Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 66

Blogging and Facebooking

I read a Jim Hines livejournal discussion about doing stuff on the Internet. I blog and am on facebook. I have mixed opinions re blogging. I have a blog so people can find me via Google. The blog has an email address attached so people are able to write me. Sometimes this is useful. Not everyone has a copy of the SFWA Directory. I keep the blog up, because it tells anyone looking for me that I'm still alive and still able to write.

But I am not a natural blogger. I find it hard to do, and it takes a lot of time. I think the effort I put in is obvious. My style is not fluid, chatty and fun. It's like chainsaw sculpture. Okay, this guy cut a bear out of a tree trunk. Well, it's not much of a bear. Looking at it, all you see is that it was hard to do.

But the blog gives me a place to put my poetry, and it gives me a place to think out loud, and people can find me. So it's worth it. I think.

I love facebook. Unlike the blog, where I mostly speak to silence, I get immediate feedback. The length constraints -- 420 characters -- mean I am forced to write short notes, mostly about the weather and what I had for breakfast and whatever I've done lately that was fun. I love how trivial all this is.

And I post links to articles and images I like, rather than writing about them. Here, this is the NASA photo of the day. Here, this is an article in The Guardian about Occupy Everywhere.

It can eat time, but I don't feel the effort I feel when I blog.

I don't think any of this is especially useful to my writing career. Yes, it has helped John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow, but they are exceptional. I figure, do what you want, so long as you still have time to do your real writing. It makes you more visible on the Internet, and a little visibility is not going to hurt.

I feel I've written or said

This is Amazing

What created the Waterfall Nebula? No one knows. The structure seen in the region of NGC 1999 in the Great Orion Molecular Cloud complex is one of the more mysterious structures yet found on the sky. Designated HH-222, the elongated gaseous stream stretches about ten light years and emits an unusual array of colors. One hypothesis is that the gas filament results from the wind from a young star impacting a nearby molecular cloud. That would not explain, however, why the Waterfall and fainter streams all appear to converge on a bright but unusual non thermal radio source located toward the upper left of the curving structure. Another hypothesis is that the unusual radio source originates from a binary system containing a hot white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, and that the Waterfall is just a jet from this energetic system. Such systems, though, are typically strong X-rays emitters, and no X-rays have been detected. For now, this case remains unsolved. Perhaps well-chosen future observations and clever deductive reasoning will unlock the true origin of this enigmatic wisp in the future.

More About Literary Fiction

I found this in my Internet wandering today, referenced in a comment in The Guardian. It's A Reader's Manifesto published in The Atlantic, an all-out attack on literary fiction. I enjoyed it, because it confirmed my prejudices. I should ask my friend Ruth about current literary fiction. She reads more widely than I do.

The author does not believe the point of change was the McCarthy Era. He likes a number of authors who were writing through the 1950s. Well, there was terrific art in the '50s, much of it done by the Abstract Expressionists. They had all been through the Great Depression, and many had been in the WPA. I got the impression many had leftwing politics, though they mostly talked about art. Mark Rothko told my mother he still carried his IWW card.

Things began to change in the 1960s. I remember my father saying, after we moved to New York, "I know there is interesting art out there, but I can't find it."

Maybe the 60s were when the commodification of culture and hostility to politics took hold. I know that's when serious money came into the contemporary art market, and the avant garde, so to speak, began creating art for the rich. Did something comparable happen in fiction? The market there is the educated middle class. I would have to do more research than I want to do to find out.

The essay does a trip on Don DeLillo, who is writing -- apparently -- about how sterile and empty consumer society it. Contempt of supermarkets comes in. I will agree that a farmer's market or small specialty stores are probably more fun. But I like food and try to like cooking, and I enjoy going to Byerly's. The description of DeLillo made me want to write about the pleasures of shopping. A science fictional shopping story?

Patrick noted that the movie Logan's Run did a terrific job of taking down the shopping culture. It's the future as people surviving inside a mall and thinking that the world outside is uninhabitable.

Anyway, cheap cynicism about grocery shopping doesn't sound very attractive. If you don't like it, then you don't like it. There isn't much more to say. Go to a farmer's market.

The essayist says modern literary prose is unreadable: clogged, repetitive, bland and imprecise. The examples he gave -- from DeLillo, Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy -- seem to prove his point.

An interesting take.

Literary Fiction

I read a New York Times interview with the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. His work sounded interesting. The interviewer describes it as falling "into an oddly fascinating hole between genres (sci-fi, fantasy, realist, hard-boiled) and cultures (Japan, America), a hole that no writer has ever explored before."

I'd say the anime director Miyazaki has explored much of the same territory: realism in Whisper of the Heart, SF and fantasy in many other movies, western culture and Japan throughout. Castle in the Sky begins in a mining town based on towns in Wales. Kiki is set in a city based on a city in Sweden. Spirited Away seems very Japanese to me. Howl's Moving Castle looks European.

In any case, Murakami sounds worth checking out, nothing like my idea of "literary" fiction.

My idea of literary fiction is the psychological and moral problems of well educated, financially comfortable members of the upper middle class. A topic I care little about.

Maybe I am wrong, and there is a lot more good lit in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books than I realize.

Fred Ho

I love this photo of Fred Ho.

Fred Ho

The wonderful saxophonist and composer Fred Ho is ill with cancer. He's 54, too young to be so ill. I wrote a poem:

Cancer shouldn't take down
like guy like you,
six foot plus
and wide through the shoulders,
with a baritone sax like a machine gun --
like Monkey willing to shake up heaven
and travel ten thousand miles
to bring truth to the people.

