Others of Robert E. Howard’s characters, like the medieval Irish warrior Turlogh Dubh, show similar influences, and Howard’s stories of the (entirely fictional) Pictish king Bran Mak Morn—whose patronymic derives from Conán Maol’s—showcase his interest in Irish and Scottish history as well as his familiarity with then-contemporary archaeological theories about the racial history of Scotland and Ireland. Howard’s interest was shared, though less effusively, by his contemporary H.P. Lovecraft, with whom Howard shared a lengthy correspondence that began, as Duncan Sneddon points out, when Howard noticed Lovecraft’s use of a Scottish Gælic phrase in his story “The Rats in the Walls.”
Tolkien, Howard, and Lovecraft are only three of many examples: ideas about Celticness have permeated the fantasy genre in all its forms, sometimes explicitly embraced and sometimes absorbed by osmosis as simply part of fantasy’s genre conventions. As Cox has observed, “Celticity holds an ever-present position in fantasy media, but in so doing it becomes effectively invisible because it becomes associated with the fantasy genre rather than any particular source culture.” This then drives writers and audiences to turn back to what they consider “authentic” sources—often wildly out of date or simply made up—of “Celtic” tradition in order to supplement what they perceive as the “generic” æsthetic resources of fantasy. Cox describes this as a “double exposure”:
By forgetting the already Celtic milieu of modern fantasy’s origins, as traced through Arthurian legends, popularly translated texts such as the Mabinogion, and Tolkien himself, modern fantasy continues to look to Irish and Welsh cultures for mysticism, exoticism and otherness, overlaying on top of that tradition another layer of perceptions of Celticity. And, because the fantasy genre’s values encourage research but little criticism of that research beyond seeking ‘originals,’ medieval, early modern and romantic interpretations of Irish, Welsh and other Celtic cultures become folded into the mix and further entrenched in popular imagination.
Against this backdrop, one might assume that writers in Celtic languages would have no interest in fantasy. Speakers of Scottish Gælic, Welsh, Irish, Manx, Cornish, and Breton are, turning again to Iain Crichton Smith, “real people in a real place,” with real and pressing political concerns and with their own literary and æsthetic traditions. As early as the 1910s, the Gælic scholar and writer Calum Mac Phàrlain categorically rejected “sgeul air ni nach gabhadh tachairt” (“a story about something that could not happen,” as the easiest kind of story to create but also as fundamentally worthless: “mur bi sgeul de ’n t-seòrsa sin fìor ealanta, cha’n fhiach e; a chionn, cha’n eil aobhar ann ach a thaisbeanadh ealain” (“if a story of this kind is not truly artful, it is worthless, because it has no purpose except to show off its art”). Mac Phàrlain goes on to dismiss the “seann sgeòil” (“old stories”) of Gælic tradition as falling into this category, lacking the artfulness to justify them; he urges writers and storytellers to focus their attention on “gnothuichean an latha ’n diugh” (“matters of today”) .
Posted 270 days ago.
Edwin Turner
There’s this line in “Jawbone” that I kept tripping over, rereading and rereading: “Like lucky thing for the local citizenry someone on your side was there in there on duty on the nightbeat last night in the crapper last night.” The line is simultaneously gorgeous and ugly, elegant and clunky—rapturous really.
Andrew Latimer
Rereading is the key here. We’re familiar with rereading whole stories that we like or ones with endings that puzzle us. But what Lish, and writers of this ilk, ask us to do is to reread sentences in the course of making our first reading. This assumes a reader, a listener even, with the patience to linger over the page, its construction. (Gary Lutz prefers a “page-hugging” to a page-turning reader.)
David Winters
“Gorgeous and ugly”—exactly, yes. Donald Barthelme once said, “every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.” Lish, when he was teaching, called this “burnt tongue”: “God only listens to those whose tongues are burnt, twisted, crippled.” Writers of fiction can achieve extraordinary power by attending to everything wrong, skewed, erratic in their natural speech—and, rather than being afraid of that wrongness, amplifying it on the page. But power of this kind needn’t be purely spontaneous; it can also be elicited by editing. The sentence you mention went through multiple revisions; Lish reworks his stories obsessively, right up to the final proof stage. When I edit fiction, in my lesser way, I often look out for those off-kilter sentences, isolate them, tweak them, try to increase their tension and pressure.
—an interview with the editors of Egress
Posted 276 days ago.
Cheryl Morgan
Every time I hear you talk about your writing you make reference to your admiration for Katherine Mansfield. What impresses you most about her work?
