Andre Who?
Andre Norton, aka Alice Mary Norton (1912 to 2005). Science fiction writer and Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. My high school’s library had many of her books – she initially defined herself as a writer of ‘juvenile fiction,’ back in the 40s and 50s – and I devoured them, sometimes two or three in a day. Then I left school, went to university, got on with a myriad other things (and authors) and forgot all about her until I added the invaluable Stanza e-book app to my iPhone and discovered that a number of her texts had passed out of copyright and were available on Project Gutenburg, one of my favourite websites.
So I downloaded half a dozen or so and read them and suddenly found myself keeping company with my 15 or 16 year old self. And I’m just as much a sucker for an inventive, star-spanning, rollicking good yarn now as I was then.
So what happens?
I wouldn’t say that there was a formula to a good Norton novel but there’s generally a protagonist who, whether adult or teenager, has some kind of growing up to do. All her novels feature some form of rite of passage. There’s usually a strong environmental theme or engagement with the wild, either literally in the form of the wild oceans the heroes of Key Out Of Time find themselves adrift upon, or the symbolised by the wolverines who accompany Shann in Storm Over Warlock.
There are also aliens, frequently very convincing aliens. In both the aforementioned books, the dominant gender in the alien races encountered are is female, with males either non-existence or powerless and firmly kept off-stage. Critics might complain (with some justification) that witchy female aliens and action-oriented male humans reflect rather stereotypical gender attributes but there’s no doubting the power of her extra-terrestrials. It’s heady stuff.
Why on earth would I want to read her?
Her books are fun! And they’re also very well-written, in that economical, efficient prose that the best writers of 50s hard SF had down. The ideas flow, plots accelerate and pages fly by. There’s plenty of action to be had but some of the best (like Plague Ship) demand that their characters find non-violent means to solve their problems and grow up, whether through guile, science, negotiation or tough choices. As with Heinlein’s ‘juvenile’ classics like Starship Troopers or the charming Star Beast, there’s a didactic undertow but never at the expense of the story
So these are children’s books?
Look, I think after Phillip Pullman, J.K. Rowling and the rest, we’ve pretty much established that there are good books and bad books and that the ostensibly targeted age group is by and large irrelevant. Good writers ultimately balance pleasing themselves with pleasing their audience. Norton loved to write and it shows.
And where next?
Off to Project Gutenburg, of course, and search on Andre Norton. Start with the ones I’ve mentioned then dig around for copies of the Witch World series. Her official site is here. She deserves as much of a cult as is belatedly gathering around the wonderful Diane Wynne Jones and I’m happy to do my bit.
Little elf toddles into the kitchen dragging supermum’s zipper shoulder bag. I use the term advisedly – it’s made entirely out of black zips, even the long shoulder strap, though supermum’s customised it with a single yellow zip to keep it closed. Little elf rounds the table (the bag following about two feet behind her) chanting “ja ja ja” and then begins to hum.
“Hmmmm….”
I join in.
“…mmmmmmmmmm…”
She tilts her head to give me a big, noisy air-kiss.
“M!”
Mission accomplished, she heads happily out of the kitchen.
“Ja ja ja ja ja ja…”
***
Dudelet returns to the issue of what I could do if I lost my job.
“You could take your guitar and go and play for money. If you play songs people like, they’ll give you some!”
Reassured by his back-up plan for my future employment, he returns to his drawing.
***
Little elf arrives in the kitchen. She gives me a big cushion, a teddy bear and a pair of trousers then demands (“Tha! Tha! Tha!”) her glue and glue spreader.
***
Dudelet is playing with a pirate set and has turned it into a rap musical.
“And then you shoot him, ah-ah-ah/And he shoots the other one/And you’re all dead/And the skel-e-ton gets the trea-sure…”
Bon Iver’s ‘Bloodbank’ is a song and a performance that keeps on resonating and haunting me, pulling up childhood whispers, memories and half truths; there’s a line about ‘Christmas morning’ that never fails to tie a little knot in my stomach. I find it hard to explain why. There was nothing terrible about my family Christmases as a child and trying to unpack any memories I have doesn’t reveal very much.
