I… have a new book coming out. As in, the day after tomorrow.

I got a bit busy, with promo and stuff. I was doing interviews, guest blogs, what have you, for most of this month. In fact – and here’s where the value for money comes in – you can go here:

http://anghara.livejournal.com/534046.html

and you’ll find links to a bunch of guest blog essays for various blogs, a handful of interviews, and more are to come – so if you go and you like what you see, keep an eye on that blog because I’ll be posting further round-ups there as things happen.

But in the meantime – the new novel.

It’s called “Midnight at Spanish Gardens.” It’s about a real place, a place that once did exist, a magical place. A place where the Veil Between teh Worlds is very thin indeed, and it is easy to step through it, and into a strange new world. And in case you think I haven’t been busy enough with the direct guest-blog-and-interview blog tour promo, I’ve also been doing a series of blog posts collected under the tag “Veil Between Worlds” and you can go read those essays here:

http://anghara.livejournal.com/tag/veil%20between%20worlds

It’s all about the special places of our lives, the special experiences. Let me tell you some more about the cafe called Spanish Gardens – I wrote about it in an essay, and this essay eventually became the foundation of the new book. I give you… a glimpse behind the Veil:

AT THE SPANISH GARDENS

Evening. You walk down a shuttered street; there are “Closed” signs in shop windows and on doors as you stroll past. Illuminated displays of things. This is not Rodeo Drive; you’re likely to see cheap, ordinary shoes. Maybe tools. Printed T-shirts. A bicycle shop.

A narrow alley opens between two buildings. There are no signs, nothing to indicate that it leads anywhere at all. But you turn. The passageway between a couple of blank brick walls widens abruptly into a courtyard. There is a doorway, dark now, with some sort of gilt writing on the glass. An accountant, maybe, or a dentist – I forget what it was, and maybe it even changed once or twice during my time here. And across the courtyard, dimly lit, a coy sign above the door, there it is, the Spanish Gardens.

It does not look very Spanish. It certainly doesn’t look anything like a garden.

The outside is utilitarian. The door is  an ordinary metal frame with somewhat dusty glass, inscribed with the hours of opening ( late afternoon, night; to this kind of place daylight is not kind). Next to it a large shop window, with one of those half-curtains like you see in cafés or neat suburban kitchens,  leaving the top part of the window open; through it, you can just see the top of the till. Through the glass door you can glimpse a narrow room, one side taken up with a glass-fronted display cabinet such as you would find in a deli, the other crammed with a couple of narrow tables covered by red and white checked tablecloths, flanked by old-fashioned wooden chairs, no two of them exactly alike. Over in the corner, beside a crimson-curtained doorway above which hang signs indicating this is the way to the toilets, a tall stool with a mike and an amplifier and a couple of speakers. Sometimes, Friday or Saturday nights, there are people here strumming guitars, singing songs like “Starry Starry Night” and stuff by John Lennon.

There doesn’t look to be enough room to swing the proverbial cat, but next to the first table there’s an arched opening, and there is another room beyond. It has a further cluster of red-check-tablecloth tables and mismatched wooden chairs. There is a large blackboard on one wall, on it graffiti from previous patrons, an ever-changing display; above the entrance archway a picture of a bullfight, a charging black bull, a matador in gold with a red cape flourished jauntily. The only nod to Spain in the place, just about, if you don’t count the guitars.

The tables have smoky oil lanterns, the old-fashioned kind. There is other occasional lighting but it’s muted, covered in shades which make the light reddish, dark. In that light the inside metamorphoses somehow. The floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows in this second room are covered with a thin, cheap red material – upholstered with it, almost, a whole wall, a gathered fall of red curtain. In a more garish light it would look cheap and contrived; in what light there is it looks mysterious, theatrical, inviting.

The glass cabinet out front has delicacies on display, and you can order pies and puddings from there. You can order burgers and fries, and pasta, and it’s all cheap, because a lot of the people who come here, who pass the knowledge of this place in whispers from senior to freshman through time-honoured secret channels, are students. But the cheap and plentiful food is not the only reason that the Spanish Gardens is famed. This place makes the best Irish Coffees on the planet, bar none.

You would come here for your celebrations – your graduations, your anniversaries. Young women with long lanky hair and bold eyes were given wine-red roses at these utilitarian, almost dingy, tables, and their memory of the event is glamoured in a romantic spell. You bring your girlfriend here to propose (I was taken there twice, for that purpose). You go there in a rowdy crowd after the pomp and circumstance of the graduation ceremony, and you order Irish Coffees (“Keep ‘em coming!”) and you get beautifully, headily, cathartically tipsy while some crooner wove his way through “House of the Rising Sun” on his high chair and you bellow the lyrics with him when you could remember them. You came here to laugh, and to cry, and to share, and to grow, and to guzzle cream pies and to linger over coffee after some sad movie show, and to be able to tell some newcomer, somewhere, sometime, “Ah, yes. I know the Spanish Gardens”.

