[Come away, O human child...]
May. 18th, 2006 02:33 pmToday's my day for finding out about strange recent fantasy-book phenoms, it appears-- one an older kerfuffle regarding what's known as the "Venom Cock" book which was nominated for the Tiptree literary award by the same person who nominated the CSI/HP mpreg cross-over just recently. In any case, I think my day was made reading the excerpt from the 'Venom Cock', which starts,
"Right away, I noticed their erections. Truth, I’d been looking for them, as had Waisi and Kobo’s twins, Rutvia and Makvia. All four of us poked each other and tittered. Behind us, Mother yanked on Waisi’s and the twin’s braids with her strong potter’s hands. She even yanked on my own scabby bristle, causing instant tears. We paid heed. Unwise while in the presence of so much masculinity to mock the phallus."
Now, that's just classic. Absolutely classic. :D :D Dragon cock. Oh baby, this could've been hot. (And btw, if that's not writing worthy of mockery, I don't know what -is-, and neither do I want to know. BEGONE, YE HUMORLESS PEOPLES!!1 Ahem.)
Anyway, while browsing amazon.com for unrelated purposes, I came across a whole big hoopla for The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue, complete with several blurbs by the author, an autobiographical note, and an express section highlighting the top amazon.com reviewers' opinions on the book. Not the usual industry mags quotes, but specifically amazon.com people. Why?? I dunno, but I found it suspicious. And also annoying and wanky, but hey-- that's just me.
Given, I haven't read this book, but apparently, it is based around this haunting stanza in the poem by Yeats: "Come away, O human child!/ To the waters of the wild/ With a faery hand in hand,/ For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
The point seems to be that the book 'demystifies' the faery world by making hobgoblins into something like semi-immortal (but mostly human) bums, and thus, "by surrounding his fantasy with real-world, humdrum detail, he makes magic believable" according to one reviewer-- which is basically what really got to me.
Now, I actually love urban fantasy & magic realism for exactly this reason (ie, 'making magic real' by setting the fantastic side-by-side with the mundane), but there's something about the inherent implication of calling this a "fairy-tale for adults" that seems to imply that in and of themselves, old-style hobgoblins aren't "believable", and one somehow needs to reinvent them as changeling bums or whatever.
Mostly, I think the whole idea of explaining away magic is vastly different than just placing it in a modern or mundane setting. To me, there seems to be a tremendously important boundary between the merely allegorical (ie, the use of fantasy tropes or elements as metaphors for some sort of psychological or social writerly agenda of exploration), which is what JKR does with magic a lot of times, and the rationalistic, which takes 'meant for adults' and turns it into a curse.
And I've realized I've ranted against 'adulthood' in fantasy in one way or another quite enough on this journal, but I still believe to some degree you cannot-- simply CANNOT-- have a successful fully 'adult' fairy-tale (by my terms) if by 'adult' you mean 'rational' and not just mundane. If your agenda-- your theme or gig, whatever-- is too obvious, and more importantly if you don't have a sense of humor about it (as the writer of the 'Venom Cock' book didn't seem to), you really can't say you're writing a fairy-tale at all. You're writing something dry and flaky and useless, like a straightforward religious retelling of The Little Mermaid (already a rather Christian piece by a rather Christian author).
To me, writing good fantasy, whether urban or classic pastoral, requires an understanding of its heart of the kind that Yeats surely had-- and also all kinds of 'modernist' retellers like Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen and CS Lewis: its heart, which is wild and dark and ancient and forever young. And that's why all the cries about how myths and fairy-tales are 'dying' and becoming lost & irrelevant are totally off-base. The heart of folktale & magic by nature cannot be put in any box, explained with any riddle, or ever taken from within our own. In my experience, the best fantasy upholds this idea by the writing itself being able to 'breathe the air' of magic rather than just use its terms or wear its clothes.
See, that's what rationalist adults and/or fantasy writers don't get-- that fairy-tales aren't about hobgoblins or dragons in the first place. I mean, I love fairies and unicorns and dragons but even if you lost them all, Faery the place would remain, and why? Because. Faery is a way of seeing. It's merely more common in children, but anyone who can look at a forest glade and feel they're elsewhere is really there. That simple, and that difficult & slippery-- because a sense of awe, wonder and Mystery doesn't come easily to a lot of people, does it?
More than that, Faery is a way of being (crazy, they say...). And this doesn't mean that this requires 'being fey' or ethereal, or that you can't transplant a Faery native into the 'real world' or a normal person into Faery with interesting results-- but that's mostly because the boundary itself is porous and nothing is quite what it seems in any good fairy-tale. Things don't have to sparkle with silver, basically, and overall there are really no rules to Faery except that one: forget what you think you know.
...All things being equal, btw, the online sf/fantasy-writer blog community sort of scares me o_0 I sort of don't want to um... I dunno, just. It attracts me less than HP fandom, is all I've got to say. Perhaps because at least in fandom you always hear '...but we're just fangirls, so' whether or not it's practiced, whereas these people have actual cause for taking themselves too seriously, and it does not do good things. At all. (And okay fine, I'll admit it, I'm more comfortable without all the 30-something & older men... sorry.....)
