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25th June 2006: Tangled Web

Posted on by Jo Walton

“Your nightmares are somebody’s daydreams,
Your daydreams are somebody’s lies.
Lies ain’t no harder than telling the truth,
The truth is the perfect disguise.”

Kris Kristofferson.

I’m not in HP fandom, and I’ve been reading the MsScribe kerfuffle with bemused detachment since Alter linked to it the other day. What I want to talk about is lying, which I do know something about.

People are saying “she lied to me!” as if lying is always in all circumstances a terrible thing, and it seems as if previous revelations about MsScribe’s lying have failed to expose her because people were so reluctant to believe that a friend of theirs had lied to them.

People tell lies.

It seems to me there are beneficial lies, there are neutral lies, there are social lies, there are selections and simplifications and sharpenings up and we all do these things, and they ought to be distinguished from the kind of lie that actually deserves vilification, the kind the nicely summed up in the ten commandments as “bearing false witness against a neighbour”. White lies and black lies.

Someone I used to know once said that writing fiction is the responsible response to being born with a really good talent for lying. I laughed with the laugh of total recognition. The same impulse that lets you make up stories lets you make up other kinds of stories — not “the dog ate my homework” or “Little Susie did it” but to embroider the dog that barked at you safely behind a gate into a dog ran out that attacked you (it could have!) so you barely got away, or turns the sibling forbidden from watching TV into the sibling shut up in a closet to prevent them from watching TV. (It’s a better story! And it’s symbolic!)

There’s a point when sharpening up an anecdote becomes elaborating it, becomes lying. I used to have terrible trouble with seeing the line on that one. Then there’s the opposite of it, where simplifying becomes lying. This is an odd point for me. I have a rather complicated family history, which I don’t always want to go into. In fact, it sounds much less plausible than lying about it. I’ll sometimes say “I went away to school” as shorthand or to short circuit saying “My grandmother died and my sister died and my grandfather had a stroke and my crazy mother, who’d just had a baby, tried to get custody of me and did for a while and after I ran away I spent a little while in a children’s home and then lived with my aunt for a bit and then with my father who, oddly, I’d never met before I was thirteen, and who happened to be an alcoholic…” (… and even that’s a simplification!)

You want to have conversations about children’s homes and schizophrenic mothers with your friends’ parents? With new teachers in new schools? With your workmates? I don’t, always. It’s like being in the closet. I want a choice about whether I talk about it. I reserve the right to simplify, even when it is actual lying… but these days I try to say “It was actually quite complicated but…” so I have a fall back position to explain if I want to.

Because the problem with the short version is that it’s hard to go back from it later to “Actually…” “Actually, you know when I said…”

And that leads me to the tangled web. Once you lie, you have to keep on lying. Furthermore, once you have told a lie and someone has believed it, they get invested in the truth of it. If you tell that lie again later, they’ll defend it just as much as you will. And you all get tangled up in lies, you have to remember them and keep them straight and defend them and lie more and more to cover them up and make them work, because if they fail you are revealed as a liar. There’s no way back from the brink. Once you have lied, you have to keep lying to cover it, no matter what, because lying at all is regarded as unforgiveable.

Well.

I once, on the bus to Greece, when I was seventeen, made up a whole fictional past for myself when the stranger in the next seat asked me. It started from not wanting to get into things, and then it all unwound from my mouth, a job, a boyfriend, a town, all totally made up and she didn’t question it in the slightest. Lots of it was her assumptions from my starting axioms. Keeping it up for days and not slipping the whole way across Europe was difficult, remembering what I had said, not saying things that contradicted it, but I managed it, or reconciled apparent contradictions to her satisfaction. I was very glad to say goodbye to her in Thessaloniki though.

I worried after that that I might be a compulsive liar. (Regrettably, Introductory Psychology Through SF has nothing on compulsive liars.) I had read Billy Liar. I had read The Magus. What I did on that bus was only one step on from the way I usually shaped my actual history to make life easier. If I can make up characters I can make up myself, and after all they’re both starting on a root-stock of myself, of angles and aspects of myself.

I thought about it a lot. One of the things I saw was that doing that was bad for the real inside me. In the end, lying made me truthful, and hiding things made me open. I try hard to be truthful these days. Oh, I may say your ass doesn’t look fat in that or that I had a lovely time when I didn’t, and I might even say the god ate my homework, and I might avoid answering the question about whether I have brothers or sisters, but those are theads of lies. I work hard avoid the easy spider-web clinging tissue kind, and save it for the fiction.

They say kids lie because they don’t know it’s wrong, and what’s wrong really is more complicated than it seems. The reason it’s wrong is that it leads to the tangled web and the tangled web can easily lead to black lies. That, I think is what happened with MsScribe.

When I read the MsScribe bio, I recognised some things early on. She was doing a thing I do — taking an actual incident and making it a story. I’d read one thing of hers before — the Lashonda story, when Peg Kerr linked to it when it was new — and I could see in that and in the “baby dykes” story that they were in fact stories. There’s a fiction impulse I have where some little thing kicks it off and before I know it I have a little story like that. They’re usually useless, they don’t fit anywhere, you can’t publish them, they need more contexting than you can give them — though actually I think the Lashonda one could have been publishable.

