The Breaking Time

A story of a veteran and his wife

A Waterloo veteran and his wife, c1850s

I'm running around in between journalism work and trying to arrange details for an upcoming trip, so I'd figured I would put this out there for all you hungry readers. 

I discovered the above photo through the dear people at Coilhouse, who last Friday, called for stories based on this wonderful old photo.

As longtime readers may recall, this sort of thing strikes both my heartstrings and creative brain juices. Saturday morning, I was in a particularly fervent writing mood and quickly dashed out the following mini-piece. I posted a pre-minor edits version in the comments over at Coilhouse, but I figured I'd post it here too.

Remember that "there is no they" applies to people in the past as well as our present time. Their lives were as rich, real and complicated as our own:

It was not a young man’s war when he left for it, and he was not a young man when he returned. His shoulder had been pounded raw by Brown Bess’ continual kick. Shortly after he and his comrades paraded through the cheering streets he found that his right hand began to tremble.

He tried to hide it, some days better than others, leaving those days in the past along with his uniform, the simmering retch of amputation yards and the morning he shot a man out of a tree. All disappeared far behind ruddy cragged cheeks and a slow, even smile.

Still, he could forget things, especially all those years later. So his hat was tattered, the brim tilted and he fumbled just to get his coat over one button. The medal, however, stood polished to a shine.

She was not young either, by the time he returned. The home caught fire two years after he marched away. While she survived leaping from the window, the fall injured her jaw. It healed, but that side of her face stood out, fixed in its scars, from the other. She made no pains to hide it – hiding was not her way – and secretly enjoyed sharpening the wry expression it made so easy.

There was much work to be done. She had no time for church; the house Bible remained dusty and little-opened. On occasion she could quote it, if called for in conversation. Blessedly, she still sang. So did he, though cruder tunes than hers; she even laughed at them once in awhile, before her hands shot up to cover smiling lips.

When the photographer came, she drew the bonnet, scarf and gloves carefully out of the ancient, fire-scarred trunk. Her hands had been cleaned carefully and before she slid her fingers into the leather, took particular note to cover the clinging smell of kitchen meat with precious, saved drops of Oxford Lavender. He clasped his right in his left, to hide the twitch, leaning forward on heavy shoulders. The young cameraman’s many attempts to adjust his equipment amused her, as did his ill-concealed blushing beneath her steady gaze.

Husband and wife both passed a few years later, within the same week. Each swore on their respective deathbeds that they had never loved another so deeply, or so true.

Comments welcome.

All Tomorrows: The Birthgrave

My column on Tanith Lee's out-of-print, brilliant feminist sword and sorcery epic is up on Coilhouse:

“To wake, and not to know where, or who you are, not even to know what you are—whether a thing with legs and arms, or a brain in the hull of a great fish—that is a strange awakening. But after awhile, uncurling in the darkness, I began to uncover myself, and I was a woman.”

So begins Tanith Lee’s 1975 novel The Birthgrave, her first. I stumbled upon it some years ago, yellowing long out of print in a bargain bin.

I usually try to avoid revisiting authors too much on All Tomorrows, and regular readers will remember that I sang Lee’s praises for The Silver Metal Lover. But lately this column has been tracing the lesser known paths of fantasy and epic. No discussion of epic during sci-fi-fanta-whatever’s Deviant Age would be complete without delving into The Birthgrave.

It is a Sword and Sorcery epic, thunderously bloody and sensual in a way that would make Robert E. Howard pant. Yet it is also a deeper story of character and identity: a feminist work of a piece with the questions sweeping through its time.

For Lee’s (at first) nameless heroine awakes with nothing but questions, as the eruption of a volcano shakes her from a seemingly endless sleep with memories of hidden power, tragedy and a bottomless sense of guilt.

Driven to find answers, she runs into Übermensch types who try to turn her into the women featured on the covers of your average Sword and Sorcery tale— slave, figurehead goddess, concubine — clinging open-mouthed to the leg of some buffed-up conqueror.

But this is not their story: it is hers. As she survives (or buries) them all, as Lee sucks the reader into the elusive quest for power over one’s own life, she makes sure you’ll never see a dread sorceress the same way again.

Coilhouse Issue 03: get one

I'm proud to announce that I've got an article in Issue 03 of Coilhouse, now available for order. It's on the Kowloon Walled City, a fascinating, lawless pocket of Hong Kong that's the closest thing to a pirate utopia in the modern age. Greg Girard and Ian Lambot's gripping, gritty photographs of Kowloon make it a piece I'm extremely happy with.

The entire issue is chock full of excellent material and I count myself lucky to be associated with Coilhouse, both online and in print. I keep having high expectations of where they'll go next and they keep blowing those out of the water. Buy one. You won't regret it.

