The Betrayal of Arthur and the scent of disdain

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Alex in criticism, Dark Jenny, King Arthur, Sara Douglass | 2 Comments

About five years ago, when I was first thinking about the story that became Dark Jenny, I began looking for books that dealt in a critical and scholarly way with the meaning of Arthurian stories. I’d read the basic, classic fiction texts–Le Morte d’Arthur, The Alliterative Morte Arthure, The Once and Future King, The Mists of Avalon, The Wicked Day–but I wanted to understand what about these stories kept them in society’s consciousness for over a thousand years. This lead me to Sara Douglass’ The Betrayal of Arthur.

Finding the book in a local used bookstore was utter serendipity, since it’s never been officially released in the U.S. Douglass, a noted Australian fantasy author (The Axis trilogy), is also a scholar and brings both perspectives to bear on the Arthurian tales. She traces them from the eariest oral traditions up to the present (or rather, 1999 when the book was pubished). As her title implies she sees betrayal as the central theme, but not in the simple way you might expect. She acknowledges the Lancelot/Guinevere duplicity, but sees it as just one more example of a life sunken in perfidy. From the moment of conception–Uther Pendragon raping Ygerna, whether by deception or force–Arthur’s life is doomed. Sexual betrayal becomes the central theme. She explains why the various eras have responded to Arthur, how and why they’ve changed it to suit their times, and what it means to them.

I was so fascinated by all this the first time I read the book that I missed what is actually a sizable undercurrent: her utter contempt for anyone since T.H. White who has dared to write about Arthur. From Marion Zimmer Bradley to Rosemary Sutcliffe, she implies that these authors simply lack the capacity to understand the material with which they’re working.

On her web page, she devotes a fair bit of space to describing the process behind this book. Even here, her disdain for modern versions of the story is plain:

“Firstly (and uncomfortably for our modern age which doesn’t like such things), the Arthurian legend as it was developed in the medieval period was a moralistic tragedy…Secondly (and this is bound to be an unpopular theme), Arthur failed because he was himself a flawed king and man.”

There are other examples, but if the disdain is so thick it comes through in the author’s own web page synopsis, you can imagine how it permeates the book.

And that annoys me, both because I’ve written my own “Arthurian” novel, and because despite being a modern fantasy author, I feel quite capable of understanding any aspect of folklore or mythology that interests me. I have no doubt Ms.Douglass would dislike Dark Jenny for several reasons (that I can’t go into because they’re spoilers). But the elephant in the room that she seems to miss is that we (contemporary authors) are doing the same thing Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory and TH White did in their times: creating Arthurian tales for our audiences. We may not recite ballads around campfires, or perform with lutes for royalty, but we know our readers as well as those great storytellers of the past knew theirs. In a thousand years, who knows which current works will be held up alongside Malory, et.al.? Bradley certainly seems well on the way to standing the test of time.

In the conclusion of her webpage synopsis, Ms. Douglass says, “The Betrayal of Arthur is not a sop to popular culture, expectations or needs.” No kidding. It remains, for me, a classic and a crucial step in the development of Dark Jenny. I wish it didn’t also, after my recent re-read, leave such a sour aftertaste.

The Best Thing Ever! (and a side order of WTF?)

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Alex in Battlestar Galactica, criticism, Dr. Who, Shakespeare, Tor.com | 1 Comment

Recently I read a review of the Doctor Who season premiere that suggested the show is essentially creating an entirely new nonlinear form of storytelling. With all respect I think this is excessive praise, much like the folks who claim Ron Moore reinvented SF television. But whether or not you agree with this idea, I’m more interested in the critical subtext that insists any currently-fashionable genre permutation must be the best thing ever!