Now LJ is an odd thing. It expects posts. I try not to post to my journal with “Got up, had a bath, made R’s sandwiches, failed to write, got Z off to school, read LJ, missed usenet, ate pasta and peas, did some grocery shopping, failed to write again, cooked dinner for the family and ate it, read my book, went to sleep” because that’s really awfully boring to read about. In fact I try not to post in my journal unless I have something worth saying, or word-count. But sometimes I think “I haven’t posted for days! But nothing has happened worth posting about!” I don’t then make up something to post about, but I see where the impulse comes from to embroider some little nothing into something, into a good story. I’ve sometimes been doing something and caught myself making up a journal post about it in my head. And all of us who have journals and post about our lives must be a little more exhibitionist than most.

I’m sure that embroidery is what she was doing. I understand the impulse to do it. Channeling it into marked fiction is a better thing to do with the impulse. But posting it in her journal didn’t in fact hurt anyone.

Beyond that, when she got into sockpuppets attacking her and calling her a “zebra” (I never heard that term before, and find it really weird) I can still see it as being theatre, done for attention, possibly actually done as catharsis, but still not hurting anyone. Yes, she may have done it to be in with the in-crowd as the bio assumes, but she kept on doing things after she was as in as she could be, rooming with Cassie Claire at Nimbus. I don’t know what she was getting out of it. Maybe for her being persecuted like that represented some way she really felt persecuted. Maybe she was just having catty cruel fun with it. If so, other people were too, from the account.

The bit where she was in hospital and paralysed — maybe she stubbed her toe. Maybe she fell and thought “I could have been paralysed in hospital”. But it made a good story. The same with the stalker and the police. No, it didn’t happen, and yes, there is an assumption of truth… and the assumption of truth on LJ is what’s really damaged by all of this.

I mean how do you know I was really concussed in February? I could have made it up for the attention. How do you even know I did laundry yesterday? How do I know you did what you posted about? Only because we trust each other to tell the truth, or a reasonable entertaining facsimile of it. That trust is a casualty of her lies.

What I don’t know — because I don’t know MsScribe — was whether she represented her own personality as something other than who she was. I doubt it, because it’s really hard to do for a sustained period of time.

When I was in the habit of telling easy lies (and I still sharpen up anecdotes, not embroider, but sharpen up, I try to keep on the right side of the line, but it’s arguable) it seemed to me there were two important things — firstly to avoid the tangled web leading to tangles and black lies that can hurt people, and secondly to remain true to my own self. I don’t always want everything in the open, but if I give the simplified version or a lie, it’s one that’s true to who I am.

I don’t know if MsScribe was true to herself under all the lacy scribbles of spider elaborations, but from what I’ve read of her, she was. One personality comes through her writing quite clearly. She lied and lied and lied, she made up sockpuppets and attacked herself, but she sent flowers to Velma in hospital. I don’t like her myself, from what comes through her writing, but that she told lies about incidents and kept on telling them doesn’t mean she isn’t the person some of you knew.

Where it seems to me MsScribe crossed the line was where she involved GT. There she bore false witness, there her lies did hurt people. At that point she couldn’t have stopped without falling completely flat on her face… but she should have taken the fall. That was where she did something actually wrong.

It seems to me that she did try to stop after that, perhaps because she came close to being caught, or perhaps because she saw that she had crossed that line. Or maybe she grew up a bit. But she hasn’t been doing it the last little while. And she probably is the person you thought she was.

In the first post I saw on this, Alter’s, he asked why she had gone to all this trouble for such a small thing, to be seen as a big name in Harry Potter online fandom. This really is a very small thing. She didn’t lie about weapons of mass destruction, she didn’t “sex up” reports of the dangers Saddam Hussein posed to the world, she didn’t even lie about having sex with That Woman.

I think if you liked her before, you can probably safely continue to like her — you just can’t trust her to be telling the truth on all points at all moments — and on that one, I’m certainly not going to cast the first stone.

Posted in Among Others, Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

6th June 2006: Best Tombstone Ever

Posted on by Jo Walton

After spending most of the morning reading pretty much all the extant Phoenician there is, both online and in Harden’s The Phoenicians which is the only thing I have in the house — must get something more recent — I was delighted to see that Sonya Taaffe just posted this on my last entry, in response to being asked how you say hello in Phoenician:

“There is always this epigram attributed to Meleagros in the Anthologia Graeca:

Walk softly, stranger: among the righteous, the old man is resting, lulled to the sleep that he deserves,
Meleagros the son of Eukrates, who put together
sweet-crying Love and the Muses with the joyful Graces: whom god-gotten Tyre reared to manhood, and the holy land of Gadara: but lovely Kos of the Meropes tended him as an old man. So if you are Syrian, Salam, if you are Phoenician, Naidios, and if you are Greek, Chaire, — say the same.”

First century BCE.

That may be the only extant example of a Phoenician greeting. What a narrow fingernail-hold we have on time! And what a lovely man he was, Meleagros son of Eukrates, dead these two thousand years, but I wish I’d been lucky enough to know him.

So, if you are Greek these days, ya sou, if you are French, bonjour, if you are Welsh, boro da — say the same!

