A recent phone conversation with the kniedzw:
Me: “When you come home and find that the gin bottle’s been opened, I just want you to know it’s all in the line of duty.”
Him, knowing I don’t drink: “What????”
Though, as I admitted, for the full period effect I really ought to spike it with turpentine or sulfuric acid.
Every so often I find myself wishing I wrote poetry (or read much of it, for that matter). Alas, I am very hit-or-miss when it comes to reader-end appreciation, and my poetical output consists of one piece that maybe someday I’ll bash into a shape where I’d be willing to put it in front of editors. So mostly I’m unconnected from that world.
But I do keep a sporadic eye on places like Goblin Fruit and Mythic Delirium — and, as it turns out, those two things are in the news together right now. Rhysling Award winner Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica P. Wick, co-editors of Goblin Fruit, will be guest-editing an issue of Mythic Delirium. Mike Allen (MD’s usual editor, and also the fellow behind Clockwork Phoenix) is running a contest to promote that guest issue. Details are behind that news link, but the short form is, you’ll be entered to win a copy of MD’s 10th anniversary issue, which includes a special poem by Neil Gaiman, complete with a hand-stamped illustration. There are not many copies of this in existence, so if you’re a Neil Gaiman fanbeing, consider clicking over to see if you can get your mitts on one.
A cover change that makes me very happy — not to mention I think the new cover’s better anyway, more colorful and more intense. I think Justine Larbalestier got an all-round win with this one.
A cover change that doesn’t make me happy at all — right, marketing, I know, anything to move the books. But seriously.
(I promise I won’t be so spammy with the book reports tomorrow.)
In other news — eighty thousand words! Astute observers will notice it’s been over two weeks since I announced the 70K mark. My two-day respite, during which I got two flashbacks written, turned out to be longer than intended, and then I missed another two days while traveling. That seems to be the pattern of this book, which is unlike any other book I’ve written: rather than my usual slow-and-steady pace, I’ve been hitting periodic droughts, then pushing rather faster than usual to make up the difference. I wrote 5K in the two days after getting back from Minneapolis, and my intent is to make 1500 every day between now and the end of the book. Mostly because that’s what I have to do in order to make my deadline while still leaving a margin for safety. And on top of that, I’m officially starting the revision before I finish the book, because this novel — again, unlike any other — is requiring me to rip out whole scenes, not just at the beginning, where I was faffing around without quite knowing what I was doing yet, but throughout. I’ve got two thousand words of utter crap in Part Four that accomplishes little more than introducing Irrith to a character Galen’s already met, which needs to be replaced with something more exciting.
(Like breaking into the newly-created British Museum to steal some artifacts. What? The place doesn’t open for business until early 1759, by which point I think my characters will be too occupied to work it into the plot, so theft it is.)
Anyway, yes, this has me a little stressed, because 1500 is kind of firmly fixed in my mind as a pace I can only keep up if I know pretty well where my plot is going, and that isn’t quite as true as I’d like it to be. I fear I might end up with more faffy scenes that will need replacing. Other people work that way and are fine, but it’s a new model for me, and not one I particularly like.
If it produces a good book, though, that’s all I really care about.
Word count: 80,003
LBR census: I’ve concluded that Midnight was the love-and-blood book, and Ashes was the blood-and-rhetoric book, which leaves this one to be the love-and-rhetoric book. But, true to the icon, I will have blood by the end.
Authorial sadism: It’s one of the laws of narrative that nothing good will happen on Friday the 13th. At least in an English faerie story. (Though apparently there’s no evidence for that superstition prior to the nineteenth century.)
(By recommendation of fjm.)
I stopped on page 145 for a very good reason: I’m saving the next hundred pages or so for when I start work on the Victorian book.
