A quote, from a review of James Woods’ essay collection The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel:

What we should value instead, Wood suggests, is story-telling that illuminates in ‘units of character rather than in wattage of style’. The best fiction, in this view, does not tell us what to think; it shows us how its characters think, and so encourages solitary readers to bring other human beings closer within their grasp. In Henry James’s terms, it is the art of being ‘irresponsible’ – of allowing fictional characters the freedom to be as confusing and uncertain as ourselves, and of allowing us to approach them with the same mixture of suspicion and sympathy that dapples our everyday dealings with one another.

Only in this way can the novel shake off the spangled excesses of a Rushdie or a Wolfe and emerge as something stronger and more durable; only by ignoring fashion can a novel ensure that it remains relevant.

…It is this second kind of laughter that especially snags Wood’s attention: moments when the reader becomes aware that he does not know these characters any better than they know themselves, and so responds with that unsettled mixture of distance and involvement described by Gogol as ‘laughter through tears’.”

This struck me as being very similar to the situation in roleplaying. With no one person controlling the story, each character (as portrayed by individual players) acts independantly of any overriding plot or purpose. They are simply themselves, complex beings responding to other complex beings and to events as in ways that they don’t always understand themselves, and cannot be reliably predicted. It makes the story, as it evolves, much more true to life in that way, more reflective in the way Woods is insinuating novels should be.

There’s potential in this medium.

A friend, Eric, has challenged me to come up with a term to capture the multiplayer interactive storytelling experience. “Interactive fiction” has become too associated with one-person experiences, like the old Infocom Games (Zork, forex) or hypertext fiction. “Roleplaying Game” or “RPG” puts too much emphasis on “game”, and not enough on story. He suggested “epic crafting”, which I think is a bit intimidating, and also doesn’t include the multiperson authorship aspect of it. I came up with “Communal fiction” or “CommFic” for short, but he thought the word fiction wasn’t inspirational enough. Ah well, the proper term — catchy without being cheesy, thorough without being erudite — will emerge in due time.

Gods of Pegana, a text he downloaded from Project Gutenberg. He knows I’ve been wanting to practice my nascent bookbinding skills on, so it was a very thoughtful and well-thought-out gift.

I bound the first copy over the weekend, a simple sewn tape binding with pages of plain printer paper. This is really meant to be the test product, as the second copy of the text is on very nice, heavy weight bond paper. There’s a couple pictures if you click on “continued” below, if you’re interested. I’m planning on doing something a bit more elaborate for the second copy, with different ribbons and beads and charms threaded onto the stitches. I think a somewhat fetishist look will fit the subject matter.

Once it was bound, I started reading the book. I hadn’t, before, though I’m familiar with other books of Dunsany. This one is pretty much a creation mythos with a listing of the gods of some imaginary world. As I was reading, I wondered if Dunsany was the first person to make up a complete imagined pantheon like this. There’s no publication in my book, but I think it was first published in the first decade of the 20th century. I’m really interested in investigating Dunsany’s inspiration for this work, and examining the text more closely. After all, inventing gods is really the heart of mythopoeia.

The current Mythic Passages newsletter features an article about author Guy Gavriel Kay. It reminds me very much of an interview I did with Kay myself, The Mythic Heart.

I recall my mother and oldest sister reading The Fionaver Tapestry when I was in my early teens, but I didn’t read it myself then. It was much later, after I had graduated from college and retired from graduate school, that my friend Jane recommended A Song for Arbonne to me. After finishing it, I quickly devoured all the rest of his works available in the public library, and have eagerly anticipated each new book. I should write Jane a letter to say thanks.

As if being Aragorn weren’t enough reason to love Viggo Mortensen, I’ve just found out that he’s an accoumplished photographer whose work will appear in the Mythic Passages conference art exhibit. The images in Miyelo, pictures of a Lakota Ghost Dance taken during the filming of Hidalgo, are absolutely amazing.

I also was given a link today to an article about Leonard Nimoy’s photographs of the Divine Feminine, a book I’d like to see in its totality.

There’s something synchronistic in this, discovering mythic photography by two actors famous for portraying characters of mythic proportion.