All Tomorrows: The Dying Earth

My column on this beautiful and surprisingly influential classic is up on Coilhouse:

"A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone’s written the story. He’s supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment."
-Jack Vance

In 1955, The Lord of the Rings was published, and promptly changed fantasy forever. In its juggernaut status, the particular breed of epic it spawned often pushed aside, in the popular mind, any type of fantasy that came before.

Just what was that? Its rough-hewn predecessors took the form of hybrid stories rooted in fairy-tale, lurid history and the raw juices of pulp adventure. Robert E. Howard’s sword and sorcery romps are a perfect example — as are H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares, for that matter. While the characters here may be connected to grand events, this was a fantasy of short stories, not novels. Instead of a painstakingly described mythos, this thrived on brain-watering mysteries and jolt endings.

Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth hit the stands in 1950. A collection of six perfect, interlaced stories set in a time when Earth’s sun is sputtering out and no line remains between sorcery and science, it didn’t exactly produce the literary paradigm shift that Tolkien did, but it has had its pull. Gene Wolfe, Tanith Lee and numerous other authors were influenced by Vance. Gary Gygax also drew heavily from it when crafting the magic of the original Dungeons and Dragons.

I’d read about it often before finally tracking down a tattered paperback copy (it seems to come in no other form). The feeling I got when I finally immersed myself in its pages was that, growing up, these were the fairy tales I’d always wanted.

In a happy bit of synchronicity, the New York Times just did a damn good profile of Vance.

Poems for Friday: Litany for Dictatorships

I've featured the work of the prophetic Stephen Vincent Benét here before, but based on the news coming out of China and Iran, I thought this masterpiece was appropriate. 

The last stanza, in particular, made me shake the first time I read it. The years may pass, but it remains as relevant as ever.

For all those beaten, for the broken heads,

The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,

The ghosts in the burning city of our time… 

For those taken in rapid cars to the house and beaten

By the skillful boys with the rubber fists,

-Held down and beaten, the table cutting the loins

Or kicked in the groin and left, with the muscles jerking

Like a headless hen's on the floor of the slaughter-house

While they brought the next man in with his white eyes staring.

For those who still said "Red Front" or "God save the Crown!"

And for those who were not courageous

But were beaten nevertheless.

For those who spit out the bloody stumps of their teeth

      Quietly in the hall,

Sleep well on stone or iron, watch for the time

And kill the guard in the privy before they die,

Those with the deep-socketed eyes and the lamp burning. 

For those who carry the scars, who walk lame - for those

Whose nameless graves are made in the prison-yard

And the earth smoothed back before the morning and the lime scattered. 

Independence Day (belated)

I spent July 4 visiting my family at a nice, secluded spot up in Virginia. There was tubing, firearms, alcohol and fire works in a rock quarry. I managed to make a passable jumbalaya. It was extremely relaxing and much needed.

When I got back into town, I was thinking about posting Jimi Hendrix's stunning rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner," but it turns out that Mer over at Coilhouse already beat me to it with an excellent post on how America changed in 1969.

That got some of my own wheels turning. At its heart this is a nation founded by the people forced or kicked out of the rest of the world. That means dissidents, schemers, con artists, zealots, criminals, slaves, inventors, dreamers and the stark raving mad. That's the good news and the bad; it's why Leonard Cohen had our number when he dubbed the U.S. the "cradle of the best and of the worst."

This weekend my 95-year-old grandmother, as exuberant and ferocious as ever, told me she believed my generation is living through "big times," maybe more than those she'd seen. 

My jaw hit the floor.

A lot has happened in the last decade: the first disputed presidential election in over a century, 9-11, the ruination of New Orleans, two wars, a historic election, massive financial collapse and massive changes in media and technology, just to name a few.

But still: measured against Prohibition, two World Wars or the 1960s, how significant are our own times?

I don't know. Many things only emerge as huge in retrospect -- in 1969, for example, both AIDS and Wal-Mart entered America -- or from a certain view, years down the road. We define what's gone before, almost as much as it defines us.

I believe we'll see years as momentous as 1969, if not more. We may already be in one. I hope, not just in America but everywhere, that for once we don't see history as ending, or as obsolete, but as both caution and inspiration. There's a lot to learn from 1969 -- and every other year gone by.

 

In closing, and in lieu of Hendrix, here's another favorite American icon of mine. Heed the words of Johnny Cash.

All Tomorrows: The Book of the New Sun

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

-From The Shadow of the Torturer

The newest installment of my column on the glories of Sci-fi's Deviant Age is up at Coilhouse. This time, I focus on what might well be my favorite epic, Gene Wolfe's stunning The Book of the New Sun:

Severian is a hero, cast with objects of great power (including a badass sword, natch) upon a path that will take him to great heights and strange places. He may even save his world. Cue swelling music.

