Not about myth this week, exactly, but legend–the sort of myth that begins as historical fact.
I was googling randomly to escape the weariness of my days and nights and I ran across the Wikipedia entry on Gráinne Ní Mháille (a.k.a. Grace O’Malley, a.k.a. the Pirate Queen of Ireland).
An account is given of the queen’s encounter with a certain Tudor pretender to the throne of Ireland.
[Legend meets punchline after the jump.]
A Fine and Private Place
Peter S. Beagle (Viking, 1960)
Peter S. Beagle wrote his first novel, A Fine and Private Place, fifty years ago at the age of nineteen. Which really annoys me because the book is so blasted good, making me aware that, although I was a skilled nineteen-year-old in my day, there was no conceivable way I could have crafted at that age a work as beautiful and knowledgeable about life, death, and love as A Fine and Private Place.
And Beagle’s greatest work, the traditional fantasy classic The Last Unicorn, still lay ahead of him.
I’ll try not to take this all personally and just feel glad we have A Fine and Private Place around… and still in-print, a minor miracle considering how fast our culture embraces new and tosses everything else into the dustbin.
A Fine and Private Place is one of the masterpieces of contemporary fantasy, and only the long shadow cast by The Last Unicorn keeps it from getting more notice. The tale occurs almost exclusively within an enormous graveyard, features ghosts and a talking raven, but it isn’t a horror story or even a dark fantasy, but a gentle and often sorrowful look at the difficulties of love and the realities of death, neither of which work out the way any person living or dead might expect.
I am somewhat embarrassed to confess that until now, I had never read a Discworld novel. It’s happened before: I’m bandwagon-phobic and when books and series become popular, a voice I’m often not even conscious of starts harumphing, “It can’t be any good. It certainly can’t be as good as everyone says it is.” The Harumpher was busy for years on the subject of Patrick O’Brian, despite his series being recommended to me by many people of impeccable taste whom I knew were undoubtedly right. Yes, I know it is a character flaw to act against one’s own best interests.
Living in the Great Arabian Book Desert, without the means to (as some people do) rent space in a container for a huge yearly shipment of books from Amazon.com, I’ve had to shove the Harumpher into a corner with a gag in her mouth. I was so happy to find a free (!!) copy of Master and Commander on the paperback exchange shelf at my son’s school. Those people on the bandwagon were right! The book is brilliant. So now I’m going to have to shell out $15 or $20 for a used paperback copy of #2, which I might even be able to find here. Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (all British editions here) showed up on the same shelf and I took it for my son whom I knew had read and enjoyed all of Pratchett’s kid books. But then I opened it up and found Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser practically on page 1. I was immediately drawn in by the mix of satire, broad humor, and complex intertextual engagement with the entire sword and sorcery tradition.
OK. OK, you guys have all read the whole series, probably. I’ve largely avoided humorous fantasy (although I enjoy humor in adventure fantasy, a different animal to my eye). This just seems smarter, by which I think I probably mean that it is serious at its heart. Or maybe it’s just because I, like Pratchett, prefer Lieber to Howard, or Dunsany, for that matter, although those and many other authors are in there too…. Anyway, it makes me happy that now I have two whole long series to look forward to.
Today’s New York Times has a short piece, including an audio clip, on Ray Bradbury. While it is ostensibly about his affection for public libraries and his efforts to keep them open now that funding cutbacks resulting from California’s budget crisis threatens their existence, it also contains two interesting tidbits, one which you probably already know and one which you probably don’t:
1. Bradbury and Bo Derek are buddies.
2. Bradbury hates the Internet.
While the first has nothing to do with libraries, the second does. And, at 89, Bradbury looks very much like the crotchety old man he is in proclaiming the Internet a waste of time.
You know that you’re an argumentative person when you feel the impulse to argue with something you agree with. This happens to me on an daily, or even hourly, basis. Today’s case in point is a slice from China Miéville’s recent and (justly) much-linked post, “Five Reasons Why Tolkien Rocks”:
“For those of us who regret the hegemony of the Classicists’ Classics, the chewy Anglo-Saxonisms of Mirkwood and its surrounds are a vindication. We always knew these other gods and monsters were cooler.”
