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Step right up, folks! Dr. Eric Schaller, Prestidigator & Mime, and I, your humble host, have consulted with our oracles and soothsayers, and after centuries of deliberation, we have discovered a winner of the Win a Unique Third Bear contest. We were amused by all the entries, and thank everyone who participated.
Congratulations are due to Alys for this contribution:
The Fourth Bear is always there, waiting just out of sight, around the corner, behind you, where you’re not looking, to snatch the only custard doughnut, or the last piece of pie. She hoards these things, as dragons do gold, in her den. She sleeps on a bed of stale pastry, and eats it in her sleep. Sometimes, children have mistaken her for a witch. She keeps her teeth and claws polished clean, but her fur is sticky with chocolate and cherry jam and other substances best not inquired into.
(Alys, please email me your mailing address, and I will send the book to you!)
0 Comments on Third Bear Carnival Winner! as of 1/1/1900
When I came up with the idea for the Third Bear Carnival, I quickly knew one post I wanted: something by Ann VanderMeer, Jeff's wife, who first knew him as a very young and mostly-unpublished short story writer, and who was one of the first editors to publish him with any frequency. She was Ann Kennedy back then, and it's partly the stories that put her on the path to becoming Ann VanderMeer, because in Ann Jeff found his perfect reader and his perfect love.
It took a bit of convincing for me to get Ann to write about her relationship not only to her husband, but to his stories. Ann thinks of herself as an editor and not a writer, but she sent me a contribution back in July, and I've held onto it until now. Much as I love what everybody else has contributed to the Carnival over these past weeks, and grateful as I am to each them ... well, this one's special...
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
VanderMeer Stories: A Personal Reminiscence by Ann VanderMeer
The earliest VanderMeer stories I read came from The Book of Frog, a self-published chapbook of stories that contained all manner of frogs and toads. In some stories the creatures were featured prominently, but in others, they were merely a whisper. I had to force the then young man of 20 (who was trying so hard to grow a beard) to allow me to purchase a copy (he wanted to give it to me).
“Nonsense,” I said. How will you ever be a full-time writer if you give your work away?” And then I bought five copies; perhaps one of the best investments I’ve ever made (and I am not just talking about how rare and valuable those copies are now).
I knew back then from reading those early tales that this was a writer to watch. He might find those stories sophomoric and simple, but there was a passion to the writing. And heart. And a great deal of playfulness.
He sent me stories for The Silver Web (a magazine I was publishing in the late 80’s early 90’s). One was a god-awful story about a high school girl going to her prom and some secret fantasy world hiding in her closet. I turned that one down quickly only for Jeff to tell me it was a test of my editorial taste. Yes, of course it was, I believe this. I did publish many of his stories during the years of The Web; “Heart for Lucretia” – a far future science fiction piece that fully illustrates the real sacrifice of sibling responsibilities, “Henry Dreams of Angkor Wat” – a surreal look at the horrors of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, “Black Duke Blues” – a story about a gifted musician in New Orleans (this one won him the Florida Individual Artist Grant) and “So The Dead Walk Slowly” – a zombie story long before zombies were popular. Each one more different than the last and yet so uniquely VanderMeer.
Jeff has always had a fondness for animals, as you can see from his fiction. From frogs he moved onto meerkats, then squid and now bears. He tells me that he doesn’t like talking animal stories and yet…his frogs talk. So do his meerkats. And in his latest new story, “The Quickening,” there is a talking rabbit. I think. At least, it seems to be talking (and it looks like a rabbit).
And this is his strength; writing fiction that has so many layers. When you read one of his stories you ar
1 Comments on Third Bear Carnival: Finale, last added: 8/27/2010
Wow. This is a beautiful summation which is not a "summation" but rather the promise of what was and is to come. I feel strangely fortunate to have so much left to read, to discover for the first time, even though it means that I do not comprehend on a deeper level what was said here about the stories; though I have I think read enough to know how both true and Of truth this post is.
I've got one very special post saved for tomorrow, but this post will end my own contributions to the Third Bear Carnival. To bring things to a close, I recorded a reading of a very short story hidden in the Afterword to the book, called "The Magician"... (It may take a few seconds to load and buffer.)
