don’t buy it. Yes, there’s a complicated thing going on between reader and author, but part of that relationship lies in the way the words are shaped and fitted together. Prose is an essential part of telling the story, and there are some of us who just aren’t going to tolerate clunky prose because it mars the experience so much we don’t give a flying fig for plot, characters, and the like. The way you tell a story is intrinsic to the story itself.
As the “contemporary critics” would have it: There is only the text. Or, at least, the text is all the author can give to the reader, before setting off a whole new process called reading.
Deal with it.
Carpetbaggery
I’ve become weary of stepping into the sf community at large, since the whole place is so volatile even the slightest stumble can set off a spark leading to mass conflagration. The fantasy vs. science fiction debate is bad enough (just…why?), and while watching various authors bump heads is fun for a while I ultimately just end up feeling sad and more than a little conflicted about what the heck I’m doing with an sf blog when the community as a whole is, sometimes, downright insane.
However, I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It is, unsurprisingly, a great novel (I never thought I would say that about any book featured in Oprah’s book club): McCarthy’s prose style is simply wonderful even if the content is extraordinarily bleak. However, thoughts drift from an America crawling with cannibal conquerors to the sf community-at-large and its hugely negative reaction to outsiders stepping into its territory. Outsiders like Cormac McCarthy, daring to write some post-apocalyptic goodness and winning a Pulitzer for his efforts, even though he never wrote no science fiction before. Whenever a “literary” writer starts up on a science fiction or fantasy project, expect a vehement outcry from authors and readers alike in some corner of the internet.
One Last Sketch 