Posted in Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

3rd June 2006 Tolkien’s allegory of WWII

Posted on by Jo Walton

was asking about Tolkien’s allegory of WWII in the foreward to LOTR when he says what would have happened in Middle Earth if it had followed the course of WWII:

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Foreward to The Lord of the Rings.

I think there was this very specific British thing about WWII that in order to win it we had to give up class privilege — the equivalent for the US would have been if in order to win they’d had to introduce civil rights and a fair minimum wage and federally funded equal education to first degree level and a free health system. I mean that’s pretty much exactly what happened, during WWII in Britain. And all this was a good thing, but for the people who were privileged it was percieved as a terrible loss of all sorts of good things which they didn’t necessarily define as privilege — because you can’t live the kind of life people lived without an underclass, at least not at that tech level.

So you get people like Nevil Shute and Mary Renault fleeing Britain for Australia and South Africa where they could, at least for a while, hope to lead a 1930s style middle-class life, and you get the huge explosion of novels about cosy catastrophes that conveniently kill off the working classes (in The Day of the Triffids the seeing hero is literally chained to blind working class people who can’t survive. I don’t think Wyndham intended this as a metaphor, but…) and Tolkien felt as if the light had gone out of everything good and beautiful and what was left was no doubt more democratic but much more lacking in magic.

I don’t think he meant “Ring as Bomb”, it was the Ring of Power, always, and I think he meant is as power — in his allegory in order to beat Mordor, Hitler, we allied with Saruman, Stalin, and the US, who I think he saw as another kind of Saruman — the US made some very odd demands on Britain during WWII — and became as bad as the enemy.

Now things didn’t turn out with Stalin or the US learning from the ruins of Berlin how to do those things themselves — largely because Stalin already knew and the US leadership were at that point I think fundamentally decent and democratic and had no imagination of themselves, then, as power-grabbing, and also their class structure had not in fact been as shaken by the war. (Civil rights movements started in the fifties though. It had been shaken, but not as much.) So the US instead of looting conquered Europe introduced the Marshall Plan — and that was the thing nobody was expecting, not Tolkien, not Orwell, nobody, there’s never been anything like it before or really since (if you consider MacArthur’s Japan part of it) and by two generations after WWII in Britain nobody was sad about lost privilege because they didn’t expect it, and the majority of people were much happier and better off anyway, and the tech level had advanced so that life was easier for everyone even without servants.

Tolkien died when I was six years old, so he lived to see that, but only just.

Posted in Books, Human culture

22nd Feb-Mar 2st 2005 Concussion updates

Posted on by Jo Walton

[I think this is worth having, because reading through these makes it really apparent what fixed my concussion. Spoiler, it wasn’t Western medicine.]

22nd March

So I listened to all you lot and went to the doctor.

I never go to the doctor. No, that’s not true. I go to the doctor when I think they can help. Mark Atwood’s statement that with socialised medicine people go to the doctor more than they need to caused me to laugh incredulously. I believe in socialised medicine the same way I believe in socialised oxygen — I’ve always got it free as required and I can’t really believe anyone has to pay for it — but I never go to the doctor. Yesterday was the first time I’d been to the doctor since we’ve been in Canada, which is four years.

Anyway, what I did myself was googled for concussion, and read the Mayo Clinic page. It told me the symptoms, it told me what to worry about, and it told me to see a doctor if I had amnesia, which I did (do, I still can’t remember how the heck I got to the restaurant) and it told me unless I was much worse than I was and might need a scan, the treatment was rest and observation. I was resting and I’d told Rysmiel to observe me.

However, because all you lot screamed at me to go to the doctor I went to the doctor, and spent the length of time it takes to read Persuasion when you have a severe headache (from 17h25 to 23h50) waiting about in waiting rooms to end up being given a leaflet that says exactly what Google had already told me. Exactly. I’m to rest and observe myself. In between, I had my eyes peered into and my blood pressure taken, I got thirstier and thirstier and more and more irritable. Also, my head hurt.

I’ve been seen by a professional, two professionals, but I can’t really feel that it was worth it.

After a night’s sleep, I’m observing myself. I find a lack of desire to wash dishes or make Rysmiel’s sandwiches before having my tea and checking my email. Is this lassitude? Or just normal laziness? I have a headache, but you kind of expect to have a headache when hit on the head. I’ve taken tylenol. Both the Mayo clinic and the doctor I saw said tylenol was OK. I’m otherwise fine. Well, I’m grumpy, but I do normally run the whole gamut of emotions from Happy through Grumpy and Dopey and Bashful all the way to Doc — which is the state of mind in which I make other people see perfectly useless doctors when they’re not well and would like to stay home drinking tea.

And I have a follow-up appointment for Friday morning so they can check I’m still OK, doubtless by looking into my eyes again.

The doctor asked me why I hadn’t come in earlier. I didn’t say I never went to doctors unless people all over the world yell at me about it, I allowed as I had been too confused to think of it.

24th Feb

I have been to the doctor again.

She thinks I’m fine, after some peering into my eyes and squeezing my face and making me squeeze her fingers.

The continuing severe headache, lack of concentration, and lack of appetite are apparently normal — this should gradually improve over time. (I have to say, it hasn’t improved much so far. If at all. But it should.) If I get worse, I should go to emergency. She thinks I probably won’t ever get that half hour memory back if I haven’t already.

