The tough guide

Kelly Link—the top 1 over 40?–on Diana Wynne Jones.

I love how magic works in Diana Wynne Jones's fiction. There's always an underlying feeling of soundness to it. I always believe that, in her alternate worlds, this is exactly how it would work, whether it's a chemistry set bringing to life chocolate bars, which then drape themselves over heaters and melt, or a witch binding up extra lives in a matchbook. I like her wizards and witches better than anybody's -- better even than Gandalf who, in 1st grade, was one of my first crushes. Her nonfiction book, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, is essential reading for anyone who wants to try tackling traditional fantasy. Let me say that again. Want to write traditional fantasy? You must read The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

A series of snakes

Something in the air? Two days ago, Dzyd Christine sent in this kinda-sorta Ouroboros from an old TMBG song, "I Palindrome I":

See the spring of the grandfather clock unwinding
(Egad, a base tone denotes a bad age)
See the hands of my offspring making windmills
(Egad, a base tone denotes a bad age)
Dad palindrome Dad
I palindrome I (I palindrome I)
I palindrome I (I palindrome I)
And I am a snake head eating The head on the opposite side
I palindrome I (manonam)
I palindrome I (manonam)
I palindrome I (manonam)
I palindrome I (manonam)

II. Then yesterday Dzyd Fhyll sent this link—new Dizzies stationery?:



III. Then a few hours later, Dzyd Kosiya submitted this quote, from page 31 of Kelly Link's new-old collection, Pretty Monsters:

It was shaped like a snake. Its wriggling tail hooked in to its narrow mouth, and Onion has always wondered if the snake were surpprised about that, to end up with a mouthful of itself like that, for all eternity. Or maybe it was eternally furious, like Halsa.

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 29

I. Levi—again!—on Powell. Here he hits the nail beautifully on the head:

What raises Powell's curiosity in Dance to the level of art is that he leavens it with a real openness to difference, from ordinary English eccentricity to unexpected sexual predilections to inexplicable fixed ideas. That mix of curiosity and sympathy allows Powell to find nearly any person of at least some interest; his much-quoted response to charges of snobbery--that if there were a Burke's of Bank Clerks, he'd buy that, too--rings true for any close reader of Dance.

I couldn't agree more; only constant curiosity and sympathy could sustain our interest over 12 books. The title of volume three, The Acceptance World (an insurance term? I can't recall) could stand in for the whole sequence. (I think this vibe, crucially, comes through in the miniseries, despite other imperfections.)

This is nice, too: "As Powell demonstrates, what people want so often becomes who they are."

OK, then: What does it mean that, all this week, I've been craving a milkshake?!

II. Calhouniana in the NYT. I like the last sentence, and also the double use/meaning of "fox":

He noted, “There are the usual mailing folds present as well as overall age toning and minor foxing.”

***

Mr. Lorello wrote that on the last day of the auction, he realized that state archivists were aware of the fraudulent listing, and he began to sense that he was being outfoxed.

III. Terminology: I'd heard of "slipstream" and "new wave fabulism" before, but not "the new weird." Here's Jeff Vandermeer's definition, which mentions a story of mine (included in 2003's Trampoline, edited by Kelly Link)—and gives the full title!

Time and reality can flow in any direction in this literature; insofar as these stories are coherent within their own narrative frameworks, they exhibit no concern for anchoring their models to a knowable world–that is to say, the “weird” elements in stories do not have to “mean” anything. Frame stories can become main stories (as in Kelly Link’s “Lull” and Jeffrey Ford’s “The Yellow Chamber”). Landmasses and locomotion may re-invent themselves as necessary for the story (as in Ed Park’s “Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts” and Christopher Rowe’s “The Force Acting on the Displaced Body”). Dreams or alternate states of consciousness can make the real world before they have even occurred (again “The Yellow Chamber,” also Alex Irvine’s “Gus Dreams of Biting the Mailman” and Jonathan Lethem’s “The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door”). All of these instabilities and textual experimentations point to a larger, overarching concern in the little weird: there are no worlds, no realities; there are only people and their self-world metaphors.” (Via Jonathan Wood at The Worlds of Paul Jessup)

"Landmasses and locomotion": Just realized something obvious—an earlier story of mine, "An Oral History of Atlantis" (published in Columbia in 2002-ish, I think; written in August 2001 for a reading at the aptly named Galapagos) featured...an unmoored Manhattan!

