Black Gate

A rather entertaining comment on the cross-posted version of my last week’s entry takes up the subject of women’s roller derby skating in relation to the woman warrior.

Venturing onto another tributary of the Great River that is the topic of realism, a few years back I heard Rudy Rucker give a pretty interesting GoH talk at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The talk was called called “Seek the Gnarl,” and the pdf file can be found here. (Wow, his site is blocked by the UAE government! I wonder whether it’s for “offense against religion” or “hacking and malicious codes”…)

Basically, Rucker’s talk was about predictability and lack of it in fiction, and how fiction should strive–in plot, character, setting, and so on–for the complex beauty of chaotic structures like flowing water or tree bark. Those structures are what he calls gnarl. Too much unpredictability and we don’t feel the aesthetic satisfactions of pattern; too much predictability and it’s flat and boring.

A lot of genre readers might take issue with where he puts realism in his various tables–might feel that the problem with a lot of mimetic fiction is that it’s too boring and predictable. (I’d argue RR is talking about realism as a literary technique rather than as a marketing category, and that he means certain specific things by “mimetic realism” not necessarily found in so-called mainstream fiction, but that’s a rather long digression.)

When I heard the talk, I didn’t feel the concept of gnarl was completely adequate to describe the mix of familiarity and surprise possessed by really satisfying fiction. I’ve always liked Kenneth Burke on “the arousal and satisfaction of expectations” in fiction, and what I find interesting about that concept is the way that as readers we can be so completely satisfied by something utterly unexpected. We love surprises and reversals, obstacles appearing at unexpected times or in unexpected ways, a different reality suddenly ghosting into solidity out of what have now been proved to be mere appearances. The maguffin is a fake, the villain is your father, the first-person narrator is the one who dunit. But the satisfaction arises out of the feeling that a pattern, an arc, has been completed–it’s just one we couldn’t at first perceive. We’re outraged by surprise if it we can’t fit it into an aesthetic whole. So the most satisfying “arousal and satisfaction of expectations” comes from complex flows and overlays of pattern–competing patterns that combine in unpredictable ways, or unfold and transform one into another. In other words, we’re back to gnarl.

(The last few paragraphs are taken from an from old and longer LJ post of mine.)

I just finished Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, which, as anyone familiar with his work might expect, is thought provokingly funny. The main character, Jane Charlotte (and,yes, as fans of Ruff also know, he’s never met a literary allusion he doesn’t like) is in a detention center, has evidently killed someone, and also seems crazy. A psychiatrist seems to be trying to determine the underlying cause of her psychosis, which forms the novel’s narrative in which Jane recounts her fantastic adventures in a secret organization dedicated to the elimination of murderers, child molesters and other purely evil people. Of course, we’ve been down this road before — is she crazy or is there really some sort of alternate universe where good does triumph over evil. All through the book you’re trying to figure out how Ruff is going to turn the tables and come up with an ending that is something more than an average Twilight Zone denouement. And he manages to pull it off.

Fun stuff, though his previous book, Set This House in Order, is his best and the one I’d recommend first if you haven’t read him before. His other two novels are Sewer, Gas & Electric and the cult-classic Fool on the Hill, which was one of the first reviews I did for Black Gate publisher John O’Neil when he was helping to start the whole on-line reviewing thing at SF Site.

I recently reread Le Guin’s Language of the Night, and for a while I thought it might be a mistake. The book is a hodge-podge: printed versions of short speeches, introductions to her earlier Hainish novels, full essays with footnotes to provide that added kick, and a light frosting (in the edition I was using to reread) of Le Guin’s own second thoughts (mostly about issues of gender). Even back in my 20s I didn’t think all this stuff was equally valuable, and on my recent reread I was finding that a lot of what I had once taken as axiomatic was now useless to me.

For instance, I was struck by the way UKL made casual generalizations that were really unfounded, e.g. the idea that France “had no tradition of fantasy for the past several hundred years.” In my lost youth, I assumed she knew what she was talking about. Now I think: What about Anatole France? Jules Verne? Guy de Maupassant? Charles Perrault? The Absurdists? Of course there is a tradition of fantasy in France.

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I had thought to dive today into Joseph Campbell on the hero and the so-called monomyth–another irritant that, one could wish, might aid in the production of a pearl of wisdom. I have been distracted, however, by a self-labeled polemic on the topic of fictional women as kick-ass fighters that referenced my post of two weeks ago. Which put me in mind of a long-running, intermittent sort-of argument I’ve had with the most excellent sf writer Ann Zeddies, a long-time student of tae kwon do, as to whether women really could go up against men in combat and win before the invention of that great equalizer, the gun. My position is yes, provisionally.

Tomoe Gozen, 12th-century female samurai.

