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Something here will eventually have to explode
Wherein I do rant.
It's not that I hate all humorous fantasy per se. I am a devotee of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books—though I consider those sort of a species of free-for-all satire, albeit one that makes me laugh out loud in public places—and I am greatly amused by Mary Anne Mohanraj's "Fleeing Gods." (I have not yet read Leslie What's Olympic Games. It's on my to-read-before-some-impatient-friend-clobbers-me-with-it list.) Mostly it's a literary stripe that I just don't read particularly often. This week, I read Esther Friesner's "Last Man Standing" in the January 2005 Fantasy & Science Fiction, and have found myself unexpectedly annoyed.
The story has been favorably reviewed in The Agony Column and I'm sure elsewhere as well. It deals with a sarcastic slave named Namtar who escapes drinking hemlock at the funeral of Gilgameš only to find himself pulled down into the underworld alive by the romantic intrigues of the goddess Inanna; along the way, he runs into everyone from an irate female bartender to the divine Ereškigal to the less than impressed shade of Gilgameš himself, with a side order of scheming priests and vengeful ghosts to boot. In and of itself, it's a very funny story. Namtar follows in a long tradition of wisecracking protagonists who consistently get themselves into hot water and must rely on the same capacity for quick talking to get themselves back out again: he's sort of a servus calidus transplanted from Roman comedy to the ancient Near East; Pseudolus among the mud bricks. The narrative displays about as much reverence as Namtar himself, with lines like "Though the death of gods is sometimes unavoidable—whether to fulfill a prophecy, to respect some hidden rule of the cosmos, to get mortals to sit up and pay attention during temple services, or simply to make for a better story—it can also be a mere temporary inconvenience, like cat-sitting." I didn't find the tone laugh-out-loud hilarious, but the snerk level is evenly high. And who could fail to be amused by the ancient Sumerian pop hit, Love Me, Baby, Like A Sacred Temple Whore?
. . . cut for righteous pedantry.
Herein lies much of my major trouble with the story. Sacred temple whores? Royal funerals in which luckless slaves accompany their betters into the afterlife to satisfy not the strictures of the underworld, but the earthly pomposity of corrupt priests who run everything? When celebrating his newfound freedom, Namtar goes on a binge in the tavern run by his old acquaintance Puabi: "There had even been a time or two (or seventeen) when the pair of them had shared a satisfying measure of beer-fueled fleshly comfort during the Feast of Inanna, all quite amicable as far as casual orgiastic sex goes." Pardon me, what? I am willing to refrain from a fisticuffs about the issue of human sacrifice, as the Sumerian literary text The Death of Gilgameš and the "death pits" of the royal tombs at Ur have been academically linked since the 1920's, but I am much less convinced of the existence of temple orgies. (Sacred prostitution, fine by me: only keep in mind that not every priestess in Mesopotamia is a prostitute. Especially the ones who have taken vows of celibacy.) Then there are the names Friesner chooses for her characters. A slave named Namtar: after the minister of Ištar in the Akkadian version of the goddess' descent? A bartender named Puabi: like the queen buried in the royal tombs of Ur? Don't let me even start on Namtar's former superior, another potter named Ibi-Sin: like Ibbi-Sîn, the last king of the (Akkadian: 2112-2004 BCE) Third Dynasty of Ur? I cannot speak to the accuracy of the name Sabit, but it suggests a Semitic—Akkadian—origin to me. (If anyone knows otherwise, however, please correct me!) Lastly, and perhaps this is the greatest sin my book: Esther Friesner gets Inanna's Descent wrong.
"When Inanna's favorite mortal lover died, the goddess of love and war determined to bring him back from the dead, a land ruled over by her sister Ereshkigal. Dressed in her finest robes, decked with her most precious ornaments, Inanna descended into the land of darkness, her dainty gold-sandaled feet itching to kick her sister's butt and reclaim her own."
