Dear ISLF readers, I know that you are an observant bunch. Surely you noticed the dearth of posts this week, my lack of response to comments and a particularly poorly produced episode of the podcast last Friday. But I swear I have a good excuse.
It’s about six pounds and wakes three to four times a night yowling for milk.
Yes, the Eaton family has grown by one, and that means this blog will experience some downtime. Expect this week to be pretty much dead and next week to see a serialized rerun of an older short story. Regular posts should resume around March 5th.
Here's a nice one, a 1929 eight-cent Grant. No real talent in finding stamps. They're everywhere. But turn it over. That's where talent comes in.
What do you see? A creased corner? A filigree of discoloration? Sure. But I see Emerson Montgomery, son of Christian and Myrtle, manager at Illinois Savings and Loan. I also see him cinching a rope, mounting a chair, slipping the hempen hoop over his head.
There are rules to it. I only see suicides that fall in the printing year -- or are going to fall.
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"If it weren't for you your family and Mr. Lafferty would find another way to persuade him. Your papa hasn't the strength to withstand him. If he must be overborne, it's just as well he do it for love. It's a kindness you do him, Christian."
"It doesn't feel like a kindness."
"Well that's just feelings. Your feelings know nothing. That's not what they're for. They are intoxicants, to be enjoyed in moderation."
Isn't the road to publication a strange and tortuous one? In my heart of hearts, I'd like to believe that every worthy manuscript eventually finds its way into print, that the market is efficient enough to separate the chaff from the grain even if it takes a lot of flailing to do so. But sometimes I have my doubts. For instance, take Lars Walker's latest novel, Troll Valley. Despite penning multiple high-quality books in the past, Walker wasn't able to get a publishing house to bite on this project. Perhaps a title about turn-of-the-century Norwegian-American Lutheran Minnesotans sounded like too much of a marketing challenge. That's a shame, because it's one of the finest things Walker has written.
From the moment he wakes up in the unfamiliar house, Shane Anderson knows he's in for pain. There's the hospital bed he finds himself in and the very large man parked between him and the door. Seems Shane's family finally wised up to his hard-partying antics and hired a professional to detox him the difficult way. All Shane has to entertain himself with for the next month is a manuscript written by his crippled great-grandfather Christian Anderson. Sounds excruciatingly boring. But as he fights delirium tremens and loosening bowels, Shane will turn to the manuscript as a means of escape, and what he finds there will shock him. He will learn not only of his great-grandfather's struggles with small-town internecine savagery and the vast social changes of the Progressive Era, but also of a supernatural secret: Christian had a backdoor to Faery.
For the record, I hold little in common with the characters of Troll Valley. I'm not of Norwegian descent, I'm not Lutheran, and the closest I've come to even setting foot in Minnesota is a trip to friend's wedding in Wisconsin. But I still found them engaging. Walker understands that literature is supposed about the stuff of universal human experience, and he uses his characters' specific situations to touch on it. Alienation and belonging, love and lust, faith and doubt -- all make appearances. What's more, Walker refuses to turn Christian and his family into flat caricatures. With one notable exception, they're well-rounded and multi-faceted, sometimes acting in unexpected (but ultimately consistent) ways. Then there's the fantasy element. Christian has a faery godmother named Miss Margit, although that term and Troll Valley's lamentably trite subtitle ("The Fairy Tale Your Grandparents Never Told You") hardly encapsulates the character. Forget childhood Disney movies: Miss Margit is eerie and wild and very, very violent when circumstances require it, and the glimpses she gives us into Fae suggest that world lies far more entangled with our own than any would care to admit. The same could be said for the thorny thematic issues the novel addresses. Though prohibition sounds like a long dead cause to 21st century ears, Walker reminds us that the mindset which spawned it is still with us. Ferocious, poignant and wry, Troll Valley is worth taking a trip into.
"Tell me again why I need this," Havey said, looking at the lock.
The salesman smiled toothily.
"The Gapstander 9000 includes a basic CitCard reader, full-spectrum auditory scanning --"
"No, I'm sure it --" Harvey squinted at the promotional holo. "'-- prevents the ingress of Commonwealth-uncertified personages.' But I'd never let in any anti-oligarchs in the first place."
The salesman's smile flattened. "It's a legal mandate. To prevent the spread of undesirable people and ideas. For everyone's good."
"That's stupid."
The lock's bolt shot out with a snap.
The salesman's smile was gone. "Perhaps you should consider a basic model."
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Over at his online journal, the inimitable Neil Gaiman posts a speech he made to the Mythopoeic Society in 2004 and recounts the lessons he learned about writing from three of the most famous Inklings. Excerpt:
Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I've said, not the only writers I read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not a writer of fantastic fiction. I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing.
Read the whole thing. Critics of both the academic and back-porch variety love to debate the purpose that stories serve. Do they merely entertain? Do they simply reflect a historical milieu? Are they literary Rorschach blots upon which a reader projects his own interests and hang ups? We could fill a book with answers to any one of these questions. But on a bedrock-basic level, I find Gaiman's conviction incredibly compelling: Stories show what an author believes to be true; stories tell those truths slant; and good stories do both of those things beautifully.
More wine, darling? Here you are. No, none for me.
Recognize the bottle? Lisbon? Our honeymoon? That restaurant overlooking the water?
Funny, I recognized it in a heartbeat. Not that I've recognized everything. I missed your glances at our waitress that evening. And, later, all the supposed nights out with the boys. Your endless construction projects in the basement.
Don't stand. Well, you can try, but you won't get far. Moderation in all things. Infidelity. Homicide. Wine.
I took our vows seriously. I meant it when we said, "'Till death do us part." Which it will. Right about ... now.
Postscript: If the above widget is giving you trouble, visit ISLF's Soundcloud page or consider subscribing to the podcast to listen to audio recordings of this and other stories.
Dear ISLF readers, I know that you are an observant bunch. Surely you noticed the dearth of posts this week, my lack of response to comments and a particularly poorly produced episode of the podcast last Friday. But I swear I have a good excuse.
