Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Schmolitics.

It’s not like I meant to take a couple months off or anything. —Oh, hush. Y’all already got more posts outta me in Q1 of 2011 than Calvin Coolidge, put together! (And two whole chapters yonder, which the Inner Marketer made me promise I’d mention somewhere in here.)

Christ, I’ve been complaining about it almost as long as I’ve been blogging: the instant gratification of a ranty political post; the lengthy time thereafter one has to regret what one has said. And it’s not that there’s anything specific I posted in haste that I especially came to repent at leisure (recently) (well, not so much; not as such); it’s just that once I made a conscious effort to post more frequently, well, there they came: outrage pellets, guaranteed to please the crowd: it may not serve to increase US, but by god it sure as hell kicked THEM in the rhetoric!

Not that THEY ever actually noticed, but hey.

I never wanted the pier to be a political blog; I hate arguing! (Cue the Spouse’s knowing smirk.) —No, it’s true: I like forcefully stating my opinions, I can enjoy staking out the silliest possible position for or against some inconsequential thing and defending my claim with bulwarks of trivia, but the moment some actual conflict rears its head, over something that matters, I’m circling the wagons to close off the episteme: I must physically restrain myself from finding a pair of lapels I can grab. My God, how can you deny this is true? For fuck’s sake why are you repeating that lie? Who could possibly intend that consequence, can’t you see it? How on earth did you get to be so stupid?

It’s why the koan’s so important to me. I don’t know that I ever will manage a sunny heart. —Anyway. Less frequency; less pelletage. Or something. That’s my pledge to you. This week, anyway.

The irony I suppose being that whenever I’m recognized offline for my online contributions it’s inevitably the rants that get mentioned? “Man, you really knew how to fire ’em up,” said the genial older gentleman at the science fiction convention, who shall remain nameless through the simple expediency of never having caught his name. —“Well, I did start blogging again,” I said. “I’m just trying to stay away from the ranting, you know?” —“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said.

As I was saying. Evergreen perennial, this. Ah, well.

Fantasy, unlike science fiction, relies on a moral universe: it is less an argument with the universe than a sermon on the way things should be, a belief that the universe should yield to moral precepts.

—Farah Mendlesohn

—Filed 5106 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

Then and back again.

Now.

I put the book in the envelope. I put the mailing label on the envelope. I put the cash card in the self-serve machine and get the postage and put the postage on the envelope. I take the envelope and I, aw, hell.

—I mean this isn’t happening now. This is happening about five or six hours ago. (Twenty-seven or so as I edit.) (My first-pass edits, anyway.) —What I’m doing now is I’m typing. I mean I’m not typing now. Or maybe I am but not this. Right now what’s happening is you’re reading this. I have no idea how long from this now that now is, so I have no idea how long ago by now the now was when I did all that.

But: it had to be done. I’d made a promise. Deal’s a deal.

So I put the envelope in the mailbox and sent it back the way it came.

Then.

I took the book down off the shelf. Which one first, I’m not quite sure. —And I couldn’t tell you when it was I took it down. I’m pretty sure it was after I took War for the Oaks from the endcap display because mostly what I remember about the first time I saw War for the Oaks was the electric tingle sparking between fingertip and cover art as I reached for the damn thing; call it whatever the German portmanteau is for ohmygodwhatthefuckthislookscool. —Shock of the new, basically. Which wouldn’t have been half as shocking had I already picked up Borderland and Bordertown, what with the elves and the motorcycles and the leather jackets and the rock ’n’ roll and all. —And while I remember the cover art for Borderland and Bordertown as a major factor in why I picked them up, I don’t remember that same spark; or not so potent, anyway. —But I could maybe have picked them up first. I was after all already a fan of the shared-world anthologies, Thieves’ World and Liavek and Wild Cards; here’s one more, with fæ punks; what’s not to love? —I think maybe I picked up Architect of Sleep after I picked up Borderland because Stephen R. Boyett, but I can’t be sure; I have a vague memory of being surprised that the one Borderland story (the postapocalyptic one, that feels like it’s in John M. Ford’s idea of the place instead of everybody else’s) was by the raccoon guy, but that’s a ghost of a wisp of a memory of a thought; untrustworthy. I could easily have picked up a book with a title like Architect of Sleep on a whim in those days. (Still would, actually. Wouldn’t you?) (Whatever became of the long-awaited sequel[s]?) (—Oh.)

