Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the perfectly real.
On any given day, the pantheon of French Girls includes Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Hardy, Jane Birkin, her daughters Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, and former Vogue Paris editor Carine Roitfeld. Coco Chanel, immortalized not so much as a young woman but as an elegant matriarch, retires nearby. They’re distinct both as fully realized people and as types—Bardot is fiery, Deneuve icy, Birkin carefree, Roitfeld edgy—but all are regularly brought in as evidence of the French Girl’s actuality.
Who is she? She’s intellectual, cool, and a bit of a romantic, but she doesn’t give her approval easily or smile too much. She might run around in black-tipped Chanel slingbacks, or barefoot if she’s on vacation. She has a signature perfume. She eats cheese without abandon and nurses a single glass of wine all night because she’s a master of reasonable indulgences. She’s almost always white, hetero, and thin, and you can only conjure her by willfully ignoring the many French women whose daily routines do not involve bicycling along the Seine in mini skirts with baguettes tucked under their arms.
But the French Girl’s influence is tangible. She makes money for big American drugstore chains, department stores, independent brands, book publishers, magazines, and digital media companies. She definitely has something to do with the fact that rosé, sales of which outpaced the rest of the wine market last year, has become so popular in the US.
The obsession has become a business, and in that sense, the French Girl is perfectly real.
—posted 2594 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of translation.
This novel Dee Goong An is offered here in a complete translation. Possibly it would have had a wider appeal if it had been entirely re-written in a form more familiar to our readers. Then, however, much of the genuine Chinese atmosphere of the original would have disappeared, and in the end both the Chinese author, and the Western reader would have been the losers. Some parts may be less interesting to the Western reader than others, but I am confident that also in this literal translation the novel will be found more satisfactory than the palpable nonsense that is foisted on the long-suffering public by some writers of faked “Chinese” stories, which describe a China and a Chinese people that exist nowhere except in their fertile imaginations.
—posted 2602 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the sermon on
the way things ought to be.
Fantasy presents the world as it should be. But “should be” does not mean that the realms of fantasy are Lands of Cockaigne where roasted chickens fly into mouths effortlessly opened. Sometimes heartbreaking, but never hopeless, the fantasy world as it “should be” is one in which good is ultimately stronger than evil, where courage, justice, love, and mercy actually function. Thus, it may often appear quite different from our own. In the long run, perhaps not. Fantasy does not promise Utopia. But if we listen carefully, it may tell us what we someday may be capable of achieving.
—posted 2610 days ago
I am altering the deal.
Just in time for September, I’ve overhauled the rewards for the Patreon that supports City of Roses!
(Mumblety-mumble decades out of school, and I still think of September as the beginning of the year.)
—Patreon has been invaluable in supporting the work I’ve been doing on volume three, easily covering the printing costs of the ’zines, and supplementing (or even covering) a grocery run in those not-nearly-so-occasional-as-I’d-like tight months. I can safely say that without my Patreon patrons, this wouldn’t be here now:
Eight issues done, three to go, and a great deal of thanks to my patrons.
But! I need more! (And my valiant patrons need a bit of a break.) —The production of volume three looms, and will require quite a lot of work, not all of it mine, and a chunk of money to complete. So: I’ve simplified and streamlined the City of Roses Patreon reward tiers, in the hopes of enticing you (yes, you) to join my One Dollar Party.
A pledge of $1 a month gives you access to the behind-the-scenes blog: at least one post a month, offering sneak peeks at upcoming installments, scenes cut for space or time or change of focus, the (very) occasional anguished musing, and cover candidates (like this one, which I’ve made public.)
A pledge of $2 a month gets you an ebook of each installment as it’s finished, (at least) a month before it appears here, for free—and you’ll also get ebooks of the collections as they’re completed. (Ebooks delivered in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats.)
And a pledge of $4 a month will get you paper copies of each installment, hand-stuffed in envelopes with handwritten notes by Your Author—and also paper copies of each collection, as they’re completed.
And finally, there’s the Key to the City:
—but there’s only six of those left.
So! Take a moment. Give it some thought. Join if you’re able. Spread the word. And thanks, again.
—posted 2644 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of police.
Imagine, a few decades after the big changes, say, in the 2090s, when ordinary people have access to nanotech (the way today every fourth or fifth homeless guy wears a Walkman with sound quality that would have blasted a 1950s “Hi-Fi” enthusiast right out of his rumpus room). Suppose you could carry in a toothpaste tube the nanotech stuff to build a pretty decent one or two room house out of whatever junk happened to be lying around. And suppose that, after you were finished with it, the stuff went back into the toothpaste tube of its own accord so that you could use it again. Press, squeeze, and you’re a little less homeless—at least for the night. As ever, though, I imagine the police will still come by early in the morning with toothpaste tubes of their own, full of foam specially programmed to disassemble the hastily constructed shelters back into junk; and the again-homeless will be told to move on.
