September 2008 Archives

I'm in Austin, Texas this week, with the same view I had when I was here last year, only four floors lower. The better views are on the other side of the hotel, looking along Congress towards the capital. Also, this year there are no labels on the window cautioning me to leave them closed lest the room fill with a plague of crickets. I'll decide that's a good thing.

This trip is non-writing related, much as I would wish it otherwise. Or, more precisely: it's non-fun writing related. There are a few writers conferences here, including the Heart of Film screenwriters conference associated with the Austin Film Festival. But that's in a couple of weeks, so in between sessions about non fun writing I've stopped off in my room to post this, turn the television on, and listen to Andrew Zimmern talk about Bolivian chunky penis soup. If I was in a hotel in Montana, and inspired by Mr. Zimmern, I could step out and score myself something somewhat related to that dish.

But I'm not, so I don't have to fight off that particular...temptation.

From his essay, Those Who Write, Teach in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine:

Young writers think all they need is time, but give them that time and watch them implode. After all, there's something basically insane about sitting at a desk and talking to yourself all day, and there's a reason that writers are second only to medical students in instances of hypochondria. In isolation, our minds turn on us pretty quickly. I have two writer friends, successful novelists who could afford not to teach, who insist that rather than detract from their writing, their lives as professors are what allow them to write, and that given more free time, they would crumble. The job provides a safety net above the abyss of facing the difficulty of creating every day, making an irrational thing feel more rational.

Yet no matter how much support you have, how many schedules you make or how many books you've written before, there remains the basic irrationality of the task: you are sitting by yourself trying to make something out of nothing, and you rarely know where you're going next. Creating your own world is an invitation to solipsism, if not narcissism, and as well as being alone when we work, we are left, for the most part, to judge by ourselves if we have succeeded or failed in our tasks. My father succinctly summarized his feelings about my choice to dedicate my 20s to writing fiction. "You're not living in the real world," he said. I reacted with a young man's defensiveness, but in retrospect his assessment seems less critical than a matter of fact.

Testify! I have unfortunately found that I can't evade madness by avoiding the insanity of the writing desk. So it seems that my choice is between greater and lesser degrees of irrationality, which is roughly akin to choosing whether I'm going to be eaten alive or sucked into a whirlpool.

...this.

Spencer Dew was gracious enough to grant me permission to reprint this piece from his new collection, Songs of Insurgency. I chose it because of its blog-length brevity and because, for me, it achieves what Edgar Allen Poe called "unity of effect." That sort of thing is subjective, of course. You can read my brief review of the entire collection after the jump.

The Sea Beneath
By Spencer Dew

An engine gives out above what were once the oceans of Kansas, what once swarmed with plesiosaurs and serpentine proto-alligators, what were once thick with fish the size of trailer homes, seas of several million giant teeth.

You try to explain all this to the stewardess, but you are, to begin with, a little drunk, plus the scene has its own quality of chaos. You are up high, and the seatbelt, she reminds you, is more than a pure formality.

Smoke occludes the starboard side. It is like a storm rolling through you, the whole tube of the airplane threatening to burst, to snap and split and spill you all out over the dry flatland, the extinct sea bottom, over all that space once crawling with trilobites, their sectioned armor rippling, all that empty distance once shimmering with rainbow-tone, warm-water coral.

The passengers groan and weep, pray, vomit into waxed paper bags. Someone faints and someone else starts screaming, something rather simplistically phrased, an expression of desire not to die.

Say you were an expert on ancient worms and a few other varieties of colonial organisms that once clustered around thermal vents along the cracks in the planet's crust, underwater, millennia ago. This was your identity, to a large degree, studying the tracks and tunnels, mostly microscopic, in stone, stone that was, in turn, once, long ago, near cracks in the ocean crust, fathoms deep. Say this was you, in a flipbook of instant retrospection, a slideshow of memories.

Here you are, examining fossilized colonies from former thermal pockets, rock which, then, lived, thriving and competing, breeding and feeding, growing, dying, and being devoured...

Now here you are, again, still now, yourself, in one such similar tunnel, spiraling in an uneasy slope of descent, at too fast a speed, toward Kansas, far below...

You try to tell the stewardess that you just can't tell if it's ironic or not, but something has hit her on the back of the head and she flops down, all bones and connective tissue.

Something smells like urine, very close.

You think about time, its mechanics, how it moves, how instants accumulate. Under pressure, they turn to something solid, compacted and reduced, an idea. Or, in the same way, they crush to powder, erasing under their own weight.

Some moments you do not remember your name, and it makes no difference. The screaming fades out, fades back in again.

Always, the ground of Kansas has waited.

Maybe you think like this, backward, to long before the draining, before the dry times, before the lumbering land beasts or men in hunting packs, before the native rhinoceros or the double-wide prefab homes, before the strip malls and titty bars and pickup trucks or sheriff's department prowl cars that pause and pull over on the gravel shoulder of an industrial access road to look up in wonder at what must be an angel, streaking, white-hot and radiant, across the sky, to arrow into the earth.

