O.K., so I'll write a _little bit_ about the dojo.

For the benefit of those who don't know me, here's some context: I've been studying Shotokan karate for four years. I'm ranked ikkyu, or first degree brown belt; my next test will be for shodan, or first degree black belt. (You count down for color belt ranks, and up for black belts.) My dojo is non-profit and taught by a rotating team of unpaid instructors.

I, like the majority of the high-ranked brown belts and low-ranked black belts, am an assistant instructor. I'm the highest ranked woman who shows up regularly, which means that I'm usually the only woman in the brown belt classes. Oh, and I'm 5' 0" and weigh under 110 pounds.

Sorry to go on so much about rank. It's because some classes are rank-restricted, and it affects who is eligible to take what, and also affects who teaches and assists. Rank, of course, is not necessarily a reflection of relative skill, let alone character or spirit or any other untangibles.

J-- is an assistant instructor. He's a tournament champion who recently joined our dojo, and today he taught the sparring class for the first time.

For the benefit of Tweedkitten and Canada Girl, here's the report on J--'s sparring class.

I had been assigned to assist at the beginning class at 10:00 am. I normally skip that one, because I take the 11:00 am intermediate class, followed by the 12:00 free-spar class. However, I was stuck with the first class, which meant three hours straight. I brought two cans of Red Bull. Luckily I got to spend the first hour individually coaching a new student, so I was merely warmed up, not tired, by the time I got to the second class.

I had expected J--'s class to be the killer one. However, Sensei Y--, who taught the second class, had us doing such complicated combinations that my brain completely locked up. It was one of those times where the thirtieth time you do it is just as hard as the first time, because each one feels like the first time. I didn't burst into tears and run off the floor, but it was a close thing.

Oops, I just realized that I have to go meet someone. Actual report on J--'s class to follow. (Short report: it was awesome! It was fun! I learned a lot! You guys shoulda been there!)

O.K., so I'll write a _little bit_ about the dojo.

For the benefit of those who don't know me, here's some context: I've been studying Shotokan karate for four years. I'm ranked ikkyu, or first degree brown belt; my next test will be for shodan, or first degree black belt. (You count down for color belt ranks, and up for black belts.) My dojo is non-profit and taught by a rotating team of unpaid instructors.

I, like the majority of the high-ranked brown belts and low-ranked black belts, am an assistant instructor. I'm the highest ranked woman who shows up regularly, which means that I'm usually the only woman in the brown belt classes. Oh, and I'm 5' 0" and weigh under 110 pounds.

Sorry to go on so much about rank. It's because some classes are rank-restricted, and it affects who is eligible to take what, and also affects who teaches and assists. Rank, of course, is not necessarily a reflection of relative skill, let alone character or spirit or any other untangibles.

J-- is an assistant instructor. He's a tournament champion who recently joined our dojo, and today he taught the sparring class for the first time.

For the benefit of Tweedkitten and Canada Girl, here's the report on J--'s sparring class.

I had been assigned to assist at the beginning class at 10:00 am. I normally skip that one, because I take the 11:00 am intermediate class, followed by the 12:00 free-spar class. However, I was stuck with the first class, which meant three hours straight. I brought two cans of Red Bull. Luckily I got to spend the first hour individually coaching a new student, so I was merely warmed up, not tired, by the time I got to the second class.

I had expected J--'s class to be the killer one. However, Sensei Y--, who taught the second class, had us doing such complicated combinations that my brain completely locked up. It was one of those times where the thirtieth time you do it is just as hard as the first time, because each one feels like the first time. I didn't burst into tears and run off the floor, but it was a close thing.

Oops, I just realized that I have to go meet someone. Actual report on J--'s class to follow. (Short report: it was awesome! It was fun! I learned a lot! You guys shoulda been there!)

J--'s class (with digressions on writing, fear, and strategies for success in all things)

It was excellent. He ran us through a lot of very focused exercises to teach us various techniques of closing distance, stripping our movements down to the essentials, and seeing what the opponent is doing and reacting appropriately to it. (The last sounds obvious, but is actually extremely difficult.) It was fun, too.

J-- said that for two years, he was entering tournaments two or three times a month (!) and that he started studying the people who consistently won to see what things they were doing in common with each other that the people who didn't win weren't doing. He mentioned a number of things, but he said the primary one was that they didn't waste motion. They didn't block a fist all the way over so it missed their faces by six inches, they blocked it with a small motion so it missed by half an inch.

