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Tuesday, May 1st, 2012
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10:31 am - May Fiction
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Happy International Workers Day!
It's also the calends of May, the festival of the Bona Dea.
Completely unrelated to this, it is also the day new fiction goes up on GigaNotoSaurus! This month it's "Tilia Songbird" by Francesca Forrest.
“I have a song for you,” the girl said, appearing in Anj’s study unannounced. The two bluetails in the cage by the window trilled a welcome.
Anj looked past the girl to the outer chamber. Where was Shen? He was supposed to keep things like this from happening.
“Your servant is striking a bargain to get your roof repaired,” the girl said, joining Anj in looking into the outer room. Then she leaned across Anj’s desk, so the two were practically nose to nose. “He’ll probably overpay,” she said. She smelled of goat. Anj leaned back slightly, but then the girl herself pulled away and stood up straight.
“Here’s my song,” she said. She clasped her hands together and began to sing, full voiced, as if she were out on a hillside, among the goats and the clouds, and not in a tiny room filled with the accoutrements of a civil servant from the Empire of Cinnabar.
Read! Enjoy!
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| Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
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11:41 am - At last it can be told!
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Well, okay, the few of you who've been wondering at all have only been waiting a week or so.
I now have an agent! And that agent is the lovely and talented Seth Fishman of the Gernert Company!! Oh frabjous day!!! He's a smart guy who is very enthusiastic about my novel, and gets what I'm trying to do with it. This is so awesome, I can't even tell you.
I'm still feeling a little unreal about it. When I first started writing in earnest, getting enough qualified sales to join SFWA seemed like an impossibly ambitious aspiration, something I'd never manage. A distant fantasy to contemplate when I was feeling extravagant. But I actually did it! And then when I got to the point where I had a novel to seriously shop around, finding an agent who'd be interested in representing it seemed like something that would never happen, I would tear my hair out over the query letter and synopsis for nothing. But I tore my hair out anyway, because you can't win if you don't play, right? And I sent out and...honestly, is this real? This is real.
And now, of course, the next step is to actually sell the puppy. Or, the next step is some revisions and send the ms back to Seth--my agent (!!)-- and then he'll try to sell the puppy. Cause that's his job. Cause he's my agent!
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| Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
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8:15 pm - Wiscon Panel Schedule!
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And the very day I wonder when it's coming out, I get the email about my schedule. So, here's what panels I'm on at Wiscon!
World Building Fri, 10:30–11:45 pm Senate A
Richard F. Dutcher, Dorothy Hearst, Ann Leckie, Amy Thomson
Good world building helps you suck in your readers. It allows them to suspend belief in their own reality and enter the reality of your story. It can also help prevent you from writing yourself into a corner. Where and how should you start building your world? What should you be wary of?
A Thousand Times No: Handling Rejections Sat, 4:00–5:15 pm Room 634
Cassie Alexander, Ann Leckie, S. N. Arly, Caroline Stevermer
It's part of the game: If you're an artist and you want to get read, or perform, or have your art displayed, you need to learn how to handle the inevitable and innumerable rejections that follow the submission/audition process. What keeps you on track? What sets you back? How do you recover from a funk? Bring your best and worst rejection stories.
Creating Your Own Religion Sun, 10:00–11:15 pm Conference 4
K. Tempest Bradford, Ann Leckie, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Deirdre M. Murphy, Larissa N. Niec
Which SF authors create interesting, believable religions, and which get religion wrong? (What does it mean to "get religion wrong" anyway?) Do made-up religions with intervening gods work better than those without? How can we as writers avoid making mistakes when creating and writing about fictional religions?
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11:49 am - In other news...
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...yeah, there's actually stuff going on in my life. Stuff that is causing some serious squee right now. But I can't say until the nature of the squee achieves a certain...specificity. Yeah. In the meantime, sorry people who deal with me on a daily basis, I am going to be slightly insane.
So, uh, I'm going to Wiscon! And I'm on panels even! At some point I'll post my panel assignments. They all look fun and have awesome other panelists!
