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Feb. 8th, 2007 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseAs well as my friends list, I have links to the RSS feeds for the Weblogs of Toby Buckell and Nalo Hopkinson. Which is all fine. I get every post as it's current, same as with everyone else.
Except. Periodically my friends page spits up a whole bunch of their posts in a row. Old posts, in clumps of four to seven. Severely out of place time-wise, and never midn that, they've already shown up once before, in timely fashion. Does anybody know if this is because I have a setting wrong?
___________________
The Stone Cage is very much as I remembered it the first time: Not fresh but compelling - almost refreshing, in fact, in the things it does that no writer now would do. Because they're clunky. Because we've found better ways to convey what we're trying to convey. because we've found other ways. Because they're unfashionable (Yes, writing has styles and fashions and trends. It's a living art, you can't *not* have these things.) It's neither as quaint as Victoriana nor free of quaintness. A little sentimental, decidedly sweet, with a narrative voice that tries a little too hard but mostly succeeds, and a darker undercurrent.
And funny when it wants to be.
The narrator for most of it is the witch's cat, who is cynical, embittered, and cast out even before the witch got hold of him. He can't avoid caring, but he's unwilling to show it, even compulsively drawn to do the opposite. He lies and cheats, soemtimes for the fun of it, and he's not kind. He likes to be funny because he doesn't ahve to feel anything else then. He's fascinated by magic, not because of the witch, but almost in spite of her. He's accompanied by a bedraggled raven who's terrified but courageous, more self-aware and moral, but reduced over centuries to resigned servility (he occasionally gets a voice, too.) Then the witch sets a trap and brings in a baby that she means to make her successor; a girl she names Rapunzel. The animals get involved, for duty or curiosity.
The witch is often and mainly a cliched villainess, except - she captured the cat and the raven as she did, locked them away, out of a demand that they love her. She rises above her role before the end. There's some total naivete on the part of Rapunzel and the prince that is sweet or cloying depending. There are overwrought bits and underwrought details around the edges. There's a great deal about love and its powers, and strong belief that anyone can become a better person. Yet though love-at-first-sight features more than once, ("How long has this been going on?" "About a quarter of an hour.") the results aren't easy; the cat heals a little, but the scars are there to the last.
___________________
More on Charles de Lint's Spirits in the Wires:
I have read much writing advice over the years; aimed at newbies and at experienced writers. Good, bad, ugly, outright criminal, astonishingly good, possibly helpful to some writers but not to me... the whole gamut, really.
Most of that advice, except possibly the outright criminal, would say: Do NOT start a novel with 50 pages of two women sitting at a table telling each other their life stories, before anything happens in the present. Even if their life stories involve being born from a computer website or something equally esoteric. (I'm tempted to say "Except Pamela Dean". She showed us 3 solid years of someone's college life before getting to the meat of the *plot*, but all those 3 years involved story, setting, theme and character, jokes and ghosts and fragments of literature, fears of pregnancy and minor details of life in the Viet Nam era. And damn the book was good. But even then, she *showed* us their life, she didn't hide it behind sitting at a table *telling*.)
Absent the frame, I'd have let him start with Saskia telling us her story-to-date in first person, if only because even if I disagree with her attitude and philosophy, Things do happen, and De Lint hasn't lost his ability to write well on a sentence level.
But the framing device, the fact that I'm aware she's supposed to be sitting at a table telling another woman, messes it up. Because it means I'm thinking "Now when was the last time anyone remotely real actually let someone else talk that long without doing more than a minimal interruption?"* Then Christianna tells her story, and that breaks it, because not one but two different women have now sat almost completely silent while another person talked for half an hour straight. And also, Christianna tries to describe herself as impulsive and flighty, which equally takes back her ability to have sat through the first story.
Had he just used two first person narratives without the device that they're sitting at a table talking, I wouldn't have blinked. I'd have assumed that for some reason the two characters were writing down their thoughts, in journals, or letters, or something, after the fact. Or even allowed them the possibility that it's already written by the time the next scenes, in third person, start up, since they take place so much later in time.
Again, the prose was enough to pull me along? So was the promise in the blurb that the plot begins with a web site crashing and one of the characters vanishing along with it.
Then we switch to the person planning the crash, and the programmer who implements it.
The person planning to crash the site: is a poseur who seekritly hates real artists, proven by the fact that he hates Saskia and her group of friends.
Was a fat kid with acne in high school, considered a loser by those who even noticed him, and mostly ignored.
One I missed in the last rant: All the starving artists de Lint reveres, being starving, are all slim or petite in some way. Probably because they're starving artists, natch. Still, you'd think at least one would have the figure you get if all you can afford to eat is high carb and you spend a lot of time sitting before a computer or a notebook or an easel.
He was a fat kid in highschool, with acne *and therefore*, it is implied, a loser. It's not stated (if one felt generous, one could even see the passing comment about the high school girl who turned him down as the nasty vengeful side already in place). But it's not hard to read these things into it, the way it's presented. Fat and ugly, even temporarily or in the past = mean and spiteful villain. All his current loser behaviour, his mistreatment of women, etc, seems to stem from having been overweight and acnified in high school, and his determination to get his own back.