Obviously, this is scary. It seems dangerous. But a lot of things in sparring that seem safer, like blocking blows to way away from you instead of to just barely miss, or to always retreat from an attack rather than to go forward, are not only going to make you lose but are actually less safe. Because they will slow you down enough that the other person will get in on you and possibly clock you. Okay, not in your own dojo where you're looking out for each other, but if you were really fighting losing would be dangerous.

I think that J--'s strategy of analyzing the methods of successful people is a very good one no matter what you're trying to learn. I learned how to write primarily by analyzing the techniques in my favorite books. I looked at what some writers did really well, and how they put the words and sentences and chapters together to do it, and thus learned how to do what they were doing-- not to imitate them, but to borrow their toolkits.

Kipling was correct that there are nine-and-sixty ways of writing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right. So my way isn't the only one, and people who write in a very instinctual way would probably find my strategy mechanical and useless. But it continues to work for me, and at some later point I may write about it in more detail and explain why, say, James Herriot can teach you how to structure a short story, how to end with a punchline, and how that can be profound and wonderful rather than cheap. Or how Caryl Churchill taught me how to give a tiny event, like the breaking of an ordinary egg, the impact of a nuclear bomb.

Like J-- was saying, you won't learn unless you really pay attention.

J--'s class (with digressions on writing, fear, and strategies for success in all things)

It was excellent. He ran us through a lot of very focused exercises to teach us various techniques of closing distance, stripping our movements down to the essentials, and seeing what the opponent is doing and reacting appropriately to it. (The last sounds obvious, but is actually extremely difficult.) It was fun, too.

J-- said that for two years, he was entering tournaments two or three times a month (!) and that he started studying the people who consistently won to see what things they were doing in common with each other that the people who didn't win weren't doing. He mentioned a number of things, but he said the primary one was that they didn't waste motion. They didn't block a fist all the way over so it missed their faces by six inches, they blocked it with a small motion so it missed by half an inch.

Obviously, this is scary. It seems dangerous. But a lot of things in sparring that seem safer, like blocking blows to way away from you instead of to just barely miss, or to always retreat from an attack rather than to go forward, are not only going to make you lose but are actually less safe. Because they will slow you down enough that the other person will get in on you and possibly clock you. Okay, not in your own dojo where you're looking out for each other, but if you were really fighting losing would be dangerous.

I think that J--'s strategy of analyzing the methods of successful people is a very good one no matter what you're trying to learn. I learned how to write primarily by analyzing the techniques in my favorite books. I looked at what some writers did really well, and how they put the words and sentences and chapters together to do it, and thus learned how to do what they were doing-- not to imitate them, but to borrow their toolkits.

Kipling was correct that there are nine-and-sixty ways of writing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right. So my way isn't the only one, and people who write in a very instinctual way would probably find my strategy mechanical and useless. But it continues to work for me, and at some later point I may write about it in more detail and explain why, say, James Herriot can teach you how to structure a short story, how to end with a punchline, and how that can be profound and wonderful rather than cheap. Or how Caryl Churchill taught me how to give a tiny event, like the breaking of an ordinary egg, the impact of a nuclear bomb.

Like J-- was saying, you won't learn unless you really pay attention.

The Knight: Book One of The Wizard Knight, by Gene Wolfe (Tor, 2003)

I also write reviews for Green Man Review, mostly of fantasy novels and Asian movies. If you search their archives for "Rachel Brown" or "Rachel Manija Brown" you will find more of them, plus some vitriolic letters to me from disgruntled authors, one of which came close to suggesting that we step outside. I don't expect to receive one from Gene Wolfe, though.

Note the title: a wizard, a knight, book one of two. The assemblage of clichés suggests that the book will be a piece of generic high fantasy. Noble knights, elves, dragons, brawny heroes, damsels in distress, and other archetypal elements of myth whose power has been all but leached away by page after page of insipid and thoughtless recitations.

Note the author: a man whose books are known for intellectual rigor, startling and powerful imagery, and puzzle-box structures in which the reader must pay close attention to the smallest details to make sense of the plot. Wolfe’s narrators are often amnesiac, not as truthful as they profess to be, not the person they appear to be, or otherwise unreliable. Themes which turn up again and again in different stories are issues of identity— a high percentage of his characters go by more than one name or are in disguise or impersonating someone or undergo physical transformations or are otherwise not what they seem— and the search for God in a fallen world.

