Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 85
April 17, 2019
Another Page from the Image Book
.
This was probably the first image--a collage, obviously-- to be pasted into the Image Book. I filled the rest of the page with a sketch of a mountain with its shadowed side in light and its lit side casting a shadow parallel to the ground. The rest of the page I filled with words. Or "words." This search for words is what the Image Book was all about. It was meant to, eventually, pull words out of nothing and place them on the page.
Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 68 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.
*
This was probably the first image--a collage, obviously-- to be pasted into the Image Book. I filled the rest of the page with a sketch of a mountain with its shadowed side in light and its lit side casting a shadow parallel to the ground. The rest of the page I filled with words. Or "words." This search for words is what the Image Book was all about. It was meant to, eventually, pull words out of nothing and place them on the page.
Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 68 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.
*
April 16, 2019
The Bureaucrat Has Left The Planet
.
Be patient with my title. All will be explained.
Gene Wolfe was a combat vet, a true and faithful husband, a practicing Catholic, and an accomplished engineer. He was also the author of The Book of the New Sun, the single greatest accomplishment of science fiction to date, and stories like "The Eyeflash Miracles," "Alien Stones," and "The Hero as Werwolf." Short fiction is not given its due these days but these and other stories by Wolfe will be read a hundred, a thousand years from now. I am not exaggerating here. He was one of our best.
But you want insight into his character. Well, okay. The first convention where I ever got to spend any serious time with the man, he and I and my wife, Marianne Porter, were sitting at a table and he started to tell us about a library book sale he'd been to the previous weekend. He was excited because he'd gotten several shopping bags of old books for two dollars each. Then he said, "Looking through them, books published a hundred year ago, so many had inscriptions like 'To Amelia from her loving Aunt Mame.' You look at them, so many inscriptions, and all these people are... are... they're all dead!"
And he almost burst into tears.
Afterward, Marianne said to me (keep in mind here that she immediately fell in love with him), "That is the most emotional man I ever met."
He was, and I don't think that was unrelated to his genius.
The first time I ever met Gene was long before, in the late seventies when he was working as an engineer but had already written some of his most brilliant work, and I was struck by how astonishingly ordinary he looked. He was one of the most ordinary-looking men I had ever met. Later, upon retirement, he grew that wonderfully eccentric Gene Wolfe mustache and achieved an eccentricity befitting the man he was. But back then, in the Midtown Diner with Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper (I was definitely bottom man on the totem pole) he looked like the Continental Op--a man who would disappear into a crowd if you looked away from him for an instant.
Much later, I set out to write Stations of the Tide .
The protagonist of the novel was never named. Throughout, he was referred to as the Bureaucrat. It was important to the story that he be underestimated for most of the book and only revealed as extraordinary at the end. So when I created him, I thought of him being Gene Wolfe. On the outside, he was extraordinarily ordinary. But inside, he was... Gene Wolfe!
Not to discourage you from reading my novel but at the end the Bureaucrat wins. Of course he does. Inside, he's Gene Wolfe.
And now, goddammit, he's gone.
Vaya con dios, Gene. If God is just, you and Rosemary are together again.
And today's Image Book page . . .
Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 69 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.
*
Be patient with my title. All will be explained.
Gene Wolfe was a combat vet, a true and faithful husband, a practicing Catholic, and an accomplished engineer. He was also the author of The Book of the New Sun, the single greatest accomplishment of science fiction to date, and stories like "The Eyeflash Miracles," "Alien Stones," and "The Hero as Werwolf." Short fiction is not given its due these days but these and other stories by Wolfe will be read a hundred, a thousand years from now. I am not exaggerating here. He was one of our best.
But you want insight into his character. Well, okay. The first convention where I ever got to spend any serious time with the man, he and I and my wife, Marianne Porter, were sitting at a table and he started to tell us about a library book sale he'd been to the previous weekend. He was excited because he'd gotten several shopping bags of old books for two dollars each. Then he said, "Looking through them, books published a hundred year ago, so many had inscriptions like 'To Amelia from her loving Aunt Mame.' You look at them, so many inscriptions, and all these people are... are... they're all dead!"
And he almost burst into tears.
Afterward, Marianne said to me (keep in mind here that she immediately fell in love with him), "That is the most emotional man I ever met."
