Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved fresh fruit. The menu above was one of her favourite meals, especially at the end of autumn. A few miles up a canyon near where we lived in Pismo Beach, there is an apple stand: its orchards are multivarious and splendid, full of obscure heritage and rare apples, and by August the season is in full swing. There are 4 or 5 kinds available every week, wonderful apples that are not commercially grown or much remembered, because they are small or a funny colour or don’t travel well.

They have names like a map through a romance: Burgundy, Nittany, Chieftain; Limbertwig, Black Amish, Red Yorking. Caville Blanc and Arkansas Black. They are all in season late in the year, just when the walnuts are also coming on ripe, and Kage lived through every August and September on nuts and apples. The cheese was added just to make up a triad, and because Central and Northern California have native dairy industries that could make the Fae swoon with desire.

We haunted the Gopher Glen Apple Farm on a weekly basis, carrying off 5 or 10 assorted pounds of fruit every time.   Some of the rarer ones had seasons of only a week or two, and were actually rationed among the fanatics: Nittanies were one of those. We went early in the day to beat out determined old ladies from Bakersfield who drove in 200 miles or more to stock up; we carried our few bags off in triumph, giggling. Kage usually ate one or two apples while we drove down the twisted mile of the canyon road, and carefully planted the cores all along the canyon wall; some are growing up wild there, now. I made absurd amounts of applesauce.

They made astonishing cider, too, by the simply expedient of pressing whatever was too bruised to sell – you never knew exactly what was in it, and it changed with every jug; you could never tire of it. The apple press was right outside the shed where they sold the fruit, and a zone of narcotic perfume filled the whole back of the place.

And since there were no preservatives or any such nonsense, you could make apple jack of it, as my brother-in-law always did: take off the cap and let it sit for half a day to collect wild yeast. Re-cap it and wait a week. Decant and sip the finest hard cider ever made. Liquid amber, changeable and smooth, fire opals in a glass.

This is what we used to do:

Take a good ripe apple – a Limbertwig, maybe, with its glassy “snap” and aftertaste of honey. Or Kage’s utter favourite, a Burgundy – the flesh is tart and snow white, but veined with bright rose red: gorgeous. Don’t peel it! That’s where the bite and half the flavour are. Add a handful of walnuts and don’t forget a nutcracker – we opened walnuts with a wild variety of rocks, tire irons and Swiss Army knives until we learned to keep a nutcracker in the car. Now cut a generous hunk of Jack cheese; plain unadulterated Jack cheese, no pepper or port or added antioxidants, preferably made from cows you have seen grazing in the orchards …

Now alternate bites. Repeat until replete.

Tomorrow: a Sunday drive through the Memory Mansion

Kage Baker arranged her brain eccentrically, but with great deliberation. She didn’t agree with Sherlock Holmes, about carefully stocking it with only what you needed – like a well organized lumber room. Hers was more the used-by-six-generations attic sort of brain, room after room, full of everything she’d ever come across. Plus, strangers had shipped things to it from time to time (a box full of gorgets; sealed trunks with labels from Singapore and Mombhasa) and it was all still up there. And the windows were open, too, letting in whatever was floating by on the breeze or needed to hide from the moonlight. Or the sun.

Sometimes she went straight to the room she needed up there, using her Memory Mansion to find a specific fact. But she also liked surprises and chance encounters, and she trusted her mind to work away out of sight when she was busy. That’s why she left it arranged with such seeming confusion.

Seismic tremors and air currents kept it stirred, so you never knew what would have come to the front when you went to take a look. Kage liked it like that. She rather depended on convention currents to bring fresh nuggets of precious metal up from the core, and layer them accessibly in the mantle for her to find.  She valued the power of free association highly, and lots of her ideas first formed that way.

Rocketing along the California Coast in the Pacific Flyer one December night (we were between cars then), Kage observed aloud that there was no stop for the tiny town of Summerland. “Why not, do you suppose?” she wondered.

“How the hell should I know?” I said in my usual helpful way. “The town is barely there anyway. All that’s there are antique shops.”

“No, there’s the Big Yellow House restaurant. It’s supposed to be haunted,” Kage said. “And the dining room walls are all hand carved out of eucalyptus. The town was founded by spiritualists, you know. Come on, speculate – what would the station be like in a town called Summerland?”

