Deeds & Words

My comments on Lisa Tuttle’s book The Pillow Friend are up at fanlit.  This book is exquisitely written, with the main character’s interiority deeply developed.  The first half of the book has a powerful sense of place.  The book suffers from a multiple personality disorder; it doesn’t know what it wants to be. 

Also, to my bewilderment, despite the strong and plausible characterization, I never engaged with the main character. I remained intellectually interested in her, but never emotionally invested. Strange, since usually once a character grabs me I will forgive almost anything in the book.

Speaking of brilliant and insightful book reviews, (and we were, weren’t we?) thanks to Chad Hull for this posting on Fiction is so Over-Rated.  Chad, here is another book that I had never heard of, that I will have to go order right now, because you’ve made my interest in it that compelling.  Thanks!

The Said Book accompanied me to the writers’ group on Saturday.  It was the hit of the day.  I passed it around and various fellow writers observed it with awe, fear and contempt. 

“I thought it was a myth,” M murmured reverently, stroking its stained and battered cover with gentle fingers. 

“Rodale wasn’t evil,” K lectured bewilderedly.  “He published one of the first organic cookbooks. Are you sure–” he interrogated sternly, “that this book isn’t a joke?”

“Ha, ha!” expostulated L with hilarity, after opening the book at random. “ ‘Admonished effusively!’  That’s hilarious!”

“It’s disgusting!” R corrected. 

“I think it’s funny!” L shot back. 

S held up his hand. “No need to argue,” he interposed. “You are both correct.” 

R crossed her arms and glared at me.  “The book is evil!” she pronounced in a tone of dread.

*

 Seriously, I did take the book to the group, and they have given me a writing assignment; find a passage of dialogue from A Farewell to Arms, and said-book the heck out of it.  I think this will be fun! The most difficult part will be footnoting the Said-bookisms I use, since I really should use the book and not make up my own.

 Stay tuned!

My review of The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack is posted at Fantasyliterature.com

Book Bloggers Appreciation Week has nominated Fantasy Literature for an award.  We are on  the “long list” at this point.  Our stalwart editing board is frantically reading through this year’s reviews to try to pick the best possible one as our submission to the contest, which will be decided by internet voting.  Expect me to be mobilizing you to vote (if you can) later on.

Most of us agree that the review of Embassytown, by Bill Capossere, is one of the site’s best this year.

I think we will be able to submit other posts as well, particularly from the columns like Magazine Monday or Fanlit Asks.

Wish us luck!

My older review of Fathom, by Cherie Priest, is up at fantasyliterature.

My comments on Spring-Heeled Jack are also posted on the author page.  Go the Authors on the red menu bar, click and click on H to get to the H-names, and click on Hodder.  Mine is the second one.  Bill liked it better than I did, but he sees many of the same problems.

I shelled out $14 (eight for the book, six for shipping) to get my hands on JI Rodale’s evil grimoire, dedicated to the Dark Elder Gods of Bathos—The Said Book.

You may not have heard of JI Rodale, but he has affected your life. His pernicious, seductive words, so honeyed and so venomous, have dripped secretly into your ears while you thought you were sleeping. They have slithered into the hearts and even souls of gifted young writers, like the sentient roots of some dark, evil, eldritch, hell-sprung, twisted, gnarled, evil (did I say evil?) tree, clinging, thriving, driving out the good clean impulses and replacing them with really, really bad things, like adverbs and melodramatic action.

Said? they whisper. Such a bland, boring word. Why not “simper?” Don’t you think he’d “simper?” Just write it down. Nobody will ever know. 

Said? How dreary. Can’t she say it with a juicy adverb? Why not “furiously?” Why not “flirtatiously?” Why not “in a fit of glorious rage?” Just write it down. Go ahead. You know you want to.

Yes, in 1947 JI Rodale, with his wicked accomplice Mabel Mulock (actually, I have no idea who Mabel Mulock was, but she shared publishing credit with Modale,) declared war on the straightforward “said expression” as he termed it, and delivered a book full of bad other choices—and, as if a menu straight from hell weren’t enough, a second section of the book loaded with fatty, high-salt, low-nutrient-value adverbs. Why? Well, Mr. Rodale says that he thinks the word “said,” is repetitive and boring.

He slips up on page 16 of my edition, though, and admits his true purpose, when he writes about JP Marquand (and later Hemingway and Steinbeck). 

