Poem of Some Day That Turns Out to Be the Poem of Today

W. S. Merwin died today. (NY Times obituary.)

Here's a poem he wrote for the occasion.

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

—W. S. Merwin

RIP. Baruch dayan ha-emet.

My Photographic Novel, Happenstance, Is Nearly 3/4 Posted! Start Reading Now!

A graphic novel I wrote & illustrated (using photographs and photoshop) has been serializing online for about a year and a half, now.  It's about two friends who change their religious views in opposite ways, but in dialogue with each other; and about the fallout from those changes in each of their lives.  I thought I'd pop up here and say it's still posting! You can go read it!  Two new pages go up twice a week, on Mondays & Thursdays.  It's nearly 3/4 up — I just put up pp. 332-333 out of an eventual 444 yesterday, and we're nearing the end of chapter 9 (of 12).  So click here and check it out:

The graphic novel to date can be read here: http://happenstance.thecomicseries.com/

If you haven't read it, give it a try; and if you like it, share it with your friends!

Poem of the Day: Four Strategic Lines

Four Strategic Lines

There, four strategic lines are anagrams.
I'm rearranging letters. A chaos features
in the rule, frames reason, grates a tragic,
rare formula. A strange aesthetic reigns.

— Anthony Etherin

Barry Eisler Reading Order

Charted updated as of December, 2022.

Some of my favorite light reading are the thrillers of Barry Eisler. As he's gone along, the overlaps in his characters/series have become more complicated.  So, in a fit of OCD and with a nod to the Terry Pratchett Reading Order guide, I made this chart. I offer it here for the edification of all and sundry.  But do take the compiler's note about how you can start anywhere seriously.

(Click for a larger version.)

Incidentally, I got into this because I had just bought my aunt the second Livia Lone book as a present — she'd liked the first — and was trying to think of how to explain who Dox was and how he fits in.  It's tricky!

 (Now updated for his forthcoming novel The Chaos Kind (October, 2021). Also released under a Creative Commons BY-SA license, in case anyone feels inspired to improve upon it. (Email me for the photoshop file if you want it.)

Alias Grace: A Brief Review

So I just binge-watched the Netflix series Alias Grace, on Netflix (based on the Margaret Atwood novel, which I haven't read). I recommend it. It's a historical drama, focused on women's experiences (even the parts about men are about how they think about, and use, women), and a lot about power and the lack of it. It's also a marvelous narrative contraption, with some real subtle possible interpretations lurking just under the surface of the ending, leaving us with a marvelous ambiguity. Also very well acted & shot. (One other advantage: it's a good length, six 45-minute episodes, and it's a closed story, not an open-ended thing.)

If you don't know, it's based on a true story, a mid-nineteenth century murder case (this is not a spoiler, it's shown in the first few minutes, and then circled back to, repeatedly).

The only negative comment I have, really, is that the actors are required to play a very wide range of ages. The lead actress is superb as the main age she's asked to do, but a scene where she gets her first period was jarring because I'd assumed (just from appearance, not having adequately thought through the timing) that she was supposed to be about 20 at that point. Similarly, one actor at the end (shan't say who, it's a spoiler) is made up to be old & it's quite unconvincing. Not sure how this could have been avoided, though.

One particular thing I really liked is a spoiler, so I'll ROT13 it: Va gur svany rcvfbqr, jura Tenpr fcrnxf va Znel'f ibvpr, vg ernyyl fbhaqrq yvxr gur npgerff jub cynlrq Znel gb zr. Ohg ernqvat hc n ovg, vg'f npghnyyl zhpu pbbyre guna gung: nccneragyl gur npgerff jub cynlrq Znel qvq gur fprar, fb gur npgerff jub cynlrq Tenpr pbhyq zvzvp vg, naq gura gur npgerff jub cynlrq Tenpr npghnyyl qvq jung jr urneq. Vg'f dhvgr n fcyraqvq ovg bs npgvat juvpu uvgf dhvgr gur evtug abgr.

Don't let that stop you, though. It's quality television. (And now I want to read the book!)

From a Commonplace Book

[Responding to the question why he was not a member of any specific religion:]
Because they all appear to have prohibitions, admonitions and proffered truths which cannot be established as a matter of intellect or natural law, which is reason -- simple reason -- unattended by revelation of faith. Most of them insist that you believe in certain things not because you can prove absolutely that they are so, but because you want to believe in them. Give me a church or a religion that has one principle: Love one another as you love yourself, and I will belong to that church.

-- Abraham Lincoln

From a Commonplace Book

There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I’ve heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness.

-- Clement Greenberg

From a Commonplace Book

When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint; but when I asked why people are poor, they called me a communist.

-- Bishop Don Helder Camara

Secondary Sources On Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun

A friend of mine, seeing my previous post (on FB), asked whether there were "annotations" of Gene Wolfe's SF masterpiece, The Book of the New Sun.  Since I wrote a lengthy reply, I thought I'd repost it here, with links.  (In the following, the "you" is my friend, natch.)

