William Preston

SF, Wells, Conan Doyle, storytelling

2012-01-21T17:54:00.000-05:00

A variety of short fiction, that's what I've read.

Continuing with some stories from The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces:

"The Burning of the Brain," by Cordwainer Smith (Paul M.A. Linebarger)
A short piece with a science-fictional premise (people can travel between the stars, but it's a taxing psychic strain on the "Go-Captains" who pilot the beautiful craft) that's really about aging, love, vanity, and honor. Some fine writing, and all accomplished efficiently.

"Gehenna," by Barry N. Malzberg
The writing is certainly skillful, but the piece is more a stunt than a story—a relationship that ends badly is seen from four different perspectives, perspectives which differ profoundly—but its brief and plays with your head, so it's hard to complain. The real problem is that there's nothing science fictional about the story. Nothing.

"A Meeting with Medusa," Arthur C. Clarke
Engaging to read, the story concerns a ship commander named Falcon who, in the opening chapter, goes down with the ship—zeppelin—in a major air disaster. Following that, a reconstructed Falcon pilots a balloon-borne vessel through the atmosphere of Jupiter, where he has a strange encounter. The ending contains a twist that Clarke seems to have felt was worth concealing. I suppose it does add something to the story to delay providing information, but it feels like a cheap trick, and it's not as if the news really alters the story's larger plot in any significant way. What the story does well is give an air of breathless adventure to a tale of scientific exploration.

The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells, ed. by John Hammond

I see a pattern to the structure of these stories that doesn't fit our modern conception of a story, though I suppose it fits more what we'd call a tale: something odd happens, but there's no sense of a conclusion; the story is in the description of the odd event, and when one is done describing it, one moves on, using with some backward-looking comment on the affair.

A case in point is "The Crystal Egg," the story that inspired Borges' "The Aleph," which I recently read. At first, we wonder why the shopkeeper in this story is so bent on not selling the crystal object placed in his window; his family wonders why as well, but he keeps his reasons to himself. Eventually, everything is revealed, and it's wonderfully fantastical, creepy, and science fictional. The story ends with a frustrating search for the lost object and some reflections on its ramifications. (Has someone ever followed up on where Wells leaves the story?) The story doesn't so much conclude as back slowly away from its ending, leaving us to think, "Oh, dear . . . "

"The Empire of the Ants" is a sort of Heart of Darkness with ants standing in for the natives. Not that there aren't natives, who are fleeing the ants, but, given Wells's propensity for social and political commentary, it's easy to think he might be forming some fable about the revenge sought by the colonized—though the story doesn't really seem to push for such an interpretation. The long and short of it is that the characters make a river journey into the Amazon to investigate tales of rampant ants. The ants turn out to be far more insidious a menace than first imagined, and the story provides a host of haunting images and ideas. As with the previous story, there's no real conclusion, but more a report of the present dire situation. A terrific tale.

"The Thing in No. 7" is more of a lark than the other two. Wells still manages to disturb us, as one member of a group of friends accidentally makes his way into the wrong apartment to make a terrifying discovery. The solution is mundane, but the set-up is suspenseful and a pleasure, the whole thing less a complete story than a tale of, "Then there was the night we stumbled on . . . My, wasn't that a shock!"

The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I'm about halfway through Michael Dirda's On Conan Doyle (which dismaying has already spent far too much time talking about other writers), and the book led me to a Holmes tale I hadn't read before, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men." It's one of those woman-frightened-at-a-country-house stories which, no matter how many times I run across them, never fails to interest me. I wonder if Conan Doyle thought the mysterious images left about on house and paper—glyphs of stick figures in various states of movement—presented an impenetrable mystery to his readers. To me, they were obviously an encrypted message, with the figures stand-ins for letters. Still, the author makes the story strange and suspenseful, even though it's largely ridiculous (the messages in odd places; an almost supernatural description of the figure who leaves one message; Holmes's relative inactivity until its too late). The writing, as usual, is a model of that clean, well-phrased English style that's also so appealing in Wells.

A few more SF stories read

2012-01-13T19:59:00.000-05:00

It's puzzling to consider what landed any given story in The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces aside from Robert Silverberg liking it. If you're going to collect "masterpieces," it seems to me that the bar ought to be pretty high.