The Third Bear Carnival will come to an end later this week, and in honor of that, here's a contest. I have a copy of Jeff VanderMeer's Third Bear collection that includes a unique cartoon by Eric Schaller, drawn on 24 July 2010. This is the only copy of this cartoon that exists, at least as far as I know (most of Eric's cartoons are reproduced in bulk by the many small, innocent children he has imprisoned in a sweatshop deep beneath Dartmouth College). It is drawn on the title page of the book, which in all other editions is unillustrated.
Here's how you can win this unique copy of The Third Bear:
In the comments to this post, write a description/explanation of 100 words or less about The Fourth Bear. (Yes, we know all about the Third Bear now, but what is the Fourth Bear?) The deadline is this Friday, August 27, at 12pm Eastern Standard Time. Eric and I will then consult, and the entry that we agree is most interesting will be the winner. All results are final and utterly subjective.
Barring unforseen claims upon our time, or an inability to come to an agreement (and thus the need to institute a mud-wrestling match between ourselves), we will announce the winner here on Monday, August 30.
10 Comments on Win a Unique Third Bear!, last added: 8/27/2010
Walking the fine line between responsibility and entertainment, the Fourth Bear faces constant upheaval: while it is his job to keep the public informed, they seem to prefer pictures of kittens in hats and youtube clips of his failures to his more serious attempts to uncover duller, darker "truths." But he never tries very hard, and usually repeats information he receives from PR managers, or, when he's feeling whimsical, cabbies. Everyone hates the Fourth Bear.
The Fourth Bear could never walk quietly and chased away the food. He smelled a little funny and burped when hibernating. No one liked the Fourth Bear. When Socrates was mad, he made Plato hang out with the Fourth Bear. The Fourth Bear did not like Plato and mocked him: this explains all that is foul in Western thought. Friendless, he wandered north and one day hid aboard a Viking ship bound for Vineland. There he escaped and soon found himself among people who accepted him for who he was. He was revered, praised, shot, and made into a cloak.
Anonymous said, on 8/25/2010 5:28:00 PM
The Fourth Bear will kick your butt in public for a small fee, and whistle Dixie where the sun don't shine. Give him a kiss and he'll charge you five bits on the dollar, two rams on the wise-acre, or a case of whiskey from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Do what you want to do but, whatever you do, don't cross him. Otherwise you will win his love for life. And that, my friends, is a fate worse than the heat death of the universe.--Sam Hell
The furry wall moves in front of your eyes as you read look close at the panel in front of you. It matters not if it's the cover of the collection a comics panel or the screen of your chosen ereader. The moving carpet blurs and resolves into the toothy face of what is presumeibly a brown bear or maybe it is a grizzly bear and it seems to smile in a knowing manner that says yup you are really seeing this. The universe responds to masses of people believing the same thing at the same time and enough of you believed the existance of the fourth bear, and that it was hungry for your attention. You should be happy it was not the fourth squid. The bear still smiles that knowing smile As it opened it's mouth. Ummmm.
Anonymous said, on 8/25/2010 6:25:00 PM
If you are juggling and drop a ball, that is the fault of the First Bear. If you have shoes that once fit but are now too large, that is the fault of the Second Bear. If you wake to find you have eaten your left hand, bones and all, that is the fault of the Third Bear. If you have riches, love, and life, but are still not satisfied, that is the fault of the Fourth Bear. The four bears, together, they will ruin your life. --Tenser Tensor
Having a Roud Folk Song Index number of -300,000 the Fourth Bear can only be found in the little-known nursery rhyme:
One for honey Two for teddy Three for polar Four for Freddy
Supposedly written by an Elm Street resident (now in a mental institution) who can spontaneously manifest huge claw marks upon her person.
Alys said, on 8/26/2010 10:40:00 AM
The Fourth Bear is always there, waiting just out of sight, around the corner, behind you, where you’re not looking, to snatch the only custard doughnut, or the last piece of pie. She hoards these things, as dragons do gold, in her den. She sleeps on a bed of stale pastry, and eats it in her sleep. Sometimes, children have mistaken her for a witch. She keeps her teeth and claws polished clean, but her fur is sticky with chocolate and cherry jam and other substances best not inquired into.