I love Doctor Who, and I trust that the show will eventually explain most, if not all, of the nonlinear moments the series premier gave us. But this nonlinear (i.e., WTF) quality of the episode “The Impossible Astronaut” is certainly nothing unique in SF, especially British SF that makes it to America. The first season of Space: 1999 is my touchstone for WTF, and that was done thirty years ago. In fact, for many years, when SF was being produced for fans but not by them, the attitude was most definitely, “It doesn’t have to make sense! It’s science fiction, they’ll swallow anything.” (An example: the unapologetic interview with screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr., included on the special edition DVD of 1980′s Flash Gordon. Semple, a veteran of the Adam West Batman TV show and the 1976 King Kong remake, seems astounded and a little insulted that anyone would expect him to take a subject like Flash Gordon seriously.)

So what’s behind this desire to overpraise whatever is currently popular? The need to instantly comment on and review things in the internet age is part of it, since these reviews are often written in the full flush of ardor following a new book/movie/TV show. More to the point, in many online critical commentaries there’s a definite urge to preach to the choir, which means that the critics mirror rather than challenge the enthusiasms of their readers (which, after all, is how you keep readers coming back). And ironically in an era when the great works of the past are more accessible than they ever have been, there seems to be a real need to establish that the Next Big Thing is also the Best Thing Ever (witness the lavish praise heaped on the reboot of Star Trek).

And that’s the opposite of real, thoughtful criticism. One purpose of critical evaluation is to remind readers that the Next Big Thing may not, in fact, be the Best Thing Ever. For example, Elizabethans experienced Macbeth as the Next Big Thing, but calling it the Best Thing Ever looks foolish when you realize Shakespeare wrote Hamlet three years earlier.

So whatever the Next Big Thing is, perhaps we need to wait until we have some critical distance before claiming it’s also the Best Thing Ever.

New cover art for Burn Me Deadly

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Alex in Burn Me Deadly, cover art, Eddie LaCrosse | 5 Comments

Here’s the mass market paperback cover art for Burn Me Deadly, from the same artist who did Dark Jenny. What do you think?

(Don’t yet have the official release date, but I’ll post it ASAP.)

Horton Foote’s Beginnings: A Memoir

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Alex in biography, Horton Foote, memoir, writers | Leave a comment

Like pretty much everyone I know, I have a massive TBR (To Be Read) pile of books filled with probably awesome literature. Some I’ve started, and for whatever reason never quite returned to. Some I know I’ll have to make myself read one day. And some–often the unexpected ones–I pick up and literally can’t put down.

That’s the joy of reading that professional writers can lose track of. We have books we have to read for research, books written by friends, books that we’ve been asked to blurb…”reading for fun” often gets pushed way down the stack. And a lot of these books are fun to read, even if the reading is prompted by one of these ulterior motives. But there’s nothing like being captivated by something you didn’t expect to grab ahold of you so quick, and so tight. Horton Foote’s second volume of memoirs, Beginnings, did that for me.

Foote (1916-2009) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter. When Beginnings begins, he’s a 17-year-old just arrived in Pasadena to study acting. Before long he’s in New York, starting to write plays and begin his subsequent momentous career. He name-drops a lot of people you’ve probably heard of, and a few you haven’t, but what’s interesting is that he never presents anything remotely gossipy or aggrandizing about these people. They’re just the folks he met along the way, most of whom treat him kindly. There’s no backstage romance, no backstabbing, and not much back story: the book starts, tells its tale and ends. Heck, he even covers meeting his wife, courting her and their marriage in one paragraph. Simple, sure, but it’s the kind of simplicity that is as rare as spring in Wisconsin.

He also uses a lot of dialogue. This might seem odd in a memoir, because truthfully, who remembers that many actual conversations from years ago? Yet because he’s a playwright, and because he doesn’t present anything that sounds remotely “speech-y” or false, it becomes a non-issue. Most of the conversations simply convey information, the way they do in real life.

In fact, what makes Beginnings work so well is that Foote’s style is so minimal, and so realistic, that it’s virtually nonexistent. He does an extraordinary job of simply getting out of the way of the story, a lesson more authors (including yours truly) could probably stand to learn. If you’ve seen the 1983 Robert Duvall film Tender Mercies (source of one of those Oscars) you have an idea of what he does, and how well he does it.

