landingtree

My Masters course encourages everyone to submit to its online magazine, Turbine, towards the course's end. Since I had no short stories finished and little spare time what with working on book, I threw some poems at it. I don't know whether they stand up - my poems are all written in a back-and-forth with my grandfather, and no poets but we two have seen them - but as part of a conversation it's some of the most fun I've had writing in the last few years.

This magazine was edited by three of my coursemates. While the rest of us rested in the month after the course finished, they were reading four hundred submissions - hats off to them!

https://turbinekapohau.org.nz




(oh also there's a bit of my reading diary up there, which I mention because it has what leaflemming will consider spoilers for my book in it, don't read until later!)

8/05/2023

I am continuing not to get around to much reading, and even less writing about it! This has been a stressful and busy couple of weeks. However, in the days before I have to return it to the library, I'm dipping into Joan Aiken's collection of Armitage stories, The Serial Garden. This is about a family to whom peculiar events happen, but only on Mondays. The stories' strength is the way they blend the mundane with the fantastic. I just read a story in which a witch tries to bake one of the Armitage children in her new electric oven. After a while the boy realises that the witch, unfamiliar with the technology, only turned on the temperature switch and not the 'bake' switch, so the oven is actually staying cold. 'I've had the same problem as that witch!' I thought.

I don't really expect 'blends mundane with fantastical' to be a very interesting goal these days, I feel like the number of wizards who ask their neighbors for sugar and dragons who do income tax is pretty well up there at this point (and maybe that's why I put off these stories till nearly too late). But again and again the practicality of the details observed got to me. A recurrent, 'Well of course it would go that way.'

by E.R. Eddison.

7/06/2023

I was read The Worm Ouroboros and Mistress of Mistresses as a teen, but this is the first time I've read one of these books myself, silently. It has a wonderful speaking rhythm; there's nothing more likely to make me put off starting a book or hasten to finish it once properly started.* For about the first half I was thinking 'Why did I wait? This is so beautiful. Why do I ever read prose that isn't like this?' - thus mistaking as I am wont to do a passing mood for a general truth of my experience, because in the second half I did begin to get moments of 'This house has been being described for awfully many lines' and 'Do these people talk about nothing except Time?' which are two of the things I'd expect a reader who hated this book to hate. (For the third thing, see below).

This book, like the other Zimiamvia books, moves between an Earth on which the book's hero, Lessingham, lives like a man out of his native time and ideological context, and Zimiamvia, a land of willful lords and ladies like unto the dawn. Lessingham woos Mary, who loves him yet resists the love; the folk of Zimiamvia spar, adulterize, and talk at evening. The question is which of these worlds is primary, which, if either, real. Elswhere Eddison writes wonderful action set pieces (mountain-climbing, military clashes), but more than the other two, this is a book of peacetime - action is smaller. Here is cricket, courtly love, philosophy. If pain, suffering, and oblivion are not the final reality, then why are they a temporary reality? If Time is a Gordian knot, why does God not cut it?

I once wrote about Phillip Mann's Wulfsyarn that it seemed oddly heroic rather than systemic in how it saw the world, its tragic plot the working out of one flawed soul given complete remit for action. Implicit in my dissatisfaction was a sense that the book could have been otherwise, that if the hero had stopped being the be-all and end-all, there would have been some book left. That is not true of A Fish Dinner in Memison. Here, all relevant women are Aphrodite,** and no great man ever fell save by internal causes; if those facts were removed, you'd be left with blank pages and a dusting of punctuation. In fact, the whole matter of the book is stated in the author's Letter at the start: the same themes which characters will dwell on for pages is there, and the worth of the book is how much one likes their orchestration. Luckily, see again re. prose style, I like it a lot.


Content notes: racial slurs in two places, hero is good British colonial man, gender binary is metaphysic absolute. This last one cannot be stressed enough. I recall vaguely that it's true in both the earlier novels, but this one draws closest to Earth and so perhaps shows it more starkly. In his working through of 'why is there a point to experience?' and 'what is beauty?' Eddison says a lot I find congenial, but wrapped up so tightly in 'The name for the thing that motivates experience is Woman, the name for the thing motivated is Man' that I want to throw bits of modernity at him. Only I think they'd bounce.




