My insane and terrifying ally Justin Howe has a poem up right now at Abyss and Apex called “City of Beautiful Nonsense”. I really like it. I think you should read it.

Judging by the time I’ve had trying to find translated copies of his work, Miguel Angel Asturias seems to be a writer who has fallen from the public eye, at least in the English-speaking world. I can’t quite figure out why. Born in Guatemala in 1899, he began his career as a political dissident, fled persecution to Europe, where he became heavily involved in the surrealist movement, and eventually returned home, where in 1967 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for the novel Men of Maize. He also seems to have been the first person to apply the term “magic realism” to the written word rather than to art. All of which suggests he ought to have been a prime candidate for competition with Borges, Garcia Marquez, Allende and Fuentes as exotic magic realist bestselling Oprah favorites. Instead, the reading of Asturias has been relegated to obscure academic pursuits. Case in point, the fact that the only places I’ve been able to read his work in English are university libraries. If I really wanted to own a copy of Men of Maize, I could get one used on Amazon—but it would cost me $100. No thanks.

So why the obscurity? I think it’s because of the kind of story Asturias tells, as well as how he tells it. My limited experience with surrealist fiction suggests a tendency, as in slipstream, to abstraction. The speculative element in a surrealist story often has the effect of hyperbole, with the implication that it can’t be taken at face value. Asturias’s fiction tends to draw from the structure and the tropes of the most primal of myth, but to depict these things with a complexity and abstractness of language that comes on like a synesthetic hurricane. The reader is left to find his own way through a soup of mythic symbols superimposed on top of an interpretation of the mimetic world whose structure only occasionally becomes visible through the soup, and which may or may not be what Asturias actually intends us to see.

Because of the very nature of his prose, this tendency to whirling chaos, it’s hard to pull out a concise quote that conveys what Asturias is all about. But I’ll give it a shot. I’ve been ruminating on The Mirror of Lida Sal: Tales based on Mayan Myths and Guatemalan Legends. These stories concern themselves with doomed sorcerer-artists, beings possessed of mythic, godlike creative power, but mortal, laughably fragile, who must inevitably be destroyed if not by their creations then by their very devotion to the creative act, which blinds them to the world’s dangers. In “Legend of the Crystal Mask”, a poor sculptor goes into hiding to escape the Spanish conquerors, and by his art transforms the cave of his refuge into a subordinate world, distorted and savage, whose population turns upon its creator and destroys him. This is the beginning:

Yes, Nurse Rain, he who made the idols and prepared the heads of the dead, leaving their cast-off bones in the lime-pit nearby, had hands thrice-golden!

Yes, Nurse Rain, he who made the idols, the custodian of skulls, fled from the men of worm-white skin, when they put torch to the city, and he took refuge in the most inaccessible of mountains, there where the earth turns into cloud!

Yes, Nurse Rain, he who made the gods that made him was Ambiastro, who had two stars in place of hands!

So we get this folkloric chantlike repetition, and we see Ambiastro treated like a god but acknowledged as a man. In everything I’ve read by Asturias (all of which deals in some way with the interaction between the modern Guatemala and its mythic past), there seems to be the implicit understanding and acceptance that the conquest is inevitable, has always already happened, and that thus Guatemala’s history can only be understood through the metaphor of conquest, of dismantling, destruction, rebirth, the piecemeal reassembly of heterogeneous fragments, without a blueprint, into something vibrantly alive and entirely different from either of its antecedents. All of which makes the abstraction, the willing incomprehensibility of Asturias’ writing an essential part of what he’s trying to do.

Which again raises the question of why his writing hasn’t stood up to the passage of time. It seems like, what with the upsurgence of slipstream in the genre publishing world, what with Kelly Link and Cat Valente and Matt Cheney and Dora Goss winning all this recognition, what with all the respect garnered by little slipstream zines like LCRW, Electric Velocipede, Flytrap, that Asturias ought to fit right in.

It probably has to do with the fact that as much critical acclaim as the edgy and poetical obscure seems to garner within genre, it doesn’t actually draw as much popular readership. For Asturias to catch on with that crowd, he would have to find a patron, a small press probably, somebody willing to front the cash and hype the hype. Small Beer managed it with Angelica Gorodischer…but they had Ursula Le Guin to translate.