Thank you all for making me go. If you hadn’t persuaded me to go Tuesday, I wouldn’t have gone myself until yesterday when the headache wasn’t lifting. The doctors haven’t in fact done anything at all for me other than making me wait around a lot, which is standard to my experience of doctors, but even so it was probably sensible.

The doctor said it’s OK to take Tylenol (paracetamol) every three hours instead of every four if that will help (which it would, towards the end of the tylenol window is when I feel worst at present) as long as I don’t exceed 4 gms per day. I know there are people reading this who know about this stuff — is that actually right? And how many days is it OK to keep on taking 4gms for?

In other news, while out I had breakfast (very good Vietnamese fried egg, pork chop and shredded pork on rice, plus tea — breakfast of champions) did some shopping and came home from the doctor on my own on a sensible variety of buses and metro. I am afraid of falling on the snow again, but then I am afraid of a lot of things I do anyway. If you let being irrationally afraid of things stop you, you end up spending your whole life whimpering under the covers, or touching all the railings like that poor Zenna Henderson character. I’m afraid of walking across highway bridges, so I did that too, to get to Premier Moisson at Monkland and Giraud. Going out, fresh air and walking probably did me good.

27th Feb

OK, I’m bored with this headache now, it can go away whenever it likes. Bored, bored, bored.

(In fact, being irritated with being sick is one of those signs that I’m probably nearly better, or so I keep telling myself.)

I’ve decided to try without tylenol today. It takes the edge off, but it doesn’t get rid of the pain, and it makes me feel all huddly, plus clockwatching all the time for when I can have my next fix. We’ll see how the more pain/less tylenol equation works in terms of how much useful brain I have. I’m afraid to write in case I mess it up — it’s a million times easier for me to write something right the first time than to fix something I’ve messed up. But I know what needs to come next.

This has been a rotten month.

2nd March 

So, it’s March. And I had acupuncture, twice, and now my head hardly hurts at all, barely worth mentioning. I had pins stuck in some really bizarre places — or at least, really different ones from the ones you get when you’re having acupuncture for your leg. I had four in my forehead and one in my scalp, one in each ear-lobe, several in my arms and legs and two in my stomach.

It’s a funny feeling, having pins stuck in you. You lie there on a table, reassuring yourself. “Well, I’ve had acupuncture hundreds of times, and it’s never hurt…” versus the primal fear of “OMG they’re going to stick PINS in me!” And it doesn’t hurt, unless they miss the point, in which case it feels as if someone stuck a pin in you.

When they’re all in and the circuit is complete, not only does the pain (whatever pain) stop hurting, which, frankly, is worth the money on its own, but you don’t want to move. Today I had to wait ten minutes on the table before they got around to sticking me. No glasses, flat on my back. I did my hand exercises. I twitched my feet. I stretched my arms up in the air. Then she came in and stuck the pins in and I spent an hour not even wanting to twitch. Not thinking about moving. Keeping quite still. I’d never noticed this before, but it was really obvious today, because of the wait.

In China, they do operations and dentistry under acupuncture. I’d have no hesitation. Indeed, I’d much prefer it.

I’m going back for another session on Tuesday, because they said even though this probably deals with the headaches, a fall and a concussion puts a load on the whole body, and I could do with my whole body tuning up.

I would have got better without the acupuncture, but goodness knows how long it would have taken. The acupuncture stopped it from dragging out any longer.

Tomorrow, finally, I’m going to write.

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

21st February 2006: Another @#$%ing research experience (My concussion post)

Posted on by Jo Walton

So, there I was sitting in a Chinese cafe on Ste Catherine half way through a bowl of won ton soup — indeed, half way through a won ton — with a pot of tea in front of me, with absolutely no idea how I got there, and totally convinced that this was in fact a dream.

When I’m dreaming and I suspect it’s a dream, I try running through the events of the day so far, because if it’s a dream, I’ll go back to earlier events, thus proving it’s a dream. This has served me very well on the couple of real occasions I’ve thought something might be a dream, and also in dreams. This time it didn’t work. There were no events leading to me being there — if I was there, which I wasn’t at all sure about. I’d never been there before. I could tell where it was because I could see the corner out of the window, Ste Catherine and St Matthieu. Down by Guy.

It was definitely a dream, because it had a choppy staccatto dream-rhythm like T.S. Eliot.

Except that the tea was hot and the ice water was cold, and the soup tasted like soup, which seemed evidence for it being real, despite the haze. There was a plate of shrimp in lobster sauce in front of me, brown, like the one they do in Tchiang Kiang, which didn’t seem like something I’d order, and a teapot exactly like my travel teapot, both of which seemed like evidence for it not being real. There were people, eating, who had faces, but realistic people’s faces are really normal in my dreams.

I drank tea, and held on to the cup. I was fuzzing in and out. I kept checking my belt pouch and my purse, which kept containing the same things. This wasn’t like a dream, except it was. If it was real, how the heck had I got here? There was $20 in my purse, which was both reassuring and evidence against it being an anxiety dream.