*Started as bracket but got too long and became footnote: I have only read two Virginia Woolf novels and seldom had two reading experiences so immersive. For one of them I sat down next to the bookshelf thinking 'I'll read a few paragraphs of Mrs Dalloway to myself' and had finished it before I stood up again. The same conversation my class had about readers by ear or inner eye had a mix of people finding the Woolf excerpt completely absorbing or completely deflecting, and it would be neat if I could say that corresponded precisely with what kind of reader people identified as, but I don't recall that it did. It's because I'm someone who doesn't necessarily see things in my head when reading that a few bits of Orlando were so powerful for me, because I did see those - one blue kingfisher, one smooth green tide of lawn. Have I written this on Dreamwidth before? Quite possibly.

**not entirely true: there are nymphs.

21/05/2023

Jane Smiley's Some Luck has the best baby POV I've run into. However I have mostly been reading my classmates' work recently. It's a good thing I wrote so much in this journal early; my reading sparsens. [For my course, we need to have at least twenty thousand words of reading diary by the start of August. I've already done this! One deadline that won't be stressful.]


29/05/2023

I'm enjoying Some Luck. The baby POV continues strong, from a succession of different babies. At a rate of one chapter per year, halfway through the book we've only covered sixteen years – not an unusual span of time for a novel to occupy itself with. I feel like I'm on a train gliding gently through a city I know, even though the train is going to keep going out through the suburbs into countryside I haven't seen before, as the events of these people's lives don't slow down but keep on rising and being moved on from, chapter by chapter, through this and two more books.

27/04/2023

Finished Housekeeping. Went to Pegasus and bought two more books by Marilynne Robinson. I love this book. It took a while to bring me up to speed with its visionariness – took me a while to settle into it – but now I am somewhat tempted to start it again from the beginning immediately.

The way it begins is: “My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs Sylvia Fisher.” Right from the start I was wondering about that 'fled'. The book is the story of life in a single house with those caregivers, under the shadow of tragedy and transience, in a small town next to an immense cold lake. The title seems to promise that the book will be something rather normal, and it isn't. The title is there to warp and twist and be looked in at through windows. A central question is whether the childrens' lives will ever become settled, amidst all this tragedy and vision and overbearing weather.


Other reading: we have reached the hinge of my masters course. Previously there was a little of my classmates' work to read, but from now on, there will be lots. Fun so far, though the time of my own needing-to-have-written-stuff is nigh upon me, I swear there was an extra week between me and the first deadline which all passed over the course of yesterday.

Today I read the first folio extract of one of my classmates, making notes with a red pen, didn't start out liking it at all, but just reached a story in the middle which made me sit up and go “Huh! Good writing is happening all of a sudden, this is sharply observed and funny and doing subtext.” I hope the stories were written in order, that would suggest steady improvement and I might like the next one even more.

I discovered a month or two ago that the IML has a small cottage maintained for it in the Wairarapa for weekend bookings by its students, by old family friends of Bill Manhire, the now-retired grand old ridgepole of the writing school. Minorly magical-seeming advantages of being a cultural institution! I'm off there on Saturday with no internet but several notebooks.

I seem not to have posted one of these in a month. Still diarying, but in a bitsier way, about halves of story collections and such.


18/04/2023

...

Let it be known that I came in biased: I have never read any Margaret Atwood except her interview with Ursula Le Guin about science fiction. I know the two writers were good friends who did not approach writing from the same direction, and I've loved Le Guin for decade now (I'm twenty-six: nearly old enough to say 'decades'). What I know of Atwood is mainly her attempt to call what she does something other than science fiction – when she does it, don't you know, it's not about warp drives, it's about characters. If I wanted to start by liking Margaret Atwood, I think I should try her realist short stories, and I may yet do that. However, I am writing a book with bits of Odyssey in it, so.

Initial result: liked it just exactly as little as I expected. The flippancy, the presentism, Penelope's shade in Hades talking about the passing time, Christian Hell appearing next to Hades as though that were not a way of imagining afterlives so different from the ancient Greek that you have to do some work if you want them both in the same place, not just throw it into your soup (it is possible I may at one time have been a Classics student)

This would seem to have me two for two on disliking feminist retellings of the Odyssey, (I also don't care for Circe much, though, more than this) which is a shame.

This said, I am only on chapter five of The Penelopiad.



