![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading Diary: the structure of buildings
Apr. 1st, 2023 04:13 pm31/03/2023
Today I read half the reading packet for next week's seminar. This is our convener's packet, which will serve the rest of us as a blueprint when we do ours: each student in the class will lead a couple hours' discussion on some craft topic of our choice. This one is about structure, how novels can be thought about synesthetically or formally. Pip Adam's piece is about how she learned to revise her books by thinking about them as though they were buildings – not a metaphor that ever gets her as far as allegory, she says, she can't tell you which bit of the book is the living room or anything like that, but a useful way of thinking in contrast to her previous metaphor, which had been jenga blocks, most bits of the book depending on most other bits and the whole thing liable to collapse. The novels she writes now have walls that aren't structural and walls that are, so she can knock bits out of them safely. This lead her to run 'The Writing Workshop Where We Don't Write,' in which people took drafts that weren't working and were invited to think them through in colors, or flavours, or by moving around the room. As someone who says he's writing a book structured like a series of walled gardens, mainly because that seemed neat, but who doesn't necessarily have any idea how to actually do that, this is useful to think about! My sense of structure is very ad hoc, is not inherently synesthetic, and is limited to what I can hold in my head at a given time, i.e. less than a novel, which is also something Pip Adam discusses here. Part of the point of images like the building one is having something that will stay in place when you look away from it.
Also in packet: bits of Eleanor Catton, who structured The Luminaries by detailed astrological charts and sections of decreasing size, and Patricia Grace, who structured her Potiki according to a genre of formal speech called whaikōrero, which moves in a circle, beginning by introducing a speaker and ending by handing off to the next.
This evening I also read a good chunk of You Should Come With Me Now, M. John Harrison short stories. One of my classmates' work focusses on memory, alienation, loneliness; I don't know whether they'd love M. John Harrison or find that he wants to deny them everything they're looking for in that material. This is my most fluid Harrison reading experience yet. I just like these a whole lot. Whether that's because I'm on his wavelength now, or his wavelength has changed, I'll only learn if I go back and try rereading Things That Never Happen, several of the stories in which I once hated with a passion.
The stories here are very short, some of them flash fiction. Two so far have been banal satires about Elf-lord Eldranol, a name calculated to sound as much like a medicine as like Tolkien. I can no longer read this banality as fully directed at what it seems to be, not when the story before one of them is so forthcoming in its exposition about the practice of digging up dead members of the British Royal Family, and then has a character say to another, “All of this is so hackneyed and played out.” I'm interested to see where Eldranol goes in the rest of the book. He isn't sufficient. Nor were the elf-lords he's a mockery of. I think Harrison is saying both these things. He's so willing to let you completely miss his point that whenever he does surface something fully, it makes me wary. He probably knows I've got that. It probably means he isn't going to give me any more of it.
Stories that stick with me especially: 'Entertaining Angels Unawares', (so full of sex and death symbols you just know Harrison isn't going to let them resolve the way you'd think), 'Yummie' (like all this book's stories, a ghost story, but this one, twined with heart surgery, chillingly right out there about it) and 'Cicisbeo'.
An example: in the story 'Cicisbeo', a man is retreating into his own attic, moving more and more of his stuff up there. In a story by an author of Weird Fiction, this could mean anything. The attic could be anything. I expected from the first that the attic would be larger on the inside than the outside, perhaps a whole world, perhaps an outlandish series of rooms; surely I've read that story several times. But when the narrator finally gets up there, it's with the line, “I got a confused idea of a much smaller space than I had expected, most of it curtained off by heavy tarpaulins which sagged from the roofbeams.” The attic is resolutely something an attic in a house could be. But reader and narrator still can't see what's in it. All the details could belong to a house, but might not. Later we get “Around [the tarpaulins'] edges I glimpsed the eerie white flicker of a butane lamp, or perhaps one of those portable fluorescent tubes.” Again, it's normal enough to seem part of reality, without his knowing what it is. In giving us two options he also gives us a doubt of indefinite extension. Maybe it's neither. He detects 'A smell which reminded me of old-fashioned house-gas', something which belongs to houses – yet doesn't anymore. When the fantastic element comes to light it is inextricably intertwined with perfectly normal events pertaining to relationships and houses, and only exists for a couple of sentences.
