Published August 31, 2009 | 
Warning: Spoilers for Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys and James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia.
I should probably not read Matt Ruff while on vacation. I found Bad Monkeys extremely disturbing. The main character has a violent background and some things to feel seriously guilty about. She leads a purposeless, drug-ridden life until recruited for a secret organization that fights evil. From then on the book is a hall of mirrors, and the apparent meaning of all the events is constantly shifting.
One reason the spygame plot (evil Troop versus fighting-evil Organization) bothered me is that good and evil don’t work that way. It’s not a question of which side you join. Some of the greatest evils of the past century were done by people who thought they were on the side of virtue, fighting evil.
What matters is what you do. How you do it. And although Ruff explicitly makes the point that otherwise good people can do evil, he doesn’t allow moral complexity its full scope.
James Ellroy‘s Black Dahlia is a compelling mess of a book. I never got the sense that the author was in control of his material — in fact, it was a runaway train. It also has some weird commonalities with Bad Monkeys. In each, a main character is carrying a huge burden of guilt for the disappearance of a sibling. Both books are meditations on good and evil. Also, they both have so many false endings that you can’t keep track of them.
Published June 24, 2009 | To the writers of fantastic fiction who broadened my childhood world.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, whose The Little Lame Prince gave me a traveling cloak and a world to see.
Rod Serling, whose brilliant Twilight Zone scripts were published as anthologies, and who promised me a chance at least of justice.
C. S. Lewis, who, on my seventh birthday, took me out of the silent planet and to Perelandra. I was 14 before I got the third book in the trilogy, which was just as well.
Edgar Allen Poe, who showed me I wasn’t the only one with a demon in my view.
Bram Stoker, whose Dracula is still a masterpiece of form as well as terror, and whose “The Judge’s House” is still terrifying.
The great Victorian and Edwardian supernatural writers: E. Nesbit, M.R. James, Henry James, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oliver Onions, F. Marion Crawford, Violet Hunt, E. F. Benson, Cynthia Asquith, Saki, William Hope Hodgson, Margaret Irwin, and so many more.
The editors–particularly Alfred Hitchcock, Seon Manley, and Gogo Lewis–who brought those stories from the dusty vaults of long-forgotten magazines into modern print.
Barbara Michaels, whose Ammie, Come Home said, “Father hurt” in a voice I needed to hear. It is one of the best modern ghost stories.
The great classic SF writers–Theodore Sturgeon foremost among them–who showed up in the early anthologies I found. (Groff Conklin’s anthologies were great.) And Harlan Ellison, whose Again, Dangerous Visions introduced me to Ursula K. Le Guin and my all-time great love, Joanna Russ. Le Guin and Russ are the Empress and High Priestess of SF/F, the two great pillars of New Wave SF.
All the people who carelessly left books where I could find them.
Published April 23, 2009 | Sonnet 65
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.–William Shakespeare
You still shine bright, 445 years after your birth.
Published April 22, 2009 | Poetry Month is ending soon, but (in addition to today’s poem), I’ll leave you with recommendations for two fine novels about poets, both by John Crowley.
Christa (Kit) Malone, college student and aspiring poet, studies with and helps to translate the work of Innokenti Isayevitch Falin, a distinguished Russian poet in exile. It’s 1962, and the Cold War is at its height. As teacher and student learn from each other, the political tensions grow toward the Cuban missile crisis.
OK, there is no way to summarize this novel. It is as tough and delicate as porcelain, shapely as a peach. Kit is both flawed and talented, and she matures as she copes with loss, grief, guilt, learning, betrayal, and love. Falin speaks with the unmistakable accents of the Slav living in translation, and from a wholly believable history.
The author writes with a feather-light, effective touch of the issues that were about to blow the country apart. He explores the problems of language — context, translation, even finding the way to speak — while subtly revealing tragedies and great joy. The story accumulates feeling as it goes along, and its narrative tensions grow more and more taut.
Occasionally one encounters a perfect poem. Much less often does one find a perfect work of fiction, whose form, phrasing, and content could not be improved.* This, to my mind, is one of the few.
Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, John Crowley
Lord Byron never wrote a novel. If he had, he would have written the story at the center of this one: a tale of passion, hereditary curses, courageous women, star-crossed men.
Around his manuscript are other stories: about the modern researchers seeking to decode it; about Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter; about a Byronic film director.
Crowley never makes the common mistake of confusing Byron the man with the characters in his poetry. His Lordship’s manners were urbane, Augustan, generous, idealistic, and warm, and all that is shown in the Byron manuscript. Having extensively researched Byron, I was able to spot dozens of charming allusions to his life and work. And the voice is Byron’s own, the same voice in his letters, journals, and collected conversations. It’s an extraordinary performance.
Byron himself is so vivid none of the other characters can quite live up to him, but the book is well worth reading anyway. I came away from it feeling glad that someone could speak in Byron’s human, humane voice. Those qualities matter.
*Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn is one such book. Rachel McKenzie’s The Wine of Astonishment is another. Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon.
Published April 22, 2009 | So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have a rest.Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.–George Gordon, Lord Byron
Published April 21, 2009 | You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:…
This poem was written byReginald Shepherd, wrote the article on Adorno and Celan that I mentioned yesterday. His blog is still up, the site maintained by his partner (for whom this poem was written), although Shepherd himself died last year from cancer.