This, of course, is the sound of my ox being gored… by my own damn ox: I’m a big fan of both mythologies (and others besides).
[Monstrous quibbling beyond the jump.]
Bill Ward has done some exploring in the library recently, inspiring me to drop in my own thoughts about some changes I’ve noticed recently in the public book-lending sphere.
I hadn’t taken a trip to the Beverly Hills Library for a few months. When I walked in last time I made an immediate turn to the right to head into the Periodicals Room and check on the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction…
Except the Periodicals Room no longer perched next to the front entrance of the faux-Moorish main library building. Instead there was a Kelly’s Coffee & Fudge, looking as if someone had lifted it off the airport concourse and dropped it next to the Reference Desk. For a moment, I wondered if I had gone into Barnes & Noble by mistake, instead of the public library.
The august editor of Black Gate once asked me to remove two occurrences of the f-word in a story, because, he said, of wanting to be able to sell the magazine to high-school libraries. While it proved remarkably hard to find a substitute with the resonance I wanted, in this case referring to brief and utterly non-romantic sex, I didn’t mind the request.
In contrast, I did mind another editor’s demand to remove quite a bit of content from my novel Bear Daughter. “Just because it’s in ethnography,” she kept repeating, “doesn’t mean it should be in your book!” One of the things she was most bothered by were the references to post-partum bleeding, and the magical protection it briefly provided against the Giant Carnivorous Bird of the Underworld. I still for the life of me don’t understand her squeamishness–especially given a couple of violent and bloody scenes, one involving exploding frogs and mass dismemberment, that didn’t seem to faze her at all. In this instance I kept the (female reproductive) blood. …
The spring issue of Conjunctions, the literary magazine of Bard College, is called “Between and Betwixt: Impossible Realism,” described as “postfantasy fictions that begin with the premise that the unfamiliar or liminal really constitutes a solid ground on which to walk.” This is a follow-up to its “New Wave Fabulist” issue back in 2003, which I reviewed for Locus.
I like the title of this new edition (makes more sense to me than new wavey fabulous), though I’m not quite sure what “postfantasy” means, other than that because it is published by academia, “post”-things are kind of popular, as are terms like “liminal.” You can see the table of contents here, with links to some stories available on-line by Elizabeth Hand, Ben Marcus, Jonathan Carroll and Jeff VanderMeer.
Something I’m putting on my reading list.
Recently I received a bit of a surprise when I went to a local library that has long been one of my ambush zones for the acquisition of unsuspecting books. All those lovely 25 cent mass market paperbacks with the stickers on the spine, all those nicely broken-in trades, all those hardbacks with the covers mylared over and glued down, were gone. Vanished. Whisked away on an electron breeze to inhabit the alternate world of the internet.
That’s a world I’ve hunted in a lot; in fact, the internet may indeed be my own Happy Hunting Grounds, the place where all those impossible to find treasures I’d only ever heard about as a kid grew like ripe fruit within easy reach. Not only was it simple and cheap, but it’s a world where anything is possible.
Of course, it’s also online cheapskates like me that are killing book stores.
I’ve blogged about my library shock in full over at my site, and talked about how important library sales were to me as a kid. How owning books, having a collection, taught a different sort of relationship and fostered a deeper respect for the world of books, fiction, and education than did borrowing them. I truly do think having these books available for purchase furthered the library’s mission of instilling a respect for the written word in the populace — especially in us kids who could buy a handful of SF novels with our lunch money after school — but, I suppose, it may have also reinforced other less desirable traits in me.
Joe Mallozzi’s online book club is reading Moorcock’s The Stealer of Souls this month (there’s already been some discussion here; Moorcock himself will appear as guest today, Wed. 6/10/09). So I thought I’d say a few words about the book… but which book is it, anyway?
That’s not a rhetorical question. Geeky details beyond the jump, cobbled together from various copyright pages, the wise words of Mr. Wikipedia, and other stuff I read somewhere once or heard someone say.