Beginnings reads most of all like an elaborate “thank you” to the people who helped that young man from Texas make his way in show business. Its Texas-flavored graciousness is part of its considerable charm. I read a fair number of author biographies (most recently Low Road, about Donald Goines), and usually they seem to succeed despite their personalities, not because of them. Foote seems the opposite: he’s decent to everyone, and everyone is decent in return. It may not be entirely true, but I’d like to think it is.

The horror of pink toenails

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Alex in fatherhood, gender roles, Parenting | 8 Comments

I’ll warn you up front, this is a rant. My last one was about the deification of Ron Moore. This one is a lot more personal, and also thankfully much briefer.

Apparently this J. Crew ad has been pissing people off because it shows a woman painting her five-year-old boy’s toenails. The ad quotes the mom as saying, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink.”

Some of the outrage from experts:

“Propaganda pushing the celebration of gender-confused boys wanting to dress and act like girls is a growing trend, seeping into mainstream culture. –Erin Brown, the Culture and Media Institute.

“This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity,” –psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow for Fox News.

And a couple of representative comments from the public, courtesy of TODAYMoms:

“Ah yes… another unhappy mother who wanted a little girl but instead got a boy. Now she is trying to change him into what she always desired. Either that or she is a closet lesbian and she is trying to ruin her kids child hoods.”

“Shame on that mother and how dare she want her SON to wear anything feminine. He is a boy and should be treated and reared as such..PERIOD!!”

Thankfully, lots of moms and other experts have stepped up to challenge this nonsense; but now, because you’re here, you get to hear from a dad.

My oldest son is six years old. He loves swordfighting, playing soccer, Godzilla movies and the Green Bay Packers. He also loves Stevie Nicks and, as part of his fannish excitement, for a brief period he liked dressing up in billowing skirts and scarves while lip-synching to “Edge of Seventeen.” He also occasionally wants his mom to paint his nails.

Now, do the last two things cancel out the first four?

I understand that this “controversy” is basically the result of trolls looking for something to be offended by, rather than any real substantial issue. But it still irks me, because it’s one more example of adults co-opting aspects of childhood for their own ends. In my experience a five year old boy is incapable of gender confusion unless his family forces the confusion on him. He’s simply unconcerned with accepted gender roles, and has the wide-open ability to enjoy things whether they’re traditionally “masculine” or “feminine.” We lose that when we become aware of things like social embarrassment, shame and peer pressure, three joys of adulthood waiting in my son’s near future. And we lose some of childhood’s magic every time these trolls do something like this.

In the meantime, though, he’s free to enjoy whatever aspects of gender he wants, up to and including nail polish and billowing skirts. He gets the magic as long as he can.

Giants of West Tennessee: Dale Watson

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Alex in Dale Watson, Giants of West Tennessee | Leave a comment

Recently a family emergency prompted a visit to my hometown of Gibson, TN. It has a population of around 300, with no school, newspaper, public library or sit-down restaurant. It’s a notorious and unapologetic speed trap. And judging from the condition of a lot of the houses around town, it’s fully embraced Tennessee’s status as number one in the nation for meth labs. But surprisingly, two artistic types emerged from this town: yours truly, and noted roots-country musician Dale Watson

I grew up in Gibson, but Dale was only there for a year, when we were both fifteen. Born in Birmingham, AL, he’s since been claimed by both Texas and Bakersfield, CA. Still, I consider the year he lived in Gibson to be just as formative, even if at the time he was more into Hendrix than Haggard. His father and older brother continued to live there after he left, and he’s written at least one song specifically about a long-lost Gibson institution:

(The location of the former Jack’s Truck Stop in Gibson.)

At the time we met, I was at the height of my Star Wars obsession, and wanted to be the next George Lucas. I was determined to use my Super 8 movie camera to make THE definitive movie about Bigfoot using stop-motion animation for the monster. Dale was the only friend I had who understood this, and his older brother even starred in the one scene I managed to complete (alas, like Orson Welles’ cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, my film has been irretrievably lost).

(The site of Dale’s former house; Jack’s Truck Stop is just down the hill through the cedar trees behind it.)