Philip José Farmer's "The Sliced-Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World," from 1971, is one of those stories built around a punchline plot, summarizable in a single clause, that telegraphs its ending because it is all about its "shock" ending, which of course isn't a shock at all. To avoid problems related to overcrowding, individuals are awake and going about their business only one day each week; the rest of the days, they're in suspended animation, which people assigned to those other days do the necessary work. How any real work gets done is a mystery, but the story hinges on our protagonist falling in love with a woman assigned to a different day but who he can see in her sleep chamber, as she shares his house. As a result of his love, he wants to switch over to her day. His love is an adolescent thing, built on nothing but her looks, and the outcome of all this, even with a small twist tossed in, is obvious from the get-go. I have yet to read any Farmer fiction that I've liked, but I've only read a few things.

1958's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by Alfred Bester, is a lark about time travel that's both entertaining and clever; unlike the Farmer tale, it does not telegraph its ending, though it certainly could have. Bester has fun with the idea: a man finds his wife in the arms of another man, so, genius that he is, he goes to the basement, slaps together a time machine, and goes back in history to remove her from his life. For some reason, this doesn't work, so he keeps heading back, knocking off various historical figures, both major and minor, in an attempt to, finally, see something happen in his present life. The conclusion is logical enough, but, more importantly, it's aesthetically and dramatically satisfying, given some elements that at first seem unrelated to the plot.

"The Man Who Lost the Sea," by Ted Sturgeon (and, with a glace back at the proceeding story, I should mention that there's even a third "The Man Who" story in the book), from 1959, is a bit of a slog at times, though there are, in retrospect, some clever touches. Written in a sometimes-effective, sometimes-strained literary style, the story keeps you guessing for quite a while as you follow the thoughts of a man lying, evidently in a space suit, on a beach. What's he doing there? Who's the little boy who keeps bothering him? What's all this about the time it takes a satellite to circle? Once all the pieces come together, it seems like Sturgeon should have stopped, so, for me, the very end feels unnatural and forced. At the time it was published, I'm sure it had quite an impact.

"Unearthed"

2012-01-11T20:16:00.001-05:00

Astoundingly—to me, at least—I finished a readable draft, which is now out with three readers. The first reader (writer, editor) already got back to me. He seems to think the thing is pretty solid as is, with just some minor edits needed, but we're going to talk more, so maybe there's something larger that will need work. I worked on it for several hours straight last night and sent it off without a final complete read-through, feeling simply done and ready to get responses. What a long process it's been. Within a week, I should have all comments back; I can then turn it around in a day or two, I hope (assuming there are no huge issues); then it's off to Asimov's, which I hope will take this next chapter in my tale of the Old Man.

Also, the Asimov's Readers' Award ballot is up. If you enjoyed "Clockworks," please consider voting for it:

http://www.asimovs.com/2012_02/ASF_AwardSubmit_2012.html

Books abandoned; stories read

2011-12-30T13:13:00.000-05:00

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Huburt Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, fell apart for me. I'm somewhat curious about where the book's thesis was headed, but the shambling structure, both narratively and philosophically, made me suspect their methods for getting there. After a lengthy analysis of why David Foster Wallace made them feel hopeless (I'm woefully shortchanging their ideas here, but in the end, it's not that important), they spend much time among Greek heroes, considering how they responded to the universe. The problem with this is that they're constructing a way to use literature to help us find meaning, but they're equating the narrative strategies of playwrights and poets with how actual Greek people responded to the sacred in their lives, and that's not an historically valid equation. The book seems to give a lot of credit to Jesus' insights into what it means to be human, but they somehow manage to not really talk about him. Great swaths of philosophical thinking a given short shrift, and then they declare that Decartes is the next great insight-provider (after Jesus). I had a hard time finding a coherent argument holding the whole thing together, and the structure of the book seemed ill–thought out. I dropped it at about the halfway point.

