Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Culling books

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, reading, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 1, 2015| Leave a Comment »

The arrival of new appliances later this week mean that I have to move the bookshelves on the stairs. Roused to long-overdue action I’ve been using the necessity to cull books, mostly from historical and children’s fiction. My goal is to eliminate all double rows of books on the shelves, but I’m finding it harder to condemn books than I thought.

The historical fiction will survive with only minor culls; it’s full of books by Gillian Bradshaw, Bernard Cornwell, Robert Graves,. Rosemary Sutcliff, and Henry Trease, and Patrick O’Brian. However, I won’t be keeping the Dudley Popes, which are no more than adequately written, nor the odd library remainder with a wretched-looking cover. Admittedly, I haven’t read any of the twenty or so Georgette Heyers, but I figure that anything Trish liked so well should be worth a read some time; perhaps after I’ve read them all, I’ll keep the best half dozen.

Most of my culls are from the children’s section. I’m keeping the Arthur Ransom series, figuring I’ll read them some day. However, I’ve decided that I can live without most of the Doctor DoLittles, the Green Gables, and the Mary Poppins books.

However, it’s wretched to cull any books, and harder still to cull Trish’s book and the odd volume we bought anticipating having children. But I tell myself that keeping a book I’m not going to re-read is hoarding, and denying others a chance to read is simply wrong. All the same, there’s such a clear history of my life on the shelves that I half-believe I could commit a series of murders more easily than I can discard even books I’m not going to read.

Read Full Post »

10 books that influence me

Posted in 10 books meme, Books, Bruce Byfield, Personal, writing, tagged , , , , on September 12, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday, Steve Bougerolle tagged me for the meme of listing “ten books that stayed with you in some way.”

Considering I’ve been on a diet of three to ten books per week (depending on their density) since I was eight or nine, confining myself to ten is a bit of a challenge. Nor did I simply want to name without commenting, or to bother other people with the meme, which is why I am blogging rather than just answering on Facebook.

Still, here is my list, in no particular order:

  • George Eliot, Middlemarch: I’m one of those who think that Middlemarch is the greatest Victorian novel. The story of several couples in a small industrial town, the novel has a psychological depth that is unequaled even today. I’ve read it three times, and can easily imagine me reading several more times, each time finding something new to admire.
  • J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: I started reading the first book of the trilogy one Saturday in the summer between Grades Four and Five. I spent a very long Sunday evening waiting for Monday so I could get the last two volumes from the store. The experience was overwhelming, and gave me a life-long taste for fantasy and science fiction.
  • Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle: Although I have been an agnostic since my mid-teens, I always assumed that a historical Jesus existed. But when I read this plausible case for the non-existence of Jesus, I was shocked for one of the few times in my life. I felt cheated that so much history and art had been founded on nothing. The book itself is obsessive to the point of unhealthiness, but worth wading through for its ideas.
  • Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign: I read this fragment of the Vorkosigan Saga for the first time a few months ago. Two weeks later, I read it again – something I almost never do. A mixture of space opera, Shakespearean comedy, and Regency romance, A Civil Campaign is one of the funniest books I have ever read, with a cast of characters that you can laugh at while still identifying with.
  • George Orwell, Collected Essays: This collection features not only the calm clarity of Orwell’s writing, but also the best record of what it was like to be an English intellectual in the 1930s and 1940s. By the time I finished it for the first time, it had had a permanent effect – for the better, I believe – on my prose style by making me much more aware of what my goals in writing were.
  • Wilkie Collins, No Name: A young woman is declared illegitimate, and seeks revenge and justice in Victorian England. Of course she has to repent at the end, but watching her get to that point is so much fun it hardly matters. This is one of the lost classics of Victorian literature, and deserves to be better known.
  • Susan Faludi, Stiffed:, The Betrayal of the American Man: I had read Backlash and admired it, but Stiffed, which was relatively ignored, is even more monumental. Feminists often say that men suffer under patriarchy as well, but, so far as I know, Faludi is the only feminist who set out to examine and prove this contention. It’s a book that every feminist should read, and every anti-feminist as well, and establishes what Backlash first suggested: Faludi is one of the great modern American journalists.
  • Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and Don D. Jackson, The Pragmatics of Human Communication: This classic textbook applies system theory to psychology. For me, it was a gateway to the works of Gregory Bateson, Jacques LaCan, and Anthony Wilden, and, as such, a lifelong influence on my habits of thought.
  • Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works (in English): I worked steadily through these thick volumes as I was writing my thesis. Jung is not an easy read, but he gave me the intellectual framework for studying fantasy and proved to me the importance of symbols in people’s thinking. If I seem eccentric, one reason is that I am more of a Jungian while most people are Freudians or anti-Freudians.
  • Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book: As a boy, I loved the deliberately archaic language and the poems between the stories, as well as their genuine pathos. I probably wouldn’t have stayed in Cubs as long as I did, except I loved the fact that the rituals were based on Kipling’s poetry.