Winder’s purpose here is to approach immigration into Britain not as a topic to be organized by theme, but as a narrative to be organized chronologically. This makes him absolutely perfect for my use, because I don’t have to spend a lot of effort winnowing out the details that post-date my period; I just stop reading. He begins with the earliest settlements of the island and proceeds from there, addressing waves of immigration as they come, occasionally backtracking a little bit to talk about the pioneers of a particular group before they showed up in larger numbers, but overall taking everything in general order.
He also addresses something I must admit I sometimes fall prey to, despite my awareness of history: the tendency to view “Britishness” (or “Englishness,” and he does track the difference between those concepts) as some kind of natural, native-bred thing, only recently disturbed by foreigners in real numbers. Even though I know about the Flemings and the Huguenots; even though I know there were Africans present at least as early as the sixteenth century; even though I got annoyed at Lisa Goldstein’s The Alchemist’s Door for its assertion that you only ever heard people speaking English on the streets of Elizabethan London . . . all of that slips so easily beneath the surface of my thoughts. Sure, I come from a country peopled largely by recent immigrants and their descendants, but Britain’s different, right? Well, yes — the scale isn’t quite the same. But when Winder points out that thirteen thousand Poor Palatines (German refugees) showed up in the summer of 1709, or that British ships hired Lascars (Indians) in large numbers and then abandoned them upon making port in London, it rapidly becomes apparent that Britain has long been more cosmopolitan than you might think.
And given that one of my goals with the Onyx Court series is to gradually open it up to the presence of the larger world, it’s very useful to know which groups became significant presences at what points in the timeline. I don’t think I’m likely to have scenes terribly far afield — Berkshire and the Channel are probably as far as I’ll go — because this is meant to be a London-based story, but I can talk about the people in London. (Fortunately, that’s precisely where the vast majority of the immigrants ended up, at least for the first couple of generations.)
Since Winder’s trying to cover twenty-five thousand years in 480 pages, his pace is necessarily brisk. (Though by page 29, we’re already up to the Norman Conquest.) This is an overview, not an in-depth exploration of any group or individual. Fortunately, the “Select Bibliography” gives you nine pages of sources to follow up with. And I appreciate Winder’s attempts to put the different groups in context with one another where appropriate; the reception of the Poor Palatines, for example, was strongly shaped by the previous experience of the Huguenots. He also doesn’t stop at characterizing the immigrants by the countries they came from: he touches on the questions of religion, economic class, and other points of demography. From a survey kind of book like this, that’s about all you can ask for.
As with Kit Marlowe and MNC, Isaac Newton is the guy I had to read a lot about in order to decide I’m not going to do as much with him as I thought.
Newton, of course, is already long dead by the time this novel begins. But he, or at least his work, is vitally important to a bunch of the events that lead up to the novel, so I needed to read at least one biography of him to decide how to integrate him. The answer is, not the way I thought I would; his religious views are just waaaaaaay the hell too incompatible with the fae for there to have been any kind of deliberate collusion there. What they got from him, they did in secret.
But anyway, this book. If I was going to read only one biography, this was a good one, within the context of my specific purposes. White’s mission here, aside from writing a biography, is to integrate Newton’s alchemy with his other work; building on Dobbs’ research, he tries to establish that things like the alchemical notion of active principles or the physical appearance of the star regulus of antimony helped him to the epiphanies involved in (say) his theory of gravitation. I don’t think he entirely succeeds at this, but I mean that in more of a narrative sense; it felt like if that were true, then you should be able to spot it more pervasively in Newton’s work. On the other hand, human beings rarely obey the laws of narrative, so.
Since alchemy and the transition to proper science are a major part of what I’m looking at, though, this biography’s focus was useful to me. Its flaw on that front, I think, is that White seems incapable of fully understanding why alchemy was something smart men could spend time on; that failure of empathy is probably linked in with his purpose, when you get down to it, justifying Newton’s alchemy on the basis that it led to Newton’s real science. Aside from that, though, this book was pretty much exactly what I needed: a detailed (yet readable) chronology of the guy’s life, in the context of his personality.