I don’t even remember if it was before I was in Brigadoon, or after. —What I can tell you is I’m sure I bought Borderland and Bordertown at the same time.

Pretty sure, anyway. —This was all a very long time ago, okay? How long? Let’s just say the shelf in question was in a B. Dalton’s and leave it at that.

Somewhat earlier.

Oh I was sunk already. I mean Tolkien, yes, and Lewis, and Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke, Alexander, Norton, Donaldson even, all of them hard on the heels of a diet of Matthew Looneys and Lewis Barnavelts and Bob Fultons and Furious Flycycles and Fat Bear Spies and Davids and Phœnices, but the thing that took off the top of my head was when Mom all unlooked-for brought home The Grey King. Magic that’s happening here, and now? —I mean, “here” was Wales, but it was a farm in Wales, and I lived on a farm, and oh who cares, I could make the jump for those songs, and that language like a secret code, and above all for the hint that something that big and that important could be just around a corner that I might see myself? Something made all the more real by how implacably and righteously unfair it was—

The rest of the books were secured post-haste. —I couldn’t sleep the night I turned twelve. I was waiting for the Old Ones, see. Maybe they’d missed me on my eleventh birthday. We’d been moving a lot.

Since then.

I was in Brigadoon, if I hadn’t been already. I graduated from high school. I saw Rocky Horror. I ran away from home the socially sanctioned way, to college; I dumped my high school sweetheart over the phone. I got an email address. (It was a much bigger deal, in those days.) I spent a summer in the Weaponshop of Isher, whose walls were held together with scotch tape; I got drunk, on beer, on wine, on White Russians. I tried acid, since I couldn’t stand smoking. I started drinking coffee in a diner in New York after seeing Crimes and Misdemeanors. I started smoking clove cigarettes. I dressed in nothing but black for weeks at a time and lost my heart beyond recall to my best friend’s sister. I saw Shock Treatment. I saw Liquid Sky. I saw Rare Air take the roof off Oberlin’s Finney Chapel. Twice. I found a Boiled in Lead album on CD. (It was harder to do, in those days.) I dropped out of college and got a job washing dishes so I could afford an 80-dollar-a-month walk-in closet that was so small I had to roll up my futon so I had room for my books. I found my heart again and sold the bass guitar I never learned how to play so I could cover rent. I was living with game designers, cartoonists, a proofreader, a botanist, a classicist, a computer archeologist. (I don’t think that’s what she ever called herself. But she made a killing, come Y2K.) Ten of us, in a five-bedroom house on a cul de sac? Somebody played me a Waterboys CD. I started dating a Jersey girl and when she moved in we swore we’d maintain separate bedrooms even as I was stashing my clothes in her dresser. Waiting for a plane in an airport in the middle of the country one of us turned to the other and said, we should get married, and the other one said, yeah, sure, only neither of us can remember which was which. We moved across the country on a whim, almost all ten of us. We got married, just the two of us, and then just the two of us got our own place. We bought a house. I backed into a career that had nothing to do with the writing I was starting to get done. We had a kid. We named her Taran, from the Lloyd Alexander books. We started buying more bookshelves for all the damn books.

I don’t know what happened to the Thieves’ World volumes. Whatever’s left might be in the attic of the house in Rock Hill? Along with that long-lost Dune Encyclopedia. The Wild Cards I’m pretty sure all got sold off. Liavek? A short while back I found another copy of the first one at Powell’s and I picked it up. The only Asimov in the house at this point is his Guide to Shakespeare which I really ought to give back to Dylan one of these days. The only Heinlein left is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. I should go get a copy of the White Hart tales; make a note of that. The original Coopers are long since lost, which is a damn shame; the old skool art direction kicked the ass of everything that’s come since; but I’ve got them on the shelves of course, along with Tolkien and Lewis and Alexander.