“There wouldn’t be one,” I said. (This was our habitual game.) “The train would stop by the empty side of the tracks.’

“Where the trees come right down to the rails. But not eucalyptus like everywhere else along here – they’d be oaks.”

“Not on a schedule. On nights with no moon .”

“In the autumn. And a limousine would be waiting, and the Faeries would get off the train and drive off in it.”

“In a limo?”

“Yeah, they drive limos now. They’ve evolved.” said Kage. “They’re The Beautiful People now, the perfect Ones that pass you on the road in classic cars, and all you see are white faces and furs and glittering eyes that look at you like you’re a bug on the windshield. Which they never have, by the way.”

“Windshields?”

“Bugs on the windshields. Baked-on bugs do not happen to the Fair Folk.”

A long silence while we both stared out the black windows. I am sure we didn’t see the same landscape.

“And sometimes,” Kage said finally, “there’s a child with them.”

When we got home, she wrote for 14 hours without a stop. The eventual story was called Her Father’s Eyes.

Tomorrow: more inventory. Thanks to Becky Miller for inspiring today’s title.

Kage Baker admired architecture. She was a part-time artist, and she never abandoned practicing the graphic arts. Her maternal grandmother was, in fact, an architect (among many, many other accomplishments); a paternal great-grand-etc uncle was an engineer for Napolean, and in fact earthworks of his design still stand in Egypt. At least, they did in WWII, when a later member of the family was there guarding Churchill on a state visit …

She used the memory mansion system of organizing memory. It consists, in its simplest form, of envisioning a building and then furnishing each room with chosen objects; specific memories are in turn associated with the rooms, the objects in the rooms, and the architecture in general. It’s sometimes recommended to choose an historical building as your memory palace, one that you can hold clearly in your mind; but the shape and the style are ultimately up to the user.

Search online and you will find proponents of the system triumphantly memorizing long series of answers for tests: complicated charts of relationships, like king lists or the periodic table of elements. Other people just use it as a way to improve their everyday memory.

Kage’s memory was just fine. She remembered nearly everything she saw, or heard, or did, or read – an almost eidetic memory, that grew larger and larger as the years went on. Her problem was not retention, but recovery – she needed a system that would let her easily pull up what she knew from the depths of her memory, and bring it up to the forefront where she could use it. Hence the memory mansion.

I came across the idea in some book when I was a teenager, and passed it on to Kage as a curiosity. I didn’t try it myself until my 30’s, when it finally dawned on me that I, too, was very likely to be mortal and prey to the ills of the flesh … but I suspect Kage had been using it since the day I told her about it,  and that the edifice of her mind had grown steadily over the years.

It had gardens, I know that. They were extensive and carefully cared for; even the areas deliberately left as wilderness. I don’t know everything she kept there, although one suspects things related to Mendoza and the Yendri. It was actually a compound, rather than a single mansion – I know that it had some free-standing outbuildings. There was a perpetually vacant lot in the Hollywood Hills we used to drive by, and she frequently described the building that stood there in her mind. It was three stories of moon-green porcelain, shaped like an egg, with a huge crescent-shaped window in its front. It was called Crescent Dome. She kept a lot of music in there.

A few of the actual rooms and passageways have made it into her stories. Parts of Gard’s Dark Fortress blend into Kage’s Memory Mansion in some of the back corridors, and I think the gardens conjoin here and there. The hidden Company bases are all parts of Kage’s compound. And there is a garden path that leads down to the shore, which looks at first glance like Pismo Beach … until the faint fog clears a little, and you see what floats in the harbor …

Tomorrow:  inventories

Exposition

Kage Baker came late to the use of home computers. Typewriters and pen and ink were her media of choice well into the 1980’s – literally pen and ink, as she preferred to use a steel-nibbed staff and a bottle of Higgins Black. Higgins Black, when it gets wet, diffuses into lovely blue and pink and pewter auras  … not especially readable, but Kage liked to use it for storm clouds in her painting, and it was already there on her desk, so she wrote with it.

