Ambrose & Elsewhere

The unspeakably great Molly Ivins has died of breast cancer.

Daniel Blackston has announced that Pitch-Black LLC is closing its doors. Flashing Swords will stay up, but will be dormant; no new issues, it seems.

I love fantasy (including its subgenre, science fiction), I take it very seriously, especially when I’m trying to write some or read some or when I should be doing something else or when I’m breathing. I want other people to take it seriously. Nonetheless, I think some people take it too seriously.

An example is the recent discussion at Lotus Lyceum about art and the marketplace. Not all of the positions that emerged in the comments were incompatible, just because they were different, but I became impatient with the dichotomy I saw developing between Art (We are artists here, dammit!) and the Marketplace (i.e. brothel). Plus, someone ventured to use the word “pulp” as if it were self-evidently a term of dispraise, and I love the glorious schlock-spangled tradition of American fantasy because of what it is, not because it is some sterile Parnassus where literary priests can conduct their mystagogic rites (which it is, in part).

I’m totally in sympathy with the writer who wants to blow her reader’s mind so hard that the top of his head comes off, and I read high literature (for pleasure, not as a sort of cultural vitamin) as well as popular literature. But to force an Art-or-Market dichotomy on American fantasy is to miss something important about why it thrived in the 20th C.

Le Guin, of course, had the words I was groping for in the face of this rampant dichotomizationifyificationizingism. So I stole them.

“I totally oppose the notion that you can put Art over here on a pedestal, and Entertainment down here in a clown suit. Art and Entertainment and the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work it is, the better art it is. … Every artist is deeply serious and passionate about his work, and every artist also wears a clown suit and capers in public for pennies. The fellows who put on the clown suit and the painted grin, but don’t care about performing well, are neither entertainers nor artists; they’re fakes.”
–Le Guin, The Language of the Night, p. 232

There’s more, but that gets at the core of my discontent with the high-road-or-the-no-road types. Their error is that they mistake the style of the clown-paint for the quality of the performance. A capable clown in vulgar paint will deliver capers worth watching. A mime too dignified to move is a fraud. If I prefer the work of Fritz Leiber to the fiction of his younger contemporary Susan Sontag (and I do) it is not because I read nothing but genre paperbacks. It’s because, in fiction, Sontag is a less honest or less capable clown. (If the field in question were essays rather than stories, it would be a different story.) Pulpiness is neither here nor there in evaluating fiction, in short.

“So what?” I hear you scream ask. “Let people have their motionless mime and call it what they want.”

Well, I do (there being nothing I can do to stop it), but I think (there being nothing I can do to stop that, either) there’s a limit to which a popular art can be refined without killing it. Jazz is the example I usually use: it was not only more popular when it was the normative mode of American popular music, it was better. That’s because popular music demands swing (later specialized as bop, rock etc.) and “serious” music does not. (It need not even be music: I cite John Cage.) When jazz became serious music it became “free” to not swing (i.e. free to suck). Audiences stayed away in droves and if jazz is not dead, it is not at all well. And it would be a bad thing if that near-death-by-respectability happened to sf/f.

Because then no one would be left to buy my self-published opus, Someone Who Looks Like Me Saves the Universe with His Big Protuberant Ray-Gun.

Someone has developed a caffeinated doughnut. I can hear myself getting fatter as I think about it.

I suppose many have seen this before but a link at a Gawker post (about blurbing for hire) led me to John Warner’s Blurb-o-matic. My favorite was “A fuzzy legend of renegade clowns that will leave you bowled over!”–I almost considered writing something that might go with the blurb. Only laziness saved me, as so often before.

I stepped out of the house this morning into full sunlight and a light fall of snow. The sun was glaring through a rift in deep blue-gray clouds. Presently the sun closed its eye and I walked on to work through the gray snow-flecked world.

I’ve missed winter in this El-Niño-plagued year.

I’ve been rereading C. S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism for the first time in at least ten years, and I have been struck (as I often am when reading Lewis) how insightful and how dim he can be. He’s always dividing the world up into Us and Them, and about Them (the people with whom he has no sympathy) he can be quite thickheaded. My favorite instance is when he contrasts readers of H. Rider Haggard with readers of John Buchan, the latter being obviously inferior for some reason.

But when he’s not UsAgainstThemming he can say things that are remarkably shrewd. In particular I was thinking of his chapter “On the Meaning of Fantasies,” which is mostly about daydreaming and its relationship to writing and reading. From this, and from something in Surprised by Joy, I gather that he was a little scared by his propensity to daydream, perhaps not realizing how universal it is. But he doesn’t let this prevent him from tracing fantasies in the psychological sense to fantasy in the literary sense and why it appeals to some and not others. (Those dread Others who bedevil his nonfiction. Still, he may have a point here.)

