Rich Horton has posted the table of contents for Fantasy: The Best of the Year. I am able to construct about this coherent a reaction:
I am in the same anthology as Peter S. Beagle!
You have to understand that I discovered The Last Unicorn so early on that by the time I was eight years old and took the book home from the Cambridge Public Library, it was a re-read. Schmendrick the Magician was a central figure in my childhood pantheon. (If I had known about A Fine and Private Place in elementary school, undoubtably Jonathan Rebeck would have been too. I had to wait until mid-college for that one.) I have debated with friends over the green-eyed magician in The Innkeeper's Song. "Constellations, Conjunctions" owes a visible debt to The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances. I could go on like this. The point is, it's safe to say that Peter Beagle is a major component of my reading life and a whacking great influence on my writing, and I shall probably grin like a maniac over simply sharing a table of contents for far too many months.* Whee.
Unrelatedly, Jolie Holland rocks my world. Between the plucked bass and the snare drum, and her snaky, smoky play with rhythm and tune, her "Mad Tom of Bedlam" would be unrecognizable to the seventeenth century, but with no effort at all I could hear it performed at Carnegie Hall in 1938. "Old Fashion Morphine" is a low-key spiritual for the damned, the dead, and the indifferent; it wants daguerrotypes and tenements and slow swamp water (and would make a damned eerie double bill with Thea Gilmore's "Razor Valentine"). "Wandering Angus" is Yeats as featured on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and "Demon Lover Improv" is an undiscovered Alan Lomax field recording, right down to the background coughs and chair-creaks and little experimental finger-picks before the music itself. I haven't yet heard a single piece of hers that sounds quite like the present day. I don't think I'll be disappointed if I do. Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
muchabstracted for pointing me in her direction.
. . . Peter S. Beagle.
*Not like there aren't many other cool people in this table of contents, such as Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Elizabeth Bear, Theodora Goss, and Holly Phillips—but I haven't been reading them since before I can remember. That said, once the initial shock wears off, I will probably look over the rest of the table of contents and start nerving out again.
I am in the same anthology as Peter S. Beagle!
You have to understand that I discovered The Last Unicorn so early on that by the time I was eight years old and took the book home from the Cambridge Public Library, it was a re-read. Schmendrick the Magician was a central figure in my childhood pantheon. (If I had known about A Fine and Private Place in elementary school, undoubtably Jonathan Rebeck would have been too. I had to wait until mid-college for that one.) I have debated with friends over the green-eyed magician in The Innkeeper's Song. "Constellations, Conjunctions" owes a visible debt to The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances. I could go on like this. The point is, it's safe to say that Peter Beagle is a major component of my reading life and a whacking great influence on my writing, and I shall probably grin like a maniac over simply sharing a table of contents for far too many months.* Whee.
Unrelatedly, Jolie Holland rocks my world. Between the plucked bass and the snare drum, and her snaky, smoky play with rhythm and tune, her "Mad Tom of Bedlam" would be unrecognizable to the seventeenth century, but with no effort at all I could hear it performed at Carnegie Hall in 1938. "Old Fashion Morphine" is a low-key spiritual for the damned, the dead, and the indifferent; it wants daguerrotypes and tenements and slow swamp water (and would make a damned eerie double bill with Thea Gilmore's "Razor Valentine"). "Wandering Angus" is Yeats as featured on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and "Demon Lover Improv" is an undiscovered Alan Lomax field recording, right down to the background coughs and chair-creaks and little experimental finger-picks before the music itself. I haven't yet heard a single piece of hers that sounds quite like the present day. I don't think I'll be disappointed if I do. Thanks to
muchabstracted for pointing me in her direction.. . . Peter S. Beagle.
*Not like there aren't many other cool people in this table of contents, such as Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Elizabeth Bear, Theodora Goss, and Holly Phillips—but I haven't been reading them since before I can remember. That said, once the initial shock wears off, I will probably look over the rest of the table of contents and start nerving out again.
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