Also I'm absolutely yes planning to go to Worldcon. Got my hotel, got my membership. I've never been to Worldcon before, but I am pretty sure it's going to be a good time, and I'm already pretty certain of running into a number of awesome folks who I either see very rarely, or have only interacted with online. I'm seriously looking forward to it!
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11:36 am - Awesome Kickstarter!
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So I've been meaning for days to post about this, but with one thing and another I haven't.
Until now!
Did you love the awesome The Native Star by MK Hobson? Of course you did! And then you read The Hidden Goddess, right?
Well, now there's a Kickstarter campaign to fund the third book, The Warlock's Curse:
The first two books in the series were the Nebula Award-nominated THE NATIVE STAR and its sequel, THE HIDDEN GODDESS. The books followed New York warlock Dreadnought Stanton and California timber-camp witch Emily Edwards as they made their way across a magical version of 1876 America. The next two books in the series (of which THE WARLOCK'S CURSE is the first) are set in 1910-11 and follow the adventures of their youngest son, Will and his childhood friend, Jenny Hansen.
THE WARLOCK'S CURSE is significantly darker than its predecessors, exploring sinister magical practices that I merely touched upon in the first two books. But while the magic is darker, there's still plenty of my own unique brand of humor, history and romance.
So if you loved The Native Star and/or The Hidden Goddess pop on over to Kickstarter and help make the third book a reality!
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| Sunday, April 8th, 2012
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7:37 am - Happy Holiday!
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The Leckies don't celebrate Easter, of course. We celebrate that ancient and terrible holy day, "Ham is on sale this week. And oh, look, peeps!"
On this day we placate the Elder Gods with animal sacrifices--in effigy, of course, because of local ordinances. We offer the ears of rabbits to the gods, and chick after sweet marshmallow chick. We eat them as one day, the gods will EAT US ALL.
Whatever you do or don't celebrate this Sunday, have a lovely day!
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| Sunday, April 1st, 2012
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10:06 am - No Foolin'
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9:26 am - Ah, April
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| Tuesday, March 27th, 2012
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12:32 pm - Blisteringly fast!
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So, I've got a big project I'm supposed to be working on. What does this mean? It means lots of blog posts instead!
I was walking this morning thinking I wanted to say something about exposition, or maybe something about slush, and when I got back I saw this:
Congratulations go to David Steffen, whose flash fiction story got rejected by PodCastle in a blistering five minutes yesterday. As David said, “I had not even finished updating the entry in my submissions spreadsheet before it got rejected.” The email confirms it: submission at 8:57 a.m., response at 9:02 a.m.
Now I want a big button that says "REJECTIONEER." Maybe with a ribbon on it. I would wear it all around everywhere. Most people would be kind of puzzled by it, but the writers, oh the writers would tremble! They would bow before me! ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR!
Or maybe not.
If you want tips on how to be rejected real fast, here are my suggestions. Write a long, rambly cover letter explaining what inspired you to write your story and what it's about. Don't forget to explain just how the story expresses your religious beliefs--use the most hackneyed, lazy phrases you can find so that I know right up front that this story will have all the depth and originality of a greeting card. For extra effect include irrelevant details, like your age, the name of your elementary school lunch lady, and what jobs you've held over the last decade or two. It is extremely important to scatter misspellings and eggcorns strategically throughout the cover note.
The exact length of this cover letter is a delicate matter--too long and reading it is cutting into my rejection time. Too short and it might not be egregious enough to make me bounce your sub back before I've even finished the first sentence of the actual story. There's an art to this sort of thing. Keep trying!
Of course, you could go for the short cover letter. Perhaps nothing more than a salutation followed by a misspelled exhortation to enjoy the story. This has many advantages, but do not forget to address the note to the wrong editor. There is also an art to picking just exactly the right wrong editor.
Then the sub. You'll want to study "The Eye of Argon" here for style tips. But in general, you want to avoid actually starting anything like a plot right off the bat. Muse for several paragraphs about random things--don't make the sentences too good, and don't forget the eggcorns--or you could introduce a whole bunch of characters without making it clear just how they're going to fit into things. If you do have dialogue in that first paragraph or two, make sure none of it actually sounds like human beings conversing. Extra points for using a setting that it's obvious you don't know anything about. And here it helps to know an individual editor's pet peeves. Give me a sub with a bad cover letter that opens with awful sentences introducing a woman who is described entirely in terms of her shapely legs, large breasts, and flowing blonde hair, time that sucker so it comes in while I'm slushing, and Bob's your uncle. You can also get great results using Arthurian literature--but be careful, if you've actually read a significant proportion of more than one pre-Mists of Avalon take on Arthur you run the risk of actually doing something mildly interesting.
