Yet Another Reason Why Michael Dirda is America's Favorite Critic

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A few weeks ago, I had the honor of introducing Michael Dirda when he spoke at the Nebula Awards banquet.  That has no particular relevance to this post.  I'm just boasting.

Dirda is technically, I suppose, a critic.  I personally think of him as someone who reads a lot of books, thinks about them very carefully, and then shares what he's learned with the rest of us.  Which is to say, he's a very valuable individual indeed.

Now, over at Bookforum, Dirda has written an essay explaining why the Best Seller List is a disaster for people who love to read books.  Here's an excerpt:

The best books of a genre seldom make the list. The finest all-around American crime writer of the past forty years—I speak of Donald E. Westlake—never matched the sales of Elmore Leonard, let alone Patterson. Reviewers praised his comic Dortmunder capers, readers ecstasized over his lean Richard Stark noirs. A novel like The Ax—as brilliant a black comedy as the film Kind Hearts and Coronets—should be famous. These days, people will line up for hours to get their Neil Gaiman books signed, but whom does Gaiman admire among living authors? Gene Wolfe. You’ve never heard of Wolfe, right? (Try the majestic multivolume Book of the New Sun.) Go to this year’s World Fantasy Convention, ask its attendees to name the greatest contemporary work in their genre, and the answer will likely be Little, Big by John Crowley. You could have read this instead of the latest installment of Twilight.

You can read the entire essay here.


And if you're going to Readercon . . .

I'll be there, of course, and flogging the heck out of my brilliantly entertaining Dancing With Bears.  But, more remarkably, Billee Stallings will be there!  Yes.  You'd be very excited about this if only you knew who Stallings is.  So I'll tell you.

Billee Stallings is one of Will F. Jenkins's four daughters and, along with her sister, Jo-an Evans, has written a memoir of the great man.  You may better remember him under his pseudonym of Murray Leinster, one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction and the man who, long  before Asimov or Heinlein or Clarke, was known as "the Dean of Science Fiction."

Alas, Murray Leinster: His Life and Times will be published just a week or so too late for you to get her autograph.  But you'll get to meet the daughter of Murray Leinster!  She's not planning to go to any more science fiction conventions ever, which means this is your best and only chance to meet her.

Plus she's a very likable lady.

I met Billee's father once, almost forty years ago, and I've never forgotten the experience.  He was an amazing guy.  If you're going to be at Readercon, you'll want to chat with her about her father.  Luckily, she'll be happy to chat with you.

Above:  Michael Dirda.  I hardly ever run into him.  But I always enjoy our conversations when I do.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 129

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Fluffy Bird Panic No. 1

Creating the conscience of your race in the smithy of your soul is not pretty.

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Happy Fourth of July!

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Hereabouts, the Fourth is an excuse for easy patriotism, barbecue, and illegal fireworks.

In Canada, it's an opportunity to be American for one day.  Click here to see what I'm talking about.

And in my house, it's an excuse to be a lazy blogger.  Happy Fourth, everybody!


Above:  Our porch flag.  It's flown over our nation's capital.  They have people whose job it is to hoist the flag on the flagpole, run it down, and then hoist up the next one, so that congressmen can give them away.  Yet, strangely enough, knowing all this, we still treasure it.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 128

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This is what a writer's notebook page ought to look like!  First, two doodles, one labeled The man with no mouth, annotated (How to literalize this image?)  Which is a tough question when you're a fantasist.

Racial Masquerade 

O dear God, I thought when I received the invitation.  But in the actual fact, it...

There were all the usual inversions:  Black is white, white is black, black as stereotype and white as somebody you wanted to slap.  But then it got subtler and more interesting.

I'm pretty sure somebody will do this at some point, when it finally begins to look like we're putting racism behind us.  And I'm absolutely certain it will be a bad idea.  When I was in college and Fifties nostalgia was brand-new, I went to a sock hop.  It seemed like it would be fun and harmless.  Only a couple of students went as hoods.  They faked a rumble and it took about thirty seconds to turn serious.  We had to drag the combatants apart.  "I'm going to kill him!  I'm going to kill him!" one kept shouting, red with rage.

We are whatever we pretend to be.

There's a profound story to be written about a racially-themed costume party.  But I didn't feel the holy fire you'd have to have to do it up right.  So I dropped the idea like the opportunity to accidentally say something really stupid that it was.

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APPEARANCES -- Sunday Update

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July 15-17        Readercon

                        Burlington, MA

July 22             Philadelphia Fantastic (reading)

                        Moonstone Arts, Philadelphia

July 23-24     Confluence

                         Pittsburgh, PA

August 19-21   Renovation (Worldcon)

                         Reno, NV

Sept. 10           The Spiral Bookcase (signing)

                         Manayunk

                         Philadelphia

Sept. 21            KGB Bar (reading)

                         NYC  

And in 2012 . . .

Aug. 31- Sept. 2   Chicon 7

                             Chicago

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Paris, a Poem . . . in print again!

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Look what came in the mail the other day!  Hope Mirrlees's other great work (the one that's not Lud-in-the-Mist) -- Paris, a Poem.  This small press limited edition folio hardcover is only the fourth publication ever of what Julia Briggs called "modernism's lost masterpiece," the second independent edition (the first was the chapbook published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf), the third unbowdlerized publication (it was reprinted in The Virginia Woolf Quarterly in the early 1970s with all the blasphemous bits edited out or rewritten by the author, who had converted to Catholicism), and the only independent hardcover.

This letterpress edition is also, as you might guess, on the pricey side.  A copy of it will set you back $375, plus shipping.  It's clearly aimed at the collectors market.  And, yes, it is beautiful, a pleasure to hold and a joy to read.

If you're interested, you can find it on AbeBooks.com  Contrary to what its entry says, the book is a folio not a quarto and there are still forty available copies out of an edition of fifty.  (Apparently, there are a few bugs in the listing program.)

What is the poem about?  Well, I've just written a review of it which attempted to answer that very question as succinctly as possible, and it came to ten typewritten pages.  But in essence, Paris, a Poem is:

1.  A daylong journey (the day being specifically May 1, 1919) through Paris which ambitiously attempts to encapsulate the city, its culture, its past, and its then present-day moment in a 600-line poem.

2.  A recapitulation of the Eleusinian Mysteries employing a myth of Mirrlees's own invention, a year-struggle between two virgins, Mary and the moon, representing the conflict between paganism and the Catholic Church.

3.  A love poem of clandestine lesbian passion.  This last is mostly encoded, and you have to dig deep, but it's there.

After its original publication, Paris, a Poem fell into obscurity for almost ninety years before being championed by the late Julia Briggs.  The appearance of this edition is one in a series of events marking the ongoing restoration of Hope Mirrlees to her proper place in the Republic of Letters.


And I want to thank . . .

Yesterday I posted a request for suggestions of places to visit in China and Andrew, David Stone, and Bruce all came through with thoughtful (and, even better, useful) posts.  My thanks to all three.  You guys are great.

Now to ponder their ideas and the train schedules.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 127

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Doodles and the slogan One Land, One Winter.

I wrote GRR[something] Treff under the largest face to acknowledge the sort-of swipe from George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books.

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