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You drag your body around behind you everywhere you go
How I am doing is not fantastically, but I aten't dead.
I have difficulty telling sometimes the point at which my pattern recognition is trying to turn into apophenia. For the first time in at least six years, I was re-reading Patricia McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain (2010), which remains among my favorites of her later novels; I can't remember if it happened the first time around, but I hit the line "Time didn't write his life on his face the way it did on others'; he seemed at once ageless and unfinished" and instantly my brain supplied "He smiled, and she saw that his face was frighteningly young for a grown man—untraveled by time, unvisited by grief or wisdom." The McKillip character under description is Nairn the Unforgiven, also known as the Wanderer, the Cursed, and the Fool, the legendary, cautionary harper whose spectacular failure at the Three Trials of Bone Plain condemned him to "find no song, no peace, no poetry, no rest, no end of days, and no forgetting," or as a bardic student a thousand years later summarizes much more bluntly, "thereby rendering himself at once immortal and uninspired. Not a good example to follow." Speaking obviously, I have a very strong model for a person who is immortally bad at their powerful calling, uncannily innocent of lived experience or even the passage of time. But I was re-reading Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn (1968) by the time I was eight years old; that book is so deeply wired into my brain that I still catch pieces of it turning up in my language or my philosophy and even so it remains intensely weird to me that I am now canonically older than Molly Grue. (As recently as the last year before the pandemic, I was being mistaken for a grad student and I hated it. I have made a point of being alive since grad school: I shouldn't look like none of that time, whatever I did with it, even happened. I trust that my body has fallen apart sufficiently over this last year and a half that I look at least my age now.) I don't know if random passages of Schmendrick the Magician live the same way in McKillip's head. I have found strikingly similar images constellated across writers I truly don't think were in dialogue with one another with no obvious antecedents except for folklore. But that line and the general lineaments of Nairn's situation and the intertwined reclamation of mortality and power make me wonder and I can't tell if I shouldn't. We're built to make connections into stories, which doesn't mean they are always the right ones.
I don't know how I missed discovering it in the spring when I fell so suddenly into The Greatest American Hero (1981–83), but I learned last night that Robert Culp directed exactly one feature film, the cult neo-noir Hickey & Boggs (1972). It was the first produced screenplay of Walter Hill, whom I know much better as a director in his own right; it looks like an early entry in the bleakly deconstructive cycle which defined neo-noir in that decade; and quite naturally for a project of Culp's in 1972, it co-stars Bill Cosby. What I am going to do about watching it is not any kind of immediate question: the film is not at this time available to me unless TCM or the Criterion Channel intervene. But once again I resent, in a thoroughly selfish way, artists doing things that are offputting enough that it interferes with their art.
I have difficulty telling sometimes the point at which my pattern recognition is trying to turn into apophenia. For the first time in at least six years, I was re-reading Patricia McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain (2010), which remains among my favorites of her later novels; I can't remember if it happened the first time around, but I hit the line "Time didn't write his life on his face the way it did on others'; he seemed at once ageless and unfinished" and instantly my brain supplied "He smiled, and she saw that his face was frighteningly young for a grown man—untraveled by time, unvisited by grief or wisdom." The McKillip character under description is Nairn the Unforgiven, also known as the Wanderer, the Cursed, and the Fool, the legendary, cautionary harper whose spectacular failure at the Three Trials of Bone Plain condemned him to "find no song, no peace, no poetry, no rest, no end of days, and no forgetting," or as a bardic student a thousand years later summarizes much more bluntly, "thereby rendering himself at once immortal and uninspired. Not a good example to follow." Speaking obviously, I have a very strong model for a person who is immortally bad at their powerful calling, uncannily innocent of lived experience or even the passage of time. But I was re-reading Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn (1968) by the time I was eight years old; that book is so deeply wired into my brain that I still catch pieces of it turning up in my language or my philosophy and even so it remains intensely weird to me that I am now canonically older than Molly Grue. (As recently as the last year before the pandemic, I was being mistaken for a grad student and I hated it. I have made a point of being alive since grad school: I shouldn't look like none of that time, whatever I did with it, even happened. I trust that my body has fallen apart sufficiently over this last year and a half that I look at least my age now.) I don't know if random passages of Schmendrick the Magician live the same way in McKillip's head. I have found strikingly similar images constellated across writers I truly don't think were in dialogue with one another with no obvious antecedents except for folklore. But that line and the general lineaments of Nairn's situation and the intertwined reclamation of mortality and power make me wonder and I can't tell if I shouldn't. We're built to make connections into stories, which doesn't mean they are always the right ones.
