Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
JaNell -- Dianetics?  That's wild.

Reading C.S. Lewis' writing on religion was the first time that I
encountered a Christian saying that there was Truth to be found outside
of Christianity.  It was also the first time I had read anything
resembling logical proofs dealing with religion.  Neither of which is
due to a lack in the spectrum of Christianity, imho, but rather is the
result of the "fundementalists" whom I grew up around.

I read the Narnia books when I was very young and grasped from the
first that it was allegorical Christianity.  Though Aslan was not,
strictly speaking, Christ, I think that he was what Christ might have
been as a lion in Narnia.  That's a fine hair to be splitting, I
suppose, but is representative of my unwillingness to definitively peg
Christ as this or that.

Speaking of Lewis and paganism & mythology: One of the most
interesting parts, for me, of Lewis' _That Hideous Strength_ (which
seemed a very different book from the first two in that trilogy) was
the use of Merlin.  It was really enthralled at Lewis' concept of a
past age full of magic and such which transitioned into our own at some
point far in the past.  I loved that Merlin had to be found and his
aid enlisted, because, being from a previous time, he was the only one
able to utilize the Old Magic without committing evil in doing so. 
It's been a long time since I read it, I wish that I could remember the
explanation better -- it had something to do with Lewis placing magic
within the realm of G-d's Creation, I think.  Which always seemed to me
to be much more Jewish than modern day Protestant.
  

    
And what shall the new topic be called? "Neil Gaiman: Ye Saga
Continuef!" gets my vote. ^_^  (That the correct subtitle reference
from the end of _Good Omens_, right?)
  

    
I won't write much, because I'm too busy trying to read Narnia, so
that I can comment; I missed them as a kid (read the Wrinkle in Time
trilogy, though, which I *loved*, and, of course, the Hardy Boys,
around that fourth grade time.  I read Needful Things in sixth; after
that, I kind of didn't go back to "children's literature" until
recently).  Anyway...

Danguy- I don't know if that's good news or bad news, but I'm hoping
muchly for you and your wife and unborn-as-yet baby.  Only the best
(btw; do you have a name yet?  Did you already mention it?  Just
curious).

On the Christianity topic; I agree with Neil, not about Narnia,
because I haven't read it, but about the story.  I just finished my
second novel, in which the two main characters go back in time in an
attempt to save Jesus of Nazareth, because he's just "one more innocent
Jew put to death because no one had the guts to stop it," and they're
trying to prevent the Holocaust, and it went hand in hand.  I didn't
write it with Christianity in mind; I just listened to the story (I
think the most important trait, in a story-teller, is the ability to
listen) and followed where it went.  I had worried about it, because,
well, my brother's extremely hard-core Christian, and believes I'm
going to Hell because I don't choose to tell those who believe
differently that they're wrong, or that Jewish people are going to hell
because they don't believe in Christ, or that homosexuals are sinners
(as if they have a decision in they're sexuality), and I didn't want
Christianity to overtake the story.  But I wrote the story, and the
thing that has me most worried is the changing of the story that Lewis
wrote.  That is just *wrong*.

JaNell and Jinx- Good luck!  Positive vibes, and the like!

Will- who's reading "Thus Spake Zarathustra", as well as "Narnia," and
likes them.
  

    
DanGuy - I spotted the allegory right off too, even at 10 or so. 

Oh, Christianity & magic... there are so many Christian sects... my
Grandma Delilah was a Christian, very much so, but she told me about a
ritual she & two of her young aunts did to tell their future (which she
managed to do just fine her whole life without ritual): you lay (set)
a table for supper backwards, doing everything backwards somehow, and
that night you'd dream your future.

She dreamed of a tall dark haired man, and my Grandfather certainly
fit that description. A self-fulfilling prophecy? Maybe, but get this:
her aunts dreamed of a dark man all in black (not Neil... I hope...)
and both of them died young. Mountain people have so many leftovers
from the old religions; all the Scots and Irish and Cherokee mixed,
plus extremely isolated communities, leads to odd religious mixes.

