Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
The Lonesome Cowboy’s Lost Lament
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
His grandfather had sung this song, late at night, in his workshop, when he was too absorbed in his work to know that Thomas was there, too focused even to know he was singing. The lyrics had to do with the moon, a heart (broken or breaking), and a cowboy.
Thomas forgot the song for decades, until he heard a noisy near-punk cover version late at night on a college radio station while driving cross-country. Just half the last refrain before the music descended into squeals and static which was either the station slipping out of range or some kind of Sonic Youthy outro. Enough to hook him, put the song back in his head — or the hole of forgetting where the song would have been.
He tried hypnotism, hours in sensory deprivation tanks; nothing helped. A friend of friend with a knack for finding things shared some advice.
“In the old days,” she said, “there was a memory-art where you imagined a mansion and arranged what you wanted to remember by the rooms and the objects in them. These days, memory is collective and external — libraries, the internet… like that. Memories are still places, but they’re real and they’re out there. If you’re willing to drive far enough, you can remember anything.”
She had a car he could borrow, and he left that night, phoning in to work from a truck stop the next morning to request a leave of absence. The car, a Ford Galaxie with shot shocks, ran on words. Thomas had to pull over every so often, flip through the one-volume Oxford English Dictionary on the passenger seat to a random word, and read the tiny print aloud. The word faded from the page and the memories of everyone within 50 miles. In a couple miles, the word would be back and the needle back on E, and he’d have to do it again.
He drove: a month, two. He did find it, eventually, spotting it out the corner of his eye as he turned into yet another motel parking lot. Congealed moonlight shapes spiraled in the air over a pile of roadside gravel. Thomas could remember every verse, every quaver of his grandfather’s hum-yodeled refrains, and his heart unbroke.
He got back in the car, found the flashlight and magnifying glass, and fueled up to begin the drive home.
A Bit of Summer Reading
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
Review: Through the Wonderglass and Adventures in Lookingland by Seelie Nican
Given all the adaptations, rearrangings, and reimagings to which Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland books have been subjected over the past 150 years, a steampunk Alice was, I suppose, inevitable. Nican’s books are more a techno-Victorian translation of the originals than a wholesale reworking on the order of Frank Beddor’s recent Looking Glass Wars. She keeps the sequence of scenes intact and even weaves a sentence of two of Carroll’s prose into each chapter, which lends an interesting patina to the text.
When her method works, which is most of the time, Nican’s visions can be striking. Her steamwork caterpillar is a cyborg fused to its own hookah. Her hatter, afloat in his mercury tank, is unsettlingly mad. Her Cheshire cat is a holograph generated by the ivory mechanism of its own smile. Her mock turtle might have swum over from the island of Dr. Moreau, and her dodo/gryphon is a metaphysical Machiavelli, orchestrating Alice’s journey among all these creatures.
With the basic method set out in Wonderglass, Nican really cuts loose in Lookingland, riffing on the more dreamlike movement of Carroll’s second book, to create such extended sequences as the tulgey wood (where the forest is the jabberwock), the Dickens-meets-Dante bleakness of the walrus and carpenter’s story, or the Escheresque sprawl of the sheep’s seagoing millworks.
While the gears and airships treatment works well for Alice, the approach is less fruitful in Nican’s space opera Hunting of the Snark. Perhaps because the Snark offers less material to work with, she spends far too long establishing the world and backstory against which she can set the voyage of Carroll’s doomed questers. The book occasionally delivers some of the frisson of Nican’s Alice books — as in the final chapter, where the Baker makes his way through the echoing, flickering caverns of the generation ship’s vast computer in search of the android that may be programmed as either snark or boojum, or, tragically, both.
Next, I’m reading Ulro’s Dream, book one of the Zoasiad, Nican’s nine-volume epic fantasy series based on the work of William Blake. The cover, melding Blake’s artwork with stereotypical fantasy art in a Frank Frazetta vein, isn’t all that appealing, but I hear the story’s good, once you get past the first couple hundred pages of the prologue.