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Your sleight-of-hand leaves all my fingers burned
Of late, I realize, I've only updated my livejournal to post writing news; and this post is no exception. My life has been so consumed by academia that I've barely written more than lyrics and some fragments of story in the last month, and I've had to go cold turkey on silly quizzes. This will change, I hope, before the end of the semester. But right now, I'm reduced to praying that whatever reviewers praise wasn't a flash in the pan: I can't believe how much more free time I had as an undergraduate than a graduate student. Life must get better after exams. It must. Dear God, it must.
That said, I finally tracked down the Locus review. (Thank you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hans_the_bold and News Haven.) It's by Rich Horton. And it makes me extremely happy.
Singing Innocence and Experience, Sonya Taaffe. (Prime, 0-8095-4479-2, $17.95, 272pp, tpb) June 2005. Cover by John Williams Waterhouse. [Order from Prime Books, PO Box 301, Holicong PA 18928; www.primebooks.net.]
Sonya Taaffe is a writer of some of the most intense and image-drenched prose around. Line by long, exquisite line her writing is desperate and involving. She made her first major impression on me as a poet—and she may be the best poet working in the SF genre right now. But she has also been publishing short stories all over the place, often on mythical or traditional fantastical themes but always individual and always centered on a central character's obsession. In his introduction Tim Pratt suggests Theodore Sturgeon among others as an influence, and that seems apposite: not just in her thematic concerns but in the desperate feel to some of the prose. If there is a fault it is that, read back to back, Taaffe's voice begins to sound bit too similar story to story, the emotional register seems to be always pitched the same. (And here a look at Sturgeon—a writer who could and did vary his register greatly—is instructive.) But this is a mild fault—taken each by itself the stories are moving jewels, and Taaffe seems a writer poised to grow into her powers (her latest stories, not included here, seem to me to be her best yet).
Singing Innocence and Experience is an excellent introduction to Taaffe's work. It collects 16 stories and 7 poems, dating back to 2001. The poems are characteristic of her work, with the same long lines and sharp images as the prose, and with complete and logical sentences: not just syntactical elements thrown against the wall, as with some poets.
My favorites among the stories include "Constellations, Conjunctions," an early piece that I was lucky enough to discover in the tiny 'zine Maelstrom (to which, I should note, I was also a contributor). It's a sweet and mysterious story about a young man, an astronomer, who falls for a young woman significantly named Stella, with a curious quality to her skin. "Featherweight" is another pure love story (many of these are love stories, and emotionally true love stories, of one sort or another), about a man looking for a heart for a mysterious creature—woman? Machine? Alien? No prizes for guessing where he finds it, but the story gets to its conclusion in a lovely fashion. Back to back stories deal with people obsessed with the sea. "Till Human Voices Wake Us" is about a teenaged boy staying for the summer with his older sister who loves a merman; and "A Ceiling of Amber, a Pavement of Pearl" concerns a woman commissioned to write a song for a man trying to find again the city under the sea he saw while drowning.
For the most part these stories are set in what seems to be our world, our time, though the slant viewpoint, and the gorgeous prose, give the settings a fantastical gloss. But occasionally Taaffe takes us elsewhere, as with "Time May Be," set in strange Aruis, and telling of a mysterious woman, Josza, perhaps not human, who takes in a lost young man. Images of the tarot mix with slow revelations of Josza's past and of the geography of Aruis.
I don't have the space to describe each story, but each is a heady brew. The poems are similarly striking. As I said, perhaps the stories cluster around too similar emotional poles, and perhaps at times they go on a bit too long. But they remain fascinating, and the collection is at once fine work and a promise of even better work to come.
(Cut for thoughts and quotation.)
I think what startled and pleases me most about this review may be the comparison, however slight, to Theodore Sturgeon. In high school, my speculative trinity was Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison. I discovered all three right around the same time* and although I can name other authors I read as voraciously in those years, and whom I still love—Ursula K. Le Guin, Tanith Lee, Patricia McKillip—I am not sure who else hardwired themselves quite as immediately into my adolescent brain. Every book of theirs we owned, I read; and what we didn't own, I trawled used book stores to find.** Godbody. Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed. Switch on the Night. You want rich and strange language? I can't help but think that I imprinted.