Give me another five list items, and I would include Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which started me reading anarchists, and the collected works of Shelley, which taught me most of what I know about poetry and kept me sane during my warehouse job between high school and university. But give me another five, and I would undoubtedly want space for another five, and five more after that. For me, books are not just ways to kill time, but some of the main building blocks of my psychology (most of the rest being music and people). So when I’m asked to list influential books, in an indirect way, I’m really telling my own story, which to me seems endless.

Read Full Post »

The book is dead, long live the book

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, ebooks, Personal, reading, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 12, 2011| 1 Comment »

Maybe it’s a character flaw, but nostalgia for a technology puzzles me. My bewilderment has last all my adult life, and now, with the all the sentimental preference for paper books over ebooks, it returns to me stronger than ever.

I first became aware of other people’s technology nostalgia when I jumped from a typewriter to a word processor. Did I miss working with carbon paper, or having the choice of redoing a page because of a spelling mistake or getting liquid paper all over everything? Not for a moment. Revision was so much easier on a computer that I barely looked back. The IBM Selectric that I kept in a back closet just in case languished in obscurity for a decade before I realized that I would never use it.

Yet much to my surprise, many people started romanticizing the typewriter. I could understand veteran writers who after several decades were reluctant to mess with their creative processes. But other people insisted that the hum of the computer kept them from concentrating (apparently the even louder hum of an electric typewriter didn’t). Their thoughts, they insisted, were geared to the tap of the keys (as though a century of using typewriters could have produced any significant natural selection in favor of them).

Soon, distressed typefaces that mimicked typewriters with old ribbons or out of alignment keys became a fashion in graphical design. You still see these typefaces occasionally today, a sentimental attachment to all the inefficiencies of the old technology added with more ingenuity than sense to the new technology.

Now, with journalists constantly trumpeting the death of the paper book, the same thing is happening. Suddenly, people are forgetting the tendency of paperbacks to fall apart after one reading (assuming pages didn’t start flying away before then), and talking about the shape and construction of the book – which is largely an accident of cheap production – as something to get sentimental over. Again, I wonder what they are rattling on about.

Not that ebook readers are perfect technologies. You have to learn exactly how hard to tap a paper if they use a touch screen, and how often to refresh so that you can turn a page without a pause interrupting your reading. Every reader, too, could use twice the resolution, even if they have improved considerably from a decade ago. I admit, too, that the end of the standard two page spread leaves me wondering what to do with my spare hand, and that a single page looks odd to my typographically-trained eye.

The mistake that people make is imagining that the medium is the book– which isn’t true for either paper books or ebooks. If it were, then to get the full experience of Catullus or Cicero, we would have to read them on papyrus scrolls. Shakespeare would have to be read on vellum, and Jonathan Swift and George Eliot on rag paper. All of these are simply media.

The book – the play, the oration or the novel – is the words and how they are put together. And that doesn’t change, regardless of whether we read a clay tablet or have the words beamed directly into our brains. If we remember a particular technology fondly, I suspect that it’s because we transfer the pleasure of the words to the medium in which we read them.

Personally, I neither welcome nor decry the rise of ebooks. They have their points, such as reduced storage space or the ability to change fonts, but that’s not what I notice when I read, any more than I notice the convenience and portability of paperbacks, or the smallness of the loss if they fall into the bathtub. When I read, what I notice is the story or the arguments, and the skill in word use. Should I live long enough to see ebooks replaced by something else, I’ll use that something else, just as I use ebooks now.

Like those who romanticized typewriters, the people currently anticipating the end of paper books have lost sight of what’s important when we read. Maybe they’re just afraid of anything that’s new, but the medium is a minor issues so long as we can read without being distracted by inefficiency or inconvenience. What matters is the words. Always.

Read Full Post »

The return of the book glutton

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Gillian Bradshaw, Personal, reading, tagged , , , , , on November 28, 2009| Leave a Comment »

I’m not a heavy drinker, and, while I appreciate fine food, I don’t stuff myself. But books are another matter. Give me a stack of unread books and the time and place to read them, and I become as gluttonous as anyone.

The habit dates back to my teen years. I’d no sooner get my allowance than I’d descend on the stores to spend it on books. Used books, new books, science fiction, classics, biography, history – it hardly mattered which. After an hour in a book store, I would emerge with a dozen books and rush home to bury myself in my room. Ignoring the parental pleas to come out into the living room and “be sociable,” I’d stretch on the bed, reading intently and staying up as late as possible. In the morning, I’d be at the breakfast table with a book in my hand. If I had to go to school, I’d walk along reading. If I had to go out, I would take along a couple of my new books.

When I reached adulthood, these habits only intensified. When I was in my twenties, I considered the perfect Saturday afternoon a descent upon the local science fiction specialty shop in which I bore home a pile of paperbacks and the odd hardcover for spoils. Just like when I was a child, a good part of my discretionary income went for books.