He was, and I don't think that was unrelated to his genius.
The first time I ever met Gene was long before, in the late seventies when he was working as an engineer but had already written some of his most brilliant work, and I was struck by how astonishingly ordinary he looked. He was one of the most ordinary-looking men I had ever met. Later, upon retirement, he grew that wonderfully eccentric Gene Wolfe mustache and achieved an eccentricity befitting the man he was. But back then, in the Midtown Diner with Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper (I was definitely bottom man on the totem pole) he looked like the Continental Op--a man who would disappear into a crowd if you looked away from him for an instant.
Much later, I set out to write Stations of the Tide .
The protagonist of the novel was never named. Throughout, he was referred to as the Bureaucrat. It was important to the story that he be underestimated for most of the book and only revealed as extraordinary at the end. So when I created him, I thought of him being Gene Wolfe. On the outside, he was extraordinarily ordinary. But inside, he was... Gene Wolfe!
Not to discourage you from reading my novel but at the end the Bureaucrat wins. Of course he does. Inside, he's Gene Wolfe.
And now, goddammit, he's gone.
Vaya con dios, Gene. If God is just, you and Rosemary are together again.
And today's Image Book page . . .
Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 69 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.
*
April 15, 2019
The Image Book for The Iron Dragon's Mother
.
In the beginning is the word. For novels, at least. There's that moment when you write the first word and everything that follows becomes possible, and that's a wonderful sensation.
But--in my case at least, all writers having their own ways and methods--before the word comes the image. When I decided to write the novel that became The Iron Dragon's Mother, I began by compiling images that had the kind of "feel" I wanted for the novel. Strange and otherworldly. Archetypal. Evocative. Something to arouse the muse.
It occurred to me that other people might be interested in them, so I decided to share.
Above is the cover of the book.
Here's the inside cover. The pic was cut from an art magazine, I believe.
Two more images.The bottom one is not a collage but a newspaper photo (I think) altered with a pair of scissors. The flame was added by pen.
There are more than a hundred such images and I'll be sharing one or more a day until I've posted them all here, in order. Sometimes I'll have something else to talk about and then I'll put it at the top of the blog. But there will be a new page at the bottom of the post.
And your daily reminder . . .
Only 70 days until The Iron Dragon's Mother comes out!
*
In the beginning is the word. For novels, at least. There's that moment when you write the first word and everything that follows becomes possible, and that's a wonderful sensation.
But--in my case at least, all writers having their own ways and methods--before the word comes the image. When I decided to write the novel that became The Iron Dragon's Mother, I began by compiling images that had the kind of "feel" I wanted for the novel. Strange and otherworldly. Archetypal. Evocative. Something to arouse the muse.
It occurred to me that other people might be interested in them, so I decided to share.
Above is the cover of the book.
Here's the inside cover. The pic was cut from an art magazine, I believe.
Two more images.The bottom one is not a collage but a newspaper photo (I think) altered with a pair of scissors. The flame was added by pen.
There are more than a hundred such images and I'll be sharing one or more a day until I've posted them all here, in order. Sometimes I'll have something else to talk about and then I'll put it at the top of the blog. But there will be a new page at the bottom of the post.
And your daily reminder . . .
Only 70 days until The Iron Dragon's Mother comes out!
*
April 5, 2019
Good Writing Advice That You Won't Take
.Writers are perverse creatures, and gonnabe writers are even worse
Case in point: I'm going to offer some free and useful advice for the soon-to-be-published. Advice that would greatly increase your chances of getting your short fiction published. And none of you will take it.
As it happens, I was having supper a while back with a table full of literary types and we were talking about things that you can't tell new writers, because they'd refuse to believe a word of it. Then we got onto the subject of happy endings.
"Readers love happy endings!" exclaimed the editor of a major science fiction magazine.
To which I replied, "But writers..."
And everybody laughed.
So there you have it. If you want to make your fiction more saleable, write stories with happy endings. Preferably with space ships and planets and aliens and such. Because readers love those too.
You won't take this advice, though. Because writers are perverse creatures.
*
Case in point: I'm going to offer some free and useful advice for the soon-to-be-published. Advice that would greatly increase your chances of getting your short fiction published. And none of you will take it.
