Premature, perhaps, but.
HYDRIOTAPHIA.
ENTIERRO DE LA URNA;
O, Un DISCURSO De las URNAS De SEPULCHRAL ENCONTRADO ÚLTIMAMENTE EN NORFOLK.
A mi amigo digno y honorado,
Thos. Le Gros, de Crostwick, Esq.
La gallina el pyre general estaba hacia fuera, y el valediction pasado encima, los hombres tomó durar adieu de su interred a amigos, esperando poco que la curiosidad de las edades futuras debe comentar sobre sus cenizas; y, no teniendo ninguna vieja experiencia de la duración de sus relicks, llevada a cabo ninguna opinión de tales despue’s-consideraciones.
¿Pero quién sabe el sino de sus huesos, o cómo él debe a menudo ser enterrada? ¿Quién hath el oráculo de sus cenizas, o whither él debe ser dispersada? Los relicks de muchos mentira como las ruinas de Pompey, en todas las partes de la tierra; y cuando llegan sus manos éstos pueden parecerse ahan vagado lejos, que, en un recorrido directo y meridiano, tenga solamente pocas millas de tierra sabida entre se y el poste.
Not quite right. I shall try again, in the morning.
Winning friends; influencing people.
Y’know, Ted—can I call you Ted? Ted, I could, if I wanted, thank you, for finally giving me a glimpse of what it is y’all think you see when you take a look at Kerry; I could sneer at you, and tell you that your partisan ideal of God is a pathetically transparent crutch, devoid of mystery and grace, part and parcel of the exclusionary rhetoric that has so bitterly divided a country so sorely in need of uniting these past four years. I could point out that the soldiers whose vote you so assiduously champion are many of them paid so little they must feed their families with food stamps—which puts them squarely in the freeloaders’ camp, whose vote you so thoughtlessly disparage. I could slyly allude to the charming hubris in whingeing on about the unworkable inefficiencies of public works over the internet—one of many great public works that make this modern world of ours at all possible—but it’s an old and tired point, worn smooth with overuse. (Besides, you doubtless go out of your way to use private toll roads, and think the free market would do an even better job of keeping cholera at bay; also, I’d have to hear you rationalize an administration that’s presided over one of the largest public-sector growth spurts in history. I’d really rather not.) —I could be rude, and unload a mercilessly colorful stream of invective that attempts to plumb the willful depths of your ignorance; I could be shrill, and hold you up as an example of all that is wrong, as one of the tuneless tootling flutes that bedevil our sleep and hold us back from all that we could be; I could be deferential, since the ground I need to cover has already been well and truly mapped. I could be a mensch, and let you know, privately, that anyone who goes on about how dumb Democrats are had probably better know how to spell Republicans. (Hint: there’s only one “i.”)
But what I’m gonna do, Ted, is this: I’m gonna tell you to stop sending me unsolicited commercial email. This may be one of the most polarized elections ever, or at least in a while, but if there’s one thing that will bring us all together, Democrat and Republican, Green and Libertarian, and unite us in a common cause, it’s an undying hatred of spam.
Verb. sap. and all that, old boy.
Oh, right, I have this blog.
It would appear I am on something of a hiatus. (An hiatus? Oh, shush.)
There is work: the balloon went up at the day job, and now I have three times as many people to oversee as before. I really need to finish the ceiling in my office (those of you who’ve assisted, my thanks: it is now just under two-thirds complete. In May—or was it June?—it was one third less than it is now); winter, after all, is coming, and unceiled eaves are drafty. Having in a rash moment submitted a manuscript to a magazine for their consideration, I now feel a nagging itch to do so again; the story that presented itself as next in the queue, however, though clearly outlined on paper, refuses to budge past the opening of the second scene, such as it is. And the Spouse, in a bid to finish her current chapter by the end of October, hell or high water, has drafted me as a jackleg flat colorist, which is pleasantly tedious work, but hard on the carpal tunnel. (Basically, I’m doing stage 3 and a little of stage 4 on a couple of pages.)
So, um. Yeah. The blog-thing. You heard Derrida died, I bet? Yeah. And Superman, right?
Hey, how ’bout that election?
(Oh, don’t feel too badly. There’s emails going back weeks I need to answer, and let’s not even look at the phone calls to be returned, shall we?)
