Scene from the Twenenenty-Firiririrst CENNNNNtury!

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Here's how you know you're not in the Twentieth Century anymore.  You're walking along the river or surfing the Intertubes when two young men go hurrying past, carrying a glowing pod.  What's going on? you ask.

And the answer . . . 

Nothing's going on.  Nothing at all.  Keep on moving.  Nothing to see here.

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Gamblers of the World, Unite!

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I'm not here today.  I'm . . . all together, children . . . on the road again!  Never mind that.  While I'm gallavanting about (our next door neighbor Pat refers to Marianne and me as "the gallavanters"), I thought I'd share with you a photo of me from my old days as a commissar in the CCCP.

Speaking of which, have you bought your tickets for the KGB raffle yet?  The KGB Bar is a Classic Commie themed bar in the Village in NYC (the walls are painted red!) and Fantastic Fiction at KGB is a really quite splendid reading series which deserves your support.  Once a year, they raise money by selling one-dollar chances for a wide variety of prizes.  The best thing about which is that the tickets are prize-specific.  So if what you want is a tuckerization by Lucius Shepard, you needn't worry that you'll end up stuck with a tour of Tor Books by editor Liz Gorinsky.

Actually, that last one sounds pretty cool.  Tor Books is located in the historic Flatiron Building and the offices are a hive of activity as a great many inherently interesting people create books.  Plus, they've got a tremendous set of shelves of all their new releases (and Tor prints a significant percentage of all the books you most particularly want) which people they like are allowed to pick and choose from.

I wouldn't mention that last except that Liz specifies that he winner gets to leave with "as many books as you can carry."  So, on reflection, even if what you're after is the Zoe Van Gelder art on back of a Ray Vukcevich Manuscript, you should drop a buck on the tour. 

Because -- trust me on this one -- you don't own enough books.

You can find information about the raffle here and this year's remarkable list of prizes here.


Above:  In truth, the photo was taken by the astonishing Kyle Cassidy on his cell phone.  Kyle takes better pix on his cell phone than I could with a RolleiFlex and years of courses.  No idea how he does that.  None whatsoever. 

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Sean

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Look what Marianne found among our family photos the other day!  It's a fumetto that Sean and Marianne and I made when the young man was considerably younger than he is now.  We'd completely forgotten doing this, but it was typical of a lot of fun stuff we used to do together.

Enjoy.

With Apologies to Charles Addams

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LIGHT DRIFT! Tonight Only!

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There I am looking cool and mysterious.  Last night, Marianne and I went down to the Schuylkill River, between Chestnut and Market to look at Light Drift, a three-night art installation.  Tonight is the last day, so if you want to see it, you'll have to hurry.

Here's the official explanation, taken from a post card somebody was kind enough to hand me:

LIGHT DRIFT is an interactive lighting installation which creates a field of reponsive and occupiable lighting elements along the edge of the Schuylkill River.

The lighting elements are shaped like orbs and are equipped with electronics that allow them to repond to the public and communicate with each other.  The orbs on land use sensors to detect the presence of a erson and relay a radio signal to the corresponding orbs in the water, allowing visitors to create and choreograph patterns of light in the river.  As viewers engage the orbs, the grid of lights in the water becomes an index of thea ctivities on land.  Light Drift brings people together through their interaction with the orbs, creating new connections along the river's edge.

The work is credited to My Studio / Howeler + Yoon Architecture.  You can find their website here, but you'll have to browse through a lot of different projects to find Light Drift.   And you can find an article about the installation here.

It's free, it goes from dusk to dawn, and come morning they'll take it all away.

When Marianne and I were there last night, the adults stared into the river, trying to gigure out the patterns of shifting light.  The children ran from chair-pod to chair-pod.  Little kids, it turns out, love to sit on things that light up.


Below:  Some more photos of the event, taken by M. C. Porter.  The last shot is of a backup pod being carried to a waiting kayak to replace a light which (as you may notice in the first photo) burned out.

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Another Good Mail Day

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Marianne and I spent the day with our friends Rosie and Demian Phillips, visiting various art museums and having a good time.  So today's post goes up a little late in the day.

But look what came in the mail!  Being a fantasist doesn't pay very well, but you get to meet some very cool people.


Above:  The packaged photographed in our garden.  Below:  Its contents.

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Revisiting Poughkeepsie, Part 2: The Language of the Night

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I dug out my tattered old paperback of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night and re-read "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" to see how it was holding up, thirty-seven years after it was first published.

Why would I even wonder?  Well, for one thing the central conceit, preserved in the title, that Poughkeepsie stands in for everything that fantasy is not has been, ironically enough, disproved.  In 1988, Rachel Pollack published the absolutely wonderous Unquenchable Fire, a fantasy novel set in the aftermath of an irruption of the shamanistic universe into our world.  In it, when the man comes to read the electric meter, he also builds a shrine and sacrifices a mouse to keep the power flowing.  The cheerleaders in a homecoming parade march topless and smeared with blood -- terrifying maenads normalized into everyday American life.  It's an exhilarating work and no question about it core fantasy.


