SF

R. A. Lafferty. An Irish-American writer walks into a bar and it’s a SciFi story

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’ve made note that I didn’t do a piece from Dave Moore for St. Patrick’s Day, but I’m about to deal with that. Readers of earlier posts this month know that I was writing about falling in with a group of Irish-American writers almost 50 years ago. The group in its last decade or so was just four of us, and you’ve heard my performance of words from the two of them who died a few years ago. Dave’s not in that group — well, he was in the group, but he isn’t dead — and I don’t know if Dave ever considered himself an Irish-American writer either. At the other pole, we have Ethna McKiernan who spent time living in Ireland, whose father was a figure in the Irish cultural renaissance, who ran an Irish-arts focused store for many years, and some of her poetry was published by an Irish publisher. That’s more Irish than green beer.

What makes one an Irish or Irish-American writer? I’m just an observer here, but I suppose opinions differ. It never crossed my mind to consider Edna St. Vincent Millay an Irish-American writer, but there’s Irish heritage there, and while her most well-known poems don’t explicitly speak of Irish themes or history, I eventually found and performed this poem of hers that’s quite Irish. Shortly after I discovered Joseph Campbell and was in my first burst of enthusiasm for him, I asked Kevin and Ethna if Campbell was counted in the realms of Irish culture. He was as unknown to them as he remains generally, but he was deeply embedded in Irish culture in his writing and life in both Ireland and the United States, and even his downfall was largely due to ending up on the losing side in the Irish Civil War. Campbell’s clearly an Irish writer who lived in the U.S., but he’s just so little-known. Let me add one more: does anyone consider Frank O’Hara an Irish-American writer? I once did a web search looking for anything written along those lines. If I didn’t come up dry, what I found wasn’t enough to dampen the leather above my bootsoles. If I was asked to find such a connection, I’d point to O’Hara’s manifest sense of mischief and his greater interest than most mid-century Americans in poets who weren’t British.

Perhaps it’s somewhat a coincidence if one is an Irish-American writer or one isn’t. You don’t have to write one way or the other, and it may not have to do with where your parents or grandparents were born. And by coincidence too long to interject here, I came to see that this Tuesday, the day after St. Patrick’s Day, is the anniversary of SciFi writer R. A. Lafferty’s death. I saw this and — ta-da — I remembered that I have a recording of Dave Moore singing his song about that writer. Recalling that, I found that recording and worked today on spiffing it up a bit sonically since it was 10-years-old and reflects some older recording tech. And sure enough, right in the lyrics Dave claims Lafferty as an Irish writer. So, an easy job to complete today’s musical piece and post?

Sort of. I didn’t plan this enough ahead of time to give Dave time to say anything about Lafferty and his writing. I had memories of his telling me, or trying to tell me, about Lafferty’s writing, which had a brief flowering in the 1960s-80s — but what was that he said back then? I thrashed about this afternoon finding a copy of his 1972 short-story collection Strange Doings.  I rapidly read a half-a-dozen of his stories just trying to get a flavor, and I got some sense of why Dave had a hard time encapsulating Lafferty’s virtues. At least in this collection, his prose style is somewhat creaky pulp, yet with that instrument he sets out to tell rather strange metafictions in even stranger ways, often ending in a shaggy dog joke. The image I got was I’m at a dive bar, and there’s this man sitting on one stool. He wants to tell me a story. As he goes on, I try to get a read on who he is. Is he some kind of scientist on a weekend bender, or an in-his-cups academic from a nearby Catholic college? Or maybe he’s a man who’s watched too many episodes of Ancient Astronauts, and takes Neil Oliver and Graham Hancock as his vademecum? Are the beverages why the story started to twist, or are you just not ready to understand the essence of the fractal he’s generating? I ask him what he does for a living, and he tells me he’s an electrician.

One thing’s certain: he needs just one more drink  to finish his story.

“So why are you so interested in all this you’re telling me?” I ask.

