Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "glen-hirshberg"
Journeying into Mary Rickert's Kingdom
TRUE (Tuesday Round Up of Everything) post Post #2:
Mary Rickert (M. Rickert)-- "Journey into the Kingdom"
I was hoping to get to Mary Rickert's new novel, The Memory Garden, before we have the chance to talk and work together at Readercon next week--just because I'm so sure it's going to be good--but work and life keep interfering. So I went back this weekend and caught up with this masterful mid-length story from 2006, which I hadn't previously read.
A lighthousekeeper's daughter and her widowed mother get visited, on their island--where the only thing that seems to grow is plants from the seed packet their husband/father had in his hand when he drowned--by the ghost of the husband/father. Who keeps melting into a puddle. And who one night brings a younger ghost-sailor as a guest. The ghosts are gentle, sweet, alive, full of stories. And they feed on breath. From the mouths of the living, or stolen from just-used coffee cups.
As in the reconfigured fairy tales of W.B.Yeats, and as in most of my favorite ghostly tales, everyone in this story tells a story (one character even declares--as though stealing the breath from MY mouth--"Don't you think we've gotten awful complacent in our society about story?"). The emotional landscape is wild and weird and full of shadows, even though the characters themselves are all somewhat detached either by grief or by no longer living (and "a remembered emotion is like a remembered taste, it's never really there"). The end is scarier than you expect, and also a sort of sweet, and as to what, exactly, happened, and whose story was closest to truth, and whether that ending is happy or sad, and for whom...
Great, great story. She's a major writer. Go read her.
Mary Rickert (M. Rickert)-- "Journey into the Kingdom"
I was hoping to get to Mary Rickert's new novel, The Memory Garden, before we have the chance to talk and work together at Readercon next week--just because I'm so sure it's going to be good--but work and life keep interfering. So I went back this weekend and caught up with this masterful mid-length story from 2006, which I hadn't previously read.
A lighthousekeeper's daughter and her widowed mother get visited, on their island--where the only thing that seems to grow is plants from the seed packet their husband/father had in his hand when he drowned--by the ghost of the husband/father. Who keeps melting into a puddle. And who one night brings a younger ghost-sailor as a guest. The ghosts are gentle, sweet, alive, full of stories. And they feed on breath. From the mouths of the living, or stolen from just-used coffee cups.
As in the reconfigured fairy tales of W.B.Yeats, and as in most of my favorite ghostly tales, everyone in this story tells a story (one character even declares--as though stealing the breath from MY mouth--"Don't you think we've gotten awful complacent in our society about story?"). The emotional landscape is wild and weird and full of shadows, even though the characters themselves are all somewhat detached either by grief or by no longer living (and "a remembered emotion is like a remembered taste, it's never really there"). The end is scarier than you expect, and also a sort of sweet, and as to what, exactly, happened, and whose story was closest to truth, and whether that ending is happy or sad, and for whom...
Great, great story. She's a major writer. Go read her.
A Record of Home
TRUE (Tuesday Round-up of Everything), week of 7/1, Post #1:
Neil Young-- "A Letter Home"
This isn't likely to be anyone's favorite Neil Young album. It's a little too much what Neil apparently intended it to be; a photo album full of family snapshots, Neil noodling around in his bedroom, figuring out (or remembering) songs he loved way back whenever, and also a sweet little letter to his mom. These aren't cover versions, not even remakes. They're just him playing them. Neil clearly loves these songs. I love a lot of them, too. But I won't be putting on Neil's versions of them much.
There's one element of this package that transcends it, though. A little gesture of glorious genius. Appropriately, in the circumstances, it seems almost a throwaway. An extra.
It's the credits. Or, not the credits themselves, but the slip of paper they're printed on, foxed and tanned and stained to replicate--so precisely that it literally stole breath from me--the paper sleeves that once housed the slabs of scratched vinyl on which I, like Neil, first heard most of these tracks.
The effect of that sleeve, at least on me, is more than just nostalgic. I took one look at it, and suddenly remembered not just those near-useless objects in general--stained and crumpled before I even pulled them out of their record jackets for the first time--but SPECIFIC sleeves. The speckles on my copy of Gordon Lightfoot's IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND. The rip down the center of my PHIL OCHS best-of.
There I was, suddenly, in my own childhood room. Humming the songs that have become MY letters-home songs. Understanding all over again how profoundly my relationship to art I love has intermixed with, transformed, become indistinguishable from my relationship to people.
It may indeed be better to burn out than to fade away, as NY once claimed on RUST NEVER SLEEPS (my copy of which had a paper sleeve with a giant coffee stain, like a birthmark, in the upper left back corner, even though I didn't drink coffee then).
But I think Neil's found another way entirely, which is to somehow keep taking in and giving out so much that you just keep burning.
Neil Young-- "A Letter Home"
This isn't likely to be anyone's favorite Neil Young album. It's a little too much what Neil apparently intended it to be; a photo album full of family snapshots, Neil noodling around in his bedroom, figuring out (or remembering) songs he loved way back whenever, and also a sweet little letter to his mom. These aren't cover versions, not even remakes. They're just him playing them. Neil clearly loves these songs. I love a lot of them, too. But I won't be putting on Neil's versions of them much.