My earliest Christmas memory is an image of my father creeping into my room and out again, leaving the Christmas bags of brightly wrapped presents, walnuts, tangerines and novelties behind him. It was at an age when I knew there was no Father Christmas but hadn’t yet told him that I knew. I think my sister and I were sharing and I must have been about six or seven. Presents were important to me but they had to be a particular kind. From six onwards, I wanted books, boxes of Airfix soldiers and model planes. I also wanted a Scalextrix, a big railway set like my cousin P., a big, complex set of Lego and an Action Man. I got the books and the soldiers but not the bigger items and if I had, I probably would have wanted something else. Consumption never ends. Besides, my adoptive mother and father were brought up during the war by parents who were themselves quite old and I think they saw something quite wrong in conspicuous consumption of any kind.
We weren’t poor – solidly lower middle class – but my parents were always very set on our being ‘not like’ other families. They were both from what you might call aspirational working class backgrounds with little to differentiate them from the neighbours beyond pretensions to gentility and a certain sense of beleagueredness. This they drew from their identity as Catholics of a peculiarly rigid and unforgiving type and Christmas, like everything else throughout the year, was seen in particularly dogmatic and religious terms.
Do I remember those early Christmases before puberty as happy times? I do, I think. They certainly weren’t specifically unhappy. I don’t think my father became seriously unhappy until his fifties when he took early retirement. What’s odd, though, is how little I remember. There was the tree, the same box of decorations pulled out every Christmas Eve, Midnight Mass (always crowded) to avoid having to go on Christmas Morning, the crib set out in the Lounge and so on. The Lounge was the Best Room. We never used it, except when there were visitors so the living room was extraordinarily crowded as a consequence – a lumber room of oddly matched armchairs and a sofa, a dining table, laundry racks, ironing boards and one of two massive pre-war sideboards full of crockery and ‘best china’. There was also a kitchen table we could have eaten at but we always ate in the living room because that was where we were supposed to live.
So what was the lounge really for?
Well, until I was five, a grandmother lived in an identical house across the road. When she died, the lounge was where they laid her out. Not much of this is specific to Christmas but it’s a clue – life in our house was always an image of something deferred to the next life, the real life to come, as you’d expect from their particularly puritanical strain of Catholicism.
Everything centred around Christmas dinner to which a particular aunt and uncle were always invited. After the Queen’s Speech (listened to with immense respect) we’d go for a walk on the beach (we lived in a seaside town called Southport in the North West of England). I liked that because I got to walk with the uncle in question who was a very good listener. Boxing Day would be spent doing rounds of visits and then life would return to normal. I’d return to my books and collection of tiny plastic soldiers, meals would return to hotpots and rice pudding and my parents would get on with whatever it was they did. To this day, I have no idea if they had anything that could be called an inner life of their own. That’s a terrible thing to say about your father and mother (and there’s another whole post to be written on that point alone) but their interactions with each other seemed to amount to a hemming in of, a corralling of any kind of difference or individuality beyond being Good Catholics, doing their Duty and bringing me and my sister up to be dutifully Good Catholics too. You’d have thought Christmas might have heralded even a tiny outbreak of modest Saturnalia but it never happened. The closest they came to it were the small glasses of Stones ginger wine or Emva Cream sherry that would appear when certain relatives did their own Christmas visits. One bottle could last several years.
I do remember the tree in particular at the house we lived in up to when I was nine. It felt huge, enormous, room-filling. I didn’t know that that much tinsel could exist without draining the world of silver. I think it held all the unlived life backed up in our house over the whole of the year.
After dudelet arrived, supermum (a huge fan of Christmas, cursed to live with a Grinch) started getting real Christmas trees and amassing her own collection of decorations. Dudelet loves Christmas and this year, I’ve no doubt that Little Elf will. It’s taken two children to get me to the point where I can regard it with anything other than dread but (don’t tell anyone) they ensure that I can even look forward to it. A bit.