War for the Oaks? Bordertown? —Those books, the very ones I pulled off those B. Dalton’s shelves, tattered and worn, beat to hell, really—travel-stained, as it were—they’re up on the shelf above me as I write this. —Borderland ganged agley at some point in all that, but two out of three ain’t bad, right?

I should maybe see about replacing it.

A couple of weeks ago.

I was checking LiveJournal between Russian DDoS attacks (like you do) when I saw that janni had just posted the following:

If you’d like to borrow Welcome to Bordertown, and you’re willing to commit to both reading it in about a week and to them talking about it somewhere online, leave a comment below. I’ll mail you my copy, and then when you’re done, you’ll mail it back to me, and I’ll send it on to the next person on the list. (ETA: And will keep doing so until the book itself goes on sale at the end of May, however many people that turns out to be, and at that point see whether it’s still in good enough shape to keep sending around.)

And you know Stumptown was coming up and the Spouse was trying to get her presentation done and her covers drawn and her book off to the printer which doubles me up on toddler duty and I still had about 4,000 words to write as it turned out and only that upcoming week to do it and yet—I didn’t hesitate at all. “For this,” I said, “I could make the time.”

Three days later.

I got one of those big Priority Mail envelopes dropped on my desk. —Good lord, this one’s a biggun.

So the first thing I did—I’d like to say the first thing I did was read Janni Lee Simner’s story, because one should be gracious to gracious hosts, but the first thing I did (after I stuck a bookmark in where Simner’s story began) was read “Fair Trade,” by Sara Ryan and Dylan Meconis, because good friends had made it to the Border, and because, y’know, comics, but mostly because I had to see the Dicebox poster hanging on the wall in the Dancing Ferret. And there it is, and there’s Farrel Din, and Alberta’s Last Thursday art-walk fits right in on Carmine Street; how weird, to find a bit of where I am now in a place I haven’t been back to in years. —And then it’s on to Janni’s piece, “Crossings,” which plays a mean little game with Team Edward, and Team Jacob, and the neatly deflatory resolution of Team Jacob is one of those things you can only do in a shared world like this: borrowing somebody else’s character whose hard set-up and expository work has already been done elsewhere in that somebody else’s story, so all you have to do is use ’em, make your point, and let ’em go back about their other elsewhere business. —So then it’s on to Will Shetterly’s story, “The Sages of Elsewhere,” because Wolfboy, because you have to check in with the folks you used to know back in the day, see what they’re up to, and he’s running a damn bookstore now. —Somebody’s getting older.

And that’s another thing you only get with shared worlds, with proprietary, persistent, large-scale popular fictions, and it’s a blessing and a curse: virtual world journalism: “I don’t know, it’s kind of like reading a newspaper. It’s not like the newspaper is inspiring, but you need to read it to see what happens.” —It’s hard sometimes to see the story qua story because you’re looking around in it, through it, past it for the bits and scraps of the larger, shared world beyond, and if something like Bordertown isn’t nearly so proprietary as the Marvel or DC multiverses, allowing individual stories the leeway they need to stand on their own merits, and voice, well—it isn’t nearly so persistent, neither: five collections of a few dozen stories, three novels, thirteen years between appearances: you’re hungrier, is the thing, for those scraps and bits.

So next it’s on to Emma Bull’s “Incunabulum,” because it’s not just characters and neighborhoods you want to catch up on, and damned if it doesn’t seem to me at least like she’s riffing a little Delany in the mix, with her declarative paragraphs, her blank Page inscribed by his wanderings about the city. —Then Nalo Hopkinson in “Ours is the Prettiest” goes and drops a whole new neighborhood (to me, at least): Little Tooth, and the Café Cubana, and Screaming Lord Neville, and the swirling madhouse stomp of the Jamboree suddenly never has not been a part of the Bordertown, even as she’s asking some pointed questions about whose magic exactly it is that gets reified by the world as it’s been in these books; and in “Shannon’s Law” Cory Doctorow brings the goddamn internet to the Border, or at least an internet, and the way it’s cobbled together foregrounds the sheer joy of the basic, simple idea which has nothing to do with computers when you get right down to it—though it’s a joy that’s tempered by the melancholy inherent in the story of a kid running away to live out the story of the hardscrabble internet pioneer, a story that’s long since dead and gone out here in the real. —And somewhere in and among all that I read the lyrics to Jane Yolen’s “Soulja Grrrl,” which gets performed in the background in “Crossings,” and the “Borderland Jump-Rope Rhyme” (and is it only me who thinks of Louis Untermeyer when confronted with folklorist L. Durocher? Probably) and also Neil Gaiman’s “Song of the Song” and Delia Sherman’s “The Wall” and Steven Brust’s “Run Back to the Border” (because Steven Brust) but my favorite of the songs I think has got to be Amal El-Mohtar’s “Stairs in her Hair,” which spawns or was spawned by a metaphor in Catherynne M. Valente’s bracingly chilly “Voice like a Hole”—