There's one element of this package that transcends it, though. A little gesture of glorious genius. Appropriately, in the circumstances, it seems almost a throwaway. An extra.
It's the credits. Or, not the credits themselves, but the slip of paper they're printed on, foxed and tanned and stained to replicate--so precisely that it literally stole breath from me--the paper sleeves that once housed the slabs of scratched vinyl on which I, like Neil, first heard most of these tracks.
The effect of that sleeve, at least on me, is more than just nostalgic. I took one look at it, and suddenly remembered not just those near-useless objects in general--stained and crumpled before I even pulled them out of their record jackets for the first time--but SPECIFIC sleeves. The speckles on my copy of Gordon Lightfoot's IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND. The rip down the center of my PHIL OCHS best-of.
There I was, suddenly, in my own childhood room. Humming the songs that have become MY letters-home songs. Understanding all over again how profoundly my relationship to art I love has intermixed with, transformed, become indistinguishable from my relationship to people.
It may indeed be better to burn out than to fade away, as NY once claimed on RUST NEVER SLEEPS (my copy of which had a paper sleeve with a giant coffee stain, like a birthmark, in the upper left back corner, even though I didn't drink coffee then).
But I think Neil's found another way entirely, which is to somehow keep taking in and giving out so much that you just keep burning.
Vampires and Sex
See my guest blog at the
Vampire Book Club
on vampires and sex. Here's a snippet to get you started: "I understand the romantic allure, I guess: the dark stranger who has the power to doom as well as bless or fulfill his or her conquests (and possibly all three at the same time); the forbidden lover at the window, luring one out of prescribed and seemingly permanent patterns; the almost unconscious and overwhelming assertion of (or giving in to) power."
My Struggle Needs "Attention of a Different Kind"
I take zero pleasure in negative book reviews, of anyone's work (which doesn't mean I don't think there should BE negative book reviews; but there's nothing to celebrate in them). But few pieces of harsh criticism have filled me with so much...no, not joy, but relief, as William Deresciewicz's skewering of Karl Ove Knausgaard 's MY STRUGGLE in THE NATION. The supposed REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST for our age (only purposely stripped of any attempt at insight or poetry or meaning)? The 3600-page second-by-second accounting of the mundanity of one man's life, rendered as flatly as possible--that's its goal, that's the only struggle--that really seems likely to win its author (if that's even the right word--I suspect he'd say it isn't) the Nobel Prize?
Here's Deresiewicz: "His book is like a box of snapshots--no, a steamer trunk; a shipping container. Their very profusion makes each of them null. What's needed is attention of a different kind. One painting, not a thousand pictures. The patience to create the beauty than in turn creates significance."
Here's me: EMPEROR!! CLOTHES! NOT WEARING...
Here's Deresiewicz: "His book is like a box of snapshots--no, a steamer trunk; a shipping container. Their very profusion makes each of them null. What's needed is attention of a different kind. One painting, not a thousand pictures. The patience to create the beauty than in turn creates significance."
Here's me: EMPEROR!! CLOTHES! NOT WEARING...
Gemma Files and Marjorie Bowen
Tuesday Round-up of Everything, Week of 6/17, Post 5:
Had heard terrific things about Gemma Files, and she'll be joining me to talk the teaching of writing ghost stories at Readercon, which seemed a perfect excuse to check out her work. Her story, "Nanny Grey," which I found in Ellen Datlow's BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR VOLUME 5, maybe holds the last emotional chord a bit too long for me, spends too much time explaining more than it needs to. But the build-up is a flat-out blast, a gritty, too-real riff on the picking-up-the-wrong-girl, heading-home-to-meet-the-(in this case, extended)-family trope. Seedy, unnerving, playful, wicked.
At the more classical end, I also caught up with Marjorie Bowen's "Dark Ann," and as I usually do when I read Marjorie Bowen, wound up feeling she's an under-acknowledged titan. At an academic conference, a writer of ghostly tales attends a lecture by a brilliant, stiff, arrogant scientist. To the writer's surprise, the scientist then seeks her out at the after-party, expressly to tell her a tale about a ghost he met (but won't describe as a ghost), which triggered longings in him he can't accept as love. And vanished. That's it. Just established, credible reality, the wispy touch of wonder, the intoxicating mixture of emotional states, one of which is dread. If I didn't already have one (or ten) already prepared, the story would be a template for the way I teach the kinds of stories I write.
Had heard terrific things about Gemma Files, and she'll be joining me to talk the teaching of writing ghost stories at Readercon, which seemed a perfect excuse to check out her work. Her story, "Nanny Grey," which I found in Ellen Datlow's BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR VOLUME 5, maybe holds the last emotional chord a bit too long for me, spends too much time explaining more than it needs to. But the build-up is a flat-out blast, a gritty, too-real riff on the picking-up-the-wrong-girl, heading-home-to-meet-the-(in this case, extended)-family trope. Seedy, unnerving, playful, wicked.