However, as I grew older, my habits changed. I was no less an avid reader, but except after Christmas or my birthday (when, naturally enough, most people would give me books), my habits became less gluttonous. I’d buy a book or two at a time, and be content. Had I thought of it, I would have said I was a changed man.

Then, about a week ago, I started re-reading a few books by Gillian Bradshaw, the English historical writer. Realizing that the newest one was over a decade old, I started wondering what she had done in the interval. A search on the Internet revealed that not only was she active, but that the local library had at least a dozen titles that I hadn’t read. When Trish checked out five or six, suddenly my book gluttony was back, insatiable as ever.

What triggers the gluttony, I realize now, is not just unread books. It’s books in which I can expect imagination, fine writing, and a variety of them. Although Bradshaw is only one writer, her work stirs the gluttony on all both accounts. Her extrapolations into the remoter regions of the classical past show a convincing imagination, and her understated writing is very much to my taste. Moreover, she writes not only of a variety of classical settings, but also contemporary novels and science fiction for both children and adult. What these things add up to the luxury of choice. When I finish each book, I have a delicious moment when I can stretch and linger over what I am going to devour next.

Fortunately for the rest of my life, these outbursts of gluttony are usually short. But, while they last, I feel wealthier and more privileged than I have any right to feel.

Read Full Post »

The pleasures of re-reading

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Personal, re-reading, reading, T. H. White, Tolkien, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 24, 2008| 2 Comments »

Ever since I learned to read, I’ve been a chain reader, sometimes literally finishing one book and picking up another one. Books have been my refuge from the bleakness and bad news of the day, a way to while away time while in line at the store, and my companion on constant rides on transit and planes. I even shave while reading to alleviate the boredom of the task (obviously, I use a safety razor). And, inevitably, I re-read.

The first time I read a book, I may have many motivations. Obviously, I need to have an interest in the topic or the writer, but I’m not a very discriminating reader, so that hardly narrows down why I might read something – everything from graphic novels to Middle English poetry might seem interesting to me in different moods. At times, I read because the writer has a reputation, and I want to push back the boundaries of my ignorance a furlong or two. At other times, I read because I’ve been given a book (I count heavily on friends to urge on me books that I might not pick for myself, and, often enough, I find myself pleasantly surprised). Still other times, I read because nothing better is at hand.

However, why I re-read is easier to delineate. I rarely re-read non-fiction from cover to cover, although I might return to particular pages when researching or needing to prod my memory. Mostly, what I re-read is fiction. If I was trying to be a snob, I would claim that I re-read only worthwhile books, but that would be a half-truth. Unless my tastes change, I doubt I’ll re-read standards of the literary canon like Henry James or Anthony Trollope; I recognize that their writing shows some skill, but, like opera, it’s a skill I recognize without appreciating.

It would be more exact to say that I re-read fiction whose skill has impressed me with its craft, regardless of how the canon regards it: Charles Dickens, but also Wilkie Collins; John Fowles and Lawrence Durrell, but also any number of writers who labored their life away in the science fiction ghetto.
What others think of my taste makes little difference to me (although I confess I can’t quite bring myself to read graphic novels on the bus). Instead, what matters is that the work shows some skill. The over-maligned Stephen King, for instance, is a master at pacing and observation of Americana – two skills that are usually missing from the academic’s checklist for greatness, but which average readers reward unconsciously by purchasing his work.
However, the books I re-read the most are those that are not only give aesthetic pleasure, but also reinforce my world view. Three books (or series) in particular come to mind: T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which shaped my sense of right and wrong; J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, from which I learned the core values of endurance and rising to the occasion; and Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin novels, which idealize friendship and a detached but amused view of the world while also offering historical adventure in the 19th century British navy.

Probably, you could gauge my character very accurately, not only from the common nature of these books – none, notably, have a modern or mundane setting – but also from the number of times I’ve re-read them. White I’ve re-read at least a dozen times since childhood, and Tolkien – the last time I checked – over 33 times, a number that astonishes me as I write it. By contrast, I have only read the twenty or so novels in O’Brian’s series three times through, but, then, I came to them much later that the other two, and they probably amount to two or three times the words of White’s and Tolkien’s classics. I’m re-reading O’Brian now, savoring favorite lines (“Jack, you have debauched my sloth”) and finding new subtleties.

The chances are, I’ll re-read all three – to say nothing of other favorites – many times in the rest of my life. However, I doubt I’ll re-read any of them as many times again as I already have. As I grow older, I am more jealous of time, and more aware of all that I have still to read. In fact, probably a new book has to impress me more than my classics did before I’ll re-read it in preference to moving on to something new. But a change of heart or a prolonged illness might change that, and, even if they don’t, I still expect many hours of pleasure ahead with my old favorites.

Read Full Post »

The pleasures of the once and future king

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, fiction, medievalism, Personal, T. H. White, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on October 25, 2007| 1 Comment »

Learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.”
–T. H. White, “The Sword in the Stone.”

After Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the book that most affected me as a child was T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. The book is best-known through the and for the Camelot! musical and later movie of the same name in which Robert Goulet and Richard Harris played the title roles, and perhaps through the Disney animation of The Sword in the Stone, the first part of the book. However, in each of these cases, that’s like knowing a sunny day through a tanning clinic. What White accomplished was not just an entertainment – although it’s all of that – but, rather, the main retelling of the Arthurian legend for the twentieth century.

White was rather unfortunate in his personal life. He seems to have been throughly dominated by his mother in his early life, and an accusation – apparently of homosexuality and possibly true – made him unable to continue working as a public school teacher. He turned to his love of naturalism and medievalism for solace as well as a living, but remained largely solitary and introspective.

Every great re-telling of the Arthurian legend reshapes the story for its times, and White is no exception. In White’s version, Arthur is a well-meaning and earnest man who has the luck or misfortune to be afflicted by a visionary tutor. For Merlin, Arthur is a tool to attempt nothing less than a major change in human psychology, away from the “Might is Right” philosophy that seems to rule international politics to a more moral, humanistic way of life. The Round Table and the Grail Quest are both efforts to steer life in this direction. At the end of the book, Arthur is even experimenting with the rule of law, although he finds it suddenly used against him.

The tragedy is that human nature seems to pre-doom this endeavor from the start. But the problem is not just the natural selfishness of people, but the fact that they are not.

The romance between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere that dooms Arthur’s efforts is not simply a matter of selfishness or uncontrollable passion. After all, White says, if Lancelot had been a normal person, he simply would have eloped with Guinevere, and nothing else would have happened. Instead, the tragedy happens because Lancelot is genuinely torn between his love for Guinevere and his whole-hearted support of Arthur’s ideals. Similarly, Guinevere is a young woman married to an older husband whose ideals she can’t really share, and lacking any outlet for her energies. As for Arthur, he is warned from the start about the love affair, but turns a blind eye to it out of guilt and out of his own sense of fairness.

For White, the other element that dooms Camelot are the five sons of Queen Morgause of Orkney, including Mordred, whose father is Arthur. White devotes a rather chilling, if somewhat racist section to the sons in early childhood, showing them totally obsessed with gaining their aloof mother’s approval. Of the five, only Gareth has the imaginative sympathy to support Arthur’s ideals wholeheartedly. Gaheris is slow, Agravaine and Mordred downright vicious. Gawaine, the head of the clan, is at least good-natured, but even he has trouble thinking beyond the tribalism on which he grew up.

In short, what White manages to do is create a psychologically convincing portrait of the main people in the Arthurian cycle, making them credible to twentieth-century readers, and winning through to a pathos in several scenes as effective as anything else you can name in English literature.

But, although that alone would be enough to make The Once and Future King an extraordinary book, it contains far more. The first part, which depicts Arthur’s childhood, is broadly comical as Arthur – or Wart, as his foster family calls him – is transformed into a variety of animals to broaden his mind, a conceit that gives White a chance to put his naturalist’s rambles to good use. At the same time, Wart receives the usual education of a country squire, learning to joust and work with hawks. In fact, the whole book is crammed with medieval lore that gives the book a ring of authenticity.

Tragically, as adult affairs absorb his mind, Arthur quickly forgets his idyllic childhood, retaining only the ideas that Merlin has given him. After he establishes his rule, the whole concept of rooting out the idea that Might is Right slowly goes wrong in a series of descents that last over several decades. At the end of the book, in a scene whose imaginative power is only faintly captured in the movie, Arthur sits awake in his tent, waiting for the battle with Mordred that he knows will end in his death. Abruptly, he remembers his childhood, and wonders if his life effort was futile. The anarchistic geese, who see no borders in their flights, have the right attitude he concludes, but he despairs of humanity ever following their example. In the end, he finds a small consolation in sending a young page – evidently Thomas Malory, who will grow up write La Morte D’Arthur — out of the battle zone, so that somebody can remember the example of Camelot for future generations, then prepares to go out and die.

Having read the Arthurian legend for years, I was ripe for White’s version when I discovered it in Grade Six. I not only devoured the book, but lived and breathed it for months in my mind, even going so far as to ask a local artist down the lane to bring the description of the mews on Sir Ector’s estate to life (she refused, polite and more than a little puzzled).

Unlike Arthur, I’ve never forgot the story of his early years, or his effort to realize Merlin’s vision. Looking back, I conclude that the book seems to have played a large role in establishing my social and political leanings, and every few years I like to return to it. Each time, I find new pieces to appreciate, and I’m reminded yet again that the literary canon is not the only source of artistic excellence.