I'm disappointed to have stopped reading Dan Simmons's Hyperion three days in. The book started out well, and almost immediately it communicated its intention to use The Canterbury Tales as a structural method for the "pilgrimage" of the novel's seven travelers. However, the length of the first tale made me realize that the tale-telling would be the bulk of the novel, unless the other tales were radically shorter. I quite enjoyed "the priest's tale," with its gothic, grim science fiction. The next story, however, let me down rather quickly, the moment it announced we were going to be exposed to a standard suspense genre sex scene. Absolutely dreadful writing took hold, and I lost all confidence in the author's project. (I very much enjoyed Simmons's "Muse of Fire," a novella from the Dozois and Strahan–edited The New Space Opera—that is, with the exception of the ending, an awkward and unconvincing reminder of the conclusion of Star Trek: The Movie, a conclusion some wag deemed "a $40-million f**k.") Undone by the writer's misstep, I looked ahead to see whether, indeed, I wasn't going to get much of a novel out of this novel (a fact confirmed by a friend who'd read it some time ago), then elected to read the concluding 20 pages or so. Overloaded with sentiment, the book merely sets you up for the next book. No, thank you.

I also read several short stories from 1983's The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces, edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin Greenberg. (I keep seeing "Arkham" for "Arbor.")

Clifford D. Simak's "Desertion" seems like an episode of The Outer Limits, which focused at least once on turning a human into an alien. Every bit of science in the story is goofy, and there's not much to the characters, but the story is a sincere little parable that, at the end, becomes beautiful and manages to carry more weight than you'd suspect it could. The editor's note at the start that Simak wrote the story in response to first reports about Nazi death camps sets you up in a way the story doesn't deserve; it's better to know this afterwards and allow the story its own argument without tying it to some particular human atrocity.

"Warm," by Robert Sheckley, is what I'd expect from this writer I was introduced to 32 years ago by a high school friend. Either humorously grim or grimly humorous, the story doesn't go where one might expect, but gets there through a method I wasn't expecting, something more thoughtful and philosophical. I know how Bradbury would have done this story (and I'd like to see that); he'd have ended in the same place but taken a radically different route. The structure springs from the notion that one is "warm" when locating something hidden or coming closer to understanding an idea. A voice from who-knows-where tells our protagonist he's getting "warmer" to where the voice is trapped. The protagonist's attitude toward the voice is what's comic, since he treats it as real yet doesn't seem all that bothered by it, as if this sort of thing happens all the time.

Lastly I read "A Bad Day for Sales," by Fritz Leiber, another parable, this one having as its target our commercialized world. A socially awkward robot/vending machine is going through his shtick with a city crowd when disaster strikes. Leiber does a great job with the scene, switching from a vaguely threatening looniness to a nightmare scenario smoothly. That various people start picking themselves up at the end seems unlikely given the description Leiber provided, but it's a neat effect and keeps the story from stopping dead.

Love the writer, hate the editor

2011-12-26T15:41:00.002-05:00

Mishna Wolff's I'm Down is, for much of its length, the funniest book I've ever read. Her outsider younger self—a white child being forced by her white father (a man evidently more comfortable about black folks than white folks) to fit into her black community—is a source of much self-deprecating humor and increasingly profane responses to the messed-up world(s) around her. Once she finally learns how to have cred in the black world, she's sent to a largely white school for gifted kids and once more finds herself having to navigate strange waters. Part of what makes the book work is Wolff's refusal to explore issues surrounding race; rather, she shows us how particular people of varying races live their lives, allowing us to draw our own conclusions about culture and class. The center of the book, as with many memoirs, is less the author than the parent, in this case the father. As the book moves through time, we see Wolff become more distant from her father, only to have a redemptive reconnection with him in one longer, more serious chapter at the end.

The book has problems, but I'm going to blame them all on the editor who, absurdly, Wolff singles out for thanks in the acknowledgements. Wolff has great material to draw on, and she has a gift for comedy. The challenge for the editor becomes how to turn the book into a coherent whole. For much of the book, when we're dealing with Wolff's earliest years, the material manages to do this itself. But as time passes, the book feels more fragmented; there's no strong sense of how much time she's spent somewhere or how something from a previous chapter affected the current one. The book's tone shifts, too, as Wolff's issues change, until we reach the conclusive scene with her father. My problem with the father's redemption, however, is less the shift in tone than the shift in the way we're expected to see this man. The scene, in which he joins his daughter's for a swim across a lake, seems to involve a different character than we've come to know. This is the guy who never works? Who never finishes any project? Who is tugged about emotionally because he seems to have no real certainty about himself? I'm not saying the scene didn't happen, but there's no sense from the author about how to connect this man with the character we've come to know.

