Well, that about wraps it up for Poughkeepsie

[mme_hardy]

I am rereading The Worm Ouroboros and savoring it. I had forgotten the long mountain-climbing section entirely; I fear teen me must have skipped it.

In any case, Ursula Le Guin once wrote an essay, "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", essentially arguing that all fantasy protagonists should speak in an elevated, heroic style. She was particularly mean to a very recognizable Katherine Kurtz, with some side shots at Roger Zelazny. She quotes and praises Eddison as an example of what should be done.

At one point she quotes from Zelazny, "I could have told you that at Carcosa", and lays down the law that great heroes don't say "I told you so".

"Well," said Juss, "thy counsel hath been right once and saved us, for nine times that it hath been wrong, and my counsel saved thee from an evil end. If ill behap us, it shall be set down that it had from thy peevish will original."

Comments

[redbird]

I may be your only reader whose immediate thought from the subject line was to worry about the actual place, and whether people there were OK. (I don't think I know anyone who lives there now, but my partner cattitude was born there.)

[mme_hardy]

Whoops, so sorry!

[larryhammer]

I do loves me some Eddisonian prose. But I don't think that cod-Jacobean is the best model for fantasy, even high-heroic fantasy.

[mme_hardy]

Eddison is a thing unto himself, and I shudder to think of the amount of reading I'd have to do to get that cadence and vocabulary into my head. And I balk entirely at the cod-Middle English. If I want to read Malory, I'll yank him down from the shelf with my ME dictionary.

He's to be savored like fruitcake, in small doses, or at least that's the way my reread is going.

[larryhammer]

His Zimiamvian romances are easier to swallow. Especially Mistress of Mistresses, which I tend to gulp.

[mme_hardy]

I didn't love Mistress of Mistresses the first time around; I should try again. But one of the things I love Ouroboros for is its knotty prose.

[pameladean]

I have seldom disagreed with anybody I admire as much as I do with LeGuin about that essay. Poor Katherine Kurtz's prose fails not because it isn't Eddison's -- as if anybody else's ever could be -- but because it's not entirely competent as what it is.

I've been very slowly revisiting The Worm Ourorbouros because David, after checking that I still liked Eddison, got me the Easton Press edition. My Ballantine paperbacks are falling apart, and the Easton edition encloses the nature of the book much better.

I had failed to notice that Juss said that! Perhaps he isn't a hero after all. Perhaps there are actually no heroes. Or the real ones are more like Lord Gro.

P.

[mme_hardy]

Poor Lord Gro! Do you think he's Jewish-coded? I've been asking myself that on this reread. I'm reading on Kindle, but being frustrated when half my long-presses on words (of course) give back no reply, and I've spotted OCR errors, although not as many as you'd think. My Ballantine is falling apart, too.

I absolutely think Eddison thinks Juss, Bluzco, and so on are heroes. They're just cranky squabbling backbiting heroes, much more Greek than Victorian.

[movingfinger]

The Project Gutenberg edition of The Worm Ourobouros came out January 2, 2022.

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/67090

I don't think it does the dictionary stuff, but it may be less error-prone.

[mme_hardy]

Aha! No, the dictionary stuff will have to be handled as my husband handled Patrick O'Brian, with the Oxford Dictionary of English on the floor beside the bed.

[movingfinger]

It also (just looked at the HTML first chapterish bit) does have at least some of the illustrations. Just reading that made me remember vividly how thoroughly fabulous the immortal Brandoch Daha is.

[mme_hardy]

Wielding his sword as lightly as though it were a willow wand!

[mme_hardy]

And messing up everybody's lives by insisting on sleeping with Supernatural Lady. And everybody goes "well, that sure is a thing to think about" and goes on with the quest.

[pameladean]

It hadn't occurred to me, but it does seem possible.

I do agree that Eddison absolutely did see those three as heroes, but I never quite cottoned to them as I did to Gro.

[mme_hardy]

Gro runs away with the novel, and I can't tell you why. Maybe it's because his emotions are much more complicated than the protagonists' ?

