Northwest Passages

Northwest Passages (2009) by Barbara Roden contains some very enthusiastic blurbs from the likes of Peter Straub ("Barbara Roden has placed herself among the ranks of the most telling, most effective, most readable living writers of the strange and fantastic tale") and others.  I know to take such blurbs with the proverbial grain of salt, yet I couldn't help but expect something more than the mostly competent yet uninvolving tales that comprise this collection. Only in the title story does the plot and characters cohere into something more than the quotidian. A few of the other nine tales read almost like cribs from the diaries of polar explorers--interesting, but nothing special.  I wanted and expected to like this more than I did, but sadly found a number of the stories a slog to get through.

A Search for the King

Gore Vidal is perhaps best remembered as an American public intellectual with a pungent wit. Of his writings, his essays are especially noteworthy, and many of his historical novels were  popular bestsellers. A Search for the King, published early in his career, is not a typical Vidal novel in a number of ways. Foremost because it mixes elements of fantasy into the story.  Basically, the novel is set in the late twelfth-century and follows Blondel, a faithful troubadour of King Richard the Lion-Heart. Early on, Richard is taken prisoner on his way home from the Crusades, and the novel tells of Blondel's adventures in central Europe while searching for him. These adventures include a fight with a dragon, meetings with werewolves and a vampire, but none of these fantastical encounters are entirely traditional according to legend.  The dragon does not breath fire, the werewolves act as bandits (as their king admits, "instead of eating human flesh we live on gold taken from human visitors"), the giant grew up in a monastery until his obtained his Growth, which the monks regarded as the work of the devil so they cast him out. The vampire is a practical female Countess, who feeds on her subjects but is careful not to kill any of them. And even a unicorn makes an appearance, but not to a young virginal girl but to a young boy on the verge of manhood whom Blondel had befriended.  A Search for the King is a slow-moving, meandering book, and not among Vidal's best, but I enjoyed it.

Black Unicorn

Black Unicorn (1991) by Tanith Lee is the first of a trilogy.  It is a slim story, part of the Dragonflight series of books arranged by the book-packager Byron Preiss. The Dragonflight series ran for about six years and included a dozen or so short illustrated novels by various authors. Black Unicorn has a small number of adequate ink drawings by Heather Cooper, and a color cover, which fails to capture the flavor of the text. The story itself concerns Tanaquil, the daughter of the desert sorceress Jaive. Tanaquil has a special talent for fixing things.  Her piecing together of the skeleton of a unicorn brings the creature back to life, and starts her on a quest to the city near the sea, which also involves the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy.  I found the story surprisingly engaging (probably due to Lee's undoubted stylistic talent), and look forward to reading the next book. 

Lee Brown Coye

Recent years has seen a resurgence of interest in artist Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981).  First there was the illustrated biography Arts Unknown: The Life and Art of Lee Brown Coye (2005), by Luis Ortiz. In 2011, Centipede Press published a large retrospective of Coye's art.  And more recently, Mike Hunchback and Caleb Braaten have published Pulp Macabre: The Art of Lee Brown Coye's Final and Darkest Era (2015).  All three of these volumes have their attractions. 

Coye's macabre artwork is perhaps best known from its appearance in three anthologies edited by August Derleth in the 1940s—including Sleep No More (1944), Who Knocks? (1946), and The Night Side (1947)—and in Weird Tales magazine from 1945 through 1952.  Coye also did illustrations for Arkham House books, including Three Tales of Horror (1967) by H.P. Lovecraft. 

Pulp Macabre focuses on the Coye's projects from the 1970s, including work published in Carcosa Press books and Whispers magazine. Coye had a stroke in the late 70s, and tried to turn back to art, but the examples shown here are sketchier than was Coye's wont, though their style is still characteristically Coye's. Still Pulp Macabre makes for another fine Coye collection. 

The Prozess Manifestations

The Prozess Manifestations (2018) is Mark Samuels' new collection of six stories, all but one of which is explicitly connected by some mention of an offstage character named Doctor Prozess, who is involved in some way with some very odd and dark happenings. 

Most of the stories are quite engaging, save for the final tale, "In the Complex," which I found rather diffuse.  The best tale, for me, was the longest, the novella "The Crimson Fog," in which a military rescue mission heads into an enlarging area covered by a mysterious and deadly crimson fog. The idea is reminiscent of some aspects of the Tarkovsky film Stalker (1979)--which was clearly also the inspiration for Jeff VanderMeer's irritatingly context-less novel Annihilation (2014), bettered in its recent film adaptation. Yet whether Samuels' novella descends from Tarkovsky or VanderMeer I cannot guess. Samuels' novella is certainly much more interesting than VanderMeer's novel, and one wishes it went on a lot longer.

