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there's always more reading to do...
Which is why I had to come up with a name for Existential Napping Reflex: the nearly unendurable urge to give up and take a nap in the face of so much I will never know, no matter how hard I try to read it all. The worst ENR I ever dealt with was while doing research in the British Museum Reading Room, where all the history just squishes you down like a bug and you realize how little of it you will ever absorb, so why not just snatch a nap?
On the poem front, an excellent place to start is Garrison Keillor's book _Good Poems_. He has included so many of the people whose work I admire in such a convenient package.
And Rudyard Kipling's _Jungle Book I and II_ -- my grandma quickly realized I was not the child for _Little Women_ like my cousins. She knew I needed to run with the Seeohnee pack with Mowgli. And as for Guy Gavriel Kay -- wow. Start with the Fionivar Tapestry: The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, The Darkest Road. There's a reason the Tolkien family picked him as J.R.R.'s literary executor. That trilogy won the World Fantasy Award the year it came out: rich, primal, vivid, and he never, ever gives you any triumph without cost, sometime great cost. Oddly, I trust him because he's hurt me more than any other storyteller I can think of. Initially it made me angry the first time I encountered this, but then I realized that he was taking a huge risk, telling the story the way it had actually unfolded, sparing me nothing. Somehow this made the joys greater when they came, because the anguish, too, was entirely there. It's like using the richest blacks and the lightest grays in a pencil drawing, or the entire dynamic range in a piece of music -- you've got the whole range of human hearing [in pitch, not in volume], and all those keys or frets or fingerings, so why not use 'em? Too many people hang out around middle C because that's what we're taught so early to find, where we're told to return if we get lost when we're not allowed to look at our hands but only at the music. Understand that I gave up my piano lessons quickly when I realized that I did not share the family musical gift, and went happily back to my pencils and paint, but I never forgot the tendency to stay in known territory at the expense of greater expressive range. And I remembered to fight it when I needed to in order to get what was in my head out into the world so I could look at it another way, and maybe share it with others.
The really terrific fan fic is the stuff that has canon nailed but has grown ideas that reach farther and deeper, sometimes so far they have to flake off into AU. The whole premise of non-canonical relationships is the simplest kind of AU. What a terrific thing that is, to have parallel universes in which to tell our own stories. My current favorite one is "The Adventure of the Displaced Watcher" by Antenna, to whom I owe a far more detailed feedback in return for such great pleasure. And Meegat's latest installment in Giles's adventures with Vulcan's Bane, "Through the Barricades". Nah, they're not hunkered down in the middle playing minor variations on known melodies that everyone recognizes. They're tearing off across the keys and I'm going with 'em because they lead a terrific expedition.
On the poem front, an excellent place to start is Garrison Keillor's book _Good Poems_. He has included so many of the people whose work I admire in such a convenient package.
And Rudyard Kipling's _Jungle Book I and II_ -- my grandma quickly realized I was not the child for _Little Women_ like my cousins. She knew I needed to run with the Seeohnee pack with Mowgli. And as for Guy Gavriel Kay -- wow. Start with the Fionivar Tapestry: The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, The Darkest Road. There's a reason the Tolkien family picked him as J.R.R.'s literary executor. That trilogy won the World Fantasy Award the year it came out: rich, primal, vivid, and he never, ever gives you any triumph without cost, sometime great cost. Oddly, I trust him because he's hurt me more than any other storyteller I can think of. Initially it made me angry the first time I encountered this, but then I realized that he was taking a huge risk, telling the story the way it had actually unfolded, sparing me nothing. Somehow this made the joys greater when they came, because the anguish, too, was entirely there. It's like using the richest blacks and the lightest grays in a pencil drawing, or the entire dynamic range in a piece of music -- you've got the whole range of human hearing [in pitch, not in volume], and all those keys or frets or fingerings, so why not use 'em? Too many people hang out around middle C because that's what we're taught so early to find, where we're told to return if we get lost when we're not allowed to look at our hands but only at the music. Understand that I gave up my piano lessons quickly when I realized that I did not share the family musical gift, and went happily back to my pencils and paint, but I never forgot the tendency to stay in known territory at the expense of greater expressive range. And I remembered to fight it when I needed to in order to get what was in my head out into the world so I could look at it another way, and maybe share it with others.
The really terrific fan fic is the stuff that has canon nailed but has grown ideas that reach farther and deeper, sometimes so far they have to flake off into AU. The whole premise of non-canonical relationships is the simplest kind of AU. What a terrific thing that is, to have parallel universes in which to tell our own stories. My current favorite one is "The Adventure of the Displaced Watcher" by Antenna, to whom I owe a far more detailed feedback in return for such great pleasure. And Meegat's latest installment in Giles's adventures with Vulcan's Bane, "Through the Barricades". Nah, they're not hunkered down in the middle playing minor variations on known melodies that everyone recognizes. They're tearing off across the keys and I'm going with 'em because they lead a terrific expedition.