As it happens, I was having supper a while back with a table full of literary types and we were talking about things that you can't tell new writers, because they'd refuse to believe a word of it. Then we got onto the subject of happy endings.
"Readers love happy endings!" exclaimed the editor of a major science fiction magazine.
To which I replied, "But writers..."
And everybody laughed.
So there you have it. If you want to make your fiction more saleable, write stories with happy endings. Preferably with space ships and planets and aliens and such. Because readers love those too.
You won't take this advice, though. Because writers are perverse creatures.
*
April 4, 2019
Moon Dust
.
Over on Facebook, there's a game I like to play which I call Art or N'art? When I'm at an art museum I'll take a photo of something that might be art... or maybe not. Then I post the photo and challenge whoever cares to state whether it's art or not. Sometimes,the bucket with odd items in it placed in a corner is N'art--cleaning supplies nobody has cleared away. Sometimes it's very challenging Art.
It's easier for me than for everybody else because I get to see if there's a label on the wall identifying the item as art. But it's fun for everyone because nobody gets mocked for being wrong. The point is that sometimes there's a thin line between art and the merely odd.
Up above is the most challenge I put to the Facebookers. Art? Or merely a classy lighting fixture?
Not to keep you in suspense, this is Spencer Finch's Moon Dust which is currently in the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The installation is based on the dust brought back on Apollo 17, the last voyage to the Moon. Which turned out to be chiefly silicon dioxide gas, iron, calcium, and magnesium. Finch translated this into bulbs of four sizes indicating the relative weights of the elements. They combine into molecules , and the whole is represented in three dimensions.
Lunar dust translated into a physical metaphor.
Art.
Science.
Magic.
There's a great deal more could be said about the work. But I'll skip straight to my point...
This was a particularly difficult Art or N'art because the art served as a functional light source. We (in the specialized sense of "most of us who care about art in the present moment") tend to think that art is not functional. If it hangs on the wall of a museum, it's art. If you can use it to clip your toenails or unclog a toilet, it's not.
But sometimes something is functional and art at the same time.
And then? It's art.
*
Over on Facebook, there's a game I like to play which I call Art or N'art? When I'm at an art museum I'll take a photo of something that might be art... or maybe not. Then I post the photo and challenge whoever cares to state whether it's art or not. Sometimes,the bucket with odd items in it placed in a corner is N'art--cleaning supplies nobody has cleared away. Sometimes it's very challenging Art.
It's easier for me than for everybody else because I get to see if there's a label on the wall identifying the item as art. But it's fun for everyone because nobody gets mocked for being wrong. The point is that sometimes there's a thin line between art and the merely odd.
Up above is the most challenge I put to the Facebookers. Art? Or merely a classy lighting fixture?
Not to keep you in suspense, this is Spencer Finch's Moon Dust which is currently in the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The installation is based on the dust brought back on Apollo 17, the last voyage to the Moon. Which turned out to be chiefly silicon dioxide gas, iron, calcium, and magnesium. Finch translated this into bulbs of four sizes indicating the relative weights of the elements. They combine into molecules , and the whole is represented in three dimensions.
Lunar dust translated into a physical metaphor.
Art.
Science.
Magic.
There's a great deal more could be said about the work. But I'll skip straight to my point...
This was a particularly difficult Art or N'art because the art served as a functional light source. We (in the specialized sense of "most of us who care about art in the present moment") tend to think that art is not functional. If it hangs on the wall of a museum, it's art. If you can use it to clip your toenails or unclog a toilet, it's not.
But sometimes something is functional and art at the same time.
And then? It's art.
*
April 2, 2019
First Glimpses of The Iron Dragon's Mother Characters
.
I am, I am told, a more visual writer than is usual, in that making sketches and pasting pictures encountered in random magazines into my notebooks is a major element in my process of world creation. Most writers, apparently, don't do this.
The other day, I came across an old notebook from 2017 (that's it to the right) and in it were a few of the characters I was trying to bring to mind.. So I thought I'd share them with you.
Top: The dowager as a young woman. She was a lot more innocent and vulnerable then.
Above: Raven.
Sometimes my entry is only a sketch--in this case, my take on the soul or innerness of a character. The sketch immediately above is of Raven, who started out as a minor character but quickly grew in significance.
I make no apologies for the quality of my drawing. We all have our crosses to bear.
Above: Nobody and his Shadow.