I don't know how I missed discovering it in the spring when I fell so suddenly into The Greatest American Hero (1981–83), but I learned last night that Robert Culp directed exactly one feature film, the cult neo-noir Hickey & Boggs (1972). It was the first produced screenplay of Walter Hill, whom I know much better as a director in his own right; it looks like an early entry in the bleakly deconstructive cycle which defined neo-noir in that decade; and quite naturally for a project of Culp's in 1972, it co-stars Bill Cosby. What I am going to do about watching it is not any kind of immediate question: the film is not at this time available to me unless TCM or the Criterion Channel intervene. But once again I resent, in a thoroughly selfish way, artists doing things that are offputting enough that it interferes with their art.
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I hear you.
(I read the rest of this fascinating entry too, but this seemed the most sensible comment I could offer.)
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(I appreciate it!)
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I've seen both poetry and crow's feet from you.
(Ironically, when I decided I needed healthier models for fictional immortality, I thought I might start with the land-rulers of McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy.)
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I'm honestly not sure if I've read any of McKillip's novels (I know I've read anthologies she's contributed to) - I should rectify that at some point.
Same here.
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She was a formative writer for me. Beyond the trilogy which I've seen collected under the omnibus titles of Riddle of Stars or Riddle-Master—The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976), Heir of Sea and Fire (1977), and Harpist in the Wind (1979), which I appear able to return to infinitely—the novels that seem to have left the strongest impressions on me are Fool's Run (1987), The Changeling Sea (1988), The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991), Something Rich and Strange (1994), Song for the Basilisk (1998), Ombria in Shadow (2002), The Bards of Bone Plain (2010), and Kingfisher (2016). I can give details if desired. I am also fond of her first published novel, The House on Parchment Street (1973). It is a completely traditional Anglo-American YA fantasy about a couple of cousins and the ghosts in the cellar, but it's a very nicely written example.
Same here.
*hugs*
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If you're up for a trilogy, the trilogy: it's a concentration of her recurring concerns and images as well as her language at some of its strongest and it is a significantly weirder kind of story, structurally-generically, than I was able to tell when I read it for the first time in middle school. If you're not up for a trilogy, either The Changeling Sea or The Sorceress and the Cygnet should be a good introduction: I love the ocean in the former and the myth and folklore in the latter and neither of them suffers from the intermittent problem of her later novels where the language becomes so graceful and evanescent that the plot just sort of dissolves. (The only one which has totally wiped out for me so far is Od Magic (2005), but they are generally much more hit-or-miss. I like pieces of many of them.) I realize I'm not talking about the characters and that's not because she can't write them, but I know more people who have bounced off her style than her protagonists. Quite a number of her people have been important to me over the years.
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*hugs*
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There was a storm on the mountain last night and I forget every year how much they're like when a storm meets a coastline -- Weather at the Edge of Things -- and between the roar of the river over its boulders and the stark sheets of lightning with nothing to really interrupt it, I thought you would have been extremely satisfied.
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I can't watch things on iTunes, but that's good to know. I found evidence that Kino Lorber put out a Blu-Ray in 2014, but it no longer seems to be available.
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H Ellison wrote The Outer Limits’ “Demon With a Glass Hand” specifically for Robert Culp. This may be part of why it has never to my knowledge been reproduced, even in later iterations of that show.
I'd find that immensely flattering!
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I really do my best!
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I am so sorry.
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I loved The Last Unicorn when I first read it, but I missed whole chunks of Meaning, which this time round are hitting like tidal waves. Hearing it in slow time, the combination of the beauty of the language and the intensity of what he's saying. Whoa. And that bit about Schmendrick's curse was one of those things.
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"Don't thank me. I tremble at your doom."
It's one of the books I can't even remember reading for the first time. I am glad it is meaningful for you.