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.)

[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.

[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.

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My friend Andy once told me after reading one of the unpublished and probably unpublishable novels I wrote while I was at uni 'You write all these grand sweeping landscapes and people stumbling around in front of them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

[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.