on self-restraint

I don’t know how authors, especially those with blogs, restrain themselves. Songwriters, too. Presumably it’s at least partly wanting their works to speak for themselves. But still, there’s so often embedded cool stuff, like grace notes in music. Miss it, and you still have the melody; catch it and you’re just bowled over with the cleverness, especially if it’s there to do something in the story. For example, there’s a tiny bit in Elizabeth Bear’s book Blood and Iron that looks suspiciously like an allusion to Bill Morrisey’s song Birches. Now, one thing I know about the author is that her musical tastes and knowledge are such that it’s a song she’d know. On the other hand, every other song allusion (that I caught) in that book was to a traditional folksong about the kind of faerie who make up half of the book’s character’s, so when that bit whipped by it had me saying “No, she di-in’t!” (I asked, on her blog. She did.) So OK, miss it and you haven’t missed much. Get it and if you love the song as I do, you’re bowled over by Bear’s coolness. Get it and think a bit about it, as I didn’t until just now, and you wonder about the analogy between the woman stuck with an oblivious spouse in the song, who finds herself a tiny bit of freedom, and the characters in the story who are trapped by love in various ways. Much cooler, even.

In another example, on one of my lists, we’ve been talking about John M. Ford’s poem “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station” which is packed with allusions. Someone pointed out as a weakness of the poem that there were no Mikado locomotives in England. People were arguing it a bit, but I contended that Ford (from what I’ve heard and read about him) would have known that, and that furthermore he wasn’t the sort of sloppy writer to put in a word just because it scanned right, or even because he liked the image, if it weren’t right. I think the Mikado is there on purpose and for a reason. (The best suggestion I’ve seen is that Ford put in all sorts of geographical anomalies to emphasize the mythic quality of the Camelot legend, and how it’s owned by the world.)

If it were me, I’d never have that self-restraint. Y’all are lucky I don’t write books; I’d be asking all my friends and readers or listeners, “Did you get that bit? Did you catch that? Did you see what I did with that chord change / literary allusion / quotation / homage? Isn’t that cool?” I know I would, because even with that short poem below I keep wanting to talk about the stuff I tried to put in: the influence of A.D. Hope running through it, the small nods to Wordsworth and to Milton himself, the anachronistic cadence of Pope I wanted to faintly echo to provide a faint hint of Johnson’s time sinc his work inspired it, the imperfect scansion combined with the feel for words, for an uneducated woman (compared to the men around her) with some natural talent, and so on. And so on, ad nauseam. I won’t … but how do cleverer people, with so much more *stuff* in their work, manage to restrain themselves?