Published April 20, 2009 | This poem by a Holocaust survivor is posted as my response to Hitler’s birthday. Celan’s Death Fugue may be the single best poem to come out of World War II. Do go read it.
Theodor Adorno raised the question of whether it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.
To me, poetry is, has always been, one of the few possible answers to the death camps, since long before I read Adorno or Celan. When I was a small child, I saw those pictures. (You know the ones.) They were in books on my father’s shelves. Books — poetry, stories, nonfiction, any kind of book — were the only defense I had against those images, against the searing things he did to me and animals, against the things he made me do, and which even then I sensed were a private expression of the same impulse that built the smokestacks.
Books are defiance even in defeat. They are victory even in death. Long after their authors are dead, they go on tapping out the message of freedom to prisoners caged in tyrannies of iron or clapboard. They can speak the truth when all utterance is forbidden and only lies are acknowledged.
Adorno’s oft-quoted dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz is a quotation from a larger, far more complex and shifting attitude. (Good article on it by the late poet Reginald Shepherd.)
Adorno also wrote:
Literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism…. It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.
Published April 19, 2009 | For April 18, anniversary of the great San Francisco Quake, we have one of the great poems of geology:
Lay of the Trilobite
A mountain’s giddy height I sought,
Because I could not find
Sufficient vague and mighty thought
To fill my mighty mind;
And as I wandered ill at ease,
There chanced upon my sight
A native of Silurian seas,
An ancient Trilobite.So calm, so peacefully he lay,
I watched him even with tears:
I thought of Monads far away
In the forgotten years.
How wonderful it seemed and right,
The providential plan,
That he should be a Trilobite,
And I should be a Man!And then, quite natural and free
Out of his rocky bed,
That Trilobite he spoke to me
And this is what he said:
‘I don’t know how the thing was done,
Although I cannot doubt it;
But Huxley – he if anyone
Can tell you all about it;‘How all your faiths are ghosts and dreams,
How in the silent sea
Your ancestors were Monotremes -
Whatever these may be;
How you evolved your shining lights
Of wisdom and perfection
From Jelly-Fish and Trilobites
By Natural Selection.‘You’ve Kant to make your brains go round,
Hegel you have to clear them,
You’ve Mr Browning to confound,
And Mr Punch to cheer them!
The native of an alien land
You call a man and brother,
And greet with hymn-book in one hand
And pistol in the other!‘You’ve Politics to make you fight
As if you were possessed:
You’ve cannon and you’ve dynamite
To give the nations rest:
The side that makes the loudest din
Is surest to be right,
And oh, a pretty fix you’re in!’
Remarked the Trilobite.‘But gentle, stupid, free from woe
I lived among my nation,
I didn’t care – I didn’t know
That I was a Crustacean.*
I didn’t grumble, didn’t steal,
I never took to rhyme:
Salt water was my frugal meal,
And carbonate of lime.’Reluctantly I turned away,
No other word he said;
An ancient Trilobite, he lay
Within his rocky bed.
I did not answer him, for that
Would have annoyed my pride:
I merely bowed, and raised my hat,
But in my heart I cried: -‘I wish our brains were not so good,
I wish our skulls were thicker,
I wish that Evolution could
Have stopped a little quicker;
For oh, it was a happy plight,
Of liberty and ease,
To be a simple Trilobite
In the Silurian seas!’–May Kendall
* He was not a crustacean. He has since discovered that he was an Arachnid, or something similar. But he says it does not matter. He says they told him wrong once, and they may again.
I have no idea if May Kendall is a relative; she was an English poet and reformer, and my ancestors of that ilk came to this side of the Atlantic four hundred years ago.
Also, go buy a copy of Earthquake Weather, a stunning collection of poems by Janice Gould.
For April 19, one of the great poems of American history
Concord Hymn
Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument,
April 19th, 1836By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Posted in Arts, geology, history, Literature, Natural History | 
Emerson, May Kendall, poem | 
2 CommentsPublished April 10, 2009 | Emily Dickinson can wait a day. Today Mike Ford would have turned 52.
A poem from the comments at Making Light:
Goetia Naturalis
from “Wolfgang Puck of Pook’s Hill”No one sees us when they dine;
Loudly the forkfuls go past,
A bird and a bottle of wine,
And a tablet goes fizz in a glass.
No one knows that we are there,
They munch without question or pause;
We crouch on the haricots verts,
And lurk like a thief in the sauce.We are the condiments, we,
To julienne, chiffonade, grate;
But set us aside and you’ll see
The void that we leave on your plate.
We sit on the rim of the dish,
The spices nobody can name;
We stand by the meat and the fish,
Some bloke in a toque gets the fame.Eggs folded into a flan,
Sausages steaming in brew;
Chicken stretched on the divan,
How they must love what they do!
Yes — and we seasonings too,
We are as tasty as they;
We are the salt in the stew,
Watch as the chanterelles play.You may think we are not strong;
We know habaneros that are;
Some Worcestershire helps things along,
You know what wasabi is for.
Still we shall sit on the side,
Court-bouillon and bouquet garni;
Your tastebuds will not be denied;
No quarter and no MSG!
A toast to you, and may you feast forever at the right hand of Will Shakespeare.