Ambrose & Elsewhere

Apparently last fall Weird Tales was asking for suggestions about the greatest “weird storytellers” of the last 85 years as a kind of anniversary promotion. They posted their list this past week (I saw it first at davidcapeguy‘s LJ) and it makes for strange reading. The five writers I personally consider to be the greatest fantasists of the 20th Century (Tolkien, Le Guin, Vance, Zelazny and Leiber) are conspicuous by their absence. The somewhat affected way “weird” is used nowadays might exclude some of these writers, but certainly not Leiber. The author of “Catch That Zeppelin!”, “Gonna Roll the Bones”, “Smoke Ghost”, “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, Conjure Wife, “The Secret Songs”, “Mysterious Doings at the Metropolitan Museum” and countless others is certainly weird enough to stand out in any company. It’s odd that Sturgeon isn’t listed either.

But that’s just the kind of grumbling you hear when any “best of” list is posted. (“What about Binky ‘Bosco’ Sorenson? He wrote a story in 1937 that blew my tiny little mind. Can’t rightly remember what it was called, but still. ‘S a goldurned outrage!”) No, the real problem here is not who they excluded but who they included: lots of music-makers (Björk, Nick Cave, Roger Waters, Tom Waits etc.), film-makers (David Cronenberg, the Coen brothers etc.), cartoonists (Charles Addams, Gary Larson etc.), luminaries of the American musical theater (yes, Sondheim is a “weird writer” it seems). The list gave me a sinking feeling as I read it–a sort of sad yet contemptuous feeling.

Why? I wondered. Okay: shoot me; I have no particular opinion about Björk and Nick Cave. But the others I’ve named (and others I could have named who seem equally out of place on the list) are creators whose work I respect and enjoy very much. Why should seeing their names on this list make me think less of the list and the magazine associated with it?

I finally pinned down the feeling. Maybe you remember the scene in Play It Again Sam where Woody Allen’s character, Allan Felix, prepares for a blind date by running around his apartment, scattering objects he thinks will enhance his cool: magazines, books, a track medal even. (“A few carefully-placed objects create the proper impression.”) Then there’s the music:

ALLAN: I’ve got a big decision to make. Do I go with Oscar Peterson or the Bartok String Quartet No. 5?

LINDA: Play the Oscar Peterson and leave the Bartok out so everybody can see it.

ALLAN: That’s a good idea.

It isn’t, of course: the date that follows is one of the major disasters committed to film, like Interiors, only funny-on-purpose.

Allan Felix’s method for impressing his date appears to be the same principle that organizes this list: “a few carefully-placed objects create the proper impression.” It’s a poser’s list, a vain attempt to bask in a little borrowed cool.

So, in honor of this weirdly unweird list of weird storytellers-some-of-whom-aren’t-particularly-known-for-storytelling, here’s Blossom Dearie singing “I’m Hip” to the fresh (if somewhat pixelated) moves of Kakashi, Naruto and co.

I finally subscribed to Talebones.

Is it because of the current current subscription drive? Is it because the new issue features Jim Van Pelt and Paul Melko (among others)–names to conjure with, in my view? Is it because, back when I was submitting to them (a few years ago now) they wrote some of the most agreeable, most encouraging rejection notes I’ve ever received?

No. All those things are true, but they’re not relevant. The real reason is much simpler.

!!!GIANT ONE-EYED ROBOT WITH PINCERS OF DEATH!!!

One of the best cartoons ever:

and one I thought about when I read Robin Hobb’s antiblogging rant.

I did think it ironic that RH wanted to distribute this thing, so she posted in on the internet–essentially, it is a blog post about how bad blog posts are.

On the other hand, as John Scalzi pointed out, she has a kind of point. Writing a blog and writing fiction are categorically different activities that some people may get confused.

On the other other hand, maybe some people are better off venting their spleen in a blog than trying to write fiction. (I don’t mean to sound supercilious: I’m willing to entertain the possibility that I’m in this group.)

On the other other other hand, I’m starting to think that the whole concept of writers having blogs as promotional tools is misguided, or at least should be guided by one’s own temperament. Someone who has a breezy and amusing personality and invests, you know, ten years of breezy and amusing posts in a daily blog, this person may be in a position to use his blog for promotional purposes. That’s not most people, whether they’re good writers or not.