"Right away, I noticed their erections. Truth, I’d been looking for them, as had Waisi and Kobo’s twins, Rutvia and Makvia. All four of us poked each other and tittered. Behind us, Mother yanked on Waisi’s and the twin’s braids with her strong potter’s hands. She even yanked on my own scabby bristle, causing instant tears. We paid heed. Unwise while in the presence of so much masculinity to mock the phallus."
Now, that's just classic. Absolutely classic. :D :D Dragon cock. Oh baby, this could've been hot. (And btw, if that's not writing worthy of mockery, I don't know what -is-, and neither do I want to know. BEGONE, YE HUMORLESS PEOPLES!!1 Ahem.)
Anyway, while browsing amazon.com for unrelated purposes, I came across a whole big hoopla for The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue, complete with several blurbs by the author, an autobiographical note, and an express section highlighting the top amazon.com reviewers' opinions on the book. Not the usual industry mags quotes, but specifically amazon.com people. Why?? I dunno, but I found it suspicious. And also annoying and wanky, but hey-- that's just me.
Given, I haven't read this book, but apparently, it is based around this haunting stanza in the poem by Yeats: "Come away, O human child!/ To the waters of the wild/ With a faery hand in hand,/ For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
The point seems to be that the book 'demystifies' the faery world by making hobgoblins into something like semi-immortal (but mostly human) bums, and thus, "by surrounding his fantasy with real-world, humdrum detail, he makes magic believable" according to one reviewer-- which is basically what really got to me.
Now, I actually love urban fantasy & magic realism for exactly this reason (ie, 'making magic real' by setting the fantastic side-by-side with the mundane), but there's something about the inherent implication of calling this a "fairy-tale for adults" that seems to imply that in and of themselves, old-style hobgoblins aren't "believable", and one somehow needs to reinvent them as changeling bums or whatever.
Mostly, I think the whole idea of explaining away magic is vastly different than just placing it in a modern or mundane setting. To me, there seems to be a tremendously important boundary between the merely allegorical (ie, the use of fantasy tropes or elements as metaphors for some sort of psychological or social writerly agenda of exploration), which is what JKR does with magic a lot of times, and the rationalistic, which takes 'meant for adults' and turns it into a curse.
And I've realized I've ranted against 'adulthood' in fantasy in one way or another quite enough on this journal, but I still believe to some degree you cannot-- simply CANNOT-- have a successful fully 'adult' fairy-tale (by my terms) if by 'adult' you mean 'rational' and not just mundane. If your agenda-- your theme or gig, whatever-- is too obvious, and more importantly if you don't have a sense of humor about it (as the writer of the 'Venom Cock' book didn't seem to), you really can't say you're writing a fairy-tale at all. You're writing something dry and flaky and useless, like a straightforward religious retelling of The Little Mermaid (already a rather Christian piece by a rather Christian author).
To me, writing good fantasy, whether urban or classic pastoral, requires an understanding of its heart of the kind that Yeats surely had-- and also all kinds of 'modernist' retellers like Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen and CS Lewis: its heart, which is wild and dark and ancient and forever young. And that's why all the cries about how myths and fairy-tales are 'dying' and becoming lost & irrelevant are totally off-base. The heart of folktale & magic by nature cannot be put in any box, explained with any riddle, or ever taken from within our own. In my experience, the best fantasy upholds this idea by the writing itself being able to 'breathe the air' of magic rather than just use its terms or wear its clothes.
See, that's what rationalist adults and/or fantasy writers don't get-- that fairy-tales aren't about hobgoblins or dragons in the first place. I mean, I love fairies and unicorns and dragons but even if you lost them all, Faery the place would remain, and why? Because. Faery is a way of seeing. It's merely more common in children, but anyone who can look at a forest glade and feel they're elsewhere is really there. That simple, and that difficult & slippery-- because a sense of awe, wonder and Mystery doesn't come easily to a lot of people, does it?
More than that, Faery is a way of being (crazy, they say...). And this doesn't mean that this requires 'being fey' or ethereal, or that you can't transplant a Faery native into the 'real world' or a normal person into Faery with interesting results-- but that's mostly because the boundary itself is porous and nothing is quite what it seems in any good fairy-tale. Things don't have to sparkle with silver, basically, and overall there are really no rules to Faery except that one: forget what you think you know.
...All things being equal, btw, the online sf/fantasy-writer blog community sort of scares me o_0 I sort of don't want to um... I dunno, just. It attracts me less than HP fandom, is all I've got to say. Perhaps because at least in fandom you always hear '...but we're just fangirls, so' whether or not it's practiced, whereas these people have actual cause for taking themselves too seriously, and it does not do good things. At all. (And okay fine, I'll admit it, I'm more comfortable without all the 30-something & older men... sorry.....)
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