Recently in Writing Category

So admonished Ipu-wer some 4,200 years ago. Nobody knows much of anything about him, except that at some point he spouted off a bunch of such things, prophecies in the Biblical sense, which means they're not so much about the future as about one fellow standing before Pharaoh and saying nasty things about the past and present governance of Egypt. All cloaked in metaphors about sinking crocodiles, Rivers of blood, grieving nobles, and fumigation via incense. The last two columns of the papyrus--described by the translator as being in a state of "lamentable destruction"--tantalize us with the words, "Once upon a time there was a man who was old and in the presence of his salvation, while his son was still a child, without understanding..."

Actually, that's not very tantalizing at all, but that's all we get. Nothing else is heard from Ipu-wer. I wonder if, in his own time, he was held in the same regard as the tentative prophet in Life of Brian, who prophesied that "At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer, and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock."

"Ipu-wer?" they'd say. "Was that the guy who went on about men sitting in bushes and robbing people, and about how the go-spells and enfold-spells don't work anymore because nowadays any old tosser can say them aloud? Pfah!" Who knows? Maybe all the good material was in missing bits of the papyrus. Maybe all that stuff about not having enough cedar for the mummies was just Ipu-wer warming up, a prophetic throat-clearing before he laid into Pharaoh with raging holy fervor and let everyone know that the gods were really displeased with his corpse-buggery or whatever it was that Middle Kingdom Egyptians found scandalous.

But now all we've got left of him are a few columns of unremarkable cryptic metaphor and stories that defy consecutive translation, barely enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry, and really only noticed at all because some of his scribblings might possibly refer to a small group of wandering Semites whose own collected prophecies and tales later became part of the best-selling book of all time.

I suppose the lesson here, if any, is that if you can't write your own deathless prose, write about somebody else who's bound to be fabulous and important so that you might at least survive as a minor point of interest appended to their fantastically dramatic and splendid life.

Here's to the Ipu-wers of present-day Earth! May you lot of hangers-on choose your subjects with care and diligence, and may the inevitable loss of most of your work be described in a footnote as "lamentable." 

I was going to write another post about arrogance and confidence and so on, but @DanielleLaPorte pointed me towards "How To Be As Confident As This Pig" on Josh Hargarne's blog, and I really don't have anything to add to that, so if you're hankerin' to read about ego and confidence and so on in particular, go there and do that. Meanwhile, I'll be writing here about a different yet tangentially-related thing. But if you go off to check out Josh's thing, this one will still be here. Amazing, what they can do nowadays with pixels and tubes and whatnot.

One of the reasons I took my January hiatus was because I needed to take a break from reading about writing, publishing, agents, contracts, Amazon shitting itself, and all of the other things which are necessary bits of knowledge to have while building a career but peripheral to the creative act of writing itself. I was swamped by everyone else's ideas and in danger of losing sight of my own, so I dropped out of sight. It was a good thing to do, and it feels good to discover I was actually missed (here and elsewhere).

I've never been a focused person--at least, I don't think so, other people in my life have disagreed--mainly because my interests and curiosity are broad. This is generally a good quality to have, but can make it difficult to sit still long enough to, say, write a novel. The rest of my life is full of real-life type things that take up time, so I spent January assessing what my own priorities are and figuring out what I needed to do to finish this book I've started. The first thing I decided to do was to stop listening to how other people write. The second thing I decided to do was cut short my nascent efforts to get involved with online writing communities.

Both of those decisions resulted from the same realization: at this point in my life my time is very limited, and I'd reached the point where I needed to discover my methodology and focus entirely on my work. There's a lot of good advice about writing out there, but I've been reading about writing for almost three decades, and the returns have diminished to the point where--right now--it's not worth it. If I'm going to invest time in reading, I'm going to read fiction, not books about fiction.

Some of the advice that's out there has to do with the benefits of community, and I'm sure that for a great many people such involvement is invaluable. But the thing about communities, particularly those built around writing, is that they take up time. You can't really join up without committing yourself to reading the works in progress of others, and thinking critically about them, and offering your thoughtful and constructive opinions. Not, that is, if you expect others to do the same for your work. Unless you're an asshole, there's got to be giving to accompany the taking. I made the decision to prioritize my creative work over that of other people.