19/04/2023

How is it respecting the lives of the twelve murdered maids to have them convey their perspective in bad poetry? How is it respecting Penelope's intelligence to have her discover blatantly obvious facts about her situation years later, in Hades, after her own death? I do not like this book very much! Also, the first note of character we get about Telemachus is that he seriously considered murdering his mother for his own convenience but decided it would be a bad bet. You can't just drop that in there! Orestes found kin-murder hard enough enough to do that it took him several plays! And Penelope sends the maids to be raped, and hates Helen who she views as a rival. In this book, one person is seldom kind to another without our getting the note that they were reluctant about it, or somehow obnoxious in the doing of it, or tactical about it. This reminded me of the Naomi Novik paragraphs where someone lays out the cold clear economics of a situation, except without the bit where human kindness complicates it.

(I mean I'm only halfway through The Penelopiad, this is characterisation of Penelope, I shall keep reading).

...
( Spoilers upon finishing the book )

17/03/2023 cont'd

Wrote a section of my novel in omniscient third, with the audience referred to as 'we' as though all of them were crouched behind a camera, zooming around, desiring to look at particular places. Then read the start of Reservoir Thirteen and skimmed the first page of Bleak House and realised how much better it would be to cut the audience loose, 'we' is an awkward gaggle of picnic-goers on what's meant to be an empty mountain. Whenever I use 'we' in these few pages, it would be far better to invent a walker on the road, a bird, a schoolteacher, a cat running along a fence, and live briefly in their eyes.

18/03/2023

Reservoir Thirteen begins with a girl's vanishing, and the search for her, in the complex landscape around a small British town. But it begins to slide away smoothly out from under itself – weeks pass on a line-turn, then months. The first chapter sets up certain patterns – long paragraphs, the unsignaled movement from a human scene to news of birds mating in the hedgerows – and then, when the start of the second chapter comes with the new year, a satisfying pattern is established: each chapter will be a year. The vanished girl fades slowly in the village's memory, and she stops being what the village is mainly occupied by – though her memory haunts it.

As of chapter two I was already looking forward to seeing this format unfold, to see everything that's been mentioned return and be expanded upon. It makes me wary of my desire to go 'and then this thing - and then this other thing!' with structure. One thing promised and stuck to has such an effect. Reservoir Thirteen has an ensemble cast, and some years a person won't show up at all or will only get two lines. I've forgotten some recurring characters' names, but it doesn't seem like a problem, so much as, one does forget some of the people in a village. I never know when a scene is going to stick, which makes them precious: does the riverkeeper get three lines this year or thirty before we switch view to the fog on the hills or the crumbling of the reservoir bank? Paragraphing gives no warning, so the reading experience is full of tiny discontinuities.

As of halfway through: the book does pass the Bechdel test, but a great proportion of its developing stories are m/f romance – often halting and failing because few of the men here are very communicative. This book reminds me of Under Milk Wood: a whole town, its preoccupations, its surroundings, and most of all sex and romance between men and women. Notably, also, the working of the land and ageing/ill health.

13/03/2023 cont'd.

I don't have a favourite writer. But writers for whom I could make a case are Ada Palmer, Diana Wynne Jones, Samuel Delany. I have read almost everything written by Ada Palmer and Diana Wynne Jones, and there are reasons for the exceptions, so I expect in this course to be reading quite a lot of Samuel Delany.

From his About Writing: 7 Essays, 4 Letters, 5 Interviews, I have printed out the 7 Essays, because that comes near the limit of how many pages from Victoria University's library copy I'm allowed to print. I suspect he would be, not disapproving of this, no, but interested in the material conditions of the reading. That I have shorn away the context of introduction, preface, contents page.

First essay: 'Teaching/Writing', which I've read before, is about his time teaching the Clarion workshop and about how art can be taught in general; a summary of the essay could be 'Any summary of this nature is of necessarily limited use; that said, find new ways to pay attention.'

I intended to begin my reading for this course with this book; the reasons I didn't were a preference for paper versus radiant screens and a complicated printer problem. The reason I wanted to start here, and am happy to be here now, is that Delany is good at paying attention. I don't want to write like him, particularly – although I am, a little bit, just now, or at least am mimicking certain tics I have noticed, less deliberately than because that is what I just poured into the well from which I'm now raising water. But if I can be as alert to the world and to prose as Delany is, then good writing will be a result of that alertness so automatic that it need not itself be trained. (I don't think this is a universal rule of writers, and there's a lot of training that has to precede it, but what he says about it resonates with my experiences of writing now). Also: he describes the workshop process well and entertainingly, the way he, as a longtime writer but a new teacher, does and doesn't know how to go about it. And I'd like to try each of the three exercises he describes.

