Ambrose & Elsewhere

John O’Neill at Black Gate wrote me just after Christmas to tell me he was buying the most recent Morlock novella (a sequel to “Payment Deferred”), and I have been invited to submit stories to two different places. So naturally I have been blocked. This is a relative rarity for me: normally when I have time to write I can write.

Nothing is more tedious than a self-involved writer writing about writing, except for a self-involved writer writing about not writing, so I’ll try to keep this brief. But one of the things I discovered about myself (as I was trying to find out what the trouble was) was sort of amusing.

I wrote for twenty years in the closet, tapping out stories for an sf/f market that was becoming increasingly remote from the kind of stories I was tapping out. This was not bright, but it was not unintentional. I decided that, since I was obviously not going to make a living at this business, that I might as well write the kind of fiction I liked reading (call it adventure fantasy, sword and sorcery, or …) and consider publication (should it ever happen) as gravy.

Dim as it was, this method had some benefits. The relevant one: as I accumulated a mountainous pile of rejection slips, I was increasingly willing to drop the big one and see what happened since there seemed to be no likelihood anyone else would ever lay eyes on the results, no matter how disastrous the experiment.

And now that some of those same stories have been published and read, I no longer have the sublime confidence of failure. There is at least a chance, a tiny chance, that the stories I write will be read by somebody. Instead of writing in a closet, I feel like I’m writing in a window.

The nice thing about an inhibition like this is that, as soon as you notice it, it vanishes like The O.C.‘s ratings. I… I ain’t a-scared o’ no windows (said the Mac user nervily).

Merry Christmas to those who like that sort of thing. To all a good night!

A message from the far future… of 1975!!!

[Edit (2/14/07): The old YouTube link seems to have broken so my technical aide son found another at iFilm.]

Paul Jessup has put up an on-line poll about the state of the sf/f fiction market.

Seen at Steve Goble‘s blog.

This one glommed from Danny Adams‘ LJ.

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Excellency James the Extemporaneous of Similar Ealand Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

Massive Stars in Open Cluster Pismis 24

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap061219.html

Edward Rothstein reviewed the new Robert Fagles translation of the Aeneid last week in the NYT.

He likes it, but from the review I’m doubtful I will. He doesn’t quote much (a bad sign in a review of a poetic translation) and what he does quote doesn’t exactly bite one on the eye or the ear.

But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power
the peoples of the earth — these will be your arts:
to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,
to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.

That’s Fagles, rendering Aeneid 6.851ff:

tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.

English is just wordier than Latin, but it is annoying that Fagles takes 2.5 times as many words (and an extra line) to inaccurately represent what Vergil says.

Remember, Roman, to rule the nations with lawful power.
These will be your arts: to impose the habit of peace,
spare the conquered and conquer the proud.

That’s my rendering, not terribly original, with only 9 more words than the original. Less words, more impact: it’s a cardinal principle of Latin poetry. It’s clear that Fagles isn’t the man to see this important point, and that may make him an unfit translator of Vergil.

But the thing that really bothered me about the review is that it praised the Aeneid by making it sound like an early Imperial civics text. The epic is this crazy wizard’s garden of gods and magic and monsters and ghosts and love and hate and death and destruction and hope and fate and horror and madness and reverence and revenge and deception and dreams and beginnings and endings and from all of this Rothstein has plucked the gray lifeless bloom of Roman Duty.

I say ugh to that. With friends like these Vergil won’t have any enemies, since no one will pay the slightest attention to him.

Remember the Monty Python episode with the abortive interview of Raymond Luxury-Yacht?

I was listening to Gerry Mulligan’s Jeru the other day and I practically fell off my chair when the track “Blue Boy” came up. It’s the intro music for the interview program.

Had I known back in the 70s who the artist was I would have skirkled to the nearest record store (such things still existed in those distant days) and laid hands on the LP with reverent violence and listened to this tremendously cool album at intervals ever since. But I didn’t because I didn’t know.

So I think that TV programs need footnotes. Not all programs; just the ones I happen to watch. I will begin my campaign to bring about this sorely needed social revolution after lunch. If I remember.

Reuters reports that Sam Raimi is on-board to make a new movie about the Shadow:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061211/film_nm/shadow_dc

No word yet on what minor role Ted Raimi will play.

The article misleadingly states that “Walter B. Gibson created the character…” In fact, the Shadow on the radio and the Shadow in the pulps were entirely different characters. The hero of the radio serial was, as the world knows, Lamont Cranston who fought crime using his mystical ability to cloud men’s minds, assisted by his friend and companion Margot Lane. In the pulps, Lamont Cranston was a playboy who sometimes allowed the Shadow to use his identity in his endless war againt crime. The pulp Shadow had no magical abilities, but he was an impressively sneaky bastard who was always firing two revolvers simultaneously, for reasons that always seemed adequate at the time. His real identity, as revealed in “The Shadow Unmasks”, was the fantastically dull aviator Kent Allard. Having gone to some lengths to remember this, I will try now to forget it again. It has to be the single most tedious naming of a previously anonymous character, except possibly for an infamous episode of The Prisoner. At least Dashiell Hammett never published a Continental Op story where we found out that the hero was named Bob Smith. I hope.

For a brief period in the late 90s there were dozens, if not hundreds, of old Shadow pulps that had been scanned and put up the internet by Shadow enthusiasts. When Condé Nast, who own the copyrights to the old Street and Smith pulps, found out about it they moved in and stepped on everybody’s face. Then they immediately launched a reprint series of the entire Shadow run. No, not really. Apparently they don’t value the property, but it’s theirs and they don’t want anyone else to have any use of it.

I read many of the old pulps in that brief internet revival; unfortunately, I didn’t save any of the texts, as my computer then was not as roomy as my computers are now. Nor can I report that they are great literature, even by contemporary pulp standards. Still, there was something about them that caught the imagination. It might partly be that the Shadow stood alone against the sinister forces of crime, yet he had a secret army of allies who would assist him at need. It might be just that he got to wear a cool hat and commit various crimes in the name of justice. For some reason this sort of paradox has tremendous appeal, even to people who should know better.

12/31/06: UPDATE

Actually, the Shadow pulps are being reprinted. A Shadowphile named Anthony Tollin has acquired the rights from Smaug Condé Nast and is reprinting them (2 per volume, $12.95 a pop) under the imprint The Vintage Library. Send before midnight, etc.

James Nicoll posted a link to the infamous Hitchens Vanity Fair piece about women not being funny. (Unlike Hitchens himself, for instance.)

I’d seen it before, and was in two minds about commenting on it here. On the one hand my views of Hitchens are colored by politics, and I don’t want to make this a blog a political soapbox; there are plenty of those on this tubulous interweb thing. On the other hand, the issue is really about writing and genre, which is on-topic. The things Hitchens says about women and humor, others were saying about women and sf not so very long ago.

The trouble with discussing Hitchens’ piece for its content is that there isn’t much there there. Hitchens’ acuity on the subject of humor can be summed up by his rhetorical question, “Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny?” Anyone who even has to ask himself this can’t know much about Parker or about humor. People have expressed some bewilderment about how CH manages to publish blather like this. I think some publications (like Slate and VF) keep him on in the interests of diversity: they can’t be univocal bastions of liberal purity with a saber-rattling chickenhawk like Hitchens as a regular contributor.

But what was interesting to me was the lack of self-knowledge that CH displays. He obviously considers himself funny because he can make women laugh (see his third paragraph) but he doesn’t seem to be acquainted with the idea of polite laughter or of nervous laughter. He later remarks “it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals.” If he’d replaced “men” and “They” with “I” he might have begun to approach the real issue.