There's also an unresolved undercurrent of the writer not telling people what she needs to tell them. Repeatedly, she lies about her own motives and actions in order to defuse situations. It's an interesting motif, but she never explores what it means. And that's true for a host of things. So while I appreciate the youthful-observer perspective on issues of class and race, there's some oddly unexamined material that leaves the work feeling incomplete and thin. This sense isn't helped by the prose; the youthful voice at the beginning is the same voice at the end, and it never rises much above stylistically serviceable.

I blame the editor. Again, Wolff has great source material and a good sense of how to set a scene and build a funny narrative. But the editor needed to take this book to the next place. The editor also needed to actually read the book. Increasingly as the pages go by, errors (typically homophones) pop up, along with missing words or sentences that don't parse. It's the homophones that are most jarring, for me; they announce that the writer tends to make these kinds of errors, which means that the editor, if she is doing her job, is going to watch for this kind of thing. What is the editor being paid to do?

So Far Gone

2011-12-22T21:37:00.000-05:00

So Far Gone, by Paul Cody, ended well. The author pulled it off, executing (oh dear, no pun intended) a beautiful ending, I thought. The protagonist of the tale, Jack Connor, will be the first person in decades to be put to death in Massachusetts, having murdered his parents and grandmother. We don't see a court case—this isn't that kind of book. Instead, we get Jack's interactions with the priest who visits him, repeated flashbacks to his early childhood (though out of chronological sequence) and later years living his parents, and the accounts of "witnesses" who contribute outsiders' perspectives on Jack and what he's done.

There's an enormous amount of repetition in the prose, and I think several chapters could have been tightened considerably with no loss. Halfway through, I didn't have any sense of the book's momentum, but then events begin to link more tightly and the noose of the narrative tightens. It's a marvelous book that doesn't settle for the standard steps one might expect to see in such a story. Cody generates sympathy for Jack by having us live through his hellish childhood. At first, I think the grandmother is overplayed, demonic, but later we get a better sense of the wildness of her moods, and eventually we sympathize with everyone in this horribly wounded family, and Cody does a nice job building that sympathy in careful stages. It's a terribly sad book, but there are redemptive and humane cracks of light showing around the sealed cellar door at its heart.

Plowing

2011-12-21T15:38:00.001-05:00

About one-third of the way through the intense revision/completion of "Unearthed," a tale that has crept up to 18K words. There will be some additions, but some trimming is ahead, too, so I don't expect the total to be too far from 18K. Finally having time to work on the thing, I'm moving through line-by-line and not leaving anything for my future self to have to figure out, which means I have to solve any problems now. (I've put off quite a few decisions, I'm finding; thanks, past self!)

I am, meanwhile, reading Paul Cody's So Far Gone (which will make or break itself in its final quarter; I'm reading Cody because he was the editor who selected a story of mine for the next issue of Stone Canoe), All Things Shining by Dreyfus and Kelly (which may be moving a bit too swiftly through the history of Western thought to be completely credible), and Mishna Wolff's incredibly funny I'm Down (the true story of a poor (literally) little white girl who lacks are cred with her black neighbors, but whose father, white though he is, moves with ease in the black community).

In other quasi-news, a Los Angeles–based producer is working with me to get my story "Clockworks" attached to some people in the business of making movies; there's no money in our agreement, at this stage, but if he manages to find a buyer, I'll let you know.

Workin'

2011-12-03T20:01:00.001-05:00

Working on "Unearthed."

Reading Errol Morris's marvelous Believing is Seeing.

Later . . .

Against obliteration

2011-11-25T08:40:00.001-05:00

I'm in the "every sentence sounds kind of stupid" mode of revision on "Unearthed." Some of them may, indeed, be poorly done; as there's no ideal sentence, each is less than ideal; the broader problem is the usual one of voice, of making the narrator sound like one person (who isn't me) rather than like me at various times of day or states of mental with-it-ness. I keep seeing sentences that make me say, "Yeah, that's exactly how I'd write that," which makes me revise to be less-like-me, though, no surprise, that's still me because who else is there to judge how the sentence sounds?