Marquand uses the word “said,” a lot, Rondale notes, “. . . but Marquand can get away with it because his writing has substance. And so it is with the Hemingways and the Steinbecks.” He goes on to say that Hemingway can get away with “said, said, said, said,” because he balanced it out with “hells and damns.” 

Marquand’s writing has substance. Yours and mine does not, so we’d better ladle up those alternative words and slap on the adverbs.

After his mock-scientific analysis of some famous writers and choices for “said,” Rodale gives us some choices. 

One can Accuse. One can accuse disgustedly, unjustly, deliberately, sternly, vainly. 

Or, one can Advocate emphatically, passionately, absurdly, warmly, fanatically, ardently. 

One can Expostulate fiercely, petulantly, madly, mildly (expostulate mildly? I don’t think one can.) 

One can Implore piteously, beseechingly, plaintively, or in tears. 

One can Jabber loquaciously. Why, yes, I suppose one could jabber loquaciously. I might not assume, if you were jabbering at me, that you were loquacious. I might think you’d just had one too many double espressos.

Please note that Rodale does not recommend you use these flashy words just in narrative, as in “She implored the judge for leniency.”  No. He wants them used as speech tags.  “‘Please, Your Honor, give my brother a second chance,’ she implored piteously.”

I thought this was probably Rodale’s first/only book, even going to far as to assume that, since it was published by Rodale Press, that it was a vanity project, or Daddy helping out an ineffectual son. Rodale has two other books to his credit/blame though; one is a synonym finder called The Sophisticated Synonym Book, and the other is The Substitute for Very. Here’s a thought about how to deal with the word “very.” Don’t use it. Or you can take Rodale’s advice. Here are some suggested substitutions for “very” as a qualifier of “risky:” altogether; notoriously; obviously; admittedly; gravely; seriously; inordinately; peculiarly (my personal favorite); inescapably. Using The Substitute for Very would be inescapably, peculiarly risky.

But The Said Book is his master work in his fiendish plan to destroy new writers. It was bad advice in 1947. It’s bad advice now. We have now all grown up reading alongside movies and TV, and, more importantly, talking and listening to people. We are used to watching body language and facial expressions for clues to motivation and behavior. We are used to paying attention to the rhythm of words and word choices in order to decipher meaning. Like it or not, text has to play by many of those same rules.

I found The Said Book on abebooks.com, and The Red Onion Bookstore shipped it within a week. This is not a reprint. Rodale himself apparently didn’t believe in the timelessness of his work since the book was not printed on low-acid paper and the pages have darkened to the color of toast. The logo of Rodale Press is a capering male figure playing some kind of wind instrument, a trumpet or something, but given Rodale’s dangerous influence I prefer to think of it as a blow-dart tube. By the way, I am delighted with the condition of the book because I conjure up a fantasy of Red Onion Books having an entire wall devoted to the unsold volumes.

I pictured Rodale’s trilogy of terror lined up on the desks of cheeky young guys who wrote the company newsletter, or the dutiful authoresses of The Garden Club’s weekly newspaper column, next to the typewriter, just above the stack of carbon paper, all through the fifties and sixties. Unfortunately, modern writers have still fallen prey to this book’s influence. Most recently, The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack owes a lot to The Said Book, all of it bad.

I have seen the book. I have looked its evil in the face. I have turned its foxed pages to read the horrors its author wants to inflict on us, and I have returned from the caverns of doom to tell you this; friends don’t let friends use The Said Book.

My hometown is in the heart of Gravenstein apple country.  Gravensteins are, hands down, the best baking apple.  They enjoyed a long golden age of popularity until the Granny Smith apple, which traveled better, replaced them.  Many of the local orchards converted to vineyards (what else?) and the last apple cannery closed about eight years ago.  There is good news for the Grav, though; the local food movement has made it a mascot and there is a resurgence in growers and sellers—and buyers.

The town celebrates the history and versatility of this apple with two annual fairs; the Apple Blossom Fair in April and the Gravenstein Fair every August.  Gravensteins ripen earlier than other apples, and by mid-August the harvest is in full swing.

The fair is about half a mile from my house.  To my disappointment, it was pretty expensive to get in–$12 for General Admission. I’m not old enough yet to qualify as a Senior, but they didn’t get in cheap either. I thought this was shocking, especially since the vendors pay $500 for a booth for the weekend (even though half is a refundable deposit). Paying $12 for the privilege of spending  more money didn’t sit well with me. Apparently I’m not the only one who feels that way, since attendance, at least on Saturday, seemed to be down a bit.

Get Your Steampunk On!

