Showing posts with label Carol Emshwiller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carol Emshwiller. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Short Story Wednesday: Carol Emshwiller and Bobbie Ann Mason select favorite stories of their own, "But Soft, What Light..." (1966) and "Memphis" (1988) respectively


New American Short Stories 2: The Writers Select Their Own Favorites edited by Gloria Norris, Penguin/New American Library/Plume 1989

Introduction / Gloria Norris
The Pacific / Mark Helprin -- (ss) The Atlantic Monthly March 1986
 Squirrelly's Grouper / Bob Shacochis -- variant form: "Fancy’s Grouper", (ss) Playboy March 1989
The Unfaithful Father / Judith Rossner -- (ss) Mademoiselle August 1986 
 Smorgasbord / Tobias Wolff -- (ss) Esquire September 1987 (Full Text)
 The Wars of Heaven / Richard Currey --  High Plains Literary Review, 1986
Temporary Shelter / Mary Gordon -- from her 1987 collection Temporary Shelter
Research / Max Apple -- (ss) Harper’s Magazine #1640, January 1987
 Lawns / Mona Simpson -- Iowa Review, 1984
Facing the Music / Larry Brown -- Mississippi Review, 1986
 Cooker / Frederick Barthelme --  (ss) The New Yorker August 10 1987
 A Lot in Common / Veronica Geng -- (hu) The New Yorker January 25 1988
 Orpha Knitting / Isabel Huggan -- Western Living, 1987
The Phantom of the Movie Palace / Robert Coover -- from his 1986 collection A Night at the Movies
Travel / Sue Miller -- from her 1987 collection Inventing the Abbotts and Other Stories
The Curse / Andre Dubus -- (ss) Playboy January 1988
 The Gift of the Prodigal / Peter Taylor -- (ss) The New Yorker June 1 1981
 Be-bop, Re-bop & All Those Obligatos / Xam Wilson Cartier -- excerpted from her 1987 novel Be-bop, Re-bop
Wejumpka / Rick Bass -- Chariton Review, 1988
Memphis / Bobbie Ann Mason --  (ss) The New Yorker February 22 1988
 Queen for a Day / Russell Banks -- from his 1986 collection Success Stories

Two anthologies, both the last in their sequences for editors Harrison and Norris, despite good reviews and an almost fool-proof concept for an anthology (or a short series of them)...get impressive authors to choose their own best, or at least for this purpose currently most favored, short fiction (a few novelettes or even a novella or two sneak into both volumes), and ask the writers to provide a headnote (Harrison's books) or an afterword (Norris's) to their story choices, which can lead to various sorts of amusement when not also enlightenment. Norris, perhaps shortsightedly, asked in both her volumes for stories published in the last three years or so that had remained favorites, making for anthologies that, for devoted fans of the writers in question (and regular readers of The New Yorker particularly), provided a litany of often familiar (and still fresh in memory) stories...Harrison, conversely, asked for overlooked stories from his contributors, which allowed them to range freely through their careers, and at times pick out something from their key developmental steps, as they were finding their way. 

