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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