The new topic doesn't start until June 29th, right? Should we get this
one over quickly or see if we can stretch it and make a seamless  fit?
  

    
Mary - No, you never mentioned that. I'm touched. If it makes any
difference, my issues with the church have nothing to do with the life,
work, and nature of Jesus... (but everything to do with Paul... but
that's a long... long...long discussion).

Neil- All this reminds me of how much I love Lewis' writing. Not all
of it was great (I found large parts of Perelandra tedious and as
you've pointed out not all the Narnia stuff is top shelf either), but I
remember taking a class on his work in college, and ended up reading
almost everything he wrote, regardless of whether it was on the
syllabus or not. I think it was his love of mythology that gave his
work such power. I remember reading a short story of this of men going
to the moon and finding gorgons there.

Michelle - I think you're touching pretty strongly on my perspective.
I think that Lewis probably did start LLW with Tumnus in the forest
under a lamppost, but as you pointed out... when looked at in the
context of his wider work, Narnia's pagan elements all take on a
Christic tone.

Danguy - incredible. Yet another reminder not to treat the medical
professionals as if they know everything or are infallible.

Dan
  

    
Will -- It's a good thing.  A Very Good Thing, in fact, as it means
that Lori is not, in fact, late, and that they will not insist on
inducing her, which would be A Very Bad Thing in most cases.

JaNell -- The new topic starts whenever this one is frozen; I don't
think there's a date set to it.
     And as regards your Grandmother, Christianity spread to many
cultures and not a one of them, that I know of, failed to incorporate
some facet of their previous religious tradition into it.  I find
liminal social constructs fascinating, particularly border languages
and fusion religions.

Dan -- Very true.  My wife and I are a bit distrusting of most of the
obstetrics portion of the medical community as is, after watching way
too many episodes of the various pregnancy/delivery shows on Discovery
and Lifetime, and this has definitely confirmed our thoughts on the
need for vigilance.
  

    
Chip Delany is so sweet and good with people that he doesn't starstrike me,
though Samuel R. Delany is a brilliant writer.  Once at dinner, Chip
remarked that it's all very well for people to look at Samuel R. Delany the
writer, but hanging out, he's Chip, and that's different.

(And once, in the audience of a scholarly panel about his works, he stood
when asked for comments and said, "I can't really comment on the works of
Samuel R. Delany, as I've never read any of them--but I am somewhat familiar
with the author's biography.)

Now, John Crowley, I can't make myself talk to.
  

    

The limit on a topic is 2008 posts. Sometime around 2000 it'll get frozen
and, hopefully, reopened.

The last time I tried to reread _That Hideous Strength_ I just couldn't get
through it. Maybe I'll try again someday soonish- I got the urge, for some
reason, a few months ago but didn't take myself up on it. 

Back in high school, when taking a class on Celtic Literature, I was told
that there were three roughly contemporary Christian scholars/writers of
fiction. They were Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams, I believe. So I
tracked down a book by Williams and ended up finding _Descent Into Hell_,
rife with imagery, from Christian to Zarathustrian. Was one of the weirder
books I'd ever read. It's been a long time now, though, so maybe I should
track that down and reread it and the Space Trilogy, seeing as I just
reread The Lord of the Rings.
  

    
Happy Birthday to JaNell!  

Jinx--Best of luck with the surgery.  Its too bad you won't get to see
Neil.  poooooo.

Tara--Turkish delight (or at least the little I've had of it) is like
an expensive chunk of jellybean insides, covered in powdered sugar. 
I've had lemon, orange, and rose flavors.  The rose was good, but the
other two left me wondering what Edmund was thinking.  (That was
Edmund, right?  Its been a while.)

