The Kingkiller Sporkicle: The Name of the Wind: Chapter 14

Chapter 14: The Name of the Wind

In which Galatea prematurely celebrates a death.

Previously, in The Name of the Wind, we returned to the Waystone for a brief interlude of nothing as a break from all the other nothing.

Everyone enjoy the year-long musical interlude?

Yeah, sorry about that. Galatea had some shit go down. Not least of which: remember the boyfriend who got scratched up by the cat? Said boyfriend is now husband!

(Said cat is still cat.)

There were other distractions, too: day job stuff, family stuff, hopes-and-dreams stuff...y'know, life. I'm alive, I'm healthy, and I'm happy; I've just been significantly short on time. That's...not actually likely to change any time soon, but I have got slightly better at managing my multiple spinning plates, which means I'm going to make a valiant attempt to get this spork back on track!

Anyhoo, on to the main event:

Title Drop: 19

We're back to the narrative proper, with the heavy indication from the end of the last chapter that shit is finally about to hit the fan. If it means Kvothe stops being amazing at everything and starts being an actual character in an actual story, I am all in.

Winter is a slow time of year for a traveling troupe[...]

Then why the fuck aren't you at court?

I am continually amazed that the Edema Ruh manage to find the front ends of their wagons, let alone make a living as performers. They are licensed players with a standing appointment at Baron Greyfallow's court. If winter is a slow time of year for a travelling troupe, then they should not be fucking travelling.

Every busker I know knows. this. If you busk in a region that actually has seasons, then when summer is over and the weather starts to get shitty you do one of two things. You can pack up and chase the season by literally heading south for the winter - a busker in Portland might go down to LA for a few months, or a New York street performer might spend the winter in Miami. I even know a variety performer who'll head to the southern hemisphere in October, spending the "winter" hitting up festivals in Australia and Indonesia.

Or, if travelling hundreds of miles to chase the weather isn't possible or doesn't sound fun...you can work indoors. Magicians book stage shows and corporate gigs for the holidays. Comedians and singers work cruise ships. Actors take on holiday pantomimes or teach winter drama courses. Acrobats and dancers hit up the holiday-themed variety shows, or get background work in one of hundreds of performances of The Nutcracker or A Christmas Carol. If you have your own solo stage show, you start your run in October and play through the holidays. If you've always wanted to put on a show with your two juggling buddies, you plan to open when busking season gets rained out.

Kvothe's troupe has an indoor gig as Greyfallow's court performers; they shouldn't have to travel to find work. More to the point, Greyfallow should want them back in the winter. The same winter conditions that make things slow for Kvothe's troupe are also making it harder for every other performer or company, which means that it's that much harder for Greyfallow to book other performers for his own court - and, with the Midwinter Pageantry presumably coming up, he wants performers around.

This, by the way, is how it has always worked between travelling performers and their sponsors. In the summer, the troupe travels, expanding their reach and taking advantage of the greater fees they can command as guest performers with limited engagements, while the sponsor brings greater variety to his court (or similar) by inviting other performers who are doing the same thing. In the winter, the sponsored troupe fulfills a longer "home" engagement local to their sponsor: they don't have to worry about bad weather causing low turnout or missed engagements, and the sponsor is guaranteed entertainment even when the same bad weather prevents guest performers from visiting court. It works for everyone - everyone who isn't as pathologically stupid as the Edema Ruh.

I Have An Interrogative: 50

Goddammit, this book makes me angry. The point is that, because the troupe is doing less performing, Abenthy has more time to teach Kvothe sympathy. The fact that they’d have just as much additional time if they were at court – where many of Kvothe’s daily chores would be redundant in a permanent, indoor venue – is not lost on me.

Kvothe, once again, is disappointed in sympathy. He once again chooses to describe this in terms of some fantasy ideal of childhood, and I am once again forced to wonder whether Rothfuss was ever actually a child, or whether his parents formed him fully-bearded from clay and a passing gnome breathed life into him.

Repetition(epetition): 68

It was useful. There was no denying that. Ben used sympathy to make light for our shows. Sympathy could start a fire without flint or lift a heavy weight without cumbersome ropes and pulleys.

Okay, but how? Making light for the shows I understand, I think. Bind the lamp to something that generates its own light, or use some fancy principle to transfer heat energy in something to light energy in something else, and done. How that’s any more efficient than just lighting a fucking lamp I don’t know, but I can at least wrap my head around how it might work. But how in the hell does it lift a heavy weight without ropes and pulleys? We already know that if you use one thing to lift another, you’re effectively lifting the weight of – at minimum – both things. So how on earth is there any way of using sympathy to lift a thing that doesn’t make lifting the thing twice as cumbersome? For that matter, how do you light a fire without flint without somehow making something else hot enough for spontaneous combustion? How the hell do you do that without a flint?

