Daniel A. Rabuzzi's Blog, page 10

We Have Met The Artist and She/He is Us

Ellen Dissanayake has been saying very wise things for decades about why we humans make art. As I stir my coffee this morning and contemplate Deep History and the Big Picture, I am happy to read her words: "Paleo-archaeologists and ethnographers tell us that from as early as a hundred thousand years ago (some say much earlier) until very recently, in many parts of the world, members of our species have spent enormous resources of time, metabolic energy, and costly materials (such as feathers and ivory from rare and powerful creatures or shells and minerals from far distances) to mount complex ceremonies in which the elaboration of bodies, surroundings, and paraphernalia is joined with vigorous and intricate dancing, dramatic performances, and complex songs, chants, and drumming. In other words, although they lacked money, they nevertheless invested their human capital in the arts. [...] To an evolutionist, devoting time, effort, and resources to apparently non-utilitarian pursuits should have made people less rather than more likely to survive. Yet the fact that they occur so extravagantly, universally, requires an opposite conclusion: the arts must have enabled their practitioners to better survive than humans who did not go to such extensive and expensive extremes. Their “value” had to be not only cultural but biological." Excerpted from an essay, "What Is The (Adaptive) Value of Art?," published August 16, 2011 on the NEA website. You can click here for the full text plus much more about Dissanayake and her work. Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

At the bar beyond the edge of the world

Fantastical motifs flourish everywhere in our contemporary field of vision: a steady return to the images we conjured around the first campfires, celebrating the most intimate and original of our minds' companions-- odd, whimsical, frightening, amusing (sometimes all at once)-- a constant counter-point to the Enlightenment's banishing of the hobs and the fairies-- a dancing, shimmering retort to the streamlined functionality and no-nonsense sleekness of industrial design and the various sects of modernism. To take just one example from modern, urban life: Visiting the craft beer aisle or a wine merchant is now like a tour of Ali Baba's cave, with labels as lovingly created as the liquid within the bottles, labels awash with phantasmagoria, eccentric figures, legendary creatures, and the just plain bizarre. Surely there is a line from the great book illustrators (Rackham, Dulac, Beardsley) and poster-artists (Mucha) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the original funny papers and then comic books and the pulp covers, meandering around fantasy and science fiction book covers, traipsing through the font foundries and the hills of Dadaism and especially Surrealism, to the concept art and posters for a thousand strange and speculative movies (Terry Gilliam!), and music album covers of the '60s and '70s (think of Hipgnosis, of Roger Dean). Thumbnail sketches of empires east of the moon and west of the sun, cameos of curious creatures, a slantwise glance at the Old Man of the Mountains and the Old Woman in the Shoe... all in aisle seven of your local Whole Foods or in the racks at your neighborhood wine boutique. For many more labels from beyond the fields we know, click: The Daily Meal, "25 Beers: Great Label Art Slideshow" (400 Pound Monkey! Hophenge!); The Oenologist, "The Art of the Wine Label"; Web Urbanist, "61 Exceptionally Creative Wine Label Designs"; The Pour Curator, "The Best Beer Label Art of 2011" And be sure to check out The Art and Design of Contemporary Wine Labels by Tanya Scholes. Click here for more information.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Sigils and Signs at the Observatory

Pam Grossman has curated yet another fabulous show, this one focused on the sigils and signs that illuminate our various paths to enlightenment (however one wishes to define the term). If you are in NYC these coming days, I urge you visit this show. [Full disclosure: my wife, Deborah Mills, and I have a collaborative piece in the show, and one of Deborah's solo works is also exhibited there, so this is hardly disinterested advice. But don't go just to see stuff by Lobster & Canary-- check out the many other fine and wondrous items, some difficult to describe, others easy to describe but hard to fathom...in all the right ways!] Alchemical symbols, kabbalistic designs and notations, and much more await you. Go! For more, click here .Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Remaking The Shield of Achilles (LOTR, Game of Thrones)