I've always been a little overweight. And never mind acne, which I had in plenty past high school, in junior high I had *other* spots, a skin condition that left my hands dotted with little red marks. And some cliques did consider me a loser - especially in Junior high, but there were moments in high school.
Charles. Dammit. We've met a dozen times. We corresponded. Half my books by you are signed, and most of those by me standing in front of you. You've remembered my name between meetings, something that, believe it, I never expect people of remotely any professional ability in my fields to ever do.
Why do you want to alienate me?
Then, of course, the computer programmer lives off potato chips and pop. but because he's not supposed to be considered a totally evil character, he keeps his figure because of a lucky metabolism (He also seems to get glimpses of magic - "see? proof he's not all evil!". But so far, since we left the two magical women, we've hit a whole pile of slightly distasteful cliches.
The villain even says "blackmail's such a harsh word".
I mean to keep reading, but I'm starting very fast to wonder why.
_______________________
Okay, for those of you who haven't ever read de Lint and have started wondering why anyone does? Go to the library, and try any of these short novels:
Jack the Giant Killer (Collected with its sequel as Jack of Kinrowan).
Greenmantle (Someone else gave it the lovely plot summary "The mafia meets Herne the Hunter. Poor mafia!")
Svaha (His sole futuristic endeavour, and it's still more magic than science.)
If you're willing to risk a longer novel, but possibly easier to find depending on your library, try Someplace to Be Flying. I'm willing to say it's his last really good novel, though others have said good things about Forests of the Heart, which I didn't read because of the bad title.
Or if you're not willing to give him a novel's worth of time, pick up one of his first two short story collections (Dreams Underfoot and the Ivory and the Horn) and read any of:
"The Moon is Drowning While I Sleep"
"Our Lady of the Harbour"
"But for the Grace go I"
"Saxophone Joe and the Woman in Black"
"Pal o' Mine"
"Bird Bones and Wood Ash"
(These aren't the only ones, either. Just the ones that stick out even though I haven't read them in years. And there are other good 'uns in the third collection, it's just that in the first two you're more likely to find something decent if you also sample stories I *didn't* name.)
__________________________________
*Yes, professional storytellers would get a pass on this one; ditto one-(wo/)man shows. Epic poets in a Nordmen's hall. Speechmakers in time periods when the guy standing on the soapbox really was a form of entertainment people would stop for. Someone being interviewed. Note that none of these involve someone you're having an ostenisble informal conversation with in a coffee shop.
Except. Periodically my friends page spits up a whole bunch of their posts in a row. Old posts, in clumps of four to seven. Severely out of place time-wise, and never midn that, they've already shown up once before, in timely fashion. Does anybody know if this is because I have a setting wrong?
___________________
The Stone Cage is very much as I remembered it the first time: Not fresh but compelling - almost refreshing, in fact, in the things it does that no writer now would do. Because they're clunky. Because we've found better ways to convey what we're trying to convey. because we've found other ways. Because they're unfashionable (Yes, writing has styles and fashions and trends. It's a living art, you can't *not* have these things.) It's neither as quaint as Victoriana nor free of quaintness. A little sentimental, decidedly sweet, with a narrative voice that tries a little too hard but mostly succeeds, and a darker undercurrent.
And funny when it wants to be.
The narrator for most of it is the witch's cat, who is cynical, embittered, and cast out even before the witch got hold of him. He can't avoid caring, but he's unwilling to show it, even compulsively drawn to do the opposite. He lies and cheats, soemtimes for the fun of it, and he's not kind. He likes to be funny because he doesn't ahve to feel anything else then. He's fascinated by magic, not because of the witch, but almost in spite of her. He's accompanied by a bedraggled raven who's terrified but courageous, more self-aware and moral, but reduced over centuries to resigned servility (he occasionally gets a voice, too.) Then the witch sets a trap and brings in a baby that she means to make her successor; a girl she names Rapunzel. The animals get involved, for duty or curiosity.
The witch is often and mainly a cliched villainess, except - she captured the cat and the raven as she did, locked them away, out of a demand that they love her. She rises above her role before the end. There's some total naivete on the part of Rapunzel and the prince that is sweet or cloying depending. There are overwrought bits and underwrought details around the edges. There's a great deal about love and its powers, and strong belief that anyone can become a better person. Yet though love-at-first-sight features more than once, ("How long has this been going on?" "About a quarter of an hour.") the results aren't easy; the cat heals a little, but the scars are there to the last.
___________________
More on Charles de Lint's Spirits in the Wires:
I have read much writing advice over the years; aimed at newbies and at experienced writers. Good, bad, ugly, outright criminal, astonishingly good, possibly helpful to some writers but not to me... the whole gamut, really.