NOTE--the timing is the one thing you can't control. (Maniacal laugh. MANIACAL LAUGH!) And David totally lucked out--he didn't follow any of my pro tips. All he really did right was the timing, and that was an accident.
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| Sunday, March 18th, 2012
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9:14 am - John Carter
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Went to see John Carter last night. Which was mostly pretty good fun. I am somewhat puzzled by the folks who can't figure out why they chose the frame they did, with Burroughs as a character. That was, you know, an actual conceit of at least the first volume. And ultimately Chabon and Stanton used it pretty well, I thought.
And ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.6) glvalentine is right, they did pretty well addressing the creepy sexism of the books. Deja Thoris gets to be pretty kickass. They (mostly, with some reservations, see below) did a good job with Sola.
But glvalentine is also right about the racism. When I saw that opening clip that was going around the web a while ago, I was a bit puzzled by the cavalry officers turning up and being so determined to make John Carter--former Confederate, clearly antagonistic--sign up. I considered it a bad omen when the guy says "people are being murdered in their homes"--because, yanno, the US was only sending the Apache cupcakes and kittens and suddenly they just snapped and started killing people for no reason, right?--and Carter's response is a weak "You started it" when I'd have hoped for that to maybe be a moment to address some of the ickier things that are going on in A Princess of Mars.
But maybe, I think, we're going to undercut the direct equation of Tharks with Apache by having the US Cavalry chase Carter into the cave. Ooops, no. So why the hell did the writers introduce that extra character?
Well, by the end I realized why, on a mechanical level it made sense. But still we're left with the book's very specific equation of Tharks with Apache. And the first thing we learn about the Tharks is how they raise their kids. Like savages, that's how!
When I first read A Princess of Mars I knew that something felt off about the equation Burroughs was (very deliberately) making, but it was something I couldn't put my finger on. I did see the patronizing attitude Carter takes towards the Green Martians, and I knew that was par for the course at the time, and I figured that was what was making me uneasy. But a few years later, after some conversations and some research for a particular project, I realized that the first thing Carter learns about the Tharks--that they don't really care about their children--was in fact an extremely common racist trope about Native Americans. Possibly still is, since for years I saw examples of it without realizing what it was I was seeing.
I'm going to hope--this is a terrible sort of thing to hope for, but you take what you can get--that Chabon and Stanton were just unaware of that trope, just not aware of the way the depiction of the Tharks is constructed of racist depictions of Native Americans. If they'd seen it, they'd have addressed it. I hope. But I wish they'd have seen it and done something with it.
If you can sit through that kind of thing, which sometimes I can and sometimes I can't, and some people very understandably can't ever, John Carter is a fair amount of fun. The visuals are cool--Paidhi Girl says the airships looked exactly like she'd imagined them, which startled her and kind of minorly creeped her out--and very little of the dialogue sounded utterly improbable. You know the sort of thing, where characters in an emotional situation make speeches that no human being in that situation would actually utter, but are meant to be "moving." The acting was very good, especially on the understanding that a film like this needs some heavy-duty, highly-skilled scenery chewing. On which topic--if James Purefoy had been onscreen thirty seconds longer than he was he'd have stolen the movie and they'd have had to retitle it Kantos Kan of Mars.
Also, a message for Disney executives--people stayed away from Mars Needs Moms in droves because it was clear from the previews that it was tripe. Mars was not the problem there. Truncating the title of John Carter because Mars doesn't sell movies was just...I mean...I don't know, I don't understand people sometimes.