—posted 2669 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of tradition.
I have, however, since entering the field, restricted the meaning I attach to the term “patriarchy.” For many, it is synonymous with “the subordination of women.” It carries this meaning for me, too, but with this qualification: I add the words “here and now.” This makes a big difference. When I hear it said, as I often do, that “patriarchy has changed between the stone age and the present,” I know that it is not “my” patriarchy that is being talked about. What I study is not an ahistoric concept that has wandered down through the centuries but something peculiar to contemporary industrial societies. I do not believe in the theory of survivals—and here I am in agreement with other Marxists. An institution that exists today cannot be explained by the fact that it existed in the past, even if this past is recent. I do not deny that certain elements of patriarchy today resemble elements of the patriarchy of one or two hundred years ago; what I deny is that this continuance—insofar as it really concerns the same thing—in itself constitutes an explanation.
Many people think that when they have found the point of origin of an institution in the past, they hold the key to its present existence. But they have, in fact, explained neither its present existence nor even its birth (its past appearance), for one must explain its existence at each and every moment by the context prevailing at that time; and its persistence today (if really is persistence) must be explained by the present context. Some so-called historical explanations are in fact ahistorical, precisely because they do not take account of the given conditions of each period. This is not History but mere dating. History is precious if it is well conducted, if each period is examined in the same way as the present period. A science of the past worthy of the name cannot be anything other than a series of synchronic analyses.
The search for origins is a caricature of this falsely historical procedures and is one of the reasons why I have denounced it, and why I shall continue to denounce it each and every time it surfaces—which is, alas, far too frequently. (The other reason why I denounce the search for origins is the use of its hidden naturalistic presuppositions.) But from the scientific point of view, it is as illegitimate to seek keys to the present situation in the nineteenth century as in the Stone Age.
Since 1970, then, I have been saying that patriarchy is the system of subordination of women to men in contemporary industrial societies, that this system has an economic base, and that this base is the domestic mode of production. It is hardly worth saying that these three ideas have been, and remain, highly controversial.
—posted 2684 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of phantasy.
Psycho-analysis divides people into two types—introverted and extraverted. Introversion represents error in man, a straying away from reality into self, a going of the mind into mind. Both psycho-analysis and criticism agree that this process cannot, or rather should not produce art. Both processes, or their possibility, exist in each individual (psycho-analysis is forced to admit that introversion always exists; extraversion exists if the individual is “successful”). They may, it is held, be combined in phantasy; and phantasy produces “living reality,” art. But what is this phantasy but the whole introversive world of man behaving extraversively—the collective-real? Unless it is introversion actually transformed in the individual into extraversion, individual mind into matter of “more than individual use” (as Mr. Read defines creative phantasies)—the individual-real? The opposition between collective-real and individual-real disappears in the general agreement between all parties that, by no matter what method, introversion must be extraverted. Likewise the opposition between romanticism and classicism: romanticism is acceptable if it has an extraverted, classical touch; classicism is not necessarily damaged by an introverted, romantic touch, so long as it does not lose complete hold of extraversion.
—posted 2692 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of rhythm.
Rhythm is that property of a sequence of events in time which produces on the mind of the observer the impression of proportion between the duration of several events or groups of events of which the sequence is composed.
—posted 2700 days ago
Eight for a wish.
19,204 words, this draft. A trend I’m not terribly fond of, I must admit. But at least the first draft of no. 30 is finally, finally done, though you should know that by “done” I don’t mean what I meant when I said the first draft of no. 29 was “done,” or no. 28 either, or nos. 27, 26, 25, et cetera, etcetera, for that matter.
A word, perhaps, about process? —The drafts I write are fairly polished: they begin where they’re going to begin, the end up where they’ll end up ending up, and they get there pretty much how they get there, sentences complete, dialogue neatly tied off, mostly, to a degree. I write them one word after another, start to finish, with very little skipping around, and for all that I like to imagine myself a fly-by-night, turn-on-a-dime, pants-seated improviser, the truth is I write to a pretty specific outline, one that’s pretty well fixed before I type the first word. It’s just not written down, really, beyond a simple list of scenes, usually just the names of key players, sometimes a location, or an action. Nothing more. I’ve already got the feel of the thing in my head, the weight of each scene, how it sits in the hand, a sort of synæsthetic proprioception that the list merely helps me keep straight. —Writing, then, largely consists of finding the actual-words-in-an-actual-sentence that will best fit to that inarticulable feel in the palm of my mind. (Helps to explain, perhaps, my meagre daily word counts: the fixed, unyielding goal is four hundred words a day: minuscule, perhaps, but enough to hypothetically complete a draft in a month; in terms of actual words set down in actual sentences, my average is south of two hundred words a day. Over the course of writing no. 30 alone, it fell from one hundred eighty three words or so a day to one hundred seventy words a day. —Another trend I do not like.)
