Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 44

On Being A Local Writer

This was in response to a facebook friend, who described his activities for the day as "a day in the literary life, minor leagues." This got me going on a tangent:

I tend to read your day as the experience as being a local writer, rather than being a minor league writer. This is an issue for me, because I think being local is good... I worked for the Ramsey County Historical Society at one point and learned about "old money" families in St. Paul. It explains a lot about F. Scott Fitzgerald, including why he drank. He's very much a St. Paul writer, just as Sinclair Lewis is very much a Minnesota writer. To me, Gatsby reads like the experience of trying to break into "society" in St. Paul. You can't imagine how closed-in that community is. Growing up at the edge of it, as Fitzgerald did, must have been awful.

Granted, science fiction and fantasy are often not local. But LeGuin seems to me to be very much a product of her childhood and the San Francisco area. The only book of hers that has a lot of background detail is Always Coming Home, set in Northern California. (I need to reread the novel set in Portland. It must have detail as well.) Thomas Disch made sense to me, when I realized he was gay and grew up Catholic in Roseville in the 1950s. That will produce a lot of darkness. Maybe he became a New York writer, though I really liked his novel The Businessman, set in Minneapolis.

I think I am writing this, because I've recently read three essays by people I see as East Coast, entitled, literary writers or would-be writers. Maybe their fiction is rooted somewhere, but their essays sound denuded, as if they have become part of the New York writing world and in the process lost their backgrounds.

But I really don't know what point I am trying to make. The literary life is never minor league. The pay can be minor league, and the reputation can be less than is deserved. The life is important, no matter where it is lived.

Flying

From a facebook discussion of flying:

I still fly maybe once a year. I hate it. For me all the problems come before I get on the plane. I hate undressing in public. I hate the porno scans. I have not had a really bad experience with TSA yet, but friends have, and I live in fear. I almost lost jewelry in the last rush to undress and dress at security. Once I am on the plane, I relax, though I usually fly into Hartford, which means an Embraer or Bombardier mini-plane.

I can remember flying Northwest Orient between Tokyo and Seoul when I was a kid. The pilot came out and chatted with us. Like us, he was from Minneapolis. The planes were big. They served meals. Flying was exciting and futuristic, rather than a depressing visit to a police state dystopia. It was never as nice as the Twentieth Century LImited between Chicago and New York, but you can't take a train from Japan to Korea.

More on SF Poetry

Another facebook post on SF Poetry:

Well, I suppose I ought to think a moment before I rant. I just realized that Paul Cook is a facebook friend of mine, though he will probably defriend me sometime today. On the other hand, since I and my friends write science fiction poetry, his essay did not make me happy at all. I flat out don't think he's right. English language poetry has a long tradition of fantasy, which continued right through the 19th century, when realism dominated fiction. Walt Whitman is pretty grounded in the real world, but Emily Dickinson uses figures such as Death, who is not entirely realistic. Don't get me started on Tennyson.

The minute you start using metaphor, which poetry obviously does, you begin to move away from realism. A lot of what you do in science fiction prose does not happen in lyric poetry, since you don't have the room. You aren't going to do science fictional world building and extrapolation in ten lines. Instead, a science fiction poem is likely to be either (a) a poem about science or (b) a poem about the images of science fiction. There is no reason why science fiction images and references can't be used as effectively as images and references from Greek and Roman myth -- or as effectively as Emily Dickinson's image of death as a person. Among other things science fiction imagery is more modern, more a part of our contemporary real world.

I get back to my original point. The boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, realism, surrealism and so on can be drawn in prose fiction. They get very fuzzy in poetry, because the history of modern poetry is not the same as the history of modern fiction.

Iain M. Banks

The wonderful British science fiction writer Iain Banks has announced that he has cancer of the gall bladder, which has metastasized. He is not expected to live through this year. He is 58 and went in to the doctor in February because of a persistant backache. This is what he found out.

He writes non-science fiction under the name of Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks. I have read only the science fiction, which is far-future space opera about a society called the Culture. I find his work too violent, but it is remarkable. To give an example: in The Algebraist, he has a species of blimp-like creatures, who inhabit the upper atmosphere of gas giants. They are intelligent, and their society -- we realize as we get to know them -- is an anarchist utopia, with one small quirk. They hunt and kill and eat their children. The children live in packs well away from adults until they are old enough and large enough to be accepted as non-edible. Everyone in their society -- adults and children -- accepts this as perfectly normal, correct behavior. It's what is done.

