Dancing, Envy, and Character

Last night I danced to New Order’s Blue Monday at Transmission and it was a freaking blast!

Why does a 40+-year-old man get excited about dancing to New Order? Well, you have to understand, I grew up in Iowa. That doesn’t help? Okay, New Order was the kind of music that if you requested it at a high school dance A) you were lucky if the DJ knew you were talking about, B) luckier if the DJ had it, and C) and “OMG go buy a Powerball ticket right now” lucky if the DJ actually consented to play it, but then when the DJ did play it the dance floor would disintegrate into a bunch of morons staring stupidly at one another until Poison came back on.

High school was four years of wishing I was both somewhere else, and someone else. I wanted to live somewhere where I could go clubbing and dance to New Order, the Smiths, and Depeche Mode, like those characters you saw in the movies. I soooo envied them, because I was that person, despite being locked away in backwards small-town Iowa. I’m sure this was a factor – at least in part – as to why my nose was stuck in a book for most of the time I was growing up. Reading about the lives of those I envied, admired, or identified with was so much better than my own stifling sentence in purgatory.
All this has led me to wonder, what is it about character that hooks a reader? Specifically, myself. Certainly, it’s all those things I just mentioned, but those span a wide range of possibility, and why would I be drawn to those qualities more than others?

Last week Mark talked about the everyman – that guy/gal who was is just a regular old person with whom we could all at least partially identify with. That kind of character never would have kept my attention back when I was a kid. I was already too much the everyman, and I desperately wanted to be someone else. The characters I was attracted to had powers. I didn’t read comics – there was really nowhere to get them and at the rate I read we just didn’t have money for it – so it was books and movies for me, fantasies that had characters with magical powers, and the wilder the better. Man did I eat that stuff up. For me, those kind of stories had the trifecta. I envied their power, I admired their fortitude, and a completely identified with their need to affect change and right the wrongs in their world.

A few of my faves:


Elric of Melnibone – Michael Moorcock
Raistlin Majere – Weis & Hickman
Garion – David Eddings
Arthur, Merlin, & Excalibur
And of course a certain boy from Tatooine who needs no introduction:

Nowadays, the characters who tend to draw me in aren’t usually superheroes.

They are regular people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.









These are characters whose devotion, stubbornness, anger, and pathology enable them to exceed their limitations and become something more.

To name a few:

Deena Pilgrim – Bendis and Oeming

Hawkeye – Fraction and Aja

Boyd Crowder – Justified

Roland Deschain – Stephen King

Londo Molari – J. Michael Stazcynski

Starbuck / Kara Thrace – Battlestar Galactica



Who’d I miss?

What Resides in the Gap between the Thought and the Word?

The most recent in my working my through Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish novels was City of Illusions.

In the Hainish tales many Hilfs (highly intelligent life forms) bespeak: they have the ability to mind-speak and/or mind-hear. And integral to this way of communicating is the collapsing of thought/speech such that lying is not possible. Between the thought and the spoken or written word there is a gap. And in that space a lie can be placed. But to communicate with just the mind, there is no gap, and thus no lie.

The Shing, the enemy of the novel, rule the very sparse population on Earth, perhaps because they may have the ability to lie even when bespeaking. They have one law: Reverence For Life.  Le Guin writes in the introduction that every novel offers the author a chance to do what they could not without it. And the Shing allowed her "the chance to argue inconclusively with the slogan 'reverence for life,' which by leaving out too much lets the lie get in and eat the apple rotten."

These explorations on communication, lying, and gaps also connect up nicely with an observation Le Guin makes in the introduction about the difference between the novel as conceived in the mind, the novel that one is finally able to produce, and how the two never merge.

I'm guessing that every writer feels that gap between the novel as envisioned in thought and the novel that gets written as those mind-scenes travel through the fingers (or through the vocal chords if you use a speech recognition program to write). But I hope we don't always feel that in that gap there resides a lie.

I hope our bodies also have a great deal of wisdom that they offer us as our thoughts move through us on their way to becoming physically present in the world.

I hope there is some electric something that allows the author's words to bridge the gap between their own mind and the minds of their readers, a sparking, sparkling arc connecting us.

I hope there is magic in the gaps. In the gaps between thoughts and words. Between people. Between worlds.

More Ursula

I've been reading my way through the novels in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, her series of philosophical/anthropological musings about what happens when differing groups of hilfs (highly intelligent life forms) cross the stars and interact with native populations. I've taken Ian Watson's suggestion for the internal chronology of the cycle as a starting point. This is not, however, the order in which Le Guin wrote the novels.