“Oh, I’m also a writer. You said you’re a writer. I thought you might be interested in this.” He looks at me, expecting reply.

“If you write like you talk, you’re more like how I play electric guitar. I run off in some direction until I hit something, then I bounce off in another direction.”

strange doings cover

This 1972 collection of Lafferty short-stories credits the cover design to “ONI”

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There should be a graphical audio player gadget below to hear Dave and I playing Dave’s song “R. A. Lafferty”  back in 2015. At the very start of the Parlando Project I set this recording in a folder of possible pieces to use for it, but I never did because I feared the audience for literary poetry might not find much relevance in Lafferty. Well, the imp of the perverse convinced me otherwise. No audio player? You see, Lafferty has documented that the audio player gadget was invented by Higgston Rainbird and — oh never mind, you can use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player if you don’t see the gadget.

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The Witch

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’m starting a Halloween series again this year, so musical pieces using public domain poems that have fantasy or supernatural elements are something I’ve been gathering, and this one popped up in a couple of lists. It’s by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, an English early 20th century poet I did not know.

Yes, she’s distantly related to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the “Kubla Khan”  and “Ancient Mariner”  guy, but this poem reminds me (in a good way) of Christina Rossetti. Here’s a link to the text of her poem “The Witch.”

My search for Halloween material and reading those early 20th century children’s poetry anthologies for this year’s National Poetry Month shows that supernatural creatures were a cultural thing in this era, and were presented in a range of contexts from folk-tale weirdness, to gothic, to pleasant guises. I’m hesitant to say without enough scholarship, but unlike ghosts or fairy folk and the like, witches were almost always depicted as evil.*

Here’s an excuse for me to trot out my favorite construct, the how-old was-X-thing-when-this-was-written calculation. Witch trials and witch executions were around 200 years past when “The Witch”  was written, perhaps long enough to be considered expired history to be toyed with for literary uses, but the general roots and results of that deadly hysteria lingered. Fear of the outsider, the strange one, their unknown and supposed beliefs and motivations never left the world. I can see it in current disgusting news stories recycling old libels.

If Halloween is a holiday that has broadened its scope from an origin of remembering the dead and their spirits into a celebration of the things we fear as much as death — and to the spice of experiencing those fears in a transitory way — then this poem is an example we might want to interrogate.

The plot of “The Witch”  is simple enough,** but Coleridge does a great job of structuring the tale. The first two of the poem’s three stanzas are a vivid present-tense monolog from what sounds like a refugee or wanderer who’s outside someone’s homesite door begging to come in from the cold. The outside voice describes herself as “a maiden still.” An interesting claim — what with the “still” — and my imagination as I read this says that she is claiming this because she doesn’t necessarily look like a young woman.

The poem’s final stanza is swift and concisely indirect in a way that pleases me. The viewpoint changes to someone else, the home’s resident on the inside of the door recounting (now in past-tense) what happens. The outsider is invited, indeed carried, in past the threshold, there’s a movement intensified by a repeating “she came,” and the poem’s standout enjambment ends a line with “the quivering flame” continuing on the next line’s “sunk and died in the fire.” It doesn’t say this, but my imagination filled this line break with the outsider changing shape into something less solid and smothering the home’s hearth-fire. The poem ends with the inside-the-home’s voice telling us the fire can now not be relit. This conclusion is ambiguous. It might be that the outsider has killed the home’s resident who would have tended the fire, just as it has killed the fire. Or it might be (and I prefer this option) that the insider is doomed to be as cold and lost as the outsider was in the poem’s opening, and now is cast in the same curse. This is a well-told tale, so easily set to music — I couldn’t resist letting it over my threshold.

But as I worked on it, it wasn’t the supernatural element that was giving me chills. Is this the wrong poem to make into song in my time and place when fear of the outsider is being whipped up for purposes? Is this poem a parable supporting that?