I'd Rather Be Reading

I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life, by Anne Bogel, is a small book of short essays about reading.  I normally like books about books, and books about reading, but each of these twenty-one short pieces seems designed to be just perfect reading timewise for a quick sit-down in the smallest room in one's house.  That isn't such a bad thing on its own, but the tone and style of the essays are that of a fatuous blog of a middle-aged person who rambles on while saying nothing. A complete waste of time.

The Karkadann Triangle

The Karkadann Triangle is a limited edition booklet (and ebook) containing two stories: "Unicorn Magic" by Patricia A. McKillip, otherwise unavailable; and "My Son Heydari and the Karkadann" by Peter S. Beagle, a story previously published in Beagle's collection The Overneath (2017).  McKillip's tale is very slight. It concerns a unicorn who had battled a sorcerer, and the sorcerer managed to change the unicorn into a young woman and send her into the future. There really isn't much story to it beyond that.  Beagle's story, on the other hand, is a real gem.  It concerns a young Persian boy who against all reason saves a dying karkadann, a monstrous one-horned beast known primarily for killing things.  Beagle's telling of the tale is near perfect.

Photographing Alice

Simon Winchester's small book, The Alice Behind Wonderland (2011), is deceptively titled and presented.  With the famous 1858 photograph by Lewis Carroll of six-year-old Alice Liddell (who was the inspiration of Carroll's famous Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) gracing the cover, and with the title as it is, one suspects a book more about the real Alice than anything else.  Yet this book turns out to be a potted biography of Lewis Carroll, emphasizing his hobby of photography, with only a short chapter at the end recounting the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves when she visited America in 1932 at age eighty and was overrun by news reporters and photographers. Which wouldn't be a bad thing (there is a good chapter describing how the camera Carroll used worked), but even this coverage is hampered by the fact that there are no other photographs in the book, despite numerous descriptions and analyses of them. It left me resorting to the internet to find the examples that Winchester describes in order for his argument to register.  As an introductory biography of Lewis Carroll, this book seems okay, but if one wants something more thorough and rigorous (as I wanted) this book doesn't meet those larger expectations. 

The Other Side of Green Hills

The Other Side of Green Hills (1947) is a children's book by John Keir Cross.  It concerned five children who are staying at a house called Green Hills in Berkshire over a Christmas holiday. They discover that there is another dimension, an Other Side, to the house where things are very different. On the Other Side they encounter a strange pair, an old man and a young girl, who are called the Owl and the Pussycat after the famous nonsense poem by Edward Lear. (The British edition of this book is titled The Owl and the Pussycat. The title was changed presumably because American children wouldn't understand the reference.)  Owl has the very annoying tendency to burst into song. Later in the book things take a darker turn, as the children find out that an evil sorcerer, who controls the creepy Moon Folk,  is seeking to open further pages of the Book of All Wisdom, by which he can rule the universe. The Owl and the Pussycat and the children must find a way to stop him. 

This is an odd book, and the initial whimsicality doesn't mix well with the more serious later parts. Even the whole set-up doesn't seem very well thought-out, and the resultant story doesn't really engage the reader. And the illustrations by Robin Jacques are alternatively interesting or off-putting. The whole book is a misfire.

Paperbacks from Hell

There was a horror boom in mass market paperbacks that ran from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.  The origins of the boom can be seen in the mainstream success of Rosemary's Baby (1967) by Ira Levin, The Other (1971) by Thomas Tryon, and The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty. These books were filmed in 1968, 1972, and 1973 respectively. Stephen King came along with Carrie in 1974 (paperbacked in 1975), but it wasn't until The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978) and The Dead Zone (1979) were becoming bestsellers that the floodgates really opened. For the next decade or so, horror as a publishing category was in boom. 

Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix chronicles those years, and is profusely illustrated with covers from the books published during that period.  Most of the cover art is decidedly cheesy, and Hendrix's text is often snarky, and one wishes he wrote more about the literary merit (or lack thereof) of more of these books, for among the cheesiest of covers there hides a number of worthy books that didn't deserve to be marketed the way they were.

