About my statement here that Quite a few literary traditions admit only true narratives (what is meant by true is a more complex matter than it would be for us, but that's another topic), comrade_cat asks, any recommended reading?

The other Toelken, folklorist Barre, repeatedly emphasizes that rather than asking what the myth says about what people believed to be true, ask what values the story is dramatizing. There are some great anecdotes on this subject scattered through his writings on Native American myth, which are among the best. For example, he asked one Navajo singer about a particular healing chantway, "Do you really believe the person is ill because they have red ants in their bloodstream?" The singer reflected and answered, "Not ants, but Ants"(Toelken's typographic rendering), and then, "We have to have a way of thinking strongly about disease." These attitudes aren't necessarily universal; there are literalists and fundamentalists in Native communities too. ( Some recommended works: )

Have missed several Black Gate blog posts. Here's today's:

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RIP, J.G. Ballard.

His was among the strange New Worlds fiction that I encountered as an unsuspecting kid in my brother's sf collection, higgledy-piggledy among the Clarke, Asimov, and Simak. I didn't know what to make of it then, but it's been sitting in my backbrain all these years, still messing with the contents.

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Strangely, one of my grad school professors was, like Ballard, born and raised in Shanghai, and like him was also interned as a boy by the Japanese during World War II. He said, of both the book and movie versions of Empire of the Sun, "It was nothing like that." I wish now I had taken notes; he gave a number of specific examples. But it shows that memoir (and memory), like fiction, are the product of an intensely personal process. This is the construction of meaning through narrative.

In searching academic literature on memory recently, I came across a review article on "Trauma and Memory" (Van der Kolk, Bessel A. (1998), Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 52:S97-S109). The author compares the recollection of traumatic events with ordinary memories from both a clinical and a neuroscience perspective. Combat veterans and other sufferers of PTSD do not experience recollection of the most traumatic events as memory, but as fragments of direct, unprocessed sensory input. During traumatic experiences, the sense-impressions received by the brain bypass the parts, like the hippocampus, that would organize them into a coherent form of consciousness, and so memories do not form as in ordinary experience. This "organizing" is the creation of a narrative out of the fragments and at the same time, creation of meaning which the fragments lacked. At the clinical level, processing traumatic memory was the stitching together of a story of the experience..... a process which most of us, most of the time, do so effortlessly we hardly notice.

No wonder being told stories, in fiction, in movies, in art, has such a huge effect on how we think and feel. Narrative is how we think and feel. ( Read more )

Last week's Black Gate post. Behind, as always these days.

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Last week I had no figures at hand regarding children and teen reading rates. A 2007 National Endowment of the Humanities report on the topic is available here in pdf format (number 47). The short version is that the reading rate is not declining for children, but that as teenagers increasing numbers of kids stop reading. The 20-page executive summary does not define what they mean by "literary reading," but in the summary for report 46, it's given as "The reading of novels, short stories, poetry, or drama in any print format, including the Internet. Any type was admitted, from romance novels to classical poetry."

Also, I inadvertently posted an outdated bestseller list. Here is the most recent PW children's fiction list online; the ABA's indie children's bestseller lists overlap but are not identical. Both are heavily weighted toward fantasy, and this is even more true of the series lists.

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Yesterday (my yesterday; I'm 8 hours ahead of EST) Theo asked about subgenre preferences. I write in several different subgenres ranging from mythological fantasy to hard sf, and all writing is difficult, as far as I'm concerned. I do think there are differences, but first, a quibble, terminological or semantic as you prefer: all fiction is fantasy. Those of us of Indoeuropean linguistic and cultural affiliation participate in a set of related literary traditions who knows how many millennia deep, in which there are major narrative genres consisting of stories not considered true. This isn't so in all other parts of the world. ( Read More )

From a street in Al Satwa:

The cross-posting of this week's Black Gate screed.

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There's recently been a bit of discussion here about kids reading sf/f. I spent some time this morning looking up sales figures for children's and YA speculative fiction, to discover that the most detailed information is in market reports that you have to pay for. Still, a few points.

First, no argument that gaming is a huge and growing market. I recall hearing recently that it has now surpassed movies in the entertainment hierarchy, but whether this was in terms of total dollars or percentage of people who consume, I can't now remember.

The percentage of kids who read is still in decline, though I haven't seen recent figures. As population grows, the total number of kids who read seems to be going up, however, or the kids who do read are reading more, as book sales are rising. ( Read more )

I have totally fallen off the lj horse. Partly it's that I've been in the throes (though I do like the increasingly common use of "throws" in this figure of speech) of completing a long-overdue academic article that proved (don't they always) harder than I expected. Article is on its way to editor! May it help me land a decent job back in the ol' USA.