Writing this also reminds me that I’m also prone to deferring life till later. I need to look carefully at that, I really do. Oh, and here’s the song. Don’t blame Justin Vernon for any of the above – it’s a gorgeous tune.
Or, in other words, what this blog seems to be about.*
Blog #1 started as a parenting blog and for some reason, nearly everyone who read it lived in the US. Eventually, certain members of my family and supermum’s family cottoned on to it as well. This began to get a little uncomfortable and I definitely began to self-censor a little which, as the whole point was self-expression, felt wrong. So I stopped and started again, kind of.**
My previous blog had a fairly respectable readership at one point – not huge but not insignificant. I’ve met and maintain online relationships with a number of people whose friendship I treasure. One thing that always struck me as odd, though, was the lack of UK readers, for the most part.† So when I shut down blog #1 and started Dad Who Writes, I thought it would be interesting to see if there were any UK parents out there who had something in common with me and my concerns. I kept in touch with the people I’d built up relationships with (“same person, just a different body”) but started looking around to see if there was anyone in the same timezone.
Quite honestly, I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted some kind of approval? Or perhaps I had a misguided idea of wanting to belong to something (I have a long and undistinguished history of trying to join things, failing and leaving). I really don’t know. Perhaps I just wanted more people to read my stuff. After all, if I didn’t want people to read my stuff, I’d write it down and burn it (qv Kafka’s novels, Jung’s Red Book, Nabokov’s final novel etc etc. I’m obviously in the same league).
I probably suffered from reader envy quite a bit on #1 but not so much on Dad Who Writes. I don’t work hard for readers and as a consequence, I have a small, much-valued number of regulars whose blogs I also commune with, at least weekly. It feels like being part of a village and I love that.
I comment on other blogs I like when I possible but most of my blogging time is spent writing and I’m incredibly grateful when anyone has a look, let alone leaves a comment. I actually prefer knowing pretty much all the people who visit well enough to envisage checking in with them regularly.
And I do love comments.
I also started twittering as Dad Who Writes (I’d been twittering under my “real ID” for a while and was curious to see what would happen – as I’ve hinted elsewhere, I have an ongoing professional interest in this stuff). What’s been interesting is that the majority of the twittering amongst UK parent bloggers has, if anything, shown me that I’m not a parent blogger at all. It’s a part of me but the subject of this blog is quite the reverse – if anything, its about resisting parenthood.
The observant will carp that it is quite impossible to resist parenthood. Wrong – resisting parenthood is essential for my survival. I am not a parent. Parenthood is one of the things I am. This blog is an expression of that and of the damage and marvels that parenthood and families produce. I’m not saying I’m going to be more on-topic about this in future but I might be.
I haven’t managed to say anything of value above so here’s a picture. This is what I mean, really.
Taken at the memorial for the Wild Geese. I'll write about this at some point.
*This is evidently one of my more confused posts.
**Actually, I’d just skip straight to the photo below the fold if I were you.
†I should clarify this, some 18 comments later – it’s not that I didn’t want American readers – quite the reverse, actually. My mother’s American, supermum and I both have Canadian relatives, she’s originally from Kenya etc etc. It’s just felt a little odd that I only had about two or three readers who lived in the UK and as a UK parent, it was kind of puzzling. I suspect that the truth is my blogging at the time was simply closer to the the style of American parent blogs – they were my original models when I started reading blogs regularly a long time ago and when I finally started my own first substantial blog (three years ago? Must look it up), they were the first ones I read regularly. But this isn’t the place for a post reflecting on the history of blogging. In short, I worked for American new media companies and in an American context and this might have had something to do with it.
I don’t have time to post tonight and I’m bored of thinking about blogging about blogging. So here’s a photograph I made a few weeks ago.