If it was a dream, I had nothing to lose by acting as if it was real. If it was real, I wasn’t in a fit state to be out by myself and ought to get in touch with Rysmiel. My watch said it was 11.52 on Tuesday 21st February. There was a calendar (a Hello Kitty calendar) on the wall that also said February. If it was a Tuesday lunch time, Rysmiel could be in work. I could ring work. I found the number in my address book. This wasn’t like a dream. I could read. My head hurt. I felt sick. I finished the soup and drank tea.

I got up and went to the bathroom, looking for a phone. No phone. In the bathroom, I tentatively decided it was real, and went to the loo. (I have a strict rule that I never use the toilet in dreams, ever since the time I wet the bed when I was oh, eight maybe? But the quantity of tea I was drinking, I needed it.)

I went back to the table and asked the waitress if there was a phone. The guy at the desk let me use his phone, and dialled for me. I got the voicemail, which was in French. I couldn’t understand it at all, which was, I immediately realised, normal for people who had been hit on the head.

I went and sat down and drank tea and tried to work on the assumption I’d been hit on the head. (Had I gone to the bathroom? Had I tried to call Rysmiel? Was time going on discretely, or continuously?) Then I remembered falling on the ice, my legs going from under me, and hitting my head. My hat fell off. I hadn’t hurt anything except my head. Nobody was near, but someone coming along called to me to be careful, in French, which I hadn’t understood (except that I had) because people can’t understand French when they’ve been hit on the head. (It’s from the film L’Auberge Espagnol.) I stood up and put my hat on. It was covered in snow. My head hurt front and back. I thought “I should go to Ma-nna, they would look after me” but I couldn’t remember where it was or what it was. I thought if I couldn’t remember Ma-nna, I should check what I could remember. I tried to remember “O for a muse of fire” because I knew that was what people tried to remember, even though I don’t actually know it. (Thank you for that, Angevin2!) I then tried to remember “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” and could remember that. Then I tried to remember my name, and remembered the version of my name I used to use when I was a kid, and then that it wasn’t that, it was Walton, and then that it was Jo. I couldn’t remember my telephone number. I couldn’t tell where I was.

At that point, dream-brain must have taken over because I still really can’t remember anything at all between that and being in the restaurant. I suspect dream-brain wanted tea, because I saw afterwards that it must have taken me across a road (wahhh!) and past two other eating places. Good old dream-brain must also have ordered (but why that?) and started to eat.

I drank tea. I started to figure out what had happened in a sensible way and to make notes in my notebook. I reproduce the notes, which are long and repetitive and talk much about how wonderful tea is (I suspect I drank about four pints of Jasmine tea) but useful research experience .

“I hit my head.

I fell on the ice.

This is real. This is the first time I’ve been really confused about dream and real when it has been real. I’m swimming a bit. I came out and got the 10.54 90 to Atwater. I missed a 15, I got the metro to Guy and walked down St Matthieu towards the remainder book place and then fell and banged my head hard somehow on the ice and I thought it was a dream and it is confused like a dream but it is real. I somehow somehow got myself into a Chinese restaurant on the corner of St Matthieu and Ste Catherine and ordered shrimp in lobster sauce. I have never been in here before.

There is too much detail for a dream, also there is taste. No taste in dream. Tea, life-giving tea, which is in a pot like my plastic travel pot. Too real. But I am missing a bit. How did I get here, how did I order? I tried to call Rysmiel but got G’s voicemail and did not leave a message. Nobody can understand French when they hit their head. I need Rysmiel. I need somebody. It’s 12.03. I can’t trust myself to get home. It was snow on ice. I may be concussed? I drank the soup. I went to the loo. I tried to phone. Let’s keep as much coherence as possible here. The shrimp in lobster sauce — why the heck would I order that? — is the same as in Tchiang Kiang. It’s 12.06. If I caught a 10.54 bus there’s an hour, say 20 minutes to Atwater — at least half an hour missing. This is real. If it was a dream — less consistent. If Heaven, why shrimp in lobster sauce, and why the tea getting too strong? No, real. I’m sure. I could believe Heaven as a Chinese restaurant, but. This is so weird. I don’t think I ever lost time before. I don’t remember, and I lost coherence. I’m OK now, I think.

Went to the loo again. The bathroom was the way I remembered it. Food has taste. I’m not tracking so well though. I need someone. I could be concussed. I could easily be concussed. I need to keep track. Tea, blessed tea, tea is helping. Even unconscious I get myself to tea. That’s a good thing. I just saw the menu go by. I recognise them, or from dream. Wow, I ordered while unconscious. Thank Healing Apollo is/was tea here.

More and more convinced this is real the longer it goes on. Also, I don’t have my pen — this pen is always in bag, the other one, which in dream I would have, is on the desk. tea is hot, also all gone. Water is cold. This is real. How interesting. She’s getting me more tea. I tried to ring Rysmiel but no answer. I could email from Guy. If could get to Guy could get home. But maybe concussion? Should I be checked by doctor? (A Chinese restaurant in Heaven would have chopsticks. They might be 5 feet long or something, but they wouldn’t be forks. Even the Chinese people have forks here. This is real.)

More tea. No dream, going on too consistently. New tea hotter. Now 12.22. I think I remember everything pretty much.