[pameladean]

He's a real person with real problems. I can't say that the grand trio has no problems, but they are at a different level, and at least sometimes they create them out of sheer, I don't know, exuberance, boredom, a frightening combination of the two?

P.

[mme_hardy]

I would definitely not let Brandoch Daha look after my child, or my cat.

[pameladean]

I KNOW, RIGHT? P.

[mme_hardy]

Does the Easton edition have the illustrations, or were those Ballantine's? I'd love seeing them in a bigger format.

[pameladean]

It has all the illustrations! They are gorgeous.

[conuly]

I have seldom disagreed with anybody I admire as much as I do with LeGuin about that essay.

A million times this.

[pameladean]

I still remember how startled and caught sorry I was after missing eagerly and absorbing so many other things she said in those essays.

[mme_hardy]

It's just such a deeply unkind thing to have written and published.

[cofax7]

I always felt bad about it, because I imprinted hard on the Deryni novels when I was a tween. Back when there wasn't all that much SFF to read anyway, esp. not cod-medieval fantasy with fabulous Catholic rituals.

Everyone gets to be wrong occasionally.

[mme_hardy]

Poison in the christening salt! And I agree about being wrong occasionally.

[pameladean]

I felt at the time, though it seemed very unlike LeGuin (to the extent that I knew anything about her) to do this, that Katherine Kurtz was being used as a stalking horse for Zelazny, who could certainly have taken the rebuke far better.

P.

[mme_hardy]

He responded? Do tell!!

[pameladean]

No, not that I know of; sorry to be unclear. It was just a feeling I had, something about her description of the general prose phenomenon.

P.

[sara]

I'm finding this hilarious because I feel like Zelazny and LeGuin, of all the genre writers I read in my misspent youth, have held up the best.

I mean he could have put an actual woman somewhere in one of his novels and that would have been a big improvement, and My Complicated Relationship With the Kroebers and Their Works could be a book all by itself, but I still get a lot out of both of them.

[mme_hardy]

he could have put an actual woman somewhere in one of his novels
(giggles)

What, the dead sister with whom he may have had an incestuous thing doesn't count?

[pameladean]

I imprinted hard on them as a slightly older teenager, too! I knew the prose wasn't All That, but they really did grab me and not let go. Also, Kurtz got better as she went along.

Everyone certainly gets to be wrong occasionally, which includes both Ursula LeGuin and Katherine Kurtz.

P.

[rachelmanija]

It's a very enjoyable, well-written essay that I don't agree with at all, though there are some sub points that have a point. "I told you so" is either petty or very exasperated, and that Katherine Kurtz excerpt does indeed sound like a company board meeting. Zelazny, however, was doing exactly what he meant to be doing.

[mme_hardy]

I don't have a problem with the ideas in the essay; it's using quotations from other authors, whom she knew to be still alive and likely to read them, that's the problem for me. And agreed on Zelazny, who could do high language exquisitely when it served his turn.

[pameladean]

Looked at just as an example of an essay, it's really amazing, and it has a kind of sparkle on it. She seems to have felt very strongly about the issue and brought all her powers, even then really considerable, to bear.

Zelazny certainly was doing just as he meant to do, and I doubt LeGuin approved of that either, but I'd rather have read her reasons for that directly.

P.

[ankaret]

My friend Andy once told me after reading one of the unpublished and probably unpublishable novels I wrote while I was at uni 'You write all these grand sweeping landscapes and people stumbling around in front of them saying 'um' and 'bugger', and I have always cherished that remark.

Zelazny is one of the very few writers from whom I'm willing to read noir pastiche. I can't cope with it at all usually.

[mme_hardy]

I want to try rereading Nine Princes (but not the second series of sequels) one of these days.

[dsrtao]

It's an incredibly fast hell-ride, and then the plot slams into a brick wall of prison. In my head, that goes on and on and on and...

In the book, it lasts two short chapters.

[oracne]

ROFLMAO

[recessional]

essentially arguing that all fantasy protagonists should speak in an elevated, heroic style.

What a deeply silly position to hold. And that is not usually an adjective I apply to Le Guin.