Revision’s simple enough, then: each scene re-typed, descriptions rejiggered, reshuffled, removed (I tend to stick in too many to start, and all at the beginning); dialogue sanded and buffed, felicitized or awkwardified as needed; every now and then a scene’s shifted from here to there, or back again—the weight of actual words can sometimes warp a scene’s fit and feel to a whole new shape. Sometimes, a scene’s removed; sometimes, it’s replaced with something else entirely. The tyranny, of those actual words. —Then one more pass, to fit everything into the iron constraints of the 36-page ’zine format (me, a formalist! Who’d‘ve thought), and a final proofing pass (not as thorough as could be, I’ll grant, but I get what I pay for), and we’re done and on to the next.
But this draft! This draft. (Fuck this draft.) The shapes of the scenes keep slipping through the fingers of my mind, and the actual words I end up with suddenly make the shape of what happens next taste impossibly foul. (I did say it was synæsthetic.) Whole scenes written down in this “done” draft are not what they will need to be, will have entirely different people doing and saying rather different things someplace else, or probably will, or should. I realized about halfway through I actually didn’t know why what was happening was happening, or rather I came to suspect that the verse I was singing was really the chorus, which knocked the whole foyer off-kilter. (Synæsthesia! Just run with it.) —Ordinarily, when I lose my footing like this, I dry up; I poke and poke; I run up daily counts in the dozens, the handfuls, the goose-eggs. I usually wipe out the scene in question and start again, fitting new words to the shape, or weighing the shape itself against the words. A few times I’ve gone right back to the start. But not this time; not this draft. The words never petered out, per se? I just kept stacking them, one actual, actually wrong word after another, and my outline’s lit up blinking red in my mind’s eye, every written scene notional post-its: adjust, cut, rejigger, rewrite from scratch, do something, please for the love of Christ. The last two scenes aren’t even scenes as such, just copious notes as to what ought to happen, if and when, the sort of thing I never do. Placeholders.
So. But still. Done. Or “done.” Or maybe the issue isn’t that word; maybe the issue is that when I say a “draft” of no. 30, I don’t mean the same thing I meant when I spoke of a “draft” of nos. 29, or 28, or 27…
(And of course it’s the next one, no. 31, that’s supposed to be the big showstopping heavy-hitter. This one was just supposed to move the pieces into place. Make certain character A gets to point B knowing fact C in time for event D, for various values of A and B and C, etc. —Like they say, theorists study strategy; professionals study logistics.)
—posted 2713 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of good fences.
As the world of the literatures of the fantastic was (we knew even then) much more extensive than the world of anything that we might end up defining as English-language science fiction (hence SF), our initial overall challenge was to work out how to sort the traffic: anything we licensed as SF please park here; everything else go somewhere else (but we knew not where).
Any initial arrogance about defining our terms was quickly chastened. The task, we decided pretty soon, was not exactly to create a universal definition of SF, for we knew (by then) that this could not be done; the task was to create an encompassing but porous boundary marker that would convince us that it plausibly enclosed something or other that fitted better inside than out (and which should be written about). Clearly we needed to operate within a narrower remit than E. F. Bleiler had applied to the construction of his brilliant Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948), which included without distinguishing amongst them “science fiction, fantasy and weird books in the English language,” and making no claim to completeness. Bleiler’s superb book was a sampler; for our part, in order to create a work of reference that left nothing out, we would attempt to adhere to a description of SF “defined” as a marriage of the various definitions of the genre that were then current. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction would be, in other words, a tenement. The published result was an interwoven edifice of entries within a boundary line marked SF, exceedingly fuzzy, leaking every which way; an eruv that did not safely distinguish the sacred from the profane. The moat protecting our tenement was a water margin.
But it worked for a while, and in a way it still works, partly because our “definition” of SF as being essentially whatever everyone else thought it was seemed sufficiently broadchurch to allow users and scholars to make use of us without surrendering their own takes on the matter. Our deliberate refusal to know exactly what we were talking about—our refusal to know what SF truly was—was, I continue to think, a good model for writing encyclopedias.
—posted 2757 days ago