But I still needed feedback and criticism. Useful feedback and criticism. I also needed some expert help in getting over my 25,000 word hump. I've got a drawer full of unfinished projects here, and all of them died around the 25,000 word mark. I don't know why, but clearly there is some barrier that I have heretofore lacked sufficient creative steam to either power over or smash through (I call it a hump, see, but it could be a wall...or maybe a pit of some kind, or an expanse of sticky tar with, like...spikes in it...or something...).

In my current situation, there was really only one way to get regular, focused, and useful criticism without any expectation of reciprocation: hire someone to give it to me.

That was a big leap for me, and I don't regret it. I happened to know someone with over two decades in the business, who lived on my side of the continent, who I clicked with--which is vital; you don't want to work with someone whose criticisms are based on their failure to understand rather than your failure to properly express. She's cheaper per hour than my therapist was, she doesn't blow smoke up my ass, and I'm confident that when the time comes to kick said ass, she'll do so. Best money I've ever spent.

I'm not telling you all this by way of advice, because it'd be ridiculous for me to tell you that what you need to do is hire a development editor.¹ However, I'm confident enough to suggest that the key transferable bit of my little process here is the identification of my priorities, the peculiarities of my unique situation, and--most importantly--the honest assessment of my weaknesses. I know what my strengths are, but those aren't what fucks a man up, now are they? Maybe what works for you, your situation, and your weaknesses is gathering a little local group of aspiring writers together and meeting in a dive bar once a week to get drunk and hack each other to literary bits.

What's important is knowing when you've listened enough, and knowing when it's time to start feeding your own creative beast whatever meat it wants, regardless of what any Expert says.

---

¹Just as it's silly for Warren Ellis to say, "If you don’t have some kind of kit for capturing ideas, even if it’s a 50p reporter’s notebook and a pencil from the local shop for local people, you’re doing it wrong." Lots of folks do that, lots of folks recommend doing that (which keeps Moleskine in business), and it works for them. I've always been of the opinion that if I can't remember an idea that came from my own skull it isn't worth remembering, and as I have a prodigious memory, that's worked pretty well for me. So: not doing it wrong, thanks.

...when an executive editor at Tor Books tells you in no uncertain terms that first-time novelists shouldn't attempt first person narratives, after you've just spent part of the afternoon writing the second chapter of your first novel... which happens to be a first person narrative?

I had asked a question in response to Howard Hendrix's comments about the "polyvocal" nature of novels. I wanted to know how you pull that off with a first person narrative. His response was that there are always other voices in any novel--as opposed to lyric poetry, for example--and that these voices will form its polyvocal nature. I had a follow-up question about how one deals with the fact that even though there are obviously multiple voices, they're all necessarily filtered through one voice in a first person narrative. I wanted to know what to focus on so I could avoid a sort of vocal monotone, which is when Beth Meacham offered tidings of first novel doom, saying that "You've really got to have your chops" to pull such a thing off.

So, I waited until the panel ended, and approached Howard with my follow-up. His more detailed response was that in order to overcome the first person filter effect, your other characters really have to pop. They must be vibrant, distinct, and interesting.

Now, when Shelly said I should press on and turn Walk of the Night People into a longer work, he specifically said it was because "We want to spend more time with these characters." This story is a first person narrative, with (at the moment) four other prominent characters. So I think I may have the character pop I need.

After another panel, I sought out Tad Williams and asked him his opinion. "First novel, first person narrative: do it or don't?"

His response was enlightening. "If you're writing a story that you absolutely love, that you're passionate about, and that's the best way you can get that across, then for Christ's sake write it in the first person." He told me about a first novel for which he had recently written one of his rarely-dispensed blurbs that had a third-person frame at the beginning but was, essentially, a first person narrative. There are all these rules, he said, and people come to conferences looking for tips. But beyond the basic three (try not to write crap, be passionate about your story and your craft, treat people professionally and with respect) any of those rules can be bent or broken as necessary for the telling of the tale. "Now, you may get a publisher who says, 'This is great, but it needs to be in third person.' So argue with them. Make your case. Rewrite a chapter in third person and ask them if they really think it's improved."