Fiction? Ha! Thrown off that horse, too. I have been fiddling with a couple of hopefully commercial if very small-scale non-fiction projects.

We have had rain here off and on for the last few days and more forecast later in the week. It's a bit comical, sort of like Philadelphians and snow, police issuing public safety warnings and so on. Since most roads and parking lots are built without storm drains, it's also a problem.

Randomly, a Friday night at the old souq:

From the Wikipedia article on Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, commander of a French voyage of exploration in the 1780s that visited southeast Alaska along the way:

One of the men who applied for the voyage was a 16-year-old Corsican named Napoléon Bonaparte. Bonaparte, a second lieutenant from Paris's military academy at the time, made the preliminary list but he was ultimately not chosen for the voyage list and remained behind in France. At the time Bonaparte was interested in serving in the navy rather than army because of his proficiency in mathematics and artillery, both valued skills on warships. (One can only speculate on the course history might have taken had La Pérouse selected young Napoleon for the trip.)

This week's Black Gate post:

A few years ago, for one of Brian Swann's anthologies of traditional Native American literature, I translated a quasi-historical story from Kwakwaka'wakw oral tradition that contained in it an episode in which a dead man is brought back to life by wolves. One of the English word choices I struggled with was the term the revivified character later used to describe why the wolves had done it.

Stories about wolves resurrecting the dead permeate older bodies of Kwakwaka'wakw story, and range from ancestor myths to first-person accounts of shamanic initiation. The myths have a subgenre featuring adolescent heroes who go out into the wild, enter the spirit realm, encounter dangerous and beneficient beings--not infrequently dying and resurrecting in the process--and return home with spiritual treasures. Does that not sound just a little bit Campbellian? ( Read more... )

And, in the spirit of catching up, two recent Black Gate posts aimed in the direction of Joseph Campbell. Last week's:

As an anthropologist specializing among other things in myth and folk literature, and as a writer who has sat on many a con panel on myth, fairy tales, quest stories and the like, I often have to wrassle the monsters Monomyth, Universal Archetype, and their lesser-known littermates, who have been spawned by Joseph Campbell and other Jung-influenced writers.

The monomyth, a word Campbell took from James Joyce, is essentially a proposed universal structure underlying the hero's journey, with phases that include The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, Crossing the Threshold (into the magical realm), and so on. What's wrong with the monomyth? There's no doubt that pieces of it are found not only in a huge percentage of fantasy fiction, but also in widely scattered mythic and folk literary traditions all over the world.

However. Is it universal? ( Read more )

Still more on female fighters. My personal opinion remains: Theo doesn't understand martial arts beyond the hitting part.

It's been a long time since I read Swanwick's "The Edge of the World," but in my not always reliable memory the edge in that story is located somewhere in the middle east. I don't feel quite as if I have wished myself out of existence as per Swanwick, but I have been feeling as if I've tipped over the edge and am still falling. I just went to catch up on my flist and discovered it had been so long since I'd done so that I couldn't even read back to where I last left off. My email inbox is a disaster. Weird disconnections are starting to happen: when I hear an American voice on the radio or street, I think, what a strong accent.

It's probably not helped by the fact that I've been sick for the past week-plus. Still no actual job, though it's looking as if I'll be teaching a short writing course and some freelance possibilities are looming closer in the fog. No fiction writing to speak of, either. Job applications and trying to make myself look good on job applications (like finishing an academic article now a year overdue) have been taking what time there is.

Days are getting longer and now the first call to prayer from the mosque behind our building starts before 5:30 a.m. It says something about something that I am now regularly awake before that, as now. If I were to look at what's in my glass as opposed to what's missing (not my usual mode, alas), an item that should go on the list is, one of the guys who does the call has a beautiful voice, so beautiful that each time I have to stop and listen.

This week at Black Gate:

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I had thought to dive today into Joseph Campbell on the hero and the so-called monomyth--another irritant that, one could wish, might aid in the production of a pearl of wisdom. I have been distracted, however, by a self-labeled polemic on the topic of fictional women as kick-ass fighters that referenced my post of two weeks ago. Which put me in mind of a long-running, intermittent sort-of argument I've had with the most excellent sf writer pointoforigin, a long-time student of tae kwon do, as to whether women really could go up against men in combat and win before the invention of that great equalizer, the gun. My position is yes, provisionally.


Tomoe Gozen, 12th-century female samurai.


