Wednesday, December 3rd

The Daily Report

Well, it's been an up and down week for news. Two days in a row I didn't get as much done as I'd planned during the afternoon. But, onward we must look and onward we must go.

Because of this and an offset sleep cycle, I've fallen into a slightly unusual work schedule where both Monday and Tuesday I ended up doing a couple more hours of writing at night. This isn't something that will work for me long term, but things in the household are unusual right now to begin with and so I'm following a practice of "whatever works, works".

That's also why I'm still fiddling with the poetry-themed newsletter, but it will go out tonight. I'll mention in the newsletter also, and that probably won't be the last time I do so, but next Friday the winners of the Rhysling Awards for the best speculative poetry of 2013 will be held. The live event is being hosted at The Goddess and the Moon in Nashville, but it will also be streamed online. In addition to the winners being announced, there will be an open mic poetry reading.

The State of the Me

Doing okay.

Plans For Today

Newsletter and Tales of MU.

The Devil Comes Home

The December issue of Apex Magazine is live on the web, and it contains a special treat. Elizabeth R. McClellan, whose most frequent speculative poetry milieu might be described as "sympathy for poor devils", previously had her poem "The Walking Man Goes Looking for the Sons of John: Six Cantos" published in Apex.

She wrote a reprise on that theme that appeared in the liner notes of the album Slightly Above Below Average, an all-star tribute benefiting the Chet Atkins Educational Fund. While a worthy enough place in its own right, it seems fitting that "Sympathy for the Devil: A Duet in Two Solos" should now find its wider audience alongside the first.

"Heaven for the climate, hell for the company," said Mark Twain, but despite this and the related frequent assertion that hell has all the best musicians, when McClellan's devil is feeling lonely and soulful, he goes walking in Memphis or Nashville, or other points south. Sometimes he finds a friend, and something amazing happens.

Like much of McClellan's work, this piece is grounded in the mythic landscape of her native Tennessee, which can make it an interesting experience as an outside looking in. But no worries about intruding; as the poem itself observes, it is hard to have a private moment in a public street. It is McClellan's skill and art as a poet to make the reader feel the significance even of that of which we cannot speak and must, as Wittgenstein would remind us, pass over in silence. Maybe it's the unfamiliarity and the sense of things known but unsaid that lends an eerie numinousness to the scene.

Or maybe it's just that I personally never feel anything like the touch of the divine so much as when I'm listening to good music played by someone who passionately believes in it.

Either way, it's kind of a surprising trick when the devil turns up and makes you feel the hand of God, or turns your thoughts to what happiness there might be had in the hereafter. It's the kind of thing that sounds like it shouldn't work, like a poem that hits all the down-home beats of well-worn folk lore while throwing around words like "Photobucket" and "Google". Some people write updates of classic stories, some people write continuations, as if the story had kept going all along and no one took much notice until it was pointed out. Time has moved on, but the devil can't. Maybe that's his punishment. Maybe it was his crime. Maybe it doesn't matter anymore.

Any which way you want to take it, he finds his moments of happiness, and taking this piece as a companion t the previous one, we're left with the sense that "sympathy for the devil" in this case is not so much about understanding why a person does bad things or seeing the world from a designated villain's point of view as it's about simply having sympathy for someone whose life took a bad turn once a long time ago and who has never really recovered from it.

Apex Magazine #67 also contains poetry by Melanie Rees and Joshua Gage, along with four short stories, sundry interviews and essays, and a couple of bonus short stories for those who buy a copy, though the rest is available for free on the web.