Just confided in the waitress and explained that I hit my head on the ice. I remember picking up my hat, but like a dream. I told her the tea was helping and could I stay a minute and drink it, and she said it was fine. I wish I could call Rysmiel. I’ve asked — well, she offered — to have the shrimp etc to go and she’s brought it in a bag. This is real, real, real, and I can’t quite believe how long I was unsure.

Ah. A fortune cookie. It says “Relax and spend more time with a loved one”. If it had said “Fooled you, this is a dream” that would have been weird! I think I’ll be OK. Can I get home? Should I go to the doctor? That fortune cookie didn’t taste of anything! But then they never do. I’m tracking. I’m fairly sure I’m tracking. I can remember my proper name and my phone number, which I couldn’t before. I couldn’t remember how to get to Ma-nna. I didn’t know where I was. I thought if I didn’t have that it was a dream, but also the thing to do was to sit down and have tea, which it was. I’m quite surprised with my spinal reflex’s ability actually.

Well, this is a research experience and a half.

Oh my god, I must have crossed a road! Well, I’m OK. But luck, thank you kind Hermes, luck only.

Just now a tall Chinese guy came in, saw a table of his friends. Him: “Ca va?” Them: long and incomprehensible answer in Chinese.

If it gets really full, I’ll have to go. I told the waitress, but even so, it isn’t fair. There’s an empty table for four still. It’s 12.37. Do I dream all the time that I am ordering lunch in Chinese restaurants, such that I can do it while unconscious? I suppose I might. I was going to go to IGA. if I’m OK, I should, because food.

OK. I’m OK. So, Guy metro, then Atwater, IGA, food for dinner. I remember what I wanted. Tell you a weird thing, I remembered that I ought to check who I was before I remembered who I was. I also said “O for a muse of fire” before realising I didn’t know the rest of it at all, even when coherent and failed on the telephone number but did remember “On first looking into”. But I’d have to be beyond a zombie not to remember that! That before my real name. Well, that’s me, hey? OK, onward!”

I’m now home, and Rysmiel is here and we’ve decided that I am in fact OK, despite still having a gap in memory, so don’t anybody worry!

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

15th February 2006: Why I love SF

Posted on by Jo Walton

I love the way SF can take something I thought I knew and turn it around on me, without cheating. I love the way you can have completely new societies, thought experiment societies, with their own extrapolated mores and ways of thought, and I get them as immersive stories, not as flat blueprints. I love the smell of the air when I step off a spaceship on a new planet, and the colour of the shadows. I love being able to think like an alien — and being able to contemplate the resonances of what treachery to the species means. I love the smell of oil on the gantries of the space station, and if adventure is somewhere else in trouble a long way away, I love watching them seeing the shape of the space in terms of somewhere to hide and shoot. I love picking something up to read without knowing anything about it other than genre and reading the first sentence and seeing the infinite possible stories beginning to fine down to the one in my hand. I love the way SF as a genre encompasses such incredibly disparate things and they’re all in dialogue with each other.

I love it when it makes my mind larger, and I love it best when it isn’t a metaphor or an analogy (applicability is something else) but is its own thing, its own story with as many pyrotechnics as you like about people who are not like me (but are) and whose problems need their context to be explicable.

Posted in Books

2nd February 2006: Why fantasy is easy

Posted on by Jo Walton

When I say fantasy is easy, what I mean is that writing in a background you already know intimately is easier than figuring out every little thing about the background. It’s easiest to put this in terms of tech levels — if you’re going to write something at a medieval tech level, or a classical tech level, or an eighteenth century tech level, all you have to do is half a ton of research, most of which (if you’re me) you’ll already have done while thinking you were doing something else. The information is out there. All you have to do is integrate that information and the magic and the history into your background. There’s tons and tons of it, you’ve already absorbed lots of it unconsciously, so when you change anything it’s clear how it connects and what else changes with it.

Wherever you start — and I tend to start intuitively, with characters, who accrete their world and magic and technology (not to mention plot!) as they go — you can go forward from there. You know how long it takes to go 20 miles, at tech level, you know that 20 miles on flattish land is the radius a C.12 equivalent castle can defend (how far a horse can be ridden and still fight. “Flattish land” is why there are so many castles in Wales, which has no flat land to speak of…) you know how messages are sent and exactly how a castle wall is built. (Incidentally, if you don’t know how a castle wall is built, they’re supposed to be rebuilding some at Oystermouth this summer. I watched them the last time they were doing some there and it was very interesting.) You can change all those things, if you want to, but even so the implications of the tech you don’t stop and think about will all fit together naturally because they really did — unless you really screw up the way the magic integrates, or unless you didn’t do the research, it’ll all hang together because it’s all borrowed from the real and complex world.

When you write SF, you have to stop and figure out every single bit of that, and how it hangs together, and all the second order implications of the tech, and the problem with that, if you write intuitively starting the characters whose world is implicit, is that it makes it all incredibly slow, and for me, when I slow to a certain point, it stalls out.

Tolkien said what he liked was history “true or feigned”, and I think fantasy worlds are, more than anything, a chance to feign history.

