flemmings | (no subject)

Someone on my FFL has been reading The Worm Ouroboros (cue chorus of "Mister, you're a better man than I") (The Yardbirds, you say? Amazing.) I could as soon read Spenser as Eddison, meaning my attention span is too short to swim through treacle like that. I *have* mastered our later speed and shortness, thank you Fenodyree, so I can't be having with the earlier leisurely prolix.

But the Someone quotes Le Guin as proposing "that all fantasy protagonists should speak in an elevated, heroic style." Good heavens, what *was* the woman thinking of? I hope it was a very early essay written when fantasy was still overshadowed by Tolkien and urban fantasy hadn't been invented. Though apparently she slammed Zelazny for making his 20th century America-dwelling Amberites speak like, good heavens, 20th century Americans. (That's not the reason I dislike Amber, btw. It's because they speak like wise-ass 20th century Americans. Likewise Eddings.) Equally, Paarfi's pastiche is all very well for the time he was 'writing', but modern man Vlad should speak in what we recognize as a modern idiom.

Perhaps she was indeed thinking of Tolkien's style, which is high and heroic a lot of the time but never, to my taste, turgid. It knows where it's going, and gets there. Possibly an English professor of English literature has a better grasp of the historic styles available to him than someone less familiar with the canon. Or his sense of style just knew to choose Tacitus' diction over Malory's.

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Ah. "From Elfland and Poughkeepsie". That piece of nonsense. As if magic could not be found in Poughkeepsie (an extraordinary, exotic name, evocative of all manner of strangeness).

I find Tolkien quite notable for the range of styles he used. "High and heroic" for the characters that suit it, demotic for the ones that suit it, what I would call "formal modern" for much of the narration. And yes, it's narratively very tight. Tolkien gets entire battles over with in a couple of pages that certain other writers would take entire volumes to describe.

Le Guin is just wrong here. (And I, too, bristle at her dismissal of Poughkeepsie—had she spent the slightest amount of time in this area, she would have realized that it's imbued with so much magic, it might actually be a portal. How else to explain the abundance of Buddhist monasteries, strange churches, and decaying mansions? There is an actual standing stone of ancient, unexplainable provenance close to where I live.)

I've never read the essay. I'd confidently assumed that it did indeed posit Poughkeepsie as a good place for Elfland to take residence because hell yes, that name. Poughkeepsie sounds like it might be Scots, and when you go into it, means 'the reed-covered lodge by the little-water place'. Magical!

Yes to Tolkien's range. Does high and low styles in a masterly fashion, and actually knows what 'formal modern' is used for. Later writers trying for a formal narrative style always seem to be pastiching the wrong authors ie the purple ones.

Edited 2022-03-15 16:05 (UTC)

As I said to Anna, I'd never read the essay since it somehow wasn't included in any volume of hers I came across. I assumed that she meant that Poughkeepsie was a proper place to locate a New World entry to Elfland, just because the name sounded so resonant. I don't know what the town was like fifty years ago, if it was a raw industrial city or something, the polar opposite of fantasy. But what I saw of upper New York State (on the train down to the city) was always enchanting to me.

New York has this rather weird administrative system (that I can't say I fully understand) in which townships are units of counties. So the city of Poughkeepsie is actually in the Town of Poughkeepsie (which boggles the English language if not bureaucratic logic.)

The city of Poughkeepsie really is a cesspool—but even its awfulness has the feel of magicking since so recently, it was not awful, it was an all-American city with high school bands and majorettes marching down Main Street on the 4th of July. And then boom!, just like that. It changed into something dark. Almost as though some Magical Being had put a curse on it. The change was that fast and that unattributable to ordinary economic causation.

This whole part of the Hudson Valley has this sense of an enchanted place. I mean, obviously, I'm over-imaginative! But I've seen some really unimaginative people respond to that, too. But it would be an excellent setting for a fantasy novel. In fact, I've always suspected that the original of Brakebills (from Lev Grossman's excellent The Magicians series) is actually Bard College, just 10 miles up the road from me.

I am boggled by your geographical nomenclature. Also confused but hey- those who get it will get it and the rest, pfft, as the Japanese say.

So when did the BOOM! Dolorous Word happen?

It was one of the things she wrote that I vehemently disagreed with. Unfortunately, I think it encouraged writers with a bad ear to think that "high style" = purple prolixity (the "pale parabola of joy" tendency). Whereas someone like Diana Wynne Jones could suggest an ocean of wonder in two simple sentences that your average semi-literate teenager would have no difficulty in understanding.

I did enjoy Eddison, though. The sheer intensity of his commitment to his chosen style just carried me along.

Edited 2022-03-16 08:38 (UTC)

Ah, the Unseelie Court must have moved in. See Emma Bull's "War For The Oaks", another really excellent example of how the demotic style can easily accommodate all manner of magic.

I lived for three years in Manhattan, which is without doubt a place of great power, but the rest of the state remains something of a mystery, apart from the also-otherworldly enclave of Woodbury Common.

Edited 2022-03-16 08:36 (UTC)

A bad ear or (my personal idee fixe) a limited exposure to older styles. You can't pastiche what you've never read- or heard, come to that. Look at all those people who have no idea how medieval or early modern English handled pronouns and their verbs. 'Thou hath' or 'I hast', etc. Did they never read any Shakespeare? (Yes, in school, and they hated it.)

Or they got hold of the Decadent poets like Dowson and Swinburne and then it was game over.

❤️❤️❤️

Yes indeed. My current pet hate is "lay/laid" as a substitute for "lie/lay".

I am willing to give a pass to people who are writing space Quakers.

I had that pet hate thirty years ago when I first read fanfiction. And the conviction that the past form of lay is lay, which even mainstream authors do. I think it has to be some regional dialect thing because the 'lie/lay lay/laid' reflex is missing in so many (American, usually) people. Who insist that the past of drag is drug.

I like Quakers in Spaaace!! But the Quaker usage is still weird to me. Fans may confuse which person a verb is, and they do, oh they do, but I've never read anyone using thee in the nominative.

I have seen 'drug' as the past tense of 'drag' in a lot of fanfic! All from the US. Like the idea that there is such a thing as "cousin incest". I assumed that it was a regional usage. Like "snuck" as the past tense of "sneak".

Edited 2022-03-18 12:35 (UTC)

The 'cousin incest' has always flummoxed me, coming as I do from a family where not one but two French uncles married their nieces, both with Papal permission don't-ask-me-how.

Because Canadians are bilingual in English, I too will say snuck when I'm being colloquial, just as I use yiddish words and constructions. But it's not something I'd ever write.

One of those serendipitous things, and actual, rather good, fanfic of "Much Ado About Nothing":

https://archiveofourown.org/works/1090029

Not bad. I caught one or two slips but mostly she managed the archaic forms in a masterly fashion.

Indeed. And points for having clearly made an effort.