Welcome to the future!

This week I have mostly been dissertating and engaging in social activism. I might have reason to get into the latter in more detail, but perhaps not yet.

I have also been shopping, however -- well, I purchased two things that have made my week.

The first was a Possum umbrella. I have a fraught relationship with umbrellas, as I am prone to abandoning them on the bus after setting them on the floor; and umbrellas are likewise prone to betraying me by turning inside out or simply snapping a rib or two at slight provocation. The fact that I am in the habit of buying cheap umbrellas does not help, so the abandonment and betrayal is an endless vicious cycle.

Possum's design is brilliant in that the umbrella comes contained in a small zipper pouch. Lots of umbrellas do, of course -- but this pouch, after you take the umbrella out, also contains a small canvas tote -- dimensions about 10" x 10". The zipper part, which is still its own pocket, and which can be closed, is at the bottom of the pouch.

This means that when I'm running errands in the rain, I can unzip the umbrella, and then, as I go into buildings or onto the bus, collapse it and stow it in the tote bag, which stays safely on my shoulder.

I can also stick 4 or 5 books in the tote, and zip the umbrella into the bottom, and trundle off to the coffee shop, safe in case of rain. (But this is only a good solution when I'm only going to one destination; otherwise I might be in a situation where the tote bag was the only carrier for both the books and the wet umbrella.)

I'm extraordinarily pleased. I've also tested the umbrella in a storm with 36 mph gusts, and though it reversed a couple of times, it snapped back just as quickly, and apparently with no damage.

Most people wouldn't think of the future as heralded by an umbrella that's harder to lose. I do.

The other purchase was a Livescribe Echo Smartpen. I'd heard of smartpens before, but somehow I imagined that they were strictly smart because they had a convenient tiny recorder in the head of the pen. Only in the last week have I found out more about what they can do, specifically that they allow your handwriting to be easily digitized, and with an additional application, transcribed into plain text.

I don't think I've written here about my ongoing dilemma regarding iPhone vs. iPad, and which one will meet my needs better. I won't go into that, because it's mostly personal minutia, but one of the issues that's kept me off the iPad bandwagon is that I think best by writing in longhand. On paper. Ideally with BIC mechanical pencils, but pens will work -- the important thing is the feel of the paper, as opposed to a stylus on a flat screen. I've thought about whether it might be possible to become comfortable thinking through typing with my fingers on the iPad screen, but I'm not certain, and one of the major issues that's bugged me in regards to the iPad is that I'm worried that I still won't be able to think as clearly typing on it as I can when I write things out.

I write things out all the time, hence the massive stacks of paper that make up each dissertation chapter, and through which I often scrabble, searching for the paper on which I made notes on any given date. It's not entirely messy, because I can almost always remember the color of the ink, the style of script I was using -- but it's not especially efficient, either. And if I want to do something with the notes, then I have to type them into the computer. Sometimes that creates an opportunity for revision, but often, it just adds a delay that I don't especially appreciate.

And yet, though I've adapted tremendously to the net in so many ways, I've never stopped feeling like I can think better through writing things down than I can by typing them. I spent most of today being increasingly frustrated, feeling like my argument was unraveling as I tried to integrate ideas from Jameson's Political Unconscious into it. It took less than 30 minutes of working with the smartpen to regain my footing.

I'm annoyed that the transcription application is separate rather than being included, and I would love it if the pens were rollerball, rather than ballpoint, but that doesn't dampen my enthusiasm in the least. This solves all sorts of problems, not least making it easier for me to go off to the coffee shop without taking my laptop and the temptation of the whole internet in large screen format with me.

A Funeral at Redwall

The BBC is reporting that children's author Brian Jacques has died, at age 71.

My elementary school librarian, Mr. McKay, saved Redwall for me, so that I could read it first. I didn't know about it, of course -- it was the first book that Jacques had published in the US. He simply took me aside, and collected it from his office, and said he'd thought I'd want to have first crack at it. 1986 means that I would have been going into 4th grade, and it was around that time that the elementary school library made a special exception for me. Normally, the rule was that you could check out the same number of books as your grade level -- 4 for 4th grade, etc. -- but I was allowed to check out as many as I wanted.

That? Was heaven.