Yes and no — but I’m going with the no. To me, it’s also a story about deceit, those lies that we invite inside ourselves, which is why I fell to and promote the reading that in the end the insider becomes the same creature as the outsider: cold, in despair, now likely self-serving and lying to be invited in though the door.

The Witches Kitchen - Frans Francken the younger

Documentary oil-painting evidence that all witches are not dogmatically against fire.

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I don’t know if I’ll find any good witches to sing about this month, but I do plan, in whatever Halloween series I can complete, to examine our fears and the why and where they take us.

You can hear my song performance of Mary Coleridge’s “The Witch”  with the audio player below. Is your way of reading this ghosting that audio player gadget?  This highlighted link is a spell to open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Well, L. Frank Baum’s Oz  has a good witch, but even there Margaret Hamilton and her flying monkeys are what’s tattooed on our dreams. Modern NeoPagans and so forth wish to rehabilitate the idea of witchcraft as empowerment with a sideboard of herbal remedies.

**The premise of a supernatural pretense to gain invited entrance to a warm homestead reminds me of a fantasy verse play and excerpted poem by Yeats.  Yeats wasn’t necessarily anti-magical beings — after all, he had his own sideline as an esoteric mage. Robert Frost directed Yeats trickster-fairy play for student actors, and later wrote this gently satiric “answer poem” to Yeats’ work. In Frost’s poem the wizard powers of New England skepticism is cast to defeat supernatural treachery.

The Mote: a 19th century SciFi prose poem

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

So, what else did our two young late-19th century North Americans Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey put in their 1894 Songs from Vagabondia  book? How about this one: a SF prose poem adrift in wine and the universe?

I’ve already mentioned that Hovey’s poetry is easy to link to the French language poets* that were a strong influence on English language Modernism that was just over the horizon in 1894, but perhaps pioneering Canadian poet Carman had obtained a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations  when it was issued just a few years before the pair’s Vagabondia book. The form of the prose poem was still fairly novel, but this experiment in that form adds another, fantastic, element too.

Vagabondia Front Piece

The front piece in Carman & Hovey’s “Songs from Vagabondia.” Here’s a link to the text of “The Mote” included in it.

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The first time I read “The Mote”  I thought it the story of a short slightly tipsy conversation between two young men in a bar. For young men with loosened tongues to talk of the universe, its unfathomable scope and mysterious connections, is a comic commonplace after all.

As the mote flies into the wine cup of one of the young tavern drinkers and the conversation starts, it’s easy to overlook the way Carman set the scene: the pair entering the tavern are of “august bearing, seraph tall.” Are Rudy Gobert and Karl Anthony-Towns having a post-game libation? “Seraph” isn’t the most common form of an esoteric word, “seraphim,” but it’s a name for the highest order of angels.

If one reads it again, taking that seraph literally rather than figuratively, then the mote which is called “Earth” isn’t a parable, but the plaything of two indolent angels! This ambiguity seems cleverly designed-in by Carman.

You can hear me perform Bliss Carman’s “The Mote”  with the audio player below. The guitar part was played with my Squier Jazzmaster, an affordable rendition of a once unsuccessful Fender electric guitar design. One of the knocks against the Jazzmaster was that it had too much open string-length between the tailpiece and the bridge, a fault that could generate extraneous noises when one uses the vibrato bar. Some modern players see this and figure: “Feature, not a bug!” So, in that manner, some of what I recorded here has me intentionally playing the outside noises that a Jazzmaster can make.

If you don’t see the audio player gadget, I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Here’s an odd thing: the 19th century French poets that were stretching the subject matter, outlook, and prosody in advance of their contemporaries in England took influences from American poets like Whitman and Poe. Carman and Hovey wouldn’t have needed to go across the ocean to France to read those Americans — but still, there’s a field of echoes going on in this pre-Modernist era. There’s another cosmic joke here too: Brits may have needed to hear some American-originated poetic ideas spoken in French before they could recognize their value!

