For years I’ve had a bit of an obsession with Venetian bauta figures. Then one day I thought of them as birds, like this one:

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer are producing an anthology of ‘New Weird’ writings, in which my story The Art of Dying - a new and improved version - is included. Jeff has put ten excerpts from the book on his website, and a list of writers. Can you match them up? First person to guess correctly wins a copy of the anthology signed by the editors.

A quick sketch of a character who has been in my head for a while:

I haven’t been able to write a story about him yet, though I’ve blackened quite a lot of paper trying. I know he lives in a crumbling old castle by the sea called Castle Orpheus and has more than one past. I think he has some connection with Franz Marc, the artist, best known for his Expressionist paintings of horses, who died in World War One of a wound to the head while riding on horseback. Perhaps he is another one of those characters who is resistant to regular narrative. He was partly inspired by the minotaur in Jeff Ford’s Cosmology of the Wider World, and partly by the art of Beth Carter.

Very rough sketch of Gwynn. Anatomy fubared as usual. I really do need to do a lot more copying of poses.

“The doctor in Phaience had diagnosed nervous exhaustion. He thought this hilarious but was happy to undergo the prescribed rest-cure, which he effected for himself in an eye-poppingly grand uptown pipe den—a place where there were chandeliers above the beds and they called you sir and made sure you ate and would literally wipe your arse for you. Minor royalty had come one night with a guard of very young female soldiers all with the faces of tropical fish.

After the passage of approximately one month he became afraid of the intentions of certain figures in the wallpaper…”

Just read this in The Age today. The jungles of Malaysia, already being logged at a rapid rate for palm oil plantations, are under further threat, it seems, from the demand for bio-fuels, which can be made out of palm oil. The article doesn’t say how much of recent palm planting has been for bio fuels, neglecting to mention that massive logging in the Malaysian forest, for timber exports and oil plantations, has been going on since long before the interest in organic fuels. But I think it does go to show that if you want to honestly live green, you have to check out the credentials of products claiming to be environmentally friendly.

I’m also posting this because of something that struck me as interesting about the Penan people who live in the threatened forests: ‘Because sharing is habitual, there is no word for “thank you”. Anthropologists recorded that anger is so rare among the Penan that 40 years after two women argued over an incident of adultery, the location was still known as “the house of hair pulling”. ‘

It was their having no word for ‘thank you’ that really interested me, but I think it’s also interesting that - if the anthroplogists are actually right, and not just seeing the Penan on their best behaviour for guests - they rarely get angry. One wonders why. The article claims that they ‘live by a gentle code’, but I would be surprised if any code has the power to do more than decrease displays of anger (in Thailand, for instance, where public displays of anger are frowned on and are not often seen, there’s still a higher murder rate per capita than the US). But I could be utterly wrong. Maybe when you live in a  small community the chance of getting away with a violent crime is so low that you stay in line. Or maybe the Penan are just very content, in which case, again, why? The mere fact of living in a rainforest doesn’t make you a nice person - according to this article, the Penan are the only non-headhunting indigenous people in Borneo. And do the Penan refrain from aggressive and annoying behaviour, or is the onus on the recipient of such behaviour to shrug it off?

According to the same article - and I mistrust fannish anthropologists, but they are often the only resource one has - ‘the greatest transgression in Penan society is see hun, a term that translates roughly as “a failure to share.” Dependent on the forest for life, and each other for survival, the Penan have, in effect, institutionalized individual generosity as a means of insulating the group as a whole from the inevitable uncertainties inherent in a hunting and gathering way of life.’

Is it this security, perhaps, and the sense of being cared for, that keeps the peace?

At the end of the article the anthropologist tells a story which is no doubt intended to illustrate the wisdom of the Penan, versus ‘our’ pride and discontent: ‘Several nights later there was a full moon. It reminded Asik of a story he had heard about some people who had travelled there and returned with dust and rocks. He asked if the story was true. Told that it was, he asked, after a moment of silence, “Why bother?” ‘

Doesn’t work for me. Those dust and rocks tell us about the history of the solar system; they increase our information about minerals and elements offworld; and well the anthropologist knows it. The Luciferian spirit within man - proud and discontent, questing for everything from money to the meaning of existence - may do his stress levels and his soul no good, but that spirit nonetheless carries the long-term hopes of the human race in its grubby hands. This is a splendid planet and we should take care of it; but all our eggs are in one basket here. We do, at some point, have to get ourselves beyond the earth, if we don’t wish to surrender entirely to the tides of cosmic fate - and since poor Alexander has no worlds left to conquer on this sphere, his spirit, too, is surely looking skyward. I wonder sometimes whether anger and curiosity are linked. Discontent can certainly give rise to both; but one doubts that the headhunting tribes would be any more impressed with moon rocks than the Penan man was.