M. John Harrison
Oh God, what doesn’t? Mansfield went all the way underground in the text. She called it “muted direction.” She wouldn’t say, “Look here, this is the evil character; look here, this is the good character; look here at what the evil character does to the good character, isn’t that so evil? And look how good the good character has been about it!” Katherine just seemed to show you people doing their stuff. If, as the reader, you drew moral conclusions about them, if you drew conclusions of any sort, they were yours. Of course she was cheating. She wasn’t absent from the text. She had gone underground and you were hearing her voice speaking from every part of the fiction, even the furniture in the central character’s front room. Of course, she got pilloried for being “amoral” and “cold.” That was to miss the point—the reason you were horrified was she had done her work right!
—an interview with M. John Harrison
Posted 280 days ago.
Who built this great dyke? Dante says it was built by the builder—a tautological answer—although he also says, of the identity of this architect, this “engineer:” “qual che si fosse,” “whoever he was.” Who was he? Sayers, in her note to this passage, glosses the ‘maestro’ as God, which seems wrong:—why would Dante add qual che si fosse to God’s name? Which is to say, in the sense that God is behind all creation, in one sense He is of course the maestro, the builder. But the question is: who constructed this specific structure, this dyke? Why would God, having created the hellspace, come back to add to it, improve it? To what end? For the benefit of the devils and the damned? They’re not there to have their lot improved, after all. Do we imagine God creating this structure of eternal punishment, but also adding-in various items of beneficial civic architecture? Dykes and damns, sewage systems and recycling centres, amenities and social housing?
Posted 287 days ago.
Certainly this must be the most ridiculous appeal to authority that has ever appeared in these pages. Do you only write about these things if you have seen, in pure euphoria, cloves being driven into the apple of the Lord? For one who has experienced fortification spectra and rainbow auras, and seen souls rising from people’s heads, and fixed words begin to stream meaning, the uneasy question is this: what if it is merely neurological? What to make of the mystic loose from any system of thought or framework, who nevertheless has a seizure every time she passes through the same doorway? How easily it may be triggered, or even inherited. I cannot even look at a bevel, my mother has told me hauntedly. Lewis Carroll saw a pack of playing cards, but he might have seen the Supreme Face. What happens when the phenomenon has a name, an explanation? If the state can be entered through the physical: through repetition, the fondling of beads, looking at a bevel, what does that say for the revelations received there? What does that mean for the meaning?
Posted 294 days ago.
To me the act of reading is a dream that is already lucid. The reader’s state is hypnagogic, a threshold position to read the text and produce its commentaries. The body, the world, these are always present: the aches in the back, the heat of the sun, the position of the limbs, the time off work, the surveillabilities of the police state. The fictive dream is an image that has already been pierced by arrows, like a martyred saint: this is what we call allegory. The path of arrows is more parabolic than bullets. You cannot always pull on a string to trace their trajectory and figure out where they came from and where the sniper’s nest must have been. Allegory grows more powerful the hazier it is: you are not being handed a set of fixed, well-mapped correspondences, but being asked to engage in your own mappings, to consider the valences, to play and be played with. This is what I think is fun about fantastical literature and why it is a genre worth choosing to read and write in.
Posted 302 days ago.
There’s maybe some sawdust left to sweep up here and there, and I’ll probably be picking crumbs of masking tape from obscured corners of the trim for months, but we’re getting close to just about being done: the first major overhaul of this entire website since I, uh, launched it. In, ah, a whiles back. Goodness.
The underlying content management system, or CMS, has been upgraded, from Textpattern 4.5.7 (released back in 2014, on the tenth anniversary of Dean Allen’s very first release of the beast) to the current version, 4.8.8 (there’s a beta of 4.9 available, but we are not, as a rule, beta people; we shun the cutting edge in this regard). —The upgrade went so much more smoothly than I’d feared, which has left me resolved to keep up with further upgrades in the future, and not let things fall so far out of date; we’ll see how long that lasts.
With the engine in fine fettle, I decided to put it through its paces, with the first major redesign, as noted, since the original design, from back in 2006. There’s been any of a number of advances in CSS over the intervening years, as it turns out. The front page is a better landing page now, I think, and everything displays in the house font as intended, or should, and it all looks so sleek and modern on a mobile device, the list of chapbooks should be much easier to navigate, now, and as for the table of contents—
Well, yes. It’s kinda been stripped bare. But! Starting next week, installments will be (re-)published on a Monday–Wednesday–Friday schedule, with the newly edited text from the recently released ebooks, all properly typeset for the web: as close to a definitive edition as is possible, for the moment. —With forty-four novelettes, at two weeks per, this will take us to September of 2026—the twentieth anniversary, more or less, of the first post hereabouts.