Actually, a lot of things about the library, where I spent most of my recess time, were heaven, including the fact that one could work as a page, reshelving books, and sometimes, be allowed to climb on top of the bookshelves to dust them, or to rotate through posters and artwork on the wall. And that in payment, one was allowed to choose selections of laminated bookmarks made using Apple Clip Art on Astrobrights paper.

But that's another post. I had never read anything like Redwall. Babe, the Gallant Pig, had come out a couple of years earlier. I'm not sure if I had read Watership Down by then, but I think not, and I think it would not have struck me as being in the same genre. The fattest fantasy book I'd read at that point was The Hounds of the Morrigan, by Pat O'Shea -- so I had just discovered, you might say, the pleasure of a big fat book, as opposed to what I think of as elementary school sized books, usually just over an inch thick.

I had never read a book with such careful, detailed worldbuilding, and yet one which was written for children. Part of me wants to say, of course! Children are interested in treats, and in eating, and so it is natural that one way of conveying the wonder of a world would be to describe the wonderful things that are eaten in that world's parties. And I also know how much I learned from Jacques: the names of herbs, and how important they were for flavoring; that fruit and mint could go together, that honey and cream were pure decadent delight. It isn't that my mother was a poor cook -- she wasn't -- but I wasn't always involved in food preparation, and when in Redwall, I stood over Friar Hugo's shoulder by default.

Redwall was the first book I read in which there was detailed, intentional, cruel violence;* where characters with names didn't just die in battle (as is gently implied in the Narnia books), or die tenderly at the book's finale, as in Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows, but were killed in callous accidents and intentionally. The body count started within 12 pages of the story beginning. I knew it was a serious, and rather adult book, because there were mentions of hell, but I also knew that it was a book that was easy enough that I could just sink into it without having to puzzle over sentences and paragraphs that I didn't fully understand. I had tried to read The Name of the Rose a little earlier, having found it in the mystery section of the public library, and thinking that since I liked murder mysteries, and that since it was thick like The Hounds of the Morrigan, and about an abbey, which I found interesting, and since it had a beautiful cover... -- but needless to say, I didn't get very far, which is just as well.

In Redwall, I found a detailed portrait of a community, where there were multiple characters who wandered in and out of the spotlight, who clearly were busy living their lives, and doing the various work of keeping an abbey running. Matthias, who was discovering his own capabilities, Methuselah, who kept records, and Constance the badger, who clearly was the dominant fighter, and whom Jacques felt no need to temper with more flowery feminity. And I watched, captivated, as that community reeled, and changed, confronted with an outsider who wanted simply to torture, to kill, to possess them. There was a typical quest/coming-of-age story in the middle of this, for Matthias, and I loved that, and took time to memorize the "I -- am that is" poem that is so important to the plot's development. But there was so much more than that, too! The history of the abbey is vital to surviving the conflict; and the way that the abbey is situated in the midst of a landscape where it is one culture, interacting with other cultures of varying compatibility, neutrality, or hostility -- sparrows! and Guerilla Shrews! -- I had never seen anything like that in my life thus far. Not told that way. I knew Jason and the Argonauts backwards and forwards, and was in the habit of reading mythological dictionaries to try and find more stories, but the tellings of Greek myths in collections and dictionaries were not attempting to be an adventure novel, and so they could not in the least compare with what Brian Jacques had done.

I remember how horrified I was by the actions of Selah and Chickenhound, and the way it felt to learn what happened to them. Reading Agatha Christie and watching Murder, She Wrote, I knew plenty about murderers, but I didn't really know about stories of betrayal that occurred in the middle of the story, of double-crosses -- I hadn't read any noir at that age. And then, when Asmodeus appeared on the scene, it was approximately like discovering that Twinkies had a creme filling.** Multiple problems that had to be dealt with, each one dangerous in a different way! I had never seen such richness between the covers of a book. And what makes Redwall extra special, along with The Hounds of the Morrigan, is that it is one of the first times that I can remember beginning to think carefully about what an author can do, and has to do, in order to make a book be brilliant. Before that, I had simply swallowed books whole, swimming through them like warm water, and this is not to say that I read through them hurriedly without enjoyment -- but stories were the air I breathed, and I am not sure that I gave much thought to how that air was produced, and the choices that went into it.

