Work proceeds apace: I have reached the part of the draft of the 46th novelette where I can loop back to finish the unfinished draft of the 45th novelette, and when that’s done I can skip ahead to what of the 46th novelette follows immediately thereafter to write that down and then, finally, settle back to finish what’s left of them both. And then? Revision, and polish, and cut to fit, and to press; and then, the third season will finally have begun.
Meanwhile: might I draw your attention to an avenue of support, for the city? There’s Patreon, for those who favor the tried and true, more commercial end of the market, but also Comradery, for the scrappy upstart end—but also, cooperatively owned and democratically run. —The tiers and the benefits from the city are the same for either, so join as you are moved; patreons and comrades receive regular updates, added extras, previews, and of course electronic and paper copies of the novelettes as they’re completed, before their public publication.
In June, for instance, there was a trip to Newport, to re-fix some perspectives and some qualities of light for the fifth volume, as well as to shoot some potential covers for upcoming zines—so, in July’s update, patreons and comrades got a preview of some possibles:
And then, coming up, in August’s update, patreons and comrades will get the cover reveal for the 45th novelette! And the title reveal, as well. Season three, step by step, begins to take shape. —And of course there’s the fact that the new novelettes won’t be appearing here until the re-runs catch up: patreons and comrades should be seeing no. 45 in about September, I’m thinking; it’ll be over a year after that before it shows up here.
So: Patreon, and Comradery. Sign up if and as you like to support the city—but of course, it’s the reading that is all. My thanks to each and every one of you, however you’ve come by.
Posted 4 days ago.
This is a good place to discuss point of view in The Emperor of Gladness. Perhaps it is dry, technical, and petty, but point of view matters a great deal to me as a reader. Point of view describes the organizing intelligence of a story. It controls the time signature, the outlay of information, the mode of telling, the mediation of backstory, the integration of event and description into experience, which itself compounds into meaning. Point of view isn’t just first, second, or third person. It’s also verb tense. It’s whether something is experiential or summarized. It’s whether or not a story is retrospective. Whether it’s told focalized through this character or that other character. It controls what feels right in a story versus what feels extraneous or improper.
The point of view in The Emperor of Gladness is unstable in a way that, pardon me, feels inappropriate. Take the first chapter, which I’ve just praised. Why does the narrator switch to an I? Or the novel in general: Why are some passages in the past tense and others the present tense? Are the present tense passages meant to be memories or dreams or both? Is the story retrospective? Is it the boy on the bridge telling us the story from many years later? Is this a story focalized through the boy? Certainly at times, we hang close to Hai, funneling observations and insights through the tight scrim of his voice. At other times, the novel sheds this limitation and attains a lyric intensity that sounds more like the Vuong of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in its sonorous profundity. Which loops us back around to the question of the narrator and who is telling us this story. Does it flow from an I and is that I Ocean Vuong or is that I Hai, the boy on the bridge at the start of the novel?
Naturally, some will say that the Western tradition of the realist novel as it descends from Henry James with its single, controlling point of view is an outmoded and outdated notion that is itself a refutation of the novel’s early profligacy with respect to style of narration. And that a looser, messier, even seemingly incoherent set of choices with respect to point of view comes closer to the experience of consciousness, etc., something, something, non-Western narrative traditions, whatever, okay. But the questions I always return to are: Does the technique make the book better? Does it add something? In this case, I would say the violations in point of view just felt random and distracting and underattended to. But let us return to the plot.
Posted 12 days ago.
Many readers of The Night Land, and more still who give up on the book, gag on its prose; The Night Land is a famously “difficult read.” For The Night Land, Hodgson devised an eccentric, faux seventeenth- or eighteenth-century style, convoluted and orotund, which even Lovecraft found “grotesque and absurd.” A few critics have supported Hodgson’s stylistic choice (Greer Gilman in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Nigel Brown in “An Apology for the Linguistic Architecture of The Night Land”), but Murphy mounts an innovative defense. He asks us to see the difficulty of reading as an intrinsic element of weird fiction, a twinning of the reader’s efforts with those of the characters’:
... the labor of the weird and the resistance to it often (but not always) transform the human subject who undergoes them, and those transformations are materially reflected in the language of Hodgson’s tales, imposing a labor of the weird on the reader as well as on the characters.