Which, as it turns out, was that of “borderline megalomaniacal jackass.” Okay, that’s a little unfair, but man — I’d heard Newton was a jerk. I didn’t realize how true it was. He had a terrible time acknowledging his debts to other people’s work, or the possibility that they might have had an idea before he did, which possibly arose because of his bizarre semi-conception of himself as a Christ figure. I’m oversimplifying here, but it seems the whole “born on Christmas Day after his father’s death” thing left Newton with a very idiosyncratic notion of God and his relationship to same, linking in with his anti-trinitarianism and so on. Anyway, if you want to know more about that, read The Religion of Isaac Newton by Frank E. Manuel, which I read before I picked up this book (probably a bad idea).
So. Readable biography of Newton plus some discussion of alchemy. If that’s useful to you, have at it.
I noticed recently that I’ve been very remiss in talking about the books going into the stew that is my next novel. I’m going to try to remedy that with some posts over the next couple of days or weeks, though it’s highly unlikely I’ll go through everything I’ve been reading.
***
Dr. Johnson’s Women could so easily have been The Dr. Johnson Show Featuring Dr. Johnson and Some Ladies. Thank God this is not that book. The author uses him as her starting point because he was good friends with a great many intellectual women, and occupied a position near the center of that social network, but he is important to this discussion only inasmuch as he was important to the women that are its real focus. Johnson was one of a number of men who served as advocates, patrons, and fans of women’s writing in the eighteenth century; his assistance, however, as well as that of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and other men, is never presented as a gift bestowed by a benevolent (and patriarchal) god. Instead it’s a commodity sought out, managed, and occasionally rejected by women navigating their way through the literary and intellectual sphere.
I am floored by this book. My knowledge of women English writers prior to Jane Austen consisted of maybe half a dozen names, if that, none of them seeming terribly important to literary history. I had no idea of the existence of, say, Elizabeth Carter, who spoke nine languages (including Arabic) and whose translation of Epictetus remained the standard for more than a century. Or Charlotte Lennox, who wrote hugely popular novels that grappled actively with the paradoxes of contemporary female life, and also a scathing feminist critique of Shakespeare. Or Catherine Macaulay, who produced an epic eight-volume history of England. Or Hester Thrale, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Rowe, Catherine Talbot, or anybody mentioned in the second half of this book, which I haven’t read yet. I only barely knew of Elizabeth Vesey and Elizabeth Montagu, because I knew the Blue Stocking Society was operational during the period of my novel, and I certainly didn’t realize how far the trend went. These women corresponded, networked, encouraged each other in their efforts, argued bitterly over their divergent opinions, and had a whole world that never seems to appear in the histories I’ve read.
This was the book that sparked my previous post, because I can’t help but contrast this period with the Victorian Age. “Bluestocking” wasn’t a pejorative yet; Johnson was not the only man to think an educated woman was a source of pride for her nation and family. Clarke presents this as the happy consequence of the mind/body dichotomy as it was presented at the time: women’s bodies might be weaker and more fallible than those of men, but the mind was sexless, and it could be disciplined to control the body. The argument that women’s minds are also inherently weaker and more fallible doesn’t seem to have the force that it acquired later. A learned woman may not be a common thing, but she isn’t a freak of nature, either, on par with a dancing bear or a parrot that speaks French.
Which makes this sound like a rosy paradise, free of trouble. It wasn’t. Clarke outlines a triad of vanity-coquetry-power that no woman could entirely escape; even those who, like Elizabeth Carter, repudiated it as much as possible didn’t negate its existence. The publicity attendent upon life as a writer or scholar had to be accompanied, in the female instance, by a lot of self-deprecation and disavowals of one’s own importance. Egotism was most definitely not okay, and it was easy to lose one’s reputation while gaining fame. But Elizabeth Carter was supporting herself as a professional writer at the Gentleman’s Magazine when Johnson was a wet-behind-the-ears newcomer to London, and other women made a living through either patronage or the public sphere, and were respected for it.