So, to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this post, what you do first is seek further information from People Who Know These Things. Then, you weigh their responses against an honest assessment of your own skills. Beth was right: I do need to have my chops to pull this off.

But I need chops to pull anything off. So, essentially, I'm right where I started: seeing whether I've really got what it takes to do this thing.

This is a perfect demonstration of why it is so vital that those of us who are writers spend time with other writers, editors, agents...anyone who has anything to do with the business and the craft. I had one question that required input from four people before I was satisfied with my answer.

What the hell would I have done if was holed up by myself with this vast and terrifying unwritten thing before me?

Given up, I think.

Mmmm....humans. More of them, please.

---

¹Originally posted elsewhere in July of 2007, during Westercon. It's Old Home Week at Writebastard! Also called "Your Humble Narrator is taking a bit of a break, but because he likes you so very much, he will still provide you with content via the magical incantation, CTRL-C....CTRL-V." Some perspectivisin': that "vast and terrifying unwritten thing" is still before me. But I haven't given up, it's not so huge anymore, and I'm not afraid of it. I have not, however, managed to gather a tribe unto me or join one. Hence, Zoetrope. When meatspace fails, go virtual.

Justine Musk has a much more constructive take on the "I don't know what the hell I'm doing" panic I confessed to a couple of days ago:

Becoming a successful writer - and by this I define ‘successful’ as someone who writes publishable fiction, and by this I mean fiction that is skilled and artful enough to create a powerful emotional experience for a reader who is not the writer’s spouse, friend or family member, who doesn’t know or care about the writer at all but would be willing to do something so drastic as to pay money for the privilege of reading her work - is all about writing your way through a succession of big and little failures. There is the failure to sell your work, and the failure to get an agent, but these are capstones: the major reason why a writer fails at either is, ironically, because they haven’t yet failed enough. They haven’t pursued the craft long enough, haven’t written or revised enough, haven’t taken enough chances or gotten enough constructive feedback. They haven’t learned enough.

In short, they haven’t completed enough practice novels. And what is a practice novel but a novel that fails to be good enough to be looked on as anything else?

I've written before about the difference between the goal of writing and the goal of getting published. The latter, it seems to me, is a recipe for compromise and crushing depression. But there's a certain attitude required to make the former work, that I haven't quite managed to adopt yet: I have to be willing to invest a lot of time and effort in a project for its own sake, independent of its eventual fate as a published work or a drawer dweller. The purpose of such a project, then, is what Justine says it is: practice.

While I've managed to avoid publication as the principle motivation for writing a novel-length work, that's a negative definition. I know what's not motivating me, but I haven't really established what is motivating me. Given my glacial progress, it's become clear that the answer, in truth, is "not much." Right now I'm able to look at a shorter work as a learning experience, probably because the irregularity of my output and my nebulous focus makes completing a 1,200 to 13,000 word piece somewhat more realistic and much less threatening.

In the end, this might turn out to be a "you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you run" kind of thing. If I get another half-dozen short pieces published over the course of the next eighteen months and I'm still quaking in my boots at the thought of a 100,000 word marathon, then maybe I'll have a problem.

Until then: breathe. Write. Practice.

Thankfully, I no longer produce much in the way of non-fiction, blog-based or otherwise. Andrew Sullivan reminds me why:

It's not the amount of time that's taken in writing a book that matters, it seems to me. Some masterpieces have been written very quickly. It's the motivation. If your primary motivation is to hit the hot button, to rush a book to market around a newsy meme, then you are unlikely to produce anything that lasts. I miss the days when books were written because an author simply had something to say and took her time to say it well.

