Shadow of a Man

 

Bookish

Literary Default: Heroic Fantasy

Sword & sorcery, heroic fantasy, classical epic -- my favorite genre (yes, singular) no matter the space-time continuum.  Last spring I was teaching Homer's Iliad, now I am reading Erikson's Reaper's Gale.  Leiber's Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser series fits somewhere in between, as does Byron's Don Juan.

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?

What I Have Learned

English 1B: two questions.

How does X serve the story?
And, what does the story serve?

English 1A?
Shift "story" to "argument".

Blades

The Adventures of Kelpman

Close-up: Kelpman in the surge.

Kelpman:
chicken wire figure (1996);
kelpflesh (2015).
Bodega Bay surge channel.

A Twist In Time

Wire art: two pieces, four shots.   I made these one weekend in 1996 at a point in my life between grad school and the rest of it when I didn't think I'd be teaching again.  An octopus and a merman, among others, came out of that angst.  Maybe my first move toward sculpture besides carving pumpkins, decorating Easter eggs, whittling sticks, and playing with random play-doh since childhood.

Clay came later.

Wyrd Oft Nereth: Two Views

Double Trouble: Recurring Dreams in Tweed (a bit threadbare) and Iron (a bit rusty)

Strange dreams last night: two different recurring threads as I slept and woke, slept and woke, slept and woke, over and over.

The first thread? Classic teaching dream: final exam time, but I've printed out, copied, and distributed the wrong semester's exam to the wrong class. Good students: they tried to answer the questions, tried to grapple with the topics, until someone came forward to point out that they hadn't read this material at all. I try to salvage something from the situation as I return over and over to this situation in the night.

The second thread? Much more heroic, no less anxious: I'm the squad leader of a band of soldiers, garbed in wool and leather and iron, armed with swords or axes, as we move through ruined battlements, a ruined city, at nightfall, seeking some sort of goal, seeking not to be ambushed in the deepening fog and shadow.  Light comes from the moon and from burning buildings.  Smoke chokes the throat, obscuring that moon and those flames.  Something is hunting us, a troop of men? a monster? The anxiety level is high as I struggle, here too, not to make mistakes, struggle to salvage something from the night's foray, even though in the dream I don't quite know, can't quite grasp the things I know I should know, and there is absolutely no one to ask . . . .