Hibernating continent

“If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.” -Francis Bacon

Cancelled all my day's events so I can stay home and get over a cold, as I have a drive to Vermont and another to New York City in the coming days. Be peaceful while I'm snuggled up, will you?

Genre and the (Parenthetical) Laundry-Woman

Hideous day of laundry and cleaning here: reminds me of several things having to do with genre fiction--science fiction and fantasy in particular. You may find them interesting. Or not. But here goes the laundrywoman, emptying out the contents of her head into the blog pail.

1.  I saw on facebook the picture of the World Fantasy winners, and they were men men men plus two couples (for editing and press work.) I don't object to men; I like men. I just wondered. It was just an awful lot of male faces. All the writing awards. And art. It's nothing to do with the particular men (in fact, I sometimes correspond with several of the winners), but I'm still wondering. Is that how it always works?

2. While I fold laundry, I often read. And I started thinking about a science fiction and fantasy trope. You know how Luke Skywalker (I have three children, so I know these things) loses his hand in great pain and gets a fancy new robotic one? And how Wormtail in Harry Potter (I have three children, so I have read the entire series aloud) loses his hand (also with great pain) and gets a fancy magic one in its place from Lord Voldemort? (Oh, and isn't he just like Tolkien's Wormtongue? And there's an important arm injury for Frodo, too.) And you know how in Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy (I have three children, did I say?) Lirael loses her hand--her best friend, the Dog (who talks and is much more than a dog) bites it off to save her--and the close tells us that she will gain a beautiful golden hand in its place, made by Sameth, the prince and Wallmaker? No doubt you may add some lost hands and metal replacements of your own if you reach science fiction or fantasy; there are more. Take Eugenides, who is deprived of his clever hand by The Queen of Attolia... Well, you add what you like. Gene Porter's Freckles had no hand. Read that one as a child. And there's a precedent of dogs biting off a hand with Fenris.

Point being, thanks to my laundry-reading, I am wondering if all this comes most clearly from the famous tale of Gotz von Berchlingen (1480-1562, a nice long life for the times), who was known as Gotz of the Iron Hand (as, say, Lirael became known as Lirael Goldenhand.) A Franconian knight, he lost his hand in 1504 in Silesia, when a cannon shot broke his sword hilt (hey, there's another trope--the sword that is broken) and drove half of it, along with arm-plates, into his right arm. His arm was crushed and the hand ripped away entirely. Being a gallant knight, he rode to camp and found a surgeon. He was later given an iron hand and continued as knight till his death, or so the book claimed. What a formidable fellow. Still competent with only one proper hand.

Maybe everybody already knows this... If not, now I do, and you do.

3. I have completely forgotten the third genre-thought I had while folding the endless laundry. Oh, lucky you! And now I need to eat and go vote. You too!

Celebratory clip

A minor moment from A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer, 2012), posted in honor of the end of my driving-lesson tribulations--my elder children took their last driving lessons and passed the road exam. No doubt a few hair-raising moments await, but they each have a license...

     “Mommer, would you go comb your hair? You look like a medusa.” Roiphe climbed out of the car, staggering a little as if the ground were a foreign medium.
     Her fingers moved nimbly around her head, collecting the crooked pins into a small dark sheaf, which she bound with a rubber band and dropped into her apron pocket. “You could have been killed, the pair of you, or landed in the county jail with a pack of misfits. Roiphe Tattnal, you don’t know the least thing about driving, no more than a fresh-laid egg.”
     “He does now. The boy proved himself a driver of ingenuity and downright verve.” Pip clambered from the passenger seat and leaned for support against the side of the auto. He was not sure he could walk away yet, having recently been startled by a close call with a straggle of cows in the lane.
     “Lil, that was a dadgum shattering experience, but I believe—I truly believe that he could have done a powerful sight more if he had put his unthrottled genius into the thing. If he survives, Roiphe Tattnal has some kind of a future in transportation.” With a wrench, Pip yanked a bushel basket off a headlamp and surveyed it.
     “First man on the moon,” Alden crowed.
     “First idiot on the moon, more like. Y'all better pluck those chicken feathers off the front before Mr. Louis sees it,” Lil advised. “That’s all I’ve got to say.”
     “Would that it were.” Roiphe rolled his eyes dramatically. “All,” he added in case she had not understood.

Tarkovsky

Thanks to Rebecca B. for posting this quote from Andrei Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time / Запечатлённое время on my facebook wall:

Modern art has taken the wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for his own sake. What purports to be art begins to looks like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalised action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in an artistic creation the personality does not assert itself it serves another, higher and communal idea. The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of human calling.

I especially love and believe this: The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. That thought is a very un20th-, un-21st-century idea, but it feels true to my own feelings and beliefs about art. And yet, the act of making a lyric poem, say, is a stirring joy in itself, and so the initial gift is repaid by wielding the gift, which in turn creates more gifts that at their best feel in-flooded rather than, as it sometimes seems with lesser works, spun from navel lint.

Another thing that is barely suggested in that Tarkovsky sentence is the idea of the artist and humility. That is, the artist's proper stance before the monuments of art from time past should be one of humility. 

And now I want to read that book...