No. I like retellings. I have trouble with blatant misrepresentations of mythology. In the Sumerian version, Inanna claims to have come down to the underworld for the funeral of her sister's husband Gudgalana. (There are certain problems with this explanation, given that Ereškigal's consort is traditionally Nergal, the god of plague and chaos; but assume for the moment that Inanna is telling the truth.) In the Akkadian version, the goddess gives no reason at all: the text implies that she has it in mind to take over the underworld from Ereškigal, but nothing Ištar says to her sister to the gatekeeper explicitly makes this point. Whether by the name Dumuzi or Tammuz, the goddess' lover—who is not a mortal; his name contains the determinative DINGIR, unambiguously indicating his divine status—does not enter into the story until Inanna-Ištar has already returned to earth and needs a substitute to take her place in the underworld. In the Sumerian story, she passes over her minister, her manicurist and hairdresser, and her faithful servant, all of whom have observed the proper mourning rites: but Dumuzi, magnificently dressed and playing his flute as blithely as though his lover had never been dead, Inanna happily sics her demon escorts on. The Akkadian version offers a more fragmentary narrative, but even if Dumuzi has mourned his lover and actually been set up as a fall guy by the powers of the underworld (as Ainsley Dicks has suggested), still he is alive and well and living aboveground when Ištar comes back up. A goddess descending into death to rescue her mortal lover, even unsuccessfully, is a sweet story: but it is not this myth.
To a certain degree, I realize that I cannot take too much academic offense—especially on behalf of a field technically not my own. And there is a simple answer to all of my dissatisfactions with "Last Man Standing": Hey. It's a humorous story. It's not mean to be historically accurate. Keep your shirt on. Fine; the shirt stays on. But because you're writing a funny story rather than a note for NABU, does that mean it's not worth the research? About the story, the author says, "This time I would like to blame the British Museum, specifically their section on ancient Sumeria, as well as Larry Gonick, creator of The Cartoon History of the Universe, for his obvious-yet-overlooked observation that in any large gathering of people, there's always some guy who has to be last in line." Frankly, the story reads as though all of Friesner's information about ancient Sumer—because I believe "Sumeria" is a font—derives from pages 105—111 of the graphic novel, especially 110 and 111. I think this bothers me on the grounds of both academia and storytelling. Most people wouldn't know the ziggurat of Marduk at Babylon from a hole in the ground.* Don't make their ignorance worse. You may not care much about the culture from which you take your material, but at least pay a little respect to its traditions. (I have some of the same difficulty with Tom Doyle's "The Floating Otherworld," though I am nowhere near as qualified to rant on the misuse of Japanese mythology as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yuki_onna.) You can twist a story in all sorts of ways and still not warp it beyond its contextual resonance. Same for history: I'd have been enthused to read a historically-detailed, anachronically-sardonic story set in ancient Uruk. Beer straws and lapis lazuli do not make up for what looks like a basic lack of interest in any real exploration of the culture in which Esther Friesner chose to set her story. As it is, I think I might have been happier if she'd made up an fantasy country that bears a close resemblance to Sumer and set "Last Man Standing" there.
So, I suppose that's all my rant comes down to: Care about what you write about. Take the time to get to know the historical period, or the mythical background, on which you're basing your story. (By the same token, although I loved John G. McDaid's "Keyboard Practice: Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals," the phrase Dingi' Pazuzu qatu Dingir Ishtar—which he uses as an example of ancient Sumerian, a potter's tuneless chant as she throws clay on her wheel—is not Sumerian. Inanna is Sumerian. Ištar is not. The word qatu, moreover, looks suspiciously like the Akkadian word for "hand." I appreciate that he took the time to find out the Sumerian word for "school," e-dubba, and use it; so why not the same attention to a quoted phrase? All right, so most of his readership will neither know nor care. But Assyriologists read science fiction too!) At least make a brief foray in its direction: it can't hurt. If nothing else, fewer writer-scholars will get annoyed.
Rant over. I return to my regularly scheduled Greek epigrams. Feel free to bash me now.
*Which is pretty much what it looks like, these days. Memo to self: don't make national monuments out of mud brick.