Right then! If you’ve only got five minutes, skip to the bottom and check out the Fever Ray video. Otherwise…
David Sylvian, Manafon (2009): The more elderly amongst you (like me) may remember David Sylvian as leader of Japan and former “Most Beautiful Man In Pop”. He’s still quite frighteningly elegant, according to photos in a recent feature in The Wire but now trades in an elliptical, ambient (in the sense of a music that is utterly soaked in its time and place), challenging assemblage of art songs based on sessions with the world’s free improvisatory royalty. Christian Fennesz’s guitar and laptop is one constant factor holding together the scratches, strings and fragments of interrupted melody; the other is Sylvian’s beguiling, glowing croon of a voice, now a touch huskier than of yore but still compelling and pulling the sessions into a powerfully personal set of songs and meditations. In fact, I’d say he’s singing better now than at any previous point in life. ‘Emily Dickenson’ wafts in on a cloud of Fennesz’s electronics. ‘Small Metal Gods’ deploys Derek Bailey-style shards of acoustic guitar but it’s Sylvian’s voice that resonates most of all.
Fuck Buttons, Tarot Sport (2009): Last year’s Street Horrsing was a surge of forcefully orchestrated electronica, leavened with blasts of sonics that teetered on the edge of white noise. Tarot Sport turns up the already strong melodic content and blows the dust of their glow-in-the-dark rave sticks. ‘Rough Steez’ has as much to do with the best of Underworld but is built on a white water of churning, distorted beats and heavily tremeloed old analog riffs. ‘Olympians’ is a fists-pumping anthem that even at nearly eleven minutes never outstays its welcome.
Black Sheep, Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse (2009). Black Sheep is a new Julian Cope (he of Teardrop Explodes, ‘World Shut Your Mouth’ and Peggy Suicide fame) project, as concerned with the specifics of time and place as Sylvian, going so far as to announce the time, date and place of each recording at the beginning of each track. In The Wire this month (I’m thinking of subscribing – Mojo and Uncut are getting serious repetitive), Cope talked about the group (I’m summarising here) as a kind of post-apocalypse attempt from far in the future to re-construct the rock’n'roll of the late 20th/early 21st century.
The concept’s great in theory but in practice you get six long dirges built around pounded marching drums and frantically thrashed acoustic guitars. It sounds like it was fun to play. It isn’t particularly fun to listen to. As a big fan of so much of his work (from the Stooges-esque metal of Citizen Cained to the luxuriously slipcased volume of the Megalithic European book), I was very, very disappointed. It could grow on me but there’s a lot I’d rather listen to instead. Gutted, really – Cope is a bit of a role-model in how to head into your fifties disgracefully but relevantly.
This video’s a passably entertaining version of ‘Rock The Casbah’ from the Joe Strummer Memorial Busking Tour 2008.
Fever Ray, Fever Ray, (2009): Sweden’s Fever Ray is Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of the much feted The Knife. If it wasn’t so good, her solo project would sink under the sheer weight of gothic eclectronica cliches that have accumulated it around it like so many barnacles. Thing is, it is dark, noirish, sparse, atmospheric, disturbing etc etc but it all works, possibly because it’s anchored in a set of great songs and performances, full of heart, warmth and soul. Andersson uses every facet of her voice, from a treated rumble to a nerve-ending shriek, layering it over mid-Eighties drum patterns and John Carpenter synths. It’s also very rock and roll and reminds me a lot of the odd little Sisters of Mercy incarnation, The Sisterhood, and their only single, ‘Giving Ground’. The current release has a DVD of dark, noirish, sparse, atmospheric, disturbing etc etc videos (see fabulous examples below) and a great version of Nick Cave’s ‘Stranger Than Kindness’ as a bonus.
Little elf and I have gone to the park. It’s grey, raining and I’m struggling with with my regular dose of weekend melancholy. But she cheers me up. She rides her scooter nearly all the way and pauses to jump in puddles. She’s getting quite fast too.
