Strange and Wilde

I've been listening to a couple of Oscar Wilde books (Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories and The Picture of Dorian Gray, both originally published in 1891), and I've noticed a striking similarity of tone between it and Susanna Clarke's book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell.

On the surface, it's as obvious as the curiously formal manner of speech between all the characters - a sort of English delicacy and indirectness. Everyone wears a tie and carries a stick and has servants who keep track of ones' shirt fronts, collar studs and stickpins. I found it slightly odd because Oscar Wilde was presumably writing about his own period (late-19th century England), while Clarke writes about a period roughly a hundred years before. One would think that the social landscape would have changed a bit more.

But there's a deeper resemblance that I like very much, and that's in the categorization of magical objects. When Wilde lists Gray's manias in order, he talks about the necromantic associations of many things, such as his categorization of jewels: "...the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent. The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her colour. The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids." This list goes on and on, but is echoed by the spells that Clarke uses, most notably the spell that Jonathan Strange uses to protect King George from the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair. "Place the moon at his eyes and her whiteness shall devour the false sights the deceiver has placed there. / Place a swarm of bees at his ears. Bees love truth and will destroy the deceiver's lies. / Place salt in his mouth lest the deceiver attempt to delight him with the taste of honey or disgust him with the taste of ashes. / Nail his hand with an iron nail so that he shall not raise it to do the deceiver's bidding. / Place his heart in a secret place so that all his desires shall be his own and the deceiver shall find no hold there. / Memorandum: The colour red may be found beneficial."

Back during the beginning of the industrial revolution, there was a surge of scientific categorization - scientists like Darwin tried to categorize the entire natural world, searching for the key to the mind of God. Nobody was trying to disprove God, rather, they were trying to get closer to God by understanding the logic behind creation. Most of these means of categorization built on earlier works - Galileo, Newton, Linneus - but they remain the solid foundation of modern science.

But there were other lists of associations, less clear and logical. These are the foundations of magic. You can be sure that wherever you see a list of things associated with other things where the relationships are neither clear nor provable by ordinary observation, you're treading in necromantic (or at least suspectly metaphysical) waters.

All of which brings us back to Clarke and Wilde's writings. I think it's the convincing nature of their magical lists that makes me love them. Being an inveterate lister, I'm always charmed by other people's good use of them.

But now I'm off. I have a list of my own, and it's time I started ticking some things off it.

Dream Anthology

I have exceedingly vivid dreams that I use as the basis for a lot of my fiction. We all know this.

A few years back, my dreams tended to revolve around military and spy technology, and I wrote a great deal of that kind of thing. It's still coming into some kind of final form, but I'm not sure what that form should be.

I'm now having the same problem with the series of occult dreams I've been having. Thus far, there are some ghost dreams and some vampire dreams, and they're all complete and lovely and cool.

Here's the crux of the issue: they're not really consistent. My first vampire dream had vampires as beings made of smoke. If you put a wooden stake into one, the smoke was absorbed into the wood and as long as the wood was never burnt, it stayed there forever. These vampires are manipulative and calculating because they must use human beings as their hiding places during the day.

The most recent had vampires as being self-sustaining beings who never needed food or sleep but whose need to drink blood came about because it was the only way they could feel physical sensation. These vampires are creatures of enormous longing and emotion, wishing for new sights and sounds and ultimately being disappointed by everything. They don't wish to kill or hurt anyone, but they must, and it torments them.

The question is how to present these stories. The Pirate says "Just write each one up as a short and get them out." I think he's likely right. As always. What I'd love is an anthology of vampire species, but I'm just not sure.

Show and Tell

I've got a heinous commute that I make a little more palatable by listening to audio books. I've managed to get through the biggies (Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Iliad) and indulged myself with crappy fantasy series (Song of Ice and Fire, Wheel of Time). But right now, I'm going through a streak of true crime, and I'm finding something bothersome.

If the events in question actually happened, it doesn't matter how horrible the writing is, someone will publish it. It seems unbelievable, but it's true. I understand that the story doesn't have to make sense - we all know that the truth is often stranger than fiction (that's why we have a trite saying for that) - but the fact that you don't have to do any character development, maintain any narrative flow or attempt to put events in some kind of understandable order seems unfair.

In the book I'm currently ploughing through (I don't even want to mention the name of the book, it's that bad), we get horrible, horrible language usage (the most glaring: use of the words "fetus" and "newborn" interchangeably in a story where the legal issue is whether the found bodies were those of stillborn babies or babies killed after birth - the difference is material!), cutting back and forth through time in a way that makes it impossible for the reader to understand what's happening, and the author's obvious bias against his subject.

I've read a good many true-crime novels written by people who weren't journalists or authors before they wrote the book in question, but were moved to tell the story of a crime that had touched them or their families. Most took great pains to lay out the story in a way that made some sequence of events clear to the reader. All of them were clear about their position on the guilt or innocence of their main antagonist.

Just before reading this current offering, I read Mikal Gilmore's "Shot Through the Heart," an account of his family and his brother Gary Gilmore's life. I was bothered that we didn't get much of Gary's personality throughout the book, but by the end I could understand that it was the very lack of understanding that haunted Mikal, Gary's youngest brother. His narrative started with his grandparents, progressed to his parents' relationship, then covered his own family life right up to the execution of his brother. There were family secrets to which he refers, but because he never knew them, we don't know them either. It's a haunting, beautiful book that makes Gary Gilmore's life and death seem both tragic and inevitable.

It's a stark contrast with a story that seems no less tragic, but I can't be sure because it's author plainly doesn't believe anything its subject has to say about the issue. The subject is a woman who had given birth to four children whose decomposing bodies were found in a storage locker in Arizona. They were full-term babies, but they had been dead so long that it was impossible to tell whether they had been born alive or not.

The woman claimed that she'd been raped repeatedly, and that her mother had killed her children because she'd been single when she'd given birth. Apart from those facts that are hammered into our heads by the author's repeating them ad nauseum, it's hard to tell what really happened, or even what the author thinks happened. The author talks about her "alleged" rapes and says that she "claims" this or that happened. It reads as though he wrote a very different story and was pressured into adding or deleting things until it made no sense.

He does say that the woman's own confessions were confused and contradictory, but isn't the author's job to help us make sense of it? To somehow put the confessions in context so that they help establish the person's guilt or innocence? Instead, confessions that cut back and forth between the births of four children over several years are themselves cut with a narrative of the events over those years until it's all a confusing soup and it's easy to stop caring, despite the authors harpy cry of "Dead babies! Dead babies!" It's heartbreaking that a story with some pretty deep issues at its heart has been so shabbily treated.

On the other hand, this is unlikely to stop me from reading more true crime. The surest sign of addiction, isn't it?

Antisocial Networking

Now is not a good time to be unmotivated. I've just finished two novels and have put together a new crit group whose first meeting is January 15th. I've committed to myself to get a certain amount of editing done so that the submission process can start.

I know what it is, though. I'm allowing myself to be deluged by other people's process. Many of my friends are writers, I'm part of several online groups and I get a few writing magazines, every one of which is deeply involved in their own process and is not just willing but EAGER to tell me about it in depth.

At some point, I have to stop listening to anybody else and figure it out for myself. It's great to get advice when you need it, but being deluged by stuff you didn't ask for can be downright destructive. So, I know what I need to do to get motivated. Stop reading my email. Turn off Twitter. Ignore Facebook.

I've got places to go and things to do, and nobody can drive the unicycle of authorship for me, can they? Well, they could, but then I wouldn't be on it. And there's nothing that sucks worse than sitting by the side of the road watching someone else ride off on your unicycle.