I don't feel so bad for not recognizing the Christian stuff in the
Narnia chronicles until it was pointed out to me anymore.  I myself
never made it through The Last Battle, while I adored many of the
others.  Something about it made reading it like torture to me.  Oh
well.

I am disgusted at the thought of pumping out more Narnia tales.  Leave
other's stuff alone I say.

Angelina.
  

    
Martha -- what a lovely line. Quintessentially Chip.  John Crowley is
someone I discovered too late in life to be intimidated by -- I like
him enormously, and admire his work, instead, which is probably more
fun.


Do you know American Gods is at 125 on Amazon.com right now? Holly
just told me. She likes checking.

...

I hope I'm not upstaging Linda's thunder, but seeing that the topic
will be frozen sometime in the next few days, and that i leave on tour
on Sunday Morning, I thought it might be a good idea to announce, very
loosely, THE PLAN. (For we have one. Kinda.)

In a couple of weeks we're going to open an official Inkwell.vue
American Gods topic. It'll be the kind of formal thing that'll start
off for several days with me answering questions about the book from An
Interviewer.  It'll be on the Well cover page, and all that. It
actually has a Start Date -- has had for some months now.

Meanwhile,  any day now, this topic will finish, because they have
upper limits and we're almost there.

To tide everyone over the interregnum, and because there is a
magnificently  cock-eyed community here, Linda and the other 
Inkwell.vue hosts have, with incredible kindness and coolness, agreed
to make a topic here for the mob from 104 (ie all you lot) so you can
keep talking and posting and so on. I'll drop in, but especially for
the period of the tour, cannot guarantee that I'll be anything more
than just another person who posts there.

There. Linda, did I get that right?
  

    
Well, it's official. The Borders by my work has its copies of American
Gods. I tried to buy one but was rebuffed. I fed the fellow a small
line and he suggested checking Meijer, or someplace similar, because
they can tend to be a bit looser with their shelf dates. No dice just
yet, but I'm going to keep trying. :) Next attempts: Sam's Club and
Target...
  

    
So... it's going to be the 'Mob from 104' topic? (grins)

DanGuy - Just to drop it in re: the "Don't. Move." line was uttered by
one of my bestest buddies a few years back as we entered his
apartment. 6 or so years prior to that, his father (wealthy
annoying-type) bought him a pet iguana. It turned out to be an
endangered Galapogos Land (Orange) Iguana. Meat eating. Ate his
sister's prize Persian cat. Was named Goliath CatKiller. Was about 5
1/2 feet body length. Scary as all hell.

It got out of the room it used at it's home in the apartment, and was
on top of the bookcase in the entryway of said apartment. We walked in,
closed the door, looked up, and froze. Chris (the buddy) utters that
line, and slowly walks up to the lizard. Goliath hisses, whips its
tail, plants it across Chris's temple, and knocks him out cold.

I'm standing in the entryway of his apartment, Chris unconcious at my
feet, looking at a bloody huge carnivorous lizard that hasn't eaten yet
that day, and was told not to move. Chris finally woke up, got the
lizard into the other room, and I never went over there again. He
finally gave the lizard to some zoo somewhere... and I still haven't
been back.

-- Walker
  

    
Danguy
I'm happy to hear that your wife escaped an induction and that you can
quit worrying for a week or two.  Hopefully the little one will make
up her/his? mind to come by then anyway. Leave the cabinet doors open
and shoe laces untied nonetheless:-) 

Sending best thoughts and wishes for all three of you.

Kristin
  

    
Wow. This topic *is* almost over. I'm glad that there will be a topic
of "the mob of 104" Everyone here is so wonderful. I would hate to lose
touch. Is everyone staying?

Danguy-that's wonderful news....but it's kind of frightening at the
same time (the doctor) good luck:)
  

    
Why Neil... I thought you *were* just another person who posts here
(granted, one that we all adore and have immense respect for and fly
around the country to chat to for a few seconds)

Walker - My life is so not as interesting as yours. I've never almost
had a good friend eaten by a carnivorous lizard. Shame he got rid of it
though... could be useful way of getting rid of evidence.
  