The Fourth Bear is a well educated art critic, who has become respected in both academic and mainstream culture. Recently, he has gotten some bad press for his scathing review of an otherwise popular exhibit, stating: ‘although visually pleasing, I have a hard time finding cranium-based art anything other than pedestrian and uninspired.’ The Fourth Bear later stated, through a content smile full of cocktail shrimp tails, that he does not wish to retract his review, and he’s sure the art community will judge the exhibit accordingly.
The Fourth Bear is a play from Geoffrey Von ZeeMire's post-elegant phase, written between his fourth resurrection and fifth suicide. As with most of his works, it is a tragedy. Although all copies of the script were incinerated during the Bat Smelting Rebellion, we do have a partial cast list:
Kenneth Squalor: Bemonocled. Bitter. Bearded.
Franzl Pottingash: Bile dampened. Brash. Braided.
Britannia Crisp/The Fourth Bear: Blunderbussty. Bright. Bare/Bear. Bear. Bear.
The Squelch: [no details given]
Efforts to revive the play based on these characters and the notes of Von ZeeMire's biographer have been met with assassination.
As part of a reviewing process that my friend Matt Cheney developed, I was part of a group each reading two stories from The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer. I chose the time when I had time travelling on a plane to read these stories. I found that a different setting (I usually read on my porch looking out over the hills in New Hampshire with the sound of birds in the background) physically took me out of my ordinary world, bound by gravity, into a unaccustomed world of different sights and sounds, which worked perfectly when I entered VanderMeer’s highly imaginative world.
In the first story, “Finding Sonoria,” a retired land surveyor, John Crake, discovers a stamp from the Republic of Sonoria from a collection he accumulated as a boy with the hope of traveling one day and discovering these distant countries. However, his stamps and his interest in travel waned as he grew older and settled for less, following a “path of least resistance.” John hires his friend Jim Bolger, an aging private detective down on his luck, to locate the Republic of Sonoria, which does not seem to exist on any map. The stamp and Sonoria become an obsession to each man. Jim, “in his little rotting house,” begins writing an imaginary history of Sonoria while John, “in the Murat Motel,” begins dreaming about Sonoria and finding a personal solace in his dreams that he is unaccustomed to having in reality.Despite their differences, the two men share “the same world, all because of a stamp.” How both men resolve this imaginary country in their lives raises a personal question how we individually resolve the mediocrity or restricting conditions in our own lives.
Before continuing with the next story, I peeked out the window of the jet I was seated in and saw large fields in the Midwest and small groups of homes and buildings, representing an unknown town. When I sit on my porch reading and a plane passes overhead, I take a moment and think about the people in that plane and sometimes wave, though I doubt if anyone in the plane could see me from that distance.It does not matter. I continue waving and I guess this action is more for me, claiming my own space, than for anyone else.
In the second story, “Three Days in a Border Town,” VanderMeer skillfully tells a story about a woman who is searching for her lost husband, a farmer named Delorn, who has been captured by a floating City that is “forever moving across the desert.”With the use of the pronoun, “you,” the reader becomes closely associated with the heroine, a border guard in a small
0 Comments on Third Bear Carnival: "Finding Sonoria" and "Three Days in a Border Town" as of 1/1/1900
Rebecca Salt, age fourteen, daughter of divorced middle class Jews from Long Island, was tired of being a Speller. She could still remember how things had felt before she got competitive, when Spelling was still a pleasure, when she had a sort of palpable sense of the l-u-x-u-r-i-a-n-c-e** of words and letters. She'd heard the symmetry between alphabet and language as a kind of ringing d-u-l-c-i-m-e-r, intricate and melodious. Sometimes the joy she took in words felt a-u-t-o-c-h-t-h-o-n-o-u-s, seeming to rise up in her from some ineffable, otherworldly source.