Read Full Post »

The bookstore grind

Posted in book stores, Books, Bruce Byfield, employment, English, jobs, minimum wage, Personal, retail, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2007| Leave a Comment »

After I finished my bachelor’s degree, I spent several years as a part time clerk in a mall bookstore. I had been reduced to a state where I was fit for little else: Not only had I gone straight through from high school with the exception of one or two summers off, but I had taken a double major and married in the same period. I needed time to coast while I considered the next step, and to earn enough money to pay my share of the expenses in the mean time.

In my naivety, I thought an enthusiasm for books was a natural qualification for such a job. Add a good memory for books and titles glimpsed, and I seemed a natural. Probably the fact that the job was minimum wage should have tipped me off to reality, but I was as green with inexperience as a new branch in spring.

Looking back, I have to say that disillusion took a surprisingly long time to set in. Yet, gradually, and with growing horror, I realized that other employees were far more interested in their shreds of status than books, and that my affinity for books was dismissed at the same time that I fielded all sorts of questions from them. I was unworldly, they decided, and they were right, although not in the way they thought.

All the other employees and managers, I realized, considered books commodities, not as exciting diversions and intellectual stimulation. Their lack of university degrees might have tipped me off, I suppose, but show me the twentysomething man who doesn’t believe he knows how the world works.

But I endured as I recuperated, experiencing the change in my life as Sunday store openings became the norm, and the embarrassment of having the older sister of a school acquaintance arrive as manager. She never said anything, but I grew increasingly afraid that she would mention my lowly status, and whispers would start to circulate that I was a failure.

However, despite this background of discontent, what I mainly recall were the surreal moments of comedy that went with the job. Some of these were corporate, such as the constantly shipping of reduced items back and forth for sales until long after any profit could be recouped from them.

One book I remembered was entitled Les Femmes aux Cigarettes, a reprint of a French photo study from the 1920s by a photographer who found the then-novelty of women smoking irresistible; it started at forty-eight dollars soon after I took the job, and had been reduced to twenty-five cent by the time I left.

I remember, too, the buzz of cleaning and drill that surrounded the visit of the owner – an event that lasted perhaps two minutes as he strode to the back of the store, shook the district manager’s hand, and went out to lunch with him.

Then there was the time I considered applying for a full-time position. The manager took me aside and talked to me solemnly of the duties and responsibilities of working full-time – as though I hadn’t been doing everything the full-timers were doing anyway. Asked point blank if she was implying that I wasn’t responsible, she back-pedaled furiously, but, with such events in my past, no wonder my view of the corporate world is ironic and bemused at best.

But what I remember most vividly are the customers. Many would enter the store in early afternoon, wanting the book they had seen on Oprah that morning, and could not understand that I had been at the store since 9AM, let alone that I’m not an Oprah sort of person. My favorite in this category is the woman who came up to me and said, “I can’t remember the name or the title of the book, and it’s hard to explain what it’s about, but it was on some television show this morning, and had a green cover.” What I wanted to do was direct her to the green book section, but, wisely, I refrained.

Another time, one of the many mothers who used the children’s section as a cheaper version of mall daycare berated us because her son had wandered. We should have kept an eye on him, she kept saying.

Then there was the time I chased a young shoplifter out the door, through the mall, and halfway across the parking lot. I didn’t catch him – which was probably good, since I might have got into trouble with the law – and, to tell the truth, I didn’t much care if I did. For me, the incident was an unexpected moment of excitement in an otherwise monotonous day. But from the terrorized look on the shoplifter’s face as he looked over his shoulder, I doubt he felt the same way – although perhaps he went on to tell his own boasting version of the story.

And who can forget the hordes who arrived in the last few hours of Christmas Eve, overheated in their winter coats, furious about everything that had sold out, and about as full of Christmas cheer as a tax collector? One Christmas, I had just slumped against the door lock when a young male executive came bounding at the door.

“I have to get a gift for my wife,” he kept saying. “I have to!” His tie was askew, and he was more than a little drunk, and all I wanted was to go home and start my own Christmas. Safe on the other side of the glass, I muttered, “Keep this up, and you won’t have to worry about buying for your wife much longer,” and let a staffer take pity on him.

I think that these random encounters helped shaped the basis of my worldview: Things don’t make sense, I decided, and I would only get a headache if I insisted in looking for the logic.

But I had outgrown the job by the end of my first shift. I enjoy people, but not constantly, and I’m not a naturally servile or patient person. After two and a half years, I was looking for a way out. I started applying for any job remotely suitable, then hit on grad school. That fall, I applied for both the Communications and English Department at Simon Fraser University. The Communications Department would only take grad students in September, and I wasn’t waiting another eight months, so I became an English master’s candidate, sinking gratefully into the familiar world where ideas mattered and books were viewed as precious.

Read Full Post »

Witches of the Mind

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, Fritz Leiber, Personal, science fiction, writing on September 11, 2007| Leave a Comment »

“Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”
– Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3

If I am remembered for anything — which is open to debate — it will be for Witches of the Mind, my study of the American fantasist Fritz Leiber. So far, my only other claim to fame is my free software articles, but they have a brief currency, and I don’t expect anyone to remember my byline more than six months after the last one appears. But, among the half dozen or so scholars who care about the subject, Witches has enjoyed a modest reputation for sixteen years. Nor have its ideas been seriously challenged yet.