Perhaps I’m thinking like a child. Enlightened people tend to pooh-pooh the idea of progress and view discontent only as a spiritual problem to be solved. I suppose I am less concerned with the spiritual evolution of humanity than our material evolution. Still, I am curious as to how the Penan have managed to make themselves so serene.

Aaaand the violence…

And now, the explanation…

So Laurie and I were talking about her character Aidan, a confirmed seme, reading Viewfinder* and identifying with Feilong**. But surely not, I said, in the scene with Asami*** - or could Aidan handle being lightly topped like that? Laurie thought Aidan would only have punched Asami in the nose. All of which naturally turned me to thoughts of two men who do not like to be uke, and light topping.

Makes perfect sense, no?

*A yaoi manga by Yamane Ayano
** A beautiful, longhaired Chinese gangster (seme)
***A shady, hunky Japanese businessman (uber-seme)
(Really, Asami is a thousand times more seme than Fei.)

Nothin’ frilly this week either, folks. But Gwynn does find his cojones.

I’ve been reading Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (and am enjoying it quite a bit and admiring it immensely). Laughed when I read this concerning the main character’s mother-in-law, Mrs Satterthwaite and her “disreputable young man, Mr Bayliss” — :

“For Mrs Satterthwaite interested herself–it was the only interest she had–in handsome, thin and horribly disreputable young men. She would wait for them, or send her car to wait for them, at the gaol gates. She would bring their usually admirable wardrobes up to date and give them enough money to have a good time. When contrary to all expectations–but it happened more often than not!–they turned out well, she was lazily pleased. Sometimes she sent them away to a gay spot with a priest who needed a holiday; sometimes she had them down to her place in the west of England.”

…Or how I can fuck about with two lines of writing for hours.

I’m writing a story (which is now a rough 6000 words with no end in sight, so it’s going to be a fairly long story), in which I originally had this in the first paragraph:

“In due course the mountains had become peppered with temples, monasteries and retreats; perhaps only difficulty of access having prevented these from growing as plentiful as blackberries, he thought, resting his eyes on a distant serpentine line of blue-tiled roofs winding up through the pine and cedar forest like the twists and turns of a dragon.”

First problem - either “serpentine” or “twists and turns of a dragon” is redundant. I thought of “the twists and turns of something bent on escaping pursuit”, which I like, but I want a Chinese legend feel, and I want to flash an early signal to the reader that the character has wandered into some sort of mock-up of the mythical east. So I’d better stick with the dragon, and see if I can fit the other metaphor in later on. So “serpentine” has to change. But to what? “Sinuous” is obvious but seems a bit common. “Tortive” and “tortile” are needlessly obscure (I generally only use obscure words in places where I’m willing to send the reader to the dictionary, and in a scene-setting paragraph I’d rather not), and ugly, and not quite correct in any case. “Wavy” is very tempting - a simple no-frills word that should have an ameliorating effect on at least the next two paragraphs. When you tend to write in a rich style, studding it even sparsely with words that a child would use can save it from becoming heavily purple - or so I’ve thought as a reader. However, “wavy” doesn’t seen quite right for communicating the sense of the roofs snaking up through forest - it would be better for a ridge of rooftops on a hill.

(Speaking of which, I Googled “ridge of rooftops” and found a poem in which it was used, along with criticism of the poem. One person said: ‘ “Ridge of rooftops” is questionable. A rooftop has a ridge, but I’m not following what you mean by a ridge of rooftops.’ I thought it was obvious - a line of rooftops, silhouetted or half silhouetted, perhaps, their contours forming a ridge. Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova - or at least his translator - uses the line here:

Slow down and stop. The sentence falls apart.
The ridge of rooftops fits in with the dawn.
The snow is talking, the fire backing it up.