—which, that move right there, that’s not something particular to a shared-world book, like borrowing a character or a setting somebody else has set up; that’s just the way art gets made, you know, the usual game of inspiration and allusion and homage, only with something like a shared world, a collective enterprise like this, you get to see it happen a little more quickly, a little more clearly, you get that giddy sense of play and camaraderie that Holly Black talks about in her introduction, of a bunch of writers sitting around writing and reading and one-upping each other, that idealized circus that any bookish youth with half a hankering to write themselves would want to run away to join, to finally hear, like Jimmy Fix-It does, heading into Danceland with the rest of Widdershins in “Welcome to Bordertown,” by Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner, that you’re with the goddamn band—

Soon.

The book itself drops in exactly a month; 30 days from now (as I write this, yes), Tuesday, the 24th of May. —I was gonna tell you about the contests various contributors are running, to win their advanced reading copies of the book, in case you couldn’t wait, but I took too damn long and the ones that haven’t ended already are ending today. —Still: Emma Bull was asking for ways to get there, and Nalo Hopkinson is yet soliciting menus for a king-hell meal to be cooked once you make it; go and read the entries already posted, because damn. (Oh wait there’s hope; there’s always hope; new contests keep being announced—)

It’s grand, it’s giddy, it’s gloriously stupid, it’s too earnest by half like all the best things you remember from then, it was terribly important to a great many people and I’ve no doubt at all that it will be again. In the thirteen years it Brigadooned itself away the phantastick ate up the world in a way it never has before, and the n00bs have been dreaming of rings and swords and elves in technicolors we never had back then; and it’s so much easier now with the internets and all to tell each other how to get there and what to do when you’ve made it. —If you’ve been before, you can go back. If you’ve never gone, then what the heck are you waiting for? Go! Go!

—Filed 5108 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment [3].

Lacuna.

Honestly, I didn’t mean to take a couple weeks off.

Busy with one of those seekrit projekts, but also with the finishing touches on no. 12 over yonder: online serialization begins Monday, and I’m still up here knitting the dam’ parachute. (At least this time I’ve left myself plenty of room for the landing.) —Anyway, it turns out I can only procrastinate so many things at one time? Or something.

I do need to get back to certain things hereabouts, though. —Soon? Soon enough.

—Filed 5166 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

Sacramento Morty’s.

You’ve been following along with Dylan Meconis’s daily Danse Macabre sketches? If not, go on: catch up. —Now. Turns out, this one?

It was specifically commissioned by the Spouse. For me.

I know a provocation when I see one.

—Filed 5227 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

What we talk about when we talk about what we’re pointing to.

Urban fantasy as a subgenre usually has a little bit of hard-boiled noir action going on, blending fantasy with the elements of a modern crime story. Here’s a body, in other words, or some other horrible atrocity, and now here’s a hero/heroine with a special magical doodad/heritage who’s going to avenge/solve the crime. That’s the super-duper simple version, and the umbrella term can cover much more, of course…but that should get you started.

—Oberon89

So, I am finishing up writing and polishing a YA novel that I thought was UF. But now I’m starting to think it’s not. By strict definition, it is. The MC and fairies having adventures around London. But as a marketing category, it seems like UF might not really work.

—Kitty Pryde

Under normal circumstances, it would be considered a straightforward Urban Fantasy/paranormal romance: independent, capable woman pits herself against the supernatural, meets up with mysterious wizard with dark powers and great cheekbones, and sparks fly, at least when Death isn’t waiting around every corner. You know, the usual.