When she did convert to computers, the ease and speed of the keyboard enchanted her. She never learned to formally type; she had a four finger shotgun style like Chico Marx on the piano, with which she really rocketed along. But for a while, she didn’t want to leave the house overnight, because she’d be separated from her keyboard. So we got a laptop. We got one of the first IBMs with the touchpad, because the commercials with the Russian monkey amused her. (Never underestimate entertaining advertising – people may buy your stuff just because it makes them laugh … ) Then she could write at Faire. The laptop’s battery only lasted an hour and there were no electric lights; but there are always ways to accomplish things in an artistic community.

Scene

It’s a hot August night in Novato, 30 miles north of San Francisco. After hours at the Blackpoint Renaissance Faire, no one can sleep – hundreds of performers and boothies are awake and relaxing off the long day of commerce and art. They play as hard as they worked. The air smells of  coal and hot oil from the smithies and the food booths; Mystery Curry and Tabouleh Surprise and left-over turkey legs and McDonald’s crap someone ventured off site to get in an orgy of modernism. Strange liquors and smokes pass from hand to hand in the sweet darkness. Kisses taste like the markets of Marrakesh, or Elfland.

Most people are still half in costume, the ones that are dressed at all; a doublet topping jeans or at least the same belt and pouches you wore all day, because it’s easier than re-packing your pockets. Armour, tee shirts, lingerie, skin paint and alien jewelry all mingle, sometimes on the same body. Along the dirt roads and through the forest of oak and bay trees move the natural denizens of the village – and no faerie novel or fantasy film ever produced a crowd as beautiful, as weird, as unexpected as these. It’s the UnSeelie Court out here, not posed or choreographed but natural and relaxed at home, with all the visitors gone at last …

The Yard of the Green Man Inn is almost as full at night as it is during the day, despite the fact that after closing it’s BYOB – we want to relax as much as anyone else, so the taps are down (except for house staff. And friends of the house. And anyone else an Inn resident thinks needs a beer ….) The Yard is lit by the lights from elsewhere: the lamplight from the Teahouse of the Mullah Nasruddin’s Donkey extends almost to our front gate. Across the crossroads in front of the Inn, the residents of Irish Camp are playing flashlight tag (not as innocent as it sounds, as they are armed with water balloons) and the beams strobe across our Yard from time to time. Since the Inn Yard is overhung by enormous buckeye trees, and slants at a considerable angle from the front door to the front gate, all this makes wandering in the darkness amid the tables quite an adventure. That’s part of the fun.

At one side, though, there is glowing little area of warmth and industry. Here is where Kage sits – at a rough wooden table strewn with the detritus of a day in the 16th century. She sits on a hay bale padded with a wool cloak, dressed in a long red shift and a hoodie with a skull and cross bones on it (she is always cold). Her red hair is braided down her back all the way to the hay bale, where the end swishes when she moves, like a lioness’ tail. She has a chocolate bar to hand, and a pewter pint cup with a handle shaped like a sea-horse; it might hold Coke and rum, or a cocktail of her own invention called The Jamaican Bobsled: chocolate milk and Captain Morgan’s rum. (Goes down fast and easy, then you crash at the bottom!)

A Coleman lantern hisses nearby for light. She needs the light to see the keyboard of her laptop, which is on the table in front of her – it’s plugged into an industrial extension cord that runs up the slope of the Yard, into the red-latticed window of the Tap Room, and so into the Inn  where it is plugged via an improvised connection to the marine battery on the shelf beside the jockey box.

And there Kage sits writing furiously of immortal time travellers, by lamplight on a portable computer running on a battery hidden in a fake Tudor pub, on a haybale under oak trees, while a Fellini film dances around her in the moonlight.

And people asked her where she got her ideas ….

Kage Baker was a great cook. Really. She never appeared to listen when Momma demonstrated her own native Southern cooking; but once we were out on our own, it appeared she had absorbed everything unconsciously. Maybe supra-consciously. Or meta-consciously.

Or maybe it was racial memory. Kage always claimed that most of her memories belonged to other people: that somewhere in her mind a back window was open, and uncounted other people had climbed in. Her mansion of memory (Kids, check out St. Thomas Aquinas and Francis A. Yates.) had been colonized by squatters. She had come to terms with this as a method of accessing the hoard of information in her mind – she assigned personae to the topics, and “remembered” what they knew when she needed to know it too.