A few years later, Brian Jacques actually came to my elementary school -- but I was in junior high. My second brother, who loved the books as much as I did, took my copy of Mossflower to school to have it autographed, and, horror of horrors, had it signed to him, instead of me. At the time, I was furious, and only slightly mollified when said brother bought me another copy of the book. It's forgiven, now. The landscape of Redwall was an escape for both of us, in the midst of family turmoil. I couldn't see that years earlier, when A. was tormenting me by being Baby Rollo, who was so quick and heedless to drop into rhyming song, who knew that joy was in singing; or any one of the other various rambunctious Dibbuns; but in hindsight, I am endlessly grateful that we both found that escape.

In the middle of the long list of Redwall books, A. and I agreed that they had begun to seem formulaic to us. But I recall that we were both delighted by Loamhedge and Rakkety Tam, and I shall look forward to catching up with the more recent books in the series, and the final novel, when it arrives later this year.

I never got the chance to thank Jacques. It seemed that I was always finding out about him being in town the day after he had been, or when I was scheduled to be somewhere else. But one night, when he was at the University Bookstore, or rather passing through it, on the way to a sold-out signing at Kane Hall on the UW campus, I caught sight of him in the midst of an entourage. And I hadn't seen the announcements that he was in town, didn't know who he was at all, only that he was in a cluster of people, and looked familiar, almost like someone I had seen on TV. And then my eyes landed on a poster announcing the event, and that it was sold out, and I realized, and sucked in my breath, and stared at him in shock -- and somehow, 20 feet away, he realized, and looked right at me, and I grinned at him as happily as I could, to try and say thank you. And he smiled back. So I think he understood.

After I finished Redwall, I wasn't content with simply chanting the "I -- am that is" poem over and over; so I went back and memorized the prologue: "It was the start of the Summer of the Late Rose." For a long time, when I thought of beautiful writing (as a quality in itself, quite distinct from a good story), that passage was at the forefront of my mind. I think it's time I refreshed my memory of it, and knocked the dust off.

* ETA: I know -- obviously, I hadn't yet found the indescribably great Pork, and others, by Cris Freddi.

** I know, it's kind of sacrilegious to talk about Twinkies in the same post that I'm writing about food in Redwall Abbey. But it was the question that everyone in elementary school pondered -- how did the creme filling get inside the Twinkie?

The first things I remember reading, or being read

(Because in the comments to the previous post, we've gotten into a discussion about how one develops preference for genre fiction, or lit fic, and to what degree that preference is innate and hardwired, much like one's sexuality.)

First and foremost, Bill Peet's The Caboose Who Got Loose. This one was read to me, but I memorized it, and I think it's responsible for my love of dactyls (Trochee fixation wasn't actually my syndrome, recognizable as it is.) Anthropomorphized train cars, and houses! Though the illustration that stayed with me for years, more than any of the others, was of a train yard at night, and a little house, suspended above the tracks, where a night watchman lived. That, to me, was another world, and moreover, one that I wanted to get to, and live in: to be high over the world, in a light place overlooking the dark place where people travelled. (There was also Chester the Worldly Pig, and The Whingdingdilly, but neither of those compared, really, to Caboose).

Secondly: books about marine life. One had lots of pictures, in color; the other was more like an elementary school textbook, mostly text, and brown and white sketched illustrations. I fixated on jellyfish, and on diatoms, and on the chambered nautilus.

Thirdly: a big treasury of Beatrix Potter, in which, as I recall, the stories that I wanted to hear repeatedly were "The Tailor of Gloucester," and "The Tale of Two Bad Mice." The best part about the latter was when Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb try to eat the dolls' food, and find the wax ham inedible. Wax fruit: more fascinating than any fart joke.

I knew fairytales, at least, I knew Little Red Riding-hood, because I suffered my parents and grandparents to help me act it out, utilizing the armoire for the woodsman to jump out of.

