{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/6558", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 6558, "subject": "This Week in Google Alerts: Tolkien, obits, Auschwitz", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "2014-06-02T16:54:01+00:00", "last": "2014-06-02T16:54:01+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Gwern Branwen", "address": "gwern at gwern.net" }, "date": "2014-06-02T16:54:01+00:00", "subject": "(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Tolkien, obits, Auschwitz", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "- on orc/wargs: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_to_Gene_Wolfe\n- short TSH review:\nhttp://bookishlywitty.blogspot.com/2014/05/from-tbr-shelf-sorcerers-house-by-gene.html\n- obituary for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Lake :\nhttp://io9.com/r-i-p-jay-lake-totally-irreplaceable-science-fiction-1584527320\n\"R.I.P. Jay Lake, Irreplaceable Science Fiction And Fantasy Author\"" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "...The Campbell Award-winning author put out a slew of novels\nthat defied categorization. He helped make the New Weird into a\nvibrant movement with the urban fantasy-tinged _City Imperishable_\nseries. He blurred the lines of steampunk, epic fantasy and religious\nweirdness with the _Mainspring_ trilogy. And he created one of the\ngreat memorable female characters of recent years with the\ncourtesan-warrior in _Green_ and its sequels. We praised the\nbeautiful, evocative writing and mixture of brutality and cleverness\nin the worldbuilding in _Green).\n\n...And in a 2009 interview (" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "http://travisheermann.com/blog/?p=229 ), Lake talked about his love of\nwriting, and how he worked his entire adult life to achieve\n\"overnight\" success:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 2, "text": "I first knew I wanted to be a writer in my early teens. I just\ndidn't know what do about it. I read Gene Wolfe's _Book of the New\nSun_ when I was 20, and thought \"You're allowed to do *this* with the\nlanguage?\" I was hooked but still clueless. At 26 I found my way into\nmy first writers' group. I wrote, critiqued and mailed out stories for\neleven years before I sold the first at the age of 36, in 2001. That\nyear I sold three stories, and turned 37. So figure a twenty year\ntake-off roll, the last eleven with serious effort behind it.\n\nThree years later, in 2004, I made the Hugo ballot and won the\nCampbell Award. In 2005 my first small press novel was released, and\nin 2007 my first trade press novel was released. My career arc looks\nmeteoric to some outside observers, but that is the result of\nliterally an adult lifetime of effort, and the patience to keep trying\nright into my middle age before succeeding..." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "- http://travisheermann.com/blog/?p=229 Jay Lake interview, continued:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "...TH: Have you reached the point at which you realized that you\nhad “made it” as a writer and author? If so, can you describe the\nmilestone or circumstances where you had that realization? Do you\nrecall how that felt? If not, what is the milestone you’re seeking?\n\nJL: Oh, I’ll never really believe that. A writer ise always very\nconscious of being able to fall off the ladder at any time. But I do\nremember the day when I felt like I was a real boy. Spring of 2004,\nabout the time I landed on the Campbell and Hugo ballots, I received\nin the mail a stack of signature sheets for PostScripts issue one." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "There on the page where I was to sign my name, Ray Bradbury and Ed\nGorman had already signed theirs. I was to send my stack on to Joyce\nCarol Oates. Eventually, Gene Wolfe would receive these same sheets.\nThat was when I knew that in some real sense, the Eagle had landed.\nThere will always be more milestones, new ambitions, breakthroughs,\nbut that day was the first time when denying I was a pro felt like\nfalse modesty.\n- http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/02/hopes-justice-amid-atrocities-auschwitz-stalin\n\"Hopes of justice amid the atrocities of Auschwitz: Otto Dov Kulka's\nbook tells a disturbing story of people about to be killed putting\nhopes of revenge and justice in Stalin's tyranny\"" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "In Otto Dov Kulka's telling, three things above all were denied\nin Auschwitz: life, hope and justice. Justice and hope were intimately\nconnected, since both concerned the future. Some of the most chilling\nstories in his book _Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death_ concern\nthe disappearance of even the idea of justice, but for me the most\ndisturbing comes from a story about where people put their hopes of\njustice....Against the metronomic murder, every night, of hundreds or\nthousands of innocent people, what do any acts of individual torture\nmatter? And in fact he says at the outset of this section of the book\nthat he can remember very few: death set a horizon within which\nordinarily terrible things could not be seen or distinguished.\n\nHe interrogates his memory and comes up with two scenes of\nindividual cruelty. In the first, a prisoner is first informally\nbeaten and then formally flogged to death in public: he is also forced\nto count out loud each stroke as he is whipped until the silence\nfalls. The peculiar horror that the author notes is the absence of\nhorror, of emotion, or even outrage:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 2, "text": "\"What I retain from this scene comes down to a feeling of a\npeculiar 'justice' that resided in all this; a feeling that it was\nsome sort of actualisation of a perplexing 'order' that overlay the\ncamp's everyday life — an autonomous system, utterly divorced from any\nfeeling of pity, repulsion, cruelty — even the distinction between\nvictim and perpetrator seems to disappear here completely. This was\nthe way I remembered that scene, that scene of violence-as-ritual, as\npart of the system, not of the Great Death or of the games of the\nsmall death, but of everyday life.\"" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "This is surely a vision of hell in which all hope of real\njustice has been entirely extinguished. It is beyond humanity in the\nsame sense that some of the tortures of nature — a cat playing with\nits victim, or the flourishing of parasitic worms inside the eyeballs\nof their hosts — are similarly terrible but we can't appeal against\nthem to any idea of justice. Nothing involved in those processes could\nchange, or even want to change. And in the annihilation of even the\npossibility of appeal to a better nature we seem to have passed beyond\nhumanity.\n\nThere is a curious parallel here with the profoundly disturbing\n_Book of The New Sun_ by Gene Wolfe, a science fiction novel whose\nnarrator is a torturer who also seems to enter into a terrible\ncompanionship with his victims. But Wolfe is writing from a\nperspective of hope, and of communication. What happened in Auschwitz,\nwhether or not it was beyond communication — as Kulka suspects — was\ncertainly never intended to be communicated. That is part of its\ndistance from humanity." }, { "kind": "sig", "depth": 0, "text": "gwern\nhttp://www.gwern.net" } ] } ] }