I do actually own a Spanish-language copy of Hombres de Maíz my sister brought me back from Spain. Maybe someday, if my skills as a reader of Spanish skyrocket to one hundred times their current state, I’ll try and translate it myself.

El Gaspar Ilóm deja que a la tierra de Ilóm le roben el sueño de los ojos.

—Hombres de Maís, first line. Roughly (I think):

Gaspar Ilóm leaves the land of Ilóm robed in the dream of his eyes.

First, a disclaimer. I used to be all about writing down my dreams. I stopped doing it around when I switched the blog over to Wordpress, partly because with the old site design I could separate them out from the rest of the content, inflicting them only on the interested. Actually I could still do that with the new site design, but am lazy. I guess the real reason is that I used to be a much better dreamer. Back in 2004, I actually practiced at it. I kept to a routine, meditation, little mantras before bed, note-taking, memory exercises. These days, I’ve allowed other preoccupations to take over my attention. So basically I just want to say sorry if this is boring, it probably won’t happen again. I just happened to have an interesting dream with some beer and sci fi violence that lent itself well to narration. Thank you. Read on, or not.

PS. I am using a more link, so those of you reading this in syndication are mocked. Read the rest of this entry »

Chapter 3 of Paul Park’s A Princess of Roumania consists of a prickly conversation between two women we have never met before, in an as-yet-unknown time and place we may only assume is the Roumania of the title. It’s unclear throughout most of the scene which character, if any, is the point of view. From sentence to sentence, Park refers to the two women variously by their titles, their first names, their last names, and even their types (”this old woman” and “the woman”). As a result I have no idea who is saying what or why it matters, and I more or less skimmed over the scene without absorbing a single thing.

In almost any other situation, I would have put the book down.

But because of what had passed in the previous two chapters, and what was promised to come, I couldn’t do it. A Princess of Roumania is an unapologetic alternate world fantasy that opens in present-day, mundane Western Massachussets on a bitter teenage orphan girl (read Dorothy) and an alienated young man with only one hand (impossible for me not to read as me) meeting at an abandoned house in the woods to talk about the events of their past that have left them broken. And then we get sucked into Roumania–an alternate earth part of which includes a frontier Western Mass of wooly mammoths, mercenaries and shapeshifters. And I am hooked.

A Princess of Roumania is half surreal, Jack London-esque survival story, half court intrigue in an alternate Eastern Europe that reads like Russian epic. And the whole thing is told in omniscient POV–not just moving from head to head, giving us the thoughts and feelings of practically every character we encounter, but at times pausing to hover ambiguously between heads, commenting on truths of the human condition elucidated only by an understanding of both the character we’ve just left and the one we are about to enter.

A lot of people can’t stand omniscient POV. At Odyssey the year I attended, there was much debate as to whether Dune, as a result of its omniscient head-hopping style, was a poorly written piece of crap. I argued no–that Dune is in fact a masterpiece of world-building, intrigue and ideas. Many disagreed.

I have to admit it’s a difficult thing to do well. The very notion of trying to write a story in this way strikes me as absurdly ambitious, and at the moment, I doubt I will ever attempt it. But doing it well (as Paul Park does, despite the odd fluke of Chapter 3, which I’ll allow is probably a matter of poor editing more than poor writing) can catapult a story onto an entirely different scale of character depth and scope.

Park’s villain, the Baroness Ceausescu, may be the most complex villain I’ve ever seen in a work of fantasy. In fact I sympathize with her to the degree that (were it not for the presence of Miranda, Park’s Dorothy figure) she might well have been the protagonist. She makes me think of the protagonists of Dostoevsky. In the opening chapters, in one of his rare, startling moments as nebulous omniscient narrator, Park lays out the premise of her character as follows:

It is a myth that evil people feel pleasure at the pain of others.

The baroness is, inarguably, evil—and yet we can justify her almost every action from the perspective of someone who is merely human. And this same phenomenon occurs every time we’re tempted merely to hate or dislike a character for their actions. Park brings us into their heads and shows us how to understand them.