The book is an extended version of my master’s thesis in English at Simon Fraser University, in which I talk about Leiber’s development of the Anima and Shadow archetypes in his fiction. Early on in my graduate program, I had decided that, if I were going to spend eight months or more writing a thesis, I was going to do something original. Adding my ideas to one of the hundreds of articles written yearly about, say, Hamlet seemed both daunting and a waste of time. Getting the idea accepted required a little bit of lobbying by my thesis supervisor, but the possibility of a book and the then trendiness of popular culture was enough to get the topic accepted.

Writing the thesis was memorable for the thunderstorm that took down the motherboard of my first computer on the very day that I was going to learn how to do backups. I spent two anxious weeks, my defence date drawing near, before I could recover the files from the hard drive (unsuprisingly, I’ve been a fanatical believer in backups ever since). It was memorable, too, for my twenty minute defence, which was curtailed when its second reader suffered a petit mal attack that he tried to hide and so kept me from the drilling I expected from him. I also took away from it a love of research, and an exhaustive knowledge of the writings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, much of which I read while developing my ideas. But, most of all, the process was memorable for my first meetings with Fritz Leiber and his second wife Margo Skinner, two of the extraordinary and eccentric people who have enriched my life from time to time.

The day after a drunken celebration over retsina and Greek food with my supervisor and external reader, I set about the task of reshaping my thesis for a book. Selling the idea of the book wasn’t difficult — there had been previous books on Leiber, but mine was the first scholarly one and the first, Leiber said, to offer any real insight into his creative development.

But the thesis title, “Divination and self-therapy: Archetypes and stereotypes in the works of Fritz Leiber,” was too academic. Perhaps in choosing the name, I was trying to subdue criticism by the conventional of my topic by hiding it under a thick verbiage of respectability. I had the idea of searching Macbeth, Leiber’s favorite Shakespearean play, for a pithier title, and found it in Macbeth’s hallucination of a dagger in Act 2. The phrase “Witches of the Mind” seemed ideal for conveying the idea that Leiber’s portrayal of women was a conceit that was never meant to be taken as a literal description. Leiber wasn’t writing about women as they were; he was writing about his own unconscious portrayal of them.

I admit that I was mildly disappointed when the book came out. I had added about twelve thousand words to the thesis, and, to keep the cost down, the publisher had set it in cramped pages. Even worse, the cover was a collage of images only vaguely associated with Leiber’s work, and featured a portrait of the subject with a jaw that looked as though it belonged on a stoic New England farmer, or maybe H. P. Lovecraft.

Of course, the important thing was to be published, I told myself. All the same, I took care not to let any of my academic colleagues actually see the cover of my main claim to fame.

And I worked that claim heavily, too. It was mainly on the strength of my book credit that I was allowed to teach at Simon Fraser University, despite my lack of a doctorate. The book also gave me a degree of recognition among fantasy scholars, particularly when it was nominated in both years of eligibility for the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award.

I didn’t mind, either, the modest amounts of cash I got in the first few years of sales. It was never much, but enough to pay for dining out a few times.

Buoyed by these small successes, I started doing a sequel. Originally, I hoped to publish the letters of Fritz Leiber and his college friend Harry Otto Fischer, in which the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series began. But Leiber no longer had his letters, and Fischer’s letters, if they existed at all, were in the library of Clarksburg, West Virginia, and out of range of my travel budget. I had more success with Leiber’s letters to Franklin MacKnight, another college friend, and published some of those letters in the New York Review of Science Fiction.

I also used them for a debunking article entitled “Fafhrd and Fritz,” which was intended as a sequel to Leiber’s “Fafhrd and Me,” which gives a heavily romanticized account of the origin of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series. My article debunked Leiber’s, and pointed out MacKnight’s role in the series’ creation.

For a while, I considered a collection of stories by other writers in honor of Fritz Leiber. But then my life changed. Leiber died, and so did the story collection somehow. The English department had a new chair, who saw sessional appointments as a way to exchange favors with other universities, and suddenly my regular employment was in question. I considered a doctoral thesis, but didn’t want to spend the time and had trouble coming up with a topic. Unwilling to move for personal reasons, I became what I call a “recovering academic” and started working as a technical writer. Shortly, after, I suffered the greatest crash and burn of my life. By the time I started climbing out of that bleak period, academic concerns seemed far away. My research photocopies lingered on a shelf by the window of our spare room, gradually bleaching into near-illegibility in the sun.

