This Week in Google Alerts: Tolkien, obits, Auschwitz
The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 02 Jun 2014
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/6558

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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

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