I Have An Interrogative: 53

I’m not saying these answers don’t exist, by the way. For all I know Rothfuss has the answers to every single one of these questions squirrelled away in a notebook somewhere. But these are questions I wouldn’t even be asking if he hadn’t hit the stupid “sympathy = science” thing so hard in previous chapters. Vagueness would have been his friend here. If all I knew was that sympathy exists but it has an energy cost, I’d accept that you could use it to light fires or lift heavy things. In fact, I’d probably accept it as similar to electricity: generate the energy somehow – by running in place or putting one of the horses in a giant hamster wheel – and use sympathy instead of wires and magnets to channel that energy where it needs to go. Hell, maybe that’s what Rothfuss is ultimately aiming for. But without either less detail in the explanation or more detail in the application, what we know of the theory of sympathy and the ways we see it used just don’t match up.

But the first time I’d seen him, Ben had somehow called the wind. That was no mere sympathy. That was storybook magic. That was the secret I wanted more than anything.

Title Drop: 20

Is This The Real Life: 21

And now we hit a section break, which just reminds me that everything I’ve just read is something I’ve seen – in one form or another – elsewhere in the book.

Repetition(epetition): 69

NaNoPadMo: 36

We pole-vault a few months ahead into spring, and Kvothe once again riding along in Abenthy’s wagon. Abenthy uses the time to drill Kvothe on his studies and asks him how he’d bring a kettle to a boil. Kvothe suggests using the heat from a sun-warmed stone to warm the water, and Abenthy points out that the stone and water are dissimilar enough to make it a poor sympathetic link that would lose most of the heat.

Kvothe pouts that it would work; Abenthy agrees, but says that Kvothe can come up with something better. Then he yells at his donkeys for a bit and comes back to Kvothe with the question of how he would drop a passing hawk from the sky. And I still generally like Abenthy as a character, so it pains me to say this, but I must: Abenthy is a shit teacher.

When you're teaching a student, particularly at an advanced level, you're either expecting a specific answer and testing your student's ability to reach it, or you don't have a specific answer in mind and you're trying to guide your student towards a particular approach to the problem. I'm pretty sure Abenthy's doing the second thing here, since I can't imagine there's a single correct way of boiling water using sympathy, but if Abenthy is testing Kvothe's ability to think like an arcanist, then he should be following up on the bloody question.

I am, as I have mentioned, a teacher of creative writing. That's a discipline with few correct answers, but with certain approaches or modes of thought that are more appropriate than others. If I ask one of my students to suggest a way of delivering exposition and said student offers a giant info-dump monologue wall of text, I am (of course) going to start by saying that that's probably not the best solution to the problem. I am not then going to ask the same student how they would handle describing a fight scene. The key to good teaching is getting a student to engage, and you do that by following through on a question with more questions that guide the student towards the best answer by encouraging them to think about how they're getting there.

And by the way? Rothfuss was a fucking teacher. 100-level English courses at the University of Wisconsin, Stephens Point for at least four years, and his reviews on RateMyProfessor.com (yes, I went there) don't altogether suck. They're also written with spelling and grammar that God knows I wouldn't accept even from 100-level English students, but that's not quite the point here. He should fucking well know how to write a fucking teacher, is the point.

Argh. So Abenthy hops topics to the hawk, Kvothe offers binding a random feather to the bird and using soap to scrub the oils from the feather - which is actually rather clever except that that would only help if it's raining (the oils are for insulation and waterproofing, not aerodynamics) -

I Know Stuff: 20

- Abenthy says that's not good enough, and Kvothe uses the opportunity Rothfuss handed him so conveniently to say he'd just call the wind and strike the hawk directly from the sky.

Title Drop: 21

Abenthy asks Kvothe how exactly he plans to do that, and Kvothe apes actually calling the wind by binding his breath to the air outside. It is, again, actually quite clever.

There's a light puff of wind, and for a second Abenthy is genuinely impressed. Then Kvothe starts suffocating.

YES. FUCK THAT SMUG, SELF-RIGHTEOUS ASSHOLE. FUCK HIM RIGHT IN THE EAR. NOT ONLY DID HE DESERVE TO DIE, BUT HAVING KVOTHE TELL THE STORY POSTHUMOUSLY ADDS A WELCOME LAYER OF NUANCE TO THE WHOLE...

Wait, what? He's not dead?

Fine. I hate you all.

