Unexpected

       I have been working on what I refer to as a "bathtub MFA."  I have some back problems and spend a half-hour or more soaking in a tub of hot water with Epsom salts several mornings a week.  If I've got to be in there anyway, I might as well be doing something.  The TV doesn't fit, podcasts are hard to follow with both ears underwater and I have drowned (and had to replace) a lot of paperback science fiction through the years.  In the past few years, I have been buying used books about writing to read in the tub.

      Most recently The Art Of Fiction, by the late John Gardner.  He was a college professor and he wrote like one, a bit stuffy, a bit speaking from On High, but he seems to have been a pretty good guy for all of that; he's not especially stuck-up on art vs. craft or serious literature vs. popular trash; he cites SF authors by name and is as comfortable using Captain Marvel comic books graphic novels as an example as the works of James Joyce.

      He opens with a series of long essays about narrative fiction and the writing process, high-level but good.  He delves into the need to engage the reader in a kind of dream -- and to not knock them out of it though clumsy work.  By the fourth chapter, he discusses non-traditional forms: metafiction and suchlike.  Being a college professor, he begins by looking back at stories that don't have a traditional narrative arc or characters: Beowolf, the Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost and others.  Gardner notes they all come from strongly authoritarian times, in which rulers were held to be inherently better than other people and fiction was seen as a vehicle of instruction: "It is hard to speak fairly of authoritarian ages, both because they're naturally repugnant to the democratic spirit and because they are forever watching from the wings, hoping to seize the stage again."

      That's from 1983, published after his death in a motorcycle accident in 1982.  He was an interesting man and his career was not without controversy.

      "...forever watching from the wings, hoping to seize the stage again."  Indeed.