Where were they then?
16 September 1968: American League President Joe Cronin fired umpires Al Salerno and Bill Valentine for trying to start an umpires’ union. Also, the Detroit Tigers whupped the Yankees 9 to 1 at Tiger Stadium. The Beatles, or at least Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, were over at Abbey Road recording “I Will.” The Amtrac Platoon in Vietnam completed Operation “Lancaster II” and began Operation “Scotland Trousdale North.” Orlando Bosch fired a bazooka on a Polish ship in Miami, and is also connected with a bomb blast on the Satrustegui in Puerto Rico; Miami later proclaimed an Orlando Bosch Day. Richard Nixon said “Sock it to me!” on Laugh-In, thereby securing his victory over Hubert Humphrey. Over on CBS, the last episode of The Andy Griffith Show was airing. And the British Royal Mail eliminated the separate rate category for inland postcards, creating a two-tiered system of first- and second-class mail. Confusion reigned, briefly.
Also, I was born. (Thanks, Mom! —I’d link to you, too, Dad, but you don’t have a web presence, and let’s face it: Mom did most of the heavy lifting.)
—16 September is also the birthdate of General Motors, Ed Begley, Jr., and England’s Henry V.
Hearts & minds,
or, The Man in Black.
I spent the bitter month of February, 1992, dressed entirely in black and canvassing door-to-door for MassPIRG. I was dressing entirely in black because I was finally starting to get over having been crushingly dumped the summer before: the sort of break-up where you find yourself on your figurative knees saying something like I love you so much that if you need me to leave I will. —Later, I found a cheery Mexican restaurant and drank too much cheap beer and staggered home singing Waterboys songs at the top of my lungs. I swore off love earnestly and loudly to whomever would listen. Now I was dressing entirely in black. How else was I to reclaim my dignity?
And I was canvassing door-to-door for MassPIRG because I hadn’t had a job in half a year. I was living in a two-bedroom apartment under a cliff in the middle of western Massachusetts nowhere with three close friends (we got up to six total for a bit there), spending entirely too much time hanging out at the UMass Science Fiction Society’s library cum offices—this despite the fact that I was in no wise a student. For a while there, I was trying to perfect my Florentine fencing with a couple lengths of PVC pipe wrapped in foam insulation and duct tape; when I went home for the holidays, I took my brother to the plumbing supply shop so we could make a pair of fresh swords and hack away at each other in the backyard. I have no idea what my parents thought of the whole situation. I spent the rest of that dour vacation hacking away on an old typewriter at a story that still hasn’t gone anywhere, patiently ignoring the doubtlessly good advice they were trying to drill through my skull.
One day after I got back I was musing aloud in the USFS library about jobs and money and the getting thereof. Someone (and I can’t recall who, but I don’t think it was the skinny guy who said he was ex-Special Forces and that we shouldn’t wake him unexpectedly if he dozed off, since he couldn’t be held responsible for what his trained reflexes would do) told me about this guy that this guy he knew knew, who could hook me up with a Situation: I’d get a car key and a piece of paper with two addresses on it in the mail. I’d then go to the first address, somewhere in Greenfield, or Northampton, say, and I’d use the key to open the door of the car I’d find parked there. I’d drive it (scrupulously under the speed limit) to the second address, in an outer borough of New York City, say, where I’d park it, take a manila envelope out of the glove compartment, put the key in its place, lock the doors, and walk away, not looking back. There’d be a sheaf of grubby bills in that envelope: enough for dinner in a restaurant and a night in a crappy hotel before training back up to Massachusetts for another work-free month or so. Until the next car key arrived in the mail. Und so weiter.
Somebody else (and I’m pretty sure it was the cute girl who was into filmmaking and pot, which is how I later came to realize that pot does absolutely nothing for me—nor her, neither, but that’s another story) told me about MassPIRG. You know: the bottle bill? Putting the people back into politics? Ralph Nader’s baby?
I ended up at MassPIRG. They were renting a room up on the second floor of an old open-court motel that had been refitted as a strip-mall, there above the pawn shop where I’d already sold my bass guitar to make rent (no great loss; I’d never made it past Peter Gunn), and they were looking for door-to-door canvassers (they’re always looking for door-to-door canvassers), so I signed up. I had a pulse, so I had a provisional job: canvassers had a couple days out on the sidewalks to make the cut. The PIRG wanted a return on their investment, you know? And I made the cut, so I had a job, my first in six months.
