Monthly Archives: June 2013

Bald-Headed, Whispering Birds

I remember all sorts of songs and snatches of lyrics from when I was little, including a lot of goofy music for kids, pop hits from the early ’70s and, of course, most of the music of the Beatles (which my mom and I both loved — she’d put them on while she was working around the house).

But there was this odd little one-off song mom had on a single disc. Being little, I never asked why she had it, or when she’d picked it up, but I loved it too. I thought it was weird and funny when I was a tyke . And, unlike a whole lot of other matters that amused me when I was a little kid, I still think it’s weird and funny.

This, then, is “The Tennessee Bird Walk.” I looked it up online recently and it was still weird and wonderful. In case you’re curious, the lines that stuck with me over almost forty years since I’d last heard it were: “Remember me my darling, when spring is in the air, and the bald-headed birds are whispering everywhere.”

The Tennessee Bird Walk (Jack Blanchard & Misty Morgan)

Thoughts on Copperfield, Bleak House, and Lions

I think the thing that interested me the most about finally reading David Copperfield was how much I enjoyed the novel. As I mentioned in an earlier post, in high school I didn’t much like Dickens. The second or third chapter of Copperfield started to bog down and I almost gave up, but, pushing on, I enjoyed most of the rest of it… until about the final third.

A number of essays at the back of the edition I read mentioned reading and re-reading the novel, but I don’t see myself doing that. But I might re-read various segments. My favorite parts come mostly before Steerforth leaves the narrative as a speaking character. After that the text produces more and more of Macawber. I gather I’m supposed to find Macawber funny, but the deeper into the text I got, the more I groaned when I saw he was to be a central character of a chapter. I disliked his meanderings so much that I began to blip over huge swathes of paragraphs where he was talking. I likewise didn’t find the machinations of Uriah Heep of great interest. Some villains you hate and you long to see when they will get their comeuppance — the Murdstones, for instance. Heep I just found so irritating I wanted to get him out of the narrative. Not necessarily because I wanted to see him get his just desserts but because I was tired of him.

The Beast and the Dragon

I’m still hard at work on my second Paizo Pathfinder novel, Stalking the Beast.

During the early parts of the day I’m getting the farm repairs managed before the weather gets really hot, and a lot of evenings I’m playing Iron Dragon.

I’m really not into trains, or train games, but some years back our friends Stacey Davis and Monique Robins introduced my wife and me to a rail building board game set in a fantasy land, and we had a lot of fun. We break it out every now and then and play a few games. My wife, who is incredibly well organized, almost always wins!

Here’s a quick peak at the board, from a web site that has a bunch of nifty looking add-on rules.

Remembering a Master

One of my favorite authors died last week. Jack Vance has been eulogized now all over the internet by more influential authors than me, and more eloquently by people who knew him better. (Matthew David Surridge wrote up a nice overview at Black Gate, and John O’Neill talks about Vance’s importance in the field in another essay there.)

I love Vance’s first Dying Earth novel, The Dying Earth, and the four books from his Planet of Adventure sequence, and I enjoy much of his other work as well. I have much of it left to read, and I’ll probably start dipping back into his fiction in remembrance this week.

The intellect, wit, and sheer invention to be found in Vance are marvelous. I can’t think of anyone who’s brought to life so many odd and fascinating human cultures, which is why I always recommend Vance not just to fantasy readers, but to writers who want to improve their world building. That said, often character building becomes almost incidental to Vance in preference to verbal cleverness and imagination, leading to a different kind of writing than that I usually enjoy, which is why I often read him in small doses.  I find him rich, but brilliant, like a really rare and excellent dessert I wouldn’t want to eat every day.