But what’s the harm, anyway? Even if the average blog is a less-than-powerful promotional tool, at least it’s not going to hurt, right? In short, isn’t it time for the other other other other hand to appear?

Not really: this is the point I was setting out to make. For many writers, an internet platform (whether it’s a blog or something else) may well do more harm than good (strictly in a career sense). This occurred to me most recently when reading a post by a fellow-Black Gate writer, whose blog is emphatically worth reading for its wit, effervescence and thoughtfulness, which made me think of two writers I don’t read anymore, largely because of their online presence.

I’ve never restricted my reading to authors who agree with me on every issue. Neither Le Guin nor Heinlein, to cite two genre examples, take the trouble to reaffirm my personal worldview in everything they write, but I can forgive them this serious offense if they don’t waste my time as a reader (as Le Guin never has, and Heinlein never did until I Will Fear No Evil and its increasingly bloated and pointless successors).

But in the case of the two they-shall-be-nameless writers I’m talking about, their online presence frosted me to their offline work because of the intensity of hatred they displayed and their strange lack of intellectual honesty. As an academic, I’m prepared to debate the merits of almost any proposition and, as a perennial snarkmonger, I like a good fight. I don’t like being doused with internet venom and set on fire because I disagree with someone’s position on some foreign policy issue, or their definition of fantasy, or some other matter about which reasonable people could disagree, and even unreasonable people could talk about without screaming if, you know, they had something that might pass in a dim light for human decency.

Even reasonable people can be caught by this trap, because no one is reasonable all the time. Charles Stross, who may be the best of the newer writers of SF, posted a piece last summer that struck me as almost ridiculously narrow-minded. (It’s here, under the title “Pernicious Reporting.” I am not, by the way, a Tibetan monk and I don’t believe in reincarnation. I just think that people–even people I disagree with–have certain rights which, unfortunately, are far from inalienable.)

I fumed about it for a day or so, meditating various responses, until I realized that it was coloring my attitude toward his work. I decided what was more important to me, deleted his blog from my RSS feed, and by parting company with Stross-the-blogger I have maintained undiminished my enthusiasm for Stross-the-author.

They used to say that you should never try to meet your favorite author; it was bound to be a disappointment. Nowadays you hardly have to try; one Google-search and you’re likely to land in the thorniest part of any given author’s crotchet-patch. However this plays out for the reader, it really may not work in the writer’s favor. So maybe Hobb was even righter than she knew with antiblog rant.

In which case, you know, burn this blog before reading.

Arthur Clarke is dead, there was a LiveJournal strike, the Hugo nominations have just been announced, it’s Holy Saturday, the US Democratic primary is starting to get genuinely ugly, and the best cheese in the world turns out to have poison in it. So naturally what’s on my mind is the proper spelling of the word magic: with or without a k?

When this came up on the SFReader Forums I barked out my usual Pavlovian reaction:

“Magicking” is fine with me, but “magick” drives me crazy for some reason. It has a “Ye Olde” preciousness about it that makes me bite clean through my elbow.

Then I got to thinking. (Is this ever less trouble than it’s worth?) Magick(e) was fine in the English Renaissance: Shakespeare used it, Marlowe used it. But spelling hadn’t been regularized then, even for names. Marlowe sometimes signed his name as “Marley” or even, apparently, as “Merlin.” (You can bet that, as a teenaged fantasy-reader and addict of Marlovian bombast, I tried to make something out of that. Fortunately the world will never know how badly that story sucked and will simply have to take my word for it.)

And magick is clearly a back-formation. It comes from Latin magicus, which derives in turn from Greek μαγικός “Magi-like, Magian.” The k that appears in some forms (like magicking, magicked) is just to prevent the softening of the c to an s sound (like the k in mimicking, mimicked) and was misinterpreted as being part of the stem of the word. We don’t write mimick in standard English and we shouldn’t write magick either.

So: that was then; this is now. Magick(e) and its byforms was okay before the 18th Century, and if people want to use it nowadays in or referring to occult religious observances it’s no skin off my walrus. But it’s clearly not to be used in a fantasy novel written in standard English. Not to be used in any fantasy novel written within the last century. Certainly not in any 20th Century classic of the fantasy genre. (No. Stop it. I’m not listening!)