Happily, Carol Emshwiller's 1966 story, as she describes in her headnote, takes on both her early attempts to move away from traditional plot and the increasing irritation she'd been feeling at the plethora of human-robot/AI romance stories she'd been reading, many of them ignoring the apparent warning of Lester Del Rey's early and much revered story on this subject that those who would seek out such a relation would tend to be emotionally stunted...one wonders what Emshwiller made of the technological developments already in place at the time of her death a few years ago allowing for greater ease of simulated romance and/or sex with hardware and software, if not quite up to the limited sentience of the stories (and similar narratives) in question. "But Soft, What Light..." not only posits an experimental robot and AI programmed to be a writer, but a machismic writer in the mode of Norman Mailer and his less flamboyant brethren, and its human companion, a young woman hired by the engineers and the robot's support staff in the Department of Contemplative and Exploratory Poetry to be its "vestal virgin"...and she displays all the self-deluding behaviors of the women who put up with "genius behavior" from their writing (or otherwise artistic) men, up to treasuring the knowledge that she is somehow loved by her artificial narcissist companion more than she worries about the minor and not so minor abuses she suffers, consistently excusing and praising her artificial guy. A blackly comic story, seemingly coming in part out Emshwiller's observations of too many women in the artistic communities she was a part of (with her painter and filmmaker husband and their Levittown house being a sort of Long Island bohemian locus).  Emshwiller notes that she considered this story also part of her attempt to write more bluntly and honestly about sex and the relations around those interactions, and she was surprised this particular story had never been picked  up for reprinting (after its first book publication here, it wouldn't be reprinted again, as far as I can tell, till Emshwiller included it in her 1990 collection The Start of the End of It All, and eventually in the first volume of her Complete Stories). She also notes that she didn't think this made her part of "the New Wave", though she enjoyed the work so tagged for the most part, since they had Agendas...not fully admitting that her agenda wasn't too far from those usually ascribed to the (admittedly somewhat amorphous) New Wave in sf.

Bobbie Ann Mason's protagonist Beverly is only slightly better off with her choice of life-partner, father of their two children and now ex-husband, a man who, like Beverly, isn't too sure of what he wants but has certainly lurking dread of what he doesn't want, and has some difficulty figuring out how to actively work for the former rather than letting resentment allow him to act out abruptly and sullenly (though, at least, not violently so much as to a certain degree selfishly, something Beverly realizes she isn't immune to, either, though she tries to be less disruptive and sulking than her ex). To further complicate matters, they aren't done with each other sexually, at least not in terms of both lust and empathy, and share custody of the children...which will be made more difficult as he intends to take a job in South Carolina, quite some distance away from their current abodes in western Kentucky, not too far a drive from Memphis, TN. The story is rich in details of their lives and those of their friends and extended families, and elegantly casual references to pop music and science-fictional films and related matters. Beverly is as effortfully trying to find a reasonable life for herself and help those around her find one as well, as much as the relentlessly nameless protagonist of Emshwiller's story is trying to invest herself in the notion of her self-abnegating sacrifice being for the Greater Good for her artificial partner and the great works it's going to be capable of, Real Soon Now. Mason notes in her afterword to the story that she envisioned a catastrophic ending for Beverly in the first draft, which among other unsatisfying respects left the impression of Beverly punished for leaving her husband; the next draft ended with what she suggests is The English Department ending: "Beverly was gazing at tantalizing visions of ambiguity in the reflections of the sky in the picture window"...and in final form Mason simply had Beverly going about the business of life, including that pertaining to her ex. 

Emshwiller, more in farce than minimalism in her story, has the budding AI/robot poet compose:
I love you.
"Let me count the ways."
One, two
Three, four
Ear neck leg Adam's apple
(Five)

Wrinkle under arm
Big toe. That's seven
But that's not all. 

Let one who can count, count,
And in a microsecond, 
To thousands.
Charms have never been better catalogued
Than this
From whorl of fingertip through pubic hair line
I love you.

Its later work is slightly more adept, if no less comically so.

For more of this week's Short Story Wednesday entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.


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Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Memorial for Carol Emshwiller: 27 July 2019, 1-5pm, at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave, New York, New York 10003

Some of the proceedings were recorded and an audio selection will be posted eventually, according to Susan Emshwiller.

Eve, Susan and Stoney Emshwiller have announced a memorial for their mother Carol, 
on Saturday, 27 July from at 1 PM – 5 PM
at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave, New York, New York 10003; (212) 505-5181

"Eve, Susan, and Stoney cordially invite you to join us for a memorial celebrating the life and work of our mom, Carol Emshwiller.

"During the ceremony we’ll be welcoming folks to share remembrances, recite a poem, sing a song, or read something appropriate, if so inclined.