My newsy output always rubbed my caveat bone the wrong way.¹ It's easy enough to oversimplify complex issues in a way that will attract a large audience that agrees with you, but I was always revisiting posts after I'd thought of some crushing oversight in my reasoning, and I was never willing to make the rhetorical sacrifices required for continued audience growth. I was, in short, far too neurotic for that sort of thing. My readership peaked a few months after U.S. soldiers hauled Saddam out of his spider hole, and there was a noticeable uptick in my mental quality of life when I finally quit writing about Things That Matter.

Sullivan is responding to Damon Linker's comments about a "new partnership between The Daily Beast and the Perseus Books Group that will publish books on a highly accelerated schedule."

What Beast Books is proposing, and what Klein is promoting, is (in Truman Capote’s words) the reduction of writing to typing. The typing might be clever, and witty, and informed, and politically useful. But in most cases, it will also be hurried and harried, merely echoing or negating the conventional wisdom of the moment, not placing it in a wider context or viewing it from a broader perspective. And that will be a incalculable loss to our culture.

To bring that sentiment over into my world: an onslaught of sparkling vampire- and young wizard-style books² would be, I think, the fiction equivalent of fast-tracking a newsy meme.

---

¹Holy crap that's awful. It's so awful I'm leaving it right where it is. Behold!
²"-style" indicates literary Dairy Drink.

Yes. Purchased with humility and more than a touch of desperation.

Remember when I said that arrogance is sneaky? You don't? You...you aren't hanging on my every word? You didn't read through the entirety of the archives when you first found this site after a Google search for "love to eat them mousies"?

Eh. Can't say I blame you.

There is nothing quite so humbling as the moment when you realize--not suspect, but know--that you've overestimated your own knowledge and perhaps even your abilities. It's much worse when you can peruse your own archives and pick out all the shining nuggets of ignorance.

Ignorance is not stupidity, it's simple lack of knowledge, and it's remediable. But because it's a lack it can be hard to see, and that means that it's easy to go traipsing off into the forest like Bear Grylls when you're actually a Tenderfoot who's liable to throw a can of beans on the fire without putting a hole in it first. Then comes the inevitable surprise, alarm, and legume-scalded face. And the weeping. The gut-wrenching weeping.

I've already had one serious attitude adjustment about this blog, which had to do with my maniacal notion that it was going to chronicle my writing of The Novel in a year. I got over that relatively quickly. I had a few things published online (and got paid for one of them, score one for me). But The Novel was still the thing, and although I was doing quite a bit of head work on it, and some revisions to bring the existing chapters in line with the ever-evolving concept, it just...wasn't...happening.

Then, one day last week, I hit on the reason why. Or rather, it hit me, in the face, with the the explosive, scalding force of a can of fire-burst Bush's: I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

Yeah, go ahead, laugh. One day that'll happen to you. I hope you're not landing the space shuttle or fighting the Taliban when it does.

It seems stunningly obvious, I know, but it took me a bit of thinking to figure out why I hadn't realized it before then. I made a simple but profound mistake: I confused the ability to write with the ability to write a novel. Not the same thing at all.

I had already started to patch the gaping holes in my literary knowledge by gathering and reading the books of the giants. I have Dan Simmons to thank for pushing me to take that on as a conscious project. In an essay about literary style, he presented the opening paragraph of A Farewell To Arms, accompanied by a sort of quiz. After the questions, he wrote:

The good news is that you don’t have to take this quiz (although good for you if you did), but the bad news is that if you couldn’t answer questions #1 and 2, you haven’t read widely enough or well enough to consider becoming a writer [...] Sorry to be the bearer of such bad tidings. Tis true, ‘tis pity; ‘tis pity ‘tis true.

Those questions were "Who wrote this passage?" and "What was the novel it appeared in?" respectively.

I didn't have the answers.

I had a split moment's worth of sophomoric rage--what the hell does he know--followed by the crystalline realization that he was right. The issue wasn't whether it's true that no one can write if they don't know Hemingway. The issue was that my thin literary diet could not support the task I had set before me.