This is an interesting character because he never made it into the novel. That happens sometimes, and I'm sorry for it. The Shadow would have been a separate (though connected) character.
Above: Esme.
Strangest for last. When I first pasted this in my notebook, I had no idea who the character was. I wrote nelf on the picture itself. But I wasn't getting an elfin vibe from it at all. So I tried again and wrote Little Black Riding Hood. Which shows I wasn't even sure what piece of fiction she might go into. (I also wrote The Legion of Riding Hoods, which I still think would make an entertaining comic book title, on the facing page.) Finally, I listened to the picture itself and wrote Esme before her deal underneath--and that one stuck.
Esme was going to be a minor character when she first appeared in The Dragons of Babel But she grew in significance as the novel went on. That she would pop up in The Iron Dragon's Mother was completely unexpected.
What makes this picture particularly strange is that the girl shown is significantly older than the Esme in the books. The Year Eater is a particularly mysterious entity and while everybody thinks they know what it means to make a deal with her, him, or it, apparently no one does.
*
I am, I am told, a more visual writer than is usual, in that making sketches and pasting pictures encountered in random magazines into my notebooks is a major element in my process of world creation. Most writers, apparently, don't do this.
The other day, I came across an old notebook from 2017 (that's it to the right) and in it were a few of the characters I was trying to bring to mind.. So I thought I'd share them with you.
Top: The dowager as a young woman. She was a lot more innocent and vulnerable then.
Above: Raven.
Sometimes my entry is only a sketch--in this case, my take on the soul or innerness of a character. The sketch immediately above is of Raven, who started out as a minor character but quickly grew in significance.
I make no apologies for the quality of my drawing. We all have our crosses to bear.
Above: Nobody and his Shadow.
This is an interesting character because he never made it into the novel. That happens sometimes, and I'm sorry for it. The Shadow would have been a separate (though connected) character.
Above: Esme.
Strangest for last. When I first pasted this in my notebook, I had no idea who the character was. I wrote nelf on the picture itself. But I wasn't getting an elfin vibe from it at all. So I tried again and wrote Little Black Riding Hood. Which shows I wasn't even sure what piece of fiction she might go into. (I also wrote The Legion of Riding Hoods, which I still think would make an entertaining comic book title, on the facing page.) Finally, I listened to the picture itself and wrote Esme before her deal underneath--and that one stuck.
Esme was going to be a minor character when she first appeared in The Dragons of Babel But she grew in significance as the novel went on. That she would pop up in The Iron Dragon's Mother was completely unexpected.
What makes this picture particularly strange is that the girl shown is significantly older than the Esme in the books. The Year Eater is a particularly mysterious entity and while everybody thinks they know what it means to make a deal with her, him, or it, apparently no one does.
*
March 21, 2019
"My God! There's a Lost Civilization in Our Refrigerator"
.
It's happened at last. One of my optioned stories has been made into an animated episode of Love Death and Robots, now streaming on Netflix.
The adult science fiction animation series takes advantage of the nature of its medium. Each story takes exactly as much time to tell as the story requires--anywhere from five to fifteen minutes for the first series. So the plot doesn't have to be cut or padded out to make it fit a Procrustean time-slot. That's brilliant.
And what do I think of what Tim Miller, the director, did with "Ice Age?"
I think I really lucked out. The combined live-action-and-animation adaptation stayed remarkably true to the original story. And where changes were made, they were all to the better. I laughed out loud when Rob said, "Too soon."
A lot of the success of the piece is due to Topher Grace and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who play Rob and Gail, a newlywed couple moving into a new apartment who discover something unexpected in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. The original story relied heavily on a kind of deadpan humor in the characters' reaction to this absurd event. It couldn't have been easy to convincingly deliver lines like "My God! There's a lost civilization in our refrigerator. (Try it yourself.) But Grace and Winstead really nailed it.
So I'm delighted. If you watch it, I think you'll be happy too. Probably not as happy as I am. But happy.
And of course . . .
The question has to be asked: What did Gail and Rob, the then-newlywed couple I based the story's characters on, think of the film?
They loved it.
*
It's happened at last. One of my optioned stories has been made into an animated episode of Love Death and Robots, now streaming on Netflix.