"We hope you can make it, but even if you can’t: please spread the word about this event. If you think of someone missing from our guest list who you believe would be interested in the memorial, feel free to invite them (we’ve adjusted the settings of this Facebook Event so that anyone can add invitees). The more family members, friends, peers, editors, publishers, former students, fellow authors, and fans of her work, the better. Come one, come all!

"After the ceremony, we’ll offer a little nosh and humble snack or two at the same location. Maybe even a beverage. Nothing too fancy, or our mom would be ticked off about all the 'fuss' we’ve made and strike us down with a lightning bolt."

 (Carol Emshwiller on Sweet Freedom)
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Friday, February 8, 2019

Friday's too-Forgotten Stories: Wilma Shore: further short fiction and more from STORY, THE NEW YORKER, and THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, et al.


On Wilma Shore on Sweet Freedom.

 Wilma Shore: 

The following four short stories (and a very brief "casual") can be read online, but behind a paywall, at The New Yorker Online:

80 * The Curving Road (ss) The New Yorker, June 12, 1948

26 *  and * The New Yorker, December 4, 1948: 
The Talk of the Town: "West Coast Intelligence: A nursery school has opened in Los Angeles, called the Tot-orium." * jk/cl




and...free of charge...

80 * Dress from Bergdorf’s (Shore's preferred title: "All Sales Final" --see the review of her collection Women Should Be Allowed here) (ss) Cosmopolitan Jun 1959, which can be read online here

May Your Days Be Merry and Bright, (ss) The Saturday Evening Post Dec 21/28 1963 (which can be read online here)

A Bulletin from the Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Research at Marmouth, Mass., (ss) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Aug 1964 (which can be read online here)
The Podiatrist’s Tale, (ss) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Apr 1977 (which can be read online here)
...and some nonfiction, from The Writer's Handbook, 1974 edition (online here) "The Hand is Quicker Than the I" (Shore on the uses of first-person narrative form, among an appropriately star-studded cast in the how-to essay anthology.)

 Encouraging the reading of Wilma Shore's frequently brilliant fiction (among other writing) is an ongoing concern of this blog, and in the pursuit of that goal, I finally purchased a discounted six week subscription trial to The New Yorker (50% discount code, courtesy of Jackie Kashian's podcast The Dork Forest, is "DORK") so as to allow me online access to the four TNY stories grouped above, while also refreshing my memory of the two latter-day The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction stories (I can only assume that Edward Ferman at F&SF was offered the viciously unnerving "Goodbye, Amanda Jean" but for whatever foolish reason didn't accept it, so that it appeared in Ejler Jakobsson's Galaxy instead). 

 "The Butcher" (in Story magazine in 1940) was Shore's second published story, but the first one she liked, as did the editor of Best Stories annual (soon to become, and remain today, The Best American Short Stories series), which demonstrates the early and continuing concern Shore had with the constrictions of traditional roles on men and particularly women; her idealistic and very competent young office worker is as certain she's ready to be an ideal wife as she is an utterly competent and conscientious stenographer, for all practical purposes the only profession a woman can expect to have in New York City in 1940 aside from teaching school. But, somehow, even with an appreciative and reasonably sensitive husband...domestic work at home isn't quite what she hoped it might be. And she couldn't tell you why. As the daughter of an accomplished writer, who dropped out of a California high school to study painting in France and be praised as a budding genius in that field by Gertrude Stein's brother, and then putting aside painting to be the wife of a failing actor, and mother of their child while still very young...one can see where the story might have some autobiographical resonance. 

 Eight years later, when the first of Shore's New Yorker stories is published, she has a firmer grip on her tools, can work in the disparities of class as well as the hemming in of sexual assignments in detailing a reunion between a young woman and her former family maid, once a friend as well as servant, now far enough removed from her former ward's life that the latter, also, can't quite put her finger on why their last encounter feels hollow in comparison to their easy interaction when the elder woman worked for the young woman's family...at least not at the time, but, as the former Miss looks back on it a few more years later, she understands better. 
"The Ostrich Farm" deals with family dynamics of a rather more heated sort, as a boundary-free mother and her overdependent daughter don't realize there's any other way to act in regard to each other and their respective husbands. This one, and the two later stories sold to Harold Ross's magazine, are notable compared to Shore's women's and little/radical magazine stories in the degree to which the men are far more in the foreground of the stories...for TNY is about Important Matters, the kind that feature Men, doncha know, in these early but still pretty influential issues of the magazine, where the at times apparently bumptious Ross could express utter confusion in most dealings with women (his successor in the chair would famously hide from everyone). 