Season Three won’t languish during the reruns, rest assured; the first draft of no. 45 has almost cracked 5,000 words. As novelettes are completed, they’ll be released as chapbooks, and Comrades and Patreons will be getting their copies as per usual; they just won’t appear publicly, here, for free, until the reruns have caught up, in September of 2026. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be five or six novelettes into the new season by then.
So that’s how we’re sliding into the new year, scrubbed clean and refreshed. In the meanwhile, if you find you’re missing the story (and don’t have copies of your own, yet), well: here’s an ebook collecting the first five installments available in a pay-what-you-want edition:
Posted 308 days ago.
Thirteen years after publication, but I’m not complaining.
Posted 334 days ago.
In the film, as Miles and Jack prepare to have dinner with Maya and Sandra Oh’s Stephanie, Miles famously says “If anyone orders Merlot, I’m leaving. We are not drinking any fucking Merlot.” And that was that; sales of Miles’ preferred Pinot Noir skyrocketed, Merlot sales tanked for about a decade. People who were just getting into wine in the mid-aughts put that much of their trust in the palate of a fictional character. A character who is wrong about pretty much everything else in the movie. A character who steals from his own mother. Such is our deference to the tastes and opinions of angry white guys. Plus, the movie elides the real reason for Miles’s stance, which is much clearer in the book: Merlot was his ex-wife’s drink.
Posted 349 days ago.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a people in possession of a suddenly and drastically foreclosed future, must be in want of powerful distractions. So when I tell you that diving headlong into a deep re-build of the ebook editions has led me to discover a solution to the breaking non-breaking space problem, that has bedeviled me lo these many years, you should understand that it is still possible for tiny sparks of light to glimmer in this darkness, and go and cherish your own.
(The breaking non-breaking space problem: one might have noticed in the text that those moments of cæsura and interruption that might ordinarily be marked by an em-dash [—] are instead marked by the trio of space–en-dash–space [ – ], a practice picked up from Dean Allen back in the day. Said trio must nonetheless travel as a unit, easily enough done in the fixed and rigorous typesetting of a static printed copy—but when the text is fluid, in all the many variable containers it might find itself in the electronic world, a website, an ebook [a desk-top monitor, a tablet, a phone]—well. An intemperate line-break, or paragraph-end, could result in a dangled punctuate, an interruption interrupted, due to the spaces between the text, and the dash. —Luckily, HTML has a code for that: , or   : the non-breaking space, just the thing for when you don’t want those awkward ends and breaks. Except—
(Except: it seems that, in the rendering engines that run within pretty much all of the current browsers and ebook readers, some interaction between dashes and quotation marks ends up breaking the non-breaking space, so that even if the code says—
run all the way across town to find out what the hell you wanted and – ”<p>
(—it’ll end up nonetheless rendered as this, if margins squeeze it so:
(You may have seen these dangled quotation marks from time to time over the years, here on the website, or in one of the ebooks, snagging the eye, an obvious mistake autonomically generated, but no less distracting, disrupting, disappointing; the failure of rendering engines to properly account for this particular use case not enough to drive me to change my typographical habits. —But! But: wrap each en-dash in its own span, with a margin to the left, or to both sides, as needed, a margin just wide enough to match the width of a space in the font you’re using, .2 of an em, or .3, thereabouts, and voila! There’s no longer, in the code, any space at all to be broken, no matter the rendering engine’s preconceptions, but, to the eye, the en-dash is properly nestled and set, and never a niggling dangle, no matter the shape of the container into which the fluid text’s flowed.)
—Thus, some slight measure of blissful satisfaction. But: it is slight, and passing, and only in the ebooks, at the moment. Making the same changes to the website is a rather more involved undertaking. A distraction, one might say. Quite powerful. Mighty, even.
And yet but also, let’s face it: the design and structure hereabouts, the shape of this particular container, it’s largely unchanged since it was first put up, some (peers closely at the calendar) quite some time ago, and forty-four novelettes is a load a bit unwieldy for a box built to hold but a dozen or two. And the doughty CMS is several generations out of date. And the provider’s reached the point in their enshittification arc where they raise rates willy-nill, I’m paying twice what I did just five years ago, and I’m not getting anywhere near double the value in return, I must say. —And so: I’m casting about for a new provider, and shortly, within the month, I think, I’ll be moving, shutting things down, rebuilding, reinventing, reloading, reintroducing—there will be some interruption of service, I’m saying, a cæsura, one might say, for a space, a span of time, but then, afterwards, oh my. But then.
(I know, I know: this is just procrastination, you’re telling yourself, busywork to distract from the necessary work of plotting and planning and writing the volumes to come, you’d say, but oh, oh my, just think: how even more powerful a distraction from everything else it will be—it already is—to figure out what happens next, then write it down to be read—)
Posted 360 days ago.