Sounds fine to me - reminding me that you have to listen to critics with a critical ear.)

However, my line of rooftops really isn’t a ridge. It’s on the face of a mountain. Its bends are not broad enough to be called meandering, and in any case I want to use “meander” in the next paragraph.

Perhaps “line” is the problem. “Procession”? No, no good - a procession is made of many elements, a dragon is one continuous element, and the metaphor and simile would clash. To the thesaurus, then, where I find “file” and “train”. “A (bendy adjective) file”, “a (bendy adjective) train” - both could work. But since I’ve got “winding”, do I even need another bendy adjective?

I like “train”, however, it’s a world with railways, so like us the character would associate the word “train” with a locomotive and carriages (and that’s why I like it), whereas in a world without railways it would only mean a trailing line; but “train” will compete with “dragon”, and I don’t want a clash of elements just here. I might use it later, though. But “trailing” - how about “a trail of rooftops”? Nope, that isn’t the sense I want.

“A sequence of rooftops/roofs”? Now, that I like. I like the rather technical feel of the word, it’s the sort of word the character would use, and it counterbalances the fantasy feel of “dragon” without bothering it too much.

“In due course the mountains had become peppered with temples, monasteries and retreats; perhaps only difficulty of access having prevented these from growing as plentiful as blackberries, he thought, resting his eyes on a distant sequence of blue-tiled roofs winding up through the pine and cedar forest like the twists and turns of a dragon.”

I might still put another adjective between “distant” and “sequence”, or perhaps a different verb than “winding”, but after the immense effort of changing “serpentine line” to “sequence” I feel like working on another paragraph for a while.

But before I do that, there’s the temptation to be a little more physically exact in the description, for instance, “a sequence of blue-tiled roofs winding up through the pine and cedar forest on a squarish mountain side in the distance like the twists and turns of a dragon.” I quite like the slightly more tightly focused physicality, but the sentence is clumsy; the dragon bit will have to be moved –
“a sequence of blue-tiled roofs winding, like the twists and turns of a dragon, up through the pine and cedar forest on a squarish mountain side in the distance.”

Or even:

“a sequence, like the twists and turns of a dragon, of blue-tiled roofs winding up through the pine and cedar forest on a squarish mountain side in the distance.”

The latter arrangement has an arse-backwards sort of almost elegance I guess, but that isn’t the right place for the simile in the overall flow of phrasing. I really do want it at the end of the sentence. Or do I…? Do I want the sentence to resolve there at the image of the dragon, or do I want it to resolve in physical geography? I’m actually not sure. I will leave both as options.

I’m aware that I often try to construct prose like music. Which parts should be loud and which soft? Where is the melody and where is the accompaniment? Do I want legato here, staccato there? Is this the right place for a discord? And I always feel I’m failing, but then I sometimes think that if you’re not failing you’re not trying hard enough.

In any case, it’s time to refer this paragraph to the editorial committee in my subconscious and get onto the next one:

“He had paused at the scenic spot at an outward meander of the trail [–steep, grudgingly narrow, slippery with mist and moss that wound along a narrow gorge which afforded a view of ??] dark forest falling into a solid mist below and pinnacles losing their heads in clouds above, and in the middle ground the still, time-halted picture of trunk and bough, branch and needle and pine-cone, a great [round?] boulder-face with lichens dawdling over it, a lone wild cherry sapling breaking out in bud, to gather a mental impression that he could take with him.”

Right. More coffee. Then onward, to the stupendous matter of whether the boulder-face should be round or not. (Will “round” conflict with the echo of “squarish”, if I end up using it? Do I want a word less lazy and general than “round”? But sometimes you want a lazy, general word, otherwise the writing becomes exhausted. Maybe a “shapeless boulder-face…?)

Fuck it, I’m going to the pub.

Ok…didn’t go to the pub. Read a bit of To the Lighthouse (and Woolf’s punctuation is going to infect me, I can feel it), made a cup of tea, and now I see that it’s best as:

“a sequence of blue-tiled roofs winding up through the pine and cedar forest on a squarish mountain side in the distance like the twists and turns of a dragon.” - and I will add more specific details when he next looks at it, something like “the train of buildings on the squarish mountain side” - letting the concrete accumulate slowly, like things appearing as mist clears.