Partly fish, partly porpoise, partly baby sperm whale

[sovay]

I have a thing for the sea. Anyone who has spent much time with me, or even read much of my work, will know this.* My earliest completed story in college featured a drowned mermaid,** the constantly spiraling novella is a sea-story,*** and I can't even count the number of pieces I have written that involve the ocean one way or the other.**** The only stories I perform with any regularity, "The Grey Child" and "The Woman Who Was Wife to the Husband of the Sea," are both about encounters with the otherworld of the sea. So, as one might imagine, I am always on the lookout for books, films, songs, that do ocean well. (In the same way that there are authors, like Seamus Heaney or Greer Gilman, who get autumn right; I need to feed my obsessions.) My definitive film is almost certainly Splash, which I saw so young that it simply hardwired itself into my brain. For authors, I suppose my benchmarks have always been Patricia McKillip (The Changeling Sea, Something Rich and Strange, the shape-changers in Riddle of Stars), Jane Yolen (Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea Folk), and Jeannelle Ferreira (strange_selkie, whose in-progress The Seal Wife I await with great hopes). And now, to that list, I can add Caitlín R. Kiernan.

Since I discovered her work in 2002,° she has rapidly become one of my favorite writers for her rich and intense style, her stories that are often, narratively speaking, little more than brushes with the unknown world and all the more powerful for it, and her indelible command of characters who are other. Plus, as I am coming to realize, she gets the sea right. (That's not the only draw, you understand. But it never hurts.) "Tears Seven Times Salt," in Tales of Pain and Wonder, is the darkest retelling of "The Little Mermaid" I have ever read, and one of the most effective in its evocation of a character stranded between one world and another. "Postcards from the King of Tides," in the same collection, catches much of the immense and unknowable terror and attraction of the sea: what is under those waves, that we can only sense and shy from and imagine. The hints of Mother Hydra, Father Kraken, in Low Red Moon and Murder of Angels. But it's her work in her most recent collection, To Charles Fort, With Love that has really caught my attention: the hallucinogenic "La Mer des Rêves," which pits one woman's dreams against the spite of the Dowager Oneirodes; and especially the Lovecraftian triptych of "A Redress for Andromeda," "Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea," and "Andromeda Among the Stones," that comprise the Dandridge Cycle: two glancing encounters with and finally the bitter history behind the woman who holds the line, who keeps apart two worlds that never should have rubbed up against one another in the first place, down in a sea-cave on the Pacific coast. Kiernan's evocation of this figure, become more sea-creature than human over the years, is marvelous; as uneasy as it is alluring.

And she puts that same combination, darkened and even more explicitly eroticized, to very good use in the first issue of the Sirenia Digest, to which I suggest you promptly subscribe.°* The lead vignette, "Madonna Littoralis," is what really inspired this post. In something like 2000 words, Kiernan stitches together the fatal magnetism of sirens and sailors' folklore, the transforming potential of sharp edges and the likeness of seawater and semen, into a bloody and beautifully-written fever dream. I cannot detail the characters' relationships to one another, though I can identify I, you, and the mermaid who lives beneath the Annisquam lighthouse. I cannot pinpoint a linear narrative. But I can say that the imagery is breathtaking, and it calls up all the sea. And deserves to be read.

I may be biased. But you should subscribe, and find out for yourselves.

And now, I should get to sleep: I am giving blood tomorrow, and have only recently gotten over a rather vicious cold. I remain amused that "phlebotomist" is still an accepted technical term.

*For further eloquence on this topic, you may read the Bookslut interview: there phrased rather better than I would be able to manage at this time of night. < / shameless self-promotion >

**"The Madonna of the Rock," written in February 2000 and published in the now-defunct Glyph #7 in October 2002. I now look back on the story and think that the language sounds like pastiche Tanith Lee, but at least I can still recognize my own obsessions. Sarah Singleton's lovely and pensive "Ebb Tide" also features a dead mermaid, although not a medieval manuscript illuminator. Hers is probably the better piece.

***"Remember What You Say in Dreams," which I owe to elisem for a beautiful necklace. A drowned man, a woman who has not lost a lover to the underworld, a man with no shadow, a woman intimately obsessed with the sea and its secrets. If it didn't keep getting longer . . .

****Okay, I'm lying: twenty-two. "The Madonna of the Rock," "Shade and Shadow," "Till Human Voices Wake Us," "A Maid on the Shore," "A Ceiling of Amber, A Pavement of Pearl," "Skins on Sule Skerry," "And the Ocean Waves Do Roll," "Sea-Changes," "The Drowned Men's Waltz," "Sedna," "Because the Mermaid Has No Tongue," "Proteus Tells," "Before Leviathan," "Postcards from the Province of Hyphens," "Shirat Hayam," "Intercourse," "Lunacy," "Eelgrass and Blue," "Gintaras," "Salt and No Wounds," "De Profundis," and (with lesser_celery) "The Waters Where Once We Lay." I can only pray that they don't all read the same.

°One afternoon in June, I picked up a trade paperback of The Crow: Shattered Lives and Broken Dreams from a dollar store, read "The King of Birds" on the bus home, and was hooked. I hunted down her chapbook Candles for Elizabeth in Pandemonium a few days later, and by August had obtained both Threshold and Tales of Pain and Wonder. I had an addiction to feed. I never looked back.

°*So, yeah. I suppose this is BookPimpage. But it's for an e-mail service. Does that count?