As Tychê would have it, yesterday I saw this story about daydreaming at Scientific American’s website. Researchers have found that “a default network of regions in the brain’s cortex–a grouping known to be active when the mind is completely unoccupied–is firing away as a person is engaged in routine activities,” suggesting that this “default network” is the daydreaming mind, which becomes less active as a person’s activities become less routine.

I wondered (and still wonder) if the daydreaming mind can remain active while the more alert on-task mind is operating. It seems to me that sometimes when I’m telling a story (out loud in a lecture or while pounding out a piece of fiction) my thinking changes and becomes a trancelike state where I can both dream and act.

On the other hand, that may just be caffeine intoxication.

I have some negative things to say about this book, Tobias Buckell‘s debut novel, Crystal Rain, so I should begin by observing that I enjoyed it, finished it without compulsion, and recommend it, with some reservations.

On with the negativity. The book begins with a prologue (usually a bad sign) in which someone crash-lands on the planet where the novel takes place. He’s not the protagonist and we don’t learn his name (although he has one, as we learn later). The first few chapters continue in this offhanded way, bouncing from viewpoint character to viewpoint character without settling on one long enough to make him/her interesting. This can work if the action in the braided chapters is so compelling that the characters aren’t the focus of interest, but these chapters seem to be deployed largely for exposition purposes: many a shadow looms, but little is done to advance the plot. If one can hang on until chapter six or seven, the plot really begins to roll. But that’s a long time to ask the reader to wait.

The novel has hero problems, also. His name is John deBrun, and he is set up in an interesting way. He washed ashore a generation ago, has not perceptibly aged since then and he has no memory of his life before then. Also, he has a hook for a left hand, a nicely piratical touch. So far, so good. But his character, as displayed in the story, is a rather floppy one. After his home town has been sacked by the invading Azteca, one would think he would go in search of his wife and son. Instead, he goes to Capitol City, for no very obvious reason except that the author wants him there. That’s a pattern which persists through the book: the hero isn’t motivated, he’s moved, like a chess-piece.

On the up side: Buckell invents an interesting and complex social situation, with the Nanagadans separated from the hostile Aztecans by a range of mountains, the Wicked Highs. (Buckell also excels at the naming of names, an important trait for an sf/f writer.) The Nanagadans are a diverse but largely Caribbean people, whose dominant religion is a form of Voudoun with physically present gods: the Loa, a nonhuman species. The invading Azteca, bred by a hostile group of nonhumans called (by the Azteca) Teotl, remain pretty two-dimensional Bad Guy Evil Villain types, with the exception of one named Oaxyctl, whose development through the book is its most sustained and interesting piece of characterization.

The book is virtually science fantasy. There are gods (nonhuman aliens) and magic (oldfather technology), but the setting is low-tech, with pistols and locomotives and lighter-than-air dirigibles: a culture that is groping its way back to technology and industry after a war-caused disaster. Buckell pulls this off to good effect, I thought.

Crystal Rain is something less than the sum of its parts. Hands down my favorite scene in the book was an airship flight by John and Oaxyctl, where they are pursued by an Aztecan airship and have to fight it out in midair, but there are many other good things in it. Still, as a whole, it doesn’t cohere. Buckell, a past master of short fiction, seems to be feeling his way in the longer form. But his talent is undeniable and I expect his novels will only get better as his experience deepens.

Rich Horton says a few kind words about “A Covenant with Death” as part of his appallingly successful effort to read and review everything, everywhere.

On rereading the story recently I was a little disturbed to find in it an undoubted woman in a refrigerator. I would have avoided this had I known what a cliché it has become, something along the lines of “You killed my brother!” The Women in Refrigerators Syndrome was first tagged in comics, but once the term enters your awareness you see them everywhere in pop culture. The Kim Bauer character in 24, for instance, exists only to be put in (or dangled near) a refrigerator (or cougar), and there are great weeping buckets of other examples.

Of course, death and dismemberment can come to anyone rather abruptly in Morlock’s world, but the casual opportunistic use of any character’s blood to paint the hero in more sympathetic colors is probably a mistake. The management regrets the error.

Of all the obituary posts on Robert Anton Wilson in the past couple of days, the one I enjoyed the most was Wonkette’s, which shrewdly observed: “[U]nlike the ‘political thinkers’ who clog Washington’s green rooms on Sunday mornings, Wilson was hilarious … on purpose.”

I hadn’t been aware of his leftist-libertarian party “Guns and Dope” (a great name for a band). I read the Illuminatus! trilogy and a couple of the Schrödinger’s Cat books many years ago, but they didn’t do anything for me–except infect me with a strong distaste for conspiracy-theory plotlines which persists to this day. Sounds like his non-fiction might be more entertaining, if not necessarily enlightening.