It’s gone now, it’s been gone for many years – the red curtains, the checked tablecloths, the secret recipe for Irish Coffee, the guitars, the picture of the bullfight. It lives, however, still. In me; with me.

Ah, yes. I knew the Spanish Gardens.

You want to come visit?…Well, you know where you can find ME. My main website is at www.AlmaAlexander.com  and I I blog regularly at http://anghara.livejournal.com  and if people want to get to know the real me that’s the more dynamic site right now. I’m also on Facebook .

Happy reading. Enjoy your summer.

Why do people treat books as mirrors?

I recently came across a post by Elizabeth Bluemle at the Publisher’s Weekly site entitled “The New Literal Mind” (link to the full post, and comments that follow, given at the foot of this essay). Elizabeth writes, amongst other things:

“I’ve noticed a strange trend among grandparents these days, and sometimes among parents: the tendency to reject a book for not being specifically, literally, representative of their child’s world.”

Parents or grandparents apparently look at a book – its cover, to be more precise – and come up with reasons why their child or grandchild won’t want to read it. The kid’s a country kid, and the book is set in the city – or vice versa. The kid has a brother, and not a sister (like the character in the book) – or vice versa. Most damningly at all, the “Oh, I don’t think he’ll really be interested in THAT” comment when the skin colour of the child depicted on the book cover doesn’t happen to match the precise hue of the potential reader of said book.

That neatly connects with another trend that has seen a lot of Internet exposure recently – the blog posts of a whole bunch of people, particularly people of colour, about how they could never “find themselves” in the books that they were given to read as children..

And that brings me to the brink of something that I do comprehend as a concept but which I completely fail to understand on a visceral level.

Why are all these people so bent on treating books as mirrors? Why is the value of a book measured by how much of oneself – in an absolutely literal sense – one can “find” in it? I have never picked up a single book with the purpose of looking for multiple incarnations of me – but, instead, I’ve sought new things, new experiences, new ideas, landscapes I might never see in real life, people I might never meet, and people I might be fascinated with but would not remotely want to actually BE. I have never picked up a fantasy book with a dragon on the cover and expected to find a clone of me riding the dragon by page five.

When I read a book, I’m not looking for me.

Look at (a random selection of) books which have touched my life.

“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott: at the time I first read that, I was still a young kid living in Europe. American history was not remotely familiar as such, not in detail, and the context of the March family’s lives might as well have been on a different planet. But with the one possible exception of going “Oh! She writes too!” when I met Jo March, I have never identified with any of the sisters. Meg is entirely too holier-than-thou (which I never was), Amy annoyed the snot out of me, Beth made me cry but I am not sure that she would not have been too precious to live with if I ever had to do it in real life, and even fellow-writer Jo often went off the rails and did things I did not approve of. I did not wade into the book desperately seeking a reflection of myself, and I was not put out when I did not find one. Did that stop me from enjoying the book and from loving my early copy of it literally to pieces? No, it did not. And if the cover on it had been anything to do with choosing it I would never have had it at all – because oh, these were AMERICAN characters who ran around wearing long dresses and white gloves none of which was remotely familiar to me so in other words these were the equivalent of “city” characters being thrown at a “country” child.

Any book of China, by Pearl Buck: my mother had a set of these and I read them, in translation, when I was pretty young. The books were old-fashioned hardcovers with slipcovers on them – the slipcovers are long since gone but as I recall a lot of collected-edition type books of that era basically had the title and the author’s name on the cover and very little else so relying on the cover art to determine whether I would “find myself” in these books never arose – but even if there was a Chinese girl on every cover that would not have prevented me from picking up such a book because, well, it had a Chinese character on the cover and I was not Chinese. I was not seeking myself in those books – I was getting thoroughly and enchantingly lost in a world not my own, where characters did not think or behave as I would have thought or behaved, where the rules were different and everything was rich and strange.