Songs of Insurgency [Amazon]
Vagabond Press, 2008
Find Spencer Dew online at www.spencerdew.com.

The Sea Beneath first appeared in thieves jargon.


Read my review...

Well, it was exactly like that.

Only without the gin.

Or tonic.

And I was in Tunisia.

Just received a brief note from Dash, editor of Expanded Horizons, acknowledging receipt of The Test. So much of this business is reduced to form letters of rejection, with a lot time spent waiting and wondering about the status of this submission or that, so it's nice to get an update. It's courtesy. That's how to run things, I think...if, god forbid, I should ever end up in some editorial capacity, I'd want to do the same.

Speaking of nice things, Anne over at Ample Sanity has been directing a fair chunk of traffic my way, so do give her a gander. And if she doesn't like geese, have a look at her site.

Now: I shall retire to the water closet and pummel my torso and thighs with a silver-trimmed tortoiseshell hairbrush, to teach myself to avoid such atrocious not-puns.

In a recent interview with Scott Timberg, Neal Stephenson had this to say about his high-concept novels:

There are a lot of ideas that bang around. They're kind of like seeds which fall on barren ground.... On a good day, I can take one of these ideas and see how it fits in with some characters and a story. And then I've got something. If that's not there, then it's all a complete waste of time.

Zing! Choirs of affirmative angels and such, the kind that are really sucking up to the Almighty.

That sort of thing is endemic in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/SpecFic corner of the universe, particularly among folks who are just starting out. To wit: I've built a whole future society based on hacking and I've created this alternative tribal culture that lives underground in the old subway systems and there's this whole new way of moving information around and I've created maps of the subway warrens and designed logos that can go on tee-shirts!

Cool! What's it about?

It's about this guy who lives in this future society that's based on hacking who's part of this alternative tribal culture that lives underground in the old subway systems and he knows all about this whole new way of moving information around and he's got maps of the subway warrens and wears goggles and this cool leather trench coat with this logo on the back that can go on tee-shirts!

Uh-huh.

I won't belabor the point, because it's obvious and wouldn't even be worth making, except for the fact that it doesn't always manifest itself with the clarity of my straw example. World-building is necessary, but if that's all you've got, then you haven't got much.

Stephen King puts it another way:

Write to entertain. Does this mean you can't write "serious fiction"? It does not. Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, and hundreds of others. But your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around. I repeat: if you want to preach, get a soapbox.

He would say that, wouldn't he? Regardless of the self-justifying tinge, the man's got a point, and it's the same one that Stephenson made: neat ideas aren't enough.

Where it gets tricky and annoying is when you think you've avoided the Neat Idea Trap. You've focused on characters and their interactions, and they move through the the world you've created like you or I move through ours--that is, without focusing on every little detail--and they've got arcs to get through, and then pow! You suddenly realize that your Neat Idea isn't your world, it's the people in it. Your characters are vehicles for your ideas, rather than people in their own right. They exist to express your thematic leanings, rather than support a story. And then you're stuck with a bunch of hollow people stumbling around banging into each other instead of entertaining the reader. After that it's all Tito's and shotguns and the belated realization that a corner apartment isn't really defensible even if it's on the second floor and has a pretty decent field of fire from the living room window.

Not that I've ever found myself in such a morass of head-pounding dumbfuckery. Not me. Smoooth narrative sailing, yes indeed.

Uh...what?

That's what I get for buying my titles second hand.

But I'm not listening.

The new Underground Voices is up. This month I'm really liking Colin Meldrum's Blank.

Colin, it turns out, is launching A capella Zoo in October, the inaugural issue of which will include a bit by a good friend of mine.

Small world and so forth.

The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that's rare -- for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking -- which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it -- over and over, again and again -- or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old. So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fucking from start to finish... and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls. So maybe there's hope. Or maybe I'm going mad... In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile -- and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely... The Swine are gearing down for a serious workout this time around... So much, then, for The Road -- and for the last possibilities of running amok in Las Vegas... Well, at least, I'll know I was there, neck deep in the madness, before the deal went down, and I got so high and wild that I felt like a two-ton Manta ray jumping all the way across the Bay of Bengal.

Hunter S. Thompson,
The Great Shark Hunt

*No, this is not a theme. It's a coincidence.

...I am apparently made out of type IV gypsum and epoxy resin.

Who knew?

This explains why I've got poor surface hardness but superior detail reproduction, abrasion resistance, and transverse strength.

It also explains the shrinkage, but we'll not get into that just now.

I'm sittin' there, I'm sittin' there, and this guy, this guy with a head fulla crazy sunlight dances up to me and hisses, "I got whatchoo neeed, monsieur!" and I look at him, I look at him with my tired yellow eyes, and I says to him, I says, "Gimme whatchoo got," and he lays the gospel on me, and I'm saved, but then I blow it all in Vegas on hookers and meth.

Sometimes you've got to draw inspiration from your immediate surroundings, dig? Yeah.

So what kind of day have you had?