Reading A Princess of Roumania has been a daunting task. Yet at every turn, I find something eye-opening, some use of omniscience that elucidates the eerie strangeness of Roumania in unexpected ways—for example, experiencing the primeval woods of an alternate New England through the senses of a girl-turned-golden retriever joyfully exploring every new scent. It’s a lesson in all the things only fiction can do.

Sialia sialis Frozen highland marsh, Barkhamsted, CT.

Don’t usually see them this far north in the wintertime.

I’ve been meaning to post something about Miguel Angel Asturias, a Guatemalan writer who won the Nobel in 1967, but the topic is still a little too engrossing for me to distill down to a point just yet.

In the meantime, a story of winter wanderings!

Sometime in mid-December it snowed a heck of a lot. I strapped on my snowshoes, took hold of my long wooden pole, and set forth.

Snowshoeing in fresh, deep snow is ridiculously fun. It should probably be illegal it is so fun. Of course, not everybody has snowshoes. I happen to own a beat-up old pair I bought for $65 back in 2000 or so, well-used but functional. These are not the classic kind made of wood and rawhide, but the more modern variety, plastic, with metal claws that attach to your boots and pivot freely from the rest of the shoe. Also toothed metal runners along the bottom for traction on steep hillsides. They are, frankly, awesome.

Running downhill in snowshoes over two feet of fluff instills in me a bizarre, dreamlike sense of invincibility. The tracks on the shoes have just enough grip to keep you from losing control completely, and their weight and surface area lowers your center of gravity, making it virtually impossible to topple forward headfirst into a tree. It feels like running on the moon. Or walking a tightrope with one of those bigass poles. I take giant loping strides and rocket along effortlessly. Abominable snow-me. The snow sticks to the trees and hushes everything, and there’s nobody around, so I sing like an idiot. Grateful Dead songs mostly. Dire Wolf.

This is Chang Farm in Whately, MA, with the Connecticut River and Sunderland on the far side. My trek began at that group of buildings in the middle distance center left. I visited the cemetery, then crossed through fields and climbed up the embankment to the bridge, out of sight at far left. I went over the bridge, past more fields to the south foot of Mt. Sugarloaf, and up to the top where I took this picture. I stopped and sucked on an icicle for a bit until I got my wind back. Then I veered off-trail and plunged down the north side of the mountain, hooting maniacally all the way and lashing my poor doggie Max, to deprive the good little children of South Deerfield of assorted Who Puddings, cans of Who Hash, and Electro-Cardio-Snooks. Then I turned around and wandered across more fields back to the bridge and home. And boy was I exhausted when I got there!

Hey!

It comes as a pleasant surprise to me to learn that a nonfiction piece of mine called “It is Unwise to Wesemble a Wizard in the Dark” will be featured in the Weirdism section of the Nov/Dec 07 issue of Weird Tales magazine. Alongside a kickass story about the science of human/animal appendage grafting by the incomparable Scott H. Andrews.

How exciting.

The last five days at the end of the ancient Mayan calendar year consisted of a miniature month called Wayeb’ or “nameless days”, which, because it didn’t fit nicely into the ordered cycle of the regular 360-day year, was regarded as a time of ill omen, during which demons walked the earth unimpeded by the gods, and mortals shut themselves up in their houses and abstained from work, food, speech, or anything else that might attract supernatural attention.

At first it comes across as a weird inversion of our modern day secular new years’ rituals, a paranoid, fearmongering kind of holiday, especially when you compare it to the gory Aztec interpretation, wherein if the sun wasn’t fed in blood (the heart of a sacrificed nobleman ripped out of his chest, and flames kindled in the cavity), it would die forever. On the other hand, it makes for a lot of interesting parallels with fasts and festivals of atonement in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Paganism. Also it provides me a convenient justification for hiding in my house on New Years’ instead of venturing out in the cold to get drunk and spend money.

Here are five variations on the symbol for the nameless days in the Mayan pictography. I am unclear on the difference—whether each of these represents a different one of the five nameless days, or whether they’re the same symbol recorded with the embellishments of five different scribes. I am and shall forevermore remain bewildered by their written language. The only thing that makes any sense to me is their math.

Happy new year?