But the comments and descriptions are still often helpful, especially when it spells out for me the quality and content of certain authors and books that, for whatever reason, I decided not to read in those years. Though tempted by some of the titles back then, in virtually every instance I find from Hendrix's comments that I'm better off not having read those books. This is a matter of interests and aesthetics, not of quality.  Occasionally Hendrix's commentary borders on too glib, but there is a lot to think about while reading this book, and I'm glad to have done so.

Buffalo Gals, etc.

Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987) is a mixed collection of stories and poems by Ursula K. Le Guin, including reprints together with one new story ("Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight"). All concern some aspects, usually mythic, of animals  or other sentient presences, and their interaction with humanity.  In the new story, a young girl spends time with an older woman who is the trickster Coyote.  The best story in the book is science fiction, part of Le Guin's Hainish tales, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," from 1971.  Some stories read like writing-class exercises, like the extracts from the purported Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics, which includes a discussion of the poetry written by ants, and how to approach the sea-literature of the penguin. Another story, "May's Lion" tells the same story twice, from a realist perspective, and from a fabulist one. The volume as a whole is not Le Guin at her very best, but even middle-of-the-road Le Guin is rewarding and well worth reading.

Alberto Manguel's Many Libraries

Alberto Manguel's new short book is called Packing My Library. The subtitle, "An Elegy and Ten Digressions," hints at the quirky formlessness of the book.  It could as easily have been subtitled merely "An Elegy" or "Twenty-one Digressions." These meditations are bookended at the beginning of the book by Manguel packing up his personal library of some 35,000 volumes in rural France before a move to small apartment in Manhattan, and to Manguel at the end having become director of the National Library of Argentina, thus responsible for another library on an even larger scale. In between these endposts are Manguel's reflections on a lifetime of reading, and on his own relationship with books. He notes at one early point that “my libraries are each a sort of multi-layered autobiographies," and later wonders:

“What quirk made me cluster these volumes into something like the colored countries on my globe? What brought on these associations that seemed to owe their meaning to the faded emotions and a logic whose rules I can now no longer remember? And does my present self reflect that distant haunting? Because if every library is autobiographical, its packing up seems to have something of a self-obituary. Perhaps these questions are the true subject of this elegy."

Further on he notes:  “The books in my library promised me comfort, and also the possibility of enlightening conversations." And occasionally he turns wistful:  “The constancy we seek in life, the repetition of stories that seems to assure us that everything will remain as it was then and is now, is, as we know, illusory. Our fate (Ovid has been telling us this for centuries) is change, our nature is to change.”

Overall this is a fine introspective book about reading and books, and their value not merely to one man but to humanity.

The Sins of Jack Saul

Jack Saul (1857-1904) was a male prostitute in Dublin and London. He was famously involved in the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889, in which the involvement of highly-positioned society figures was covered-up during criminal prosecutions related to a London homosexual brothel located on Cleveland Street. Saul was also the central character and contributor to an infamous volume of pornography, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881). The Sins of Jack Saul tells Jack's story, and provides a detailed look at the Dublin and London gay underworlds of the mid-Victorian era, based on archival documents. I could wish that the sources were better detailed, but the narrative itself is well-written and the subject covers in detail aspects of the Victorian underworld that are usually glanced over if discussed at all. I found the book fascinating. The copy I read of The Sins of Jack Saul is labelled the "Second Edition" and was published in 2016.  It doesn't say when the first edition appeared. (The cover photograph is not of Jack Saul—no photographs of him are known to exist).

Totalitopia Plus ...

PM Press has a series of small books on "Outspoken Authors." They are a mix of short fiction (usually at least one previously unpublished story), perhaps some essays, a lengthy interview, and a more than decent bibliography. This time I've read the John Crowley one, as I've read a number of his previous books with considerable pleasure.  For me, the interview was revelatory, and the overview of Paul Park's books made up by far the most interesting items in the volume.  Oddly, the fiction just seemed to me too diffuse--well-written but without real heart.  The new story ("This Is Our Town") which opens the book is sets the tone for all that follows, and later stories like "Gone" (a curiously passive account of aliens) and "And Go Like This" (headed by a Buckminster Fuller quote which was clearly the springboard for the story) seem pointless exercises. Crowley can be excellent, but this volume is neither representative of his work, nor a good starting point, despite its undeniable literary qualities. 