The adult science fiction animation series takes advantage of the nature of its medium. Each story takes exactly as much time to tell as the story requires--anywhere from five to fifteen minutes for the first series. So the plot doesn't have to be cut or padded out to make it fit a Procrustean time-slot. That's brilliant.
And what do I think of what Tim Miller, the director, did with "Ice Age?"
I think I really lucked out. The combined live-action-and-animation adaptation stayed remarkably true to the original story. And where changes were made, they were all to the better. I laughed out loud when Rob said, "Too soon."
A lot of the success of the piece is due to Topher Grace and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who play Rob and Gail, a newlywed couple moving into a new apartment who discover something unexpected in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. The original story relied heavily on a kind of deadpan humor in the characters' reaction to this absurd event. It couldn't have been easy to convincingly deliver lines like "My God! There's a lost civilization in our refrigerator. (Try it yourself.) But Grace and Winstead really nailed it.
So I'm delighted. If you watch it, I think you'll be happy too. Probably not as happy as I am. But happy.
And of course . . .
The question has to be asked: What did Gail and Rob, the then-newlywed couple I based the story's characters on, think of the film?
They loved it.
*
March 11, 2019
The Devil's In the Tarot Deck
.
Rachel Pollack, who is an authority on the tarot as well as a very fine writer, once told me the reason why stores selling tarot decks usually keep them in locked display cases. There is a belief or tradition, it seems, that for a tarot deck to work it has to be given to its owner. And, human people being the swine that we are, some of us interpret that meaning that a stolen deck will suffice.
So, to make sure that a) it works and b) I don't force my wife into a life of crime, I bought Marianne the Philly Tarot.
There's a nifty story behind it. Artist James Boyle was commissioned to create an illustration for a Philadelphia Magazine article on the rising popularity locally of Tarot cards and the occult. (An article, incidentally, that could have been written any year I've been alive.) His illo (below) was so very cool that both he and the magazine were inundated with requests to know where people could buy the entire deck.
So Boyle opened a Kickstarter account and in one day got orders for three times his target amount. Then he got to work, not just making the drawings but coming up with witty local associations for the cards.
So in thie deck, the Devil is (of course) Gritty. The Emperor is Ben Franklin, the Empress Betsy Ross, and The Lovers are of course Rodin's The Kiss. So far as I can tell, there's not a dud image in the lot.
It's also better made than it had to be. The edges are gilt, the cardboard is of excellent stock, etc., etc.
I would have loved this deck just for Jason Kelce (who, wearing Mummer gear after the Eagles won the Superbowl, famously said "No one likes us and we don't care") as Justice.
Not that the artist needs more business, but if you have a desire to buy the deck, you can do so here.
And as always...
I'm on the road again! Details when I return. In the meantime, the house is protected by My Son the Black Belt and Miss Hope, the noted mad scientist cat. So don't even think about it.
Immediately above: Miss Hope on her Spectromic 20 Photometer doing important science stuff.
*
Rachel Pollack, who is an authority on the tarot as well as a very fine writer, once told me the reason why stores selling tarot decks usually keep them in locked display cases. There is a belief or tradition, it seems, that for a tarot deck to work it has to be given to its owner. And, human people being the swine that we are, some of us interpret that meaning that a stolen deck will suffice.
So, to make sure that a) it works and b) I don't force my wife into a life of crime, I bought Marianne the Philly Tarot.
There's a nifty story behind it. Artist James Boyle was commissioned to create an illustration for a Philadelphia Magazine article on the rising popularity locally of Tarot cards and the occult. (An article, incidentally, that could have been written any year I've been alive.) His illo (below) was so very cool that both he and the magazine were inundated with requests to know where people could buy the entire deck.
So Boyle opened a Kickstarter account and in one day got orders for three times his target amount. Then he got to work, not just making the drawings but coming up with witty local associations for the cards.
So in thie deck, the Devil is (of course) Gritty. The Emperor is Ben Franklin, the Empress Betsy Ross, and The Lovers are of course Rodin's The Kiss. So far as I can tell, there's not a dud image in the lot.
It's also better made than it had to be. The edges are gilt, the cardboard is of excellent stock, etc., etc.
I would have loved this deck just for Jason Kelce (who, wearing Mummer gear after the Eagles won the Superbowl, famously said "No one likes us and we don't care") as Justice.