But wait; Severian is a torturer. His world is Urth to its inhabitants. The moon is green, the sun old and dying. There are rumors that the great citadels of his ancient city once moved between the stars. What, then, are the angels and holy relics that fill the land?

Such is the setup of Gene Wolfe’s masterpiece The Book of the New Sun, a genre-bending four book epic equal parts philosophical treatise, rich allegory and Romantic odyssey.

Wolfe was one of the leading lights of sci-fi’s Deviant Age; that blazing era from 1965 to 1985 when no concept seemed out of bounds. As with Tanith Lee, he did so much brilliant work throughout that time (and after) that any number would be excellent topics for their own column.

The Book of the New Sun comes at the end of that period, and in it Wolfe melds the shocking innovation of his earlier career with a deep undrerstanding the power of old tales well-told.

With multi-volume works, I usually prefer to pick out the strongest entry. Here, I’ll make an exception. The entirety of Wolfe’s opus is so damn good that I found myself unable to choose a single part. It is, like the best epics, one tale.

Farewell David Carradine

They don't make 'em like they used to

My brief appreciation of the recently departed and much-missed David Carradine (along with a host of links to some of his lesser known appearances) is up at Coilhouse:

Carradine first rose to fame in the ’70s TV series Kung Fu as wandering monk/martial artist Kwai Chang Caine (a role originally sought by Bruce Lee). He’s as well or better known to later generations as the eponymous villain in Quentin Tarantino’s epic revenge saga Kill Bill. As Caine, a soft-spoken, hard-bodied Carradine helped form the culture’s idea of a martial artist, to the extent that many fixtures of the role have now become cliche.

Less remembered, unfortunately, are his turns as Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory or a rabble-rousing train robber in Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha. Also, if you haven’t seen Death Race 2000, do so now.

Carradine struggled with alcoholism and personal issues his entire career. In that time, he got saddled with a lot of dreck. Fortunately, he persevered and survived to get a role, in Kill Bill, that allowed him to show off his considerable talents. Managing to bring both seething villainy and world-weary gravitas, Carradine’s performance was a key factor in turning the movies into something more than a simple bloody rampage.

All Tomorrows: The Changed Man

My latest All Tomorrows column is up on Coilhouse. This time, I tackle Orson Scott Card's early short work -- and what it says about the writer he's become:

People change.

Once upon a time there was a talented young writer who explored death, horror and the future with uncommon vision. He had a rare talent for the fast-moving plot, the unexpected twist and the exploration of deeper philosophical themes, all in the same space.

People change, and not always for the better. In recent years, Orson Scott Card, who made his fame with brilliant works like Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, has turned his attention towards advocating for one loathsome cause after another. Dogma and fear have gotten the better of his creative talents. If you want evidence, read Empire. Hell, Warner Brothers has the rights, so it may soon be coming to a theater near you.

While Card may now deride much of the “New Morality and the Pill” era, his earlier work is very much of a piece with the glories of science fiction’s Deviant Age. In this edition of All Tomorrows, I’ll focus on The Changed Man, a slim volume released under that title in 1992 that happens to be contain the strongest single collection of Card’s early work that I’ve found (if you want the entirety of his short stories, including some other gems, get the massive Maps in a Mirror).

This column is less about the collection itself than some of the tales contained within. It’s about gems like “Eumenides in the Fourth floor lavatory,” “Fat Farm,” “Closing the Timelid” and “Prior Restraint.” Dread and the bubbling of the nasty subconscious are a theme, and these stories stand as a reminder of the writer Card was, and could have been.

All Tomorrows: All Creeds Spring from Catastrophe

The latest edition of All Tomorrows, my Coilhouse column on sci-fi's hidden gems -- in this case the later Octavia Butler's superb Parable of the Sower -- is ready for you, dear reader:

All creeds spring from catastrophe.

The late Octavia Butler, as keen an explorer of the human soul as ever trod a future-scape, understood that far better than most. In plain, well-turned prose she charted the bonds that hold (or fail to hold) us together through time, space and tragedy.

Perhaps the pinnacle of this search is her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower (also: read Kindred, trust me). The tale is framed as the journals of Lauren Olamino, a woman who might one day be revered as a prophet or messiah. For now though, she’s just a terrified teen in the middle of an apocalypse, praying for survival.

Dystopian fiction, along with its post-apocalyptic sister, is a popular genre these days, and with the fractious times we live in it’s not hard to see why. Since I’ve begun writing this column, I’ve had more than one reader comment how energizing rebelling against a dystopia would be or how freeing it would be to “see it all burn down.” The recently departed J.G. Ballard was right when he noted that “The suburbs dream of violence… they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.”

In "Parable" Butler strips any bit of glamour away right out of the gate: dystopian times are mostly death, fear and desperation (ask anyone who’s ever lived through a warzone). But while she topples down one dream, she gives the reader a wondrous and utterly rare thing in novels of a dark tomorrow: hope.