Loose (SF) Canon

Charles Platt was a seminal figure in science fiction from the 1960s (New Worlds days, in London) through the early 1990s, as a writer, editor, and witness to the scene (mostly in America, to which he emigrated in 1970).  Loose Canon (2001) collects a bunch of his essays that appeared in various venues such as Interzone, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, as well as some zines published by Platt himself.  In a simple sense, the book exemplifies his disillusion with the science fiction sphere as place for literary experimentation as well as technological optimism.  Thus it often reads angry, bitter, and cynical, but it always reads true. One may not always agree with Platt, but his views are always cogent and worth reading.

Another Borges

Having just read Doctor Brodie's Report, I still felt the need for more Borges, so I turned to the anthology Extraordinary Tales, by Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated in 1971 by Anthony Kerrigan, and originally published in Spanish in 1953. Basically, it's a collection of passages, often of some kind of transformational scenes (mythological, philosophical, historical), from the editors' wide reading through world literature. Most source are verifiable, but some are not (or the passages that are given do not appear in the work cited), so there is some of the usual Borgesian playfulness. Overall, the tales are moderately interesting, but there are no real classics. Again, not first-tier Borges, but not without interest.

Doctor Brodie's Report

In the Afterword to Doctor Brodie's Report (1970), Jorge Luis Borges notes that these eleven short stories are the first he has written since 1953.  Thus they can be considered late-Borges, which is different from classic-Borges, which includes such first-class tales as "The Aleph," "Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius" and many others.  Though the tales collected in Doctor Brodie's Report appeared in English in such venues as The New Yorker (five stories), The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine, they remain second-rate Borges, but they are all worth reading.  The best stories in the book are the first, "The Gospel According to Mark," and the last, titular story "Doctor Brodie's Report."  

The Making of The Wind in the Willows

This volume, published by the Bodleian Library of Oxford University (and showcasing some of their holdings of Kenneth Grahame's manuscripts), is a very attractive and nicely illustrated account of the origins and publication of Kenneth Grahame's classic, The Wind in the Willows. There isn't much more to say about it, just that if you like this kind of book (as I do), this one is well-done and engaging.

Le Guin's Last Words

Ursula K. Le Guin corrected the proofs of this small book just one week before her death in January 2018 at the age of 88.  It is called Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing.  It began as conversations with David Naimon at a small community radio station in Portland, Oregon, where Le Guin lived.  The book version of these conversations is divided into three main sections:  "On Fiction," "On Poetry," and "On Nonfiction."

All three parts are interesting, though the one on poetry is on a foreign ground for me.  Nothing seems out of place if you have read Le Guin's nonfiction, particularly her recent collection Words Are My Matter (2016), which is referenced often in section three. 

All in all this is a pleasant coda to a long and distinguished career. 

The World Turned Upside-Down

The first words I read by Junot Diaz were his supposed confession of having been raped as a child, published in the April 16, 2018 issue of The New Yorker.  All the Holden Caulfield bells went off in my mind:  Phoney!  Sexual assault is charge to be taken seriously, but in this case it seemed that Diaz was making a generic and contrived complaint, one that just didn't (for me) ring true. Soon afterwards some charges against Diaz himself of sexual abuse surfaced, which made his "confession" seem even more like a calculated pre-emptive strike for sympathy.  Be that as it may, I thought I'd give one of his books a read, and by most accounts the book to read was his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Well I'm now completely baffled as to why this book won any award at all.  It's a poorly written account of the sad (and not short enough) life of a Dominican geek in New Jersey, with the author sneering at his characters all of the time.  If something as repulsive as  MTV's Jersey Shore had been based on a novel, then the novel would share a kinship with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. 

After struggling to get through Diaz's book, what a great pleasure to read The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things (2018), a short story collection by British writer Mark Valentine.  It contains twelve stories, all originally published in small press sources between 2013 and 2017, plus a section "Notes on the Border" comprising some diary entries from 2001 through 2003.  There is more talent and artistry in a few pages of Valentine's prose than could be found in an entire novel by Diaz.  The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things was published in a limited edition of 199 numbered copies. Why is there such a disparity, and one in the wrong direction, between the receptions of Diaz and Valentine? Valentine is a literary writer, while Diaz is schlockmeister of the tee-vee generation.  It's a sad world that Diaz is acclaimed while Valentine is read only by the cognioscenti.

Strike One, Strike Two . . .

Some books just don't click with particular readers, for various (often personal) reasons.  Two books encountered in succession struck me this way.