"And Vulcan answered, 'Take heart, and be no more disquieted about this matter; would that I could hide him from death's sight when his hour is come, so surely as I can find him armour that shall amaze the eyes of all who behold it.' When he had so said he left her and went to his bellows, turning them towards the fire and bidding them do their office. Twenty bellows blew upon the melting-pots, and they blew blasts of every kind, some fierce to help him when he had need of them, and others less strong as Vulcan willed it in the course of his work. He threw tough copper into the fire, and tin, with silver and gold; he set his great anvil on its block, and with one hand grasped his mighty hammer while he took the tongs in the other. First he shaped the shield so great and strong, adorning it all over and binding it round with a gleaming circuit in three layers; and the baldric was made of silver. He made the shield in five thicknesses, and with many a wonder did his cunning hand enrich it. He wrought the earth, the heavens, and the sea; the moon also at her full and the untiring sun, with all the signs that glorify the face of heaven- the Pleiads, the Hyads, huge Orion, and the Bear, which men also call the Wain and which turns round ever in one place, facing. Orion, and alone never dips into the stream of Oceanus." --The Iliad, Book 18, lines 478 ff (trans. Samuel Butler, 1900). __________________________________________________ At their digital forges, the masters of CGI have in the past decade rendered Middle Earth, Narnia, Westeros and dozens of other fantasy worlds. Lobster & Canary always sits in the theater watching the ever-lengthening credits rolls, applauding until the lights come on the platoons of artisans who bring the techne to the screen: the programmers, engineers, designers, matte painters, miniaturists, concept artists and storyboarders, compositors, animators, simulation researchers, visualizers, developers, shader writers, special effects wizards of every description. Click here and here , also here and here for insights into how leading firms such as RODEO FX, Pixomondo, Industrial Light & Magic and Weta Digital work their craft. Weta is the bridge to the even more fundamental craftsmanship that propels the best recent fantasy/science fiction films: the devoted attention to making traditional sets and props in traditional ways to make the fantasy real. Weta Digital's mother company (founded six years earlier, in 1987) is Weta Workshop...which created Middle Earth for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. Artisans at Weta-- John Howe, Ngila Dickson, hundreds of others directed by Richard Taylor, Tania Rodger, Daniel Hennah-- made 900 suits of armor, hundreds of swords, 10,000 arrows for 500 bows, 19,000 costumes, 20,000 household implements and artifacts, landscaped and built massive outdoor sets for Hobbiton, Helm's Deep, Minas Tirith, and so forth. HBO is taking the same care on Game of Thrones. And -- as Peter Jackson does, as Terry Gilliam does, likewise Guillermo del Toro, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese--the HBO team, including author George R.R. Martin, highlights the work of the craftsmen and -women who hew and forge, weave and paint the imagined world into a visual reality. Listen to Game of Thrones production designer Gemma Jackson (no apparent relation to Peter) and graphic designer Jim Stanes: Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Maurice Sendak

Like millions of others mourning the death of Maurice Sendak, I recall as some of my earliest memories the images from Wild Things and remember wanting to sail and caper with Max, to start the wild rumpus. Yet influencing me even more were In the Night Kitchen... ....and his illustrations for The Juniper Tree and other of the fairy tales collected by the Grimms... I just want to be sure we recall these masterpieces as well, not let the brilliance of Wild Things overshadow everything else Sendak produced.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

The Space Jockey (Ridley Scott's Prometheus)