Since I can't revel in Kvothe's untimely demise, I suppose I should spork his almost-death:

I tried to draw a breath but couldn’t. Mildly confused, I kept trying. It felt as if I’d just fallen flat on my back and had the air driven from me.

Are we sure "mildly confused" is what we want here, Rothfuss? I'm just saying, if nearly thirty years of perfectly competently breathing came to an abrupt halt for me, I'd skip over "well, isn't this peculiar" and go straight to "HOLY SHIT I CAN'T BREATHE FUCKING HELP ME!!!"

But hey, that's just me. This is, I think, an extremely minor issue of word-padding; remove "Mildly confused, I kept trying" from the paragraph and the whole thing is better...but five words shorter.

NaNoPadMo: 37

Yes, I'm counting it. Kvothe's still alive, which means I'm owed. Anyway, Kvothe freaks out, Abenthy freaks out, and in the grand tradition of The Name of the Wind, everyone's freaking is done with too many words, too much punctuation, and too little immediacy for a scenario in which our protagonist is suffocating to death.

Alert The Editor: 123

Kvothe blacks out, and comes to in time for some pretty decent paragraphs of Abenthy deflecting Kvothe's mother (who still doesn't have a name, by the way) and then being all sullen and silent towards Kvothe. I'm finding I can sort of tell when Rothfuss views a segment as purely utilitarian - just a step on the road between loving paragraphs of Kvothe-wank. It's not wheel-spinning as we've seen in so many chapters so far; it's straightforward "move-things-to-the-next-scene-I-actually-want-to-write" prose. The irony is, of course, that these sections tend to be among the best-written, because in his haste to get from point A to point B Rothfuss doesn't waste time on purple prose and irrelevant asides.

Ben twitched the reins and Alpha and Beta tugged the wagon into motion. We were last in line now. Ben stared straight ahead. I fingered the torn front of my shirt. It was tensely silent.

Because before now, Kvothe's shirt had been so chatty.

Alert The Editor: 124

In hindsight, what I had done was glaringly stupid. When I bound my breath to the air outside, it made it impossible for me to breathe. My lungs weren’t strong enough to move that much air. I would have needed a chest like an iron bellows. I would have had as much luck trying to drink a river or lift a mountain.

When I had bound my breath, etc. Rothfuss really has some issues with the pluperfect.

Alert The Editor: 126

I'm also genuinely not sure this makes any sense. Isn't Kvothe's breath always bound to the air outside? What the hell is he breathing, otherwise? When he blew out, after binding his breath to the air, he didn't blow all the air that ever was; he got a light breeze to the back of his head. You'd think, if the issue was pure volume of air, that he wouldn't have been able to blow in the first place. At most, he should thereafter have been trying to inhale twice what was previously in his lungs, which should have left him less asphyxiated than a little inflated and possibly rather gassy for a while. Embarrassing, sure; deadly, no.

I Have An Interrogative: 54

Allow me also to note that, once again, Rothfuss blew his wad before the main event. Before the section break, Rothfuss describes the steps Kvothe goes through to bind the air to his breath as he's doing it - clearing his mind, focusing on the Alar, and so on. Aside from feeling PadMo-ish, that flattens what would have been a great opportunity to briefly trick the reader into thinking that Kvothe had figured out how to call the wind on his own. Imagine it this way: with no explanation of what steps he's going through, Kvothe appears to call the wind, and immediately starts suffocating. We, as the readers, think 1) holy shit, Kvothe really is that clever, and 2) holy shit, calling the wind really is that dangerous. It feels like a rubicon crossed, both for the character and for us.

Then, with the paragraph quoted above, we discover what Kvothe actually did, and with it get the reveal that cleverness + thoughtlessness = just as much danger as real magic, a theme that recurs throughout the book and that Abenthy will soon introduce in an extremely literal fashion. We need a little cat-and-mouse with what Kvothe's actually capable of to break up the pure wank; we lost it because Rothfuss incorrectly thought that a blow-by-blow explanation of what he was doing would make him look particularly clever.

It's almost enough for me to introduce a Premature Plotjaculation count, but the count list is already bordering on unwieldy. Maybe another few chapters will force my hand.

The troupe stops for a "greystone" in the road: a literal standing stone that has toppled over like most of the Henges that aren't named Stone (seriously, Britain has a shit-ton of henges and most of them aren't total tourist traps, so go check them out). Abenthy knows them as "waystones", and a couple other names for them come up over the rest of the chapter, which feels like it's leading to an etymology fail but never quite gets there.

We do, however, get a terrible pun from Arliden about Kvothe's torn shirt!

“This shirt is wholly holey, more than it has any right to be.”

#dadjokes - and see Chapter 8 for my multipurpose pun rant.

