I restricted myself to a Saturday visit, $10, a pass through the artists’ and dealers’ rooms, a couple of panels. ConBust is a very small, somewhat insular convention held on the Smith College campus, with a focus on women in the publishing industry and a slight intellectual bent due to the smattering of braniacal Smith professors in attendance. For all that, however, ConBust turned out to be a surprisingly silly affair. Lots of chainmail and renfaire dress-up, marshmallow-firing hand crossbows and nerf duelling on the quad. I imagine this was due to the undergrad influence, and my being more used to hanging out with grad students and the wise, reserved nerds of Small Beer Press.

I caught the end of what must have been a really fascinating discussion on Pan’s Labyrinth, and was dismissed in my attempts to argue that the flaws in its narrative are intentional comments on the conflict between the demands of realism, fairytale and horror. I could maybe have contested the point, but I had already made myself that guy by showing up late, and anyway I’m never very good at disputing the opinions of the person with the talking stick.

Also went to a thing about urban fantasy, which sadly (for me) ended up being more about serial novels than short stories or stand-alones, but did include some interesting insights about industry trends in categorization, the branching off of dark fantasy from fantasy and horror, urban fantasy from dark fantasy, supernatural YA from general YA, and the necessity or lack thereof for the people writing the novels to care what name they get called as long as the editors can be trusted to know what they’re doing. I wish they’d stuck more to that track, but the audience was comprised more of readers than writers and so the fan-oriented perspective prevailed.

For lunch I ate half a loaf of country sourdough bread from the Hungry Ghost, which is right down the street from Smith and I have been meaning to try ever since I moved here. It was freaking awesome. The Ghost is a tiny little brick building on a knoll in downtown Northampton, the inside of which is almost completely taken up by an enormous, beehive-looking brick oven. There’s a skinny rack for finished loaves and a cash register, and that’s it. It was like walking through a little blue door back in time to the Middle Ages. And the bread…damn. Best lunch I’ve had in a very long time.

Then it was back to (Un)Seelye Hall for an incredibly in-depth lecture by Kelly Link and Sharyn November on the state of young adult fiction. I took notes, and I do not usually take notes. It seemed like everything they loved best was stuff that twisted, broke or challenged the genre boundaries and industry categorizations that had seemed so insuperable in the other panel. That made me happy. I really like YA, both for the breadth of what it allows and accepts, and for the gloriously open minds of its readership, and while thus far I have only ever tried halfheartedly to write or sell things to that market, someday I will make it happen. And it just floods me with goodwill towards the world (though part of that may have been the smell of the uneaten bread in my bag) that there is all this vibrant and fascinating stuff being done with it that I’ve never even heard of.

And that was all, ’cause I had to be out of NoHo by four. I went to Forbes Library and wrote feverishly under the gaze of some pipe-smoking city founder’s portrait until my wife arrived to pick me up.

Cultivar at Smith

Though it is not yet spring in New England, I’m calling it spring on the Mossy Skull, which entity exists in spirit over a scattering of many latitudes between the 49th and 20th parallels. There are weeds coming up in my garden and snails on the undersides of dead wood. Among other things this means the gallery photos at top shift to the Spring catalog (go WordPress plug-ins!).

I went to the Lyman Conservatory for their annual spring bulb show a couple weeks ago. As usual I took no pictures of the bulbs because they pale compared to everything else. Even the greenhouse itself is a crazy victorian lotus wrought in glass and metal. Meh tulips.

Giant lemon – Apparently not a cultivar? Scifiest looking lemon I ever saw.

Some orchid or other…. The orchid room is pumped full of atmosphere and special effects smoke, and there are coi swimming around at about hip level. The wading-through-Everglades effect is sufficient to make me utterly unable to retain species information. If only they would cut it with some flashing blue lights and pumped-in prog rock, maybe I could provide more competent captions.

Been having some odd happenstance around here…entries showing up in triplicate and suchlike. So I am upgrading to WordPress 2.3.3. Things may go haywire for a short while. You will likely not notice at all.

Occasionally, as a matter of probabilities, one must expect to find himself in a snow-fogged graveyard.

A diploma!

No, just kidding.

This is one of those things you do because everyone else is doing them. What do you call those things? Memes? It’s a list of ten books I’ve read that I think you haven’t. Courtesy of Scott Andrews, Jay Ridler, and other such heroes of the obscure.

1. Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser – A convoluted allegory for Christian morality in the form of an epic poem written in faux-old English about a bunch of color-coded knights running around doing heroic deeds on behalf of a nice lady riding a palfrey.
2. The Celestine Prophecy James Redfield – The official Hollywood fad religious cult handbook for the year 1993.
3. Turtle Moon Alice Hoffman – A disturbing borderline supernatural romance that was pressed upon me for beach reading one summer on the Cape by my mother and grandmother.
4. Tom Sawyer Abroad Mark Twain – Sequel to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, in which the boys embark on a hot-air balloon ride around the world. Sort of “Mark Twain does Jules Verne”.
5. Eclogues Virgil – Dirty pastoral poems by the author of the Aeneid.
6. Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley – A silly farce about turning fairtytale tropes on their heads for the purposes of Eeevil.
7. Decision at Thunder Rift William H. Keith, Jr. – A video game tie-in novel about angry dudes piloting giant robots for revenge! Yes indeed. Forgive me, readers, I have slummed.
8. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Henry David Thoreau – Waldenesque, but with a lot less preachy insanity and cost-of-living accounting. Instead he waxes rhapsodic on youth, nature and brotherly love. About a journey taken by Thoreau with his brother John, who died not long after, when both were in their twenties. I was a sucker for Thoreau back in high school (and an idealist); you could probably have found me sitting in the school’s courtyard at 7 AM on a chilly spring morning reading this book and trying not to cry.
9. Phantom Susan Kay – The life and times of the Phantom of the Opera, including his life in that cage at the gypsy carnival, as designer of torture chambers to the shah of Persia, etc. Brooding gothic fun.
10. The Defense Vladimir Nabokov – A chess-playing genius goes insane in glorious monochrome. A short book, but unbelievably tortuous in its symbolism. Kafkaesque.