First of all, let me say that I mostly agree with the aforementioned polemic (which is not on the subject of women fighters generally). I certainly agree that Laila Ali's physique is much more believable for a woman fighter than the lollipop figure favored in Hollywood actresses (huge head, stick neck and body). Secondly, let me say that I have no street cred as a fighter. In my 25+ years in the martial arts, I've never used it outside the dojo, unless you count last summer when I tripped hard on the sidewalk and actually rolled instead of landing in a bone-breaking crash. However, one of my seniors had come to our aikido school as a street fighter--in a South Philly gang, family members in the mob, etc.--and also after many years in other martial arts, so I feel free to rely on his insights and conclusions. Moreover, though this was in dojo conditions--meaning at the minimum that you know you are about to be attacked--I have many times successfully thrown and/or pinned men who are significantly taller, heavier, and stronger. So my thoughts on women fighters are not totally pulled out of a dark and hidden orifice.

All people, male or female, have physical limitations. Some people are short and light; others are big and slow, or have bad knees, or no flexibility in their shoulders, or have trouble thinking in 3-D. ( Read More )

At Black Gate this week:

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Animator Hayao Miyazaki is one of my favorite directors, and Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) one of my favorite movies of all time. Princess Mononoke is also wonderful, and My Neighbor Totoro a sublime children's film. Packing for Dubai, with extreme space limitations, I made room for the smallish plush catbus a friend brought me from Japan.

Diana Wynne Jones is one of of my favorite fantasy authors. I had originally intended to devote this week's post to her work. Then I watched Howl's Moving Castle for the second time--the first since reading the DWJ novel it is based on. I should love it, right?

The movie Howl has many excellent qualities. Like Mononoke and Sprited Away, the animation is beautiful and well worth seeing on the big screen. The war footage, with the monstrous dreadnought airships and wizards in the shape of winged demons, is accomplished with the usual Miyazaki flair with all things aerial. The love story between Sophie, transformed by the Witch of the Waste into a 90-year-old crone, and the literally heartless Wizard Howl, seemed reasonably satisfying the first time around. The moving castle is just plain fun, and Billy Crystal does an OK Calcifer, if you accept that Calcifer is a cute, friendly little fire demon. (And that's Lauren Bacall as the Witch of the Waste.) If you haven't watched it, do so, but also check out Miyazaki's other, better movies. To be fair, Miyazaki only came on board after the initial director bailed on the project, so its flaws may not be all his doing.

For me, though, the book tells a far more interesting story. It's not just that, as DWJ notes in more recent editions of the book, that Miyazaki made Sophie and Howl into gentler and nicer people. Or that he subsumed the human interest in the story in order to develop his pacifist theme. It's that every character and plot element is more nuanced, complex, and plain dangerous in the original. Howl starts out a cowardly, womanizing drama queen; Calcifer untrustworthy and secretive. He's a freaking captive demon, for goodness' sake!

Sophie, the POV character, is nosy, impulsive, and officious, and also much more active than in the movie, and stronger. She sets the story in motion by (albeit without realizing it) imbuing the hats she trims for a living with magic that changes the wearer's life. At every stage she alters her environment with often drastic consequences. Part of her arc is her discovering she is in fact a powerful witch and has to be more careful with her powers. That large chunk of plot is taken out of the movie, where she doesn't do much more than cook, clean, and take care of the male characters.

Admittedly the novel had to be simplified for the screenplay, but without the Wales sections of the book--completely removed from the movie--Howl is pretty much a cipher. And I missed the book's self-consciousness about fairy tale cliches...

Castle in the Air (not to be confused with Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky) is billed as a sequel to Howl, but is really a stand-alone story about a carpet merchant in an alternate Baghdad, who becomes tangled with a threadbare magic carpet, a beautiful princess, a maleficient djinn, the usual DWJ assortment of toxic and/or useless relatives, and eventually Howl and Sophie. It's also good, although to my mind DWJ tends to shortchange her story climaxes (Howl being no exception). House of Many Ways is supposedly an actual sequel, but the pub date is 2008 and I haven't yet laid my hands on a copy. See the movie! It's entertaining enough. Then read the book. It is entertaining, complex, funny, and memorable.

Via frostokovich, Peter Singer on military robotics and the near future of war.

More than just removing humans from risk, these technologies record everything that they see. So they reshape the public's relationship with war. This has given rise to what soldiers call "war porn." You get some clip of the UAV blowing someone up in an email, as if it's a joke. There are 7,000 video clips of combat footage out there for anyone to download, put to music, etc.

So they have to rewrite the script.

This week's Black Gate screed.

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I am one of the few who saw Conan the Barbarian on its first release. The theater was the now-demolished but then-infamous theater in downtown Philadelphia that one commentator referred to as the Budco Take-Your-Life-In-Your-Hands Goldman theater. Our Conan experience at the Goldman was not life-threatening, if you don't count my feelings as I watched Schwarzenegger, too 'roided-up to hold a sword with both hands--although my now-spouse did find a large knife under his seat, which he handed over to the management. We were the lone viewers except for one other man who, whenever Sandahl Bergman brandished her sword, began to exclaim, "She's hot, oh, man, oh, baby, she's hot!"