—jallenecs

After doing some research on the genre, I wondered if most urban fantasy fiction is in 1st person or you can get away with close 3rd with alternating POVs, corresponding with chapter breaks and/or scene changes.

—RedRose

Urban Fantasy is really bookcover-based, and as a genre is really a mashup of fantasy and romance novels, and we’re still sorting out the schizophrenia of clichés that this has produced.

—Lauren Panepinto

And, sorry, I appreciate why you might want Urban Fantasy to mean what it meant 30 years ago, and you guys have perfectly good arguments as to why it should, but in common conversation it just doesn’t.

—Artw

Urban Fantasy seems to me to revolve around the uncomfortable relationship between gender and power.

—Daniel Abraham

If ten people are talking about urban fantasy, they’ll actually be talking about six different things.

—Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn for the win, and not just because she’s written a neat overview of how the thing we pointed to when we said “urban fantasy” shifted and changed when I wasn’t looking into a bunch of other things pointed to by a bunch of other people. —“Urban fantasy,” of course, is a genre, and genera—whether we’re talking about the flavor-of-the-season catch-as-catch-can shelving categories of agents and sales reps, or the (somewhat) more considered taxonomies of critical apprehension—well, they’re social objects:

…those [objects] that, instead of existing as a relatively limited number of material objects, exist rather as an unspecified number of recognition codes (functional descriptions, if you will) shared by an unlimited population, in which new and different examples are regularly produced.

—And so while it’s possible to quibble and snipe over this trope or that and whether it’s really part of how you think the thing you think you’re talking about works at this precise moment in time and place in history, you should never think you’ve actually defined the thing in question, not necessarily, not sufficiently, not at all—it moves when you aren’t looking, shifts, changes; while you’re otherwise engaged, someone else points to something else entirely, and here we are left talking past each other, the ten of us, about six different things. —At least.

So what am I pointing to when I say—

Well, Christ, what is it I’m saying, anyway? Urban fantasy? Low fantasy? Modern fantasy? Syncretic fantasy? Contemporary fantasy? Indigenous fantasy? —Well much as my own finger might rather prefer contemporary fantasy (actually, my finger might best prefer indigenous fantasy, as suggested by Brian Atteberry: fantasy “that is, like an indigenous species, adapted to and reflective of its native environment,” but Lord does that fast become a problematic term)—I think it’s clear; the game’s given away: vox populi and critical weight and a couple of filips and grace notes we’ll come to all compel me to walk over here and sit me down under the blinking neon sign that says URBAN FANTASY.

Despite those wags who insist the “urban” must mean that Little, Big isn’t what I’m pointing to and Perdido Street Station is. It is; it isn’t; all of these terms have their problems, even the milquetoasty “contemporary.” —But it’s urban we’ve settled on; urban it is.

So that’s what I’m saying. What is it I’m pointing to?

At the end of the nineties I spent a lot of time walking from an office on Park between Washington and Alder to an apartment on the same block as what would later become Robin Goodfellow’s house at midnight, at one in the morning, at two. My route to avoid busy Burnside took me through what we were only just derisively starting to call the Pearl, through the heart of what would one day become the Brewery Blocks, when it was still, y’know, a brewery, and at midnight or one or even two the glass bottles would be clink-clinking together on the conveyor belt that ran overhead across the street from one stage of the brewing process, in that building there, to the next, in the building yonder. And somewhere on one of the corrugated metal sides of one of those buildings there’s this thing, and I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s where the main power line comes in and it comes down the outside of the wall in a sort of pipe that ends in in several up-curled snouts like horns from which sprouts a thicket of much thinner cables that branch out to carry the power off hither and yon throughout the building. And sometimes there’s one that isn’t in use anymore, so there’s no cables sprouting, just those horns, upturned, empty, waiting. And walking past at midnight or one or two I saw them and I said to myself, I said snakes, I said pythia, I said oracle—

—and there she stood all of a sudden, sprung fully if not finally formed into the pinkish-orange streetlight: this Lori Petty-looking kid with spiky yellow hair and goggles pushed up on her forehead and black jeans and a white T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off and mismatched Chuck Taylors with duct tape on the toe, and one work-gloved hand was on her hip and the other was holding a glimmering baseball bat, and she very obviously expected those snouts to turn and talk to her—

Kip, meet Jo; Jo, meet the author.