This requires a bit of explanation. Back when I was posting my reviews of all the stories in Interfictions, I missed this one. Only lately did a few shrewd readers notice this and call me on it. At their behest, here it is. With apologies for the chronological dementedness.

“Alternate Anxieties”
Karen Jordan Allen

In the Afterword, Theodora Goss mentions this as one of the first stories she recognized as interstitial. And it is, in a very literal sense: it’s part-way between a story and the notes for a story (and/or the notes for a philosophical essay?). To me, it reads like a personal journal entry—somewhat self-indulgent, thoughts and ideas recorded for the purpose of catharsis rather than that of telling a good story. At times, the fragmented structure (numbered outlines, incomplete sentences, a lot of line breaks) meant I had to force myself not to skim. This is the challenge and the danger of this sort of experimentation in fiction: there’s always the chance of going too far, knocking readers out of the story. For me, though, the structure was only part of what contributed to that effect. The ideas involved—parallel universes, decision trees crippled by postmodern self-evaluation and unhealthy paranoia—didn’t do much to inspire me. Possibly this was because they rang a little too true.

Anxiety and self-doubt are touchy subjects, and Allen deserves respect for having the guts to lay hers out there with such frankness. (I acknowledge the possibility that this isn’t an autobiographical piece of fiction, but expect that’s not the case. Maybe it’s presumptive, but I think to write about self-doubt in such depth as this necessitates having experienced it at least once.) However, it’s because these subjects are so touchy for me personally that my reaction to them in this story was so negative. I think of Notes from Underground, a similarly bleak and even despairing work, which, when I read it, both blew my mind and angered me intensely at the same time, and which, while I was duly impressed and influenced by it, I will never read again. Why not? Because part of its influence on me was to make me wish from the bottom of my being never to become the Underground Man. How does one avoid becoming mired in self-doubt? By choosing not to wallow in it; part of which, for me, means not seeking out the type of fiction which addresses it. Not that I haven’t read and even written my share of circular-reasoning, postmodern fiction. But in every one of those stories (a total of three I can think of offhand), the object was to break the circular reasoning, to find motivation or excuse to move on with my life and accomplish something, rather than wallowing in indecisiveness and misery. “Alternate Anxieties” doesn’t seem to be about that, and in that respect, it leaves me with the unpleasant feeling of being stuck in a rut, spinning my wheels, but only getting stuck deeper.

Thanks to Shara, I am now deeply absorbed in the 1932 Ralph L. Roys translation of the Chilam Balam—the Book of the Jaguar Priest. The Chilam Balam is a transcription of Mayan oral tradition crushed together with bizarre fragments of Catholic morality and dogma, made around the year 1540 by one or more enslaved native priests at the behest of their new Spanish masters. It was written in Yucatec Maya, but using a phonetic transliteration of that language into Spanish script, rather than the native pictographs (because the Franciscan friars who forcibly converted them to christianity had declared all native art or written language the work of the devil). To all that, add the whole issue of subversion/coercion involved in having to write your own history with your conquerors looking over your shoulder, and it’s no surprise what an inextricably convoluted time somebody like me is going to have making head or tail of it.

At certain points, the author(s) very blatantly play toady to their masters, praising and elevating the “one true god” at the expense and even the condemnation of their own traditions. In other places, the Jaguar Priest seems to claim the Spanish god and the precepts of their religion as inevitable products of the natural evolution of Maya belief and prophecy. And at times he even seems to ignore his conquerors completely, relating rituals of sex and death that surely must have melted off some friar’s socks.

Trying to synthesize a unified message out of all this lush and bloody chaos would be absurd. But as a distillation of a unique moment in time and place, and as a springboard for speculation, the Chilam Balam is a joy to read.

From Chapter 9, “The Interrogation of the Chiefs”:

“Then, my son, go bring me the green blood of my daughter, also her head, her entrails, her thigh, and her arm; … as well as the green stool of my daughter. Show them to me. It is my desire to see them. I have commissioned you to set them before me, that I may burst into weeping.”

“So be it, father.” …

This is the green blood of his daughter for which he asks: it is Maya wine. These are the entrails of his daughter: it is an empty bee-hive. This is his daughter’s head: it is an unused jar for steeping wine. This is what his daughter’s green stool is: it is the stone pestle for pounding honey. … This is what the bone of his daughter is: it is the flexible bark of the balché. This is the thigh of which he speaks: it is the trunk of the balché tree. This is what the arm of his daughter is: it is the branch of the balché. This is what he calls weeping: it is a drunken speech.

It gives an idea of what Miguel Angel Asturias and Julio Cortazar might have been trying for in their surrealist efforts at creating modern Maya myth. Which part of it is metaphor and which is real, and for whom? Does the son understand that the father isn’t really asking for his daughter’s blood and gore? Whether he does or not, will he obey the spirit, or the letter? If the father drinks enough blood, will he fool himself into believing it was balché? Will he forgive himself for asking? Will he forgive his son?

Figure 22 from the Chumayel manuscript.
Talk about the conquered consuming the conqueror… is it me, or does this look like a Picasso?