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| Thursday, March 15th, 2012
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1:28 pm - Clockwork Phoenix 2
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Originally published at Ann Leckie. You can comment here or there. So, I meant to post this yesterday. Except yesterday was, for me, the worst technology day in the history of technology. On the good side, I got a new keyboard and an upgrade to Windows 7 out of the deal. Also that kind of old but still functional automatic backup thingy I’ve got running saved all my data. On the bad side, I was so freaking stressed out yesterday I can’t even. Do not ask me what happened, you will only receive sputtering and some incoherent swearing. The worst part of it is, it was pretty much all my own fault. AAAAARGH!
Anyway. Let’s start today off with something good! Back in the day I decided that I needed to write a post-apocalyptic dinosaurs on Mars story. The result was “The Endangered Camp,” which appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 2 Which was, itself, chock full of awesome stories–one was nominated for a Nebula (Saladin Ahmed’s “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela”), and several others turned up in various years best volumes.
But it was not avaiable in an ebook edition. Until now! Gentle readers, I give you the Kindle edition of Clockwork Phoenix 2! For $3.99!!!!
Editor Mike Allen has links to Amazon UK and Amazon DE and says it’ll be available in epub and mobi at Weightless Books next Tuesday.
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| Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
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9:09 am - Umbrellas
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Sometimes when I'm trying to explain the idea of privilege and saying or doing racist or sexist things without realizing it, and what might be a good way to respond to accusations that one has done or said something racist or sexist, I use an analogy.
Imagine you're walking down the street swinging your umbrella. And suddenly someone shouts, "Ow, dammit, my eye! Watch where you're swinging that umbrella!"
What's your first reaction? Surprise, maybe, because you didn't think you were swinging that wide, or that anyone was behind you. And the first words out of your mouth would probably be something like, "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't realize! Are you all right?" Because after all, you didn't actually want to hurt anyone, you feel bad that you did.
So, that analogy? That is not meant to encourage people to cut umbrella-swingers slack. It's meant to demonstrate that in most real-world situations where you hurt someone unintentionally, the generally accepted response is to apologize sincerely for having hurt someone, and in most cases to be a bit more mindful with your umbrella in future. So that, in these other situations when someone is likely to say something like, "but the person who got poked was too meany pants in her complaint!" or "They didn't explain exactly how or why having a sharp metal ferrule jabbed in their eye might have been uncomfortable, how am I to know unless they tell me very politely and in great detail?" or "they should have complained quietly off in a corner so I don't have to feel bad about having hurt them!" you can see how obviously wrong and ridiculous those reactions look. If I poked you in the eye with my umbrella and then told you I might listen to you if you didn't use horrible words that make me uncomfortable, you'd think pretty badly of me. And rightly so.
Now imagine bystanders watching someone poke a person in the eye with their umbrella. The recipient of the umbrella-stab reacting "Ow, dammit, my eye! Watch where you're swinging that!" The umbrella wielder reacting at first indignantly, but then after a bit saying, "Gosh, I'm sorry."
And a few bystanders say, "But the person who got poked should have explained how and why they were hurt! Quietly somewhere in a corner so that umbrella-swinging dude didn't have to feel bad about it in front of us! I mean, sure she was mad, but she really ought to have been mad in a way that didn't hurt his feelings!" Imagine that. I mean, really imagine that.
Imagine being the person on the receiving end of that umbrella, and how you would really feel--not how you imagine you ought to feel (but won't when you actually get your eye jabbed).
That is the point of the analogy.
Honestly, some days I want a hammer and a big metal stamp that says CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE.
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| Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
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9:45 pm - More Required Reading
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More from Hal Duncan!
How to Write a Paragraph
How to Write a Point of View
These are both very basic, like How to Write a Sentence, from the other day. But looking back on my younger writer-self, I think even with his explanations some of this would have been invisible to me five or ten years ago. If you're reading these--for the love of all that's good in the world, read them, particularly if you're struggling in slush--and you don't see what he's saying, print them out and tape them to the wall and read them every morning until it comes clear. This is essential stuff.
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| Thursday, March 1st, 2012
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8:44 am - March Fiction
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It's March 1! Which has always made a much better candidate for the First Day of Spring than the equinox, in my mind. Let's not even talk about the (IMO relatively recent) silliness of calling the solstices the first day of the seasons they are, in fact, the middle of. (There's a reason the traditional names for those two days are "midsummer" and "midwinter," people!)
