Comfort for a Sore Throat

A hot toddy and a good book:
The Fall of the Kings
by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman.

I think this is my third reading.

Appreciating Erikson's Sword and Sorcery

Steven Erikson of the Malazan sword-and-sorcery novels is a damn fine novelist.  He can write character like nobody's-business.  I wonder how much genre-thinking obscures the true measure of his worth and contribution to that grand old ideal, the Commonwealth of Letters.

For those who know . . . Whiskeyjack--or Kalam-- that's all I have to say . . . right?

"The Other Worlds": Life's Largest Riddle

The Other Worlds is an excellent mythopoeic novel by a dear friend, Christoph Greger.  Christoph's own humble way of introducing the book to the world is worth quoting: "Hey all you cystic fibrosis lit fans, Ren fair geeks, and/or mythopoeic/modernist bildungsroman junkies -- here's something that might be of interest."

This fine novel deserves deep interest, presenting classic character-in-crisis; entertaining and evoking in the tradition of Yeats, Morris, Dunsany, de Lint, and Windling; and offering entry into multiple worlds, this one we share and those others 'beyond the fields we know'.  The setting and the style are distinctly contemporary; the themes and dilemmas, definitely timeless.  Life's largest riddle--mortality--met by mystery, measured by memory, and beset--or aided?--by magic waits at the heart of The Other Worlds.

Read this book.

Understory

What do you see?
What's happening?
How does the shot feel to you?

___

Or, is this is a crime scene photograph?
If so, what's the crime?
What happened?
Or, is it about to happen?

-------

Story-thoughts always make me happy.

-------

"Why do you think in terms of crime, Matt, especially crime stories?" a friend asks.

Family tradition?

Literary tradition?

Even Homer's epics are crime stories, if you want to take that angle . . . .

Recommended: An Inspector Richard Jury Mystery

The second in the series from Martha Grimes.

The Old Fox Deceiv'd's Arnold is probably my favorite character -- next to Richard Jury himself, of course -- in the entire series.

Feet Of Clay

"What can I tell you, Carson," I had to say aloud, "that you don't already know?" The pottery wheel slowed to a full stop. I set both feet squarely on the floor. Before me, the clay glistened, a wet lump.  I spoke again to the shadows, to the clay masks I’d hung on every wall. Empty eyeholes stared back at me.  I had to raise my voice. "Omniscience, you know, being the purview of the dead?"

--draft sentences, stepping into a new story

Exploration's Joy

When I first found and read Charles De Lint's "The Little Country" back in grad school--on the heels of De Lint's "Dreams Underfoot"--it felt as if I were rediscovering the best aspects of play and treasure-hunting and discovery itself. I was having a fine time as a Renaissance / Medieval / Restoration / Neoclassic / Romantic specialist--I kept changing my fields, for I'm a hungry and ambitious generalist at heart--but I was spending my days and nights bearing down perhaps too hard as a student, as a researcher, and not as the learner, as the adult-child, as the explorer that I am most at home being. I relearned to refresh my professional studies with such spirited and generous storytelling--and to bring such spirit and generosity to my professional duties in the classroom and in the carrel.

Prepping For Class

Kem Nunn's first novel, Tapping the Source; Bushmills; and the Eelfish.

In between chapters, I'm contemplating Point Molate and a quick kayak-run in the Bay this weekend.

Required Reading, Say I

Coffee Break . . . Outside

How Romantic?

Flames And Ashes

Quick Fiction/Story Fragment found in an old notebook yesterday (and slightly edited today):

FLAMES AND ASHES


How to put this? She'd glow, absolutely glow, after sex. Then, he found that he could bring out that glow just with his words, his attentive listening, his tuning in and drawing her out. At first, he exulted in his success and skills, in her heated responses to his focused intensity. He enjoyed these new shared flames and the joyous visible proof. Later, he found he missed kindling, for him, the hotter joys of bodies and psyches engaged. He missed feeling satiated himself. Too late, he realized that in proving his power to feed her he'd starved himself. But why hadn't she seen that and remedied that for him? Was that even a fair question?


--MD


If you click on the "Fiction" label below, I believe you can see a handful of my other Quick Fiction pieces, among other things, as well.

Blue Drop

"Why can't you ever let anything just go?" Cora cried.  "Just let it go."

"You think I like remembering everything?" said Tom.  "There's this deep well--dark, dark blue with no edges that I can see--and I just keep dropping deeper and deeper."

"What are you talking about now?  Can't you just finish an argument, for once?"