It's not that I hate all humorous fantasy per se. I am a devotee of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books—though I consider those sort of a species of free-for-all satire, albeit one that makes me laugh out loud in public places—and I am greatly amused by Mary Anne Mohanraj's "Fleeing Gods." (I have not yet read Leslie What's Olympic Games. It's on my to-read-before-some-impatient-friend-clobbers-me-with-it list.) Mostly it's a literary stripe that I just don't read particularly often. This week, I read Esther Friesner's "Last Man Standing" in the January 2005 Fantasy & Science Fiction, and have found myself unexpectedly annoyed.
The story has been favorably reviewed in The Agony Column and I'm sure elsewhere as well. It deals with a sarcastic slave named Namtar who escapes drinking hemlock at the funeral of Gilgameš only to find himself pulled down into the underworld alive by the romantic intrigues of the goddess Inanna; along the way, he runs into everyone from an irate female bartender to the divine Ereškigal to the less than impressed shade of Gilgameš himself, with a side order of scheming priests and vengeful ghosts to boot. In and of itself, it's a very funny story. Namtar follows in a long tradition of wisecracking protagonists who consistently get themselves into hot water and must rely on the same capacity for quick talking to get themselves back out again: he's sort of a servus calidus transplanted from Roman comedy to the ancient Near East; Pseudolus among the mud bricks. The narrative displays about as much reverence as Namtar himself, with lines like "Though the death of gods is sometimes unavoidable—whether to fulfill a prophecy, to respect some hidden rule of the cosmos, to get mortals to sit up and pay attention during temple services, or simply to make for a better story—it can also be a mere temporary inconvenience, like cat-sitting." I didn't find the tone laugh-out-loud hilarious, but the snerk level is evenly high. And who could fail to be amused by the ancient Sumerian pop hit, Love Me, Baby, Like A Sacred Temple Whore?
. . . cut for righteous pedantry.
Herein lies much of my major trouble with the story. Sacred temple whores? Royal funerals in which luckless slaves accompany their betters into the afterlife to satisfy not the strictures of the underworld, but the earthly pomposity of corrupt priests who run everything? When celebrating his newfound freedom, Namtar goes on a binge in the tavern run by his old acquaintance Puabi: "There had even been a time or two (or seventeen) when the pair of them had shared a satisfying measure of beer-fueled fleshly comfort during the Feast of Inanna, all quite amicable as far as casual orgiastic sex goes." Pardon me, what? I am willing to refrain from a fisticuffs about the issue of human sacrifice, as the Sumerian literary text The Death of Gilgameš and the "death pits" of the royal tombs at Ur have been academically linked since the 1920's, but I am much less convinced of the existence of temple orgies. (Sacred prostitution, fine by me: only keep in mind that not every priestess in Mesopotamia is a prostitute. Especially the ones who have taken vows of celibacy.) Then there are the names Friesner chooses for her characters. A slave named Namtar: after the minister of Ištar in the Akkadian version of the goddess' descent? A bartender named Puabi: like the queen buried in the royal tombs of Ur? Don't let me even start on Namtar's former superior, another potter named Ibi-Sin: like Ibbi-Sîn, the last king of the (Akkadian: 2112-2004 BCE) Third Dynasty of Ur? I cannot speak to the accuracy of the name Sabit, but it suggests a Semitic—Akkadian—origin to me. (If anyone knows otherwise, however, please correct me!) Lastly, and perhaps this is the greatest sin my book: Esther Friesner gets Inanna's Descent wrong.
"When Inanna's favorite mortal lover died, the goddess of love and war determined to bring him back from the dead, a land ruled over by her sister Ereshkigal. Dressed in her finest robes, decked with her most precious ornaments, Inanna descended into the land of darkness, her dainty gold-sandaled feet itching to kick her sister's butt and reclaim her own."
