Mangling the Iambic...
Aug. 19th, 2010 06:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lagilmanLast night at KGB/Fantastic Fiction, in addition to my novel excerpt, I read a wee something I wrote twisted a while back, and read every time I have a new book coming out, so it seemed Appropriate to perform in honor of my co-reader Mary Robinette Kowal's's First Novel.
Since it went over well, I am hereby reproducing it for y'all.
To Book or Not to Book
To brace or not to brace; that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The inevitability of that Klausner review,
Or to take refuge against a poor store display,
And by ignoring deny them? To work: to weep;
No more; and by weeping to say we endure
The heart-ache and the thousand returned books
An author is prone to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To work, to weep;
To weep: perchance to go out of stock: aye, there's the rub;
For in that work of bookstores what fears may come
When we have shuffled off this contractual coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of too little backlist;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of Locus,
The reviewers' wrong, the disappointed reader's spite,
The pangs of despised love, the payment's delay,
The insolence of wannabes and the spurns
That patient merit of the unpublished takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a delete button? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of there being nothing after,
The remainder'd country from whose bourn
No author returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus publishing doth make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And manuscripts of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the pacing of action. - Soft you now!
The fair New York Times list! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my words remember'd.
This work by Laura Anne Gilman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
And, for those interested, a few photos from the evening, via and © Ellen Datlow:
My folks were somewhat taken aback by how crowded KGB Bar gets on reading nights...
Mary and me, trying to look like the flash hadn't just blinded us...
Mary and her shadow puppet play
Me, in the act of reading (probably the least self-conscious I was all night, ironically enough)
I do like Ellen's B&W shots...
Many thanks to everyone who came out last night -- Mary and I were both "who are these people, do you know them?" which means we had total strangers there. That is always So Cool.
Since it went over well, I am hereby reproducing it for y'all.
To brace or not to brace; that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The inevitability of that Klausner review,
Or to take refuge against a poor store display,
And by ignoring deny them? To work: to weep;
No more; and by weeping to say we endure
The heart-ache and the thousand returned books
An author is prone to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To work, to weep;
To weep: perchance to go out of stock: aye, there's the rub;
For in that work of bookstores what fears may come
When we have shuffled off this contractual coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of too little backlist;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of Locus,
The reviewers' wrong, the disappointed reader's spite,
The pangs of despised love, the payment's delay,
The insolence of wannabes and the spurns
That patient merit of the unpublished takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a delete button? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of there being nothing after,
The remainder'd country from whose bourn
No author returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus publishing doth make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And manuscripts of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the pacing of action. - Soft you now!
The fair New York Times list! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my words remember'd.
This work by Laura Anne Gilman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
And, for those interested, a few photos from the evening, via and © Ellen Datlow:
My folks were somewhat taken aback by how crowded KGB Bar gets on reading nights...
Mary and me, trying to look like the flash hadn't just blinded us...
Mary and her shadow puppet play
Me, in the act of reading (probably the least self-conscious I was all night, ironically enough)
I do like Ellen's B&W shots...
Many thanks to everyone who came out last night -- Mary and I were both "who are these people, do you know them?" which means we had total strangers there. That is always So Cool.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 11:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 11:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 02:00 pm (UTC)Much like mtlawson, I initially read it as lambic rather than iambic, so I was confused, but overjoyed once I began reading. I hope I get to see more like this! :-)
no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 03:46 pm (UTC)And yes, I saw "lambic", too, which is appropriate for a pub, actually...
no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 05:56 pm (UTC)But. After 40+ years, it's a familiar and pretty much useless grumble.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 11:46 am (UTC)That was a great little soliloquy there, although in my caffeine starved state I read the title of the post as lambic, not iambic. My brain then replied, "If it's a mangled lambic, how can you tell?"
Nice pics, and glad to see you had a good time.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 11:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 12:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 01:20 pm (UTC)The pics are great, and you look wonderful reading so it's easy for me to see that you felt good about it.
And, "who are these people?" ftw!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 02:32 pm (UTC)And your hair looks MAH-vel-us, dahlink! Reminds me of Helen Mirren's do. You look great. Congrats on the great reading!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-19 03:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-23 11:49 pm (UTC)