I think. Maybe she was only telling the simple truth. Over the years, I got used to Kage discussing plot and character points as if she were reporting a story she already knew. We talked about the characters in her stories the same way we discussed friends and relatives, and much more often. So for all I know, she really was eavesdropping on secret, hidden and alternative universes; she said that if her brain had to be full of this static, she might as well write it all down and make some money.

Just as she assigned music to each novel, she assigned specific cuisines to each character. While she wrote In The Garden of Iden, we ate a lot of medieval dishes. Most were good, some weird, all were interesting: though I do not recommend the roasted pork with butter-cream frosting … the introduction of Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax necessitated more Victorian cuisine, which was mostly either appalling or addictively delicious. Lots of these foods interbred with what we served at the Dickens Fair, too, and some of the food tried out in our Parlour set was research for stories. Boiled puddings. Ice cream bombes. Absinthe with all the ritual trimmings.

And of course we tried every kind of chocolate we could find. Milk chocolate with lavender and sea salt is, astonishingly, superb.  I thought the dark chocolate with chile was vile, but Kage loved it.

Not all the cuisines were for human beings. The Children of the Sun eat a lot of fried foods – not all the oils can be safely consumed by non-Children, though; Kage longed all her life to be able to swig lemon-scented lamp oil, so she gave that ability to them  … a lot of Chinese food evokes them, too. And hominy grits with maple syrup. (Don’t knock it until you try it.)

Yendri can subsist on plain water if they need too, or if they are  philosophically arrogant. They like smoothies and milk shakes and fruit juices. They rarely eat meat, but like omelettes and  meringues and souffles when they do eat. They can drink just about anyone else under the table, too, and have a fondness for retsina and whiskey. Man, that was entertaining research.

Kage herself being a psychotically picky eater, she sought experimental subjects on which to try some of this mood food. Mostly they were me. (In Mendoza In Hollywood, Edward eats sardine tacos – my work, that.) Demons – who are also psychotically picky eaters – often indulge in livers. Luckily, I like liver, so Kage could experiment with recipes. Eventually she discovered foie gras, though, and had to make enormous moral decisions every time we found it on a menu.

With her passion for veracity, Kage had to make and serve and eat as much of the book foods as possible. Which is why and maybe even how she was a great cook. It has certainly contributed to my having the ageless figure of the Venus of Wittenburg.

Now, though, I must go write. And eat. And drink. I think the afternoon calls for a Pimm’s cup and some water ices … and maybe fried wontons for dinner. With a peach souffle. Yes …

Tomorrow: more on the Mansion of Memory

And much as Wine has played the Infidel
And robbed me of my robe of Honour, well …
I often wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the stuff they sell

Kage Baker was an avid reader. She was one of those kids who is a self-taught reader, first memorizing the full text of her favourite stories and then reciting them until that magic circuit completed itself in the brain: and she could make the connection between the squiggles and the sounds. Books were every bit the magic door all the teacher propaganda claims they can be, for Kage. She spent her childhood in them, always hunting for more worlds to explore. It was because she wanted more that she finally started carving her own doors through the walls of reality.

People always ask writers what they like to read. The simplest answer to this question is, anything they can find the time to read at all – writing is engrossing and time-consuming, and usually the only written word that can be managed is in the cause of research. When Kage was pressed to say what she read when she could read for fun, she always cheerfully responded: “Dead white guys.” Which was, basically, true. She had old fashioned tastes and was not ashamed of them.

Her baby favourites were classic fantasy authors like George MacDonald and Kenneth Grahame and Edward Eager. Bullfinch’s Mythology. Peter Pan. Thorn Smith was a favourite that carried over from childhood to adulthood. When Kage grew older, she graduated to  writers of adventure and scope,  like  Rudyard Kipling and Robert Lewis Stevenson and Patrick O’Brien. A certain amount of derring-do always enthralled her – not so much the person of the hero (though she had a decided weakness for those) but the cut and thrust of a really ripping tale. And God, she loved sea stories!

She loved Shakespeare, too, but once really good movies started being made, she rarely read him anymore – Shakespeare is meant to be watched and heard. Her best-beloved of all the films was the 1935 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream;  she looked all her life for a way into that wood near Athens.