You should outlast illness
like a Taoist sage,
kick ass
like a Shaolin master,
blow that sax
like it's the International
sung by all the planet's people together.

The dragon king
of the Eastern Ocean
should bow his crowned head
and carry you
beyond mortality.

The poem is flamboyant. So is Fred Ho. I am really hoping he beats this. He is someone we need. If I had a way to reach Monkey or the dragon king, I'd be asking for their help. Where are all the Taoist sages when you need them?

From Facebook

I commented on facebook that "literature is not what it used to be."

One of my friends asked, "When was the golden age of literature?"

I answered:

I had to go away and think about your question. I would pick the 19th century as the golden age of the literary novel. However, as far as I know, the category of literary novel did not exist then. People like Dickens and Twain have been made ancestors of the literary novel, though they more properly belong in the history of popular fiction. I suspect that the true literary novel came into being circa 1900 with the James-Wells divide and then High Modernism. So maybe the golden age is Proust. I suspect the literary novel as we know it today came into existence after WWII, possibly in the post-war red-baiting era. (I'm talking about the US here.) Fear of the witch hunters made people careful about that wrote or painted. It was safest to do work that was inward or abstract or concerned with formal problems. Or you could turn to art for kids, trashy art, stuff no one took seriously: SF, comic books and Mad Magazine. Just an idea...

By "literature" I mean the writing that the commanding heights of culture -- the New York Times and the New York Review of Books -- take seriously.

The Guardian

The Guardian has an interesting article on science fiction and literary awards. I found the comments mostly interesting and added my own:

Interesting discussion. I have read almost no "literary" fiction written in recent decades. Not sure why. It seems uninteresting to me. Maybe it's the recognition that Mieville is talking about. If I want to find out about the real world, I can read the news or nonfiction or talk to people or simply go outside.

Is science fiction formally conservative? Often, yes. Delany talks about this. When reality is uncertain, as it is in science fiction and fantasy, then an experimental style can make the narrative too confusing and unclear. Experimental sf can be done, as was demonstrated in the 1960s and 70s, but it's not easy. I once had to write a description of someone who was trapped in a half-hour-long time loop. Since she was inside it, she didn't realize what was happening. Every turn round the loop was new to her. And the novel was written from her perspective. So how did she figure out what was happening, and how did she get out? I nearly went crazy writing that section, and I have never been happy with the result. That's as much of a formal problem as I want.

I try to write good, clean language, drawing on the Icelandic family sagas as examples, and keep most of the weirdness to the ideas. I tend to think of science fiction as a fiction that takes place inside metaphors. The craziness, the disjunction, the surprises happen in the narrative line, rather than in the language.

A lot of science fiction and fantasy is not good, which has to do with commodification and the needs of people trapped in a not very pleasant society. You dream of escape, and the market gives you false and unobtainable and badly written dreams.

But from the beginning, whether you start with Mary Shelley or H.G. Wells, there has been sf which challenges the status quo intellectually and morally. The best is well written. Speaking of awards, I direct you to the Tiptree, science fiction's gender bending fiction award. Its winners and short list members are often interesting.

books/The Guardian has an interesting article on science ...

books/The Guardian has an interesting article on science fiction and literary awards. I found the comments mostly interesting and added my own:

Interesting discussion. I have read almost no "literary" fiction written in recent decades. Not sure why. It seems uninteresting to me. Maybe it's the recognition that Mieville is talking about. If I want to find out about the real world, I can read the news or nonfiction or talk to people or simply go outside.

Is science fiction formally conservative? Often, yes. Delany talks about this. When reality is uncertain, as it is in science fiction and fantasy, then an experimental style can make the narrative too confusing and unclear. Experimental sf can be done, as was demonstrated in the 1960s and 70s, but it's not easy. I once had to write a description of someone who was trapped in a half-hour-long time loop. Since she was inside it, she didn't realize what was happening. Every turn round the loop was new to her. And the novel was written from her perspective. So how did she figure out what was happening, and how did she get out? I nearly went crazy writing that section, and I have never been happy with the result. That's as much of a formal problem as I want.

I try to write good, clean language, drawing on the Icelandic family sagas as examples, and keep most of the weirdness to the ideas. I tend to think of science fiction as a fiction that takes place inside metaphors. The craziness, the disjunction, the surprises happen in the narrative line, rather than in the language.

A lot of science fiction and fantasy is not good, which has to do with commodification and the needs of people trapped in a not very pleasant society. You dream of escape, and the market gives you false and unobtainable and badly written dreams.

But from the beginning, whether you start with Mary Shelley or H.G. Wells, there has been sf which challenges the status quo intellectually and morally. The best is well written. Speaking of awards, I direct you to the Tiptree, science fiction's gender bending fiction award. Its winners and short list members are often interesting.

Writing Today

I met Lyda and Naomi for writing at the coffee shop. I started with a headache, then added too much coffee and too much conversation, so I didn't get much writing done. I hope next week is quieter, and I am wise enough to lay off the coffee. Still, the conversations were interesting.

I have almost finished the current story, after many tiny revisions. It will go to the Wyrdsmiths this week.

Then I have nothing in the works except revising the novel. When I became unemployed, I had a huge stack of unfinished work. I have slowly reduced the stack.

Boy, it has been a long process.