Paul Boccaccio

Based on the recommendation of Neil Gaiman, via his blog, I read The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, a collection of criticism and other essays by Samuel R. Delany on sf and the craft and mechanics of writing. It boggled me. His fresh, lighting thought, his ability to strike to the heart of whatever he was reading or seeing, the power and wisdom of his analyses… Delany, along with Alberto Manguel, Harlan Ellison, and Jorge Luis Borges, gives the impression that he reads everything, and thinks genius thoughts about all of it. He reads a new book of poetry either once a week or every day, I can’t remember which.

So, naturally, I didn’t understand some of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, but the rest—especially Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words, an essay on language & sf, and the chapter of excerpts from his journal—proved inspiring, both in terms of story material and a desire to think better about the world around me.

Harlan Ellison once said, all a writer needs to know he can learn from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: pay attention. Notice the small things. This book had me stopping every few pages to write something down in my pocket notebook—which, due to its long residence in a certain pocket has taken on the shape of certain curved, pocketed body parts.

A notebook is essential to any writer, especially one with a memory as poor as mine. I keep it on me at all times, and interesting snippets of conversation, spontaneous lines of (admittedly terrible) poetry, short story ideas, the interesting way the light hits a patch of ice or the way a leaf skitters, spider-like, across the hood of a car—all of these go into the book, which is in its eighth iteration. I bought a stack from a certain Machiavellian superstore when I couldn’t find them elsewhere. I use 99 cent, stitch-bound mini-marble composition books (though if I had more class I’d use Moleskines or something. I do have a fountain pen, so sweater-vest crisis averted), but anything the writer will use works, so long as he uses it regularly.

Delany spoke of language as a breathing entity. Each word carries with it a picture, and each subsequent word modifies the picture created by the previous.  So then, he says,

A novel is a picture modified forty-nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine times.

His essays are full of such quotable sound-bytes, such as:

A story is a maneuvering of myriad micro-memories into a new order.

Stew on that for a minute. He’s saying a story is a way for the writer to get people to remember events or perceptions his way, structured his way, to mean what the writer wants them to mean. Redacting history—personal or communal—for effect. Memory shuffling. Reading is getting more like dreaming all the time.

Throughout the book, Delany, like Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison, gives me plenty of new writers to search out. One such is Joris-Karl Huysmans, who wrote ‘A Rebours, a book Delany cites as an example of using expertise in a range of subjects to lend your characters verisimilitude. I’ll have to get that particular book from ILL, as it’s too obscure for our public library, which is usually excellent.

In one of his essays, he wrote that Wilde’s Salome is linked to Edgar Allen Poe’s Politian, that Wilde “took cadences and repetitions in the dialogue” from Poe. I’ll need to read Politian to further illuminate the significance of the rhythms I noticed, but that’s a good example of the insights Delany casually throws away.

Another chapter I particularly enjoyed was his criticism of The Dispossessed, one of my favorite books by Ursula Le Guin, who is one of my favorite authors. Delany ends his essay—which ripped through flaws in the book I hadn’t noticed; flaws which stem from Le Guin not fully realizing certain facets of the characters—by praising The Dispossessed, and saying it was worthy of its awards, but if she had fixed those few problems, it could have been “one of the greatest books of the last three hundred years.”

That’s the standard and the spur. Write as best you can; dig deeper into your characters; fix the problems, never take the easy out. Above all, understand what you’re doing, and why. Leave nothing to chance.

Based on how much I’d enjoyed Bloom’s Seven Major Tragedies, I checked out another lecture series: Peter Saccio’s William Shakespeare : Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, from the library. These lectures broadened my understanding of Shakespeare generally, and in regard to his specific works.

Since I listened to Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies right after Bloom’s lectures, I can’t help but compare the two. I prefer Bloom’s reading of Iago to Saccio’s—I think it’s deeper and more honest, and maintains the layer of unknowable nihilism in the text. In the words of Alfred in The Dark Knight, some men just want to watch the world burn. And Saccio’s “thespian” voice is affected and pseudo-British, which is unnecessary. I prefer Bloom’s readings, which are full of passion without seeming silly.

But Saccio provided a scope Bloom’s lectures didn’t have. He covered all the major comedies, histories, and tragedies (as the title says), and did so well. He talked about cultural and period issues, how the Elizabethan audience would have responded to the plays, what the stage was like, and many other concerns Bloom didn’t touch. Both gave examples of interpretations of the plays, and good performances to watch. I’ve added Ian McKellen’s Macbeth, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and Henry V, and some of the BBC performances to my watch list.

These lectures stressed the period and climate in which the actors staged the plays almost as much as the text. Saccio says, and I’m paraphrasing, that Shakespeare’s text was a starting place, not the end. He gave examples of performances of Shylock which completely altered the audience’s perception of the character—an aspect of theater I hadn’t considered fully before, and one which strikes to the heart of reading and story. A similar effect occurs in the mind of the reader—of a novel, comic, whatever. In a play, the actors form another layer of interpretation, which means a director can take the audience places the playwright didn’t intend. That makes my writer’s heart a bit nauseated, but there you go. If you love something, set it free. A good director can take your play-on-paper and transform it into something more than you intended. That’s the mark of good collaboration, which a performance certainly should be.

Austin Grossman’s first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, is a fun, quick book that references the whole of superhero comics (and some other fantasy) with the usual tropes and plenty of in-jokes. (One such is the reference to criminals being “a cowardly and superstitious lot,” said with plenty of irony.) It redoes many of the deconstructions of superheroes over the years with a light, fun air.