First of all, let me say that I mostly agree with the aforementioned polemic (which is not on the subject of women fighters generally). I certainly agree that Laila Ali’s physique is much more believable for a woman fighter than the lollipop figure favored in Hollywood actresses (huge head, stick neck and body). Secondly, let me say that I have no street cred as a fighter. In my 25+ years in the martial arts, I’ve never used it outside the dojo, unless you count last summer when I tripped hard on the sidewalk and actually rolled instead of landing in a bone-breaking crash. However, one of my seniors had come to our aikido school as a street fighter–in a South Philly gang, family members in the mob, etc.–and also after many years in other martial arts, so I feel free to rely on his insights and conclusions. Moreover, though this was in dojo conditions–meaning at the minimum that you know you are about to be attacked–I have many times successfully thrown and/or pinned men who are significantly taller, heavier, and stronger. So my thoughts on women fighters are not totally pulled out of a dark and hidden orifice.

All people, male or female, have physical limitations. …

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It’s been almost four years since I’ve moved, and half of my library is still in boxes, mainly because the bookshelves I’ve been wanting to install haven’t been.  Instead, there are some rather rickety temporary structures that weren’t really designed to hold books (more to display things) which are sagging under the weight of the volumes I’ve so far unpacked.  As it happens, I hope this weekend to get started working on the library, not so much the bookshelves as reorganizing what I already started, and soon realized I’d planned wrong, doing some painting and generally getting ready to install real bookshelves at some point.  I’m actually looking forward to delving into my collection and dusting off some stuff I’ve forgotten about (and/or haven’t gotten around to read).  In fact, the only thing I liked about moving was the chance to start reorganizing my books/records/CD collections, though, as the date of the move got closer, there was too much last minute stuffing into boxes hat I’m not entirely certain if all my “L” authors really are in the boxes with the “L” on them.  Could mean “late additions.”  We shall see…

Which brings me to this thing, an online way for you to catalog your stuff and get recommendations from people who like the same stuff you do. At this point, the last thing I need is more suggestions on what else I should be reading in addition to what I already haven’t caught up with, and I really don’t need a database, but I have started to add titles to the list as I finish them. I really don’t know why I’m doing this, other than that I can. Eventually, I hope to have everything shelved in a real library so that if I need something, I can physically see and retreive it. That, to me, is part of the enjoyment of books as objects after you’ve read them. But, seeing as how we are all moving, like it or not, to a virtual life in which we download pdfs and mp3s, it seems like a good place as place as any to start building these other shelves. At least they don’t cost nearly as much…

 

 

 

I’m an unrepentant role-playing gamer; an addict, if you must know.  My gateway drug was the original Dungeons & Dragons – the boxed set with the pseudo-Smaug red dragon on the cover.  My grade school chums and I played at every opportunity, from quick encounters at recess to marathon weekends of goblin-slaughtering and lair-looting.  OD&D was just the beginning.  From there, I branched out into other games: AD&D, Traveller, The Fantasy Trip, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Call of Cthulhu . . . the dragon’s share of my formative years were spent tooling around the galaxy, delving into catacombs, or losing my sanity to various squamous and rugose horrors.

The games changed over the years.  Oh, I still delve into OD&D, part of the so-called “Old School revival”, but most of my gaming time is spent playing D&D 3.5 or a homebrewed d20 version of Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy.  I’ve explored story games like Grey Ranks and In a Wicked Age, where the tale being told is more important than the framework of rules.

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Most sf/f criticism can be sorted into three four heaps (as far as I’m concerned): book reviews, literary history, snark, and stuff that doesn’t interest me. The first two categories are obviously useful, I expect; I wish those last two categories overlapped more. One wastes a lot of time in the snarkosphere.

Every now and then, though, I read something that goes elsewhere. I wouldn’t call it a heap–there aren’t enough things there to qualify as a heap. More like a stack. These are pieces of sf/f criticism that help me think about reading and writing–that enrich my experience.

Like I say: there’s not much there. But sf/f isn’t unique in that respect: much (not all) literary criticism strikes me as stuff by people who can’t read who are telling other people how to read. I generally find it unreadable and, what with one thing and another, I have to read a lot of it.

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Bill Ward recently posted two articles on “hyperspeed reading,” the first a reaction to columnist Sarah Weinman’s claim of reading 462 books in a year, and the second taking a deeper look into reading speed.

I’m not a slouch when it comes to the amount of books I read in a year. I finished eighty-one in 2008, but that makes me look positively lazy and incompetent compared to Weinman’s mid-four centuries claim.

However, here’s my confession. I actually am a speed-reader. I taught speed-reading and reading comprehension courses for two years as part of a private reading school that sent me around the country teaching through various University programs. Now I am coming forward to talk about my own experience with what “speed-reading” encompasses and discuss what happens in your brain when you step on the gas and blast through pages like Wally West. (Or Barry Allen. Or Jay Garrick. Or….)

There exists no single speed-reading method. A number of different schools teach varying techniques. Some of these I do not consider “reading” at all, but a form of skimming. The method that I taught uses a broad approach that combines several techniques, but still requires that students read every word. Nevertheless, I offer this disclaimer about what follows: this is only one of the ways of teaching what schools classify as “speed-reading.”

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