Banks is a fine, funny and bleak writer. All his utopias -- the Culture is one -- are ambiguous. But he argues that utopias, albeit ambiguous ones, are possible. We are not stuck where we are. Society can be improved. He is a socialist.

Two of his novels take their titles from Part Four of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. I just found the entire poem online. This is Part Four:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Blogger's accursed program is left-hand-justifying all the lines, thus damaging the layout of the poem. I'm sure there is an easy way to fix this, but I don't know it. Most likely you can still see how beautiful this is.

I post it in honor of Iain Banks and because we are all mortal.

SF Poetry

A guy named Paul Cook posted an essay on the Amazing website on why science fiction poetry is so awful. Amal El-Mohtar, who edites a fantasy poetry magazine, posted a reply to him on Apex. My friend Catherine Lundoff alerted me to El-Mohtar's post, which I read and liked. Then I clicked the link to Paul Cook's essay and got thoroughly pissed.

Remember that I write poetry as well prose, and I belong to workshop of poets who write science fiction and fantasy poetry. I think our best work is pretty darn fine. I don't like someone dismissing what we do.

I posted this at the Apex site:

Thank you for replying to Paul Cook. I found his essay wrong and angering, much like the literary critics who explain that science fiction is not real fiction. There are all kinds of blurry lines here. Science fiction poetry and fantastic poetry are not, it seems to me, sharply divided. Nor is SF poetry sharply divided from poetry about science. Nor is fantastic poetry sharply divided from “literary” poetry that draws on fantasy, romance and myth. I don’t know enough to carefully divide all these categories and compare them. I don’t think Cook has done the job.

But then I wanted to post on the Amazing site, home to Cook's irritating essay, and their anti spam defense won't let me register. This meant I had a rant without a home. So I posted it on facebook.

Cook wrote: "I was inspired to write this essay because David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer decided to include a poem called “Ragnarok” by Paul Park in their Years’ Best SF 17 that was written to mimic the Icelandic Sagas. Setting aside the fact that English does not have the same kind of syntactic cadences that Icelandic does, thus dooming the poem, Park nonetheless tells a tale that could just as easily have been written out in prose in a story."

The sagas are prose, not poetry, and their syntax is pretty straightforward: subject-verb-object. Because the language is inflected, this structure can be altered for effect. If you want to emphasize the verb, move it ahead of the subject. "Struck he Thorvald in the head." Not a big deal. You can do it easily in English. I use these sentence structures fairly often in my fiction. "Then came fall, when the days shortened and the sheep were gathered in, then winter, dark and long."

I don't know what Cook is talking about here. If Park were imitating the sagas, he would be writing prose. My best bet is he is imitating Eddic poetry, if he is imitating anything, though the stanza Cook quotes does not sound much like Eddic poetry. I'd have to read the entire poem to be sure. I'm not sure what a syntactic cadence is. (Maybe Greg Feeley can tell me.)

Eddic poetry has more tangled sentences than saga prose, but it's not really bad. You can figure it out, unlike skaldic poetry, which is crazy. And it has cadences, if this means that it has a meter. However, the marked stresses and alliteration of the Eddic line can be reproduced in English. People do it when they translate the Poetic Eddas -- or Beowulf -- into modern English.

The short form is: I don't know what Cook is talking about on a topic that I know a little. I suspect I would find other problems with the essay, if I looked at it more closely. But maybe I am simply crabby.

Update

I sent the very wet noir planetary romance to its editor yesterday, feeling uneasy. My writing group liked the story, especially the Autonomous Leica (a robot videographer) and Baby, the pseudo-pterodactyl. I like the setting. But I am not sure about the story line.

Today I am doing a wash. When Patrick gets back from a meeting, we will go out. The day is bright and sunny and fairly cold.

Minicon Report - Day One

From facebook:

The first day of Minicon went well. I had two panels. One had a ridiculous topic, the physics of fairy tales, but went pretty well once Jane Yolen got talking about fairy and folk tales, since this is a topic she knows really, really well.