Which I promptly muffed.
I’d like to think when you tot it all up that I raised more money than I cost in wages, though I was goose-egging at an alarming rate toward the end, there. (So maybe if you added in overhead..?) And much as it’s easy to laugh nowadays at the follies of lovelorn drop-out me kicking my way through ice-crusted snowdrifts from one suburban Springfield door to the next in my black boots and black jeans and black turtleneck and my long black coat, it doesn’t change the fact that at the time it all hurt in some deep and ineluctable way that made knocking on strangers’ doors and telling them about such eminently worthy causes as the Reduce Reuse Recycle and Polluter Pays initiatives, asking if such public service weren’t worth twenty, forty, seventy-five bucks, all much harder than it had to be.
And there were those annoying get-to-know-you team-building goal-congruencing exercises! Oy. We had to play them every day before hitting the streets for some godawful reason (then, turnover was high): “If you could be any color, which would it be, and why?” “What’s the best thing that happened to you this week?” “What do you see yourself doing five years from now?” —Gah. I turned in my clipboard after four or five weeks and went back to sulking, thankyouverymuch.
But not before the New Hampshire primaries.
In 1992, Ralph Nader put himself up as a write-in candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the New Hampshire primaries—to make some noise, test the waters, provide an alternative, scare up a soapbox, shake things up. Nobody was thrilled with front-runner Tsongas, but none of the other Democrats seemed ready to call for the all-out revolution needed to undo the 12-year Reagan-Bush interregnum. We wanted fire; we wanted bellies; we wanted motherfuckers up against the wall. We got genteel bupkes. —Hell, Barry put himself up as a write-in from over the border in his UMass Daily Collegian comic strip and got, like, a dozen votes. Discontent was in the air. (Then again, maybe not: Mickey Mouse never actively campaigns and he regularly gets written in, so what do I know?)
So, on that fateful day, when it came time for the get-to-know-you stuff before we got in the car and drove to Springfield to hit the sidewalks (which time, it should be noted, we didn’t get paid for), whoever-it-was who was in charge of congruencing our goals eschewed the usual Barbara Walters group interview for a rousing Nader sales pitch: he’s the guy who invented PIRGs! He saved us from Detroit! He’s running a campaign against corporate interests, for the people of this country, and he needs volunteers! We were asked to sign up for a slot on the bus to go up to New Hampshire and knock on more doors to help get the word out.
Well. I didn’t sign up for a slot on the bus. And I was miffed when he dropped out of the race after posting disappointing returns in New Hampshire. But when the Massachusetts primary rolled around, I wrote him in. And by early November, it was clear Clinton was going to hammer Bush for Massachusetts’ electoral votes, and Clinton was a slick-talking centrist who damn skippy wasn’t going to be putting anybody up against any walls. So I had no qualms about writing in Nader for president again.
(Of course I voted for Nader! I was a whiny pampered guiltily liberal ivory-towered at-loose-ends young white man! Weren’t you paying attention?)
Words—
I only ever really knew him through his words, but they were good ones: they were funny, they went on both wisely and too well about things like comics and Buffy, they stood up for small things; they suffered no fools gladly, but he’d occasionally let ’em take a fool around the block and back, and if sometimes they got outraged, it’s only because he was paying attention. He paid a lot of attention; you were going to learn something whenever you let him have his say, and there’s a lot of things in this world both little and big that are the better for it.
A moment of silence, please, for Aaron Hawkins.
—And then start making more noise than ever. He was the Uppity Negro, after all.
The mood I’m in—
He shrugged gracefully, rolling his beard between two fingers. “I’ve had a local reputation for a long time as a sort of knowledgeable nut. People invite me to their history classes, and I give them demonstrations and talk about extinct attitudes. I talk about chivalry, honor, prouesse, and playing by the rules, and I watch their skins crawl.”
Farrell was startled to feel his own skin stir with the words. Hamid said easily, “Well, you make them real edgy, John. This is Avicenna, they just like theoretical violence, rebels in Paraguay blowing up bad folks they don’t know. They like the Middle Ages the same way, with the uncool stuff left out. But you scare them, you’re like a pterodactyl flapping around the classroom, screaming and shitting. Too real.” The round eyes seemed to flick without closing, as parrot’s eyes do.