Wood asks if we're entering the Post–New Weird...

IV. Dizzyhead Benno—not surprisingly, a Ben Franklin fan!—has started a website with LJ Ruell, called Poor Richard. Check out LJ's stunning entry into the New Yorker's Eustace Tilly contest:



V. What did people think about the movie Atonement?

In the company of j'aime

Dizzyhead Bill writes:

Shirley Jackson (who'd be in my J'aime list) did a like/don't like passage in her unfinished novel "Come Along With Me":

"...I like everything about big department stores except shopping in them. I do not like salesgirls and their manners, and having to buy my dresses in a special behemoths department, and I do not like the stupid mockery of people who enjoy keeping you waiting; I do not like credit offices, but I enjoy quarreling over a bill."

* * *

Shirley J. brings to mind Shelley Jackson, who'll be reading with Samantha Hunt, Kelly Link, and Lucy Corin this Friday—what a lineup! It's for Tin House's Fantastic Women issue.

* * *

False Etymology of the Day: the word gem comes from a corruption of j'aime.

Winding down...

A few more from us—


Best novel ever?



A horror story:



...and one more from Idalia...

No olive branch in sight

This is just too much.

Dizzyheads. I realize I've been endangering your health with these "title bouts," but what can I do? I'm just a conduit. You are the ones doing this to yourselves.

Check it out: The level of play has reached dizzying heights. Here comes Dizzyhead Jessica, back for a second round, with a spinal cracker (cf. "Come Together"?) entitled "The Young and the Restless."



But wait! Idalia sends in her second-round entry—let's call it "Fight Back and Win"!

* * *

New New-York Ghost is out...

T is for...

. . . and for "Where is the Asian Justin Timberlake?" as asked in today's Sunday Styles. Who knows? But researchers think they've found today's Asian Let's Active...or Long Ryders...or something?

* * *

. . . and for The Girl Detective, a new play based on Kelly Link's delightful deconstruction of a story that closes out her first book, Stranger Things Happen. I need to see this!

I'm recently back from the AWP in Atlanta, where I happily bumped into Kelly and Gavin Grant, outside a packed panel on "literary gossip"; we then traveled (with the proprietress of Pinky's Paperhaus) to an agreeably odd, Costco-sized grocery store in Decatur. I witnessed mad Link/Small Beer love at AWP: One of my Poetry Foundation colleagues, upon seeing Kelly's name in the conference catalog, gushed with enthusiasm; the One Story table was keeping Kelly's amazing "The Great Divorce" out of sight, because it was too popular—you had to ask for it by name, you had to know it was there, it was almost illegal; on the way back to New York, someone was reading Stranger Things Happen, rapt . . .

* * *

U is for . . .


. . . and for Up Is Up, But So Is Down mastermind (and—more importantly—Dizzyhead) Brandon Stosuy, who gives a great interview over at 3:AM Magazine.

* * *

And V is for Believer Goddess Vendela's second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I read on the plane to Taiwan (I was about to say that I devoured it in a single sitting, but there was a stopover in Seattle in which I walked around and did vague leg stretching exercises, dismantling the sitting position). As the title suggests, the time to read this is now—it's a winter book, with an appealing brittleness of emotion, funny and devastating in turns...and often at the same time:

I looked over her shoulder at what she'd traced in the salt and pepper. I thought it would be a clue, a postscript to what she'd told me. In large capital letters, she had scrawled: BUY MILK.