At the more classical end, I also caught up with Marjorie Bowen's "Dark Ann," and as I usually do when I read Marjorie Bowen, wound up feeling she's an under-acknowledged titan. At an academic conference, a writer of ghostly tales attends a lecture by a brilliant, stiff, arrogant scientist. To the writer's surprise, the scientist then seeks her out at the after-party, expressly to tell her a tale about a ghost he met (but won't describe as a ghost), which triggered longings in him he can't accept as love. And vanished. That's it. Just established, credible reality, the wispy touch of wonder, the intoxicating mixture of emotional states, one of which is dread. If I didn't already have one (or ten) already prepared, the story would be a template for the way I teach the kinds of stories I write.
Boursier-Mougenot Installation
Tuesday Round-up of Everything, Week of 6/17, Post 4:
Wandered into the downtown branch of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and stopped dead, in the lobby, for at least fifteen minutes, mesmerized and laughing at the sound and sight of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's installation of three inflatable backyard swimming pools gently circulating porcelain bowls and saucers, tuned and filled just so, their chimes as they bump randomly together as rich and atmospheric in that place as the bells of Riverside Cathedral on a Westside Sunday morning. Only funnier. Summer officially started for me right there.
This link doesn't begin to give you the sense of it, or the scope. But at least you can get an idea.
Wandered into the downtown branch of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and stopped dead, in the lobby, for at least fifteen minutes, mesmerized and laughing at the sound and sight of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's installation of three inflatable backyard swimming pools gently circulating porcelain bowls and saucers, tuned and filled just so, their chimes as they bump randomly together as rich and atmospheric in that place as the bells of Riverside Cathedral on a Westside Sunday morning. Only funnier. Summer officially started for me right there.
This link doesn't begin to give you the sense of it, or the scope. But at least you can get an idea.
The Coroner's Lunch
Tuesday Round-up of Everything, Week of 6/17, SIDEBAR:
Today's Kindle Daily Deal is THE CORONER'S LUNCH, the first book in Colin Cotterill's eerie, funny, earthy, spectral-tinged mystery series about the only coroner in 1970s Communist Laos. If you haven't yet discovered this, it's my favorite series currently running, it's sui generis, and you owe yourself the treat.
Today's Kindle Daily Deal is THE CORONER'S LUNCH, the first book in Colin Cotterill's eerie, funny, earthy, spectral-tinged mystery series about the only coroner in 1970s Communist Laos. If you haven't yet discovered this, it's my favorite series currently running, it's sui generis, and you owe yourself the treat.
More Marias
Tuesday Round-up of Everything, Week of 6/17, Post 3 1/2:
Javier Marías, again. Stunningly pithy for a Platonic Once ler. And I recognize this flavor of ghosts-and-loss pondering. Yes I do:
"The narratives we invent...will render us fictions. Even our gestures will continue to be made by someone who inherited them or saw them and was unknowingly mimetic or repeated them on purpose to invoke us and create a strange, momentary and vicarious illusion of our life...We lose everything because everything remains except us."
Javier Marías, again. Stunningly pithy for a Platonic Once ler. And I recognize this flavor of ghosts-and-loss pondering. Yes I do:
"The narratives we invent...will render us fictions. Even our gestures will continue to be made by someone who inherited them or saw them and was unknowingly mimetic or repeated them on purpose to invoke us and create a strange, momentary and vicarious illusion of our life...We lose everything because everything remains except us."
Javier Marías
Tuesday Round-up of Everything, Week of 6/17, Post 3:
Javier Marías lives on the windy side of genius, for sure. I picture him not so much writing as leaning out of his stylized, lushly appointed garret, a cross between the Once ler and Plato, only he talks more than either.
But:
"I believe I've still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything but tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one."
Story of my life(story)?
Javier Marías lives on the windy side of genius, for sure. I picture him not so much writing as leaning out of his stylized, lushly appointed garret, a cross between the Once ler and Plato, only he talks more than either.
But:
"I believe I've still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything but tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one."
Story of my life(story)?
REM
TRUE (Tuesday Round-up of Everything), Week of 6/17, Post 1:
REM's "Unplugged: 1991-2001" is exactly good enough to remind me how good they once were, no better. Every song I thought I remembered, I still remember. There are a couple ("Find a River"!) that I forgot I remembered. And every song I'd truly forgotten--that is, virtually everything after drummer Bill Berry left except "Electrolite"--I still can't remember, even after hearing it again. Given that Mr. Berry always struck me as more solid than special, it's amazing how deep and wide the gap is between almost everything this band did with him and everything they did without him. Even unplugged, with Berry (in 1991) and his fill-ins (in 2001) tapping congas and cans.
REM's "Unplugged: 1991-2001" is exactly good enough to remind me how good they once were, no better. Every song I thought I remembered, I still remember. There are a couple ("Find a River"!) that I forgot I remembered. And every song I'd truly forgotten--that is, virtually everything after drummer Bill Berry left except "Electrolite"--I still can't remember, even after hearing it again. Given that Mr. Berry always struck me as more solid than special, it's amazing how deep and wide the gap is between almost everything this band did with him and everything they did without him. Even unplugged, with Berry (in 1991) and his fill-ins (in 2001) tapping congas and cans.