This was an old man. Not an incredibly old man; obsolete, spavined; not as worn as the sway-backed stone steps ascending the Pyramid of the Sun to an ancient temple; not yet a relic. But even so, a very old man, this old man perched on an antique shooting stick, its handles open to form a seat, its spike thrust at an angle into the soft ground and trimmed grass of the cemetery. Gray, thin rain misted down at almost the same, angle as that at which the spike pierced the ground. The winter-barren trees lay flat and black against an aluminum sky, unmoving in the chill wind. An old man sitting at the foot of a grave mound whose headstone had tilted slightly when the earth had settled; sitting in the rain and speaking to someone below. (Harlan Ellison, "Paladin of the Lost Hour")
In one single motion, Will leaned from his window, as did Jim. Without a word they gazed over the trembling surf of trees.
Their rooms were high, as boys' rooms should be. From these gaunt windows they could rifle-fire their gaze artillery distances past library, city hall, depot, cow barns, farmlands to empty prairie!
There, on the world's rim, the lovely snail-gleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherry-coloured semaphore to the stars.
There, on the precipice of earth, a small steam feather uprose like the first of a storm cloud yet to come.
The train itself appeared, link by link, engine, coal-car, and numerous and numbered all-asleep-and-slumbering-dream filled cars that followed the firefly-sparked churn, chant, drowsy autumn hearthfire roar. Hellfires flushed the stunned hills. Even at this remote view, one imagined men with buffalo-haunched arms shovelling black meteor falls of coal into the open boilers of the engine.
The engine!
Both boys vanished, came back to lift binoculars.
"The engine!" (Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes)
The steps from the ground floor had old-fashioned nickel-plated nosings over carpet worn down to the backing, red fuzz at the edges. (Miss Mundorf taught first grade, Miss Willard taught second grade, Miss Hooper taught fifth. Remember everything.) He looked around him, where he lay remembering in the silver light; the soft walls were unlike metal and unlike fabric but rather like both, and it was very warm . . . he went on remembering with his eyes open: the flight from the second floor to the third had the nickel nosing too, but no carpeting, and the steps were all hollowed, oh, very slightly; mounting them, you could be thinking about anything, but that clack clack, as a change from the first flight's flap flap, put you right there, you knew where you were . . .
Charlie Johns screamed, "Oh God—where am I?"
He unfolded himself, rolled over on his stomach, drew up his knees, and then for a moment could move no more. His mouth was dry and hot inside as pillowslips creasing under Mom's iron; his muscles, leg and back, all soft and tight-tangled like the knitting basket Mom was going to clean out some day . . .
. . . love with Laura, spring, the lights with 61, the shoulder on the lock, up the stairs flap flap, clack clack and—surely he could remember the rest of the day, because he had gone in gone to bed gotten up left for work . . . hadn't he? Hadn't he? (Theodore Sturgeon, Venus Plus X)
Particularly Sturgeon has the talent of writing about otherness from the inside: characters that other writers might approach for their outré value (monsters! freaks! aliens!) he makes human. Or, even better, he leaves them their strangeness; but puts the reader under their skins so deftly that you don't even realize it's happened until the book's closed. And he is concerned with love, in all its manifestations: the socially acceptable kinds, and the kinds that make some people swallow hard and either stare too closely or look away. (See Some of Your Blood, The Dreaming Jewels, Venus Plus X—most Sturgeon, frankly.) That's something I have always wanted to do. And that someone thinks I can, however marginally, makes me feel entirely justified in staying up until six in the morning last night to work on a short story.
I have to grade Latin quizzes. I have to write out lesson plans. But this is also what I do: and I'm glad it pleases other people, too.***
*More accurately, I started reading all three en masse right around the same time. I no longer remember my first Bradbury, but I know that I'd read The Halloween Tree by the time I was assigned a project on the origins of Halloween in fourth grade; I read Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels in second or third grade, and promptly had nightmares; and I'd be surprised if I hadn't come across Ellison before high school, simply because I grew up in a house strewn with science fiction and fantasy, and I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. But the summer before ninth grade, I read Fahrenheit 451 for school, my father came home with a trade paperback of Angry Candy (containing one of my favorite stories still, "The Paladin of the Lost Hour"), and either I found or my mother recommended Venus Plus X. And I was lost. The bookstores of the Boston area took a plundering over the next couple of years.
**I will admit that this process burned me out slightly on Bradbury: it's only in the last half-year that I've started re-reading him. But I am pleased to report that Something Wicked This Way Comes is still remarkably creepy at three in the morning on a windblown October night.
