Mr. Kay

[handslive]

I'm gonna do a couple of separate entries here because the topics are so far apart. :-) And I thought I'd start with the furthest out, our attendance at Guy Gavriel Kay's reading.

I had no idea he pronounced his name 'guy' as opposed to 'gI', which is how I've always pronounced it in my head. It just rolls off the tongue so, well, nicely. A small thing to get stuck on I guess. I had no idea he was a hockey fan, but in this country who could be surprised? I had no idea he'd received awards for his poetry before he ever even consider writing his first book (and, naturally searches for poetry and GGK pretty much only return mismatches or references to his latest book). Months ago, I was (for some unexplained reason) reading the credits at the front of The Silmarillion and noticed a reference to 'Guy Kay'. I showed this to purplejavatroll and we agreed it was unusual, but couldn't possibly be the same guy. Wrong!

So it goes without saying it was a very interesting evening. :-) His selection of poetry reading for the night was interesting, and I think aimed pretty directly at the kind of fannish audience he expected to get. I wondered if anyone I knew would show up. He was doing more than one reading in different locations, so maybe other people in other places. There was always the chance that an old poetry teacher of mine (who worked on Tesseracts, I think, and certainly did reviews of Canadian speculative fiction writers) would be there, but no. Perhaps, thankfully. I don't really have an opinion yet about the poetry. Certainly, I've liked the stuff I've read so far and the stuff he read. But I'm hesitating to say 'Great' or anything because, well, great poetry is something special and this might merely be excellent . . . or good.

His reading from Lord of Emperors was from probably my favourite scene at the beginning of the book. The scene introduces a marvellous new character, one of my favourites of the second book, and brushes casually against the supernatural in a way that makes it seem both intricate and complex and also everyday and nearly instinctive. This is a view of magic in fiction that I've really grown to appreciate in part because it's so fucking hard to do well and also because it suggests that the power of it still surrounds us, but remains unseen because we have chosen not to see it or see it only accidentally.

He answered a few questions, of course. The one about movie options on The Fionovar Tapestry was predictable and his answer, I think, spoke to his hopes for other things and his hesitation to take it seriously. Frankly, at this stage and looking at his body of work so far, I'd think that Lions of Al-Rassan was much more likely. But that's me.

I asked him about the lyrics in Song for Arbonne. These have always intrigued me because the rhythms are ever so slightly off in some cases. This usually speaks to either the difficulty of writing lyrics that don't just come out looking like heroic couplets or sometimes the fact that there is actual music imagined or attempted. Well, actually, there's a third choice here. He said he carefully studied translations of period songs from the time of the troubadours and tried to write his lyrics as though they were translations that almost succeed, but not quite, to give them a kind of authenticity for the reader. And in this sense I think they succeeded for me, because I certainly read them the same way I would read actual translated lyrics or poetry, wondering how the music went and how the original sounded to the writer. He also mentioned the fact that there are no authentic reproductions of troubadour music, but that he listened to a few French performers who came very close and whose work he enjoyed. I wish I could have brought myself to have him write down some names. But maybe a search of his "authorized" web site will be fruitful.

While waiting at the bus stop to go home, I saw an old junior high school friend. Someone I've bumped into several times in my life. We were at university together briefly, before his girlfriend got pregnant and he dropped out to marry her and get a job. I've seen him waiting tables in a few places since then and I know he's found things hard. I'm never sure what to do about that, if I should actually do anything. Our lives were quite distant from each other even when we met in university and have only moved further apart. At times like that, I feel my connection to others and the assistance I might offer very keenly, but I also feel my disconnection from them in so many other ways. Maybe pity is just a sort of emotional flinch away from trouble you know you could have borrowed yourself. Maybe this is why we despise pity in others and mask it in ourselves if we can. Maybe it would be better for us both if I simply nodded and made no attempt at conversation.