When I write fantasy, (or, for that matter, alternate history, which is even more history) what I’m drawing from when I start making things up is history. When I write SF, to a large extent what I’m drawing on, to get the same 360 degree versimilitude, is other SF.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with variations on a theme (Bach!!!) but I’m much more likely to do something original when I write fantasy, or alternate history, even though what I like to read best in all the world is someone landing for the first time on a planet that smells strange and has aliens.

Posted in Poor Relations, Small Change, Writing

2nd December 2005: Scattered thoughts on fantasy

Posted on by Jo Walton

Kate Elliott posted an interesting piece saying that SF has a finite knowable universe and fantasy an infinite and unknowable one,

That’s actually really close to my instinctive definition of SF, made up to exclude Christopher Priest’s early work which was making my head explode at the time: “In SF, it all makes sense in the end.” No matter how weird and inexplicable, you have to trust the author that it will all be explained.

However, there’s a shortage of fantasy where it also doesn’t. Oh, there’s magic, but most fantasy magic is pretty explicable and pretty easily reduced to rules too. Even in the Dunsany-influenced strand of fantasy, it’s really a whole lot like “what if the medieval imagination of magic was real”.

I was talking about this on rasfw once, fantasy which isn’t Tolkien’s “history, true or feigned” but which is set in real sense-of-wonder fantasy universes — we had Dean’s The Dubious Hills, Lisa Goldstein’s Summer King, Winter Fool (where the religious service on the solstice doesn’t work and the nights keep getting shorter), and Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters. This was a few years ago, there may have been more since, or more we didn’t think of.

And I’ve thought of another one, Ted Chiang’s “72 Letters”.

And Turtledove’s brilliant story “Secret Names”.

Any more, anyone?

Then Sarah Monette has an interesting post, to which I commented:

I think there’s a defended border between fantasy and SF, which has Darkover and Pern and Star Wars lined up along it, bristling with guns, and stepping across it leads to loud explosions and bright lights, magic and spaceships! But I think there’s also an undefended border where fantasy is quietly doing SFnal things.

I like your original idea, that you have different kinds of characters in fantasy universes from SF universes, and hence different kinds of stories arising from those different kinds of characters. I think that’s a productive insight. I’ve been thinking about that. It’s made me think of the possibility of a story where the hero’s tragic flaw is that he is mindset-wise from a fantasy universe, whereas he’s living in an SF one — and I don’t mean like Pham in A Deepness in the Sky or Vanye in The Chronicles of Morgaine which are the closest I can think of this being done.

And to go on from that:

Ignoring marketing conventions and talking only about ways of writing, I’ve been known to say that everything about writing is character. (Description is part of character. World is part of character. Plot is part of character…) In that sense, taking Sarah’s original post about the characters, if you consider fantasy and SF together as ways of writing about people who are not people from this world, whose axioms are not of this world, defining world as “set of cultural assumptions”, then they do indeed have a lot in common. But they also have distinct differences at a fundamental level which doesn’t have to do with technology or magic or anything but to do with how empty the sky is for the character.

In the post-Enlightenment universe of SF, the sky might be full of starships and orbitals and ringworlds and space stations, but for the character whose universe this is, it’s just another place you can go. It’s empty of agency.

For the fantasy character the sky might be empty of everything but clouds and a passing hawk, but it is wholly and poignantly full of agency. As Ted Chiang says (put link here) this is often easier in low tech societies where everything seems to have more agency, but you can have it anywhere. That agency might be destiny, gods, magic, dark lords or dryads, which I’ll sum up as “the numinous”, which fantasy is all about approaching.

Now by sky here, I mean part of the interior landscape of the character’s world. The sky is the axiom about the sky in the character’s head, and the way the writer reflects that in the reality of the fiction. (I keep clarifying things here to the point where I’m afraid it’s getting, as Delany says, opaque with clarity.)

There’s the thing I was talking about above where I mentioned Pham and Vanye (together in a sentence for the second time ever) which is more often done the other way around. It’s quite commonplace to take a character from our world or an otherwise post-enlightenment SF world, and put them somewhere where magic works. They generally poke at it and accept it. (Stross’s The Family Trade does some lovely poking.) Donaldson actually does this inside-out tragic-flaw thing in the Covenant books. I’m not sure how well it works, but it’s certainly what he’s doing.

Doing it the other way around, the character would be deluded — or, as in Turtledove’s “Secret Names” it would suddenly become fantasy. “Secret Names” works because it’s really short and really delightful, you couldn’t do that at length I don’t think. The character would be deluded because we privilege reality. Magic doesn’t exist, as Jeff Vandermeer’s monkey keeps saying. (Starships don’t exist either, but they don’t exist in quite a different way.) Magic, in the real world we’re sitting in, only works inside people’s heads.

A lot of fantasy is doing pretty rigorous SF worldbuilding on “what if certain ideas about magic were real” and “If they were real what would they mean to people?”

When I think about what I do myself, I start from the characters. I build the world from their assumptions. I’ve written six fantasy novels (and published four) in four different worlds. Every one of them started from the characters and their assumptions about the world and went outwards, with magic and religion being awfully close together — except Tooth and Claw where I started from Trollope’s characters and axioms and made them real for dragons. But the sky is empty in that world. The closest it comes to the numinous is a hillside on which the stones do not move around — and that’s a perfectly real hillside near Llandovery, and I promise, the stones really don’t move around.

