Dentistry, General Weirdness, More Fungus

I’ve just returned from the Tufts University School of Dentistry after leaving at 7 am this morning.  It is now almost 11 hours later.

Equal amounts of time were spent in the chair and on the road; (I got a little lost on the way home, but the real slow down was the first snow fall of the season.)

In the interim, I’ve managed to read a fair amount of VanderMeer’s FINCH. (Laying in a dentist’s chair for nearly six hours doesn’t leave you with too many options for amusing yourself.)

I have to say in all honesty that the initial opening of Finch put me off just a little bit.  I’m probably one of the few people on the face of this green Earth with an English Lit degree who detests Shakespeare.  The word play really puts me off.  Clever? Sure.  So are monkeys having a tea party.

I’m bothered by both the wasted time (stop comparing everything on the planet to your love for Romeo and shove the damned dagger in your breast already, take the frickin poison, just shut up and DO something!) and the added effort needed to unravel the tangled skein of yarn that the words on the page have become.  Who was the subject?  What was the action?  One page in and I’ve stopped seeing story and have become mired in cross-reference, double-entendre, checking the definition to make sure I really understand how a word is being used (and it is ALWAYS the fifth or sixth 14th century totally obscure usage of the word that has been chosen).

Liter-AIR-iness almost always strikes me as coming from a writer who had little or no story to tell and filled the page with something they considered clever and ends up being something that would have been kicked back by any English professor with a note to include some substance.

(I have the same reaction to one of the few fantasy series that I have enjoyed in the past, Donaldson’s Covenant triliogy and his over-use of the word crepuscular in particular.)

I’m equally bothered by writers who include song lyrics, stanzas from epic poetry and similar space-fillers (regardless of how informative to the story they may be): I skipped almost all of the Elven trash in LOTR. Tolkein may have put an enormous effort into making up histories and languages, but he didn’t have to share them with me.

Science Fictional efforts along the above lines have been struggles for me: it took strong effort on the part of a close friend to get me into Delany: I was reading Spinrad at the time (Iron Dream, Bug Jack Barron, Men in the Jungle) and Moorcock (Bastable’s adventures, Cornelius) and found them to be treating on the same concepts and themes (in a broad sense), but wildly different in presentation.  The latter played with tropes and drew on existing icons already resident in the brain, the latter used language to craft new sensory impressions.

I might have gotten to the point more quickly here by pointing out that about the only kind of poetry I really appreciate are limericks….

So it was that I approached the opening of Finch with a little trepidation: without really knowing Jeff, I find that I like what I do know about him. I also believe that creativity in all of its forms ought to be rewarded, if only for the effort.

Jeff starts with an abruptness that I presume is a take off or homage in some ways to the hard-boiled detective novel and a use of language and descriptive terminology that looked like it might be in my off-putting category.

It took a few pages to get used to, but I think it says quite a bit about Jeff’s skill as a writer that within those few pages I have slipped into appreciating it. The style has become part of the story rather than the way the story is being told.

I’ll also say that I am very impressed with the manner in which a knowledge of all things fungal creeps in to the use of language and background – something that one not familiar with necrophores would not be able to appreciate.

VanderMeer has taken an aspect of our real world – one that is largely unnoticed by most everyone – and has harnessed it to create a very stunning and rich other world.  Ambergris is a place that I find truly creepy because I am familiar with how prevalent and pervasive fungal life is in our world.

Have you ever turned over a rock or a stump that was infested with fungal tendrils? Imagine that moist, loamy, fuzzy, dark and crawly place touching you all over…. You’ll have some small idea of the world inhabited by Finch.

I’m enjoying it and expect that I will continue to do so until the end, which is probably only a day or so away.  Full report on this book at that time.

~~~

I ran into a motorcycle gang at the supermarket and it seems that this particular club has adopted one of Ray Bradbury’s titles as their motto: Something Wicked This Way Comes was emblazoned on the back of their vests and leathers (along with the tre cliche skulls, flames and nekkid lady tattoos). I wonder if Ray knows that he’s permeated the culture to such a degree.  I wonder even more if the motorcycle club members know where they lifted their motto from. (Or even if any of them can read.)

~~~

The general weirdness is the fact that we had snow today, and a projected temperature of 70 degrees coming for this Sunday.

The more fungus part?  An anecdote:

Many moons ago I was living by myself and without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that the pile of bones outside the cave was getting pretty large.

I’d gotten into the habit of walking to a local diner in the morning, picking up two large coffees (styrofoam cups) and the paper.

The cups were inevitably left on just about any flat surface – windowsills, desk corners, the top of the television.  Some became ashtrays, others breeding grounds for some kind of fungal spores that produced a green skin across the surface of whatever coffee remained in the cup.

One fine morning I received a call from a friend who was a fairly frequent (although reluctant) visitor to the apartment. He’d suggested on a number of occassions that I might want to clean up a little bit and had gotten my by then standard answer – “but the ashtrays are full!”

His call was to announce that he was coming by for a talk.  In preparation, I cleared the books and papers off the couch so he’d have somewhere to sit. While waiting for him to arrive I decided to have some lunch and I remembered that the diner served split pea soup weekly.  Today happened to be that day of the week.  I skipped on over to the diner and brought home a large soup – in a styrofoam cup. The same kind of cup they served their coffee in.

Sitting there waiting for my friend to arrive my gaze happened to cross the row of cups sitting on the windowsill – each one a thriving agricultural of green fungus.

I took the spoon out of my soup cup and put it in the kitchen. I put the cup with the soup on the windowsill. Then I waited.

Shortly thereafter my friend arrived. On his way to the couch I manuevered him past the window and commented that things were getting really crowded and that I really needed to clean up a little bit. He didn’t say anything to that but I did see him look at the cups.

We engaged in casual conversation for a few minutes and then I mentioned that I was hungry.  He refused my offer and I went into the kitchen, where I grabbed my soup spoon.

I sat back down and casually reached over to the windowsill, grabbed a styrofoam cup seemingly at random and started digging in to green, gloppy, chunky stuff.

My friend started to protest when he saw what I was about to do and then turned his own shade of green.

It took a good long while for me to convince him that it was really pea soup.