# This Week in Google Alerts: Tolkien, obits, Auschwitz *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 02 Jun 2014* > 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. --- ### Gwern Branwen *02 Jun 2014, 16:54* - 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 ``` ---