Mother Tongue: 18

And scads of shitty poetry! First up, it's Kvothe's mother singing a little ditty:

“In evening when the sun is setting fast,
I’ll watch for you from high above
The time for your return is long since past
But mine is ever-faithful love.”

There's a second verse that Arliden sings, but I'll spare you: it's just more basic imagery, ABAB rhymes and questionable scansion.

Kvothe The Raven: 8

Oh, but we're not done! After eleven-year-old Kvothe ogles his parents frenching and takes mental notes in case he ever wants to stick his tongue down a girl's throat some day (ew), he asks his folks what's up with the greystones and gets this in response:

“Like a drawstone even in our sleep
Standing stone by old road is the way
To lead you ever deeper into Fae.
Laystone as you lay in hill or dell
Greystone leads to something something ‘ell’.”

Credit where it's due, that's quite funny - and Rothfuss does make sure the "something something 'ell'" scans correctly. Line 3 scans like crap, though, and the first line fouls up the rhyme scheme, so I'm still counting it.

Kvothe The Raven: 9

It gets better. Remember when I mentioned that Rothfuss clearly hates poets? That claim was not baseless:

My father stood for a second or two looking off into space and tugging at his lower lip. Finally he shook his head. “Can’t remember the end of that last line. Lord but I dislike poetry. How can anyone remember words that aren’t put to music?”

Y'know, that's an excellent question FOR A FUCKING ACTOR.

No idea, Leo - I haven't seen Titanic since I was twelve.

Kvothe picks up on the "drawstone" of the rhyme and asks his mother what it is; she answers that it's another word for a "loden-stone", which is nothing more than a lodestone with an "n" in it.

Mother Tongue: 19

Again, Rothfuss takes a word that actually exists and tries to get clever with it. This is not the last we will see for "loden-stone" under this count, by the way, but I'm getting about sixty chapters ahead of myself (fuck me, this book is long).

Arliden is too distracted by his hate-boner for poetry to pay the slightest attention to Kvothe or his mother:

“Remember this, son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart, and some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.”

Kvothe The Raven: 11

I can't even muster snark any more. Look, I'll pick music over poetry most any day: I can candidly admit that I never gave much study or thought to poetry and it's an art form that typically doesn't grab me. But I would never call a poet "a musician who can't sing"; in fact, I'd venture that poets are musicians whether or not they can sing - that the best verse channels the raw musicality of language and the spoken word to create a kind of music that doesn't need notes or key signatures. Poetry is absolutely not second-rate songwriting, and you only have to look at the literally thousands of songs that use their music to prop up bargain basement lyrics to make a pretty strong case that songwriting is often second-rate poetry. I might not get poetry, per se, but I respect the hell out of it.

My mother made a slightly unladylike snort. “Elitist. You’re just getting old.” She gave a dramatic sigh. “Truly, all the more’s the tragedy; the second thing to go is a man’s memory.”

Fuck you and your "unladylike", Rothfuss,
Hanging a hat on Arliden's elitism does not make it less elitist,
Whaddya wanna bet Rothfuss meant the first "thing to go" as a man's ability to maintain an erection?

Ladies And Gentlemen: 20

There's another, less formal verse about greystones, which I mention only so that I can do this:

Kvothe The Raven: 12

Home stretch, people. Kvothe goes back to Abenthy, who starts to tell him about Lanre, stops, and moves into warning Kvothe about the danger of flinging his abilities around without consideration of the consequences. Yes, an older man nicknamed "Ben" gives his surrogate son figure a speech about great power begetting great responsibility, and I can't believe I've read this goddamn thing five times and only just realised that.

Abenthy drops the title, which I'm double-counting because it's the name of both the chapter and the book (and because I'm grouchy at Spider-Kvothe)...

Title Drop: 23

...hangs a hat on the fact that eleven-year-old Kvothe talks like a forty-year-old ponce...

...and engages in some light Kvothe-wank while he's at it.

Stu Stew: 52

It blows my mind that that is the first Stu Stew count for the chapter.

Abenthy cools off towards Kvothe, Kvothe is miraculously not a little shit about it, and there is some ominousness about the happy fun times coming to an end in the near future - and that, as they say, is that for the chapter.

Alert The Editor: 132

Coming up, we have a stretch of chapters that genuinely have some of Rothfuss' best writing in them. Don't get me wrong - they're still eminently sporkable - but between short chapters, interesting imagery, and reasonably consistent narrative momentum, I'm hopeful we can breeze through them without losing our collective minds.

Counts:

Alert The Editor: 132

Face The Music: 10

I Have An Interrogative: 54