Oh, well: there it is in Chapter VIII of Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. And it doesn’t bother me a bit, though why it doesn’t bother did bother me, if you see what I mean. Then I looked a little closer at the context:

And were he so fortunate as scape these mantycores, yet cowlde bee never climbe up the gret crages of yce and rocke on Koschtre Beloorn, for none is so stronge as to scale them but by art magicall, and such is the vertue of that mowntayne that no magick avayleth there, but onlie strength and wisdome alone, and as I seye these woulde not avayl to climbe those cliffes and yce ryvers.

This is from one of the 2 or 3 densest passages of the book where Eddison actually inflicts on the reader a fair imitation of Renaissance English without the benefit of kindly editing. So this isn’t really a 20th century example. It’s a sixteenth century example, which just happens to have been written in the 20th C. I hold no brief for Eddison’s social opinions (he seems to have been been pretty antidemocratic) but stylistically he was no quack.

And that’s what bothers me when fantasists drop fake-archaisms like magick into their text to create atmosphere. It’s just quackery, like vendors at a Renaissance Faire who screech “melord! melady!” in fake-Cockney (I’ve-seen-Benny-Hill-I-know-what-English-people-sound-like) accents. The “atmosphere” created is ersatz: Shannara, not Middle-Earth.

Should fantasy novels be written in standard English, though? Why not move away from the standard–change the standard?

Well, aim high, I say. But asking people to learn a new dialect of English so that they can read your book is maybe asking a little too much. Burgess might have been able to get people to do it, but most people won’t have similar success. And I’d add that the greatest of all sf/f stylists, Ursula Le Guin, achieves her effects with very plain language. So you don’t need to mash up words to impress people. All you need is genius.

Arthur Clarke is dead, it seems. Behind every man alive now stands one more ghost.

[Seen at jimvanpelt‘s LiveJournal.]

Today it’s Belle Rêve but tomorrow it’ll be Belly Rave…

This never bothered me before, but it seems like Belle Rêve is a solecism; it should be Beau Rêve, according to the infallible penguin who wrote my French dictionary. Oh well: Pohl & Kornbluth probably liked the sound-devolution of belle into belly. Or maybe they’re making a point: bad linguistics leads to bad city planning. (Or maybe they talked to a different penguin, the same one Tennessee Williams used to hang out with.)

Okay, okay–maybe I’m going a little overboard on the garfish. But today is (a.) the Ides of March, when a bunch of Julius Caesar’s close personal friends (some of them garfish or pipefish for all we know) stood around him and put holes in him until he stopped moving, and (b.) the official release date of The Return of the Sword (available directly from Flashing Swords Press or Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc).

The Return of the Sword started out, you may remember, as an attempt to recover from oblivion the stories in the briefly-available Flashing Swords E-Zine Annual, lost in the web-wrack and e-foam when Pitch-Black Publishing foundered with all hands. Some of the stories weren’t available, and some new ones were added. I was sorry, for instance, to see Steve Goble’s Spider John story didn’t make the crossing to the new anthology–but instead we have the first story in his series about the Faceless Sons, and it is, in a word, a riot. (How can you dislike a story with the line, “The man in the bloodstained white mask contemplated the impaled head”?) So the new anthology is undoubtedly bigger and better than the one it was designed to replace.

eeknight has a rundown of the contents and contributors here. The editor plans a sort of virtual book-tour in the blogosphere: it’ll be interesting to watch (and be a part of). So expect more noise and base self-promotion in this space.

This afternoon, in an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid useful work, I was reading the Gospel of Luke and I came across this familiar line:

εὐκοπώτερον γάρ ἐστιν κάμηλον διὰ τρήματος βελόνης εἰσελθεῖν ἢ πλούσιον εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ εἰσελθεῖν.

–Luke 18:24

usually translated

“It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

You waste more time if you look everything up, so I was interested to find that τρῆμα (the word usually translated as “eye”) can mean “orifice”, and βελόνη (the word usually translated as “needle”) can refer to a pipefish or garfish.

So maybe what Jesus was actually saying was, “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the yinyang of a pipefish…” This doesn’t add any moral or spiritual meaning that I can detect, but it is funnier, sort of like the lion jumping straight through the crocodile in Baron Munchausen.

In the wake of the now-bountifully-bipartisan sex scandals afflicting American politicians, one has to assume there is an inevitable link between intense moralism (as opposed to morality), the drive to seek public office in the US, and the compulsion to purchase sex.