Not that the artist needs more business, but if you have a desire to buy the deck, you can do so here.
And as always...
I'm on the road again! Details when I return. In the meantime, the house is protected by My Son the Black Belt and Miss Hope, the noted mad scientist cat. So don't even think about it.
Immediately above: Miss Hope on her Spectromic 20 Photometer doing important science stuff.
*
February 12, 2019
Josh Hitchens IS Jeffrey Dahmer (Again)
.
Those who read my blog on a regular basis know that I think that Josh Hitehens is a cultural treasure. Six years ago, Marianne and I had the privilege of seeing his original one-man performance as a serial killer in a play he wrote himself, The Confession of Jeffrey Dahmer. Last night, we saw it again, in the company of Samuel R. Delany, Dennis Rickett and Bill Wood.
So, half a decade later and half an hour longer, how does the performance hold up?
It's still terrifying.
The basement space at the Art Church of West Philadelpia wasn't as scary a venue as the near-lightless garage of the original performance. But it's still an intimate experience that puts you very close to a man the likes of which you pray you never run into. (Chairs are set up for seventeen audience members -- one for each of the men and boys Dahmer murdered, though director Ryan Walter says that if anybody is absolutely desperate to see the play, he can slip in a couple of extra chairs.) And Hitchens does a miraculous job of putting the audience in the mind of someone at the extremes of human thought and experience.
This time around, I was struck by how funny the play was. After his performance, Hitchens returned to discuss the play with the audience. Everyone was free to leave if they they wished; nobody did. So I asked about those lines. "About 85% of he play is taken directly from Jeffrey Dahmer's only words," Hitchens said. "All the funny lines were verbatim."
So for ninety minutes or so, we got t live inside the mind of a monster--and a human being. Because the monologue's intent is not to exploit the sensationalistic aspects of what happened--though those were not whitewashed, either--but to give us an idea of what it would be like to be such a man.
There's a line from the original version, since revised, which I like to quote every now and then: "I slept with over a hundred men and boys and I only killed and ate seventeen of them. I think that should count for something." Imagine that said in a flat, affectless voice and now you have some idea of whether you want to see this or not.
But whether it's your sort of thing or not, it's an astonishing performance, a magnificent piece of theater, the sort of accomplishment that justifies is art and its genre.
There are still a few tickets left, I believe, though the run ends on the 17th. If you wish, you can buy tickets here.
And I Cannot Resist Including . . .
After the show I took a snap of Chip Delany and Josh Hitchens together. Two very brilliant creators, though in different media.
Note Ryan Walter in the background, aware of the camera and posing for it. That's a true man of the theater. I like his attitude.
Above: Photos by Michael Swanwick and free to use, so long as you include a credit. I should mention that the photo on top is of Josh Hitchens as himself; he looks quite different when he's being Dahmer.
*
Those who read my blog on a regular basis know that I think that Josh Hitehens is a cultural treasure. Six years ago, Marianne and I had the privilege of seeing his original one-man performance as a serial killer in a play he wrote himself, The Confession of Jeffrey Dahmer. Last night, we saw it again, in the company of Samuel R. Delany, Dennis Rickett and Bill Wood.
So, half a decade later and half an hour longer, how does the performance hold up?
It's still terrifying.
The basement space at the Art Church of West Philadelpia wasn't as scary a venue as the near-lightless garage of the original performance. But it's still an intimate experience that puts you very close to a man the likes of which you pray you never run into. (Chairs are set up for seventeen audience members -- one for each of the men and boys Dahmer murdered, though director Ryan Walter says that if anybody is absolutely desperate to see the play, he can slip in a couple of extra chairs.) And Hitchens does a miraculous job of putting the audience in the mind of someone at the extremes of human thought and experience.
This time around, I was struck by how funny the play was. After his performance, Hitchens returned to discuss the play with the audience. Everyone was free to leave if they they wished; nobody did. So I asked about those lines. "About 85% of he play is taken directly from Jeffrey Dahmer's only words," Hitchens said. "All the funny lines were verbatim."
So for ninety minutes or so, we got t live inside the mind of a monster--and a human being. Because the monologue's intent is not to exploit the sensationalistic aspects of what happened--though those were not whitewashed, either--but to give us an idea of what it would be like to be such a man.