“A dinosaur. You think so?” John Erne laughed—a rattle of the nostrils, no more. “This is my time.” He leaned forward and patted Farrell’s knee hard. “This is the time of weapons. It isn’t so much the fact that everyone has a gun—everyone wants to be one. People want to turn themselves into guns, knives, plastic bombs, big dogs. This is the time when ten new karate studios open every day, when they teach you Kung Fu in the third grade, and Whistler’s mother has a black belt in aikido. I know one fellow on a little side street who’s making a fortune with savate, that French kick-boxing.” Farrell watched the combat master’s face, still trying to determine how old he was. He appeared most youthful when he moved or spoke, oldest when he smiled.
“The myriad arts of self-defense,” John Erne said. “They’re all just in it because of the muggers, you understand, or the police, or the Zen of it all. But no new weapon ever goes unused for long. Pretty soon the streets will be charged with people, millions of them, all loaded and cocked and frantically waiting for somebody to pull their trigger. And one man will do it—bump into another man or look at him sideways and set it all off.” He opened one hand and blew across his palm as if he were scattering dandelion fluff. “The air will be so full of killer reflexes and ancient disabling techniques there’ll be a blue haze over everything. You won’t hear a single sound, except the entire population of the United States chopping at one another with the edges of their hands.”
Farrell asked quietly, “Where does that leave chivalry?”
—Folk of the Air, Peter S. Beagle
I don’t know; I don’t know. It’s September, and last week the weather slowly began to turn with a great creak into aumumn. It’ll yet flutter into summery heat now and again, but we’re sleeping under heavy blankets now, and we dress in layers, and I really should be losing this urge to grab half the country by the collar and scream myself hoarse about how mind-bogglingly stupid they are, how blind, how irresponsible.
A blue haze over everything, of invective and two-minute hate.
(Don’t mistake this as a plea for reason and moderation. Can’t we all just get along? Be decent, to one another? —Some of us sure as fuck can’t, but there’s not much we can do about that without persuasion, and it’s hard to persuade somebody when you’re screaming in their face.)
It’s been a week. Alex Lencicki can tell you. He was there, and I wasn’t, and while maybe now that the freak show has packed up its narrow tents there’s maybe something of a catharsis, still, like the summer breaking, it isn’t enough.
And I don’t know now that there ever will be.
I’m working on it.
I’ve been sick. (Stupid canned con air.) It’s at about 4600 words. Maybe another 1000 to dig my way out of it, and then the links, and the photos. (Christ, that’s a lot of theoretical bloviating. Maybe I’d better pull out the red pen—) It was going to go up last night. It might go up tomorrow. But I have to work tomorrow. And Sunday. We’ll see.
So Selina Kyle actually ran for mayor of New York City? What the fuck was up with that?
Sorry. Anyway: Bill and Vera and Erika and Clio and Anne and Patrick and Lori were all on the scene in one way or another, so you can go spoil yourself there. I might yet beat the titans of con reporting, though, so there’s that. —But they’ll have better pics.
One last thing: I just re-read Whedon’s original script for Alien: Resurrection, and was startled and amused this time to notice how much Firefly is in there. It’s a stretch to say that Firefly redeems his famously scuttled Alien script, the way Buffy redeemed Buffy, but it’s not that much of a stretch. Certainly, it’s a more intriguing lateral comparison than City of Lost Children.
We done? For now.
And so we return and begin again.
Oh, there’s a lot to go through, like the creepy coolth of dessicated, plastinated corpses when arranged with surgical precision by a gentle German huckster, and what it’s like to crack an egg into a bubbling hot pot of soon tofu, and then there was the Con, but I want to just take a moment here and now to register my disbelief at something we saw on the drive back from San Diego to LA, and it wasn’t the $2.25 a gallon we were paying for regular unleaded. I get out of the car to stretch my legs and what I hear is somebody telling me to call now, because operators are standing by. It was the gas pump. There was a little screen on the gas pump over the screen you use when you’re paying for gas with a credit card. It was a television screen. It was playing commercials to a steady stream of momentarily captive audiences.
And then came the Fox News update.
We have no shame. None whatsoever.