This is, in part, an old-style country fair, and I’m a sucker for the old tractors and mystery machines that show up every year. I came across this beautifully detailed gem, which I thought was some kind of a press, or even a weird baking device, at first. The man staffing this station told me that it is a sewing machine, circa 1868. It was pedal-driven, like the much later model (1888) sitting next to it. I was captivated by artwork. Even a sewing machine could be beautiful.

I see why steampunk is such a hit. Who can resist gears and cogs, big spinning wheels, and locomotion you can actually figure out? 

The hat vendor is also a big fan of steampunk, although she didn’t know about the Handcar Regatta, coming up in September.

Blast from the Past

I think I ate my last corndog when I was fourteen—that would be forty years ago.  Spouse and I were having a discussion about this issue and we both remember that I bought a package of corn-dogs once.  We cooked some and each ate about one bite before throwing them, and the rest of the package out, so I don’t think that counts.  I broke the long corn-dog fast on Saturday and had one of Uncle Bill’s. Since I’m not a huge hot dog fan, and I love cornmeal, the 50:50 ratio of breading to meat was perfect for me. The dog was browned to the color of a cattail. I ate it with some yellow mustard, which, Spouse informs me, is traditional. I would have incurred the wrath of the corndog gods if I had used ketchup, which was one option. Anyway, the whole thing was delicious. Even the hot dog was good. The cornbread had a crunchy crust and the inside was granular and soft, not too sweet. Eating a corndog meant that apple cobbler and apple fritters were not going to be a choice, but I did buy a pie to take home for dessert. The pricing confused me. A whole pie cost $10, but a serving of fritters cost $5. The math seems off.

A Horse is a Horse

The guy with the show Percherons was there with his dappled gray team, giving wagon rides. He has another set of matched grays that look white to the uninformed, and a pair of black Fresians. The dapples are my favorite. I got there early before the horses had worked too hard. The gelding was curious and friendly and wanted to eat my camera. The mare seemed a little checked out; not unfriendly, just sleepy. I hung out while the guy hooked up their harness. It turns out the mare is the lead horse on the team, once they get working. He had her bred to a Fresian, and she is due in April.

Farm life is nicely represented at the fair with llamas, goats, sheep and this year, strangely, a pygmy camel. The exotic bird folks were there with their macaws and parrots.

Everyone Deserves Music

The fair has two stages and they alternate bands. I listened to the String-rays. I liked them! They opened with a country-ish number called “Made in America.”  I couldn’t quite figure out the story line; there’s a reference to the corporation and the unions but it sounded like the unions “took what the corporations gave . . .” Not sure what the point was. Then they played an old-timey reel and some folk music. Good stuff—a great bassist and awesome fiddle player.

Go for the Cheap Lemonade

I paid two dollars for a glass of lemonade. It had ice. As I was walking home I spotted a lemonade stand in a cul de sac around the corner from my house.  A little boy about three ran toward me, shouting, “I’m the money man! I’m the money man! Gi’me money and I gi’you lemonade!” I could not resist such a stellar marketing ploy, so I walked up to where his folks were staffing the booth. I paid a quarter for a little cup of instant lemonade from a thermos and it was as lemony and tasty as the fair variety. The only thing missing was the ice. Let this be a lesson, folks, buy local. Buy from three year olds if you can.

(Warning; Spoilers. I have listed the biggest of them in Comments, but there may be others. Read at your own risk.) 

Last week I read two books. One was the popular and much-hyped Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder. The other was Devon Monk’s Dead Iron. 

As an aside, both books have been marketed as steam-punk. Both books have enough gleaming brass, gears and cogs, and things that go clickety-click and snickety-snack to qualify in that genre. Dead Iron, however, is fantasy; fantasy the way Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is fantasy. Spring-Heeled Jack, with an alternate history based on the idea that one of the fundamental incidents in the reign of England’s QueenVictoria never took place, hews more closely to science fictional steam-punk . . . 

. . . and I digress.

I want to write about my reactions to these two different books because I think it says something about how we access fiction. Spring-Heeled Jack is a wild, gaudy, theatrical “What if?” of a book. After the primary historical change, the other what-if’s follow fast and furious. What if, somehow, Victorian era scientists had discovered, and could manipulate, DNA (a common steam-punk trope)?  What if heavier-than-air-craft can fly?  What if coal could be augmented to make it provide better mileage—clean coal, I guess you’d call it?  This leads to airships with rotors, flying armchairs, steam-powered velocipedes—an oxymoron—and genetically engineered parakeets who deliver messages and are hilariously vulgar about it. 

