Zachary Gillan

14 ON MORRISON At the same time, both writers willfully, sometimes irrepressibly, penned rather difficult prose. I'm a full professor of English with tenure at Harvard University, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it took me at least three readings to comprehend Beloved at even a basic level. There are passages in Morrison's works that no reader I've ever met understands on the first go. But this literary difficulty was neither aesthetically coy nor glibly aspirational. It was an ethos. Morrison's insistence on making us puzzle things out was an attempt to effect, she said, an "egalitarianism that places us all (reader, the novel's population, the narrator's voice) on the same footing." This democratic orientation to the work doesn't pander. Morrison doesn't condescend to your level; she challenges you to rise to hers. "My writing expects, demands participatory reading," she said. "My language has to have holes and spaces so that the reader can come into it." In other words, this ambiguity has a purpose. The point is that we cannot know, we cannot judge-and sometimes the point is that there are ways of doing both that allow contradictions to coexist. Morrison believed that literary form could instantiate philosophical ideas of this kind. As she said of William Faulkner: "The structure is the argument." As she wrote of Mark Twain: "The brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises."

Sound the productive ambiguity klaxons

I have been reading The Source of Self Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison.

These two short essays are in the book. I think they are a must read.

inthesetimes.com/article/toni...

A killer!

Writing my stupid little bullshit while a death cult sets the world on fire

14 ON MORRISON At the same time, both writers willfully, sometimes irrepressibly, penned rather difficult prose. I'm a full professor of English with tenure at Harvard University, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it took me at least three readings to comprehend Beloved at even a basic level. There are passages in Morrison's works that no reader I've ever met understands on the first go. But this literary difficulty was neither aesthetically coy nor glibly aspirational. It was an ethos. Morrison's insistence on making us puzzle things out was an attempt to effect, she said, an "egalitarianism that places us all (reader, the novel's population, the narrator's voice) on the same footing." This democratic orientation to the work doesn't pander. Morrison doesn't condescend to your level; she challenges you to rise to hers. "My writing expects, demands participatory reading," she said. "My language has to have holes and spaces so that the reader can come into it." In other words, this ambiguity has a purpose. The point is that we cannot know, we cannot judge-and sometimes the point is that there are ways of doing both that allow contradictions to coexist. Morrison believed that literary form could instantiate philosophical ideas of this kind. As she said of William Faulkner: "The structure is the argument." As she wrote of Mark Twain: "The brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises."

Sound the productive ambiguity klaxons

ter. A mother lights her son on fire. A woman poisons her boss. Most people don't know that Toni Morrison wrote horror novels. But she was more invested in genre fiction than you might imagine. She and Nabokov were equally fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe, for example, and firted with melodrama, the fantastic, the Gothic.

I equivocated, Serpell goes for it

Building on some of the stuff I blathered with Casella last year: bsky.app/profile/meal...

It’s what I’m working on right now; if I can actually get any words done instead of just staring at my screen in despair it should be in ARB in April, or… about

Writing my stupid little bullshit while a death cult sets the world on fire

Blanquitos Fiction by Karlo Yeager Rodríguez.

Helluva day to remind you it's the last day for Nebula nominations. If you're still choosing, please consider my short, "Blanquitos" in the short story category

Sam J. Miller: "...when weighed against U.S. imperialism, are eldritch abominations really so scary?"

www.typebarmagazine.com/blanquitos/

🙏

Point/Counterpoint This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won't Share Published: March 26, 2003

Time is a flat circle

there really is something immensely clarifying about realizing that "death cult" is not an ironic or jokey term

I’m losing track of my own essays but I think it was this one that says we need to distinguish between weird fiction as a mode and the weird as an affect

Yes. Yes you do

Which is to say I agree with sj

I’m losing track of my own essays but I think it was this one that says we need to distinguish between weird fiction as a mode and the weird as an affect

Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison, which has a big picture of Toni Morrison smirking at the camera

Yes… ha ha ha… yes!!

Yeah, it’s been a favorite of mine too and it hits way too close to home

I really like that last idea. Weird fiction can often point at things profound yet ridiculous simultaneously, the clash of perspectives irreducible to one another, so having one's tongue in one's cheek is a good way to get closer to whatever a truth might be than if it’s placed elsewhere.

The Prestige but it's just me and @megapolisomancy.bsky.social throwing terms like "accepted premise," "answering unasked questions," "structured ambiguity," and "unsettlement" at each other during increasingly bewildered con panels. Steve Aylett stands in for Nikola Tesla.

strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

Weirding the Periphery: How Imperialism Infiltrated Our Imagination Through Fantasy So much of foundational fantasy is about the (often imperial) core versus outside territories.

Were the very premises of traditional fantasy narratives priming our brains to accept imperialism this whole time?

www.typebarmagazine.com/weirding-the...

It’s very revealing.

If you get to it first let me know how it is

Tapping the sign in solidarity

Terroir landscape vs noir poison metaphor Hauntology the way each book rewrites/reconfigures the ones before

When you set a piece down for a week and then come back to it and find that where you thought you had written paragraphs there are just sentence fragments

God, yes, I hate that one