***However perversely, I'm glad this is not an unmixed review: I know that I write about obsessions and otherworldly encounters and far more about love than I ever expected I would, and I do worry that I repeat myself too often. So it's good to have someone else remind me—hey, you want to try something else now? I just have to figure out what . . .
That said, I finally tracked down the Locus review. (Thank you,
hans_the_bold and News Haven.) It's by Rich Horton. And it makes me extremely happy.Singing Innocence and Experience, Sonya Taaffe. (Prime, 0-8095-4479-2, $17.95, 272pp, tpb) June 2005. Cover by John Williams Waterhouse. [Order from Prime Books, PO Box 301, Holicong PA 18928; www.primebooks.net.]
Sonya Taaffe is a writer of some of the most intense and image-drenched prose around. Line by long, exquisite line her writing is desperate and involving. She made her first major impression on me as a poet—and she may be the best poet working in the SF genre right now. But she has also been publishing short stories all over the place, often on mythical or traditional fantastical themes but always individual and always centered on a central character's obsession. In his introduction Tim Pratt suggests Theodore Sturgeon among others as an influence, and that seems apposite: not just in her thematic concerns but in the desperate feel to some of the prose. If there is a fault it is that, read back to back, Taaffe's voice begins to sound bit too similar story to story, the emotional register seems to be always pitched the same. (And here a look at Sturgeon—a writer who could and did vary his register greatly—is instructive.) But this is a mild fault—taken each by itself the stories are moving jewels, and Taaffe seems a writer poised to grow into her powers (her latest stories, not included here, seem to me to be her best yet).
Singing Innocence and Experience is an excellent introduction to Taaffe's work. It collects 16 stories and 7 poems, dating back to 2001. The poems are characteristic of her work, with the same long lines and sharp images as the prose, and with complete and logical sentences: not just syntactical elements thrown against the wall, as with some poets.
My favorites among the stories include "Constellations, Conjunctions," an early piece that I was lucky enough to discover in the tiny 'zine Maelstrom (to which, I should note, I was also a contributor). It's a sweet and mysterious story about a young man, an astronomer, who falls for a young woman significantly named Stella, with a curious quality to her skin. "Featherweight" is another pure love story (many of these are love stories, and emotionally true love stories, of one sort or another), about a man looking for a heart for a mysterious creature—woman? Machine? Alien? No prizes for guessing where he finds it, but the story gets to its conclusion in a lovely fashion. Back to back stories deal with people obsessed with the sea. "Till Human Voices Wake Us" is about a teenaged boy staying for the summer with his older sister who loves a merman; and "A Ceiling of Amber, a Pavement of Pearl" concerns a woman commissioned to write a song for a man trying to find again the city under the sea he saw while drowning.
For the most part these stories are set in what seems to be our world, our time, though the slant viewpoint, and the gorgeous prose, give the settings a fantastical gloss. But occasionally Taaffe takes us elsewhere, as with "Time May Be," set in strange Aruis, and telling of a mysterious woman, Josza, perhaps not human, who takes in a lost young man. Images of the tarot mix with slow revelations of Josza's past and of the geography of Aruis.
I don't have the space to describe each story, but each is a heady brew. The poems are similarly striking. As I said, perhaps the stories cluster around too similar emotional poles, and perhaps at times they go on a bit too long. But they remain fascinating, and the collection is at once fine work and a promise of even better work to come.
(Cut for thoughts and quotation.)
I think what startled and pleases me most about this review may be the comparison, however slight, to Theodore Sturgeon. In high school, my speculative trinity was Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison. I discovered all three right around the same time* and although I can name other authors I read as voraciously in those years, and whom I still love—Ursula K. Le Guin, Tanith Lee, Patricia McKillip—I am not sure who else hardwired themselves quite as immediately into my adolescent brain. Every book of theirs we owned, I read; and what we didn't own, I trawled used book stores to find.** Godbody. Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed. Switch on the Night. You want rich and strange language? I can't help but think that I imprinted.
This was an old man. Not an incredibly old man; obsolete, spavined; not as worn as the sway-backed stone steps ascending the Pyramid of the Sun to an ancient temple; not yet a relic. But even so, a very old man, this old man perched on an antique shooting stick, its handles open to form a seat, its spike thrust at an angle into the soft ground and trimmed grass of the cemetery. Gray, thin rain misted down at almost the same, angle as that at which the spike pierced the ground. The winter-barren trees lay flat and black against an aluminum sky, unmoving in the chill wind. An old man sitting at the foot of a grave mound whose headstone had tilted slightly when the earth had settled; sitting in the rain and speaking to someone below. (Harlan Ellison, "Paladin of the Lost Hour")
In one single motion, Will leaned from his window, as did Jim. Without a word they gazed over the trembling surf of trees.