Six years into the rote of shuffling flash cards in every free moment, gasping out words as she ran out the door to school, eschewing the playground to snatch more time at recess and lunch, her evenings collapsing into a formless mass of homework seeping into study… well, six years into it she found herself waxing e-l-e-g-i-a-c about the days when words had seemed to sing and spin. It seemed almost s-a-c-r-i-l-e-g-i-o-u-s to admit it, but she regretted the k-n-a-c-k for words that had bound her to this labor.
"The Quickening" is the one story original to The Third Bear, and it's a story that fascinates me because it is entirely composed of ambiguities. I like ambiguities in fiction -- they respect the reader by assuming an intelligent audience that wants to be an active participant in the meaning and import of the tale. (Speaking of awareness of the audience, I should note that this post will probably make most sense to people who have read the story. Yet another reason for you to get the book!)
First, I want to suggest the narrator is unreliable and that this is a story about memory and imagination. Let's create a corpus -- here are all the uses of the words "memory" and "remember" in the story:
My parents had died in an automobile accident when I was four. I had a confused memory or two of life with them that involved the snow in Minnesota and bulky, uncomfortable coats, but nothing more. (21)
It was a summer day, I remember. (22)
I remember thinking that his face shone oddly in the same way as Sensio's as he suffered his humiliation bound to the post. (24)
At first, we talked mostly at night, when I thought Aunt Etta couldn't hear us. I'd forgotten the strange ways in which that old bungalow could carry sound, or I'd just decided to risk it. I can't remember. (26)
"Remember, it's just an animal," Aunt Etta said to me, during that first meal after she discovered me talking to Sensio. This was back when she thought she might flatter Sensio into cooperating with her plans. I know she was wearing something else, but in memory she is wearing the same outfit as she did to the photo shoot. (28)
That was just the first of three fancy dinners, each more tense than the last. In memory, they are all mixed together, but they each had their own characteristics… (30)
I imagine I was screaming at her, although I can't remember making a sound. (32)
The circus woman, whose name I can't remember, sat on the couch and looked out at the orange orchards in the distance while I brought Sensio in and put him on the wicker chair to her left. (33)
I remember feeling a perverse pleasure at being a kid, at not being expected to put forth the effort. (33)
"She liked you, Sensio," I remember telling him. "She'd definitely help us." As if I were an adult, or had any money, or any sense. (36)
I know I should think of Aunt Etta every day. I know I should be kinder to her memory. I know I should be sorrier about what happened. (41)
The structure of the story itself is also relevant to this movement through memory. The narrative consists of basically two parallel, alternating structures: Structure A is a loose and nonlinear collection of memories and thoughts; Structure B is a mostly linear description of the events during the photography shoot and then immediately afterward.
Given how many times Rachel-as-narrator refers to memory and remembering, and even sometimes says she knows something is not as she remembered it, but she is presenting what is remembered anyway, there is no reason to trust her representation of events as factual within the world of the story. Instead, the events are what she prefers to remember.
But that's not all. How we remember the past affects who we are in the present. The meanings of past events are not incontrovertible. It's no coincidence that Aunt Etta hires a photographer to capture her
0 Comments on Third Bear Carnival: "The Quickening" as of 1/1/1900
In honor of the publication of Jeff VanderMeer's new short story collection, The Third Bear, I've asked a group of writers to read a couple of stories each and create some sort of response over the next few weeks. Some of those responses will be analyses of the story, others will be personal essays, at least one will be a work of visual art, and, who knows, some folks might be inspired to create stories of their own, or poems, or movies, or stained glass windows. I've given them no limits or guidelines other than it has to be something they can either post to their own blog or I can post for them here.
I will keep updating this post with links to each entry in what I'm calling the Third Bear Carnival. If you happen to have a copy of the book, or even just of some of the stories in the book, feel free to create something of your own and link to it in the comments to this post (I'll add relevant links to the main set whenever I have the chance).
Many of the writers just received the book last week, so the Carnival is likely to be slow to start, but once we get going, I think some marvelous things will appear...
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Wow. This is a beautiful summation which is not a "summation" but rather the promise of what was and is to come. I feel strangely fortunate to have so much left to read, to discover for the first time, even though it means that I do not comprehend on a deeper level what was said here about the stories; though I have I think read enough to know how both true and Of truth this post is.