"Finish it?  There's never an end, don't you get that?  That's what hollow, what empty, means.  It still hurts.  You blink, and I can roll out this anger at what happened before, at what you did or didn't do, at what I did and didn't do, like it happened yesterday.  And it's been years.  You know all that.  Of course, I still get mad.  Getting mad hurts less than being sad.  Sad's like this grip that squeezes and squeezes and never lets up.  The only way to breathe is to roar."

"Roar, roar, roar!  The past--let it go!  You need some help."

"Why do you think I'm still talking?  What do you think I'm doing here?  Throw me a goddamn rope."

"No!  No, you . . . coward!  Swim for it.  Swim out of your goddamn imaginary blue hole yourself!  Or drown.  Drown, drown, drown, drown."

Draft in motion, from "The Devil's Acre."

Isla Blanca

I like water-and-rock shots like this to feed my imagination.  I picture an island and I put my characters in play there.   This time, there's been a murder, and now that the fog has pulled back out to sea, well, Tom Dacre is about to wish the sunlight wasn't quite so bright.  Though that's not fair, he . . . .

Asilomar, actually.
Looking north toward what I call the Gazebo Rocks.
Perspective?  Memory for mourning?  Story-telling?  Uh-huhh.

McGuane: "Swallowing Hot Soup Upside Down"

Here's a piece from Thomas McGuane's Panama, a novel that made a lot more sense for me in 2006 or so than when I first read it back in 1985 or '86, in my mid-forties than in my mid-twenties.

If you know the novel, you just may know what I mean.

I have a lot of respect for how McGuane writes, for how he mixes the verbal gymnastics here with the practical considerations of characters in motion.


She put some music on--Tejas by Z Z Top, I think, something hard--stood up, and slid out of the rest of her duds.  I was transfixed, all my general views gone, everything withering to make room for the present, the furious rifle vision which riddles everything, that madhouse of what seems like a good idea at the time.


I had come with the flowers in addition to my usual maladies, been touched, and now found myself just as addled as thrilled.  My mental focus left like water for her to swim in; and suddenly we were on the floor and she was slipping away and I'm thinking, I can settle this.  And then I thought about Catherine and how it could be when it was with someone you loved.  This was the girl from the storm cellar.


She said, "You've got premature ejaculator written all over you."  I glanced into mid-air.


I felt completely there for it; but the feeling of the inside of her ran up spreading through me like swallowing hot soup upside down.  I looked down, as I do, and thought, as I am afraid I do, that she couldn't get away.  But she had some little movement that ought to be against the law.  And I was grateful, wondering where my old vanity had gone, when it was always my benificence that I thought was on the line, not these glorious collisions.  The earlier theater between Marcelline and me evaporated and it all grew dead serious; and probably, objectively, maybe even a trifle grotesque, as in knotty and wet and uncoordinated.


--from Thomas McGuane's Panama, Penguin Books, 1978: pages 50-51.

Jolly Roger

"House-pirate."

"House . . . pirate?  What's that?"

"Focused sublimation, I think."

"Aaaarrrgggghhhh.  Isn't there something easier?"

"We wouldn't want there to be any real trouble . . . ."

Moya Cannon: "Isolde's Tower, Essex Quay"

ISOLDE'S TOWER, ESSEX QUAY

It is our fictions which make us real.
--Robert Kroetch

Is there no end
to what can be dug up
out of the mud of a riverbank,

no end
to what can be dug up
out of the floodplains of a language?

This is no more
than the sunken stump
of a watchtower on a city wall,
built long after any Isolde might have lived,
built over since a dozen times,
uncovered now in some new work--
a tower's old root in black water
behind a Dublin bus stop;

and the story is no more than a story.
Tristan drifted in here on the tide to be healed,
taken in because of his music,
and a long yarn spun on
of which they'd say--

Had not the lovers of whom this story tells
Endured sorrow for the sake of love
They would never have comforted so many.

Dreaming

I had meant to hit the water this past weekend, but the stormy weather kept me home. Because of the traffic and driving issues, actually. I managed two pool workouts though, so I'm placated, if not happy.

Out in the water on a stormy day? That's gravy, as long as I have a clear, doable exit.

On the highway over the Santa Cruz mountains in the pelting rain with all those fools who don't know how to drive in rain anyway? No, no thank you.

The above shot? January 8, 2012. A glorious day in Pacific Grove.

Tonight, I'm working on handouts for class (well, not right now) and reading around.

I'm rereading Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" for class.