Against this backdrop, Hodder positions two figures from history as his main characters; explorer and writer Richard Francis Burton, and poet Algernon Swinburne. People like Dr Livingstone, Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale wander through the tale now and then. The book covers murder mysteries, time travel and the appearance of a strange apparition that can spring twenty feet into the air and disappear.

Dead Iron takes place in a remote valley in northeastern Oregon, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The railroad is coming to the town of Hallelujah, and the townspeople have mixed feelings about it. Mostly, though, it is seen as a good thing, a sign of progress. In rapid succession, Monk introduces our cast of characters; a man who is hiding the fact that he turns into a wolf when the moon is full; a man so filled with love for his wife that he tries to return from death; a witch whose thirst for vengeance is stronger than the pull of her own blood; a local girl who was left as a foundling; and the railroad man, in exile from his own land, determined to take back his kingdom by force, even if it means destroying America in the process. 

Can you already tell which book I liked better? 

Dead Iron has a much less elaborate story, and a far smaller canvas than Spring-Heeled Jack. In some ways, it isn’t even as well plotted. The story drags badly about two-thirds of the way in, and Monk rushes her ending. She plays with standard fantasy, standard steam-punk, and some Appalachian-style folk-tales, such as the changeling boy who turns into a block of wood, all familiar tropes. Secretive werewolves, girls with hidden destinies and powerful witches really aren’t new characters either, but Monk’s way of developing them, from the inside (close-third person POV, mostly) makes them intimate and accessible. I fell into Dead Iron and barely came up for air.

Hodder’s characters are revealed from the outside, and it seems like there is a thick pane of glass between me, the reader, and their true thoughts and motivations.

Ah, but Michael Swanwick writes what-if fiction, and reveals his characters from the outside in, and I usually can’t put one of his books down. I loved Embassytown, China Mieville’s extravaganza of a what-if. Avice Brenner Cho, the first-person narrator, is not well developed as a character, primarily because she has to report on everything else that is going on, and I didn’t care. I can be sucked into a cool premise quickly if other things, like fine writing, are also in place.

Part of the character problem with Spring-Heeled Jack was precisely that the main characters were historical. Hodder felt free to play with history any way he wanted, but he pretty much left Burton alone. I think I would have been drawn in more quickly if Burton had been less the Great Man of History and just Richard Burton, exploring a mystery (in fact, Hodder works very hard to justify just why his Sir Richard Burton was even knighted). He has a similar problem with Swinburne, who is basically written as a cliché because Hodder can’t figure out what to do about the fact that real-life Swinburne was probably gay.

Monk’s characters are her own from the beginning. She uses mythology and folklore as a starting place, but these are not real pioneers who settled in the historical Wallowa Valley and Monk is under no obligation to remain true to anything except her vision. Neither is Hodder, but he acts like he is. Perhaps that’s the difference.

So, I liked Spring-Heeled Jack and I loved Dead Iron. The gender divide?  The triumph of character over idea?  I don’t think so. I think the “character” writer has to have an idea the reader can care about when she closes the book. And I think the “what-if” writer must give us people who engage our imaginations. And the best books, of course, are the ones that give us both.

My review of John Connolly’s supernatural thriller The Whisperers is posted at Fantasyliterature.com.  I wrote this so long ago I had forgotten about it!

Imagine that you are holding a jewelry box.  It is small; it fits in your palm.  The mother-of-pearl lid glimmers with the radiance of a new moon in the summer night sky.  Along the sides, the carvings remind you of swans, egrets flying, full-sailed boats or fishermen swirling nets over placid water.  The hinges are unobtrusive.  You open the box and see, nestled into the delicate velvet lining, a strand of gemstones.  Some flash fire, some hold color deep in their hearts. 

Reading The Oracle of Stamboul is like holding that box. 

Michael David Lukas’s book, at 297 pages, is just long enough to carry us to a different time and place.  The time is the late 1800s and the place is the capital of the Ottoman Empire. 

From the Oracle of Stamboul, I learned more than any map, any chart or talking head had ever taught me about the Empire, about Turkey, and about that numinous space in the world where east and west blend.  The Ottoman Empire existed for more than six centuries; a huge expanse of geography that was multi-ethnic and multi-faith. By the time Eleanora Cohen, the main character of the book, is born, the Empire is on the final curve of a long downward spiral.  The characters do not know that, but the book does.  It is against the dramatic backdrop of a pivotal point in history that we learn about Eleanora.