In Hodgson, the weird is inseparable from its expression and its reception—the reader must be estranged from current reality in all ways. As Murphy stresses, Hodgson’s “stylistic and formal strategies [are] centered on the problem of how to refer to or represent the non-/un-/abhuman.” In so doing, Hodgson reminds me of Christian mystics such as Jakob Böhme, Hildegard of Bingen, and Teresa of Ávila, and of alchemists such as “Basil Valentine” and Michael Maier, who each in idiosyncratic ways contorted syntax and made strange their vocabulary in attempts to represent the interaction of the human with that which is not human and with that which is cosmic. Equally, Hodgson points forward to the varied linguistic permutations of the twentieth century. As Murphy asserts: “weird fiction constitutes an explicitly self-reflexive and experimental genre that is, in its own unique ways, comparable to the broader formal experiments of high modernist and postmodernist fiction that developed alongside and after it.” I agree fully with that assessment, and would love to see studies putting The Night Land in conversation with The Waste Land, Finnegans Wake, Dadaist and Surrealist plays and manifestos, Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and so on.
Posted 20 days ago.
It’s July, which means it’s International Zine Month! Hooray!
I’ve written before, about my, well, I wouldn’t say discomfort with the zine scene, no, I mean, maybe I’d go as high as out-of-placeness, but you put it like that, I mean, I tend to feel out of place just about anywhere I go, so. City of Roses is a number of things, a website, some books, an epic, an oddity, what I do with what time I can spare, but it has always been a zine. So, thinking locally, here’s to the IPRC and the Portland Zine Symposium! And you should go fold and staple some paper of your own.
Posted 25 days ago.
France commissioned the original statue in 1870 after losing the Franco-Prussian War, a glittering likeness of its patron saint to boost morale. It sits outside the luxe Hotel Regina in Paris’s first arrondissement, framed by the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre. Nancy, France; Melbourne, Australia; and New Orleans and Philadelphia all have their own copies made from sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet’s original molds. Though Portland’s souvenir may have the quirk of being the trickiest to access, protected on its humble, grassy loop de loop by an unrelenting swirl of traffic.
Coe commissioned the statue as tribute to veterans of the Great War. The other three monuments he donated to the city—of Lincoln, Washington, and his old hunting buddy Teddy Roosevelt—are in storage after being toppled during protests in 2020. But Joan of Arc remains on her horse despite bouts with vandalism. As the O reported, an “informal and altogether illegal unveiling” a week before the official dedication set a tone. Her laurels and pennant have been stolen and replaced more than a few times. Teens soaked the statue in black paint after a re-gilding in 2002. (She’d gotten a little green.) And in 2012, someone taped a giant drill bit to the horse’s head, turning it into a unicorn and somehow causing $1,800 of damage. Still, Portland generally seems to like its Joan of Arc. Coe’s patriotic motives aside, perhaps the legend of a spiritually inclined teenager subverting gender roles through radical political action serves a different inspiration today.
Posted 39 days ago.
August Clarke
I think, as we’ve discussed before, that uh, there is a startling lack of depictions of lesbian sex in the wonderful moment we’re having where there’s lots of really great Sapphic–writ large–stories and genre fiction. And when there is sex between women, um yeah, they’re never wearing a dick. And I think that this is a pretty critical problem of world building and a lack of ingenuity and interest in the fact that sexuality makes culture, too. If we are world building, a society, a culture, sex and sexuality is part of that culture.