Dr. Seuss, specifically Hop on Pop, and The Cat in the Hat. The Cat in the Hat Comes Back was vastly superior to the original. Green Eggs and Ham made me very, very uncomfortable (early aversion to people who won't stop pestering you?) Horton Hears A Who was also vastly superior to Horton Hatches the Egg, mainly because I figured out that the Grinch had to be much tinier than I had realized. (This led to a brief phase in which I wondered whether the world as we knew it might be contained on a piece of lint stuck under God's toenail.)

Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day, which, now that I think about it, is very much a book about the world being transformed into another place.

There was Captain Kitty (go look at the illustrations!), which totally explains my love for the lime helmet LOLcat. And again, voyages, and other worlds.

And The Wheedle on the Needle, which I loved, and Leo the Lop, which I loved a little less, I think mainly because of the embarrassment phobia.

The Year At Maple Hill Farm, lovely for all the detail in the illustrations.

There was also an easy reader book about a mouse exploring a house, fascinating because it was illustrated with photographs, rather than drawings.

And there was Professor Wormbog's Gloomy Kerploppus: A Book of Great Smells. There were other Mercer Mayer books in the Little Critter series, but mostly I did not like them, because they were mostly about what I should and shouldn't do.

There were others: The Poky Little Puppy, The Little Engine That Could (fascinating because of all the things that could be carried on a train, which made up for the stupid didacticism of the story), a Little Golden Book version of A Child's Garden of Verses.

Later, there were the Something Queer books, which also made a huge impression -- but the ones above were what I owned, and what I read, or had read to me, before I got to the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and on from there.

On believable characters, and reading sci-fi

After writing yesterday's review of Bradford Morrow's The Diviner's Tale, I was startled this morning by one of the comments on this article in The Guardian, about whether speculative fiction was ready to break into big awards like the Booker Prize. One of the commenters responds as follows:

I think it is probably not the best idea. I have read a lot of science fiction and the problem lies with the characters, it seems as if all SF writers are incapable of producing a believable character, especially if it is an Alien character, which does not end up sounding like your English Teacher from High School. Morever, some of the more fantastical elements of simply making up names for alien cultures, with wobbly bits, it is absolutely confusing and mostly ridiculous. There is always a war going on in which not much seems to be happening.
Proper fiction, got which some niche should be preserved, should as a starting base point have believable characters. I am fairly sure that it is beyond the capabilities of any Fantasy/SF author to come up with anything more than Carboard charachters, whereas novels rooted in reality have more dimensions more reference points to peoples lives, so is probably superior. (emphasis mine)

The funny thing about this is that it is precisely what I would say about most literary fiction. I had to rack my brain and my bookshelves to find literary fiction titles/authors whom I loved, and thought of as having believably complex characters (the latter being the condition for the former). I did think of one, and immediately: Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved, which I've read over and over again, and never gotten tired of. Now that I think about it, I also enjoyed Michael Cunningham's The Hours, though I don't own it. Let's see: I also was absolutely delighted with Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, and the sequels that followed. For the most part, literary fiction, no matter how many titles I look at, and what awards they're up for, give me the sense that the authors carefully followed a formula akin to that of the sonata form, carefully choosing objects and character traits that they felt were both unusual and poetic. This was how I felt about the house dragged across the ice in E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.

But I remember my delight at reading Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, when a friend lent it to me as an undergrad, as being a book that seemed to be written about the same world I lived in, or closer to it -- my university and my own development did not present the opportunities of Nick, Robin, and Thomas. In jr. high and high school, I read Terry Brooks, and David Eddings, and Piers Anthony, and a lot of Star Trek novels. It seems funny that I read these (most of which I now think of as fluff) at the same time I loved Dorothy L. Sayers and Noel Streatfeild, who wrote what I think of as utterly believable characters, and who seemed to see the world as I saw it (and thus to be confronted with adventures and problems like my own). When I got to college and someone introduced me to Carolyn Heilbrun's Kate Fansler detective stories, I felt that I had found someone writing about a woman who I hoped to become.

I don't remember when I started reading current sci-fi/fantasy, exactly. However, I will never forget the experience of reading Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series, and thinking "oh, my God, I had no idea that it was even possible to capture life, and its disappointments and victories, in this way." I'm afraid that's not an especially original eloquent blurb, but it's what I felt at the time, and what I still feel when I go back to the whole quartet to reread it, which I do about every year. If you're curious, you should rush right out and buy the series, or at least the first volume, and you should pay no attention to the cover art, which gives the impression that Melusine is a soppy bodice-ripper. It's nothing of the sort. Though it is a series in which sex, both abusive, and non, plays a major role. And it's what I would hold up as an example and standard to literary fiction authors who feel that they simply must include a sexual abuse plot in their novels: that is how you do it.