Fortunately, my brain tends to absorb and retain things, so I've been soaking it in Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, et al., and wondering why it took me so damn long to feed myself properly. I've learned more about writing in the past two months than I have in past ten years. It's a wonderful thing, and I feel my writer's sinews strengthening. So, there's been some progress.

Back to that cork board. Expanding on the theory that what I'd been doing so far wasn't going to take me any further, I set out to acquire some new tools, with the explicit intention of using them to help build a more solid structure for the Novel: note cards for characters and plot points, strung together, easy to shuffle around as things changed. I'd noticed last year that all of my unfinished books tended to peter out around the 20,000 word mark, where my initial rush of free-associative creation ended and the more precise work of constructing proper arcs and so on should have begun. If I knew more about where I was going, I reasoned, I'd have a better idea of how to get there.

And that's when my can of beany ignorance exploded.

I've got a story, yes. Is it a good one? No idea. I don't know about pacing a longer work. I don't know about scenes and sequels. I don't know about structure. In short, while I have an intuitive grasp of many of the things I'll need to do to build a story that can hang together for 100,000 words and bring the readers along with it, there's a lot more that I don't know, and I've been behaving--and writing here--as though I do.

Whoops.

As I said, ignorance is remediable. But for years I've been holding on to the pretentious, cavalier assumption that, someday, I'd just...do it. Sit down, write The Novel, get published. Now, here it is. Someday. And instead of working, I've been assuming. Wanting to have written instead of wanting to write.

There's a brief post followed by 207 comments over on Nathan Bransford's site, all in response to his question: how important is creativity over craft? I don't know if I'd put a percentage on the two, the way some commenters have. But I do know that I've been behaving as though creativity was all that I would ever need. I was wrong.

Now I've got a hell of a lot of work to do, and many things to learn. I'm pretty sure I can do it and learn them...but it's hard to avoid feeling like I've wasted too much time.

Holy shit what a rheumy-eyed, beaten down, completely unfabulous medical waste disposal bin of a day. Week, even. Month. Year!

To that end, I am off to Staples to procure a large cork board, 3x5 cards in several colors, pushpins, and string. This has to do with novel-writing, obviously.

I do believe I've reached the point where sanity can only be found in making up an imaginary world and living in it, and if I don't set about doing so immediately, I might as well nip off and donate my body to science because my brain will shrivel into a small wrinkled ovoid of leathery Spam within a fortnight.

I'm not one of those, but I'd like to be, so John Scalzi's rant is a valuable bit of etiquette instruction for me. This portion in particular, though awkwardly written, resonated:

What it comes down to is that the belief that selling work really comes down to who you know is magical thinking, or at the very least it's wildly overrated in terms of what actually sells work. Yes, there are authors for whom their assurance of a blurb on your cover might convince a publisher to buy your novel, sight (and quality) unseen. Currently, they are called "Stephenie Meyer" and "Dan Brown."

That's part of a syndrome I've written about before: a focus on getting published, as opposed to writing. It's akin to a neophyte pitching a novel he hasn't finished yet, before he's ever published a lengthy work of fiction. Stephen King gets to sell an idea for a book he hasn't written (and so, most likely, does Dan Brown). Me? Not so much.

My problem--and it's a good one to have, I guess--is that I live in gut-crunching fear of coming across as an egomaniac in e-mail exchanges with an editor who's agreed to publish my work. Part of the reason for that is that editors are busy people and their e-mails to someone who is basically a stranger can be short and impersonal. But the greater portion is my own neurotic fear...for example, I got paid for the Spanish translation of "...Sumerian Pot..." when it was published in Letras Libres, at which point the writing became something of a product, and a business transaction. I worry that my correspondence with editor Ramón González was overly focused on securing payment, and the whole thing was a bit nerve-wracking because I was dealing with arranging said payment across an international border using a language I don't speak very well. So, on the one hand, I fear I came across as an ungracious, grasping materialist, and on the other hand I fear that any attempt to correct that possible impression would just come across as neurotic and unprofessional.