There's a line from the original version, since revised, which I like to quote every now and then: "I slept with over a hundred men and boys and I only killed and ate seventeen of them. I think that should count for something." Imagine that said in a flat, affectless voice and now you have some idea of whether you want to see this or not.
But whether it's your sort of thing or not, it's an astonishing performance, a magnificent piece of theater, the sort of accomplishment that justifies is art and its genre.
There are still a few tickets left, I believe, though the run ends on the 17th. If you wish, you can buy tickets here.
And I Cannot Resist Including . . .
After the show I took a snap of Chip Delany and Josh Hitchens together. Two very brilliant creators, though in different media.
Note Ryan Walter in the background, aware of the camera and posing for it. That's a true man of the theater. I like his attitude.
Above: Photos by Michael Swanwick and free to use, so long as you include a credit. I should mention that the photo on top is of Josh Hitchens as himself; he looks quite different when he's being Dahmer.
*
February 6, 2019
Carol Emshwiller, 1921 - 2019
.
Carol Emshwiller has left the planet. She lived for almost a century yet her friends -- pretty much everybody who knew her -- agree that her death came all too soon.
I have no memory of how we first met. One day, on seeing me, her face lit up and she cried, "Michael! It's so good to see you!" and I realized that we were old friends. This was, by the way, her response to all her friends. She was a beacon of life. It shone from her.
I also have no stories about her. Stories are about conflict and it's almost impossible to imagine conflict with Carol. But I do have one small anecdote.
We met by chance one day, as we occasionally did, and I said, "Carol! How are you doing?"
"I'm in mourning," she said. "I've just finished writing Ledoyt and all these characters I've been living with for over a year are gone. It's as if they'd all died. I'm bereft." Then she asked, "Don't you feel the same way when you've finished a novel?"
It's not all that often that writers talk seriously about writing. So I gave Carol's question some thought. Then I said, "No. I see it as a moment of liberation. I've been persecuting all of them for 400 pages and now I've stopped. I imagine them running down the street, waving their hands in the air, shouting, 'I'm free! I'm free! I'm going to buy a hamburger!' and 'I'm going to move to Poughkeepsie and nothing's going to happen to me there!'"
Which is, in part, what I value about Emshwiller's fiction. She wrote stories and novels totally unlike anything I've ever written. She gave me (and all the rest of us) windows into worlds we never could have seen without her.
I have no interest whatsoever in fiction I could have written myself. I found Carol's work intensely interesting.
I'm particularly fond of Carmen Dog .
Above: Photo by Gordon Van Gelder. He'd just given Carol a Nebula Award and thought the moment should be memorialized. Used by permission.
*
Carol Emshwiller has left the planet. She lived for almost a century yet her friends -- pretty much everybody who knew her -- agree that her death came all too soon.
I have no memory of how we first met. One day, on seeing me, her face lit up and she cried, "Michael! It's so good to see you!" and I realized that we were old friends. This was, by the way, her response to all her friends. She was a beacon of life. It shone from her.
I also have no stories about her. Stories are about conflict and it's almost impossible to imagine conflict with Carol. But I do have one small anecdote.
We met by chance one day, as we occasionally did, and I said, "Carol! How are you doing?"
"I'm in mourning," she said. "I've just finished writing Ledoyt and all these characters I've been living with for over a year are gone. It's as if they'd all died. I'm bereft." Then she asked, "Don't you feel the same way when you've finished a novel?"
It's not all that often that writers talk seriously about writing. So I gave Carol's question some thought. Then I said, "No. I see it as a moment of liberation. I've been persecuting all of them for 400 pages and now I've stopped. I imagine them running down the street, waving their hands in the air, shouting, 'I'm free! I'm free! I'm going to buy a hamburger!' and 'I'm going to move to Poughkeepsie and nothing's going to happen to me there!'"
Which is, in part, what I value about Emshwiller's fiction. She wrote stories and novels totally unlike anything I've ever written. She gave me (and all the rest of us) windows into worlds we never could have seen without her.
I have no interest whatsoever in fiction I could have written myself. I found Carol's work intensely interesting.
I'm particularly fond of Carmen Dog .
Above: Photo by Gordon Van Gelder. He'd just given Carol a Nebula Award and thought the moment should be memorialized. Used by permission.
*
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