Even when writing took most of her time, she’d pause for a break with a beloved author. But when your most beloved authors are Dead White Guys, new releases are pretty rare. She didn’t encounter Forester until her 30’s, so Horatio Hornblower kept her company for quite a while. Discovering Patrick O’Brian kept her occupied for most of 2 years. Finally, though,  she was reduced to re-reading the old books and waiting for the next Terry Pratchett. Sir Terry continues to illuminate the world, gods keep him forever! Kage would put off a deadline for a new Pratchett novel.

What she didn’t read much of was contemporary science fiction. She’d read it when we were kids – at my insistence, mostly, I adored it and was space-mad from second grade on. She read classic fantasy a lot when it suddenly became available again in the 1960’s – but she was a C.S. Lewis fan rather than a Tolkien adherent (Kage said Tolkien didn’t have enough red and gold in his stories. She was in full agreement with that long-suffering crony of Tolkien’s who was once heard to mutter, “Oh, God, not another fucking elf!”)

She wrote science fiction and fantasy because her ideas did not fit anywhere else. But there were  no elves of any habits in her fantasy; rockets were conspicuously absent from her science fiction. She said it was about the stories, not the gadgets. She felt there was a paucity of humanity in both science fiction and fantasy in modern times – but she had grown up on a different vintage, and she tried to match it in her own tales.

By the time she was a full-time writer, Kage only read in her own field when someone sent her a new work – for review, for advice, for a blurb, or just for friendship’s sake. She read science fiction as a duty; sometimes pleasant enough, but still a duty. She went back to Long John Silver when she wanted to be romanced.

Which I guess proves that what the vintner buys for herself is not retailed on to the next drinker. What enchants must be bought for private use and consumed one’s self. The generous vintner, though, will at least pass on recommendations. Which Kage did.

So try one of her cocktails, kids.  Some of them are old-fashioned, but they have quite a kick under the fruit spears and paper umbrellas.

Tomorrow: food for thought

Kage Baker had a  vast superstitious respect for the Aristotelian unities. Those are the classic precepts of how to tell a story, derived from The Poetics of Aristotle (whose did you expect?). These are the unities of action, place and time:

1)  Action: a story or play should have one main plot line and few or no subplots;

2) Place: it should take place in one location and the action should not travel;

3) Time: the action should take place in no more than 24 hours.

This is how you write a perfect story. Kage said they sounded like the recipe for a sitcom.

But she knew about them, and she ritually applied them to everything she wrote. Then she tossed them out. In fact, Aristotelian  unities have mostly been observed in the breach over the years, especially since Shakespeare’s  success. The Bard of Avon is now honored as the best writer in the English language, but in his own time, he was something even more amazing: an actor and playwright who died rich. Willy ignored the unities constantly, to the indignation of several of his contemporary critics, who could not understand how the work of someone so ineducate and careless kept drawing crowds and making money. But the lesson was not lost on the writers who have come afterward.

Dickens, who sits on Shakespeare’s right hand in most pantheons, knew perfectly well what the unities were, and ignored them. He even made considerable fun of them in a passage in Nicholas Nickleby, wherein a literary scholar (neither an actor nor a writer) solemnly explains how Shakespeare is wrong, all wrong, because he does not observe the unities. He also demonstrates his own special theory, that the meaning of Shakespeare can be completely altered by merely changing the punctuation … try this at home, kids! The results are hysterical. As was Kage the first time she read this passage.

It was obvious, from what Kage said about her past as a nuts-and-bolts, gaffer’s-tape medievalist, that she was familiar with the unities. If you also read what she wrote, she clearly wasn’t observing them. Never a Con went by without someone fresh from an English class pointing this out to her – sometimes with amusement, but more often genuinely annoyed. What makes a 20-something from the 21st century take umbrage with a science fiction writer not employing the unities? Pedantry apparently is unaffected by the passage of time.

At first, feeling obligated to the readers, Kage would explain that modern fiction had different requirements from classical Greek plays. She would explain that modern audiences don’t actually follow the action well when a novel is split into 24-hour segments all published separately (an idea that was, to her astonishment, seriously considered by her critics). She would cite long lists of books much better and more famous than her own that nonetheless ignored the unities as much as hers did. Didn’t matter. Dickens’ nitpicker was evidently an immortal archetype; down the years he has fissioned like any other bacterium, and his descendants come to all science fiction conventions.