Wolfe tends to take the most clichéd genre elements possible and then use them in such odd and original ways as to create the sense of something entirely new: generation ships, vampires, and robots in The Book of the Long Sun, torturers, witches, and cannibals in The Book of the New Sun, and clones, aliens, and shapeshifters in The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

The Knight is Wolfe’s take on high fantasy, and his dragons and elves and knights bear the same resemblance to the standard fantasy ones that Severian does to the standard questing hero— which is to say, not much.

A teenage American boy is swept into a strange realm in which seven worlds exist on top of each other, so that one can fall into a pool of water in Mythgarthr and emerge in Aelfrice, then return by climbing a tower. People in the lower worlds can sometimes see denizens of the upper ones carrying on their lives in the sky.

The boy is told that he had an encounter with magical beings called Aelfs, but has lost his memory of it and of how he passed between worlds. All he knows is that he is now called Able of the High Heart, and that the Aelfs want him to right some wrong that was inflicted on them—but he has no idea what it was.

The story takes the form of a very long letter Able is writing to his brother on Earth. It seems that Able has lost more than just his memory of his name and a few specific events. His memories of his homeland are vague and his thoughts don’t resemble those of any teenage American I’ve ever met. Maybe that’s because Wolfe has no idea how to write a convincing contemporary teenager. But it’s more likely to be deliberate. Able begins the story as an innocent, a slate blank of history but inscribed with ideals.

He meets a noble knight, and decides that he wants to be one too. He meets Disiri, a beautiful Aelf queen, and falls in love. After he and Disiri make love, she transforms him into a grown man, and not just a grown-up version of himself but a big strong Conan type— an archetypal fantasy warrior. Then she sets him on a quest to find a magic sword.

In a running joke, Able tells a series of men what happened, and they all respond that they know exactly what he means— they became men after they first slept with a woman, too. Able, who has a man’s body but the worldview of a sheltered and innocent boy, is pretty sure that he’s the only one who isn’t speaking metaphorically, but he’s not positive.

Able’s quest takes him up and down and across the worlds. It works as a picaresque full of striking images and memorable characters, from a dragon whose man’s face is visible when he opens his mouth, to an immense water goddess reminiscent of (and perhaps related to) the undines in The Book of the New Sun, to a talking cat who remarks upon an exquisite pair of fire Aelf maidens, “When I say the ugly one, I mean the one who looks least like a cat.”

Though all the elements of quest fantasy are present and well-executed, it’s impossible to read the book purely as a story of a boy who becomes a knight and has adventures in a world based on Norse mythology.

Able has the body of a man but a child’s purity of heart, coupled with the occasional thoughtless cruelty of a child. (There may also be a pun on the ancient title “Childe,” meaning a noble awaiting knighthood.) But he is missing not only his past, but his culture, his true name, probably a significant piece of his personality, and possibly his real identity. He thinks he’s a modern American boy, but he doesn’t speak or behave like one; and too much is made of a battle-damaged man who thinks that Able is his lost brother for it to be the irrelevant ravings of a madman.

Though Able often protests that he is telling the truth, he skips a number of significant events, perhaps because they’re too painful to relate. Or perhaps for other reasons. He often neglects to mention that seemingly new characters are actually people we met much earlier, now going unnamed or under a different one. And what he does see, he sometimes fails to understand.

And while one can map Mythgarthr to Midgard, the Valfather to Odin the Allfather, and so forth, in an astonishing moment near the end the “Norse mythology” shell cracks open and a visitor from an entirely different tradition appears. And he is awesome.

The questionable reliability of the narrator, the frequent lacunae, and the dreamlike transitions between place and time make the book resemble a pointillist painting, which seems to present a clear and detailed picture from afar, but upon close examination dissolves into color and form.

The Knight is written in a far more simple vocabulary than is usual for Wolfe, and it often attains the stripped-down beauty of an old saga or ballad. (The occasional moments when Able does talk like a modern teenager are extremely jarring.) If the plot seems meandering, perhaps it’s because the significance of the events won’t become apparent until the second book comes out. And while it’s more intellectually than emotionally engaging, there is no scene which isn’t a pleasure to read for the prose or the wit or the sense of wonder.

This story about a boy is a grown-up pleasure, like coffee or wine: complex, a little bitter, a little difficult, but one which will reward you if you develop a taste for it.


Frankly, I'm not sure that I really understood the book, but I didn't have a year to mull it over and re-read it before I had to turn in a review. I take comfort in the suspicion that Michael Dirda wasn't sure he really understood it either:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38093-2004Feb12.html