I had no idea that was going on in the eighteenth century.
The political dimension seems to have been mostly lacking; Carter apparently disapproved of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Still, it’s a remarkable bit of feminism I was almost completely unaware of. And the book is quite readable, so if you’re interested in literature, feminism, or the ideals of the Enlightenment, definitely take a look at this one.
One pattern of thinking is that everything was better back in the Good Old Days — a point in time that continually shifts according to the perspective of the observer. For much of Europe’s history, it was the Garden of Eden; a modern American might put it in the 1950s. Whenever it was, it was better that now, and we are continually falling from that idyll.
Another pattern is the gospel of progress. We’re getting better all the time. We’re continually climbing from the pit of our unenlightened past, improving on what went before, heading for the stars. Tomorrow will be brighter than yesterday was, and the day after that, brighter still.
The former is more or less a conservative paradigm; the latter is a liberal one (or perhaps it would be better to say progressive.) Taken in their pure form, both are lies.
Because human history isn’t linear. It squiggles and loops and goes in three directions at once. There was a fluorescence of female intellectualism in eighteenth-century London that withered in the nineteenth, but less than we have now; New Kingdom Egyptian metallurgy and sculpture made medieval Europeans look like enthusiastic but not terribly bright seven-year-olds, but their realism doesn’t match Michaelangelo; Minoans had better plumbing than Renaissance Italy, but no hot showers. And the problem is that buying into either lie blinds you to important things: the injustices hidden beneath the happy mask of Leave It to Beaver, the risk of those injustices coming back again in the future. Or new ones. It isn’t just two steps forward, one step back — maybe five steps back and three to the side and then do a backflip and end up facing a different direction entirely.
And yet it’s so tempting. It’s a lot easier to hold onto the notion of a line than an n-dimensional Gordian Knot with multiple strings whose number changes every time you look at them.
I know that I tend toward the liberal pattern of thinking. There’s a lot of truth in it, especially if you pick a certain set of strings and decide those are how you’re going to measure progress. Of course, there’s truth in the conservative pattern, too — especially if you pick different strings. But the more I read of history, the more it all dissolves. (Of course this post is brought to you by my research. I figure the eighteenth-century intellectuals gave it away, if nothing else.) History is really damn complicated, and it really is going in all directions at once. And no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to keep all its twists in my head, never be able to grasp the whole of it.
But I can think about which strings I’m picking, and which ones the person I’m reading has picked. And I can try not to make my own patterns too neat.
1) How different is modern German from the language circa the eighteenth century? It looks to me like they were speaking New High German, which is apparently more or less the same as Standard German nowadays, but my own facility with the language ends with one proverb and one alarming speech about having a grenade (don’t ask), so it’s all Greek German to me. My guess would be that it differs in much the same way as eighteenth-century English does, i.e. more in phrasing and word choice than anything else, but I’d like to know for sure.
2) Once I’ve sorted that out, I will need someone to do small amounts (i.e. a few sentences) of translation work for me, either into the modern language or into New High German, if that’s noticeably different. If you have fluency with either of these, or know someone who does, please drop me a line.
(You would be justified in asking why I should contemplate translating into an archaic dialect of German when I haven’t been writing these novels in equally period English. The answer is, because I can. Assuming I can find a translator, of course.)
Approximately twenty-two hours transit time for six waking hours on the ground in Minneapolis. >_<
But I got to see family, which was nice.
I’m going to be mostly away from the computer for the next three days, so if you have anything urgent, uh, contact me telepathically or something.
My maternal grandfather passed away today, the last of my grandparents to go. He was 91.
Closing comments, not because I’m too upset to deal with them — I’m not; I’m doing okay — but because they just don’t seem right. That social pattern is wrong for this situation, at least in my head.