What I have finished so far, in order:

The Dispossessed (published in 1974)
The Word for World is Forest (1976)
Rocannon's World (1966)

I had a revelation in reading this last one. As far as I have been to tell Rocannon's World was Le Guin's first published novel. And in reading this early work, I realized that up until then, I have thought of UKLG as She Who Can Do No Wrong. As the epitome of excellence in the craft of writing.

But Rocannon's World is a mess.   Let's go on an adventure! Ah, look here at this creature, what will happen in our interacting with it? Interaction. Conflict. Move on to another interesting creature or group of people. What will happen now? And on and on. And all these creatures, all these peoples, all these events, none of them feel fully tied together into a whole. There are some very beautiful passages, and some striking ideas that Le Guin carries on to explore in the later-written novels. But in those later novels every passage is right, is a piece of the whole, is said beautifully, correctly, just as the story needs it to be said.

For me this was an important discovery. Ursula herself learned her craft. She got better. She got fantastic. But she wasn't always fantastic, she seems to have practiced her way there.

Perhaps some of us are gifted with something like a natural talent for story-telling, but we aren't necessarily lost if we haven't been  born into it. We all can practice our way toward excellence.


That was a good thing to be reminded of.

Tonight I finish Planet of Exile. (Which interestingly, though published in the same year as Rocannon's World, is a much more integrated and so more engaging novel.) A quote by Le Guin, from the introduction to this novel, nicely captures what I've been trying to think through here: "I learn by going where I have to go."

Next up: City of Illusions.

On Words, Big and Li'l, All Those I do not Know.

In my last two posts, here and here, I reflected on how being thrown out of a story can sometimes be the mark of greatness in that tale. These musings were spurred by a post from Claudia about her love of big words.

I knew reading that post, that I wanted to write a post about my most unique reading experience.

Cloud and Ashes. Three Winter's Tales. By Greer Gilman

I felt in reading this collection of three interrelated stories that I was only understanding a smidgen's worth of the whole. There are many words, both big and small, whose meaning I did not know. Some still elude me, being unable to find them in any dictionary. Here's a sampling, taken from just a couple of pages:

swaling
fells
enneads
limbeck
anneal
besom
hoyden
snecked

But my aren't they pretty words?

Often, even when I knew the words, I didn't fully get the meaning of the sentences.

"And he was leaves. Brown leaves of oak, the lightfall of a thousand hallows. He was galls and tassels, traceries of veining; he was shards of acorns, shales of light. His lady's cups."

I could see that the story was referencing folk tales and Shakespeare and, and, and...., but mostly those references escaped me. Sometimes whole paragraphs escaped me. Pages. And yet...

The girl glanced at Kit. "I see thou's done already what thou can't undo." He felt her eflshot eyes. Her breasts were April, but the eyes were January, haily, and the tongue a cold and clashy March. Scathed, he felt himself, dishevelled in his raffish coat, with moss and toadstools in his hair. Leaves everywhere. And ramping after Thea, like a woodwose in a mumming. Mad for love.

Oddly enough, I love this novel. Because in reading this thing that I could not understand very well, I still felt it. There is a beauty and a melencholy that runs throughout and it was as though with the reading of each word, I was a bell that that word rang. A bell whose call would tear at your heart, sounding out low over the moor. A bell that weeped for things what cannot be undone.

It was curious, this not understanding/understanding. And I was so mesmerized by the language of the words, phrases, sentences I didn't mind not being able know. For me it was a book that wasn't at all about the head, it was about the gut. And it was my gut that kept me reading.

I'll end with a final selection. As you read it see if you can stop reading halfway through. I know I can't. Write me a comment and let me know. See if you can figure out why it wraps you up and won't let go. I think one reason is obvious, but I don't want to give it away.

The whitehaired child had slipped his lead; he whirled and jangled as he ran. His hair was flakes of light. He whirled unheeding on the moor. And childlike fell away from him, like clouds before the moon, the moon a hare, the hare a child. He lowped and whirled and ranted. Whin caught him; he was light, and turning in her blood to sun. He bore it. By its light, she saw the beggar's shadow, like a raven on the rimy earth, that hopped and jerked a shining in its neb, a glass. A thief! the raven cried. Whin stood, as if the cry had caught her, in the whirring of the light like wings, a storm of wings; held fast. The child was burning in her hands, becoming and becoming fire. And she herself was changing. She was stone; within her, seed on seed of crystal rimed, refracted. She was nightfall, with a keel of moon, and branching into stars. She was wood and rooted; from her branches sprang the light, the misselchild. In that shining she was eyes of leaves, and saw her old love's blood, like holly on the snow.