But that isn’t the point, that little where-I-got-my-idea moment, and anyway I’m lying about it. Just a little. You can’t help but lie about something like that when you set it down (and of course I warned you I would). —No, the point is the moment just before, the moment when the thing there on the side of the building shivered, or could have shivered, maybe, if the light had been right; when a wonder-generating mechanism of fantasy reattached itself however briefly to something any one of us could see out in the world: cables; snakes; pythia: not a portal opening onto some secondary world beyond the fields we know, but something indisputably here and now: contemporary; indigenous; syncretic.

The only reason it’s urban is because so very many of us who make it and read it these days live in cities. (Or suburbs, yes. Or exurbs. Urban. Look at the words.)

So that’s what I’m saying, and that’s what I’m pointing to, but what is it I’m talking about? Any fantasy which draws its sensawunda from the here and now? Because that’s awful broad, isn’t it? And there’s nothing at all in there about noir or crime or hard-boiling anything or vampires or dhampires or werewolves or witches or undone leather pants or tramp stamps or cheekbones or a close 3rd with oscillating POVs or well anything specific, you know? —Yes, yes. And no, I’m not talking about something that impossibly broad. I mean, it’s definitely a thing, it’s a valuable distinction, but it’s an awful big circle on any Venn diagram you’d care to make. We should maybe focus. Look more closely where we’re pointing. Keeping in mind of course that nothing we say can ever be necessary or sufficient enough to define what it is we’re talking about, so we’re just fucking around, right?

So if we take a closer look say at Enchanted—

Yes, Enchanted, the 2007 Disney flick about the animated princess who falls through a manhole into 21st-century New York City—

Yes, it’s an urban fantasy.

Look, just watch this, okay?

See? Urban fantasy. —No, not because it takes place in a city. Not just. But because it takes something particular to a particular city—no, not busking, or not just busking, but—well, watch this—

I mean, this shit really happens in New York. The spectacular busking, the audience participation, the spontaneous musical numbers, the sort of moment that just doesn’t happen, not in the same way, in Harvard Square or on Maxwell Street or Pioneer Square or wherever it is in London that busking goes down. —And granted, Central Park isn’t usually full of pre-rehearsed Broadway players between roles, but that’s just part of what makes the movie moment transcendent (and scoff if you like, but silly, and overblown, and swooningly earnest, these things all transcend)—thus magical, thus fantastic, but a fantastic moment grounded and rooted in a very real place we all know or at least can get to, not just drawn from but indisputably of a very particular here and now. —Wonder, however clumsily, reattached.

(It works the other way round, too. —I read Folk of the Air years before I ever flew down to the Bay Area and rode BART out to North Berkeley and when I got out of the train and stood on the platform and looked around and the way the light soaked the air without ever quite falling and the dark hills over there and all the water that you couldn’t see left me stranded in Avicenna for a long and dizzying moment instead, with Julie Tanikawa about to ride by on her big black BSA. —The indisputable here and now, without warning, reattached to wonder.)

But remember that none of this is necessary to define what it is we’re talking about—Bordertown is urban fantasy beyond the shadow of a doubt, and yet rather firmly takes place in a city that doesn’t exist, or rather (and this is the key, though it’s still off thataway, on the edge of the fields we know) it’s variously every city the authors see it as and need it to be, patchworked, multivalent—nor any of it sufficient to so define. (So why are we talking about it? I don’t know. Passes the time?) —When I started thinking about these posts and this one in particular I figured I’d stop here, you know, rough out the idea that what I was pointing to when I said “urban fantasy” was anything of the fantastic in an otherwise recognizable place, and then I would’ve backed off and tried to knock that over from another angle, see what happened when it broke.

But that isn’t it, and it isn’t sufficient. It isn’t even a genre, not yet. It’s—an idiom, a loose collection of tropes, windowdressing; it’s too clumsy and loosely fitted a tool to use for any close-in work. (Hell, you could fit great steaming chunks of magic realism in that definition, and I think we all know that’s not right.) —So: more focus, more specificity, more—noir? More boiling? More cheekbones? More leather? More Glocks?