It's early days yet, and by nature I'm inclined to worry about social interaction in general. I suppose I should take some solace in the fact that I'm actually concerned about etiquette and the impression I make, even if it means I occasionally feel like a boorish Philistine and become paralyzed with the fear of not knowing how I actually come across. Judging by what Scalzi has to say, there are some people who aren't concerned about that sort of thing at all.

I took a summer workshop from him in 1997, before he was Jonathan Ames, when I lived in Jersey City surrounded by crack vials, murder, and fire. Well, he was still Jonathan Ames, just not as much (at the time I didn't know about the thing with the hairbrush). I didn't know what I was doing back then, so I didn't get much out of it. Not that I know what I'm doing now, but I have a better grasp of what questions to ask.

These days he's doing quite well, and is only five years older than me, which makes me feel small and doomed. Here's a recent profile of him in New York magazine.

Ames, ever the showman, calls the crowd to attention. Then he apologizes. The knife-thrower is running late.

"I wanted Miss Saturn, she's this hula-hoop person. But she wasn't available," he tells me later. "So then I wanted Ula the Pain-Proof Rubber Girl--I once broke a cinderblock on her belly while she lay on a bed of nails. But she wasn't available either. So she suggested Throwdini." More than anything, he loves to put on a show. Despite the harrying demands of a TV series, he describes the process as fun, like "putting on a big wedding." On set, he looked around and said, "All these people! All these trucks! There's a truck with a spigot on the side where coffee comes out! All because I wrote something. This is beautiful."

I often ask my graduate students on the first day of a creative writing course to write down their cultural influences. I do this because I find that the biggest problem in student writing I see, other than poor mechanics, is self-absorption. Too many of them write about their personal wounds: drug and alcohol abuse, car wrecks, anorexia, dysfunctional and failed families, failed love affairs, depression, anxiety, and rage against feelings of powerlessness. I don't mean to suggest that these are not suitable catalysts for making literature, but my students tend not to see these stories within a social matrix or cultural lineage. They feel locked within themselves and think of artistic expression as a key that will let them into the kingdom of emotional freedom, rather than seeing art as a mindful reframing of experience and emotion through a forming intelligence. They write with too much "I" and no sense of "we." They can tell me what has happened to them - but they cannot tell me the significance, the moral and psychological consequences. They cannot step outside of their anguish to see the cultural context that shapes them. They just know that they, who among the most privileged people who have ever lived on Earth, feel they don't belong anywhere.

Alison Hawthorne Deming
"Culture, Biology, and Emergence"
The Georgia Review, Spring 2009

Over the years (he said, settling back into his worn chair by the fire and picking a stray strand of greasy mutton from his voluminous beard) I've been using the phrase "It's all material" as a kind of mantra, especially when life presents me with one sort of drama or another. It's true. Anything decent I've managed to write, no matter how weird, always has some kernel of reality in it somewhere. That kernel might not be the heart of the story, but it's there. In Sumerian Pot, it was the bit about the martinis.

Other stories, like the one I woke up with in my head a couple of weeks ago and managed to write down before it got away, are firmly grounded in real experience. In that case, it was September 11th. That's a big one.

But it all goes into the meat-grinder. Being in downtown Manhattan during a terrorist attack. Drinking too much on New Year's Eve. Jacaranda blooming outside my window. Every last little bit gets filed away somewhere.

Some people carry notepads around to write these sorts of things down. I'm of the opinion that if I have to write it down to remember it, it's not worthy of remembrance. I have a somewhat freakish memory for that sort of thing, though, so that might not work for everyone.

The trouble is, if something's too close to reality, the story breaks. At least, my stories break; I know there are plenty of folks out there who can put a skim coat of fiction over their lives and don't get yelled at by Oprah for lying. I was all impressed with the story I wrote a couple of weeks ago: it had emotional impact, weird punch, all of that. But the impact and the punch were there because I was too close to the experience I was using as the basis for the story. What seemed to me to be a dense, meaningful conk on the head in 1,400 words fell flat when I asked a writer friend to read it. In fact, she missed the central point of the piece entirely, and it wasn't because she "didn't get it." That which seemed crystalline to me was clear only because I knew it was there. To someone outside my bubble it was obscure to the point of absence.

