Kip Manley's Blog, page 24

Things to keep in mind (The secret of time)

My purpose in looking back to that first era of widespread book reading is not, however, to emphasize the abundance of deep reading, or book reading, or leisurely time that we have lost. The more I’ve studied readers of the eighteenth century, the more I’ve doubted that we (by which I mean a historically fairly new “we”—people who can buy books but also must earn money, manage households, walk dogs, bath children) ever really had more time to read. I do not believe that the minutes crowded by messages, HBO series, and childcare today correspond in any direct way to time that we—posters and messengers, scavengers of the internet, wage workers and intellectuals—once spent with books. The readers I represent struggled to make room for the reading of books in lives that they perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be crowded in the same way we perceive ours to be. They worry, like us, about other media forms that seem quicker and shallower and more enticing than books. They sense that round-the-clock entertainment and distraction might render book reading extinct. They dream of a future when books will find a wider and more attentive public. In focusing on book reading rather than on media consumption generally, my first gambit, then, is this: ever since people like us have had access to books, the time we’ve spent with them has been defined as fragile, hard to come by, and good to hope for.

—Christina Lupton

Things to keep in mind (The secret of description)

Meditation. Three elementary possibilities for the novelist: he tells a story (Fielding), he describes a story (Flaubert), he thinks a story (Musil). The nineteenth-century novel of description was in harmony with the (positivist, scientific) spirit of the time. To base a novel on a sustained meditation goes against the spirit of the twentieth century, which no longer likes to think at all.

—Milan Kundera

Things to keep in mind (The secret of the size of the pond)

Ambition in genre writing is often a perilous thing. The undiscriminating taste of genre readers (actually a highly discriminating taste, but a taste that discriminates only its kind of book from all others, aesthetic quality aside) and the invisibility of genre writing to all other readers are only aspects of the problem. Central is the question of whether the forms and constraints of any of the modern genres—horror, say, or SF, romance, sword-and-sorcery, or the Western—are worth struggling with, worth the effort of transforming. What readership will witness your labours or be able to understand what you have done?

—John Crowley

Things to keep in mind (The secret of what keeps it going)

What, after all, kept him writing with any sense of accomplishment if his view of the present state of life was so melancholy, and his faith in words to sustain a better vision so frail? Why did not he cease before he did?

The answer may be partly that for Spenser, in his own particular form of exile in Ireland, writing had become somehow synonymous with living. The long poem, instinct with a better time, peopled with the glistening creations of his imagination, sustained him despite the profound disappointments and frustrations of creating and living. To stop one would have meant stopping the other. That the attraction of ceasing was strong is attested by the temptation to give in that assails his epic protagonists; that he saw no final reconciliation of the images in his head and what he saw around him, or even what he could write, is evident from his own words and from the fact that all ideal moments of vision vanish and all the lovely ladies and brave knights meet only to part with promises of future bliss.

—A. Bartlett Giamatti

Two bananas and a New York Times

Forty’s coming slowly, sadly. —I suppose I was due for a bit of a break after last year’s epic run? But not too much, no, no. The next three novelettes have to go off like clockwork, plotwise, at least: maybe that’s why the words have suddenly gone chary.

So here, have a cover reveal; the image that will eventually grace this dilatory no. 40, “ – dirty white noise – ”.

In other news, I’ve started reruns: posting the early stuff on the sorts of webserial portals where the kids hang out these days, Royal Road and Reddit and Scribblehub, to start. Think of it like cheap paperback editions on spinner racks in drugstores, and I do not mean for any of that to be taken as the slightest bit derogatory. There’s honor in the stooping. —One can’t help but feel the slightest bit out of place, though: I’d been discombobulated enough by urban fantasy’s slip into paranormal romance; now the shelves are littered with things like isekai and litRPGs and ratfic and “hard magic” systems, and I’m just dizzy. Still. One has to put oneself out there.

A final bit of teasing: there may well be some new edition news forthcoming. I’ve been running some numbers. We’ll see.

But that’s all about handling what’s already been written! I need to get back to what comes next. Happy spring once more, y’all.

No. 39: Beautiful, we are (Closing)

this Copper tub – her Majesty

No. 39: Beautiful, we are (Act IV)

“You know, you know” – Exfiltration – a Failure of simile

No. 39: Beautiful, we are (Act III)

“Mine is the Hand!” – salt & iron, and the Heat – a Brutalist landmark – This is how

No. 39: Beautiful, we are (Act II)

a Folder not Terribly thick – Motorvation – lush white Shag

No. 39: Beautiful, we are (Act I)

a Forest of Tattoos – what She could reach – for all to See, and anyone to Take – Rapprocher