One high point of our friendship was the summer night he and I walked from Gibson to the nearby town of Humboldt along Highway 79. There’s a quirk to this trip: the sign in Humboldt says Gibson is four miles away, while the sign in Gibson says Humboldt is six miles away. Either way, we walked about five miles, talking about whatever it is teenage boys talk about (use your imagination), until a local older teenager known as “Bird” (a.k.a. “Big Bird,” because she was very tall; oh, we were witty) saw us just as we reached Humboldt and offered us a ride back in her car.

The fallout from this was predictable. Dozens of people passed us, of course, and my mother was mortified that her son was seen walking along the highway at night like some common…well, highway-walker, I guess. Propriety had much more importance back then than it does now. I don’t know if Dale got in trouble, but I somehow doubt it: I suspect his father understood just how maddening Gibson could be to boys not old enough to drive, but certainly old enough to understand that they lived in a town that considered them weird and therefore hated.

Dale and I lost touch over the years, and while I’ve followed his music and exchanged some e-mails with him, we’ve only spoken once. He’s had a tragic life that I won’t get into here, but he’s also produced a body of work that at times astounds me with its depth and honesty. While I was home this past weekend I was forced to endure part of the Academy of Country Music awards show, and realized how pandering and shallow today’s mainstream “country” music is compared to what Dale does. I wish Dale the best, and hope someday to have a chance to sit down and seriously catch up on things. In the meantime, I can wholeheartedly recommend his music.

Release day for DARK JENNY

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Alex in Dark Jenny, Eddie LaCrosse, release date | 5 Comments

Today is the official release day for the third Eddie LaCrosse novel, DARK JENNY. It drops as a trade paperback, e-book for all the usual platforms, and audiobook, read once again by Stefan Rudnicki.

And how, you ask, does this novel stack up to the previous ones?

“Bledsoe skillfully combines humor, action, deduction, and emotion to make the material fresh and engaging for fans of both fantasy and noir.” –Publishers Weekly starred review

“Bledsoe’s clever combination of noir and myth makes for an engaging story, and placing investigator Eddie at the center offers a fresh twist.”–Booklist starred review

“The third Eddie LaCrosse adventure delivers a skewed version of the King Arthur legend that is at once both tongue-in-cheek and strangely powerful.”–Library Journal

“Dark Jenny is unlike any fantasy novel I have ever read before.”–Bookworm Blues

“Bledsoe’s latest is a superb work of fantasy; he treats the Arthurian Legend template with respect, and does some great imaginative updates.”–The Agony Column

“Dark Jenny is a lot like the movie Clue on a twisted date with The Princess Bride.”–The World in the Satin Bag

“(It can) heal the sick, raise the dead, make the little girls talk outta their heads.”–Jerry Lee Lewis (okay, he was talking about himself, but I like to quote the Killer whenever possible)

DARK JENNY is available at all major online and brick-and-mortar outlets.

The Wicked Day: the weight of legend

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Alex in King Arthur, Mary Stewart, Wicked Day, writers, writing | 2 Comments

It’s no secret that my new Eddie LaCrosse novel Dark Jenny (which hits stores tomorrow, March 29) draws its inspiration from Arthurian sources. So on the eve of its release I’d like to write about the straight Arthurian novel that’s so good, I wish I’d written it: Mary Stewart’s The Wicked Day.

Stewart’s first three Arthurian novels (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment) were about Merlin, who I find the least interesting of the major characters. There’s something ineffably smug about him as he toys with destinies and then fails so spectacularly he takes Camelot down with him. In a sense he’s the Karl Rove or James Carville of the Arthurian world (or maybe Lee Atwater, if you want to stretch a point), and a novel with that approach might be fun. As it is, and despite Stewart’s skill, after three books I was ready to seal Merlin in a cave myself.

But Stewart switches gears entirely for The Wicked Day. This novel is about Mordred, Arthur’s bastard son by his half-sister Morgause. Unlike the first-person narration of the prior books, this one is in third person, so all the characters we’ve previously seen through Merlin’s eyes are now shown from a different perspective. Stewart makes Mordred a complex, driven but honest young man who both fights his destiny and embraces it. His relationship with his father is fascinating, since both know of Merlin’s prophecy that Mordred will bring down Arthur’s kingdom, and yet they forge a close friendship.