Every culture has sex as a business at some point, every culture has sex at some point, probably. We have neolithic dildos, in fact, right? Like it is a sort of transcultural phenomena that we make prosthesis as a part of our experiencing each other and being with each other, and I think to a certain extent this might be a discomfort with depicting women’s sexuality period. Or women’s sexuality as active.
I think that there is a much greater representation of protagonists, or at least point of view characters who are sexually inexperienced and who need their love interest to guide them into sexuality and show them all of the ropes and do unto them. I really struggle to think of point of view top characters in genre fiction, period.
C.L. Clark
Period. Regardless of genres, genders, or gender pairings or anything.
Clarke
Yeah, it is almost always the perspective of the bottom or—I think assigning top and bottom to men, women couples is weird and doesn’t work, in fact–but it is either the bottom’s perspective or the woman’s perspective, usually. Or occasionally you might get a man’s perspective and drawn her as well and indeed men in genre do have sex here and there.
But I think that with that lack of world building interest, we also have a loss of the technologies we produce as queer people to be with each other. A thing that I was really concerned with in writing this book was making sure that there was a subcultural aspect to the queerness here. Which necessarily pairs with there being queerphobia in this world. If you have a queer normative world, which—that’s a huge thing in itself. But if you have a world where at the very least same gender attraction is not policed, and is sort of normative in this space, and there’s no pushback at all, then you have no reason to make a subculture. And then you, by extension, have no reason to make sex toys that are appropriate for the kind of sex you wanna be having, right?
Clark
I feel like you could still have it, it just becomes a mainstream item like any that you buy–you buy your cups, you buy your crockery, your silverware, you buy your dicks.
Clarke
And indeed, why don’t the couples in fantasy also have dicks that they wear? Get into it.
Posted 53 days ago.
Since the renovations hereabouts, we’ve been re-running the novelettes from the start on the usual Monday–Wednesday–Friday schedule, and as we speak the tenth novelette, “Surveilling,” is just about done; the eleventh, “Rounds,” will begin appearing next week, and—well. There are eleven novelettes per volume.
So let’s celebrate! Commercially. —For the next week (through Friday, 30th May), any paperback copies of “Wake up…” bought through me are available for the deeply discounted price of twelve dollars US (ten pounds sterling), plus shipping, and any ebook copies of “Wake up…” are available for three dollars US from myself, and the outlets where I can reach the pricing: itch.io, Payhip, Smashwords, and Google Play. So go! Treat yourself! Put the start of the epic on your shelves!
Posted 71 days ago.
To my mind, it’s how you do the world-building which is really significant; in other words, it’s in the execution of world-building, just as in the execution of every other aspect of storytelling, where the other strategies come in. Fan-service–oriented world-building will tend to create material which feels like a comfortable fit for the setting and a logical outgrowth of stuff we already know; Lower Decks is fantastic at this, coming up with novelties like the idea that the Daystrom Institute has an entire wing where they keep all the megalomaniac computers that Starfleet captures. World-building oriented towards creative freedom will offer surprises and novelty, showing us something we never expected to encounter in the Star Trek galaxy which at its best can shake up our assumptions and open up fresh possibilities, at worst simply looks incongruous and silly and gets ignored and glossed over by later writers. (To take an example from the golden age, remember when The Next Generation established that fast warp travel was unravelling the universe and all Starfleet ships had a speed limit imposed on them they could only break with special permission? No shade on you if you don’t, I keep forgetting it too and I didn’t watch the relevant episode that long ago, and no subsequent Trek show has seen fit to yes-and that particular bit of world-building.)
Even if you could come up with a world-building approach which perfectly split the difference between fan service and creative freedom, all you’re doing is kicking the can down the road, playing for time without addressing the core dilemma any new Trek thing must address—where is it going to lie in that spectrum between honouring the franchise’s past and trying to establish its own legacy?
Posted 72 days ago.