Monette isn't the only sci-fi/fantasy author who has been able to reach me, though she was the first, and the one who did so most dramatically. I think it's fair to say that she's the reason I began paying attention to other sci-fi authors, and to blogs at Tor. I haven't time tonight, but at some point, I would like to write more about why the other major genre that I read is YA Lit.

So, if you're reading this: is there a book, series, or genre, that amazed you, that knocked you flat by portraying the world more richly than you imagined was ever possible?

I promise there will be a real blog post soon.

But if you're looking for something to read, you should go and check out the excerpt of Jo Walton's Among Others at Tor.com.

I've been thinking about writing a Jo Walton post all weekend, because I went out Saturday night to buy eggs, to make bread, but the little convenience store 3 blocks away only had extra large eggs. Honestly, why? Surely it would make more sense to have regular-sized eggs on hand, for people who buy them both for eating plain, and cooking?

So I walked another 8 blocks, to the big grocery, where there were eggs, standard large size, thank you very much. And I bought them. And I would have walked home, but it was raining, and I thought, oh, I could walk to the university bookstore and see whether they have Among Others in stock, because I am curious about it and have heard that it is appearing early.

They didn't. What they had was Lifelode. Lifelode! Which I have been curious about for two years, but thought I might never encounter in the wild.

And $25 is a lot of money to pay for a book without seeing it first, especially when you are a reader who is either enraptured or entirely unmoved by the author's books. I don't mean this as a criticism of Jo Walton; it's just that she writes books that move a lot of different people, not all of whom are me.

Anyways, I looked at Lifelode long enough that I missed the first bus. And then the second. And then I gave up and bought it, resolving to skimp on the gluten-free treats and other luxuries, and reminding myself to hang onto the receipt in case I didn't care for it.

I needn't have worried though, because I love it just as much as I love The Prize in the Game, which I still think is the closest that any book has come to duplicating the music and intensity of feeling that I associate with opera in print.

You should buy Lifelode if you loved The Prize in the Game, or if you have a spare $25 around, but you probably don't -- so if you see it in a bookstore, then for god's sake, take the time to look at it, because it's worth missing buses for.

Anyways, I was uncertain about whether I would like Among Others, because what if I felt like I was reading it through a filter that stripped it of all emotion (which, sadly, is how I felt about both Ha'penny and Half a Crown, and I don't really understand why, which makes it all the more vexing. I'm pretty sure it's me, and not Jo Walton -- I should be clear about that.) I liked Farthing very much indeed.

But I'm reading it right now, in between bouts of working on another project, and it is very good indeed, at least at 15% of the way through. I'm not going to link to any of the reviews that are all over the place, because I'm of mixed minds on whether they'll be any good; I only started to read each, and then decided they were telling me something I'd rather hear from the book itself.

Instead, here are two quotes:

‎"Until the end, knowing them brought us nothing but good. And in the end, I don't think they understood. No, they did. They were as clear as can be. It was we who didn't understand.
I wish magic was more dramatic."

"Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn't supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans."

And if they don't make you curious, well, then nothing else I can say would.

I might post a real review, if I think there's anything I can say about it when I'm done reading that will be useful to you. I might attempt to review Lifelode, except that it would be better if you read it without hearing me go on and on first.

The best thing about Jo Walton's writing, for me, anyways, is that she knows how to write about the searing intensity of feelings, not just joy or sorrow or raging anger, but everything in between, too, tranquillity, and even the light stirrings of desire. And she knows how to write about people not only feeling, but people seeing other people feeling, and reacting; and she does all this without the least bit of telling, rather than show. I don't know how she manages it, because it ought to be telling, especially in the latter case -- but it's always wonderfully natural -- the realization rising naturally from whoever is having it.

I suppose this is a real post; it's just sort of a scattered excited one, though I'm very serious, not feeling flip at all. A nice contrast, then, to diss reflections.