There was a bit of a break, wasn’t there. Let’s call it the mid-season hiatus, that excess of late-model broadcast television that led to such grotesque neologisms as the “mid-season finale,” I mean, really. While the story wasn’t progressing, we were finding a new house, and moving into it, and I was preparing for my first federal criminal trial which got postponed at the last minute (COVID) (not mine), and so have had to prepare for it all over again. We’ve already done the cover reveal and talked about the re-runs; here, have a gander at the new study, where the magic will be happening from now on.
The first draft for no. 40 came in at 21,219 words that were trimmed to a fighting count of 15,175, which might help to explain why it took so long. (Might not, granted.) And I’m in the very odd and highly magical space, here as we approach the end of the current volume, where I need a solution to a story problem and cast about only to find the perfect answer assembling itself from bits and pieces I’d stuck in earlier, on this whim or that, not at all knowing what I might need them for, or why, and on the one hand it is shivery spooky, this sensation, but any gift cuts both ways: shouldn’t I have meant to have planned it this way all along, if I had been paying attention? Genius is not luck, after all.
But nonetheless: I’ll take the luck. —No. 40, available now on paper; appearing here for free at the very end of this month.
Posted 1046 days ago.
The different truths are all true in our eyes, but we do not think about them with the same part of our head. In a passage in Das Heilige, Rudolf Otto analyzes the fear of ghosts. To be exact, if we thought about ghosts with the same mind that makes us think about physical facts, we would not be afraid of them, or at least not in the same way. We would be afraid as we would be of a revolver or of a vicious dog, while the fear of ghosts is the fear of the intrusion of a different world. For my part, I hold ghosts to be simple fictions but perceive their truth nonetheless. I am almost neurotically afraid of them, and the months I spent sorting through the papers of a dead friend were an extended nightmare. At the very moment I type these pages I feel the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Nothing would reassure me more than to learn that ghosts “really” exist. Then they would be a phenomenon like any other, which could be studied with the right instruments, a camera or a Geiger counter. This is why science fiction, far from frightening me, delightfully reassures me.
Posted 1078 days ago.
Foley was no innocent. He’d been down to Cooper Square and the Tenderloin, passed an evening, maybe two, in the resorts where men danced with each other or dolled up like Nellie Noonan or Anna Held and sang for the crowds of “f--ries” as they called themselves, and it would have figured only as one more item of city depravity, except for the longing. Which wasn’t just real, it was too real to ignore. Foley had at least got that far, learned not to disrespect another man’s longing.
Posted 1086 days ago.
This poet contains great beauties, a sweet and harmonious versification, easy elocution, a fine imagination: yet does the perusal of his work become so tedious, that one never finishes it from the mere pleasure which it affords: It soon becomes a kind of task reading; and it requires some effort and resolution to carry us to the end of his long performance. This effect, of which every one is conscious, is usually ascribed to the change of manners. But manners have more changed since Homer's age, and yet that poet remains still the favourite of every reader of taste and judgment. Homer copied true natural manners, which, however rough or uncultivated, will always form an agreeable and interesting picture. But the pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and conceits and fopperies of chivalry, which appear ridiculous as soon as they lose the recommendation of the mode. The tediousness of continued allegory, and that too seldom striking and ingenuous, has also contributed to render the F--ry Queen peculiarly tiresome; not to mention the too great frequency of its descriptions, and the langour of its stanza. Upon the whole, Spenser maintains his place upon the shelves among our English classics: but he is seldom seen on the table; and there is scarcely any one, if he dares to be ingenuous, but will confess that, notwithstanding all the merit of the poet, he affords an entertainment with which the palate is soon satiated.
Posted 1094 days ago.
My purpose in looking back to that first era of widespread book reading is not, however, to emphasize the abundance of deep reading, or book reading, or leisurely time that we have lost. The more I’ve studied readers of the eighteenth century, the more I’ve doubted that we (by which I mean a historically fairly new “we”—people who can buy books but also must earn money, manage households, walk dogs, bath children) ever really had more time to read. I do not believe that the minutes crowded by messages, HBO series, and childcare today correspond in any direct way to time that we—posters and messengers, scavengers of the internet, wage workers and intellectuals—once spent with books. The readers I represent struggled to make room for the reading of books in lives that they perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be crowded in the same way we perceive ours to be. They worry, like us, about other media forms that seem quicker and shallower and more enticing than books. They sense that round-the-clock entertainment and distraction might render book reading extinct. They dream of a future when books will find a wider and more attentive public. In focusing on book reading rather than on media consumption generally, my first gambit, then, is this: ever since people like us have had access to books, the time we’ve spent with them has been defined as fragile, hard to come by, and good to hope for.