Anyway. Enough of me getting my early morning crochety on. It's the calends of March. But I can't make any of the couple of Roman feasts--one to Juno, one to Mars, it's Ancient Roman New Year, and time to rekindle the fire in the temple of Vesta, if you were curious--seem like they have some sort of thematic connection to this month's story. Not enough coffee, probably.
So. This month's story! Is "Tattooed Love Boys" by Alex Jeffers.
The guy (his name sounded like Raf) asked how old Theo was—seventeen—and suggested she bring him in. Raf looked only a few years older than Theo. Emma liked the little blue-black glyph inked on the concave bone of his left temple between hairline and eyebrow. She thought it was meant to evoke a bird’s wing. But then Raf turned to change the CD and the tattoos on his shoulder and back, what wasn’t covered by his wifebeater, disappointed her. Koi fish, lotus blossoms, a whiskered Asian dragon—boring. As cliché as the horned skulls and flames and roses Theo dreamed about.
But when Raf returned his attention to her Emma decided he was good looking so she asked how he’d known to speak English. “You speak it very well,” she added. She wanted a moment to contemplate the image that had just come to her of Raf kissing her big brother, caressing Theo’s shoulder and arm. Raf’s long fingers left strokes of color on Theo’s skin, fire-breathing skulls, schools of glistening koi.
“You have the American look,” Raf said.
Emma didn’t believe he meant to sound condescending.
Read! Enjoy! Happy Ancient Roman New Year!
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| Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
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9:25 am - Hal Duncan on How to Write a Sentence
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Your assigned reading for the day!
I've posted a few times about things like word choice, and information flow. Duncan's post is addressing those, and a few other things, but they're all things that are sort of...part of each other.
Anyone still working to get out of slush, trying to figure out why you aren't selling at all, or why you aren't getting past slushreaders, read what he's got to say and ponder it. Meditate on it daily. What he says is invaluable, and true.
I do want to kind of amplify something he touches on--the question of efficiency, or removing anything "unnecessary." A lot of people spend time paring anything away from the sentence that can be pared and still have something comprehensible or "grammatically correct"*
That "cut everything unnecessary" is absolutely true, but "necessary" isn't just a function of grammar. In fiction "efficient" isn't just about sentences that have everything they need to be informative and grammatical and no more. It's a much, much more complicated issue than that. When you're writing fiction, anything you need to achieve your effect is necessary. That might be a long string of adverbs. Or passive voice. Or sentence fragments, or a sentence two pages long with a zillion nested clauses. Who knows? Only you do. And then only if you've got the tools to see that yes, that's exactly what you need.**
Where a sentence of basic prose is purposed to communicate, a sentence of narrative is purposed to conjure.
Go read it.
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*"Grammatically correct" is a much, much more complicated issue than many elementary school English teachers seem to realize. Do not make me rant by speaking to me of avoiding singular they, or ending sentences with prepositions, or how one should never use passive voice (defined as something that is, in fact, emphatically not passive voice). If you find prescriptive pedanticism tempting, go read Language Log for a few months.
**Really, honestly, that's hardly ever exactly what you need. It's probably good policy to think long and hard before you do something like that. Still, it's possible it'll have the effect you want, and that's when "rules" about adverbs--or anything else--not only won't help you, they'll actively hurt you. THERE ARE NO RULES. There are only choices that produce (or fail to produce) various effects. Forget about rules. Make the choices that will give you the results you're after. As Hal says, don't just pull things off the shelf and call it okay because it doesn't break any "rules." Think about all your various choices, and what you want the sentence to do, and then decide.
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| Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
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3:06 pm
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So today I'm reading Walter Burkert! I have a feeling I will be Not Reading Walter Burkert in the very near future!
I've read some by him before, and mostly enjoyed it and felt I'd learned some things. But this...well. It's Homo Necans and purports to find the origins of animal sacrifice in ancient hunting practices and rituals. Okay, sounds plausible to me. Tell me, Walter, how did we get from hunting to "make a parade with some basket-carrying girls, a flute player, and the cow, throw some barley, kill the cow and burn it's thighbones and it's time for a nice big supper!"?