Now that we’re all enthused.
Yeah, so, the Spouse and I are off to Comic-Con, where we’ll be crammed into an exhibit hall a third of a mile long with tens of thousands of speculators and cosplayers and the occasional cartoonist. And you shouldn’t take my grousing too seriously: fun will be had, of a serious and determined sort, and I don’t doubt that photographic evidence will surface after the fact that makes or breaks more than one reputation.
We will also talk comics, I imagine. At least once.
If you’re in the neighborhood, drop by: I’ll be spending at least some of my time at Tranquility Base, where Jenn’s hooked up with Scott McCloud, Patrick Farley, Daniel Merlin Godbrey, and Tracy White. That’s Booth #1230, across from the Image Comics pavilion, which will include a booth for Flight. Plus I’m sure at least a third of the Pants Press will be in the vicinity at any one time. Should be a blast.
I’ll leave you with a pointer to the latest review of Jenn’s Dicebox, and contrary to Kevin’s snark, I’ve got no nits to pick. (Where on earth did I get this reputation for persnicketiness?) —Anyone who realizes an opinion formed in the middle of a work-in-progress will doubtless be changed by later readings of later material is A-OK in my book. (And anyway, us critics ought to stick together.)
Avast.
Just a quick note, in case y’all don’t pay much attention to the “Commentations” box in yon left sidebar: The Poet, one of the deejays for The Crystal Ship pirate radio station (1982 – 1984), has posted a neat little oral history of their piracy as a comment to an old post on Portland’s own Subterradio, and pirate (harrumph: “micropower”) radio in general. Check it out.
So here’s another one up for the Crystal Ship, and the PRA, and Free Radio Berkeley and Subterradio, and Liberation Radio, Radio Free Radio, the Voice of Laryngitis, the Crooked Man, WGHP (With God’s Help, Peace) and the Voice of the Purple Pumpkin, Secret Mountain Laboratory, the Voice of Voyager, Radio Ganymede, the Voice of FUBAR (Federation of Unlicensed Broadcasters on AM Radio), and WUMS (We’re Unknown Mysterious Station, perhaps the longest-lived pirate ever, who broadcast from 1925 – 1948, and whose equipment, upon retiring, was requested by both the Ohio Historical Society and the Smithsonian).
Some context.
Oh, hey: if you’re swinging by from the Willamette Week story, and you’re wondering about the tersely cryptic excerpt, well, here; and here’s the reason why my desk is groaning today:
He was very afraid, very alone. He had the thinnest arms I had ever seen. His whole body trembled. His wrists were so thin we couldn’t put handcuffs on him. As I saw him for the first time and led him to the interrogation, I felt sorry. The interrogation specialists threw water over him and put him into a car, drove him around through the extremely cold night. Afterwards, they covered him with mud and showed him to his imprisoned father, on whom they’d tried other interrogation methods.
They hadn’t been able to get him to speak, though. The interrogation specialists told me that after the father saw his son in this condition, his heart was broken, he started crying, and he promised to tell them anything they wanted.
—Sgt. Samuel Provance, 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion
Of course, I don’t know why I’m so angry today. We’ve known we were capable of this particular damnation for over a year now.
(This is, indeed, more of a literary blog than anything else, I suppose. But what passes for politics these days has a nasty habit of getting in the way.)
But what I really want to do is direct.
I’d begin with a quote from the Diller Diaries, but I’ve long since lost my fanfold printouts, and nobody, but nobody, has it online anywhere. Shame on us; shame on us all. —I’d begin with an apology for the self-indulgent nature of this post—I’m going to be writing about (my) writing, after all (technical term: whingeing)—but it’s in the nature of blogs to be self-indulgent. If you gaze for long into a navel, the navel gazes also into you, yes yes, but meta-apology’s getting a tad ridiculous, don’t you think?
So all I have left is to, well, begin.