This is a novel for life. To be kept at my bedside and pondered over for all the years to come.

On Being Thrown Out of the Story - Part II

A couple posts back, Claudia got me thinking about the idea of interrupted reading, of writing that throws the reader out of the story, of good writing that does this.

Not knowing the words the author uses is one kind of being chucked out.
Another is the beauty of the words, which I discussed in my most recent post.

In today's post, I'm ruminating on having to stop reading in order to think more fully about the ideas developed in a work. And for this exploration, like the last, I'm using Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed:

"[Shevek] recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his "cellular function," the analogic term for the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. ... That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual but never compromise; for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice--the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind."

Sacrifice vs. compromise; individual, state, society; work and function; security vs. morality; change and revolution. And Le Guin goes on for two more pages. Page after page of idea after idea, incorporating the concepts of time, loyalty, work, humanity, pain and suffering, joy vs. pleasure.

Within the whole of the novel, there are a couple of spots where Shevek engages in this sort of deep, internal reflection. The rest of the novel helps to support these sections by having the characters embody the ideas in their personalities, dialogue, and action.


Reading these sections, I was torn by wanting to go on, but also wanting to stop. To savor. To think about how these ideas fit into my own life. Were they true? Were they helpful?

Not only did I want to slow down to savor the ideas themselves, I also wanted to stop and marvel at how Le Guin wrote the novel so that I could understand those three pages more fully. "Cripes! Everything's she's written up until now has been aiming right here!" Flip, flip, flip. "See?" Flip, flip. "And here? See!" Flip "And here!"

I like to believe that Le Guin would not have taken it as a compliment if someone reviewing the novel had said it was so engrossing that it never shook them out of the story. For me, the very reason the reading was so engrossing was because it invites reflection. Reflection on the reader's own ideas and commitments. It's like inhabiting a three-dimensional mobius: being pulled out of your life and into the story while in the next moment, the story inviting you to pull it into your own life. A two-way engrossing, wrapping and warping. Being pulled in and enclosed by the novel's left hand, while being released and gently nudged back by the right.

By David Benbennick

The Little Words Can Throw You Too

I've been pondering since Claudia's last post, this idea of interrupted reading, of writing that throws the reader out of the story. We often talk about that as a flaw in the writing. But in this post (and my next couple) I'm trying to get a handle on throwing out that, in some writing at least, is just right.

Sometimes I'm reading a story and the writing is so _______, I just can't go on. And rather than the negative adjective that your brain may have supplied there, I'm thinking about when the writing is so beautiful or lyrical that I just need to stop and read the line again. Or when an author has chosen the absolutely perfect word to capture a feeling that is very hard to describe in words.

My most recent experience of the later example comes from Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which I was reading when Claudia's blog went live.

Shevek has just landed on Urras, the lush planet from which his species evolved. Only he has never set foot on it. (Four? Six?) generations ago a dissident group of Urrasti emigrated to Urras's desert moon, Anarres. There has been next to no communication between the two civilizations since that time.  He is surrounded by photographers. Le Guin writes:

"The men around him urged him forward. He was bourne off to the waiting limousine, eminently photographic to the last because of his height, his long hair, and the strange look of grief and recognition on his face."

The strange look of grief and recognition.

Reading these words I was instantly there with Shevek, perhaps I was Shevek just a little bit. Here I am, standing for the first time on the planet from which my deepest ancestors evolved. I have the eyes I do, the skin, the perceptions, my entire body and likely a good portion of my mind, all of these are the way they are because my species came to be, here. Right here. And I have been separated from my body's truest home my entire life. I am for the first time smelling the trees, feeling the winds, seeing the colors of the sky, being embraced by the world that made me the sort of being I am.

Grief. Recognition.

With just those two words, Le Guin captured for me the ephemeral of coming home to a place that one does not know.

Grief. Recognition.

And I cannot read on, because I want to sit with that complicated emotional state awhile. And layered in that state is something more, is awe. My appreciation of Le Guin's ability to do this to me. How not only has she nailed it in two words, she's also given the sentence a meter that moves you to those two words and punctuates them. And again I just need some time.

And as I savor the moment, more layers stack up. Recognition. Grief. Recognition of writing at its best. Grief that I am nowhere even close to that ability.

Yet.