A beautiful novel.
      I urge anyone to read The Wizard of Earthsea, not just those who are C.S. Lewis & Tolkien fans [two others often mentioned in reviews of Le Guin’s work], and not just those who are interested in fantasy and science fiction. The language is spare, noble, at times biblically rarefied. The psychological insights are shrewd and not over-labored. What this slim novel says about the human condition and our collective struggle to overcome fear and be whole could fill a library.
     I’m not very good with plot summaries, so I’ll keep mine minimal: the setting is a mythic place called Earthsea, made up mostly of ocean and archipelagos. A boy, Ged, grows up on the isle of Gont with great innate talent for magic. He rapidly grows into his powers, eclipsing his peers, but struggles with pride, anger, and temper. He lets loose a dark nemesis early on in his development which he must spend the rest of the novel coming to terms with and challenging. This struggle of Ged’s to reckon with and integrate a dark side, a shadow, forms the dramatic and emotional crux of the novel.
     I loved too how Le Guin explores the idea of True Names; everything in Earthsea has a surface name [the protagonists’s birth-name is “Duny”] and also a True Name [his True Name is “Ged”]. Like Plato’s Ideals, this world of Earthsea is made up of transitory markers and their inherent, immortal signifiers. Magic on Earthsea is dependent on a sorcerer’s knowledge of True Names — without the knowledge of a thing’s True Name [be it animal, stone, ghost, person, region of the sea, etc] , one cannot control it or affect it with spells. Much of the action in the novel revolves around Ged, his friends, and his enemies navigating the external world and the unchanging signifiers that world is tethered to. It’s a fruitful and flexible philosophical underpinning that (among other things) distinguishes Le Guin’s world as unique in the fantasy canon.
     There’s so much more about this book I loved. For instance, the inhabitants of Earthsea seem to be uniformly dark-skinned — at one point early on, Ged thwarts a pirate raid, and the murderous, pillaging pirates are described somewhat like Vikings, pale-skinned and fair. Ged and most of his friends, meanwhile, are clearly described in many passages as being dark-skinned or black. Not many books of the fantasy/sci-fi canon — and keep in mind the times; she wrote this in the 60s — feature non-white protagonists, let alone entire nations of non-whites. And incidentally, Le Guin doesn’t treat this detail at length or pointedly/politically (it’d be fine if she did, but that would mean a totally different novel); this physical detail of her characters is mentioned very matter-of-factly.
      Finally, and I’ve talked about this already in brief — I love Le Guin’s voice. It’s tender but forthright, economical but not dry, careful in its use of details: just enough to keep the novel from being too lofty & allegorical. She spends good, warm, emotional page-time on the friendships Ged forms, the rivalries, the interactions with people and animals which help shape and challenge him — something vital to this novel of otherwise solitary struggle and awakening.
     So, anyway: man, book review. Been a bit since I bashed out one of those. I feel like a middle schooler again. Enough — it’s a damned great novel so go to the library, git it, read it.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Site

Order Ursula’s Books
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

Hello everyone — for those who’ve been keeping up, I won’t be posting anything to snailcrow.com for quite some time. Some writing and music projects will be keeping me too busy for even the sporadic attention I was giving it in months past. For those of you who have asked about the site and have been involved in the past, thank you so much for your attention and kind words.

Yours,
SC

Brush pen on water color paper. Altered re: grayscale fill-ins, contrast & scale:

   

More art here, including another in the ‘Sister’ series.

Any thoughts?

   
All art C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

! ! ! ! ! NEEDLE OUT Album Release ! ! ! ! !

HAI TEAM!

      My new album’s out and I’m happy to share it. I know cds are passe and all but it’s the only way I’ve gotten around to distributing the thing, so bear with me. I’m proud of these 11 songs (about 35 minutes) and I hope you eat ‘em up like fritos.
      As a bonus, you’ll get free cd-sleeve-sized ink & brush art with each order for a limited time (i.e. until I get too busy to do it).
      Free mp3 and order page here. Just $6 including shipping [US only], that is cheeeepieeeee!

      Enjoy the Springin.

-C.Way

Various photographs, paintings, collages & drawings of mine for sale via PayPal here.

“Untitled 10″:

Thanks for looking and let me know what you think if you have a chance.

-CW

    (Photo credit to red nails, wrongcity)
   
     

      “Hungry Saw” was not a favorite Tindersticks record of mine when it was released. Aside from abut three or four cuts, it struck me as a very respectable effort which suffered from mediocre performances & material in its first half and which was lopsidedly rich in emotion and re-playability in its second. No Curtains, but what the hell is?
      But last night, live, the record — which they played in its entirety aside from a middle suite of older material and an encore — ripened and grew into itself, lent strength by the urgency of the band’s delivery. Terry Edwards and the brass/woodwinds accompaniments in general helped the songs reach intense emotional swells of force only hinted at in studio. And Stuart with his slight bodily stutter, his seductive and slightly-medicated sway, his maracas-shaking rhythm-keeping, helped fulfill each “Hungry Saw” song to what was promised on record.
      I recognized many of the songs as if for the first time, like people who I’d seen through rainy windows. “Yesterdays Tomorrows” is a good example, lent drama onstage which never hit me on LP. “E-type” too was so amped with swagger & sheer drive. “Boobar”, a favorite of mine on record, emerged stronger live as well — the band storming out of the hushed bridges, jovial and grinning at one another, mastering the song’s swells in and out of hush and gentleness.
      Total truism, but this is why seeing music live matters. To see loved songs not so much transformed as fulfilled, like sketches blooming with color before your eyes — to have your later listenings enriched with memory, as if memory was another instrument, another section in the orchestra — there aren’t words for that magic.
      My only disappointment is the continued absence of Dickon Hinchcliffe [I think it was your standard creative-differences split between he and Staples, but not sure] — or some other live violin player capable of rounding out the Tindersticks’ sound with some of Hinchcliffe’s gorgeous arrangements. Hinchcliffe’s contributions to the band’s sound were enormous, defining — and I miss his touch on “Hungry Saw”, I miss his baroque and anguished lines, his dissonances, his sweep and pathos, and his soulful vocal lines on “Waiting for the Moon” and “Can our Love…”. Still, they did a hell of a job live trying to patch over the hole left by his leaving.

      Other things I remember –

      “My Oblivion”, that swoony crescendoing opiate, a little edgier than on record, absolute fucking lotus.
     
      “My Sister” — I song I never expected to hear live — played with a palpable sense of discovery and spell-casting by the ensemble, especially the delicate otherwordly percussion in the beginning, and that pindrop-hush interlude — the “orange and mustard planets” passage — executed as it needs to be: with wonder, tragedy, enchantment.
     
      Stuart’s gentle, endearing, half-lidded way with the audience and with his band; his searing, brief solos and tremolo-bar chords at the end of “Her”.
     
      What a band. By turns morose, noirish, soul crooning & fanfaring; day of the dead, lullaby gondola-sway, flamenco explosive, carny wobble; raking up love’s gutters and tambourining amid the refuse.
     
      What does everyone else think? Who went?

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009