For several years, I thought that Witches and the academic era of my life were things of the past. Then, a few years ago, I heard from Benjamin Szumskyj, a library technician and fantasy scholar from Australia with a love of Leiber’s work. He had some extravagantly kind things to say about Witches, and did an interview with me for a fanzine. He went on to edit a collection of Leiber’s early and small press work and a collection of essays on Leiber, cajoling me and shaming me with his enthusiasm until I actually managed to write my first academic paper in over ten years, “The Allure of the Eccentric.” Ben has far surpassed my own efforts, but, in my conceit, I like to think that I may have been a minor influence for him.

Since then, I have been thinking of dusting off the Leiber-MacKnight letter project. Some improvements in OCR scanning in GNU/Linux makes that more of a possibility than a few years ago.

And every now and then, I run across copies of Witches on the bookshelf, dust them off, and dip into a page or two. I feel as though it were written by someone else now, except that I remember writing the odd phrase or two. Yet the book holds up well, considering its years, and I still can’t resist a wistful pride in having written it.

Read Full Post »

Learning to love the Harry hype

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, fiction, HarryPotter, Personal, science fiction, Uncategorized, writing on July 21, 2007| 1 Comment »

Yesterday, I went to the Chapters store at Granville and Broadway in the early evening. When I got there, the staff were preparing for the midnight launch of the new Harry Potter book. Watching them, I soon found myself changing my mind about all the Harry-hype.

Having read fantasy ever since I discovered it in the sixth grade I’ve always been cool to the popularity of the Harry Potter series. I’ve read all the books, but I’ve only been moderately impressed. J. K. Rowling shows flashes of invention and whimsy, but her books are far from the best children’s fantasy for those in the know. Personally, I’d rate dozens of children’s writers above Rowling – Joan Aiken, Lloyd Alexander, J. R. R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula K. LeGuin, Garth Nix, and Philip Pullman, just for starters. Her voice is too uncertain, her characters too stereotyped, and her books too much in need of editing (especially after they became popular) for her to equal writers like the ones I’ve mentioned. Her main innovation is to blend fantasy with the school story to create a sub-genre that is simultaneously new and familiar.

I’d put the series in the middle of the pack: neither outstandingly bad nor – for all the hype – outstandingly original or any sort of literary gem, not even one in the rough.

But if I haven’t been enthusiastic about the books, the promotion has thrilled me even less. For one thing, it seems unnecessary. Why bother to hype a book that you know is going to sell several million copies? Spend the money on some worthy midlist writer, and the publisher could have two bestsellers rather than the one.

More importantly, I had dismissed the midnight book launches and parties as simply another attempt by people to inject a little excitement and meaning into their lives. The attempt seems healthier to me than following a sports team, or seeing terrorists under the bed, but, in the end, the launchings of Rowling’s books have always struck me as being much the same sort of group event, carefully manipulated to allow people an emotional release – a modern update of bread and circuses, really.

But that was before I saw the preparations for the event. The store had put a castle and dragon painted on brown paper around the entrance, and most of the staff was dressed for the occasion. Some were in black, witchy costumes. One woman managed a severity that made her a perfect Severus Snapes – or would have, except that she kept grinning. A man was wearing a top hat and tails with a long blue and white scarf that seemed to owe as much to Doctor Who as Harry Potter. Another woman was wearing wings and a straw hat and layers of loose brown cloth, apparently meant to be a house elf or at least some supernatural being. Still another woman had a brightly colored snake pained on her face that ran from her right cheek across her temple and down to her left temple.

These people and more were rushing around setting up tables and putting out stacks of Rowling’s previous books and the Harry Potter action figures. Given the wages of the average book store clerk, you might have expected them to be complaining about the extra work and the longer hours.

Yet that’s not what they were doing. Instead, they were laughing and chatting animatedly as they worked, pausing to show their costumes off to each other.

That’s when I had a Scrooge-like conversion. If all the promotional events could give so much pleasure to those organizing them (let alone the children for whom all the effort was for), they couldn’t be all bad.

Yes, the object of this attention seemed unfairly singled out from among her betters, and the promotions seem needless, and the motives behind them cynical. Yet, all too obviously, they were a welcome break in routine, and a chance those involved usually didn’t have to exercise their creativity. From the unpromising origins of the launch, they had managed to make something approaching a holiday.

That’s why, for all my misgivings, I don’t really have the heart to criticize. Anything that brings such gifts to people can’t be all bad. So, while I’m not buying a Christmas goose and hurrying off to Bob Cratchit’s house loaded with gifts for the family, I am looking at all the activity with a far more benevolent eye than a couple of days ago.

Read Full Post »

The last days of Fritz

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, fiction, Fritz Leiber, Personal, science fiction, Uncategorized on July 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »

When I came to do my master’s thesis in English, two points were very clear. If I was going to spend the better part of a year researching and writing, I wanted the result to be publishable. In addition, having gone through the agonies of trying to find a new perspective on Hamlet, I wanted it to be original. Eventually, I decided to write about the American fantasist Fritz Leiber, whose work I had been enjoying since the sixth grade. That decision not only got me the publication credit I’d craved (it’s still in print under the title Witches of the Mind), but also meant that I was accidentally there for Fritz’s last days and wrapped up in the whole unhappy story.

