Heads Up!
I want to wave the banner for a superb essay in the November issue of New York Review of Science Fiction (website located here ).
Tom La Farge, whose weird, wonderful fantasy Zuntig I tried to flog for Nebs a couple years back (small press, hard to get hold of) has written this article entitled "Collage and Map" concerning the friction between Modernism and some fantasy writers. While I don't think he's quite right about the PJF, he does a wonderful job of defining each--and finding the value in each. No sneering.
Check out this graph near the end:
Ruins are natural sites for revery. What fictive mode could combine or anyhow draw upon the different aesthetics of fantasy and of Modernism? If I have described them accurately, each provides a different pleasure through a different kind of reading. Modernism places experience at its core: fantasy centers on belief. These values ought not to be irreconcilable, since both reflect a desire for reconnection to the real and a retrieval of meaning, even for the revival of the archaic. Both propose a revitalized world in which desire is clarified. Both take a stand against money, in Auden's words "the brokers . . . roaring like beasts on the bloor of the Bourse": money as a value, a measure of self-actualization.
Speaking of fantasy, I decided to delve into the pile of books supplied as freebies at World Fantasy Con, and I've read the beginning of one; more anon.
Tom La Farge, whose weird, wonderful fantasy Zuntig I tried to flog for Nebs a couple years back (small press, hard to get hold of) has written this article entitled "Collage and Map" concerning the friction between Modernism and some fantasy writers. While I don't think he's quite right about the PJF, he does a wonderful job of defining each--and finding the value in each. No sneering.
Check out this graph near the end:
Ruins are natural sites for revery. What fictive mode could combine or anyhow draw upon the different aesthetics of fantasy and of Modernism? If I have described them accurately, each provides a different pleasure through a different kind of reading. Modernism places experience at its core: fantasy centers on belief. These values ought not to be irreconcilable, since both reflect a desire for reconnection to the real and a retrieval of meaning, even for the revival of the archaic. Both propose a revitalized world in which desire is clarified. Both take a stand against money, in Auden's words "the brokers . . . roaring like beasts on the bloor of the Bourse": money as a value, a measure of self-actualization.
Speaking of fantasy, I decided to delve into the pile of books supplied as freebies at World Fantasy Con, and I've read the beginning of one; more anon.