Posted in Books, Writing

21st October 2005: Contains obscenities (Emily Dickinson guy)

Posted on by Jo Walton

I was in Argo yesterday evening, a little independent new bookshop on St Catherine West, near the second-hand bookshops Westcott, Vortex and Astro. I went in to see if they could order Noel Streatfeild’s reprinted 1930s adult novel Saplings for me.

When I went in, the owner was deeply involved in a discussion with a guy who wanted to buy a dictionary of antonyms and synonyms, as to the merits of the four different ones they stock. It’s an odd little shop, no bestsellers, no SF, lots of classics and poetry and plays, lots of dictionaries and weird things. They have a poster in the window with photographs of famous poets.

I browsed while the antonym-and-synonym guy weighed the merits of his choices very earnestly and at great length. He had the looks and the accent of a first generation immigrant from India or Pakistan. There was nobody else in the shop. I picked up a couple of Dover Thrift editions of poetry.

The door opened, and a strange man rushed in. He has disordered white hair, his clothes weren’t fastened right, and he looked drunk. I wasn’t close enough to tell, but he looked dirty, as if he might smell. I looked away after my initial glance, because my instincts tell me to just keep away from people like that. I thought he was about to ask for spare change.

“Fucking amazing,” he wheezed, as I stared at spines. “Emily Dickinson, just wanted to say, saw in your window, fucking incredible. Because I would not stop for death, do you know that one, fuck, it’s pretty fucking amazing. Because I would not stop for death he kindly stopped for me. The carriage held just but ourselves and immortality. Fuck, would you think of that, just fucking awesome for fuck’s sake. Emily Dickinson. Fuck. Beautiful. Because you have, you know, in the fucking window…?”

He wound down, sputtered, and I looked up again. I realized that the owner, the antonym-and-synonym guy and I had all had the same instinct and were all looking away, embarrassed, not wanting to get involved. They both had the same frozen look on their faces that I could feel on mine. None of us were responding.

“Fuck,” the loon said again, “Emily Dickinson.” Then he turned and left, banging the door behind him.

“What did he say?” asked the antonym-and-synonym guy.

“I don’t know,” the owner said. “I heard an obscenity and I stopped listening. When you’re open to the public, you’re open to the public, you can’t stop the public coming in.”

“But what did he want?” asked the antonym-and-synonym guy, frowning at the closed door.

“He wanted to quote Emily Dickinson’s famous poem ‘Because I could not stop for death’,” I said. “Because her picture’s in the window.”

“I don’t know,” the owner said. “I just didn’t listen.”

Then the antonym-and-synonym guy decided which two dictionaries he wanted to take, bargained the owner down a little because the cover of one of them was a little torn, and I paid for my purchases, provisionally ordered Saplings and left.

“Be careful out there,” the owner said as I went out.

Be careful of what, I wondered, people who think that Emily Dickinson is just that amazing?
Because I would not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
and Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
a swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then ’tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

Posted in Books, Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

23rd September 2005: Venting about copyedit

Posted on by Jo Walton

Dear Copyeditor,

Contrary to your base assumption, I am not a moron.

When I use mixed metaphors — and you may note I only do it in the first person section — I am using them as a form of characterisation. The same applies to the odd word choice. Yes, you are correct, “tiny” would be a more sensible word to use of a grain, even a metaphorical “grain of truth” than “distant”. I used “distant” for a very specific reason. This is first person. First person works that way. Every word in first is a word the character has chosen and which conveys that character’s thoughts. In a way, you can think of it as being all dialogue. If you had your way, you would bland everything worth having in this voice out of existence.

Furthermore, if I had wanted to explain terms before using them, I would have. I explain them when I want to explain them, I am aware that use of them before explanation is to unenlightened readers. This is a thing we do in SF. Don’t worry about it. My test mundanes had no problem with it.

In addition, I do not use British spellings out of some strange desire for authenticity and anachronism, I use them because I grew up in Britain and they seem natural to me. In general, I’m quite happy for you to change them to US spellings. For this particular novel, which is the most English thing I’ve ever written with the possible exception of the story about pulling wings off fairies, I think there is actually a case to be made for using “aeroplane”. I can live with “airplane”, but I definitely want to keep “hoarding” rather than “billboard”. That isn’t in fact spelling. Really, not only am I not a moron, I’m not expecting this to be read by morons. If the US reader doesn’t know what a newspaper hoarding is, they’ll figure it out from context or remain confused. Telling them it’s a billboard won’t help. It isn’t a billboard.

The real problem I have with you is that I don’t trust you. I think that’s your problem with me too, essentially we need an atmosphere of mutual trust, and we don’t have one. I know I don’t use enough punctuation. This is an area where I really like to let the copyeditor help. However, if every one of your word corrections is wrong, how can I trust your extensive use of commas and semi-colons above mine? This means that every single comma change causes me distress and anguish. Thank goodness you didn’t get to do Tooth and Claw.

Now the good news. Astonishingly, for a copyeditor, you seem not to mind “towards”. This is clearly a case of evidence that nothing is perfect, not even things that appear to be perfectly awful.

Posted in My Books, Small Change, Writing