I mean, I was going to work on it last night. Settle in. Made another circuit of the Meier & Frank to fix some details in my head: those canister lights are only on the one particular floor, so the first image I’d had in mind as a conversational break—looking down the escalator at a slice of the chaos of the make-up counters on the first floor—wouldn’t work. The mannequins on the landing were as creepy as I’d remembered, but not in the way I’d remembered, and I’m still not necessarily happy with the creep: I need the opening image, I need the break in the rhythm, but do I need the note this particular image injects right up front, the hollow plastic eyesockets turned half-assedly into eyes with a few translucent strokes of brown watercolor to suggest lids and lashes? —Was pleased to note the specific style of dress I’d had in mind was actually available for sale; we’ll ignore the fact that it’s currently June, the scene in question is set in the middle of September, and I have no idea how seasonally sensitive this sort of designer dress is. For whatever reason, I got fixated on T-shirts: yes, they’re a sort of Dadaist Greek chorus, but I was suddenly hung up on the idea that the mannequins ought to wear a couple of “real,” “actual” T-shirts. Jotted down slogans seen here and there throughout the Misses section: “I’m a Leo! It’s all about me!” “Is it chicken or is it tuna?” “Artificial Respiration Training! (Cute boys only, please!)” “The center of attention.” Made note of a weird hall display in the landing of the closed-off floor: a glass case with a couple of fake topiaried shrubs inside, green flocking crumbling from old brown wicker frames, and lots of plaster? plastic? statues inside, including a nauseating little Cottingley fairy, all white butterfly wings and adorable turn-of-the-last-century Sunday dress, perched atop a plastic-plaster plinth, beneath which: a whole make-way-for-ducklings garden statuary set. Perfect! For what, though? They aren’t going up to housewares. There’s no reason for them to stop and stare at this halfway house. Tuck it away, for later, I suppose, next to the poisonous idea of otherkin, charitable satire thereof.
Home I hie myself, then. The laptop’s set up and plugged in. The notebook’s fished out of my bag and propped up on the corner of the desk. But there’s blogs to check, and the news; a couple of MP3s to download, and there’s that thing about Brokeback Mountain, that line about the sheep is too priceless to let slip, and I’d wanted to do something with the Mayday mystery, right? So sketch the one in quickly, fire up Photoshop for the other, but here’s Jenn, home from work, and then Bill, our current houseguest; time to heat up some dinner, and pour some wine, and we’re working our way through the Northern Exposure DVD, so there’s forty-five minutes or so while we’re eating and cleaning up, and then it’s back to the computer, but I have to finish massaging that 20 January ad and tweak the .gif and after I post it there’s the usual problem that the .blogbody CSS for hyperlinking supercedes the class override written directly into the a tag for no reason at all I can discern, which means the images have the distracting hyperlink line under them, so I see what I can do to fix that, and then we have to water the cat (old, hyperthyroid, kidney troubles, subcutaneous fluids) and feed the both of them and keep the one out of the other’s medicated bowl, and then, well, there’s more blogs to check up on, and news to read, and wow, is that the time?
(The whole time the notebook’s there on the corner of the desk, and I’m not looking at it, not at all, nossir.)
Half-past midnight I finally pack it in. I passed the first bit, there on the escalator. Got to the moment that Orlando kicks the door open and stopped it dead there in the middle of a sentence: “Orlando kicks” —Somebody once said, always leave off in the middle of a sentence. That way, you have somewhere to pick up right away when you get back to it. It doesn’t work any better than any other nostrum, but hey. Any snake-oil in a storm. (Somebody also once said, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns. Not that they have guns. Aheh.) I scrapped the found T-shirt slogans. Went with a Virgo variant on the Leo and a picture of Einstein with his Meyer-Briggs profile scribbled underneath it. Had to spend some time checking which is the most popular profile ascribed to Einstein, though. Of course.
Two-hundred twenty words, and that’s being generous.
(Hey, says the magpie. What about a paralitticism on Northern Exposure and utopia and reality TV? Arcadia, New Jerusalem, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World—)
Every day for years, Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 AM to 8:30 AM, with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eighty-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years.
—Joan Acocella, “Blocked“
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.
—Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography
The rules are simple: somebody calls you out, or you call somebody out. You pick a referee and a time and you each come up with a list of three words. The referee adds three more. When the appointed time arrives, you receive the total list of nine words. You have three hours to write a story using all nine. Go!