Today I read half the reading packet for next week's seminar. This is our convener's packet, which will serve the rest of us as a blueprint when we do ours: each student in the class will lead a couple hours' discussion on some craft topic of our choice. This one is about structure, how novels can be thought about synesthetically or formally. Pip Adam's piece is about how she learned to revise her books by thinking about them as though they were buildings – not a metaphor that ever gets her as far as allegory, she says, she can't tell you which bit of the book is the living room or anything like that, but a useful way of thinking in contrast to her previous metaphor, which had been jenga blocks, most bits of the book depending on most other bits and the whole thing liable to collapse. The novels she writes now have walls that aren't structural and walls that are, so she can knock bits out of them safely. This lead her to run 'The Writing Workshop Where We Don't Write,' in which people took drafts that weren't working and were invited to think them through in colors, or flavours, or by moving around the room. As someone who says he's writing a book structured like a series of walled gardens, mainly because that seemed neat, but who doesn't necessarily have any idea how to actually do that, this is useful to think about! My sense of structure is very ad hoc, is not inherently synesthetic, and is limited to what I can hold in my head at a given time, i.e. less than a novel, which is also something Pip Adam discusses here. Part of the point of images like the building one is having something that will stay in place when you look away from it.
Also in packet: bits of Eleanor Catton, who structured The Luminaries by detailed astrological charts and sections of decreasing size, and Patricia Grace, who structured her Potiki according to a genre of formal speech called whaikōrero, which moves in a circle, beginning by introducing a speaker and ending by handing off to the next.
This evening I also read a good chunk of You Should Come With Me Now, M. John Harrison short stories. One of my classmates' work focusses on memory, alienation, loneliness; I don't know whether they'd love M. John Harrison or find that he wants to deny them everything they're looking for in that material. This is my most fluid Harrison reading experience yet. I just like these a whole lot. Whether that's because I'm on his wavelength now, or his wavelength has changed, I'll only learn if I go back and try rereading Things That Never Happen, several of the stories in which I once hated with a passion.
The stories here are very short, some of them flash fiction. Two so far have been banal satires about Elf-lord Eldranol, a name calculated to sound as much like a medicine as like Tolkien. I can no longer read this banality as fully directed at what it seems to be, not when the story before one of them is so forthcoming in its exposition about the practice of digging up dead members of the British Royal Family, and then has a character say to another, “All of this is so hackneyed and played out.” I'm interested to see where Eldranol goes in the rest of the book. He isn't sufficient. Nor were the elf-lords he's a mockery of. I think Harrison is saying both these things. He's so willing to let you completely miss his point that whenever he does surface something fully, it makes me wary. He probably knows I've got that. It probably means he isn't going to give me any more of it.
Stories that stick with me especially: 'Entertaining Angels Unawares', (so full of sex and death symbols you just know Harrison isn't going to let them resolve the way you'd think), 'Yummie' (like all this book's stories, a ghost story, but this one, twined with heart surgery, chillingly right out there about it) and 'Cicisbeo'.
An example: in the story 'Cicisbeo', a man is retreating into his own attic, moving more and more of his stuff up there. In a story by an author of Weird Fiction, this could mean anything. The attic could be anything. I expected from the first that the attic would be larger on the inside than the outside, perhaps a whole world, perhaps an outlandish series of rooms; surely I've read that story several times. But when the narrator finally gets up there, it's with the line, “I got a confused idea of a much smaller space than I had expected, most of it curtained off by heavy tarpaulins which sagged from the roofbeams.” The attic is resolutely something an attic in a house could be. But reader and narrator still can't see what's in it. All the details could belong to a house, but might not. Later we get “Around [the tarpaulins'] edges I glimpsed the eerie white flicker of a butane lamp, or perhaps one of those portable fluorescent tubes.” Again, it's normal enough to seem part of reality, without his knowing what it is. In giving us two options he also gives us a doubt of indefinite extension. Maybe it's neither. He detects 'A smell which reminded me of old-fashioned house-gas', something which belongs to houses – yet doesn't anymore. When the fantastic element comes to light it is inextricably intertwined with perfectly normal events pertaining to relationships and houses, and only exists for a couple of sentences.