Comments

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Ork! Ork! Ork!

For she's a saline good fellow, for she's a saline good fellow, for she's a saline good fe-el-loooooww...

And so say all of us!

(You really do rather have the corner on the market, in my opinion. And I didn't think 'The Madonna of the Rock' read like pastiche Lee. It reads like early Taaffe.)

[sovay]

(Thank you. Although you should be warned that I feel much the same way about your writing: I still remember a sea-fragment you sent me for a birthday, I think, that was sheerly lovely. How goes the novel, speaking of which?)

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

*blush*

Thanks. I'm very pleased that you enjoyed "Madonna Littoralis." There will be more sirens...

[sovay]

You're welcome. (All the compliments are true.) I look forward to them.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Have you seen The Secret of Roan Inish? Because if you haven't, I suspect you would like it.

[sovay]

I have indeed, and it's another of my favorites. I didn't imprint quite so strongly on selkies as on sirens, but they're in there.

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

My first instinct was also to recommend this.

In terms of books, you might be interested in Shulamith Oppenhiem. She published a Scottish fantasy, THE WORLD INVISIBLE, with Ace in the early 90s (selkies, which you're not as fond of, I know), and two more-recent collaborations with Jane Yolen: THE SEA KING and THE FISH PRINCE AND OTHER STORIES: MERMEN FOLK TALES.

[sovay]

I am not unfond of selkies!

Cool. I have The Fish Prince and Other Stories, but not the other. Haven't read The World Invisible: therefore I shall have to check it out. Thanks!

Are you familiar with Mollie Hunter's A Stranger Came Ashore?

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've read anything by Hunter, but I seem to recall seeing something of hers recently (THE KELPIE'S PEARLS?). Will see if it's still around next time I hit the bookshops.

I did read Kenneth Lilington's YA novel titled simply SELKIE forever ago (although I remember being much more taken with his AN ASH-BLONDE WITCH).

On the adult front, I recently read a romance novel by a friend which has a Selkie: SEAL ISLAND, part of the Tor Romance series. Not many surprises, but some nice characters. (The selkie stuff is integral, but not really the point of the story--the female character's personal awakeneing--which is why it wasn't in the first batch of FYIs. :->)

[sovay]

Mollie Hunter has written a number of excellent children's books, usually based around Scottish or occasionally Irish folklore, of which The Kelpie's Pearls is one. (Others that I've particularly liked are The Mermaid Summer and The Smartest Man in Ireland. But she is frighteningly prolific.) A Stranger Came Ashore sets the ballad "The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry" in the Shetland Islands, I believe sometime in the early twentieth century, and it's dark and deeply folkloric. One night in a storm, a ship goes down with all hands aboard, and the only survivor seems to be a man who calls himself Finn Learson. Once recovered from his drowning ordeal, he's handsome, charming, a skilled fisherman and dancer; and he has his romantic sights set on Elspeth Henderson, the beautiful sister of the novel's twelve-year-old protagonist Robbie. But obviously the smiling stranger is not what he seems, and neither is Robbie's fearsome schoolmaster, Yarl Corbie, and you'll know a lot more about Shetlands folklore by the time you finish the book. I read it first in fifth grade, I think, and haven't picked it up for years: but it made an impression on me.

I haven't read Seal Island, but thanks for even the second-round recommendation. There is also very lovely selkie imagery in Susan Cooper's Seaward.

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

Oh, lord. This makes me want to rush out and get her whole bibliography. I was planning on going to Powell's tonight... Damn, I forgot book I was going to bring back.

[eredien]

Is "Till Human Voices Wake Us" in anything that Rush-that-Speaks and Gaduior might have lying about the apartments? I want to read it, having also always loved the Eliot.
(Er, hello, by the way. I'm one of their housemates. We met at Readercon and all sang folksongs).

Also--this summer I am planning a weekend-visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. If you can, you're invited to come with us.
And if you can or if you can't, you might want to give Lewis Thomas' essays a try.

[sovay]

It was published in Not One of Us #28 in September 2002, and reprinted this summer in Singing Innocence and Experience, which the happy couple might have somewhere around. (I actually have no idea. Bad cousin. No biscuit.) If not, the collection is available online. Alternatively, and probably much more simply, I can e-mail you a copy.

(Hello. I know who you are.)

Thanks for the invite and the recommendation! I am currently buried in dead languages, but when I come up for air, I shall seriously consider both. Why do you recommend the latter? Oceanography I can see, but I know not from Lewis Thomas.

[eredien]

Lewis Thomas is one of my favorite writers of nonfiction. Of anything, really. His books are short enough to read on the train in one trip, or even a few essays in a half-trip while you're busy being distracted by the crazed drunk down the car.

He was a biologist, and wrote essays nominally about biology, but also about word-origins, strange animals found in the sea and above it, about his newfound delight in otters, about poetry, and about mutant goldfish with little suckers on their feet. One of his compliations won a National Book Award sometime in the 70's, but I know it's good because I keep a loaner copy and my own at home.

I recommend starting with either The Medusa and the Snail or Lives of a Cell, then reading anything else of his you can get your hands on. I'd wait on Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony until you've read at least the other two, though, as its essays are more unsettled--though I find them equally brilliant and fascinating--and may turn you off to him as a writer if you read them first.

[sovay]

Mutant goldfish with little suckers on their feet. Awesome.

[eredien]

Yes.