When we get to the playground, there are only ourselves and two women, probably sisters, with two boys, one about three and the other six. Little elf goes on the swings then sits on the skateboard simulator – a double arc or rails like a truncated section of a helix with two rubber coated boards attached and handles at about chest height for older children to hand onto as they swing up and down the length of the rails. Little elf likes to be pushed a little way up one curve and then to roll back down again. We do this a few times then we jump in more puddles, she insisting that I have my turn. Then she sheds her red wellington boots and heads off to the sandpit that’s been there since summer. It’s also empty, though the other people in the playground have left their coats lying nearby. They’ve created a large sand fish, about six feet long, with chestnuts for eyes and some other piece of detritus for a mouth (actually, I find out later that it’s a moustache).
Little elf is immediately attracted to the fish. It crosses my mind to try and chase her away but the other people seems to have finished. She digs at it for a bit with one of the many plastic spades left lying there then loses interest and wanders off with a bucket of sand to jump on and off the wooden beams enclosing the pit. She makes me join in. Then she starts to dig at something else.
Whilst we’re engaged in this, the women and their children come back to pack up. The (I presume) mother talks loudly about small children doing “this sort of thing” and about repairing “monster fish”. I feel a little embarrassed and apologize for the damage, commenting that at this age, you can’t really keep them away. They don’t react.
They leave and I’m a little relieved. They have educated, very middle class accents and are dressed in jeans and slightly dressy looking windbreakers. Then the younger walks past, heading in the other direction. Five minutes later Little Elf decides to sit on the fish. She plucks off the eyes and the moustache and I pretend (I don’t want to squash the fish) to sit on the tail. She decides it’s a train. Then she climbs off, having done very little damage, and carries on with something else. Five minutes later, the woman reappears and comes straight over to the sand, without her children. Her speech goes something like this.
“Monster fish is my son’s as birthday present. It took us three hours. Three hours! I think you show no awareness of any kind of spirituality in letting your little boy or girl damage it. You show very poor parenting skills in setting her that kind of example. This was his present, and to let a work art get damaged by your child is very wrong.”
And so on, for about two or three minutes. I open my mouth a couple of times but I don’t want to get into a shouting match in front of little elf who by now is paying attention. Finally, she pauses and I ask.
“Do I get to respond?” She shrugs in a ‘Well, what can you possibly have to say for yourself?’ sort of way. I pause, gathering myself.
“You’re not even going to apologise, are you?” she says. The contempt, the certainty of her rightness in her voice is literally staggering.
“This is a public sandpit for use by everybody,” I begin.
“Hmmph,” she says. Then she walks away. I wanted to say rather more than (is there a statute of limitations on this work or has she colonised this corner of the sandpit forever, for example, or to ask what kind of parenting skills it shows that your six year old thinks it’s okay to wee in a puddle in the middle of a playground – though she did tell him off) that but she probably wouldn’t have listened. Either you can imagine that there are other perspectives on the world than your own or you can’t.
Talking about this to supermum later, she categorises it as someone with low self esteem taking it out on the nearest target and I wonder whether by little elf slightly damaging her fish, we were directly attacking her. After all, it was a work of art.
Then I carry on being depressed about my low parenting skills, lack of spirituality and general failings as a human being for the rest of the afternoon. But at least I didn’t shout my head off at a stranger in front of little elf.
“Ooh, I don’t want to go to work today.”
I’m making toast for dudelet. Dudelet is sitting at the kitchen table drawing a robot.
“Then you shouldn’t go.”
“But I have to go.”
“Why?”
“Because…”
Because what? Good question. Because I have commitments and meetings. Because its important to feel useful. Because if I start staying at home whenever I feel a bit miserable, somehow it will magically trickle down to other people and everything will start to fall apart. I’m not exactly sure how, but it will. And besides, I’m paid to show up. It’s a matter of honour.
I look at dudelet. His robot has a big square body and stripes. There are red spots across its chest.
“Well, because I have to.”
“What will happen if you don’t go to work?”
“There are things that won’t…Stuff won’t happen that really should happen.”
“Will you get fired?” I stop buttering his toast and turn around. He looks a little anxious.
“No, of course not.”
“But you might get fired?”
“No I won’t.”
“What will happen if you get fired?” Why is he so determined to have me fired? Does he know something I don’t?