Well, I'm not a hundred percent sure, because we've spent the majority of the first part of the book on how "ancient hunting practices" involve weird assumptions about aggression and sociobiological theories about how men are the "breadwinners" and hence through their hunting provide for their women and children. (Honestly, breadwinners. Hunters bring home bread. Really? No thinking that one through? Granted, this is translated from German and my German isn't good enough to know if the word in that language involves Brot or not, but still.)
See, primates aren't predators by nature, so when humans invented weapons and became predators, they became Ultra Dangerous to each other. This required channeling all that (male, natch) aggression towards hunting. In order to guarantee aggression during hunting, males are required to see the prey as totally masculine, because male responses to seeing women and children would sap them of their vital masculinity--I mean, would undermine aggressive responses. Somehow, though, sex with women is an extension of male aggression.
Yeah, I don't know either. But hey, maybe he's right! I mean, it's not like research has shown that in hunter/gatherer societies it's women's activities that actually provide the majority of their group's nutritional needs. And it's absolutely a universal that in such societies men do all the hunting and women stay home watching babies and foraging for berries. Right?
A vast amount of ethnographic and archaeological evidence demonstrates that the sexual division of labor in which men hunt and women gather wild fruits and vegetables is an uncommon phenomenon among hunter-gatherers worldwide. Although most of the gathering is usually done by women, a society in which men completely abstained from gathering easily available plants has yet to be found. Generally women hunt the majority of the small game while men hunt the majority of the large and dangerous game, but there are quite a few documented exceptions to this general pattern. A study done on the Aeta people of the Philippines states: "About 85% of Philippine Aeta women hunt, and they hunt the same quarry as men. Aeta women hunt in groups and with dogs, and have a 31% success rate as opposed to 17% for men. Their rates are even better when they combine forces with men: mixed hunting groups have a full 41% success rate among the Aeta."[17]
Oops.
But this here, this is amazing. Read this:
In the shock caused by the sight of flowing blood we clearly experience the remnant of a biological, life-preserving inhibition. But that is precisely what must be overcome, for men, at least, could not afford "to see no blood," and they were educated accordingly.
No, seriously, you just read that. Walter Burkert said, in public--in print no less--that men could not afford to avoid seeing blood with the implication that women could, indeed, spend their lives free of the sight of blood.
He said it in print, in German, and then allowed it to be translated into English so even more people could slam their heads against their desks after reading it. This is more egregious even than calling hunters who bring home meat "breadwinners" while dismissing the nutritional contribution of the folks who are, in his (quite faulty) model, actually providing the plant part of the diet. And the fact that he wrote that sentence and never seems to bat an eye over it....
Seriously? I mean, seriously? If he doesn't start giving specifics about actual sacrificial rituals real soon this bad boy's flying across the room.
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| Monday, February 20th, 2012
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7:51 am - Nebula Nominations
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So, SFWA has announced this year's Nebula Ballot!
It's a great thing to wake up to! Everyone who follows this LJ knows I loved Embassytown, so I'm really happy to see it on the list. Then I see that the awesome Carolyn Ives Gilman (get that blog going already so I can link to it!) is there with her awesome novella "The Ice Owl" which, if you haven't read it yet you should.
I see Rachel Swirsky is there for her novelette "Fields of Gold"! I look further down the list of novelettes.
I nearly have a stroke. Because also on that list? "Sauerkraut Station" by Ferret Steinmetz and "The Migratory Pattern of Dancers" by Katie Sparrow. Both of which appeared, of course, in GigaNotoSaurus.
Now, obviously I'm a big fan of both those stories. But, you know, that doesn't mean that enough Nebula Voters will also like them as much as I do, and enough to recommend them over other stories that are equally awesome. Apparently, however, that was the case! How wonderful!!!!
I can't tell you how pleased I am to see these stories on the ballot, and how happy I am for Katie and Ferret. Congratulations, you two!!!!!
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| Friday, February 17th, 2012
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9:25 am
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Sometimes, when I'm reading old, translated stuff--I mean, really old, not just a hundred years but a couple of thousand--I run across moments when something rings really true or real. And usually I just go, "Huh, cool." But sometimes they make me scratch my head a bit.
