Things I've Read, March 2015: Finding Rhythm
Dear reader,
I've been thinking about colour. People of colour to be exact. About the way that race is perceived, and the inherent racism of the comment "I don't see race". About the way Sunlili Gonvage gave up non-white writers for 12 months.
I've been thinking about what giving things up does. How sometimes a period of self-denial is the way that we can attune ourselves better to what we have, or, what we are. I've been thinking about this partly because of 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess in which the author, Jen Hatmaker, takes a series of Lent-like periods to reduce her excesses to the slightly arbitrary number of seven: seven articles of clothing to wear throughout the month, seven foods that she's allowed to eat. The goodness here is not in the act, but in the examination of practice it produces. When we fast, it's not food that we're giving up, but a lack of self-examination. (I should mention that the book is good, and she brings it off with a welcome self-deprecating humour.)
Both those last two things come together in A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, which Margaret Atwood called one of the "wellsprings" of fantasy literature. It's a classic, and I can't believe I hadn't read it before: unlike many of the remembrances of children's classic, it holds up and then some. The writing is fluid and graceful, and it features one of the first people-of-colour heroes in fantasy literature (to my knowledge). In the afterword, Le Guin talks about how she snuck his skin colour in, under the radar, as it were, because "many white readers in 1967 were not ready to accept a brown-skinned hero".
In the afterword, she also says this, which I've been thinking about for days:
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win.
Also circling my thoughts has been The Peripheral by William Gibson. Gibson's early novels which I grew up on (in many ways), popularised the idea of a far future and the idea of cyberspace, but also often concerned itself with the struggle on the streets below the gleaming skyline. Interestingly, as he's progressed, he's written back into the present, stating at one point that what's happening now is far more interesting than anything he ever imagined. The Peripheral is both: at once future and present, with people in a near future running a version of history like a computer runs a virtual machine. Like all Gibson, the prose gleams with tightness and the ideas are everpresent, although the protagonists do suffer from a strange lack of agency.
I've been reading, and re-reading How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish. The good thing about this book is that it will appeal to exactly the sort of people that you think it will. It's seeing someone good at obsessing about things obsess over something that they're good at obsessing over. Fish quotes here how Annie Dillard was once asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" Her response was "Do you like sentences?" If you don't know how to like sentences, but are looking for a place to start: this would be a book worth reading, and re-reading.
And speaking of Annie Dillard, she's been on the list for a while, but I've only just started Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (her most lauded book) and boy, howdy, she can write a sentence.
I still think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake.
And the way that "mornings" interrupts the sentence mid-way, indicating not just time period, but time periods, spreading the initial verb throughout a season, and the way "wake" only comes right at the end, with the mild surprise of that being both the strangest and most inevitable time to think of the cat that she no longer lives with. The whole sentence mirrors its effect: the idea of the tomcat is present at the start, and she finds it lingering into her wakeful state, like a dream that stays with you.
Or see:
Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then shadow sweeps it away.
Where you expect the conditional of the sentence to be about the activity of the narrator—walking or talking or breathing—and instead it's about the activity of the light itself. That phrase "trick out in gilt" is both perfect and itself unexpected, just as the landscape under the dance of light can be.
And then the next sentence reads: "You know you're alive." And isn't that the truth?
Yours,
Guan