 But "The Moon Belongs to Everyone", while written from the viewpoint of a male protagonist, still manages to have a gentler if no less wrenching emotional underpinning, where it's less the assignment of roles by society that can be constricting so much as those driven by tragedy...as when a young family, with an infant and a boy on the cusp of adolescence, loses their wife and mother suddenly. And the sense of compromises acquiesced to in the face of tragedy and need, and difficulties in fully overcoming those challenges, taking their toll. 

 And by "Lock, Stock and Barrel", the wry sense of humor Shore brings to her best work is in full flower, while no less deftly drawing the predicament of the man who can't quite understand how or why his marriage has failed, and how he tries to come to grips with that fact...or, perhaps more accurately, tries very hard not to. 

 These are all good stories, if not quite up to those Shore would collect from her slightly later writing for Women Should Be Allowed, her only published collection...and presumably one delivered to her book publisher about the same time as she contributed to Avram Davidson's Fantasy & Science Fiction "A Bulletin from the Trustees...", her first overt sf story, or at very least her first story for the speculative fiction magazines, and discussed in the earlier posts. Following the savage satire of "Goodbye, Amanda Jean", "Is It the End of the World?" is only a bit less (obviously) apocalyptic, dealing as it does with environmental (mostly atmospheric) degradation so profound that it might well kill us all at any time during the events of the story, but that doesn't mean that the small power-struggles and mutual dependences of family life are any less distracting from that greater danger, and how people will tolerate and adapt to almost any threat in the face of the "need" to simply get to where they want to meet, for one small purpose or another, and on time.

 And while "Amanda Jean" and "End" certainly could qualify this post for consideration as entries in the February is Women in Horror Fiction Month observations, "The Podiatrist's Tale", a grimly amusing ghost story, helps clinch the deal...this might not be the last short story Shore published, but I'm not yet aware of another after 1977, and it deals with how the vicissitudes of aging might not be relieved even after death...

 Even as we lost another writer not too unlike Wilma Shore in her sensitivity, craft, insight and wit, and bubbling-under influence, Carol Emshwiller, this past Saturday at age 97, with her daughter Susan and son Peter/"Stoney" announcing the fact on Tuesday. Emshwiller, who also had a not to too dissimilar life from Shore's beyond their literary work in some ways, not least in terms of engagement with the community of the avant garde in several artforms, followed such other recently-lost peers as Ursula Le Guin, Kit Reed, Grania Davis and Kate Wilhelm...and inasmuch as I attempted to write up her brilliant first collection Joy in Our Cause a few years back while staying in a hotel in Barre, Vermont, with wonky computer access and there to attend the memorial service for one of the last of my aunts, my father's sister Shirley, it might be past time for a better try. For Emshwiller, too, is perhaps not fully appreciated enough for what she contributed, sometimes obliquely, to modern horror, as well...while writing primarily surreal or satirical or metafictional work, in the modes of contemporary/mimetic fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and even in two innovative western novels.

 Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's reviews.