The novel is set in Poughkeepsie.  As is Pollack's later Temporary Agency, which I also strongly commend to your attention.


All this proves, of course, is that fantasy has grown and changed since the essay first appeared in 1973.  But I approached the essay prepared for anything.

The first thing I noticed was how much fantasy has changed in the last third of a century and how little fantasy was available then.  Le Guin acknowledged the tremendous debt that fantasy readers owed to Lin Carter for his Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, without which (at that time) you could not have claimed to have a serious fantasy genre at all.  And she consistently referred to her subject as "heroic fantasy," which was at the time the single best term available.

If you ever doubt the power that a name has to shape our thinking, consider only the following sentence, central to Le Guin's discussion of the language of fantasy:

Nobody who says "I told you so" has ever been, or ever will be a hero.

Ged, in the Earthsea books, started out as a hero-to-be.  But over the sequence of books, he grew out of it.  As Le Guin's art matured, she more and more came to distrust the very idea of heroes.  Yet, early on, she was thinking in those terms simply because the language told her to.

This is not a criticism, however.  Le Guin's essay does open a window into an earlier literary era, when fantasy readers had to scrabble through cardboard boxes stuck behind the "Occult" and "Children's" sections of used book stores, to feed their hunger.  But it invalidates none of what she was talking about.

What she was talking about was language and the ways in which it can be properly used to create a fantasy world that lives and breathes upon the page.  On which subject her language soared!  To a young aspiring fantasist, it was a clarion call to battle.

(And in that metaphor, we see again how a simple name, "heroic fantasy," can shape our responses.)

Accompanying her discussion of the ways language can be used in a fantasy are examples of ways it should not:  Archaicisms, false feeling, fake grammar, journalistic prose . . .  To many, many gonnabe writers, these few brief pages were worth any number of writing workshops.

To answer the question I first asked yesterday:  Yes, the essay holds up extremely well.  It would still be a very good starting place for someone trying to learn how to write fantasy.  In some ways fantasy has moved beyond it . . .  But to a very large degree it was Le Guin herself who changed the genre.

Which is why Aqueduct Press published 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin (edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin and priced at a very reasonable nineteen dollars in paperback) in the first place.


And speaking of mischievous Finns . . .

Years ago, at Finncon, a fan came up with a wicked idea for a practical joke: "We should get a fan with a very strong Finnish accent to call up our next prospective guest of honor and say, 'I am calling from Helsinki to inform you that you are to receive a very great honor."

"That's a funny idea," I said.  "But what science fiction writer could conceivably think he or she has a shot at the Nobel Prize?"

The fan smirked.  "Stanislaw Lem."

Sometime after that, I told this story to Gordon Van Gelder.  He smiled gently and said, "Or Ursula K. Le Guin.  But who would be so mean?"

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Revisiting Poughkeepsie, Part 1: 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin

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This came in the mail the other day.  80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin is a festschrift for the woman whom I suppose we shall now have to refer to as the grande dame of fantasy.  And of course ...

But wait, I hear some of you say.  Festschrift?

Fairly asked.  A festschrift is a collection of writings, a book, celebrating a particularly valued individual and presented to him or her while said luminary is still alive.  (If the book were gathered and published posthumously, it would be a gedenkenschrift. )  Because it's so much trouble to put together, it's normally reserved for people who are both outstanding in their chosen profession and greatly beloved.

Le Guin was about to turn eighty, and her friends got together to present her with exactly such a literary beast.  It contained stories, poems, essays, and front-of-church testimonials by such luminaries as Eileen Gunn, Gwynneth Jones, Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ellen Kushner, Nancy Kress, etc., etc., etc.  In the wake of what was probably a pretty good party, it's been published by Aqueduct Press, and members of the general public are allowed to buy and read it.

Now, either you want this book (I did and now I have it) or you don't, and you already know which camp you dwell within, and no amount of descriptive analysis will budge you one way or the other.  

So I'm not going to review the book.  Why bother?

However, I was inspired by Lisa Tuttle's heartfelt contribution, "'From Elfland to Poughkeepsie' and Back Again, or, I Think We're in Poughkeepsie Now, Toto," on how important a single seminal Le Guin essay was to her, to go back and revisit said essay.

I've been meaning to reread "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" for some time now.  It came out in 1973 when genre fantasy was a new phenomenon.  I read it shortly thereafter and was blown away by it.  "Yes!" I thought.  "She gets it!"  We were all just figuring out this new (though most of the texts worth reading were half a century old by then) phenomenon, and a lot of very silly things were being said and thought and written about it.  Le Guin's essay was not silly.  She understood fantasy and why it should be valued and she said some things that were very valuable to a young, unpublished writer who aspired to write the stuff himself.

Over a third of a century has passed, and there have been some remarkable changes.  I wondered how well the essay held up.

Unfortunately, I'm currently all on fire to work on "The Stone of Loneliness," a story I began several years ago and which suddenly and unexpectedly exploded back into life yesterday.  So I haven't the time to write down what I found out today.  I'll have to tell you tomorrow.

In the meantime, allow me to leave you with the three most terrifying words ever found at the end of a fantasy novel or, indeed, a blog post:

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

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