No. 46 has been cracked, but it’s slow going, at the moment, with occasional bursts of activity interspersed with occasional sloughs of, well, not despond, no, not exactly, but not exactly exuberant, either, and all the while the draft of no. 45 ferments in its fallow. —No. 45, which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is or was or will end up having been a much more straightforward tale, a take on that basic plot-kernel in which a stranger comes to town; no. 46 is intended to be or at least it will maybe have been a rather more relaxed and (seemingly) shapeless affair, a hang-out, I believe, is the term of art—an aimless stroll through thirty-two short films, though, in retrospect, it might well turn out our flâneur was rather more slyly pointed that perhaps, at first, it had seemed. But aimless strolls are, well, aimless; difficult as it may be to know where they might end up, no matter how pointed they end up having been, it can be just as difficult to know where, exactly, to begin them, and sometimes precisely because one wished to engineer the point.
But that’s a me-problem, I suppose. Otherwise? I still haven’t managed to do what justice I owe to Spear Cuts Through Water; I got distracted, I admit, by re-reading Lud-in-the-Mist, which has been—instructive? —And also Empson, on the pastoral, yes, of course, as always, and, but, what else? I’ve watched the Pitt, we’ll probably finish that tonight, and I’m intrigued by the notion that it’s a DS9 show, at heart, but that all has little enough to do with what’s going on here. Andor next, but also ditto, and anyway, I need to get back to work.
Posted 92 days ago.
Surrealism may attain to the supernatural (e.g., Magritte, Breton) but is only one of its forms, and not perhaps its most satisfying one: Rembrandt, Cézanne, Giotto, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante satisfy more deeply, they engage the reason as well as the unconscious intuitive, and the more elements common to us all that a work of art draws upon the more totally it can move us. And that term “move” should be thought of very literally—i.e., parts, or all, of our being are set in motion by works of art.
Since I believe there is a most intimate relationship between the quality of a person's life, its abundance or sterility, his integrity, and the quality of his poetry, it is not irrelevant to say that, judging by some—not a few—I have met on my travels, the people who write banal poetry and, to almost the same extent, those who in desperation make up a fake surrealism, usually seem to be the same academics who talk a liberal line concerning education and politics (and often, as teachers, are genial and popular) but who, when it comes to some crucial issue, such as a student protest, will not commit themselves far enough to endanger their own security. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Is their poetry banal because their lives are banal, or vice versa? I think it works both ways. If these people committed themselves, took risks, and did not let themselves be dominated by the pursuit of "security," their daily lives would be so changed, so infused with new experiences and with the new energy that often comes with them, that inevitably their poetry would change too (though obviously this would not ensure better poems unless they were gifted in the first place). But on the other hand, if they could manage to put themselves in a new, more dynamic, less suppressive relationship to their own inner lives and to the language, then they might discover their outer lives moving in a revolutionary way. So the process is dual, and can be approached from either direction.
And for myself—not without anguish, not without fear, not without the daily effort of rousing myself out of the inertia and energy-sapping nostalgia that would cling to old ways, to that dying bird-in-hand that's falsely supposed to be worth two free ones chirping in the bushes—I believe our survival demands revolution, both cultural and political. If we are to survive the disasters that threaten, and survive our own struggle to make it new—a struggle I believe we have no choice but to commit ourselves to—we need tremendous transfusions of imaginative energy. If it is indeed revolution we are moving toward, we need life, and abundantly—we need poems of the spirit, to inform us of the essential, to help us live the revolution. And if instead it be the Last Days—then we need to taste the dearest, freshest drops before we die—why bother with anything less than that, the essential?
Wallace Stevens wrote, “The poet feels abundantly the poetry of everything.” We must not go down into the pit we have dug ourselves by our inhumanity without some taste, however bitter, of that abundance. But if there is still hope of continued life on earth, of a new life, the experience of that abundance which poetry can bring us is a revolutionary stimulus. It can awaken us, from our sloth, even yet.
Posted 101 days ago.