Start of second essay, name forgotten just now: one of the things that can stop me writing is trying to write like a critic. I spend more time reading book reviews than I do writing. This starts up a prevailing wind pushing me toward wanting my finished piece to do something, something which may be good and interesting but may also be unreachably distant from the start point of the blank page. There is not no worth to distant goals, but I have not yet managed to do this. I seem to draw my energy, like Delany seems to, from the lower levels of the writing process's scaffolding. I love to surprise myself by suddenly realising that a narrative potential exists, or that I could break my own rules, or that x could really have been y all along. In its negative aspect, this leads to stories which are maps of my own thought processes and thus illegible to others, and stories which wildly skip forward over the top of what might have made one care about them. There's definitely an argument that the job I should have set myself this year is 'learn to write a novel, which is shaped like a novel, from beginning to end,' instead of, 'So, each chapter will correspond to a garden, right, except at all different time periods, and the psychic pigs are important but won't actually appear onstage in part one, no, ditch that, I'm putting in the psychic pigs immediately because they fit onto this page right here...'

Also I read another chapter of Everything For Everyone, and whoof, this book is prepared to be dark. Feelings were felt. Where I write, above, 'my pessimism warns that nothing will ever go this well', what I'm talking about is how the fall of Capitalism shakes out in the end; this book and I are in full agreement on how much crisis would (will?) plausibly happen first.

I just read – what a day it is for reading! - the start of a Delany collection called Silent Interviews, and laughed at how directly he addresses the reader about reading, by discussing the question of whether good readers skim, skip words, or are inattentive, in a scene peppered with details in excess of the point at hand – where the speakers are sitting, and what they're eating.

14/03/2023.

Well, I played Disco Elysium, a game full of good writing, but since the things I would immediately want to talk about are art, music, voice acting, and game design, these being inextricable from the effect of the writing, I won't set them down here. Oh, although, I also played Hades, and that is a game to which Delany's idea of excess he talks about in that introduction applies; the most elevated readerly emotions happen beyond the task of the aesthetic object, in the spare space, in the things the reader can forget between readings or the viewer of paintings might not initially notice in the background, or, here, all the actions which are not necessary to complete the game. Hades is a sequence of rooms in which you fight monsters with your buff little Zagreus-man, repetitive enough to require little thought but variable enough to stay interesting, and the story of Hades is contained in the relationships you build with NPCs in the course of repeated failures to break out of the underworld, almost entirely through text conversations you read along the way. But then, after a battle, I can also go off and stand for a minute at a window watching the souls of the dead drift along a walkway far below, a detail I did not notice during my first fifty attempts to break out of the underworld because I was too busy breaking out of the underworld. I'm not sure I agree with 'most elevated' or if that's even a good paraphrase of Delany, but I certainly do like what happens in this space, the space only a re-player or a re-reader notices (although for each player or reader it's a different shape).

Also I read another couple chapters of Everything For Everyone. One is an interview with someone who doesn't really like telling their own story, certainly not in order; the voices of the interviews aren't strongly different voices in the 'writers did one style here, different style here' way, it's all very transparent, but thought has been put into differentiating them in terms of how the interview process feels to them and what it means to them, which I like. Some interviewees are really glad to have their stories told, others feel themselves being retraumatized and stop the interview, others are willing to be there but really stuffed-up about the past so that it comes out in no clear order.

And then the chapter on gestation work, which is also about housing and co-habitation in all its permutations. Since I've written 'co-habitation' on my list of themes for the novel I'm writing (despite what I say above about not finding high-level scaffolding helpful I do have a list), this is more relevant than expected. Also I've written something in this territory before: a novella in which supernatural events militate against the formation of any stable households, and have given rise to a society which tries to prevent the formation of what we know as close human bonds while still letting people live as well and happily as possible. (One thing this chapter makes me think is 'I should get that published', though its ending is in a deeply confused state and where, anyway, can one publish novellas?) I guess family structure and the requirements the world's economics put on it are an interest of mine? Without having done much reading around that stuff, and without, even, living in a situation that's done any formal talking about it. We have the silent precarity of short-term renters with our lives in several different kinds of flux.

