Announcing: HOPE-IN-THE-MIST

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It's official! Hope-in-the-Mist, the first book-length study ever of the great fantasist Hope Mirrlees will be published on July 10th at Readercon in Burlington, Massachussetts.

Bookman extraordinaire Henry Wessells will be publishing the book under his Temporary Culture imprint. At 96 pages, it'll be a slim but (knowing Henry) beautiful book. With an introduction by Neil Gaiman and a frontispiece by Charles Vess. Why those two in particular? Simply because Neil's Stardust was in part inspired by Mirrlee's great fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist, and because Vess did the illustration for the first published version.

Intelligent people can argue for hours about which version (illustrated, prose-only, or movie) is best. But as for me, I saw the Vess version first and imprinted on it like a little baby duck. So I, quite appropriately, am extremely happy.

Details and ordering info can be found here.


How it came about . . .

Everybody has a hobby. Mine is writing. After a long day of courting literary immortality, I like to relax by writing non-fiction. Several years ago, I noticed that the only thing anybody appeared to know about Hope Mirrlees was that Virginia Woolf had called her "“her own heroine — capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed." So I went to Woolf's Diaries and Letters and copied down everything that Woolf had written about her.

I followed those leads to other leads in a treasure-hunt that went on for years. I found myself in contact with academics, critics, and relatives of the author all over the world. With his permission, I published a long letter from Mirrlees's nephew Count (now Prince) Robin Ian Evelyn Milne Stuart de la Lanne-Mirrlees in the New York Review of Science Fiction. The late Julia Briggs as a courtesy sent me a draft of her article on Mirrlees for the Dictionary of National Biography -- and I sent her back corrections. I received a note from T. S. Eliot's widow Valerie, granting me permission to quote from one of her husband's unpublished letters.

It was a great intellectual adventure for me.

And now it's over. Since Julia Briggs died, I've been so far as I can determine the world's foremost authority on Hope Mirrlees. However, I put everything I know about her into the book and so whoever reads Hope-in-the-Mist and then discovers one more fact about the lady (what she said at that tea with Yeats, what Picasso thought of her, the title of her never-written fourth novel) will instantly inherit the distinction. With, I might add, my blessing.

So who was Hope Mirrlees and why should you care . . . ?

This post is getting a little long. So I'll tell you tomorrow.

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Rainbow Over the Painted Bride

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Last Friday, Marianne and I went out on the monthly art crawl and, as we were parking our car, saw a rare double rainbow, landing smack-dab on the Painted Bride Art Center.

The Painted Bride is a pretty rarefied organization, artwise. Not sure how they'd feel about this shot.

The man who covered the Center with mirrors and tiles, however, Philadelphia's own legendary artist Isaiah Zagar, would have to approve.

Oh, and stay tuned . . .

I've got an announcement to make. Probably Monday.

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Chip!

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I was quoted in a long article about Samuel R. Delany that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday.  And my friends have been calling me up ever since and asking to speak to Michael Swankier.  Anything that gives my pals a chance to razz me happily is a good thing.

You can read the article here.  I believe my name may have been corrected.

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In Which I Finally Become Too Cool to Live

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Last night, Marianne and I drove up to NYC to catch Philip Glass and Patti Smith performing at the City Winery. The evening was titled "Footnote to Howl, The Poet Speaks, Homage to Allen Ginsberg," and was held twelve years to the day after the poet's death. Which was an event Smith and I believe Glass too were present to witness. So Glass played piano (is anybody surprised that he's a brilliant pianist?) while Smith read Ginsberg's poetry. Plus some of Smith's poetry and songs and a couple of Glass's etudes, and a fair amount of reminiscing about "Allen's passing."

Patti Smith really did manage to catch that incantatory-prophetic thing that Ginsberg's best poetry embodies. I thought her reading of "Wichita Kansas Vortex" was the highlight of the evening, but Marianne thought it might have been a poem about Manhattan which was (I blush to admit) new to us both.

So, having been there, I am now officially too cool to live.

Allen Ginsberg breezed through Williamsburg back when I was in college, as he did from time to time, on the day when a total eclipse of the sun was visible from nearby Norfolk. A couple of my friends saw him in a diner and went to say hello.

"Did you see the eclipse?" he asked them. "Oh, it was mad! Mad!"

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City Root Rootless

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Yesterday, Marianne and I jaunted down to 12th and Callowhill Streets to see Keiko Miyamori's sculpture City Root.

The blood-red cube of resin contains a 4,000-pound root mass of an oak tree pulled from the ground at an urban excavation at 11th and Girard Streets, here in Philadelphia. Bricks, metal, and glass caught in the roots are visible, as are strings of bubbles and fracture lines within the resin itself.

City Root is gorgeous, monumental, and essentially abandoned. It's sitting behind a chain-link fence on the grounds of Shelly
Electric Company , because cracks developed during the long curing process, rendering it unsuitable for outdoor display, and so the park which commissioned it refused to accept ownership.

The whole sad story can be found here.

What a beautiful piece of art it is, though! If you happen to have a business with a huge lobby or a mansion that needs something to astonish and intimidate your friends . . . well, here's your chance.


And in the mail today . . .
. . . came an advance copy of The Best of Michael Moorcock, edited by John Davey with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, from Tachyon Publications. Now, the idea that you can squeeze all the best of Moorcock's short fiction into a single handsome trade paperback is laughable. Nevertheless, it is one heck of a good-looking book, crammed with absolutely superior fiction.

The bottom line? If simply knowing this book is about to come into existence doesn't make you want a copy of your own, then I have no respect for you. Intellectually, that is.

I got an ARC because Jacob Weisman, the publisher, is a buddy. The rest of the world, alas, will have to wait until May 15.

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This Glitterati Life (Part 10,343)

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Tuesday, Marianne and I went to see Kyle Cassidy's play, Raven's Gate, which was given a reading at The Painted Bride. It was directed by Carla Emanuele, and performed by Trillian Stars and an actor whose name (this kind of low-budget event doesn't have programs or anything) I managed to miss. Plus Get the Woolite written by Mona R. Washington and directed by Anthony P.Kamani. Quite a splendid evening, with surprisingly lively question-and-answer sessions after each play.

Then last night we went out on Toad Patrol again. It's a glamorous, glamous life!


And I cannot resist sharing this with you . . .





It's called Matrix Ping-Pong, and what a terrific example of the power of the imagination it is!

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A Pleasant Thing to Find in One's Mailbox

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My Alex Award has arrived!

The Alex Awards, you'll remember, are given out by the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association every year to ten adult novels that young adults can read with pleasure. Nick Hornby has dubbed them the "not boring" awards, because by definition any novel a teenager can be bothered to read is not a snooze.

You can see why I'm so pleased with this. And being in the company of nine other winners very pleasantly points out the fact, often obscured by awards, that this is not a competition. We're all of us engaged in a common attempt to write books that will endure.

The ALA gives out a slew of YA awards yearly, the very biggest of which is the Newbery Medal. Which was won this year by Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. I just now checked its online listing at Amazon and saw that it's rated as being for ages 9-12. I hate those upper-age caps and their implicit aren't-you-too-old-to-be-reading-this?-ishness.

So I guess that it's the twelve-year-old in me that thought it was a fine piece of work.

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