Posted 1102 days ago.
Meditation. Three elementary possibilities for the novelist: he tells a story (Fielding), he describes a story (Flaubert), he thinks a story (Musil). The nineteenth-century novel of description was in harmony with the (positivist, scientific) spirit of the time. To base a novel on a sustained meditation goes against the spirit of the twentieth century, which no longer likes to think at all.
Posted 1110 days ago.
Ambition in genre writing is often a perilous thing. The undiscriminating taste of genre readers (actually a highly discriminating taste, but a taste that discriminates only its kind of book from all others, aesthetic quality aside) and the invisibility of genre writing to all other readers are only aspects of the problem. Central is the question of whether the forms and constraints of any of the modern genres—horror, say, or SF, romance, sword-and-sorcery, or the Western—are worth struggling with, worth the effort of transforming. What readership will witness your labours or be able to understand what you have done?
Posted 1138 days ago.
What, after all, kept him writing with any sense of accomplishment if his view of the present state of life was so melancholy, and his faith in words to sustain a better vision so frail? Why did not he cease before he did?
The answer may be partly that for Spenser, in his own particular form of exile in Ireland, writing had become somehow synonymous with living. The long poem, instinct with a better time, peopled with the glistening creations of his imagination, sustained him despite the profound disappointments and frustrations of creating and living. To stop one would have meant stopping the other. That the attraction of ceasing was strong is attested by the temptation to give in that assails his epic protagonists; that he saw no final reconciliation of the images in his head and what he saw around him, or even what he could write, is evident from his own words and from the fact that all ideal moments of vision vanish and all the lovely ladies and brave knights meet only to part with promises of future bliss.
Posted 1147 days ago.
Forty’s coming slowly, sadly. —I suppose I was due for a bit of a break after last year’s epic run? But not too much, no, no. The next three novelettes have to go off like clockwork, plotwise, at least: maybe that’s why the words have suddenly gone chary.
So here, have a cover reveal; the image that will eventually grace this dilatory no. 40, “ – dirty white noise – ”.
In other news, I’ve started reruns: posting the early stuff on the sorts of webserial portals where the kids hang out these days, Royal Road and Reddit and Scribblehub, to start. Think of it like cheap paperback editions on spinner racks in drugstores, and I do not mean for any of that to be taken as the slightest bit derogatory. There’s honor in the stooping. —One can’t help but feel the slightest bit out of place, though: I’d been discombobulated enough by urban fantasy’s slip into paranormal romance; now the shelves are littered with things like isekai and litRPGs and ratfic and “hard magic” systems, and I’m just dizzy. Still. One has to put oneself out there.
A final bit of teasing: there may well be some new edition news forthcoming. I’ve been running some numbers. We’ll see.
But that’s all about handling what’s already been written! I need to get back to what comes next. Happy spring once more, y’all.
Posted 1278 days ago.
(Originally posted on the Patreon.)
The first recorded use of the term can be found in the work of the German philosopher and poet Novalis, who, in 1798, wrote of two hypothetical kinds of prophets: a magischer Idealist, and a magischer Realist. The discussion—one about idealism and realism—is beyond the scope of this piece, so suffice it to say that the term is then put to sleep for more than a century, until another German, Franz Roh, summoned it in 1925, when discussing a specific vein in German painting of the late 1910s to early 1920s. It is in his book Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme Der Neuesten Europäischen Malerei that magical realism resurfaces, now deployed to explain a distinct return to realism in post-Expressionistic painting. “Magical,” according to Anne Hegerfeldt, is how Roh understands this return—one mediated by “a sense of mystery and unreality.”
Interestingly, the term reappears a year later in Italy, in the work of Massimo Bontempelli, an Italian poet and future secretary of the Fascist Writers’ Union. Whether Bontempelli—who was more interested in fabricating new European “myths” after the hard reset of World War I than with German Idealism or painting—was aware of the work of Novalis and Roh is a matter of debate. But that Bontempelli is looking for “an explanation of mystery and daily life as a miraculous adventure,” in the words of Maryam Asayeh and Mehmet Arargüҫ, and the fact that he was a wordsmith (a fascist poet, that most sado-masochistic of combinations), puts his understanding of the term closer to ours.
Posted 1379 days ago.