I managed six thousand words in three hours. Five hundred reasonably coherent words every quarter of an hour; as a genre exercise, it didn’t suck. And I was a wreck. Heart-racing, hands-shaking, couldn’t-shut-up bundle of neurotic energy. And even if the words were reasonably coherent and ended up altogether as something not worse than their totted-up sum, they were unmediated: a gormless rush of the me-est me, which usually ends up sounding like a Harlan Ellison huckster, hot under the collar—a sarcastic salesman unreeling the anecdote that’s supposed to help him close. (When I cool it off, it veers into a weird, dim echo of William Vollmann’s jiu-jitsued snark, which I like better, but, and anyway find much harder to hit.) (And maybe that’s why I impose so many rules, my own private Dogme, as if I could oulipo myself into somebody else.)
I can see how Trollope’s rate is possible. I just can’t imagine making a regular daily go of it.
(Besides, didn’t he write highfalutin’ fluff?)
(And? quoth the magpie. Isn’t that all you’re after?)
So three hundred words an hour, nine hundred words a day: this is much more conceivable. Isn’t it? It’s a serial, after all: a net serial. Eminently disposable. The words are there to get you from Point A to Point B and leave you panting for Point C to come; if they shine themselves along the way, that’s all well and good, but no agonizing allowed, bucko! Well-turned phrases be damned! You have a job to do, one you’ve done before, so suck it up and go. Point A: Point B. Begin.
(Those of you familiar with the art/craft dichotomy as, for instance, taken down by Delany in the aforementioned “Politics of Paraliterary Yadda-yadda” should start laughing now. It won’t make me feel any better about not having posted in two months—well, really, six months, and a dead computer’s good for only so much. —But I will grin sheepishly, I suppose, yeah yeah, and that’s better than nothing.)
The problem is that Point A and that Point B. Point A is usually not where you thought it was, and Point B ends up something else entirely, which can mess you up if you were dropping hints about Point C last time and now it isn’t. The words aren’t just the vehicle, after all: they’re journey and destination, too, and even if I see Point B in my head (a lightning flash: a pose, a line of dialogue, an emotional sense I feel in my bones just so—I close my eyes, I can taste it) I don’t have any idea what it really is until I write it down. Any critic approaching any work is one of several blind people trying to describe an elephant; a writer with a work in progress is one blind person, alone, with some blueprints for an elephant lot. They really ought to think twice before opening their yaps. (Violence: violence, and power, in the context of walking up to the groaning boards of fantasy’s eternal wedding feast, still laden with the cold meats from Tolkien’s funeral, and cheekily joining everyone else who’s trying to send the whole thing smashing to the ground just to hear what noise all that crockery will make, with little more than a crappy net serial, ha. Those of you familiar with the politics of genre ghettoization and the attendant shame and self-loathing and projection may now commence to chuckling heartily, ha ha. —But! Also: genderfuck, romance the way we wanted it done back in the day, those moments in pop songs when the bass and all of the drums except maybe a handclap suddenly drop out of the bridge leaving you hanging from a slender aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back, and the occasional sword fight.)
So I don’t necessarily know what any given Point B is, but I see those flashes of them, off in the distance: having gotten to this Point B, or that, is the entire point of starting off from A, after all. But you write and you write and you stop and you take a look at where you are, and it’s an utterly different Point B; the Point B you wanted is way over there, and here you are over here, except that suggests it’s the plot that’s changed, and it isn’t: those moments that make up the flash all depend on each other, and what went before, and if the words it takes to limn the image end up at odds with the words that need to be said, if what you’ve got onscreen when your hour’s up and the three hundred words have been laid in place don’t conjure what you felt in your bones, what you can still almost feel, not so strong, an echo overlaid by these horribly precise words all a quarter-turn off— I don’t have any idea what it really is until I write it down, but if the words end up betraying what I wanted it to be—? Where do I go? What do I do?
(Rewrite. Revise. —Oh, shut up. You’re missing the point.)
“I don’t like writing, I like having written.” Ha! I don’t like having written, either, most days. I like what I would have written, if. I like what I’m going to write.
Any day now.
Two thousand words! There. See?
Piece of cake.
So all I have left—
Point; counterpoint.