Adding in some new titles last night, it occurred to me that oh yeah, I have something on my website that could be useful as a racial-diversity resource. Of course, I’ve read only a fraction of the books listed there, so I can’t say they’re all worth reading; some of them may in fact be head-‘splodingly bad. But if you’ve got a hankering for fantasy novels that acknowledge the existence of a world outside of the usual feudal-Celtic-Norse triangle, well, there’s a starting point.
(A perenially incomplete one. E-mail me, or comment here, with others I should include: author, title, and which category they belong in.)
I have a couple of different stories in the pipeline that take place in semi-Chinese societies — specifically, societies where I’ve decided to base the language on Mandarin, at least as far as the phonology of names is concerned. (i.e. I’m neither using actual Mandarin in the story, nor conlanging beyond deciding what to call characters and towns.) IANASpeaker of Mandarin, so my question for those who are is: how likely are you to be distracted by possible meanings for the names I’ve made up?
To put it differently: if I invent German-looking names for a story, I can (and do) check in a dictionary to make sure I haven’t named a character “Elbow” or something like that. And it’s relatively easy to avoid actual words, just by changing a few letters. With the semi-Japanese names in the doppelganger books, on the other hand, I kind of let it go, because any random pair of mora I threw together were likely to mean something in Japanese — tsue is a walking stick, for example, and katsu, depending on the kanji, means “to win,” “thirst,” “yet,” “living,” “cutlet” (when written in katakana) and something you yell at Zen practitioners when they screw up. (Or so my favorite dictionary tells me.) So the Cousin names and honorifics in particular were likely to mean something whether I wanted them to or not.
Mandarin’s more opaque to me, since I don’t speak more than about five words of it, and those very badly. I’m familiar with the function of tones in it, so I suspect it’s likely any random syllable I stick in a name is likely to mean one or more things, possibly incongruous ones. Hence asking the fluent speakers: how badly would that distract you, in a story written in English? Is it something you could just sort of breeze by (provided I don’t accidentally hit upon something flagrantly obscene), or is your brain likely to play the homophone game, coming up with variant translations of the character’s name?
My parents linked me to this cover of Toto’s “Africa” by a Slovenian a capella group (whose great performance is especially marked by its simulated thunderstorm at the beginning), and it made me realize:
I really like good a capella.
And, in parallel with my taste in instrumental music, what I especially like is neither the melody nor the beat, but the stuff in the middle: the harmony, the changing chords in the background, all that good substance. I never really paid attention to that layer of “Africa” before now, but something about hearing it rendered in human voices made it really appeal to me. So help me, o internets: can you recommend good a capella albums that do a lot of that kind of thing? (Not covers of Toto songs; strong and interesting harmonies.)
Just saw the list of recipients for the 2009 Medal of Freedom.
One of the first thoughts I had upon reading it was, somewhere in America, there are people frothing at the mouth because only three out of sixteen are straight white men. (And of those three, one is physically disabled and one is a pillar of liberal American politics. I don’t imagine the people frothing think much of either of those guys.)
[Edited to add: I should have made it clearer in the first instance that the people I imagine are frothing at the mouth are not the entirety of conservatives. I’m talking about the birthers, the Sarah Palin worshippers, the Rush Limbaugh goons and the Freepers, and the rest of the wingnutty base. I honestly think it’s a shame that they have become the vocal face of American conservatism, because they’re doing their best to turn it into the party of racist reactionaries, and that’s an opposition I simply cannot respect.]
Six are women. Three are black. Two are Hispanic. One is Native American. One is Bangladeshi. One is Jewish (at least one — I didn’t check religion). Two are open gays. There are foreigners and the aforementioned disabled guy. Out of sixteen, only Jack Kemp belongs to the core Republican demographic.
And you know what? It warms the cockles of my heart to know that conservative bloggers are probably already bitching about this “affirmative action” list. I want them to be unhappy, because the list they would be happy with is not a list I want to see.
(Not actually true. What I really want is for even conservative bloggers to celebrate diversity. That would be far better than the ongoing fight with people who think the only “real Americans” are the straight white Christian ones. But until we have that, I’ll enjoy this.)