No. I like retellings. I have trouble with blatant misrepresentations of mythology. In the Sumerian version, Inanna claims to have come down to the underworld for the funeral of her sister's husband Gudgalana. (There are certain problems with this explanation, given that Ereškigal's consort is traditionally Nergal, the god of plague and chaos; but assume for the moment that Inanna is telling the truth.) In the Akkadian version, the goddess gives no reason at all: the text implies that she has it in mind to take over the underworld from Ereškigal, but nothing Ištar says to her sister to the gatekeeper explicitly makes this point. Whether by the name Dumuzi or Tammuz, the goddess' lover—who is not a mortal; his name contains the determinative DINGIR, unambiguously indicating his divine status—does not enter into the story until Inanna-Ištar has already returned to earth and needs a substitute to take her place in the underworld. In the Sumerian story, she passes over her minister, her manicurist and hairdresser, and her faithful servant, all of whom have observed the proper mourning rites: but Dumuzi, magnificently dressed and playing his flute as blithely as though his lover had never been dead, Inanna happily sics her demon escorts on. The Akkadian version offers a more fragmentary narrative, but even if Dumuzi has mourned his lover and actually been set up as a fall guy by the powers of the underworld (as Ainsley Dicks has suggested), still he is alive and well and living aboveground when Ištar comes back up. A goddess descending into death to rescue her mortal lover, even unsuccessfully, is a sweet story: but it is not this myth.
To a certain degree, I realize that I cannot take too much academic offense—especially on behalf of a field technically not my own. And there is a simple answer to all of my dissatisfactions with "Last Man Standing": Hey. It's a humorous story. It's not mean to be historically accurate. Keep your shirt on. Fine; the shirt stays on. But because you're writing a funny story rather than a note for NABU, does that mean it's not worth the research? About the story, the author says, "This time I would like to blame the British Museum, specifically their section on ancient Sumeria, as well as Larry Gonick, creator of The Cartoon History of the Universe, for his obvious-yet-overlooked observation that in any large gathering of people, there's always some guy who has to be last in line." Frankly, the story reads as though all of Friesner's information about ancient Sumer—because I believe "Sumeria" is a font—derives from pages 105—111 of the graphic novel, especially 110 and 111. I think this bothers me on the grounds of both academia and storytelling. Most people wouldn't know the ziggurat of Marduk at Babylon from a hole in the ground.* Don't make their ignorance worse. You may not care much about the culture from which you take your material, but at least pay a little respect to its traditions. (I have some of the same difficulty with Tom Doyle's "The Floating Otherworld," though I am nowhere near as qualified to rant on the misuse of Japanese mythology as
yuki_onna.) You can twist a story in all sorts of ways and still not warp it beyond its contextual resonance. Same for history: I'd have been enthused to read a historically-detailed, anachronically-sardonic story set in ancient Uruk. Beer straws and lapis lazuli do not make up for what looks like a basic lack of interest in any real exploration of the culture in which Esther Friesner chose to set her story. As it is, I think I might have been happier if she'd made up an fantasy country that bears a close resemblance to Sumer and set "Last Man Standing" there.So, I suppose that's all my rant comes down to: Care about what you write about. Take the time to get to know the historical period, or the mythical background, on which you're basing your story. (By the same token, although I loved John G. McDaid's "Keyboard Practice: Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals," the phrase Dingi' Pazuzu qatu Dingir Ishtar—which he uses as an example of ancient Sumerian, a potter's tuneless chant as she throws clay on her wheel—is not Sumerian. Inanna is Sumerian. Ištar is not. The word qatu, moreover, looks suspiciously like the Akkadian word for "hand." I appreciate that he took the time to find out the Sumerian word for "school," e-dubba, and use it; so why not the same attention to a quoted phrase? All right, so most of his readership will neither know nor care. But Assyriologists read science fiction too!) At least make a brief foray in its direction: it can't hurt. If nothing else, fewer writer-scholars will get annoyed.
Rant over. I return to my regularly scheduled Greek epigrams. Feel free to bash me now.
*Which is pretty much what it looks like, these days. Memo to self: don't make national monuments out of mud brick.
Assyriological Agony
The two stories in question do nothing to help alleviate this general ignorance, mostly because, I suspect, the authors and then the editors were simply lazy, and that's a real shame. I've done translation work for projects on Mesopotamia, both a play and a novel, and the fact is that Sumerian and Akkadian are both beautiful languages representing a fascinating culture. "Dingi' Pazuzu qatu Dingir Ishtar" is neither Sumerian nor Akkadian-- it is in fact nothing but gibberish, much like the attempt at Akkadian in Jacqueline Carrey's "Kushiel's Avatar" (see page 42), which seems to have simply been simply a bunch of words pulled out of dictionary without any regard to morphology or syntax.