The Apotheosis of Harlan Ellison

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’m not a fully-qualified Science/Speculative Fiction fan, though I did read it when I ran into it as a young man. Dave Moore, whose voice, songs and keyboard playing you’ll hear from time to time here, read more of it. I’m not sure if Dave introduced me to Harlan Ellison’s work, but my memory is that he did loan me a copy of Dangerous Visions  back in the Sixties. In that 1967 anthology, Ellison made the case that SF was the heir to a Modernist tradition of fiction using outrageous and unique situations—he was claiming SF could be more Kafka than L. Sprague de Camp.

It’s unlikely he was the only person thinking along those lines, but he certainly helped to popularize the idea at a time when an aging generation of SF writers, steeped in pulp magazines and cents-per-word paychecks were in danger of losing touch with the younger post-WWII generation who were more likely to be college educated and experienced in some chemically enhanced inner-space traveling.

Dangerous Visions cover

Used copies may have slight foxing (or are they cannabis stains?)

 

Ellison was an any-world-class curmudgeon. His non-fiction writing is full of enthusiasms and invective, with almost no middle ground. At times he reminds me of another late 20th Century artist/social critic: Frank Zappa. Both of them liked to remark that “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.” Over the course of his career Ellison seemed to transform from a US-born angry young man punching mostly up to a more generalized misanthropy, where at appearances he would sometimes riff like an insult comic. He once called my late wife who he had just met at an event, “Cathy Carbohydrate.”

These two things worked together. SF had always had a darker side, and the border between it and the gothic strain of fantasy or noir-ish mystery was crossed back and forth often. I believe a utopian, Transcendentalist wing of SF remains, but the terms SF and dystopia now seem to follow one another almost automatically.

Is this the artists’ fault or ours? A large question that.

Thursday night I read that Harlan Ellison had died. Friday I was booked to record with Dave. Friday morning, as I slept, I dreamed that Dave was showing me a binder full of typed manuscripts of stories he had written. As he flipped the pages I read parts of the stories. In style, they were the sort of thing a teenager just starting out would have written, so in the dream’s timeline they would have been written in the Sixties. In the dream, Dave, after learning of Ellison’s death, was telling me that Harlan Ellison had looked over these stories, and that Ellison didn’t like them very much, though he thought the last one had some promise. There was a short, encouraging note from Ellison scrawled in the margin on a page in the story. As I glanced up toward the middle of the page, I saw some dialog in which a character in the story was saying something. The character in this non-existent dream-story was named Octavia Butler.

Now I remind you: this is a dream. Dave never had Ellison critique any early stories he wrote. In the dream, these stories existed, in the waking world they don’t. But here’s the funny thing. I told you at the start that I’m not a fully-qualified SF fan. If you had mentioned Octavia Butler to me on Friday, the only impression I would have was that she was a writer. I wouldn’t have been able to name any of her work or have been able to place her in a genre. In the dream, I just thought it odd that Dave was using a writer’s name as a character in a story that the dream had had him writing 50 years ago. I was about to ask him why, when I woke up.

octavia-butler

Octavia Butler, before or after she was in my dream

 

I biked off for breakfast and hurriedly came back to write the piece you can listen to below.  Looking for info I might use in my song, I searched on Octavia Butler. In the Sixties, Butler was a young, unsure author, fearing that she was too “ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless.” While she was still in school, Harlan Ellison, this man with a reputation as a scouring critic, had told her she had promise and should go to the Clarion Conference and present her work there, a suggestion that lead to her first publication in 1971.

Nothing there I could use in the song as it turns out, but strangely this was also nothing I knew when I had dreamed that dream early in the morning. I did use one bit I found in my searching: an interview with my former co-worker John Rabe that revealed that Ellison was still using a typewriter as his writing machine in the 21st Century. I thought of those older generation pulp writers and their per-word paychecks.

That afternoon, Dave and I recorded “The Apotheosis of Harlan Ellison.”  It turned out that in the waking world, Dave had not heard yet that Ellison had died. The player gadget below will let you hear it—though not on your typewriter.