“Through Desert and Jungle”, by Henryk Sienkiewicz: Yes, I am a European child and I read European authors. Sienkiewicz was a Polish writer – of adult historical novels – who happens to be a Nobel Prize winner; he wrote a book for what would these days be considered a YA audience, which was a cornerstone of my mother’s growing up, and then mine, and then I gave the book as a present to my young nieces when THAT generation came up to the point of demanding things to read. I loved that book. I love it today, still. It concerns the adventures of a young English girl and a young Polish boy, children of Suez engineers in Egypt, who are snatched as hostages to be exchanged for persons being held by the colonial government during the Mahdi rising. The kids ride on camels across the desert in the moonlight; they are thrown into the chaos of conquered Khartoum; they are tossed out again in search of someone who would know what to do with them; they escape, and in their travels they cross from the Sahara into the near-equatorial jungles and savannahs, meeting lions, and elephants, and warring black tribespeople into whose path they blunder, and dying explorers, and malaria, and they live in hollowed out baobab trees, and oh GOD it is wonderful stuff. I first read this book years before I, too, stepped onto African soil – and even after I had done this my own experience of Africa was far, far different than those of the two protags of this book (thank Heaven…) To this day I have never been in Northern Africa, the Arabian part of Africa, Egypt or Algeria or Libya or Morocco; I have never seen the pyramids, the dunes of the Sahara, the Nile, or the Suez canal. I may or may not get to do this in the future. There was NOTHING of me in that book when I read it – I was not English, I was not Polish, I had never been to Cairo or seen the desert or experienced the humidity of equatorial jungle or set eyes on a living elephant. But I plunged into the story which has now held three generations of my family’s girls, and I had one hell of a ride.

But all of those are more or less “real” contexts, in the sense that although they were unfamiliar at least they were possible, they existed somewhere out there on this planet which turned with me upon it. What of true fantasy? If it is true that you need to find yourself in a book of fiction in order to enjoy it or even accept it, how did true fantasy ever even get a toe in the water?

The Hobbit, by J R R Tolkien: There are no such things as dragons. Or trolls. Or dwarven kings under the mountain. Or hobbits, for that matter. And there are no characters in that list which I could identify with, even remotely. Oh, I have always aspired to be an Elf, but I can no more be Tolkien’s Luthien than I can be Cinderella – both are creatures of the imagination.

Yes, before people point out the obvious, I am aware of archetypes, and people possibly identifying with an ARCHETYPE of a character rather than the character themselves. But I ask, again – where does Imagination come into this? Curiosity? An itch to discover things that are outside one’s own purview, things that one might never see or smell or touch in reality but which become all the more real because they take such firm and potent root inside the potent imaginary scenery of our own minds and hearts? Isn’t this what books are FOR – the chance to imagine something that had been unimaginable, to look out onto the world through a pair of eyes which might perceive it differently from our own?

Do people seeking to find themselves and only themselves in a story – people who dismiss the story as inadequate, for whatever reason, if they cannot – really believe that a child is incapable of imagining the things that are not spelled out for it? If that is the case I despair for the human race because it is wonder and imagination, the kind nurtured in very young children, which has taken us this far – and which may still be the only thing that will carry us forward.

Elizabeth Bluemle writes:

“As a child growing up in the sand-colored deserts of Arizona, I loved reading about kids in New York City, or the swamps of the south. I did enjoy the odd book about my own landscape, in part because there were so few of them, but if I’d limited myself to books about kids like me in a setting like mine, I’d have likely been bored, for one thing, and grown up with a very narrow world view, for another. I was living my life; the magic of books lay in getting to live someone else’s.”

A commenter by the name of Gail Gauthier then comes in from a completely different direction:

“I think one of our reasons for reading is to connect with someone–the author or characters we believe to be like ourselves. Even when we’re reading to try out different lives, I think there’s usually something about the book that we connect to. We think a character is like ourselves or like someone we’d like to be. Or something is happening in the book that has some significance for us.”
As a reader – then (as a child) and now (as an adult) – I am not sure that Gail Gauthier’s comment speaks for me. I did NOT enter a book seeking a character I believed to be like myself, or even particularly want one. The “something about the book that [we] connect to” that Gail speaks of has always, for me, been the STORY. A story lived by characters whom I could believe were living it. It did not matter in the least whether or not the character was “like me” or not – and preferably it would be someone not like me at all, someone whose own take on life and their own particular worldview would be sufficiently UNLIKE me to teach me something which I had until that moment not known or been capable of knowing.

Elizabeth Bluemle continues:

“We have many missions as booksellers, but it’s a strange world when one of them is the need to defend children’s curiosity and imagination against the instincts of some of their most loving and well-intentioned guardians. “

To which I can only give a resounding AMEN. Let’s keep the books as portals, as gateways into the unknown, as a magic carpet which can take us to lands unknown and perils unnumbered, where we can go wearing someone else’s skin – learning what it means to be HUMAN, as opposed to just being ourselves. There are enough mirrors surrounding us all our lives in which we can peer short-sightedly and see only our own faces – there are more and more every day, and often life does seem, in an eerie and tragic way, to be lived inside a carnival fun-house where there’s nothing BUT mirrors to surround us. A book, a good story, is a doorway out into the green meadows of summer, into the dunes of a yellow desert, out into the stars. Leave the mirrors behind. Let’s stop trying to find ourselves in other people. Let us, instead, try to find other people in ourselves.

Full text of the Bluemle blog post, complete with commentary:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/660000266/post/770045677.html