True Names

Not the Vernor Vinge short story, although that's good too.

One of the things I admire about Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is that he has a knack for genuinely alien names. Sometimes, unfortunately, they sound really ugly to my critical ear, but they do sound outlandish and different. Glen Cook is also good with this; sometimes David Brin can pull it off, and sometimes he goes into 'rewq' territory. (I know perfectly well you key-mashed backwards, Brin.)

Anyway the point of this is: I'm naming some Graycloaks (they are not Graycloaks, but I tend to use 'Graycloaks' as an umbrella term for everyone in that world, regardless of what culture or ethnicity they actually are; for future reference, Rill and Lin Mountjoy are of a people called Kelu, who are ethnically different from the Adroanzi of the northern plains and mountain), and I'm having some trouble with their names. I suspect I'm going to have to wring my brain and come up with some basic conlang rules, and that makes my head hurt because I'm not smart enough for an actual conlang. Waugh.

(These are the stone-magicians, the ones who starve themselves in order to keep out the Graycloaks. They can eat, or they can defend their barren stony pans. They eat pride, and defend. A people like this have an unforgiving language. I'm thinking it has a lot of unexpected softnesses so they can at least keep moisture in their mouths.)

Why my English teachers were not up to snuff.

I was in all of the advanced classes in high school; in college I was permitted to opt out of English, literature, what have you, entirely, and jumped on that option like a toad out'n Calaveras County.

In high school, I was given the usual gamut of books to read - Frankenstein, Moby-Dick (which Ms. Gage hilariously insisted upon calling "Moby-Whale" in a worthy attempt to avert sniggering), Great Expectations, Lord of the Flies, ek cetra. Like most/all of all y'all, I had already read all of these books long before the tender savageries of ninth-grade English, and was bored stupid for the in-class discussions. I'm not faulting my teachers for this. They were probably delighted that students were reading anything past Sweet Valley High. (Ms. Jordan - all of them were "Ms.", even Ms. Patterson who was so obviously a missus that she gave up and began writing her name on the board so - caught me reading The Vampire Lestat in class once while I was waiting for something else to happen, and reamed me out. "What on earth is that?" "Um. I wanted to see what the fuss was about." "... Fine. What is all the fuss about?" "This guy never seems to have to pay for his mistakes." "I don't want to see that book in here again, it's not worth you." This was my first encounter with contemporary literary criticisms.)

My quibble with my English teachers was not that they made me read the Grand Western Canon, but that they never made me curious to look beyond it. I'd already delved into Austen, Dickens (blergh), Faulkner, and Steinbeck from my parents' bookshelves. (Tortilla Flats is my daddy's favorite book.) Fine. But not in four years of obedient essay-writing and earnest talk of symbolism did there arise any recommendations for other good authors. I mean, I wasn't asking them to be all Harold Bloom and boom forth "THESE ARE GREAT AUTHORS (and none other)", but I would've liked to have had mentioned at some point that if I liked Faulkner and Steinbeck, why not look into Joseph Conrad (whom I found also on my parents' bookshelves before some jackass tried to make me read Heart of Darkness), and from Conrad, go on to Ford Madox Ford and Henry James? Am I spoiled by Pandora?

What I am getting at, in the most roundabout kind of way, is that when I got slammed for reading Anne Rice in a class that was all about understanding the Western canon and book-larnin about Romeo and Juliet and some god-awful mess hight "The Scarlet Ibis", I took from that book a trail that led me to Poppy Z. Brite (glergh) to Tanith Lee (YAYE) to Julian May (flippin sweet) to David Brin. My teachers couldn't even be bothered to mention Ring Lardner or D.H. Lawrence.

I'm not blaming the downfall of American literacy on my high school teachers' failure to encourage curiosity about the entire body of work open to Young Minds, but: I had to find out about Saki from Stephen King.

( My favorite short-story author. )