Ridley Scott's Prometheus hits the screens June 8th--a prequel-of-sorts to the Alien movies. Lobster & Canary loves the fact that Scott is finding out for himself-- and sharing with the rest of us-- what the back-story is to the giant downed spacecraft that houses the eggs that contain the Alien in the very first movie. In that movie--Alien (1979)--when the Nostromo responds to the beacon, the diverted crew's reaction upon their discovery of the derelict vessel is muted. Their exclamations of amazement (a stray "I've never seen anything like it," and "are you seeing this, Ash?") feel perfunctory. They voice no excitement over it being a clearly alien ship, i.e., the movie implies that the humans either already have encountered or expect to encounter other sapient species. The extraterrestrial ship serves more as a MacGuffin to propel the plot than a subject in its own right. And yet one can sense Scott's own curiosity aroused over one detail on the ship: the giant, petrified corpse (its chest shattered, ribs protruding) reclining in what appears to be a pilot's chair, beneath some kind of massive navigation device. The camera goes in close and then lingers over the corpse's face, whose frozen expression, limned by the shadows the lanterns cast, might seem to be one of warning or sorrow. Who was this pilot, dubbed "the space jockey" in fan circles? What civilization did he/she/it and the ship belong to? Why was the ship carrying a load of Alien eggs? The questions are not asked, let alone answered, in Alien (and are not even referred to in any of the three sequels)-- all attention moves immediately to the (admittedly pressing) issue of face-huggers and chest-bursters, and so on. Scott says in a recent interview: "I always figured it's a weapon, and I always figured that [the ship in the first Alien] was a carrier of weapons. Therefore, who is that, inside that [Space Jockey] suit? That wasn't a skeleton, that was a suit. And if you open up the suit, what do you get inside it? And why were they going, where were they going?" [Click here for a good summary in io9 of "what we know about the Space Jockey."] Another wonderful instance of how a story lurks in the back of an auteur's mind, has "a life of its own," opens out on mysteries, pinnacles and pitfalls. Here's the trailer for Prometheus. Looks like we will get answers about the Space Jockey--be careful what we ask for. Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Moebius Soars On

A Lobster & Canary reader reminded me the other day that we failed to note the passage of Moebius, one of the most influential artists of the past fifty years. Moebius (the pen-name for Frenchman Jean Giraud) died last month. Lobster & Canary fell instantly in love with Moebius's work at the appearance of the first American editions of the pioneering magazine he co-founded, Metal Hurlant, known on our shores as Heavy Metal. Above all, we love the idiosyncratic wanderer, Arzach, soaring over eccentric landscapes on his faithful pterodactyl. Moebius worked on many fantasy/science fiction touchstones of the late 20th century, ranging from Alien to The Silver Surfer. His influence is pervasive throughout the speculative genres (I suspect he also has a following among urban planners, architects, and clothing designers). Learn more here, here, and here. Soar on, Moebius.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

Parasitic Experimentation in Fantasy Literature

Brian Stableford, in his indispensable The A to Z of Fantasy Literature (Scarecrow Press, 2009), asserts:

"Literary experimentation in fantasy is to some extent parasitic--and not only in commercial terms---at the expense of the wide and consistent appeal of fantasy's commodifiable formulas" (page 84, in the entry on "Commodified Fantasy").

What a great springboard his statement would make for a panel discussion at, say, Readercon or Arisia, or at the Brooklyn Book Festival! Stableford is an astute, measured commentator on the fantastical genres, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the field-- his views merit serious consideration.

What precisely does he mean by "parasitic"? What qualifies as "literary experimentation," what answers best to "fantasy's commodifiable formulas"? A long-running debate, both within the genre and much further afield (echoes of Aristotle, Horace, and Cicero carry down through the clashes); Stableford's comment above is a part-response to Ursula K. Le Guin, whom Stableford cites in the entry as the source of the term "Commodified Fantasy."

Alas for the lack of time to explore the worthy debate further right now-- but I think the lobster and the canary shall return (here or elsewhere) to the evergreen contest between "commodity" and "experiment." Besides Le Guin's observations over the years, Gary K. Wolfe's Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan University Press, 2011; Amelia Beamer co-authored some of the essays) figures here, likewise Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), and the extensive work by respectively David Hartwell and John Clute. It will be interesting to map our genre-focused explorations against more general recent discussions about fiction and its uses. Zadie Smith's "Two Directions for the Novel" (in her collection of essays, Changing My Mind, published by Penguin, 2009) comes quickly to hand, as does Orhan Pamuk's The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (Harvard University Press, 2010) and the insights of respectively A.S. Byatt, James Wood and Marjorie Garber. And not to forget classics such as E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, Wallace Stevens's The Necessary Angel, and the critical work of Virginia Woolf, V.S. Pritchett, William Empson, and Owen Barfield.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

The Scop's Voice Still With Us: "Wassailing Worms, Bright Marauders and Be-charmed Bees"

In honor of poetry month (and to swim with the swift stream of poetry in every month), I recommend The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems In Translation, edited by Greg Delanty & Michael Matto (W.W. Norton, 2011).