“Look, darling, I’m not going to get fired.”
“But what if you were?”
“I’d get another job.”
“But what if you couldn’t?”
“I would.”
I feel cold. To lose a job, to not be able to find another, to not be able to look after everyone, to lose the house, to lose everything…it’s a deep, deep fear. It underpins too much.
“What do you want on your toast?”
“Jam. Look at my robot! It’s for you, daddy”
It is, of course, a beautiful robot.
It seems that Sleep Is For The Weak does these great writing meme things. So here’s my contribution based on this week’s Writing Prompt #3
3. Take a well-loved bedtime story that you’ve read so many times you know virtually off by heart. Then re-write yourself and/or an episode of your day into the story.
- Inspired by April’s Tribute to “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”
Dudelet and I both love Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves In The Walls. So this is a rather flimsy tribute written and posted in haste. Plenty of time to repent tomorrow.
Dad Who Writes sat in the front room listening. There were the usual house noises – the cat flap that wouldn’t stick creaking in the wind, the fan in the digital video recorder humming and the little chime of his iPhone announcing the arrival of another seventy two tweets – but there was something else nagging him just out of the reach of his hearing.
He listened harder. The central heating? No, it wasn’t on. This reminded him that he was cold and if he was cold then Dudelet and Little Elf were probably cold too so he tiptoed to the kitchen and turned it up. He went back to the lounge. The pipes began to creak.
Little Elf was restless so when she began to call “Mummy?” (supermum was out at a yoga class), he went and gave her a cuddle. In her room, the noises sounded a little more distinct. He could hear a kind of scraping and at one point he was sure that someone said “Shhh”, though it was a weird, metallic little voice. Or perhaps it was the fan in the DVR or one of the arsenal of strange noises the hard drive could produce at will.
Little elf nestled into his shoulder and went to sleep. Dudelet moaned loudly. Dad Who Writes put Little Elf back her cot, madesure her rabbit was close at hand and went to Dudelet’s door to listen. He heard Dudelet turning over then settling down again.
He went back to the lounge.
“Something isn’t right,” he told his iPhone.
“Tweet,” the iPhone said comfortingly.
An hour later, supermum came home and as it had been a long day, they went to bed too.
Two hours later, they were woken up by Little Elf who yelled once then went back to sleep.
“Those are noisy pipes – did you turn the heating down?” asked supermum.
Dad Who Writes came back from checking the heating that he knew he’d turned down before they went to bed. Then he went back again to get supermum some water “being as you’re already up.”
Then he checked the front door was locked because he had a ‘horrible doubt’. Then he went back to bed. There was definitely a noise
“I think there’s something in the walls,” he told his iPhone.
“Tweet,” the iPhone said, a little more doubtfully but it was still trying to be comforting.
Two hours later, THE DALEKS CAME OUT OF THE WALLS!
“Flee,” shouted supermum, gathering up little elf.
“Choo choo!” shouted little elf, pointing delightedly at a Dalek progressing elegantly along the hallway.
“They can’t get down the stairs,” shouted dudelet from Dad Who Writes’ arms as they tumbled and harum-scarumed down the steps. The Daleks paused at the top of the stairs and the family looked up at them.
“Exterminate!” said the Daleks.
“In the Wolves book,” said dudelet,”Don’t the family go into the walls?”
“I think they hang out at the bottom of the garden while the wolves have a party first,” said Dad Who Writes.”
“It’s too cold in the garden,” said supermum. “Can we cut straight to the walls bit?”
“I’m not sure about the Daleks, actually,” said Dad Who Writes. “Perhaps I should have done a Thomas story instead.”
“Choo choo!” said Little Elf.
Dad Who Writes had thankfully grabbed his iPhone on his way to dudelet’s room and he quickly posted a few revisions. Soon, a number of small, colourful, anthropomorphic engines marshaled by a fat man in a top hat were trundling around the landing. Little Elf charged up the stairs delightedly and the engines fled for their lives.
Then everyone went back to bed.