I'm reading bits from Kaui Hart Hemmings' The Descendants, an excellent novel that has been made into a film with George Clooney recently. I'm rereading bits from Linda Greenlaw's The Lobster Chronicles and Ian Rankins' The Complaints.

I'm listening to Grace Potter and the Nocturnal's eponymous CD right now, and I'll replay it once more before putting in a quieter CD, one of Jack Johnson's.

I've a shot of Irish in some water, and I expect to drink a bit of tea too, English Breakfast, no doubt, before I crash out.

I recommend all of the above, by the way.

The handouts, though. I'd best get back to those.

"Like Pearls, The Pain"

A moment from Joe Coomer's Pocketful of Names:

She climbed up into the stern of the boat. Flakes of rust and paint rained on the granite floor. Driftwood watched her climb, then settled down, chin to forepaws, to wait. She sat on the bare wood of the washboard, clasped her hands and pressed them between her crossed legs.

So Will had loved Emily. And he had loved her. And now he was in love with Zee. It was plain to see, and impossible to understand, how his affection was so embracing, so encompassing, and so malleable. His heart seemed so easily restored. She knew that she herself held grudges for years after the end of a relationship. She revisited diaries, letters, and even greeting cards in attempts not to understand old failures but to relive them. There was nothing to be resolved, no transforming catharsis in memory. Time did not heal old wounds. The hurt persisted, and like pearls, the pain survived deep in a center that had to be continuously swathed with yet another layer of forgetting that only soothed until the next remembering. The boy at Haystack, Mark, his name a crystal she cut her tongue on each time she said it. It was the first time in her artistic life that art seemed unimportant. She just wanted to bury her face in his neck and lie there forever. It was more important that she watch him create. And Jalendu, who was as lost in love as he was in New York, and who tried to hide from love and the city in her. How could you not love my sweet brother? It was easy not to love him. She had no other choice. After months of desperately trying to be in love with a man she admired, who made her laugh and cry with his tenderness, a man who found the world around him strange and mystifying and full of beauty, who regarded her as its zenith, she'd given up. "It's not that I don't want it to be there," she'd told him. "It simply doesn't exist."

"Perhaps it will be born later," he suggested.

And from that point on she could not meet his eye or hear his voice. It was all part of the world she already knew and did not need. When they separated she did not miss him. After he was gone, there were times when it was only as if he'd moved back home to India. He was safe, at home in his culture, surrounded by comforting, close reflections of his own face. "I will die if I cannot be with you," he said. And he did. And he was right about love, too. It was born later. She came to the understanding that this was a man who would have been a companion. There were worse things than being adored. She saw him in a glass of water, in puddles on the street, the rain sweeping down her windshield before she switched on the wipers. His sister came and took his remains back to their parents' home on a sandbar in the River Houghli. Sitting there in the stern of Break of Day, she suddenly realized that both men, Mark and Jalendu, had lived on islands. It was troubling. Is that why she'd come here? Or was it only coincidence? Arno had left her an island, not a farm in Nebraska. In fact, she'd only moved from one island to another. Manhattan was an island, too. If you wanted to be direct about it, every land mass on earth was an island. The only thing that differentiated every human, every island dweller on the planet, was their individual distance from the water.

--Joe Coomer, Pocketful of Names.

Quick Fiction: What He Missed

David kept coming back to it. Did Julia miss him? What did she miss about him, if anything? He'd claimed he didn't want any calls, but he kept checking messages. What did he miss? Her bright eyes and smile, of course. Sweet, soft kisses, juicy curves, cinnamon skin, and . . . her hair. Black river, black storm. Thick, dark flowing. Pulling, twisting, losing himself in it just and he--and she, surely--loved. Is that really what he missed? Mostly, he missed the selfishness, the easy and simple selfishness. Doing what he wanted, doing what she wanted. Now, nothing was simple; nothing was easy. He missed Julia, but he also missed his life before Julia, when he wasn't so selfish, when he wasn't so neglectful of his own home.

Quick Fiction: Oracle

ORACLE

"Treasure is where you find it!" Who said that? Mel Fisher? Amy Fisher? Captain Jack Sparrow? Blackbeard's ghost? He pulled out the pewter reproduction of the Spanish doubloon, meant as a memento of Sir Francis Drake's South American successes--piracies for his rogue queen. He checked the dull luster of the faux-coin against the gold ring on his left hand. His heart quickened at the sudden vision of galleons under siege, cannons firing, and fierce swordplay. "Heads, you win." He flipped the coin quite high. He caught it, checked it, flipped it again. And again. Again. Finally, he pocketed the oracle. He'd have to try his luck later.