With the original Old English on the left-hand side, and its translation (or, as Seamus Heaney reminds us, a "rendering") on the right hand, the collection treats us to "poems of exile and longing," "poems about living and dying," poems of battles and of saints, remedies, prayers, charms, and-- of course-- a rich trove of riddles.

Besides Heaney, the translators include many of Lobster & Canary's other favorite poets as well: Molly Peacock, Mary Jo Salter, David Wojahn, Yusef Komunyakaa, Saskia Hamilton, A.E. Stallings and Jane Hirshfield.

I find it impossible to resist lines like these:

"Wassailing worms
Feast afresh where limbs lie slain
Devouring flesh: only bones remain."

(from Stallings's version of "The Riming Poem")

"My jacket is polished gray
Emblazoned with roses and fire."

(From Billy Collins's rendition of "My Jacket is Polished Gray")

"An etched ship of air, a silver sky-sliver,
it lugged a month's loot from its raid on time..."

(from Peacock's translation of "I Watched a Wonder, a Bright Marauder")

Ah, metrical words to charm the bees, to hold malice and spite at bay, to honor the waves and the clouds and the trembling leaves of the aspen!Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.

A Little Green Heron in Drop-Time

Several decades ago, I watched a Green Heron hunting in a half-strangled stream --dwindled to a thread at the bottom of a drainage ditch-- mere yards from a major intersection in a large city.

Wherever I had been going forgotten, I tracked that heron as it tracked fish. It knew I was there, but did not fly, so intent was it on its own errand. I crouched down among the reeds and the minor willows, and watched the heron for many minutes...five, ten, more, I did not know. So close I could see the blazing yoke of its eye, the striations of its throat plumage (it must have been an immature), the delicate fronding of the feathers on its back as it leaned forward, coppery green plumes overlapping with the rusty brown.

I have not lived in that city for many years but I visit often and have, on occasion, passed that spot. I always pause and look, hoping to catch another glimpse of a Green Heron there, furtively, professionally about its business. I never have (not there, though elsewhere), but I see always the palest tint of a shadow stalking down the little stream, and I smile and am for one long moment in the past, while simultaneously also in the past-as-I-recreate-it, the present, the present-as-I-imagine-it-for-the-future, the future, and the future-in-which-I-am-remembering-my-recollection-of-the-original-event.

That "then" is Drop-Time.

When that Green Heron walks with studious ferocity through my mind, I am in Drop-Time; that Green Heron leads me to and accompanies me in Drop-Time. A psychopomp perhaps, at the very end...but for now a guide who also escorts me back to the lands of Clock-Time.

What T.S. Eliot describes in "Burnt Norton":

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable."

Drop-Time: private time without intermediation, a surprise and an awakening, time hollowed out from the regular river, elongated and linked across the long stretches of the current, directly tied like a bundle of leaves (or feathers) floating and bobbing and dipping in the stream. Time that has a smell and a texture, anchors itself in a place, and is--above all--intimate, that is, not to be confused with the grand public memories constructed and commemorated in monuments, museums, what Pierre Nora dubbed "les lieux de memoire."

Drop-Time is where we go on our search for paradise, and revival, for our lost youth and our hopes for the future, the retrieval of once-dashed aspirations and the restoration of the world's first green.

Drop-Time is what Stefan Zweig seeks to inhabit-- and where he takes us-- as he calls forth life-as-it-was in the cafes of his vanished Vienna. Likewise Gregory von Rezzori looking for the Czernowitz of his birth in The Snows of Yesteryear, Kamau Brathwaite evoking Barbados and Jamaica, Rita Dove on the enchantment of the everyday ("You start out with one thing, end/ up with another, and nothing's/ like it used to be, not even the future"), Seamus Heaney disinterring memories and roped bog-men from Irish earth, Alice Oswald giving voice to the god of the river Dart. Drop-Time is the Breton childhood chiseled by Pierre-Jakez Helias in The Horse of Pride, is integral to the jazz-mystical odyssey poured forth by Nathaniel Mackey in his From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, is at the core of meaning surrounding the Ephrussi netsuke collection traced by Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes.

There goes my little Green Heron, forever hunting minnows along a tiny brook.

Eliot again, more "Burnt Norton":

"Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at."

Succumb, succumb to the deception! It yields heaven.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.

(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.