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Friday, February 12, 2016

FFB: NO LIMITS edited by Joseph Ferman (Ballantine Books 1964); THE BEST OF TRIQUARTERLY edited by Jonathan Brent (Washington Square Press/Pocket Books 1982)


August 1964...aside from your servant, two other and more immediately impressive creations were introduced to a largely indifferent world. From Ballantine Books, an original publication collecting short stories, a novelet or three and a novella from the magazine Venture Science Fiction, which had published nine issues in 1957-58, before being formally merged with its elder sibling, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (which Mills became the editor of, as founding editor Anthony Boucher moved on; Mills had been assisting at F&SF, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and the other Mercury crime-fiction magazines; after publishing Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon" and much else at F&SF as editor, he moved on to become one of the more important literary agents of his time). From Northwestern University, issue #1 of a newly reformulated little magazine, TriQuarterly, which in its initial series, beginning in 1958, had essentially been a campus-bound magazine devoted to student and faculty contributions; Charles Newman, who had come to Northwestern as a professor in '63, wanted to make a more sophisticated and widely-appealing project of the magazine. 

 Both magazines were consciously and rather successfully attempting to advance the art of literature. Robert P. Mills, as editor of Venture (Joseph Ferman was its publisher, as head of Mercury Press), was hoping to feature sophisticated adventure fiction (hence in part the title), but also, as the contents took shape, sexual themes and somewhat greater attention to bringing emotional resonance to satirical sf became common factors of Venture's fiction...not least in the several contributions from Theodore Sturgeon, but also in the work of Avram Davidson, Algis Budrys, Leigh Brackett, Judith Merril, Poul Anderson, Walter Miller and C. M. Kornbluth, among others. If the magazine might not have had No Limits, there were certainly fewer in several ways than other magazines had imposed. Newman for his part wanted to make TQ a home for post-modernist fiction and poetry, and attendant nonfiction. It would, through the next decade and a half and a bit more, take on innovations in format and offer special theme issues devoted to specific writers (such as Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges) and international literature and genres of fictional form and beyond (such as the visual issue 32, "Anti-Object Art" [1975], which was Newman's last as editor, and with guest editors Lawrene Levy and John Perreault; the cardboard covers featured a pocket containing five cards of photographs of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty"); another issue was devoted to a narrative told in photographs.  
Venture had a UK edition (and an otherwise identical, two-months delayed Australian edition) from 1963-65, which published more issues than the two US editions combined, reprinted a different mix of stories from the US edition, and immediately added stories from F&SF, under the editorship of Ronald Wickers. The Fermans (Joseph's son Edward started editing F&SF and other Mercury Press magazines in the mid-'60s, including probably ghost-editing No Limits) relaunched Venture for another short run in 1969. TriQuarterly continued under the editorship of Elliott Anderson, eventually co-editing with Robert Onopa and Jonathan Brent, for the balance of the '70s. Then, in the wake of too many issues of interesting work (apparently the science fiction issue was the Last Straw, for a university which also cancelled its English department sf course reportedly for being too popular, following a western issue and one devoted to Love/Hate that featured some elegant but straightforward-seeming feminist adventure fiction), first Onopa, then Anderson, then Brent (who was formally editor of one issue only) were fired from the magazine and replaced by one Reginald Gibbons, who was very careful to minimize the achievements of the previous editors at every opportunity over his decade as editor, which resulted immediately in the magazine becoming much less innovative and much less widely-admired--more conventional and less important, and eventually in TQ becoming a grad-student-staffed webzine. The 20th anniversary issue/anthology, edited by Gibbons and Susan Hahn, doesn't at any point acknowledge this book. 