Their rooms were high, as boys' rooms should be. From these gaunt windows they could rifle-fire their gaze artillery distances past library, city hall, depot, cow barns, farmlands to empty prairie!
There, on the world's rim, the lovely snail-gleam of the railway tracks ran, flinging wild gesticulations of lemon or cherry-coloured semaphore to the stars.
There, on the precipice of earth, a small steam feather uprose like the first of a storm cloud yet to come.
The train itself appeared, link by link, engine, coal-car, and numerous and numbered all-asleep-and-slumbering-dream filled cars that followed the firefly-sparked churn, chant, drowsy autumn hearthfire roar. Hellfires flushed the stunned hills. Even at this remote view, one imagined men with buffalo-haunched arms shovelling black meteor falls of coal into the open boilers of the engine.
The engine!
Both boys vanished, came back to lift binoculars.
"The engine!" (Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes)
The steps from the ground floor had old-fashioned nickel-plated nosings over carpet worn down to the backing, red fuzz at the edges. (Miss Mundorf taught first grade, Miss Willard taught second grade, Miss Hooper taught fifth. Remember everything.) He looked around him, where he lay remembering in the silver light; the soft walls were unlike metal and unlike fabric but rather like both, and it was very warm . . . he went on remembering with his eyes open: the flight from the second floor to the third had the nickel nosing too, but no carpeting, and the steps were all hollowed, oh, very slightly; mounting them, you could be thinking about anything, but that clack clack, as a change from the first flight's flap flap, put you right there, you knew where you were . . .
Charlie Johns screamed, "Oh God—where am I?"
He unfolded himself, rolled over on his stomach, drew up his knees, and then for a moment could move no more. His mouth was dry and hot inside as pillowslips creasing under Mom's iron; his muscles, leg and back, all soft and tight-tangled like the knitting basket Mom was going to clean out some day . . .
. . . love with Laura, spring, the lights with 61, the shoulder on the lock, up the stairs flap flap, clack clack and—surely he could remember the rest of the day, because he had gone in gone to bed gotten up left for work . . . hadn't he? Hadn't he? (Theodore Sturgeon, Venus Plus X)
Particularly Sturgeon has the talent of writing about otherness from the inside: characters that other writers might approach for their outré value (monsters! freaks! aliens!) he makes human. Or, even better, he leaves them their strangeness; but puts the reader under their skins so deftly that you don't even realize it's happened until the book's closed. And he is concerned with love, in all its manifestations: the socially acceptable kinds, and the kinds that make some people swallow hard and either stare too closely or look away. (See Some of Your Blood, The Dreaming Jewels, Venus Plus X—most Sturgeon, frankly.) That's something I have always wanted to do. And that someone thinks I can, however marginally, makes me feel entirely justified in staying up until six in the morning last night to work on a short story.
I have to grade Latin quizzes. I have to write out lesson plans. But this is also what I do: and I'm glad it pleases other people, too.***
*More accurately, I started reading all three en masse right around the same time. I no longer remember my first Bradbury, but I know that I'd read The Halloween Tree by the time I was assigned a project on the origins of Halloween in fourth grade; I read Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels in second or third grade, and promptly had nightmares; and I'd be surprised if I hadn't come across Ellison before high school, simply because I grew up in a house strewn with science fiction and fantasy, and I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. But the summer before ninth grade, I read Fahrenheit 451 for school, my father came home with a trade paperback of Angry Candy (containing one of my favorite stories still, "The Paladin of the Lost Hour"), and either I found or my mother recommended Venus Plus X. And I was lost. The bookstores of the Boston area took a plundering over the next couple of years.
**I will admit that this process burned me out slightly on Bradbury: it's only in the last half-year that I've started re-reading him. But I am pleased to report that Something Wicked This Way Comes is still remarkably creepy at three in the morning on a windblown October night.
***However perversely, I'm glad this is not an unmixed review: I know that I write about obsessions and otherworldly encounters and far more about love than I ever expected I would, and I do worry that I repeat myself too often. So it's good to have someone else remind me—hey, you want to try something else now? I just have to figure out what . . .