Most of that advice, except possibly the outright criminal, would say: Do NOT start a novel with 50 pages of two women sitting at a table telling each other their life stories, before anything happens in the present. Even if their life stories involve being born from a computer website or something equally esoteric. (I'm tempted to say "Except Pamela Dean". She showed us 3 solid years of someone's college life before getting to the meat of the *plot*, but all those 3 years involved story, setting, theme and character, jokes and ghosts and fragments of literature, fears of pregnancy and minor details of life in the Viet Nam era. And damn the book was good. But even then, she *showed* us their life, she didn't hide it behind sitting at a table *telling*.)
Absent the frame, I'd have let him start with Saskia telling us her story-to-date in first person, if only because even if I disagree with her attitude and philosophy, Things do happen, and De Lint hasn't lost his ability to write well on a sentence level.
But the framing device, the fact that I'm aware she's supposed to be sitting at a table telling another woman, messes it up. Because it means I'm thinking "Now when was the last time anyone remotely real actually let someone else talk that long without doing more than a minimal interruption?"* Then Christianna tells her story, and that breaks it, because not one but two different women have now sat almost completely silent while another person talked for half an hour straight. And also, Christianna tries to describe herself as impulsive and flighty, which equally takes back her ability to have sat through the first story.
Had he just used two first person narratives without the device that they're sitting at a table talking, I wouldn't have blinked. I'd have assumed that for some reason the two characters were writing down their thoughts, in journals, or letters, or something, after the fact. Or even allowed them the possibility that it's already written by the time the next scenes, in third person, start up, since they take place so much later in time.
Again, the prose was enough to pull me along? So was the promise in the blurb that the plot begins with a web site crashing and one of the characters vanishing along with it.
Then we switch to the person planning the crash, and the programmer who implements it.
The person planning to crash the site: is a poseur who seekritly hates real artists, proven by the fact that he hates Saskia and her group of friends.
Was a fat kid with acne in high school, considered a loser by those who even noticed him, and mostly ignored.
One I missed in the last rant: All the starving artists de Lint reveres, being starving, are all slim or petite in some way. Probably because they're starving artists, natch. Still, you'd think at least one would have the figure you get if all you can afford to eat is high carb and you spend a lot of time sitting before a computer or a notebook or an easel.
He was a fat kid in highschool, with acne *and therefore*, it is implied, a loser. It's not stated (if one felt generous, one could even see the passing comment about the high school girl who turned him down as the nasty vengeful side already in place). But it's not hard to read these things into it, the way it's presented. Fat and ugly, even temporarily or in the past = mean and spiteful villain. All his current loser behaviour, his mistreatment of women, etc, seems to stem from having been overweight and acnified in high school, and his determination to get his own back.
I've always been a little overweight. And never mind acne, which I had in plenty past high school, in junior high I had *other* spots, a skin condition that left my hands dotted with little red marks. And some cliques did consider me a loser - especially in Junior high, but there were moments in high school.
Charles. Dammit. We've met a dozen times. We corresponded. Half my books by you are signed, and most of those by me standing in front of you. You've remembered my name between meetings, something that, believe it, I never expect people of remotely any professional ability in my fields to ever do.
Why do you want to alienate me?
Then, of course, the computer programmer lives off potato chips and pop. but because he's not supposed to be considered a totally evil character, he keeps his figure because of a lucky metabolism (He also seems to get glimpses of magic - "see? proof he's not all evil!". But so far, since we left the two magical women, we've hit a whole pile of slightly distasteful cliches.
The villain even says "blackmail's such a harsh word".
I mean to keep reading, but I'm starting very fast to wonder why.
_______________________
Okay, for those of you who haven't ever read de Lint and have started wondering why anyone does? Go to the library, and try any of these short novels:
Jack the Giant Killer (Collected with its sequel as Jack of Kinrowan).
Greenmantle (Someone else gave it the lovely plot summary "The mafia meets Herne the Hunter. Poor mafia!")
Svaha (His sole futuristic endeavour, and it's still more magic than science.)
If you're willing to risk a longer novel, but possibly easier to find depending on your library, try Someplace to Be Flying. I'm willing to say it's his last really good novel, though others have said good things about Forests of the Heart, which I didn't read because of the bad title.
Or if you're not willing to give him a novel's worth of time, pick up one of his first two short story collections (Dreams Underfoot and the Ivory and the Horn) and read any of:
"The Moon is Drowning While I Sleep"
"Our Lady of the Harbour"
"But for the Grace go I"
"Saxophone Joe and the Woman in Black"
"Pal o' Mine"
"Bird Bones and Wood Ash"
(These aren't the only ones, either. Just the ones that stick out even though I haven't read them in years. And there are other good 'uns in the third collection, it's just that in the first two you're more likely to find something decent if you also sample stories I *didn't* name.)
__________________________________
*Yes, professional storytellers would get a pass on this one; ditto one-(wo/)man shows. Epic poets in a Nordmen's hall. Speechmakers in time periods when the guy standing on the soapbox really was a form of entertainment people would stop for. Someone being interviewed. Note that none of these involve someone you're having an ostenisble informal conversation with in a coffee shop.
