Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Tolkien, obits, Auschwitz

From: Gwern Branwen <gwern at gwern.net>
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2014 16:54:01 +0000

- on orc/wargs: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_to_Gene_Wolfe
- short TSH review:
http://bookishlywitty.blogspot.com/2014/05/from-tbr-shelf-sorcerers-house-by-gene.html
- obituary for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Lake :
http://io9.com/r-i-p-jay-lake-totally-irreplaceable-science-fiction-1584527320
"R.I.P. Jay Lake, Irreplaceable Science Fiction And Fantasy Author"

    > ...The Campbell Award-winning author put out a slew of novels
that defied categorization. He helped make the New Weird into a
vibrant movement with the urban fantasy-tinged _City Imperishable_
series. He blurred the lines of steampunk, epic fantasy and religious
weirdness with the _Mainspring_ trilogy. And he created one of the
great memorable female characters of recent years with the
courtesan-warrior in _Green_ and its sequels. We praised the
beautiful, evocative writing and mixture of brutality and cleverness
in the worldbuilding in _Green).
    >
    > ...And in a 2009 interview (
http://travisheermann.com/blog/?p=229 ), Lake talked about his love of
writing, and how he worked his entire adult life to achieve
"overnight" success:
    >
    >> I first knew I wanted to be a writer in my early teens. I just
didn't know what do about it. I read Gene Wolfe's _Book of the New
Sun_ when I was 20, and thought "You're allowed to do *this* with the
language?" I was hooked but still clueless. At 26 I found my way into
my first writers' group. I wrote, critiqued and mailed out stories for
eleven years before I sold the first at the age of 36, in 2001. That
year I sold three stories, and turned 37. So figure a twenty year
take-off roll, the last eleven with serious effort behind it.
    >>
    >> Three years later, in 2004, I made the Hugo ballot and won the
Campbell Award. In 2005 my first small press novel was released, and
in 2007 my first trade press novel was released. My career arc looks
meteoric to some outside observers, but that is the result of
literally an adult lifetime of effort, and the patience to keep trying
right into my middle age before succeeding...
- http://travisheermann.com/blog/?p=229 Jay Lake interview, continued:

    > ...TH: Have you reached the point at which you realized that you
had “made it” as a writer and author? If so, can you describe the
milestone or circumstances where you had that realization? Do you
recall how that felt? If not, what is the milestone you’re seeking?
    >
    > JL: Oh, I’ll never really believe that. A writer ise always very
conscious of being able to fall off the ladder at any time. But I do
remember the day when I felt like I was a real boy. Spring of 2004,
about the time I landed on the Campbell and Hugo ballots, I received
in the mail a stack of signature sheets for PostScripts issue one.
There on the page where I was to sign my name, Ray Bradbury and Ed
Gorman had already signed theirs. I was to send my stack on to Joyce
Carol Oates. Eventually, Gene Wolfe would receive these same sheets.
That was when I knew that in some real sense, the Eagle had landed.
There will always be more milestones, new ambitions, breakthroughs,
but that day was the first time when denying I was a pro felt like
false modesty.
- http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/02/hopes-justice-amid-atrocities-auschwitz-stalin
"Hopes of justice amid the atrocities of Auschwitz: Otto Dov Kulka's
book tells a disturbing story of people about to be killed putting
hopes of revenge and justice in Stalin's tyranny"

    > In Otto Dov Kulka's telling, three things above all were denied
in Auschwitz: life, hope and justice. Justice and hope were intimately
connected, since both concerned the future. Some of the most chilling
stories in his book _Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death_ concern
the disappearance of even the idea of justice, but for me the most
disturbing comes from a story about where people put their hopes of
justice....Against the metronomic murder, every night, of hundreds or
thousands of innocent people, what do any acts of individual torture
matter? And in fact he says at the outset of this section of the book
that he can remember very few: death set a horizon within which
ordinarily terrible things could not be seen or distinguished.
    >
    > He interrogates his memory and comes up with two scenes of
individual cruelty. In the first, a prisoner is first informally
beaten and then formally flogged to death in public: he is also forced
to count out loud each stroke as he is whipped until the silence
falls. The peculiar horror that the author notes is the absence of
horror, of emotion, or even outrage:
    >
    >> "What I retain from this scene comes down to a feeling of a
peculiar 'justice' that resided in all this; a feeling that it was
some sort of actualisation of a perplexing 'order' that overlay the
camp's everyday life — an autonomous system, utterly divorced from any
feeling of pity, repulsion, cruelty — even the distinction between
victim and perpetrator seems to disappear here completely. This was
the way I remembered that scene, that scene of violence-as-ritual, as
part of the system, not of the Great Death or of the games of the
small death, but of everyday life."
    >
    > This is surely a vision of hell in which all hope of real
justice has been entirely extinguished. It is beyond humanity in the
same sense that some of the tortures of nature — a cat playing with
its victim, or the flourishing of parasitic worms inside the eyeballs
of their hosts — are similarly terrible but we can't appeal against
them to any idea of justice. Nothing involved in those processes could
change, or even want to change. And in the annihilation of even the
possibility of appeal to a better nature we seem to have passed beyond
humanity.
    >
    > There is a curious parallel here with the profoundly disturbing
_Book of The New Sun_ by Gene Wolfe, a science fiction novel whose
narrator is a torturer who also seems to enter into a terrible
companionship with his victims. But Wolfe is writing from a
perspective of hope, and of communication. What happened in Auschwitz,
whether or not it was beyond communication — as Kulka suspects — was
certainly never intended to be communicated. That is part of its
distance from humanity.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net