[One qualm I have with this chapter is that I don't think we're within a century of implantable wombs, I seem to recall reading somewhere that that is a technical challenge on the order of a Mars colony - but this is just one of those unchecked convictions one picks up around the place, so who knows? Also in this book they're getting ready for a Mars colony, so. Pauses to skim scientific paper names: huh, I'm not going down this rabbit hole now but it is being worked on, and in fact it's already been done with partial success. I retract my qualm pending actual research.]

Also this book is very full of therapists and people in therapy. I don't know why I have a knee-jerk reaction against this, because, after all, I am in therapy, and it's been extremely valuable to me, and that's without me even having gone through the traumatic collapse of global Capitalism yet. I guess it's that I have no current sense that therapy as a whole is as good as it is in this book, no particular conviction that the discipline will move in good ways, as opposed to being a weird mess with some good therapists and practices in it, some of whom I was lucky enough to find. I guess this is a microcosm of my sense of the book's optimism as a whole. (Though also it reflects a knee-jerk and poorly informed prejudice against psychoanalysis specifically, which I can get halfway out of my mouth into reasoned argument before running into the fact that I have never spoken to a psychoanalyst or a client of a psychoanalyst about psychoanalysis or looked at a study about the effectiveness of psychoanalysis).

I have now been writing my reading diary for an hour I could have been spending writing my novel or, alternatively, reading; this is why they get you to hand your reading diary in in August, with three months to spare at the course's end.

This year I'm doing the Writing for the Page masters course at the Institute of Modern Letters; basically, it's a course in which ten people end up with a draft novel each by November. More on this later! But I keep not getting around to writing about the course, so here are some excerpts from the reading diary it asks students to keep. It's a rainy, windy day, thirteen degrees out, i.e. cold enough for my liking, and I just cycled home exuberantly, singing in the Mt Vic Tunnel (all the cars honk and I have to join in somehow).

~

08/03/2023

...and I've started Everything For Everyone – an oral history of the New York Commune 2052-2072, a structurally fascinating utopia. It makes the conclusion of Nothing To See jump out at me as especially pessimistic – presenting, instead of [spoilers], a period in the near future when communal action overthrows the flailing Capitalist nation-states and fixes the world. The book's authors project themselves into the future: this is a project that will be undertaken by these real people, M.E. O'Brien and Eman Ahdelhadi, in another fifty years' time. Politically the book's focus on mutual aid networks and social reproduction theory* appeals to me, though my pessimism warns that nothing will ever go this well; narratively, the conceit of the book as a scholarly introduction followed by a collection of interviews allows a beautiful collection of voices and perspectives. We'll see how this one sticks the landing, and what my Trotskyist family members think about it. (Prose-wise, in the wake of Barzun it is again the case that I want to nitpick individual words).

12/03/2023

Another chapter of Everything For Everyone today, and a really interesting conversation with my activist sister about it. She says the revolution it's depicting strikes her as plausible, for the most part: people have been saying 'One day capitalism will finally eat itself' for a while, and it hasn't happened yet, but it's still a coherent thing to imagine happening. Meanwhile, I enjoy the quality this book shares with Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, a favourite work of mine: the future arises from the present in really weird ways. Today's trivial-seeming social club is tomorrow's only source of intercontinental communication. Also, I have heard from a lot of people,** Americans and other, who are sick of the centrality of New York in the discourse; this book is very deliberately global in scope. New York's in the title, but chapter two is about Palestine and that social club I mentioned arises from ships that circle the Indian Ocean. (I'm interested to see how this would chime with Robinson's New York 2140, which I suspect of being an active counter-inspiration, though on very little evidence).


13/03/2023

Today I read Leese Webster, by Ursula Le Guin and James Brunsman. It is a picture book about a spider living in an abandoned palace who begins to make her webs into art. I suspect it of also being about writing, but what's that Le Guin said about message versus applicability? A good fable is a multi-purpose tool like a bowl, you can put a lot of different things in it and it's still the same bowl, ready to be re-used. I read this book while looking for Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, a book whose applicability to my novel project I understood; still haven't found that book, but I went home from Victoria Library with six unrelated things none of which I'd been looking for, and having read a Le Guin story I'd never heard of. Serendipity is one of the things this course is for.






*[note: I have not actually read any social reproduction theory, but it came up in the conversation which recommended me the book, so: based on what I deduce social reproduction theory to be from the first third of this book alone, it appeals to me!]

**[note: two people. Guess I like to sound confident in this diary, huh.]