Right now I'm reading translated Egyptian stuff. And one of the things I read recently was Egyptian Tales Translated from the Papyri. There's a story in there that's set at the time of Khufu (as in the great pyramid of) but was pretty obviously written a good deal later. We don't have all of it, but it starts out, Pharaoh wants to hear stories of magic, and various people step up and oblige. They're all set in Khufu's past, but one of Pharaoh's sons says he's got one that's amazing and the magician is still alive! Khufu is impressed enough to summon this magician, who, it's said, can restore the dead to life.
"Wherefore is it, Dedi, that I have not yet seen thee?"
And Dedi answered, "He who is called it is that comes; the king (life, wealth, and health) calls me, and behold I come,"
And his majesty said, "Is it true, that which men say, that thou canst restore the head which is smitten off?"
And Dedi replied, "Truly, I know that, O king (life, wealth, and health), my lord."
And his majesty said, "Let one bring me a prisoner who is in prison, that his punishment may be fulfilled."
And Dedi said, "Let it not be a man, O king, my lord; behold we do not even thus to our cattle." And a duck was brought unto him, and its head was cut off. And the duck was laid on the west side of the hall, and its head on the east side of the hall. And Dedi spake his magic speech. And the duck fluttered along the ground, and its head came likewise; and when it had come part to part the duck stood and quacked. And they brought likewise a goose before him, and he did even so unto it. His majesty caused an ox to be brought, and its head cast on the ground. And Dedi spake his magic speech. And the ox stood upright behind him, and followed him with his halter trailing on the ground.
That "Wherefore is it" exchange at the beginning I could have cut off, but I find it amusing. "Why haven't I seen you before?" asks the king, and Dedi says, as politely as possible, "Well, you never asked for me until now!"
But the head scratchy thing is the business with the duck. Pharaoh, quite understandably, suggests using a condemned man for the experiment. Dedi refuses. Not humans! His reason convinces Pharaoh, but it doesn't really make sense if Dedi is actually bringing things back to life.
This is the moment where this scene suddenly rang true to me--Dedi is a fake. That duck and pig and ox really died--they had to for the trick. Kill a duck and who knows one duck from another? Dedi has a confederate somewhere who's assisting him with his stage magic, but the whole thing will be over if he tries to substitute one recognizable human being for another. This is glaringly obvious.
But this isn't a story about stage magic. This is a story about real magic. Dedi is the genuine article. So why didn't the scribe who wrote this either let Dedi resurrect a human being, or give him some better excuse, since really the only point of the show for Pharaoh was to convince everyone that Dedi was the real deal?
Of course, the "real" magicians of ancient Egypt were actually stage magicians, frauds one and all. I wonder if the scribe was drawing on their own experience of seeing magic, and maybe not realizing the significance of "No, no, I wouldn't treat any human being that way. How about this duck?"
For me it has the odd effect of taking something that's obviously a fictional episode in an obviously fictional story and suddenly making it seem real--a literally true, yes-that's-exactly-what-happened, snapshot of an actual moment.
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| Thursday, February 16th, 2012
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7:58 pm - Context is for the weak
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| Monday, February 13th, 2012
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9:18 am - Links 4 U
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First off, the Carl Brandon Society is holding an auction to benefit Con or Bust, which helps fans of color make it to conventions. Check it out!
Second, the other day I ran across this post, Why Do People Keep Calling Me a Racist? An Explanation for (Some) White People. Go read. Do not argue. Do not say "But..." Just read and ponder.
dsmoen on Why I No Longer Support the Writers of the Future Contest. Like her, I've got no beef with previous winners or finalists. But in my opinion anyone considering submitting there ought to take a long, hard look at what they're associated with. I've occasionally had conversations with people who don't see what the big deal is with Scientology. After all, freedom of religion and neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket and all that. Thing is, if it was just a question of believing things I thought were absurd I'd wish every Scientologist a happy Space Clam Day and go about my business. But we're talking about an organization that physically abuses its members, chases them down when they try to leave, threatens and harasses anyone who publicly disagrees with them or opposes them, and worse. They have, in fact, broken legs and picked pockets.
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