06 December 2007

VanderMeer takes "Logorrhea" to another dimension

In Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories (which I recommend to the selfish and generous alike) edited by John Klima, every story BUT ONE involves its own particular word.

Jeff VanderMeer's more-than-a-story "Appoggiatura" uses the words of all of the other stories, each word having its own mini-chapter. And now "Appoggiatura" has leapt from the page to another dimension.

Please your ears
Jeff * has made a podcast of each part of his multi-part story, and it's not just a reading.

Listen to podcast #13, titled "Pococurante", which is also the title of my own story in the anthology. (John Klima has asked us authors to say something about the words we chose. If my word had been porwiggle, there might be a need to fully develop something. If proficious, I could even see the usefulness of a story by me about my story. But saying anything about pococurante is, don't you think, a say too much?)

Here is an excerpt from Jeff VanderMeer's "Appoggiatura", which just happens to be Part 13:


POCOCURANTE
From the Book of Smaragdine, 212th Edition:

A careless person has no cure, unlike a careless thought or animal. Calling a careless person a pococurante or other fancy name will not, by the precision of the term, suddenly make the careless careful. Once, a careless farmer living outside of Smaragdine lost his own name and had to take the name of his ox, Baff, much to the delight of the villagers (one of whom found the farmers name and used it as his own). A woman once lost her vagina and by the time she found it she had twelve children. Losing ones shadow is perhaps the most common affliction of the careless, which explains why, on a hot afternoon day, you will find so many little dribbles of shadow in every lonesome crack and crevice. A lost shadow has no wish to be found, because, inevitably, it will just be lost again.

But the truly carelessthe person who has descended into a place that not many can understandwill lose much more than that. These truly cursed people can lose even a love so strong that it radiates like heat. The kind of love that creates laughter around even the simplest act. When enough love is lost to this kind of indifference or carelessness, wars beginsometimes in lands far distant from the occurrence, but always these wars come home. Such effects are magnified depending on the status of the individual. Thus, when statesmen, when queens, when caliphs, become careless, they lose whole armies and people die on vast scales in foreign lands. The innocent taste sand in their mouths, not the green spring air of their native country. Their bones line the roads of places so far away and exotic that not even the wind through their skulls can say the names. A careless commoner often loses hate as well, even though such hate will replace itself indefinitely and the person therefore never realizes their own carelessness. But for this reason, many careful kings and queens find the hate of others and use it as if it were their own.

Alas, a careless person has no cure, unlike a careless thought or animal. It is just the way of the world.

Read what John Klima has to say in "Logorrhea as told by Appoggiatura", and see the links to all the podcasts for "Appoggiatura".

Note:
The VanderMeer "Appoggiatura" podcasts were produced and recorded by Jason Erik Lundberg.

Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories
TABLE OF CONTENTS:


Hal Duncan - “The Chiaroscurist
Liz Williams - “Lyceum”
David Prill - “Vivisepulture”
Clare Dudman - “Eczema”
Alex Irvine - “Semaphore”
Marly Youmans - “The Smaragdine Knot”
Michael Moorcock - “A Portrait in Ivory”
Daniel Abraham - “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics”
Michelle Richmond - “Logorrhea”
Anna Tambour - “Pococurante”
Tim Pratt - “From Around Here”
Elizabeth Hand - “Vignette”
Alan DeNiro - “Plight of the Sycophant”
Matthew Cheney - “The Last Elegy”
Jay Caselberg - “Eudaemonic”
Paolo Bacigalupi - “Softer”
Jay Lake - “Crossing the Seven”
Leslie What - “Tsuris”
Neil Williamson - “The Euonymist
Theodora Goss - “Singing of Mount Abora”
Jeff VanderMeer - “Appoggiatura”

2 comments:

Jason Erik Lundberg said...

Hi Anna! Just to clarify, I recorded and produced the podcast, and was happy to be involved in the project (if exhausted by the end of it!).

Cheers,
Jason

anna tambour said...

Thanks for telling me, Jason. I've added a Note in the text. It certainly sounds like quite a project. I would love to be able to hear it, but until Telstra provides service and not fibs, there are many Australians like me who can't hear podcasts, see videos, and do much more than read a book or walk around the world while a plain-vanilla page loads.