I don't think there's quite what you're looking for. The closest that there is—and in any event the first secondary work devoted to The Book of the New Sun that one should lay hands on—is Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle, by Michael Andre-Druisi. It defines many of the obscure words, and also has a certain amount of commentary/exposition, although hardly a complete reading. Beyond that I can think of three other books, none quite perfect for your needs: there is Attending Daedalus by Peter Wright, which is about Wolfe's work in general but which focuses on The Book of the New Sun; there is Marc Aramini's Between Light and Shadow, volume one of a projected three-volume work discussing all of Wolfe's fiction, but its entry on The Book of the New Sun, while good, is brief (c. 40 pages) and is more thematic than annotational. And then there's Solar Labyrinth by Robert Borski, which has a number of essays on specific puzzles in the Urth cycle. All three are worthwhile; none are quite what you're looking for.

That's mostly it for books. There are a few essays scattered around — in review collections by John Clute, for instance — but nothing systematic. Three web resources might have some more of what you're looking for. First, there's the Wolfe Wiki, which is variable (some works get only a skeleton treatment, some a very detailed reading), but it looks like there's some good stuff there. There are the archives of the Urth List, which is the mailing list/forum for discussion of Wolfe's work, which has a lot of stuff in it, but so far as I know it's not indexed & you'd have to do a tremendous amount of searching. And then there's Reddit, about which I don't know much, but it looks like there's a fairly active Gene Wolfe section there. Again, while I imagine there's some good stuff in all three, none are quite what you're looking for.

One more set of resources to discuss. There are now two podcasts devoted to close readings of GW's work. One, The Gene Wolfe Literary Podcast, seems good, but it's just starting (and I've heard only one episode), and is doing a lot of short stories & many novels before they get to the The Book of the New Sun. So they probably won't get to it for years. The other, Alzabo Soup, is actually doing The Book of the New Sun now. But at this point I can't quite recommend it. I find many of their readings simply careless: some strike me as flatly disprovable, others as wholly wrongheaded even if not flatly contradicted by clear textual evidence. I'm getting a lot out of it — even with its problems, they pick out details & things I missed on my several times through the books — but I think their overall interpretation is questionable, and I think that, unless you feel you have a good grasp on the text, they will mislead as much as provide insight. I wish this wasn't so; after the first ep or two I had great hopes for it, but I have been disappointed as I've kept listening. I haven't stopped listening yet, but I may; at this point it's more frustrating than enlightening, although it is that, too, at least in certain local observations if not more broadly considered. Alas! I really wanted it to be great. (It's gotten a fair amount of positive attention, so I may simply be an outlier here, but for what it's worth a Wolfean whom I respect a great deal — whom I can't name, because it was a private communication — said they dislike it too, for some of the same reasons.)

Beyond that, I would suggest that a large number of the mysteries—not all, by any means, but more than you'd think—can be cleared up by simply reading the entire work (i.e. both The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun, the sequel) closely & carefully, and then doing so a second time, while the first is still fresh in your mind. That's a huge time commitment, of course — five books, each twice — but it's the best route I know of.

I do wish someone would put out a proper annotated edition. (No one will, and if they did they wouldn't hire me to do it, but I would love to if both of these counterfactuals were miraculously overcome.) Or that there was a "rereader's companion", online annotations that went chapter-by-chapter.

will say, in conclusion (after far more than you wanted to read, I'm sure!), that the best route is to get Lexicon Urthus, do a careful reading with it to hand, and then either do a careful rereading, or read the Wright, the Aramini & the Borski volumes, the WolfeWiki pages, and possibly explore other online stuff as well, and then do a careful rereading. Wolfe is work. Personally I think it's well worth it. But many others, doubtless, won't find it so. (Of course the books can also be enjoyed on a surface level, as a sword & sorcery romp, although that's obviously, A) not what they are when read closely, and B) not what you were asking about.)  

In Which, as a Throwaway Notion in a Letter, the Origin of the Autarch's Social Role In THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN Can Perhaps Be Found

And—though I pale to admit it—I have my vice. It is writing, and in everyday circles that is viewed a good deal more seriously than, say, pot probably is in yours. In short, your business is my besetting weakness; your business letters are my pornography; your shop talk my dissipation.

Which gives me a story idea. A nobleman, a pillar of the Jockey Club, who (on alternate Thursdays) creeps away from the Fabourg St. Germain to become (heh, heh!) a Montmarte used-lace merchant. Can't you just see him gloating fierce gloats as he speculates on Society's reaction to the news that he is secretly a petit commerçant? That's me except that I reverse it—I steal way to become a nobleman.

And you know what the petite bourgeoisie think of that.

— Letter from Gene Wolfe to Damon Knight, December 3, 1969

Reprinted in The Best From Orbit (1976), p. 337

From a Commonplace Book

My first concern is not for the reader. That would be pandering. My first concern is not for myself. That would be self-indulgent. The writer's first concern should be for the verbal object that's trying to get itself said.

-- William Gass

From a Commonplace Book

Antoninus said to Rabbi, "Why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west?" He replied, "Were it reversed, you would ask the same question."

-- Sanhedrin 91b [quoted in Dov Aharoni Fisch, Jews for Nothing, pp. 308 - 309]

From a Commonplace Book

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit... the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution.

