Category: News & Curiosities

Two blog posts on reading that piqued my interest lately:

• Ari Marmell talks about being “Blind in the Mind’s Eye.” That is, when reading or writing descriptions, he does not visualize them, and if he takes the conscious effort to do so, “it doesn’t seem to add much value.” I would have loved to know what he does perceive foremost when reading…
• …an answer to which might be provided by Matthew Cheney’s discussion of “Ways of Reading,” in which he describes his own, primarily aural experience of the written word. Cheney also comments on the general usefulness of reading analytical (versus evaluative) criticism as a way of gaining access to other people’s perceptions of the same works – which is indeed a major part of why I love reading detailed, descriptive essays.

Since I’m always fascinated by differences in how people process and organize information – how do YOU read? Do you hear sounds first, or create images in your head, or some combination of the two, and/or something else entirely? Have you noticed that it affects what types of writing you prefer to read, or what you remember from what you’ve read and how you remember it? Somewhat on a tangent/more generally, do you feel that books demand you to read them in any particular way?  (I have one friend who can’t read a book unless she’s concurrently taking exhaustive notes and marking bits off with Post-Its. You should see her copies of  Thomas Pynchon and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.)

I’d describe myself as being primarily visual – although since I perversely have rather bad spatial and cognitive mapping skills, I suck at visualizing expansive and/or complex architecture and geography, except in a very impressionistic way. (Hence why sci-fi description frequently demands multiple re-reads from me – alien architecture and three-dimensional battle scenes are Right Out.) I notice aural qualities mostly on a subconscious level; if I’m interested in paying explicit attention to them, I either have to make a conscious effort of it, or read things aloud. (I suspect that’s not uncommon.) Secondary to my visual perceptions, I tend to form an overall sensual/synaesthetic impression, which is not infrequently influenced by the cover art. (Yep, I really, really do judge book covers, on more levels than one.) A random sampling:

• Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is flat, grey-white/blue-grey, and concretey. Her Earthsea Cycle is twilight-purple and gold, fading warmth, sun just gone under a horizon of black waves.
• Robin McKinley’s Sunshine is dark, warm, glossy, and… squishy. Like a molten chocolate cake (appropriately).
• A. S. Byatt’s short stories are greyish-gold light filtering through shallow water.
• Orson Scott Card’s Ender books are austere, even greyness, shading towards graphite, and a few degrees below room temperature.

That impression is a huge factor in my decision to re-read things – if I really, really like the feel of it, I want to have it recreated. It’s analogous, for me, to being attached to particular aspects of a season or time of day – wanting to see late-afternoon autumn sunlight coming in through a particular window, or to feel a particular temperature of breeze, say. I feel like there has to be a word for that in German…

– E

Harlan Ellison is selling his first typewriter.

– E

On a very blustery, ashen autumn day indeed –

“The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere –
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir –
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”

– from “Ulalume,” Edgar Allen Poe

—–

“The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast acorn cups underfoot in the russet slime of dead bracken where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lancinating cold of the approach of winter that grips hold of your belly and squeezes it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush.”

– from “The Erl-King,” Angela Carter

My reading lately: Poe, for the first time in years; Ligotti (meh^10 – why is he compared to Poe?); Sarah Arvio’s collection of poems about her ghostly “visitors,” Visits from the Seventh. Anyone have any other recommendations for October-appropriate reading?

– E

(It didn’t get that far, but maybe it will eventually, if I ever edge over some critical tipping point between “this is the part of my brain that is not filled with books” and “ALL IS BOOK HERE”…)

I suddenly remembered just now that I had a dream last night about reading a book by Jeff Vandermeer, whom I haven’t actually read yet. I don’t remember what the book was about anymore, but I remember it being fragmentary, illustrated, and mystifying. Dream-book, come back!

That further reminded me that about a month before I actually read K. J. Bishop’s The Etched City (my review), and was eagerly anticipating having the time to read it, I had a dream about reading it, a sketchy, dust-filled dream built around the one or two clear snippets I remembered about the book from Vega’s review of it (desert, outlaws, irreal city). When I actually read the book, I was only briefly disappointed that the city in it didn’t look anything like the one I dreamed about, since the actuality (“actuality”?) was just as satisfyingly mysterious, though a lot more humid. I’m still trying to figure out what was happening in the dreamed etched city, though.

Does this ever happen to anyone else?

– E

Jeff VanderMeer recently posted an extract from his introduction to Caitlín R. Kiernan’s newest and tantalizingly awesome-sounding collection, The Ammonite Violin, of which a shiny and as-of-yet untouched copy is sitting on my shelf…

“… [Kiernan’s] is a kind of dirty, modern lyricism. Like many of the Decadents, her prose is, yes, lush, but it’s also muscular, allows for psychologically three-dimensional portraits of her characters, and has the flexibility to be blunt, even shocking. Mermaids, selkies, vampires, and fairies all make appearances in this collection. However, the method of description and storytelling creates a sheer physicality and alien quality to the context for these creatures that both humanizes them—in the sense of making them real, if not always understandable—and makes it impossible to see them—so often the case when writers describe “monsters”—as just people in disguise or as caricatures we can dismiss because they exist solely for our passing frisson of unease or terror.”

Let this serve as a reminder to me both to start in on the collection as soon as possible, and to get off my butt and pull together my review of her last collection, A is for Alien, which is one of the most powerful collections I’ve read.

—

This has probably made its rounds of the Internet numerous times already, but this is the first time I’d thought to look for, and found it: approximate maps of China Miéville’s continent Rohagi, home to Perdido Street Station, The Scar (if only briefly), and Iron Council. Scanned from a mostly-Miéville issue of Dragon Magazine.

—

More from Jeff VanderMeer – brief interviews with some of this year’s World Fantasy award nominees. (My kneejerk reaction to the gallery of finalist novels’ covers: Yup, still want to cut whoever approved the slutacular cover art for The Red Tree.) Also, some interesting words on the selection process itself, since Kakaner and I had recently been discussing similar topics:

“As a former judge, I can say that it’s a very difficult and thankless task, picking the finalists, and knowing what goes into the process, it’s fair to say that the finalist list should be viewed as a winners list, in a sense. Judges will always be second-guessed, but every jury works very, very hard and reads many thousands and thousands of pages of material. It’s not a job anyone does except because they love fantasy.”

—

And finally – an interview with Kij Johnson, of “Spar” notoriety (Kakaner’s review):

“Everyone is disturbed by it, which is good. They should be. I certainly was—I had a hard time reading the entire story through when I was doing the revisions. There are probably a bunch of people who hate the story because they see it as a particularly unpleasant sort of porn. Other readers find all sorts of stuff in it: challenges to gender roles; semiotics; Stockholm Syndrome; an exploration of relationship dynamics; the definition of humanity. It’s been really cool, especially when I embedded something in there that people caught, and also cool when they see something I hadn’t verbalized to myself while I was working on it.”

Also has some other interesting bits, including details about her writing process and her thematic interests, as well as what the Internet has done for short-fiction publishing.

Go to:

Kij Johnson
Caitlín R. Kiernan
China Miéville