That's not always a bad thing. If you throw something out there thinking it's about The Meaning Of Eucalyptus and everyone says "This is a fantastic piece, it's like Watership Down for koalas," then maybe take a few steps back and see if you can discover something unintentionally fabulous and work with that. In my case, I was trying to do a specific thing, and failed. So, I need to find out whether I still want to accomplish what I thought I was going to do when I started out, or if what I actually did might turn out to be better than what I intended to do.

We all clear on that? Good.

No, this isn't the third Exciting Thing.

A continuous stream of clouds and mist has not such a manner as his; waters stretching far off into the distance have not such a mood as his; all spring's flowering glory has not his gentleness; autumn's bright purity has not his strictness of form; masts driven by the wind and horses in the battle line have not his daring; tile sarcophagi and tripods with seal-script have not his antiquity; the season's flowers and fair women have not his sensuality; walls run to weeds and ruined palaces and tomb mounds overgrown with brush have not his resentment and mournfulness; the leviathan's gaping maw and the leaping sea turtle, the bull demon and the snake god, have not his sense of fantasy and illusion.

So wrote Du Mu in his preface to Li He's collection of poetry. But he didn't actually like Li He's work...or, if he did, could not permit himself to praise it unreservedly, as was expected in such prefaces.

Li He died in 816 at the age of twenty-six, and had entrusted his bundled manuscript to his friend Shen Shushi, who toted it around with him for fifteen years, neglecting his duties as literary executor.  Du Hu was a young but promising writer employed by Shen Shushi's brother in Xuanzhou, and late one night, in the throes of drunken guilt over his neglect, Shen Shushi sent sent a messenger over to Du Hu's house to request that he write a preface for Li He's manuscript.

As the story is told, it was well after midnight when the messenger banged on Du Hu's door, and such things simply weren't done. So he refused. But Shen Shushi kept after him, motivated, perhaps, by the fear of his friend's unquiet ghost. Eventually Du Mu relented.

Within the context of this period of Tang poetry, one aesthetic norm was a kind of poetic gravity expressed by the subtle illumination of moral and political issues, achieving what we today might call "significance." By those standards, Li He's poetry was beautiful, but frivolous. Summarizing Du Mu's unusually critical preface, Stephen Owen writes, "...Li He's poetry depends on gorgeous diction and fresh ideas, only without the engagement in the social and political world that produced one kind of depth in a Tang context of values [...] In effect, Du Mu is saying that Li He's poetry rings hollow."

Du Mu held to accepted standards of "serious" poetry even as he was seduced by the fantasies of Li He, and he produced the fanciful passage above while writing what was, for the time, a rather harsh critique: "...he sought to capture the quality and manner of the moment, yet he departed so far from the usual paths of letters that one scarcely knows of them."

We should all be damned with such faint praise.

Li He, The Tomb of Little Su

  Dew on the hidden orchid,
  like crying eyes.
  Nothing ties a love knot,
  flowers in mist I cannot bear to cut.
  Grass like the carriage cushion,
  pines like the carriage roof,
  the wind is her skirt,
  the waters, her pendants.
  A carriage with oiled sides
  awaits in the evening.
  Cold azure candle
  struggles to give light.
  At the foot of West Mound
  wind blows the rain.

I started this project on April 28, 2008. The original tagline was "One Year. One Novel. One Contract." The blog was to be a focused narrative of my attempt to reach that goal. Have I reached that goal?

Of course I haven't. Don't be silly. If I'd reached it I'd be knee-deep in opiates and loose women and men and would have already forgotten about all you little people.

I gave up on the whole One This And That intention thing for the blog on June 2 of last year, saying,

I've come to the...well, I won't call it sudden...but I've come to the realization that that's well, stupid.

Not just the practical aspect of it, I always knew that I was asking the near-impossible of myself. But: it's a stunt. Let's see how clever and good and talented I can be.