 On the day that Eleanora is born, a flock of hoopoes, a bird related to kingfishers, roosts in the town of Constanta, Romania, where Eleanora’s mother is in labor.  Leah dies during childbirth, leaving Eleanora to be raised by her loving father Yakob, a Jewish carpet merchant, and Ruxandra, her practical and disapproving aunt.  The birds, Eleanora’s flock, however, remain.  It soon becomes apparent that Eleanora is a prodigy in many ways.  She learns to read quickly.  Once she learns to read in one language, others come quickly to her.  She does arithmetic in her head, and she has a strange connection with animals.  These abilities terrify her aunt, whose disapproval of Eleanora grows. 

When Yakob plans a carpet selling trip to the capital of Turkey, Eleanora stows away in one of his trunks.  Eleanora has been fascinated by a six-volume novel called The Hourglass, and the adventures its characters have, but she finds crouching in a steamer trunk with no food or water is less glamorous than the book made it sound. 

 Eleanora had never truly considered what it meant to shut oneself inside a trunk.  When she had thought about it at all, she had always imagined that time would pass quickly, that, like the tedious parts of a novel, she could skim through the journey and arrive no worse for the wear in Stamboul.  This, of course, was not the case.  If anything, time moved more slowly, dragging its hooves like a weary pack horse forced to travel long days at the end of its strength.   

Her hoopoes follow her on the journey.  When she is discovered, it is too late to return her to Romania, so she stays with her father and his patron, Monsef Barcous Bey. 

Lukas’s descriptions are exquisite, painting the images of the river, the cities, bringing the smell and feel of the ocean, the taste of the food and the coffee.  Eleanora is a miraculous child, but she is still a child and her view of the world is child-like in many ways.  In Moncef Bey’s house she discovers a huge library, and is briefly tutored by the American headmaster, Reverend James Muehler, who is a spy. 

The point of view shifts among many of the characters, including the Sultan, Abdulhamid II, a kindly man who seems unprepared to rule his fractious empire.  The Sultan enjoys fortune-tellers, talking birds and various oracles, to the concern of his Grand Vizer and his mother.  Eleanora’s abilities, shocking in an eight-year-old girl, soon reach the palace and the ears of he sultan. Eleanora and the Sultan share a love of reading novels and a love of birds, and the hoopoes make another connection between the two. The sultan’s mother originally distrusts Eleanora, not because she is a child or because she doesn’t believe in oracles, but because Eleanora is a Jew.

 The story is small and fascinating, Lukas’s prose is exquisite, and he uses action and sensuous detail to reveal not only place and time but character, as in this sequence when the Sultan, who is hungry during Ramadan, goes scavenging for a snack. 

Glancing out again at the courtyard, he opened the larder doors and pawed through the spices, a tin of sardines, and a stale piece of flatbread.  He was on the verge of eating the bread with the sardines when he discovered, at the very back of the larder, a box of baklava.  Glistening with syrup, the pastries were dusted with bright green ground pistachios.  His mother had a penchant for sweets.  It would be no surprise if she had hidden the box specifically for consumption during Ramadan. She was not a young woman, and had been afflicted by the sugar disease for some time now.  In either case, she would never know that it was him who had found it.  Glancing over his shoulder, he popped one of the pieces into his mouth and swallowed it with only two chews.  The next piece he took his time with, savoring the sweet, flaky crunch of the dough and the peculiar tang of the ground pistachios. 

The scene not only gives us the texture and flavor of the treat but tells us a great deal about the sultan, the supreme ruler, and his relationship with his mother. 

Eleanora is placed in the awkward position of having great influence but no power.  The best advice she has been given is from the midwife who helped deliver her, who tells her, “Trust yourself.  Listen to your stomach.  This is all we have.”  This advice guides Eleanora as she struggles to find her way through a morass of political upheaval and the force of history. This is a beautiful, whimsical book, with the research woven deeply into the strands of every sentence.  It is as intricate as one of Yakob’s fine carpets.  The book is complimented by an exquisite cover (although Michael David Lukas told me, when I met him at the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, the birds on the cover are not hoopoes) and lovely endpapers with a map of the empire. 

I wanted to end with some grand, evocative sentence like, “The book is as real and enlightening as the glint of sunlight on the Bosphorus,” or, “It stays with you like the taste of honey-drenched pastry,” but I think those don’t do the book justice.  This is one of the most beautiful books you will read.  Go read it.