First was The Forever War (1974), by Joe Haldeman. Yes, it's a patently obvious contemplation of the Vietnam war, stretched across space.  Yes, it won the Nebula Award in 1975, and the Hugo Award in 1976. And it's well written, but I just found it hard slogging, with themes that do not much interest me, and characters with attitudes that (to me) belong to out past not to our future.

Next came The Gates of Paradise (1960) by George Andrzeyevski.  It was translated from the Polish in 1962 by James Kirkup.  I'd seen the 1968 film of the novel, and found it to be an interesting if exasperating mess, gradually revealing the flaws behind the people who were involved in a religious quest in medieval France. So I thought that perhaps the original source might be better. Alas, it's not, and the film at least has the benefit of eye candy, something lacking in the book.  In fact the book is one of those pointless attempts at being avant garde. Its contrivance is that the entire novel is one long run-on sentence (with a second five word sentence as the final line). The contrivance palls very quickly and it is a struggle with little reward to keep reading on, and on, and on.

Vidal, of Course

Gore Vidal (1925-2012) wrote novels, essays, plays, screenplays, etc.; he was an all-about man-of-letters, with a polished style and a quick wit.  Of all his writings, I find his essays to be of the most consistent high quality.  This volume, Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking (1999), edited by Donald Weise, collects Vidal's writings on sex, mostly on same-sex relations.  Vidal had some interesting attitudes.  Though he spent some five decades with a male partner, he shunned the term "gay" and "homosexual" (as a noun).  He was perfectly open about his relations with men, but he would say there are homosexual acts but not homosexuals, even as many others accepted the term "gay" or "homosexual" as a badge of honor. 

This book contains fourteen essays, and three long interviews. The standout essays are "Sex Is Politics" and "The Birds and the Bees", but Vidal is also very acute in writing about people he knew, from Eleanor Roosevelt, to Tennessee Williams and W. Somerset Maugham.  The interviews are somewhat lesser.  Vidal is at his best in writing prose.

A few of Vidal's stray statements on modern culture strike me as worth repeating for their self-evident truths:

"If I were dictator or president or otherwise in control of a well-run country . . . I would not allow any religious group to have schools. And without schools, there would be no Catholic Church in two generations because their doctrines are so insane that nobody in his right mind would accept them.  Then I would tax all churches heavily. That would reduce their influence by 90 percent." (p. 238)

"I don’t think Western Civilization as I’ve understood it and cared for it will continue. I don’t really in my mind’s eye see the human race in existence for another hundred years, right or wrong. When you feel like this, it makes it very difficult to create a work of art because I think the principal impulse to create is the will to make something permanent, even though you know that from the stand-point of eternity, nothing is permanent. But certainly in terms of the generations of man, as the Bible would put it, you do have a sense of continuing and addressing future generations. And so you will not become entirely extinct because of what you have wrought. Well, if you don’t have that sense or if you are fairly convinced that there is going to be no future either for the written word as you practice it or for the human race as such, well, this sort of takes the moxie out of you. And I don’t think I’m the only one to feel this.  I think that the deterioration in all the arts that we are now seeing is a sign of this." (p. 250)

The Seventh Ogre

Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981) was primarily an artist of the weird.  Early in his career, he adapted and illustrated an East Indian folk tale as his first book, The Seventh Ogre (1932).  The story tells of a blind man and a deaf man who team up and have a number of adventures, including while scheming to steal the gold of an ogre, who calls upon six other ogres to help him (unsuccessfully) defend his gold.  While Coye's macabre illustrations are interesting and well-done, they don't seem a very good match for the tale. Still the combination makes for an interesting little book.

The Secret Lives of Authors

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Writers (2007), edited by Dan Crowe, is a kind of coffee table book about writers and their writing spaces—their desks, their surroundings, their rituals, and their favored desk-top tchotkes.  Basically, the editor wrote to sixty-some-odd writers about their daily work as writers. There are some well-known authors included, but a lot of the names are of less-known, and all of them are decidedly pretentious in a literary way (i.e., genre authors were evidently not asked).

As an exercise, I though the book sounded interesting, but the end-result is considerably less engaging.  One goes from such insights as Lionel Shriver's note that "having the nerve to write yet another book in a world already drowning in blather requires bravery, arrogance, and willful naiveté" to Tim Carvell's "the only way to write is to first spend a considerable amount of time not writing." Well, both statements are true, but it's rather sad that they represent the best this book has to offer.