The best part of the book is one of the two central characters, and one of the first person narrators: Doctor Impossible. At his core, he wants to be seen and known, for the people who ignored him all his life to take notice. This is why, he explains, he wears red tights and a cape. It’s harder to fight in a cape, but it makes an impression. He’s resigned to the more ridiculous tropes of his nature. His attitude throughout is, “Well, villains do this sort of thing, I might as well.” Much more than the heroes, he feels human, especially in passages where he wrestles with the purpose behind his pursuit of Evil Science.

The difference between the quality of his thoughts and speech is pronounced. What he wants to do, he does not do. He starts giving away his plans, even though he knows he shouldn’t. He’s overwhelmed by science, and by his own latent greatness. Hear the love and pride in his voice when he describes the liquid that made him what he is:

The target solution was a unique fluid. A revolutionary fuel source, infused with the zeta radiation only I understood, a fluorescent cocktail of rare poisons, unstable isotopes, and exotic metals, it roiled in the beaker, swirling purple and green. Toxic isn’t the word for it; it was malign, practically sapient. A single drop would have powered an ocean liner for a thousand years.

After becoming mesmerized by the liquid, he peeled off a glove and touched it (something of a no-no in science, so I hear), and it exploded all over him; it made him a new person through pain and physical transformation. I can understand him even at that point. But when he speaks… It’s like an idiot has hijacked his vocal cords, and he spews cliche banality after inanity. He doesn’t understand why he says such silly things either, which makes him even more believable.

All throughout Soon I Will Be Invincible, Doctor Impossible does stupid things, things he knows are stupid, even as he’s doing them, so he can take over the world. To do this, he needs to be invincible. He’s practically invincible already, though he takes several beatings. He’s fast, impervious to bullets, and the smartest man in the world. But he’s a normal guy, under all that. This passage endeared him to me, and made him feel more real:

My style of work takes a lot of preparation.  I build things and test them out. I have to order parts, or cast them myself. I have to pull all-nighters to debug my robots’ pathfinding routines before an invasion. It isn’t that interesting to other people.

He’s good people and, more importantly, he’s my sort of people. Like he says, he has to debug his robot swarm’s code like everybody else. He’s not that evil, either, or I’ve become so sympathetic to him that I don’t care that he wants to drop the world into another ice age.

The Fatale storyline, on the other hand… Meh.  I thought it was fine, and interesting to get an inside view of the hero team, but it’s a rehash of The Authority, by Warrent Ellis, in the same way The Authority is a reinterpretation of all the previous superhero teams. I thought The Authority did a better job of showing what a superhero team is like from the inside–better even than the continual X-Men soap opera. The Boys, by Garth Ennis, takes a darker view of superheroes than Soon I Will Be Invincible, and I’d believe that version before Soon I Will Be Invincible’s. All of it builds on The Watchmen, of course, but most superhero books nowadays do.

Fatale is the other first person narrator. Oddly, given this amount of narrative focus, she’s mostly insignificant (or we feel she is, from inside her head). She spends the whole book having emotional crises, but that didn’t grate on me like it usually does. Possibly because she and Doctor Impossible have basically the same struggles of identity; they could have each gone the other way: Fatale as a villain, Impossible as a hero. Lily’s flip-flopping between hero and villain backs this up. There are no ready-made villains or heroes; everyone makes discrete choices.

One gripe: I hate present tense narrative. It doesn’t give immediacy, it’s distracting, and only that. Stop present tense in your neighborhood. We can make a difference.

The way Grossman handles backstory, and the way we’re brought into this world, is perfect. He explains current events by referencing previous events and people, which he assumes we’re aware of, while giving us enough detail to make us understand what he’s talking about. Excellent technique. It’s subtle, artfully done, and unobtrusive–exactly the way backstory should be. And the slow reveal of history through Doctor Impossible’s memory, the twist of characters at the end (again, playing with identity), all these make this an exciting, fast read.

Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé, a one act in French, about Salomé, daughter of Herodius, and niece/step-daughter of Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch. I don’t know if what I read was a good translation, since I don’t know French, but the language felt stilted, perhaps forced, though all the characters’ repeated reference to the moon and Salomé’s crazed litany of desire for Iokanaan gives the play a staccato rhythm, and redeems, for me, some of the odd phrasing. The end was inevitable–not just because we know the fate of John the Baptist from Scripture, but also because Salomé’s strength of obsession couldn’t go unanswered.

Salomé is basically insane–spoiled and mad with lust, and she’ll do anything to get what she wants. She doesn’t care whether she’s preying on the fatal love of the young Syrian or the hubris of Herod, who here is a petty, approval-driven man, willing to bow to his desires in some things, like taking his brother’s wife, but not all. He can’t get past his own bruised sense of propriety to the state of unbridled, unresistant acquiescence to temptation where Salomé lives. She has no filter, and no boundaries.

Wilde references the moon a lot, especially how it looks–invariably like a woman obsessed with death, looking for dead things. The play feels decadent and grotesque, melodramatic and extravagant; very much like the Art Nouveau in style at the time. I felt Wilde’s addition to the Biblical story, at the very end, was unnecessary, and didn’t quite fit with Herod’s shrinking, hand-washing character throughout the play.

Read the text for free, in French, English or both, side by side. Also worth noting: Aubrey Beardsley drew a series of illustrations for this play, of which this is a good example.