There is plenty of room for humor in Mesopotamia. There is plenty of room for drama. And yes, there are even Assyriologists like me who are willing to help authors get it right when they come to us with questions.
But only if the authors decide to care.
Re: Assyriological Agony
Beyond that, it's the responsibility of the author to make sure the details are spot-on, if that is even her intention in the first place (which it may not be)—and our responsibility is to make it clear that we might have issues with the story. The ball is then in the author's court. Beyond that . . . ?
Re: Assyriological Agony
Re: Assyriological Agony
However, I doubt that any ignorance has any part in the destruction of our own heritage. I don't see your logic points in that statement, as human nature being what it is, we do it to ourselves, usually.
Re: Assyriological Agony
I'm flattered an humbled to have found a few words from my story so intelligently and seriously discussed. First, let me apologize for my lack of command of Sumerian grammar. And for the obvious fact that I mixed Sumerian and Akkadian. But I would seek to push back on the characterization of laziness. While I cannot pretend to a specialist's knowledge, I have genuinely tried to do my research.
The quote -- while synthetic -- is meant to characterize a real, if somewhat heretical late Sumerian (hece the overlap of languages) thought: that the demon Pazuzu is the hand of the Goddess. While I may not have put it as eloquently as I might, it was integral to the story (and to the ending, where the posessed pianist raises his right hand and hisses). Yes, I have taken liberties with the spoken language, but my intent, at least, was authentic.
Like most science fiction writers, I do try to respect known facts while bending them here and there in service of storytelling. I'm very happy for the feedback, and will most certainly keep this group's critique in mind.
At the risk of asking for even more, I'd be happy to share with anyone interested a story of mine which appeared in an anthology called ReVisions last year. Called "The Ashbazu Effect," it is an alternative history in which printing is invented in Sumer. I'd be most happy to hear what folks here think, so that I can do a better job next time.
Best Regards.
-john
Re: Assyriological Agony
One of the reasons the line read oddly, I think, was that it used Akkadian vocabulary but not Akkadian grammatical structure. (The phrase "Pazuzu is the hand of the goddess Ištar" would, I think, come out looking like dPazuzu qāt dIštar / qātu ša dIštar, depending on how you wanted to express the genitive.) So it came across as somewhat more strung-together than might have been intended.
I had not before made the connection with Janacek's gesture in the next-to-last scene. Thanks!
Re: Assyriological Agony
While the ReVisions anthology is not in bookstores anymore, the story is scheduled to be reprinted in the online journal Tekka. Or, if you'd like to take a peek now, you can download a pdf from my site: http://www.www.torvex.com/jmcdaid/files/index.shtml
Again, thanks for the input. I really have great respect for Sumer and have a passion for getting the important stuff right.
Re: Assyriological Agony
Re: Assyriological Apology
This is a tough time to be an Assyriologist, watching Iraq's cultural heritage destroyed and stripped away by organized crime while the American occupation does nothing (or in some cases actively participates, as they did at Babylon) and the American public looks the other way. The result is that we scholars sometimes lash out in frustration, but this is no excuse for bad behavior on my part.
I would be happy to look over your story and provide what feedback I can. I have a vision of a Sumerian printing press that resembles a breadmaker-- toss in dirt and water and voila! Tablets!
hansthebold@yahoo.com
Re: Assyriological Apology
As an interested amateur, I share your horror and sadness at the impact of America's adventure in Iraq in lives, cultural hostility, and irreplaceable artifacts. Even before this latest episode, the contributions of the region to Western culture were given short shrift, and I cannot imagine the situation will improve. I'd like my stories to at least contribute to a more positive understanding and be responsibly researched. I'm actually very glad to have met you all -- which never would have happened without this thread. So thanks for caring enough about my writing to challenge it. :)