I’d be curious to know how the ratios compare to Bush’s picks, but honestly, I’m too lazy to sort through demographic info for eighty-one more people. At a glance, it looks more white male to me — but it’s hard to tell from just names, and I’m inclined to assume that interpretation anyway, so my glance is admittedly not a good basis for evaluation. Even if Obama’s choices over the next few years aren’t more diverse, people are going to view them that way, because the guy making those choices is black, and so of course he’s probably rewarding all kinds of undeserving minorities while ignoring the achievements of the Great White Male. Right?
<headdesk>
I’d rather focus on the good. Like, now I’m really interested to read more about and by Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow. He sounds awesome — and I’m not just saying that because he’s an anthropologist. <g>
#19 – convincing myself that taking a few days off to regroup and rethink will make achieving my deadline easier, not harder.
Not sure I believe that one. But I’m trying to, right now.
I’ve been so busy this week that it’s taken me days to get this link posted, but: a fellow named Marshal Zeringue contacted me a little while ago with what amounts to a one-question interview question, which was, If they make my book into a film, here’s who I’d like to play the lead role(s).
I cheated a bit and answered for both Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie. Head on over there to see who I have faces for in my head (and who I don’t).
(As far as the comet book’s concerned — I don’t have a good visual reference for either Galen or Irrith yet. I should try to fix that.)
It’s International Blog Against Racism Week again, and boy do we have things to choose from — at levels of fame ranging all the way from Sonia Sotomayor and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. down to things like the U.S. cover of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. (And quieter things than that, no doubt, from one corner of the world to the other, in every city and town.)
Riffling through my brain to see what I might have something to say about, I landed on, of all things, movies. Specifically, the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Most of my Avatar news has come via anima_mecanique, who has been posting off and on about the head-desk moves of the filmmakers in whitewashing their source. Avatar, if you don’t know, is an animated series set in a fantasy world that I tend to think of as western Pacific Rim in inspiration: the various elementally-themed societies are mostly different varieties of Asian in basis, with the Water Tribes blurring over into northern Pacific natives/Inuit. In other words, not Eurofantasy. But along come the filmmakers with their live-action movie, and suddenly not only is the whole cast white, they’re committing cultural blunders right left and center, like telling people to show up for casting calls in their “traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you’re Korean, wear a kimono.” <headsplode> Well, they backpedaled a little to cast some brown people, like that nice boy from Slumdog Millionaire since everybody likes him, right . . . only last I heard, that nice boy and all the other non-white actors are playing members of the Fire Nation. Who are, y’know, the enemy.
Oh yeah. That fixes everything.
The problem is, I’m not sure what I can do to protest this problem other than make a blog post. Boycotting the movie? Not effective. My one lost ticket sale won’t make anybody take notice, and if a lot of people boycotted it, enough that they did notice, Hollywood wouldn’t say “oh, I guess we should cast Asian actors next time.” They’d say, “oh, I guess we should go back to Eurofantasy.” I can buy the animated series, and I’m going to (I’ve seen the first season and loved it), but after that, it seems like all I can do is talk.
Which isn’t totally ineffective. After all, it was fan outcry that got them to cast Dev Patel (even though he would be way better as Sokka than Zuko). And now that I look on the IMDb, it seems they’ve got a Korean actor for one of the Earthbenders, so hey, there’s one who isn’t on the wrong side of the war. At least some of that has happened because people talked about the problem.
I just wish I knew how to do more. I’ll probably end up going to see the movie, because I suspect that I’ll achieve more by supporting baby steps toward non-Eurofantasy than holding out for perfection, but it’ll annoy me. Especially since it’s pretty obvious that the filmmakers don’t even really get where they went wrong.
Over on FFF, I’ve done a follow-up post to my poll on side stories, examining patterns in the data (both poll answers and comments). If you’re curious how it all fell out, take a look over there.