The first time I read the book, I admit I was disappointed in the ending. Not that it was a surprise: it’s the ending that the Arthurian legend must have, one way or another. But up until then Stewart had fleshed out the characters and situations so well that the inexplicable events actually came to make sense. And then comes the final battle at Camlann, where Arthur and Mordred meet, and die. Instead of giving us their final confrontation, held in a futile attempt to make peace, she retreats and falls back on:

None of those watching was ever destined to know what Arthur and Mordred spoke of.
(first edition, p. 302)

This sudden distance from the climactic moment is jarring, and when I first read it, it well and truly pissed me off. I felt cheated, all the more so because I loved the rest of the book. For years I called it “99.9 percent of a good book.”

But as time passed (and I made my own run at Arthurian-ish characters) I realized her choice made sense. No matter what she came up with for this climactic scene, it pales next to the weight of a thousand years of legend. By leaving this moment to the reader’s imagination, she gives the story the sense of inevitability and tragedy that a more literal depiction could never have done. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what they said, because the end of the story was written by Fate long before either Mordred or Arthur came along.

So I’ve come to fully love The Wicked Day, to the point that I’ll probably never attempt a straight Arthurian novel. And besides, Dark Jenny covers all the bases I wanted to touch. It’s my Camelot, skewed and tweaked to fit in the world of Eddie LaCrosse, sword jockey.

The Sword-Edged Blonde eBook for only $2.99!

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Alex in eBook sale, Eddie LaCrosse, Sword-Edged Blonde | Leave a comment

Right now the good folks at Tor Books have the eBook of my first Eddie LaCrosse novel, The Sword-Edged Blonde, on sale for $2.99. So all you Nookies/Kindlers/iPadders, there’s never been a better time to see what a mash-up between high fantasy and hard-boiled pulp looks like.

Review: Alice Hoffman’s The Red Garden

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Alex in Alice Hoffman, Red Garden, writers, writing | 2 Comments

If Alice Hoffman was a painter, her brush strokes would barely touch the canvas, yet her pictures would be as vivid as Monet’s. She crafts delicate stories that always seem on the verge of wafting away until they come back to earth with some devastating, perfect detail.

The Red Garden is something new from her: a book pitched somewhere between a short story collection and a novel. The individual tales stand more or less on their own, but the cumulative effect is much more novelistic. The continuing character is Blackwell, a Massachusetts town that she tracks from its settling in 1750 through the present day. Founded by a woman so tough and determined that she milks a bear to keep the settlers alive, the town remains home to strong-willed women who either choose duty over love, or find love’s solace fleeting. The men are often confused, aimless, seeking a direction in life that many of them find in the wilderness of the nearby mountain. Bears are a recurring motif, as are bees and eels in the river. The titular garden grows plants that inevitably turn red for reasons that the reader knows, but not the inhabitants.

And there are elements of overt magic, specifically in the story “The Fisherman’s Wife.” But for the most part, the supernatural elements remain subtle, hidden, easily explained to the characters with more mundane explanations. Only the reader, with the perspective of history, sees them for what they truly are. And it’s that gentle, cobweb-light push/pull of magic and reality that defines the book’s tone.

Stylistically, Hoffman goes for something equally subtle. Characters weave in and out of the stories, and Hoffman plays with narrative voice when it suits her (“The Truth About My Mother,” for example, is told in first person). There’s a sense that the penultimate story, “The Red Garden,” resolves threads left from the very first tale, “The Bear’s House.” But then there’s a final story, “King of the Bees,” that thematically says no story ever ends, not even when we think we understand it. Blackwell’s tales go on, just as life continues past our own moments of epiphany.

As a reader, I try to expose myself to things vastly different from what I write. The Red Garden has virtually nothing in common with my own stories, but I hope it teaches me to be a hair more subtle, or to risk a moment of delicacy amongst the swordplay and carnage.

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