I mean I started kicking this around because it seemed to me there’d been a divergence between old skool urban fantasy and the paranormal romance that lines the supermarket shelves these days; because saying to myself that what I wrote was urban fantasy meant trying to imagine what Jo Maguire would look like in leather pants on the cover of a book her tattooed back to us all (and then bursting into laughter; “I thought it was UF, but now I’m starting to think it’s not”); because I thought I saw ways that television and comics and role playing games had helped shape and widen that gap, which fascinated me, and anyway I’m a sucker for roads less travelled and not taken. So I set up my oppositions and sketched out the common ground and started doing the spade-work necessary to figure out exactly which term I preferred and whether I agreed that indigenous fantasy is essentially a rhetoric of intrusion or immersion and while I was dithering about Daniel Abraham went and said, “Genre is where fears pool—”

—and see that’s what’s missing from what I would’ve been talking about, that’s why what I’d had in mind as common ground wasn’t a genre any more than SF is a genre, or fantasy, or superheroes. Genre is where fears pool. It’s the immediacy, the kick, the redlining engine that doesn’t leave you the luxury of looking back and seeing what you just ran over, and urban fantasy, says Daniel Abraham, seems to him to revolve around the uncomfortable relationship beween gender and power—

And that certainly isn’t sufficient, no, and it isn’t necessary either but nonetheless watch it all slide and slip and snap quite suddenly into place, Anita Blake and Buffy and Eddi and Farrell and Doc and Oliver and one could even start reaching down for some of the dimly glimpsed taproots like Conjure Wife and hey, like I said, there’s Enchanted at the other end with some self-consciously conversed Disney platitudes about princesses saving the day.

But that’s heady and it’s late and I’m dizzy and this has gone on long enough for now. I want to back up, come at this ungainly construct from another angle, try to knock it over. See what happens when it breaks. And anyway I think I need to take up Clute next. —So.

—Filed 5269 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

The Great Work.

The time my mother slapped me?

I was a junior in high school. Seventeen? Maybe. I don’t remember what it was I wasn’t to be allowed to have done, but I was complaining about it, bitterly, vociferously, rounding it out with the rising plaint of it just isn’t fair!

Life isn’t fair, she said, exasperated.

That’s no excuse! I snapped.

Pop!

What underpins all of the above is the idea of moral expectation. Fantasy, unlike science fiction, relies on a moral universe: it is less an argument with the universe than a sermon on the way things should be, a belief that the universe should yield to moral precepts.

—Farah Mendlesohn

Which isn’t what happened at all. —Oh, I was complaining about something; I was a teenager. And she’d told me more than once (but not that much more) that life just isn’t fair. And I wanted to say something in response, of course I did; I was a teenager. But if I ever managed to mutter anything at all I doubt it was so pithy. No, the time she slapped me I don’t even remember what she said, or I said. I just remember standing there, in the kitchen of the farmhouse outside of Chicago, the sting, the vague sick flutter in my belly and the half-swallowed grin of embarrassment, the acknowledgement that you know I’d probably deserved what I’d just got, but.

So I lied, just now. —But you know what they say about writers.

I’m not about to talk about it over there; over there, there’s whole words I can’t even spell out for fear of breaking—something. (Like the song says, as soon as you say it out loud they will leave you.) —But I have to talk about it somewhere. When I started to write it it was ten years ago and what we called the thing it was then was completely different than the thing we call by that name now. Used to be it was Eddi and the Fey concert T-shirts; now it’s tramp-stamped werewolves, and is that a bad thing? A good thing? A class thing? A get-off-my-lawn thing? Actually maybe not a different thing at all? —I don’t know, but I think maybe something got written out from under my feet, and it might be a good idea to figure out what it was before I land.

—And also there’s Mendlesohn, and Clute; Clute and Mendlesohn.

Which is not to say they’re wrong, my wanting to hash it all out like I want to. I mean, of course they’re wrong; they’re working with models. All models are wrong. But some are useful, and I haven’t yet figured out whether, or which.

Hence, the Great Work. Limned and primed.

—Filed 5376 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

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