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Half-day from work today, tra-la-la.
So my friend Gaudior has this thing for fictional works in which there are gay angels. Doesn't matter if the plot or worldbuilding is good--though I'm assured that helps--but if it has gay angels in it, she's reading or watching it. I am also afflicted with a similar syndrome: "Mangrove Swamp Fiction Fixation." What does this mean? If it's a work of fantastic literature set in New Orleans, Florida, or the Caribbean, I'm reading it.
Since I dislike the heat of Florida intensely, and have never been to New Orleans or the Caribbean, this confuses me to some extent. It must be the cadence, the atmosphere that hangs over and informs the stories like Spanish Moss over some great dead swamp-tree. Some favorite (good) examples include--Manatee Gal Ain't You Coming Out Tonight by Avram Davidson, and the excellent One Breath Away threads on Nexus, set in a dark New Orleans (the story archives, unfortunately, appear to have vanished into the ether, or I would have linked to them).
Creole Folktales by Patrick Chamoiseau is the kind of raw material these stories spring from. It's been translated from the French, but the translator is a genius, and Chamoiseau's retellings/adaptions have to have been even more brilliant to start with if the translations ended up this good. They're stories for an audience--the storyteller, at times, distances himself from the tale, draws himself in at odd moments, adds commentary that is never to be taken at face value. The images are sometimes disturbing, sometimes wonderful. Sometimes both. This little bit, for instance, in a kind of "Bluebeard"-ish tale called "A Little Matter of Marriage." The bride runs in terror through the house of her new husband, the Devil:
"An anguish clung to the curtains, and sorrow lay everywhere, everywhere, like a fine coating of dust. Holding the bundle of keys, she mechanically opened a few doors, and a few more, and then and there was seized with a frenzy heedless of all prohibition. Click-clack, click-clack, she opened and went on opening, discovering glacial gloom, old furniture writhing with roots from the primordial tree, shapeless heaps smelling vaguely of dead jellyfish, shards of shattered cities, stacks of tibias hollowed into flutes, cemetery walls crawling with life. ...the shadows of another room revealed a profusion of glances without pupils or eyelids. One door opened onto glass jars boiling with tears."
There's tales here you know bits and parts of, like that one, and tales here you don't, like "Ye, Master of Famine." And there's ones you think you do that leave you with a taste in your mouth (honey on rotten yam): "The Person who Bled Hearts Dry" takes place on a slave ship, and a dark and terrible thing it is.
Ye's family is starving to death in "Ye, Master of Famine":
...One day the mama couldn't take this anymore. "Ay we Bondie, mande'y an pawol," she told Ye. "Go see the Goodlord and ask his advice." In those days of yesteryear, the Goodlord was only a country policeman off in a backwater. He had not yet assumed all his divine powers and lived modestly among us, spending his Sundays in a hut of spun stars set in the thickest of thickets.
But this book, this storyteller, the Carribbean, take the dark things in, too and make things of them that are wonderfully other, tipped with humor grey rather than dark or light, and genuine fear, and beauty, beauty.
So my friend Gaudior has this thing for fictional works in which there are gay angels. Doesn't matter if the plot or worldbuilding is good--though I'm assured that helps--but if it has gay angels in it, she's reading or watching it. I am also afflicted with a similar syndrome: "Mangrove Swamp Fiction Fixation." What does this mean? If it's a work of fantastic literature set in New Orleans, Florida, or the Caribbean, I'm reading it.
Since I dislike the heat of Florida intensely, and have never been to New Orleans or the Caribbean, this confuses me to some extent. It must be the cadence, the atmosphere that hangs over and informs the stories like Spanish Moss over some great dead swamp-tree. Some favorite (good) examples include--Manatee Gal Ain't You Coming Out Tonight by Avram Davidson, and the excellent One Breath Away threads on Nexus, set in a dark New Orleans (the story archives, unfortunately, appear to have vanished into the ether, or I would have linked to them).
Creole Folktales by Patrick Chamoiseau is the kind of raw material these stories spring from. It's been translated from the French, but the translator is a genius, and Chamoiseau's retellings/adaptions have to have been even more brilliant to start with if the translations ended up this good. They're stories for an audience--the storyteller, at times, distances himself from the tale, draws himself in at odd moments, adds commentary that is never to be taken at face value. The images are sometimes disturbing, sometimes wonderful. Sometimes both. This little bit, for instance, in a kind of "Bluebeard"-ish tale called "A Little Matter of Marriage." The bride runs in terror through the house of her new husband, the Devil:
"An anguish clung to the curtains, and sorrow lay everywhere, everywhere, like a fine coating of dust. Holding the bundle of keys, she mechanically opened a few doors, and a few more, and then and there was seized with a frenzy heedless of all prohibition. Click-clack, click-clack, she opened and went on opening, discovering glacial gloom, old furniture writhing with roots from the primordial tree, shapeless heaps smelling vaguely of dead jellyfish, shards of shattered cities, stacks of tibias hollowed into flutes, cemetery walls crawling with life. ...the shadows of another room revealed a profusion of glances without pupils or eyelids. One door opened onto glass jars boiling with tears."
There's tales here you know bits and parts of, like that one, and tales here you don't, like "Ye, Master of Famine." And there's ones you think you do that leave you with a taste in your mouth (honey on rotten yam): "The Person who Bled Hearts Dry" takes place on a slave ship, and a dark and terrible thing it is.
Ye's family is starving to death in "Ye, Master of Famine":
...One day the mama couldn't take this anymore. "Ay we Bondie, mande'y an pawol," she told Ye. "Go see the Goodlord and ask his advice." In those days of yesteryear, the Goodlord was only a country policeman off in a backwater. He had not yet assumed all his divine powers and lived modestly among us, spending his Sundays in a hut of spun stars set in the thickest of thickets.
But this book, this storyteller, the Carribbean, take the dark things in, too and make things of them that are wonderfully other, tipped with humor grey rather than dark or light, and genuine fear, and beauty, beauty.