Here’s how it happened:

When my thesis became a book, my friend Paul Zimmer arranged for Trish and I to meet Fritz while we were in the Bay area. Fritz was diffident with people he didn’t know well, but his friend and soon-to-be second wife, Margo Skinner – a socialist, journalist, poet, and practicing alcoholic – was outspoken enough to fill any awkward gaps, and everyone was soon on friendly terms. On subsequent visits, the four of us went out to dinner several times, and we met at a couple of science fiction conventions in Washington state twice as well, where we acted as their designated wheelchair attendants. Neither Fritz nor Margo needed a wheelchair full-time, but they often found them convenient in crowds.

I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we had become friendly acquaintances. So, when Margo conceived the madcap idea of taking the train across North America to a convention in London, Ontario, Fritz and Margo asked if we could be their native guides in Vancouver (it had to be the train, because Margo was terrified of flying). It would prove to be the last trip for both of them.

Everything about the trip seemed cursed from the beginning. A thousand inconveniences plagued Margo, Fritz, and their housekeeper (who had come along to help push their wheelchairs) from the beginning. They got as far as Seattle, and we were driving down in a van borrowed from my in-laws to pick them up – when we had engine trouble and had to turn back just south of Belllingham.

Fortunately, a Seattle science fiction fan stepped in, and got them to the border the next day, and we spent the next day showing them Vancouver, lunching at the hotel Vancouver, wheeling them around the aquarium, and going out for dinner in Stanley Park, so that Fritz could have some fresh salmon. I remember, too, Fritz staring at an otter through the glass at the aquarium, looking as wide-eyed as a child, for all his over eighty years. The next day, we saw them off on the train, and that was the last easy day they had.

We later heard that the trip to London was even more nightmarish than the first leg of the trip. For much of the time across the prairies, the air conditioning was out of order, causing them almost to collapse. When they got to London, the hotel wasn’t wheelchair accessible, and the convention staff assigned to them were unreliable.

But it was when they headed south to Chicago to catch the train back to San Francisco that the nightmare really settled in. The trip turned into a ten hour ordeal that left Margo and Fritz dehydrated. Not only did they miss their train, but Fritz collapsed in a semi-comatose, only occasionally coherent state.

Fritz’s son Justin and his grand-daughter, Arlynn Presser, got Fritz on a plane home, and Fritz went directly to California Pacific. Margo followed via train, resolutely refusing to fly. Meanwhile, knowing nothing of events, Trish and I were planning a holiday in the Bay Area, staying on the floor of the library at Greyhaven. We arrived to find a badly distracted Margo, and soon realized that, whatever our holiday would be, it wouldn’t be restful.

Instead of playing tourist as we’d planned, we found ourselves part of Margo’s life support for 12-14 hours each day, along with a punk poet, an ex-dominatrix and Dolores Nurss, who claimed descent from one of the Salem witches. That wasn’t the way we wanted to spend our holidays, but what else, in all decency, could we do?

We also found ourselves spending far too much time in Fritz’s hospital room, watching his labored breathing and realizing increasingly with each passing day that he wasn’t going to pull through, or even become completely conscious again. However, the one time he roused even a bit, his only clear words were that he wanted to get well again, “So he could tell stories.”

I think that everybody broke down when they heard that.

The situation quickly became worse. Although Fritz could well afford his hospital care, he was over eighty, and the hospital clearly saw him as not worth making much of an effort for. The standards of basic hygiene seemed appalling to my eyes, and the fact that Fritz developed pneumonia there seems to confirm my impression. Meanwhile, Margo, who was dealing with her own cancer, and had seen death too often to be deceived by Fritz’s condition, was on the verge of a breakdown.

Matters weren’t improved, either, when Fritz’s son Justin arrived. Personally, I liked both Margo and Justin, but they didn’t like each other, and the strain of them remaining polite only added to the growing tension.

The end was as obvious as inevitable, but we couldn’t wait for it. I had teaching contracts that I had to fulfill, and we had to leave. A couple of days after we did, we learned that Fritz had died. “Senile decay” was given as the cause of death – meaning that his body had stopped working because he was too old.

I can’t claim to have known Fritz long or well. Still, the memory of those final days returns to me sometimes. I often think the hospital’s shabby treatment of Fritz and tell myself that, if I ever fall ill in the United States, I’m getting back to Canada if I have to push my gurney up the highway by myself. Sometimes, too, I’m in a dream in which I’m pushing Margo through miles of hospital corridors, only to finally get outside to stand on a windy, darkening street while cab after cab sails by – an event that actually happened on our last night there.

And I still can’t hear Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” without tensing, remembering how we played it over and over in the hopes that it might lead Fritz back to consciousness in his final days. It never did, but the music has become haunted for me, anyway. I used to mark student papers to that music, but now the associations with the last day of Fritz are stronger than any other memory I have of it.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »