[books] Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
Last night, I finished reading Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980) [ Powell's ]. Brighter minds than mine have spent much thought on this book over the years [ Wikipedia | Riddley Walker Annotations ], but oddly enough I still have a few things to say.
This book could be a type specimen in the argument Daniel Abraham was exploring just yesterday about the dynamic tension between sentence and story. One could write a perfectly decent bit of post-apocalyptic science fiction about the recovery of lost knowledge and the dynamics of social and technological power using the plot, characters and setting of Riddley Walker. That’s not what Hoban did. He wrote a puzzle story, where the puzzle is in the framing, phrasing and vocabulary of the story — a technique for example much deployed by Gene Wolfe among others, but Hoban takes it to a grand scale. That layer of linguistic manipulation completely shifts the book away from the underlying story it tells and pushes it into another sphere entirely.
Riddley Walker is written in a mode very reminiscent of eye dialect. In point of fact, this is not eye dialect, in the sense that the narrator is explicitly writing things down rather than having his speech quoted. He lives in a world that barely has orthography, let alone dictionaries. Spelling is remarkably eccentric, yet largely phonetic. The sense of the culture that comes through Riddley’s word choices, and the reader’s efforts at comprehending how the meanings have shifted, is a huge part of the experience of the book.
Science fiction writers especially use linguistic evolution as a story telling and worldbuilding tool, but most of us don’t do it with every damned word on the page. This is impressive, and challenging. To say the least.
One thing I struggled with was sorting out which of the linguistic transformations were literary devices of the book, and which were my own misunderstandings of the substrate of English culture embedded in the story. For example, it took me quite a while to recognize that “Pry Mincer” was a corruption of “Prime Minister”, and I didn’t grok the connection between the Eusa shows and Punch-and-Judy until that was explicitly stated fairly well along in the book. This is not a complaint, just an observation. And in fact, it’s that selfsame lexical detective work that makes the book both so much fun and so much work. Sorting out the subtle expansions of meaning in the words “hevvy” (“heavy”) and “foller” (“follow”), for example, occupied me considerably.
My best advice, swiped from tillyjane (a/k/a my mom) is to read it aloud. Much like Huckleberry Finn, this book makes more sense that way. Though I never did figure out what “sarvering” meant in the phrase “sarvering gallack seas and flaming nebyul eye”. (The Internet has since informed me that “sarvering” means “sovereign”, but I’m not sure that makes much sense, either.)
At any rate, you will likely either love or hate this book. I don’t see much room for ambiguity. Enjoy.
Tags: Books, Language, reviews
Posted: 8:56 am Sun December 26 2010 | Comments(1) |
[photos] Your Sunday moment of zen
Your Sunday moment of zen.
Derelict farm equipment, rural Oregon. © 2007, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Oregon, Photos, zen
Posted: 7:49 am Sun December 26 2010 | Comments(1) |
[links] Link salad is a boxer and a fighter by its trade
100 Aspects of Genre: Story v. Sentence — Daniel Abraham is really damned interesting.
A 1944 Christmas miracle for Gen. Patton — The World War II general’s holiday greeting to troops in Europe that winter included a prayer entreating God to end the rains that were bogging down the United States’ 3rd Army. Interesting and vaguely weird bit of cultural and military history.
Cambridge university refuses to censor student’s thesis on chip-and-PIN vulnerabilities — (Via danjite, on account of I missed it.)
What a gay Marine taught me — A little note for all the bigots and fools on the conservative side of DADT.
?otD: Does the fighter still remain?
12/26/2010
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hour (Sunspin outline development, a bit of WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.75 hours (solid)
Weight: 247.6
Currently reading: Between books
Tags: Culture, gay, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Science, Tech, weird
Posted: 7:46 am Sun December 26 2010 | Comments(0) |
[photos] My big Christmas present
My big Christmas present, from Mother of the Child. Mmmm.
© 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
Sometime soon I’ll do a more detailed photo shoot of this fine piece of antique technology.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Cool, family, Photos, Tech
Posted: 11:32 am Sat December 25 2010 | Comments(1) |
[personal] Happy Holidays
Here at the turning of the year amid an entire confluence of a whole basket of religious and cultural traditions, I wish you a happy holidays, whatever you celebrate. Light, love and life to everyone.
Tags: Personal
Posted: 8:23 am Sat December 25 2010 | Comments(3) |
[photos] Your Saturday moment of zen
Your Saturday moment of zen.
Extreme closeup of metal sculpture with Christmas lights, rural Oregon. © 2007, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Oregon, Photos, zen
Posted: 8:22 am Sat December 25 2010 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad wonders why the streets are so empty
io9 discusses my novella, Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh
Yesterday on Twitter and Facebook, I linked to this fascinating article on Julian dating — Which is to say, timekeeping. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people thought I was talking about Julian Assange. Hilarity ensued.
The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas — Hahahahah.
Suitcase Santas — Art guru James Gurney on the traveling spirit of the season.
UFO Santa — From x-planes.
Santa Claus was from Turkey? — Well, yes. Didn’t everyone know this? Home of all right jolly old elves.
Walking Santa, Talking Christ — Why do Americans claim to be more religious than they are? Because, um, Christians are an oppressed minority in this country. Yeah, that must be it!
Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays — Are people really so stupid that they are willing to let a bunch of cranks and media opportunists convince them that A) there is a War on Christmas, and B) wishing someone “happy holidays” is somehow akin to attacking their religious beliefs? Apparently, many people are precisely that stupid. (Thanks to lt260.)
?otD: Turkey, ham or goose?
12/25/2010
Writing time yesterday: 3.0 hours (Sunspin outline development)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.5 hours (interrupted)
Weight: 250.2
Currently reading: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
Tags: Books, Cool, Culture, Funny, Links, Metal, Personal, Photos, Politics, Science, stories, Travel
Posted: 8:20 am Sat December 25 2010 | Comments(2) |
[personal] Sick
Yesterday my throat started itching. Overnight I had a terrible time getting to sleep or staying asleep. A 3 am wrong number didn’t help, either. This morning I am at the beginning of a fairly serious chest cold, it feels like. I’ve already canceled plans with the Scholes family, and may not even have the energy and focus to write today.
As a result, the usual wit and erudition are postponed to a later date.
On the plus side, I watched a DVD of Inglourious Basterds last night. Enjoyed it quite a bit.
Tags: Books, health, Movies, Personal, Sunspin, Writing
Posted: 8:52 am Fri December 24 2010 | Comments(4) |
[photos] Your Friday moment of zen
Your Friday moment of zen.
Extreme closeup of metal sculpture with Christmas lights, rural Oregon. © 2007, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Tags: Oregon, Photos, zen
Posted: 8:48 am Fri December 24 2010 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad got run over by a reindeer
Always innovative Toronto Public Library lets us check out humans as well as books — This is kind of cool. (Via willyumtx.)
High-Tech Electronics Dressed Up to Look Old — Everything old is new again. (Thanks to my Dad.)
Quote of the Week — Andrew Wheeler with George Orwell on atheism. Hilarious.
Schoolchildren announce bumble-bee breakthrough in top science journal — A paper in Biology Letters today demonstrates how important it is for pupils to conduct their own original scientific experiments. Ok, this is cool. Primary school kids doing novel research. (Snurched from Scrivener’s Error, who points out that “What is saddening, in a way, about this article is not that it happened… but that it’s so exceptional.”)
The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks — (Thanks to biomekanic.)
Rules For (Republican) Radicals — Money shot: More importantly, the GOP new rules mean that new tax cuts do not require any offsets at all. Which is to say, they are replacing a rule that prevented policies that add to the deficit with a rule that enables policies that add to the deficit. They may call that “strict,” but it is the opposite. Coz that’s how the GOP rolls: convinced of their own fiscal responsibility, despite those inconvenient true facts.
?otD: Tissue or wrapping paper?
12/24/2010
Writing time yesterday: 5.0 hours (revisions, WRPA, Sunspin outline development)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.0 hours (badly interrupted)
Weight: 249.6
Currently reading: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
Tags: Cool, Culture, Funny, Links, media, Personal, Politics, Religion, Science, Tech
Posted: 8:46 am Fri December 24 2010 | Comments(1) |
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