Day 39: Ursula K Le Guin, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Muhammad Ahmad
Ursula K Le Guin - Concerning Theo
If I tried to imagine
the son I didn’t have
if I hadn’t had one,
I could never ever imagine
the one I did have.
The beauty of him!
His big nose!
His voice with its dry edge
in which the fifteen-year-old’s still hiding
along with some sexy man of fifty,
oh, a voice to melt answering machines.
And he is so kind and so funny!
And he never sits down!
And he flies to Jakarta!
Never could I imagine
such a person. Not in my wildest.
When he was three
he would fling his arms
about me at knee level
thus rendering me immobile
and cry in his then very sweet
high voice, “Mama!
Don’t wowwy bout it!”
OK, OK. I won’t
worry about it.
I love Ursula's poems that she wrote for her family. Those are the most poignant ones in the book A Visit with the Peacock.
What I love is the first sentence with its mind-bending tense shifts, made even trickier with the line breaks. Taken out, it reads:
"If I tried to imagine the son I didn't have if I hadn't had one, I could never imagine the son I did have."
That is a really difficult (but correct) sentence to parse. On my first reading I was startled by the second line. I thought it was completed there, and it caused me some minor pain. Would the poem be about a miscarriage or abortion or something very serious? I strongly believe in abortion of course, but I assume everyone, like me, who is not unfamiliar with the experience will sometimes come across the stray thought: he/she would be x years old now. It is a thought more curious than painful, (having a child in our situation would have been a disaster) but the other day I was reading a book to my nephew about babies and he asked me "have you ever had a baby", and it caused me to stop with wide eyes and then laugh, no, not really.
But the poem is about joy of remembering her son at all ages. Le Guin is very critical of masculinity throughout her work, but like Bell Hooks, shows that the solution against patriarchy is not to hatred towards men but to love them, which can be hard, but not when it is a small child. We have to keep that love throughout our children's life.
Although it is an awkward white country rap song, the otherwise sublime musician Lucinda Williams wrote a song on the topic called Sweet Side that always makes me near tear up.
Perhaps the only thing that turns this poem into extreme sacharine is the baby talk at the end, but other than that, I love Ursula Le Guin and that she wrote and published this poem.
Thomas Ligotti - Gas Station Carnivals
I don't read much horror, but for the last year I have been occasionally returning to Ligotti's collection Teatro Grottesco- not because I particularly enjoy the stories, which often make me drowsy with their verbose prose, but because they capture a disquieting mood I want to return to and figure out. I have only read about half the stories but have read them all twice. There are strengths and weaknesses in each story, but something about them keeps me from giving up.
This is the opening which sets the scene:
Outside the walls of the Crimson Cabaret was a world of rain and darkness. At intervals, whenever someone entered or exited through the front door of the club, one could actually see the steady rain and was allowed a brief glimpse of the darkness. Inside it was all amber light, tobacco smoke, and the sound of the raindrops hitting the windows, which were all painted black.
Although the setting is a bit cliche, I like the detail of the blacked-out windows. I have been to a listless cabaret club like this once, a daytime show in rainy Louisville where the people sat around sullen and silent.
The story is mostly the protagonist's friend trying to say "do you remember the Gas Station Carnivals? please, you gotta remember them". The narrator does not, and we then proceed to hear all about them.
The friend describes that on family vacations, they would encounter ramshackle amusement parks:
Situated on some empty stretch of land that stood along, a rural filling station, they consisted of only the remnants of fully fledged carnivals, the bare bones of much larger and grander entertainments. There was usually a tall arched entrance way with coloured light bulbs that provided an eerie contrast to the vast and barren landscape surrounding it. Especially around sunset, which was usually, or possibly always, when Quisser, and his parents found themselves in one of these remote locals.
I really like this imagery. Sometimes when Ligotti gets away from the narrator's mental gymnastics, he can describe things vividly while leaving just enough blank space for the reader to fill.
He then describes several eerie and desultory performers in the sideshow tent- the most detailed one being The Showman who sits with his back to the audience and never turns around but always feels like he is about to.
Then at the end is a classic and formulaic twist.
I feel like Limmy perfectly parodied Ligotti's kinda fiction in the Dee Dee slketch about the laughing cow
Gah, I find these stories mostly dull and aimless but they have plenty of memorable scenes.
Michael Muhammad Ahmad - Bad Writers
This was in the Best Australian Essays 2017, and although it is entertaining, leaves me feeling like I've been in bad company.
Ahmad writes about his experiences as a creative writing workshop facilitator, and being unafraid to call out bad prose and cliches, he has caused a lot of walkouts. But Ahmad spends the essay being quite nasty about all the people who have ever taken his feedback the wrong way.
A bad writer in year seven, who weighed 100 kilos and whose voice had not broken yet, demonstrated to me why so many young people in Australia are given the entirely wrong impression about the novel from a very young age. He said, 'I am a novelist - I've written 300 pages and it has chapters.' I told him that these were not the criteria that determine what is a novel and that it was the responsibility of his English teachers to explore with him the history and diversity of a form which has radically changed lives and shaped societies and cultures for as long as it has existed.
This is a direct quote from the essay, and surely you are thinking "man, if this isnt a joke then this guy is a real asshole". There are a few other anecdotes about him righteously teaching some defensive amateur a lesson while also making cracks about their fashion or weight. It feels like something you'd see in a KillTony bombing compilation. Again, bad company.
This arrogance is unfortunate, because he makes some good points about the purpose of writing workshops (I know myself that it is very hard to get better at writing without critical feedback). The other point he makes is that bad writing is both universal and contrary to popular belief, is not subjective. His criteria:
What these people are writing is consumed with cliches, vague images or no images, no detail and no specificity, no sense of place, no sense of character and no distinction of voice.
That is fair enough. I like that he offers critical writing workshops outside of the stupid university system- it inspires me to try and find a mentor for my own writing. But I just don't like the dick-swinging of this essay. Partly because I see this us vs them mentality in my own writing, which my paranoid conscience urges me to constantly soften the blows.