As her story evolved and her patience waned, Kage simply refused to argue. She told the unities freaks that she was writing about time travel, and so The Poetics were irrelevant.  She developed a theory of temporal homogeneity: all time was actually simultaneous, she said. Not only did everything happen that possibly could, it was all happening NOW. Our view of time’s linearity is a mere artifact of our sensory organs – it only appears to flow past us because we are facing into its stream. Time’s arrow is like the pointer on a roulette wheel, and we are standing on black while it is always pointing to red.

Did she believe this? Sometimes. Eventually. She did once and may have again … but she could tell this story oh, so convincingly, in a carefully bounded moment that perfectly adhered to the unities. And her auditor always believed her.

I choose to believe it, too. Somewhere,we have gone early to the Hollywood Bowl for the Tchaikovsky Spectacular tonight. We’ve spent the afternoon making 4 dozen egg rolls by hand; we have 2 bottles of cheap red wine and 2 or 3 snuggly gentlemen. The night will be perfect. There we are, and it is Now. and Always.

Tomorrow: what the vintners drink

Kage Baker was honest to a fault. In fact, she is the illustration for that phrase – “to a fault” – in my mind; I didn’t understand it at all until I realized that Kage would tell the truth no matter what. It’s not that she didn’t care about offending people, or self-defense, or surviving a chance encounter (as some adamant truth tellers do not); no, she cared passionately. She just couldn’t tell lies very well. Knowing she could not, she stopped doing it early in life, choosing instead to change the subject or subcontract falsehood (to me, usually) when she couldn’t avoid it. If she couldn’t manage those defenses, she’d just tell you: Yeah, that does make your ass look big.

However, she was paramount at self-deception. A writer has to be. A writer must convince the audience of the reality of their world, and the easiest way to do that is to believe in it themselves: at least for the duration of the tale. Alice’s task of believing 6 impossible things before breakfast is just SOP for a writer. If nothing else, you need to believe someone is listening to you tell the story. Wilder imaginings can include someone paying you for it.

Kage deftly exercised situational reality as she wrote. The requirements of a particular world/plot/character would take over to the point where she was constrained by laws of physics that only existed in her own head. Our brainstorming sessions became arguments over how some hypothetical metal or process worked, debated as passionately as if we were cramming for an engineering exam.

Theology students must have similar conversations. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Once, this question mattered a lot. How do you avoid that infamous immortal’s Achilles heel of losing your head? Let the damned head go and make the brain impervious; your immortal flesh can be restored eventually, and in the meantime you are safe in fugue in the adamantine fortress of your own skull. But first we had to concoct a physical method that Kage could believe in, because she couldn’t tell good lies.

Kage had to be convinced her own self as to how something worked before she could write about it. Believe it or not, although she was  not known as a “hard” science fiction writer, she worked long and hard to achieve an intellectual grasp of the physical laws in her universes. None of the equations that ran her science or her magic included that dread parenthesized caveat (And here a miracle happens).

So, on the positive side of the ledger, Kage believed in all her stories at least for the duration of their birth. Often longer – it often felt as though our household was crammed with the characters from her books, eccentric roommates whose needs and appetites engrossed us just as much as what to have for dinner tonight. Stories with Ermenwyr in them were always especially lively; he is a hell of a houseguest …

On the debit side: Kage could also convince herself she needed to do something else, anything else, rather than write. She neatly justified this by deciding that the other activity was going to lead to writing – a road trip, a specific restaurant, a week spent on a new game: it could all be research. Oddly enough, it often was, too: a week-long camping retreat in Big Sur ended up producing two short stories and the sorcerous duel scene in Anvil of the World. It also produced an epic battle against raccoons in the middle of the night, but that is irrelevant to our current discussion …

Here, at the moment, in Los Angeles, it is too freaking hot to work at the computer. I am convinced to the bottom of my soul that I need to get away from this damned desk. So, I am going to trust that all is grist for the writer’s mill and go do something else for awhile. It’ll probably involve cold beer and a book.  Inspiration will eventually result from a long immersion in barley, hops and a book. And if it doesn’t, I’ll switch to rum and kill some zombies – it always worked for Kage.

Tomorrow: avoiding writing. Don’t pretend you never thought of it.