So we just got back from a birthday dinner and a viewing of Shrek 2 which, better than the first, so, good humor and bonhomie all around, even if Bill’s snarking off about how it went over his head, and I’m doing the usual before-bed sweep of email and referral logs and that sort of thing, and it seems Bill Scher, who’s been slaking parched throats over at the Liberal Oasis for a good long while now, said something nice about me on the Majority Report, putting me in the rather heady (if lower-cased) company of uggabugga (diagrammatist extraordinaire) and skippy (the bush kangaroo). And so now I’m looking around at the last post a couple of days ago about a comics spat and at the litter of revolver bits lying about still to be put together and wondering about the whole poltical–non-political–apolitical blogging thing, and worrying whether the personal is political enough, but then I remember I meant to tease Jim Henley (with good humor, and bonhomie) for asserting that dance or the novel can be defined in some necessary and sufficient manner that poetry cannot, and of course attempting to define a political blog or a non-political blog or an apolitical blog is just as much a mug’s game as defining poetry, or the novel, or dance, or comics. It is what it is: Damon Knight’s definition works for everything, see. Not just science fiction.
So I’ll point you to an entry by Elkins, instead, since she’s much better at this sort of thing than I am, and it’s off to bed with me. (Though I do wonder: which definition of the novel did Jim have in mind? My own favorite, whose provenance escapes me: “A piece of writing, of a certain length, that has something wrong with it.”)
Something I didn’t necessarily need to know:
When a hand-crafted, all-natural vanilla marshmallow is dunked in a glass of Rosemont Estate’s 2002 shiraz, the aftertaste—once you’re past the initial burst of something foully rot-sweet, like a failed grappa—is an astonishing simulacrum of IHOP’s blueberry syrup.
Two pictures.
Sure, everybody knows that the it-couple in the foreground is curator extraordinaire Lori Matsumoto and evil robotics genius John Wiseman. But who’s that dapper gent in seersucker strolling through the background of Patrick Farley’s latest comics infostrip for Wired?
And this, by the way, is what shoes look like at a Mountain Goats concert when you’re trying to figure out how to deal with the flash and you hit that button on the upper-left side while holding the camera in your lap. —The green Fluevogs would be Sara Ryan; and I would never wear those brown Nunn Bushes with seersucker.
Zero to sixty and climbing.
I was swaying a little, because Sara had bought me one more Manhattan, which means I owe her a drink. It was noisy, so I leaned in a little where he was squatting on the stage. “Seven days ago,” I said. “I hadn’t heard a goddamn thing. My friend over there,” she’s buying a T-shirt from Peter, and I can’t see her in the crowd, and he wouldn’t know her from Eve, but I gesture over that way anyway, “she says, you have to hear this stuff. So I downloaded a couple of songs, you know?” He’d told the guy ahead of me, who’d borrowed my pen so he could sign the CD, that it was twelve bucks, so I handed him two fives and two ones. “And here I am.” He didn’t even bother to count it. Just stuck the money in a pocket somewhere and handed me a CD. “Hey,” he said. “That really means a fuck of a lot to me.”
Which isn’t true. The first Mountain Goats song I scraped off of Limewire was a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy,” back in April. Which—and it’s a mighty fine song, don’t get me wrong, and Neutral Milk Hotel is one of those bands on my really-ought-to-look-into-them-soon list, and you can hear the quavering kick in his yelp and you can almost see him hunched over the guitar, yes, but—it’s not, perhaps, the most representative sample.
I was scraping Mountain Goats off of Limewire at the behest of Sara and Victoria and Johnzo, who’ve all done right by me so far. And if that first song didn’t move me much, well, the dark matter of P2P is shot through with Goats: there’s 450-some-odd titles in the repertoire, at this point, I think: all those songs stuffed directly onto cassette tapes through a boombox, all those prolific tiny-label releases. Plus all the bootlegged live versions, and all those rabid fans, spreading the gospel. So somewhere at the beginning of May I went back for more, and found “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and “Cubs in Five” and I never looked back. —And I know there’s no zealot like a recent convert and I know I’m foolish with having just fallen in love but can I tell you anyway? Listen. Just listen to the angry joy. Listen to the bitter glee. Listen to all these people who know they are about to see something so big that you can’t call it terrible and you can’t call it wonderful, and listen as they try to put it back together again afterwards. He is apocalyptic in the best possible sense of the word, and that’s why when you’re in the same room with him and he’s singing you lift your hands into the air. He immanentizes like a sonofabitch.
So it hadn’t been seven days. So I was lying. But it felt right at the time, and I’d do it again, in a heartbeat.