The other panel was on self-promotion for authors. It was me -- the old, tired, war-weary, cynical pro -- and four writers who were starting careers, either with small presses and through self-publishing. The two young women on the panel believed totally in social media, especially twitter. The young man on the panel believed in selling his book face to face. He had managed to sell 1,200-1,500 copies in the course of a year, which impresses me. Adam Stemple and Michael Merriam were in the audience and added their comments. A good, energetic discussion with hand waving and shouting.

I felt afterward, talking to Russell Letson, that the advice I was given decades ago on self-promotion was pretty good. Go to cons and meet people. This may not give you a huge career, but it can help in little ways. You will, at least, meet authors and editors and learn about their experiences. When I'm in a mood to be social, I like cons. I have certainly met a lot of interesting people over the years.

But I continue to think that most efforts at self-promotion don't work.

Minicon Report - Day Two

From facebook:

I was wearing a bright red turtleneck and black pants from J Jill yesterday, and I felt I was too talkative and assertive. I even talked through a guy in the audience, which I never do. So today I am wearing a dark brown turtleneck, jeans and pearls. I feel the pearls will induce decorum, and the dark brown turtleneck with mute my mood down to morose and withdrawn. Unfortunately, I have no panels, so won't find out if this makes me a better panelist.

Along with the pearls I am wearing a 40-year-old Yves St. Laurant silk scarf that is brown, tan, green and bright reddish-pink. So the costume has a certain amount of cheer. The scarf is there to provide color and elegance.

Most of the time, I throw on a pair of jeans and a turtleneck and am dressed. But I pay more attention to what I wear at cons. I am an accessory kind of person, so I especially pay attention to jewelry and scarves. Thus this post.

*

I realized, bringing these comments over from facebook, that my con report is all about me. What else can I say?

Minicon is 48 years old this year. It exploded in the 1990s, and people split off into three other cons. Many of the younger people went to the new cons, though I did notice a number of young people at Minicon this year. I saw two or three people of color, all African-American, which doesn't seem like enough. A lot of the attending fans are old, in their 50s or 60s or 70s. It's like going to a science fiction convention in a retirement village. The energy level is pretty low. There are a lot of canes.

The interview with the Guest of Honor, Judy Czernada, made her work sound interesting. I will look for it. Her background is in biology, and she appears to know her science; and her books sound fun.

The annual panel on the best SF of the year was good, as usual. It consisted of Russell Letson, who reviews for Locus; Greg Johnson, who reviews for New York Review of Science Fiction and The SF Site; and John Taylor, a really bright and interesting linguist, who teaches science fiction (among other things) at South Dakota State. I took notes.

At one panel, I don't remember which, I learned about reverse shoplifting. This is done by authors, who want to get their books sold and read. First, you order a copy of your book from (say) Barnes and Noble. This puts the book in their system. Later, you begin putting copies of your book in the science fiction/fantasy section of Barnes and Nobles stores. People pick up the book and take it to cashier. Because it's in the system, the cashier can sell it. Voila! You have sold a book.

I don't know about the accounting and record keeping consequences. Do you get royalties? Does the sale show up in compilations of book store sales? I know it is hell for accounting, since the store has sold a book it doesn't, according to its records, have.

I want to know more.

Mostly I spent my time at Minicon talking with friends. I have friends in the Twin Cities Metro Area, people I really like, who I only see at cons.

Minicon Report - Day Three

From facebook:

Overcast day. This being Minnesota, there are no flowers blooming, and the grass is still stubbornly brown. Not that I mind. April is the cruelest month, and we don't even get lilacs here. Just mud and all the debris that the now-gone snow had hidden. Scraps of paper and plastic. Dog poop. Last fall's sodden leaves.

I have a raw throat, which may be a cold or simply too much talking at Minicon. I am going to miss the con's last day and stay home and read and maybe write.

Wyrdsmiths

My writing group met last night. Jane Yolen is in town and her son Adam Stemple, who is a member of the group, brought her along. A very nice gathering. Though the staff of the coffee house where we meet had to ask us to be less boisterous, since we were bothering the other customers. The staff said we could crank up the volume after 9:30. The coffee house closes at ten, and they figured we would make sure the place was empty at closing time.

Jane was not the problem. It was the rest of us.

We were cheerful and happy.