    

Yes, Neil has it perfectly.  When this topic reaches the limit - which is
2007 posts - we will start a new topic for The Mob from 104.  When June
29th rolls around we will start new topic for a two-week American Gods
interview with Neil.  Martha will be the official interviewer.  It should
be awesome.  And that's the plan.
  

    
E-mail from Kathy Li:

Tara--not to get everything all mired and sticky in Turkish delight, but 
since nobody mentioned this in the old thread, if you are familiar with 
Liberty Orchards candy ("Aplets & Cotlets"), *that's* Turkish delight 
(rahat locoum). I'm usually reminded of Botan Rice Candy (fresh, not the 
petrified *crunchy* ones :-). Until I learned this, though, I thought of 
Turkish Delight being exactly as you described.

One of the magic places of Narnia for me was the England of the Pevensies, 
no less exotic, exciting, strange and wonderful than Narnia or 
Archenland.  Took me a while to figure out how anybody could carry a torch 
in their pocket. :-)

As for the whole Narnia thing, I have to admit to being guilty of 
encouraging the "I want more of the same and don't care what it is" 
sales-trend by having purchased a copy of THRONES DOMINATIONS. (The 
punishment for the crime was reading it, and realizing what I had done.) At 
least in that case, the publisher hadn't trumpeted that the "continuation" 
of the novel would be even more palatable to me by pointing out the new 
author would not deliberately work any Christian idealogy into the new bits 
(despite a biblical title), but I'm sure if they had thought it would boost 
sales, they would have. <sigh>.

Last point: Once, long ago, cruising the SF/F aisles of some chain store, I 
got caught in chat with a young Narnia fan, who very obviously had never 
met anybody else who'd read and liked the books (!!).  Her mother, very 
earnestly, requested that I name some other (implied: "Christian") books 
that were just like the Narnia series which it would be "safe" for her 
daughter to read.  I, being young and having no knowledge of what 
constituted Christian, just said so and recommended several fantasy books I 
liked.

I've seen the dread proselytizing influence (if that's indeed what it is) 
flow the other direction.
  

    
Angelina and Kathy - thank you for those descriptions - I now have a
decent mental image of TD. (I'm not familiar with Liberty Orchards
candy, but I will try to find this stuff somewhere and give it a try.)
I headed back to topic <73> to read the previous posts about Turkish
Delight and found mostly shudders of horror from those involved. It
doesn't sound nearly as good as what I had imagined, unfortunately.

re: "just another person who posts there": Who's this Neil character
everyone's always going on about? I'm only here for the interesting
stories about lizards and overdue babies... ;)
  

    
Perhaps I shouldn't say this for fear of the idea being contagious
and ruining someone else's Turkish Delight experience, but
I sometimes think the powdery stuff on the outside of Turkish
Delight is corn starch rather than sugar.  It actually surprises
me when I eat the stuff - the flavor is never as strong as I expect
it to be - I keep thinking it's a big dose of super-sugary stuff
and then it isn't.

I should pipe in that I also had no clue about the Christian 
references when I read Narnia as a kid.  (Probably not too surprising
since what little religious education I had was Jewish, plus
whatever bits of Christianity one picks up from living in America
and reading a lot...)  But it just rubbed me the wrong way to hear 
them say something amounting to "we're going to take something that
was an important element of what the author did, and twist it around
into something different because we think we can sell more books that
way."
  