-- Igor Stravinsky

From a Commonplace Book

Elements such as magic are labeled fantasy because their vocabulary is not scientific, and because they are placed in vaguely medieval worlds that are not historically connected with our present. Yet time travel is just as magical as turning lead to gold. The distinction is in the history, or the lack of one. Any fantastic motif can be science fiction if a history is even implied that leads from our world to the world of the text. If this history is dispensed with, the text is a fantasy.

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, The Novels of Philip K. Dick, p. 26

From a Commonplace Book

Some men interpret nine memos.

-- Palindrome by William Irvine

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

-- Palindrome (author unknown)

From a Commonplace Book

Three themes of anime: carnival, elegy, armageddon.

-- Seen on the internet; source lost [I read this in an Oubapo posting, more than a decade ago, and copied it.]

From a Commonplace Book

If America ceases to be a free country, you won't necessarily notice. It won't smell different, dark clouds won't gather on the horizon, the roads will remain open, movies will still play in the theaters, and television will, most assuredly, stay on.

Like the mass of people who lived in the Soviet Union, or who are now living in Iran, you'll go about your business, making accommodations, and trying to get by...

We're a long way from a mullacracy in the U.S., but we're definitely closer to being one than we were a few years ago, and, I'll say it again: what's most disturbing is how many people are unperturbed. And what those who are upset should understand is that, contrary to what we think we know in our bones, there aren't many effective arguments from self-interest in favor of freedom. Being free just isn't a matter of convenience, and being unfree isn't necessarily inconvenient. It's a matter of principle, and of pride. I don't think many people care about the principle, but, for a couple of hundred years, Americans have been fiercely, even violently, proud of being free. Are they still?

-- "Ogged" at http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.html#001957

From a Commonplace Book

Since I started doing interviews, I’ve answered the "preaching to the converted" question more than any other. It seems to me predicated on an unthinking use of the terms "preaching" and "converted." It’s not as if all preachers, including for instance John Donne, were merely dispensers of predigested, soundbite rhetoric and cliché; good preachers are gifted articulators of the thorniest, juiciest, most dangerous, most contradictory problems, dilemmas, controversies. It’s not as if the "converted" are always only Moonies lacking any sort of spiritual liveliness or freedom of thought. Quite the contrary. The converted, the congregation, united by certain beliefs, share amongst themselves bewilderment, despair, hope needing amplification, confusion needing examination and elucidation, and avenues of interesting and productive inquiry. Lockstep congregations are a sure sign of a moribund faith, of the absence of anything Divine. A good preacher rattles her congregants’ smugness and complacency, and congregants to do the same for the preacher. Good preachers are exhilarating to listen to, and the converted have a lot to think about. So this "preaching to the converted" question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater.

If one’s intended audience is "the unconverted," one is an evangelist. The evangelizing playwright usually makes dreary plays, cautious plays which try to woo and seduce hostile, recalcitrant people, people less enlightened than the playwright — plays of condescension, in other words, plays which arrange their glib, necessarily simplified certainties in neat rows and send them forth, marching into battle. Ugh. That’s a degradation of the power of theater, of the purpose and power of art. As I said, art suggests, describes, explores, tests ideas; art doesn’t issue marching orders. There are far better, more effective ways of organizing people than playwriting. And while art educates, it’s never sufficient as a means of instruction; at some point a more reliable narrative must be sought. Art should strive for a level of complexity and depth that mirrors the complexity and depth of life, and for that matter that mirrors the complexity and depth of politics.

Although there are times when a good, nasty skit is called for.

-- Tony Kushner (NY Times, June 4, 2004, "10 Questions for... Tony Kushner")

From a Commonplace Book

Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it. (And not all young people are lucky enough to be young. Think of those people at your college who wanted to be politicians or corporate lawyers, for example.) I'm not talking about the accouterments of youth: the unlined faces, the washboard stomachs, the hair. The young are welcome to all that — what would we do with it anyway? I'm talking about the energy, the wistful yearning, the inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of invincibility, the hope that stings like chlorine. When I was younger, rock music articulated these feelings, and now that I'm older it stimulates them, but either way, rock 'n' roll was and remains necessary because: who doesn't need exhilaration and a sense of invincibility, even if it's only now and again?

-- Nick Hornby (NY Times, 21 May 2004, op-ed page)

In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of "David Copperfield," the novelist David Gates talks about literature hitting "that high-low fork in the road, leading on the one hand toward `Ulysses' and on the other toward `Gone With The Wind,' " and maybe rock music has experienced its own version...

Maybe this split is inevitable in any medium where there is real money to be made: it has certainly happened in film, for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture, once upon a time. It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, "that high-low fork in the road" is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. It now requires more bravery than one would ever have thought necessary to try and march straight on, to choose neither the high road nor the low. Who has the nerve to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off? In other words, who wants to make art that is committed and authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include, rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of seeming not only sincere and uncool — a stranger to all notions of postmodernism — but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as well.

-- ibid.

From a Commonplace Book

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

-- Charles de Gaulle