This space has seen several posts over the last few weeks on the topic of fantasy and realism. Today I'd like to gnaw on another bone, and that is fantasy and verisimilitude. Swordsmanship is a good enough place to start. Now, a confession. I am no master of the sword and know basically nothing about European styles, and I have not touched a bokken since arriving in Dubai. I do, however, have a basic understanding of Japanese sword work, and have done tens of thousands of sword cuts in my life, a few even with a genuine medieval samurai sword. I have learned from experience why the Japanese invented shiatsu. So, all that swinging and whirling swordsmen do before they actually have at it? Imagine your life is threatened and what you have to defend yourself with is a cast-iron frying pan. Are you going to play like a majorette with a baton? Or conserve your strength, block if you need to, and watch for a chance to hit your attacker with it very hard? Swordswomen are another topic that makes me cranky. I've been a martial artist for nigh on 30 years, and I have no doubt of the the capacity of women to be effective fighters, but most women will never have the upper body strength that men can develop, and unlike men can't substitute power for good technique. See: frying pan analogy.

What is the obligation of a fantasy writer to supply verisimilitude? None, really; a writer's job is to tell a story. Is it bad for adventure fantasy to be thinly disguised wish fulfillment? I mean, we all need some in our lives. ( Read more )

Alas, the web version of the story doesn't have the pic of the Tardis on the helipad atop the Burj al-Arab.

Obama inaugural Black Gate post (no thematic connection... I don't think):

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My first encounter with mythology was, so far as I can remember, via an older brother's copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942). In retrospect the title is presumptuous, as it covers only only the Greek, Roman and Norse mythoi, but at the time I didn't know how many cultures around the world had traditional stories about gods, monsters, and, sometimes, human heroes encountering them. Moreover, as I later came to understand, her sources for these most familiar versions of the Greek stories (other than Homer) were often the Roman retellings dating to the pomo Imperium--were what we might now call fantastic literature rather than genuine myth. Be that as it may, these were my first myths, and I read all I could get my hands on in the children's section of our library.

So when I opened Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief, it was with a sense of coming home, in the best possible way. The central premise of the hugely entertaining book and its nearly as enjoyable sequels (titled collectively Percy Jackson and the Olympians) is that the Greek gods, and all the monsters of Greek myth as well, are as active today as in antiquity. Since Olympus follows Western civilization around, it currently occupies the six-hundred-and-sometieth floor of the Empire State Building in Manhattan. The Greek gods are still as, er, prone to falling in love with mortal women as ever, with all the resulting demigod heroes/troublemakers you might expect. However, because demigods have such a poor prospect of reaching adulthood, the Olympians have set up a summer camp on Long Island, called Camp Half-Blood, where prospective heroes can learn survival skills and train for heroic quests. Now, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades took a vow after World War II to abstain from unions with mortal women, because their offspring had come so close to destroying civilization entirely. Think they succeeded in their vow? Meanwhile, there's a prophecy around regarding a child of one of the Big Three, as they are known, such that every monster and minion of Kronos (who is scheming to reassemble himself and escape Tartarus) is out hunting for such a child in order to destroy him or her.

( Read More )

This week's Black Gate screed:

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Though I've understood since childhood that not everybody shared my love of the fantastic, it wasn't until quite a ways into my adult years that I realized this must be in large part due to differences in how people's imaginations operate. One spur to this realization was an on-air comment by a local arts-and-culture talk show host that she couldn't get into a book where things happened that couldn't in real life (yes, a statement we could unpack at length). At the time I was observing my young son discover stories. It was clear to me that he derived some of the greatest pleasure from precisely those things that never could happen in real life. Moreover, the stories he invented to tell me from two years onward (which I wrote down whenever I could) were gleefully fantastic: night being stolen, his father putting on breasts, the street sucking our house off its foundations. From watching his friends I also was able to see that not all kids do love the fantastic equally; he was close to one end of some bell curve. When the differences show up so early, they start to look like something innate.

The term mimesis is sometimes used to describe techniques of realistic fiction--as imitation, in other words, of something that already exists. All kinds of questions occur here with regard to how people, whether adults or small children, form judgments about what real life consists of and what constitutes an imitation of it, or a violation of its principles. Many of these principles are culturally constituted. Laura Bohannon's much-anthologized article, "Shakespeare in the Bush," describes how the Tiv rejected Hamlet as unacceptably unrealistic, on the basis of, among other things, the motivations of nearly every character. Others arise out of an individual's experience. For those born with synaesthesia, there would be nothing at all unreal about descriptions of numbers possessing color, or (my own case) sounds having a tactile component.

( Read more )