My previous blog, which stumbled and arced and streaked through Tha IntraTubes for over five years, was described in admirable terms by a long time reader as a "conceptual train wreck." He liked those sorts of blogs, as do I. But I thought I'd give the subject-specific format a shot, because Doctor Internet's Prescription For Blog Success at one point involved such focus. My focus was going to be a novel in progress and writing in general. Nothing else.

But that was dull. Dull. Dull. My god it was dull, it was so dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and desperately dull. Even leaving aside my utter failure to meet the unitary goal stated at the project's inception, I really don't think I'd have much luck producing regular posts on a single subject that would be worth reading.¹

So, I shifted to an emphasis on writing, and more snippets of things I liked. That got tiresome after a while as well, so finally I gave up and started posting whatever struck my bent head at any given time, provided it fit within certain ill-defined boundaries that changed on a regular basis and had some correlation with the table of tides from a 1927 edition of The Old Farmer's Almanac that I found in my pants the morning after what was apparently a very good night out with a group of urchin fishermen.

The stats tell the tale. I started writing whatever sucked the toes of my fancy sometime in March. My traffic roughly doubled, and the number of repeat visitors steadily increased. Those repeats are the coveted regular readers. I've got some now. Not many. But some. You know who you are! Thank you.

This, then, would be my delayed The Show So Far post. I now return you to your regular programming.

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¹"Or regular posts on multiple subjects that are worth reading!" Yes, yes. Shut up.

One day, while riding on his mule, Jia Dao suddenly came up with the verse: "The bird spends the night in the tree by the pool, / the monk knocks at the gate under the moonlight." At first he wanted to use the word "shove;" then he wanted to use the word "knock." Not having settled on the best usage, he rode along on his mule, first drawing the character "shove" with his hand, then drawing the character "knock." Without realizing it, he passed through half a city ward in this fashion. Those who observed him were astonished, but Jia Dao seemed not to see them. At the time Han Yu was serving as provisional Metropolian governor of the capital. Han had a stern and punctilious disposition, and his awesome presence at that moment made itself felt on the great avenue. Passing the third avenue, the criers were clearing the way, but Jia Dao just went on writing characters with his hand. Only when he was suddenly pushed down from his mule and dragged before the Metropolitan Governor did Jia Dao realize the situation. The advisers wanted to have him reprimanded, but Jia Dao responded, "I just happened now to come up with a couplet, but I haven't been able to get a particular word right. My spirit was wandering in the realm of poetry, and this is what led me to run into Your Excellency. I do not dare call your wrath down upon me, but I hope you might be kind enough to give this some consideration." Han Yu halted his horse, thought about it for awhile, and said to Jia Dao, "'Knock' is finer."

-Zhou Xunxhu

...that's like a coked-up gorilla that swings through the transept of your mind, kicks out your retinas with its foot-fists, and escapes hooting from your skull, thundering into the world and dragging your blind and insensate carcass behind it like a duffel bag full of dead cats?

Because that doesn't sound like a very nice sort of day to have, and if you've had such a day, you can put my sympathies on the shelf next to it.

You don't keep your days on a shelf? What do you do with them, then? You're not one of those people who just piles them up on the couch or something, are you? Honestly, you really ought to take better care of them. You only get so many, you know, and their resale value goes way down if they're all scuffed up and bent.

Incidentally, and in furtherance of the papal thematic thing I've got going on this week for no apparent reason, there was once an antipope who was more into fox hunting than the whole Jesus trip, which didn't sit very well with his cardinals. He hadn't celebrated mass for awhile, and when they insisted that he do so instead of running off with the hounds on the Sabbath, he rode his horse into church, belted out a cursory Mass from the saddle, and trampled a few parishioners on the gallop back to the hunt. I think things might have gotten stabby shortly after that.

I can't for the life of me remember this fellow's name. So if you know the name of the pew-busting fox-hunting antipope, be a dear and leave it in the comments, would you? It's been bugging me all day, like a tweaking lemur in a synagogue.

OK, I shall stop now. Clearly I need to be smacked around a bit.