    
Corn starch?  I don't think that corn starch could make my teeth hurt
quite as badly as the stuff on turkish delight did, but who knows...

oh, and by the way...the pictures from the bald beauty contest are up.
 I'm not very...photogenic (well demonstrated here) but here it goes.

http://baldgirl.freehomepage.com/angelina.html
  

    
DanGuy- Oh, boy. Don't get me started. I could bug you with
Appallachian culture & dialect instead of boring Neil.
About your baby's status- the part of the Rowan story that I left out
was that, after he got here (traumatized, I'm sure, as I was squatting
there with my knees around my ears yelling, "GET...THE F#@%...OUT!!!"),
the midwives examined his placenta and discovered 
that, in spite of the calendar and being 9lbs 3oz and 22 inches long,
he was possibly as much as 2 weeks early! 
Cameron (my husband, the tentacle eater) immediately went over and
started a lengthy discussion about placental color and texture, and
began poking it! I mean, back to me, I just had your rather large
headed baby here!

Bill- AG is already in some stores? I'll be making calls tomorrow.
I've been accosting people who have a copy just to know what all is in
there about that dreadful dinner at ConCat. I was secretly hoping Neil
or somebody would kindly send me the passage as a lovely birthday
surprise...=(

Walker- Only you. But I have had a deer skull from a deer killed at
least a decade before attempt to brain me... I now have it bound &
humiliated by Mardi Gras beads wrapped over the antlers...

Angelina, I'm not photogenic either, probably best remembered in
motion.

And yeah for continuing the topic...

JaNell, happily watching the Simpsons 'Homer's Mom lived in a commune'
episode
  

    
American Gods should be in the stores by now. Tuesday is the on-sale
date, though. It has a "one day laydown" which means that stores can
get into Big Trouble for letting it go out before then.

Amazon.com have started sending out foreign copies, I've been told.
The US copies will probably be going out pretty soon from Amazon and
B&N and Borders Online, and it's possible that a few copies may get out
in the mail a day or so early.
  

    
Is there a name for the little semi-circles of fabric, metal and a
'reed' that they used to sell kids as ventriloqual aids, that let you
do a sort of cut down Mr Punch voice? I don't think they are swatchells
or swizzles, which are much bigger -- these are just the things you
push to the top of your mouth...
  

    
Neil-  I was bored, so I Googled....is this it?  

http://www.sagecraft.com/puppetry/traditions/swazzle.html 

http://www.monkeyjoke.com/VentAd.html
  

    
E-mail from Dianna Graf:

Warning: The following post has a whinge in it.

To all of you about to enjoy fresh copies of American Gods hot off the
press.... Please spare a thought for us who are getting quite a different
deal than what we'd expected

You see, i went to the local friendly bookstore where they are
ever-so-nice and always-willing-to-please to ask (again) that they put in
a request to the publishers to have Neil come and visit. Adversity is
rearing it's ugly head in the form of a pessimistic mindset that causes
some of the parties concerned to think , "They'll never send him. All our
efforts will be for nothing. So why bother?"

Undamped by said peoples' attitudes, i've persisted and certainly some
requests are being made. But yesterday as i looked forward (vocally) to
June the 19th, the friendly bookstore person said, "I don't think they'll
be here that soon." To which i replied, "But that's the day. It is. It
is". And a flurry of paperwork rose and fell and a phonecall was made and
i saw with my own eyes that indeed the delivery date is August the 10th!
And softcover only! Apparently this is the deal for all of Oz where our $
is so weak they don't expect that anyone will want to fork out up to $70
for a British HC. 'Cept me and lots of other people who have not been
filled in of these important details.
Fortunately they've ordered me one from DreamHaven that will be here
sooner. And i have read it, but it's the sharing of the moment that i was
so looking forward to.  i was organising the Hobart part of the Hong
Kong-Helsinki-Hobart Neil-o-Philes Party . i guess the party of the third
part will just have to wait :(

Thankyou for listening and goodnight  :

Jinx - Best wishes and good luck :)

JaNell - Happy birthday!

Post script: Just had a cheerful thought - will get everyone together on
the the 19th and we can all take turns to read out loud from the copy
that i have.... So *that's* alright :) YAY!!!

- dianna , whose raincloud has moved on :)