 There are at least mildly classic stories in these anthologies, and at least several others in the case of each author that might've been opted for instead...Kornbluth's "The Education of Tigress Macardle" is the more humorous side of the same coin that inspired his unfinished story, completed by Frederik Pohl as "The Meeting" ("Two Dooms" might've been included
instead);  the stories by Davidson and Miller are among their best-remembered work, but others of theirs for the magazine are impressive, and the Sturgeon here could easily have been "Affair with a Green Monkey"...and so on. The at least near-classics in the TQ book include the Oates story, the Brautigan duo, and the Sayles; Elkin (in relation toward Nabokov) and Singer are elegantly represented; Baumbach's metafiction is clever; though Borges, Carol Emshwiller and many others had major stories in the magazine as well. MacMillan amounts to a key TriQuarterly "discovery", with the seeds of his first two novels as well as stories in his only collection gathered from the magazine; in the other, Asimov was happy enough with his story collected in the best-of to name a retrospective collection for it, and it probably should be noted that not only did Sturgeon's Educated Estimate (aka Law: 90% of everything is mediocre or worse) first get widespread audience in his (first recurring magazine) books
the 1969-70 US revival
column, but Asimov began a regular science column first in Venture, which moved over to F&SF upon the merger of the two, and that column helped spur Asimov's pop-science career, in many ways the primary work of his life till his last years, when fiction finally was paying even better. Sturgeon, for his part, would later have continuing book-review columns in Galaxy, National Review (!), and Hustler (!--though during Paul Krassner's editorship). Sturgeon was the kind of writer who could and did sell a short sf story to Sports Illustrated.

Sadly, these anthologies were by no means pushed hard by their publishers... Ballantine was at one of its lower ebbs in '64, and while 50c for a slim, nine-story paperback wasn't extremely expensive, it wasn't cheap; $4.95 for a mass-market paperback, even with 20 stories ranging from vignettes to novellas, in 1982 was ridiculous (and earlier Washington Square Press releases at least had been published on heavier, perhaps acid-free paper and otherwise looked like their production value might begin to justify their inflated price, as with the similar Doubleday Anchor line of rack-sized paperbacks). A handsome-enough generic over on the Venture book (and no mention of the source magazine anywhere), and an even more generic cover (which has not been previously online) on the TQ. And while women contributors are underrepresented in both volumes (and didn't achieve parity in the magazines, either), at least neither volume is the completely stag affair too many anthologies of this sort had been in their years.
(courtesy WorldCat)
The Best of TriQuarterly
Editor: Jonathan Brent
Publisher: New York : Washington Square Press publication of Pocket Books, 1982, pb, 310 pp
Introduction / Jonathan Brent
Two stories: Revenge of the lawn; A short history of religion in California / Richard Brautigan -- #5, Winter 1966
How I contemplated the world from the Detroit House of Correction and began my life over again / Joyce Carol Oates -- #15, Spring 1969
Notes on the present configuration of the Red-Blue conflict / Robert Chatain -- #16, Fall 1969
Three meetings with Vladimir Nabokov / Stanley Elkin -- #17, Winter 1970
Altele / Isaac Bashevis Singer -- #18, Spring 1970 (translated by Mirra Ginsberg)
From The Tunnel : why windows are important to me / William H. Gass -- #20, Winter 1971
The traditional story returns / Jonathan Baumbach -- #26, Winter 1973
The warden / John Gardner -- #29, Winter 1974
From Lookout Cartridge / Joseph McElroy -- #29, Winter 1974
Sacrifice / Ian MacMillan -- #40, Fall 1977
Autoclysms / Michael Anania -- #40, Fall 1977
The missing person / Maxine Kumin -- #42, Spring 1978
Caye / T. Coraghessan Boyle -- #42, Spring 1978
Blue day / Arnost Lustig -- #45, Spring 1979
The first clean fact / Larry Heinemann -- #45, Spring 1979
Two shoes for one foot / John Hawkes -- #46, Fall 1979
In the town of Ballymuck / Victor Power -- #47, Winter 1980
Walking out / David Quammen -- #48, Spring, 1980
Dillinger in Hollywood / John Sayles -- #48, Spring, 1980
Amarillo / Jonathan Penner -- #50, Winter 1981
Notes on Authors / Anon. (presumably Brent).

 Index to Venture Science Fiction's US and UK iterations
Index to Triquarterly through 1997 and issue #100

 For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
Issue 20, Winter 1971






































































Speculators are wishing hard on this one now because of the Cormac McCarthy...



































Issued as a two-volume set...Winter 1976...

























 


























































Complementary covers (and issues!), above and below (the first issue of Venture)
Sturgeon's seemingly awkward title is masterfully employed in the story...
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