Last night I began All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. Is that the same line drawing of a whale that was on the Philbrick Moby-Dick book? Hmm. I started this as a way to pull myself up from the obsessive thoughts of death spurred by Julian Barnes's excellent Nothing to Be Frightened Of. It may be "nothing to be frightened of," but it's also "nothing one wants to obsess over to the point of distraction," so rather than dwelling, in my reading, on my eventual obliteration, I moved on to a book more focused on the bright bonfire of storytelling and not the encircling dark.

The book moves briskly, though the culture its aiming to cure, no longer god-saturated (a process that started hundreds of years ago), isn't the whole picture. Certainly there are plenty of folks who, contra the fallout from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, still see the world as under God's command. Yes, even these "believers," of whatever religious background, approach things more independently and existentially than, say, their 14th-century peers, but they nonetheless inhabit a different reality than these writers. In any case, after an analysis of our current "nihilism," they move into a discussion of how David Foster Wallace both probed this radical uncertainty and succumbed to it. I'm only about 50 pages in.

Revision, first steps; Philbrick's Moby-Dick

2011-11-11T17:21:00.001-05:00

Revising
How long since I'd read this opening to the draft of my story-in-progress, "Unearthed"? How long ago did I write it? It's wonderfully unfamiliar. It needs work, but there's a lot to work with, as well. Interesting. "My words are cicadas." Hm.

Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick
After reading Philbrick's book, you don't necessarily need to read Melville's novel. I read two-thirds of the book, a few years ago, before running aground on yet another digression in the narrative. Philbrick's book, wildly overpriced at $25 (it's about as long as a good-sized short story), visits many of the book's finest moments, lines I underlined when I made my own foray into the text. There's also interesting material about Melville's pushy relationship with shy Hawthorne. Less good are the attempts to force the book to make statements about the way America is heading toward the catastrophe of the Civil War; these line readings don't seem to fit, and, even if the argument felt more solid, it's clunkily done in this small space, with sudden shifts of intent in a tiny chapter's final paragraph. This seems more like an essay to have run in The Atlantic, and I can't imagine what audience would buy it. But you ought to get it from the library and fly through it.

"Clockworks" posted

2011-11-05T17:53:00.003-04:00

I considered—on the advice of some friends—creating a Kindle version of "Clockworks," my "Old Man" prequel that came out in Asimov's this year. But you know what? I feel like I already got paid for it, and at this point, I'm just happy to have more people read it. Better here than on some bit-torrent site that scanned and chopped the Asimov's issue. In addition, making a "cover" for the thing seemed like too much of a hassle.

So: Here's "Clockworks," at your right, clickable as a PDF. Yeah, I turned off the widow and orphan control when formatting it; it was simpler than the other options.

Please let me know what you think. I'm curious as to how many people download it. Today I printed out a pretty-much-completed draft of the next story, the prequel "Unearthed." I've still got a fair bit of work to do on it, but I think those of you who enjoyed the other "Old Man" stories will enjoy this next one at least as much.

More about "Mote": other stuff as well

2011-10-22T21:30:00.003-04:00

I wrote a follow-up to my review of The Mote in God's Eye, but my blog took a distinct dislike to what I'd written and, after first leaving it stranded mid-sentence, then deleted it (okay, that was my fault, but it didn't give me a chance to say, "Wait! Don't!").

I didn't talk, the first time, about the title itself, which has to do with both the world from which the "Moties" come (near the "eye" of the Coal Sack's "Face of God") and the biblical aphorism about removing an obstruction from your own eye before daring to pluck the smaller obstruction from the eye of another person. This is, I suppose, the point of the book, though it dealt with in a way that is somehow understated while also being clunky.

Niven and Pournelle set up parallels between the humans and aliens: command structure, sexuality, rising and falling civilizations. It might have helped the point had someone on the human side provided a critique of human systems in light of what they saw in the Moties, but instead everyone blunders along rather ignorantly, though a few passing comments are made to draw attention to the similarities. In a literary work, this would have surfaced as a theme; here, it's a motif that never rises beyond a surface depiction. In fact, had someone ever pointed it out, the clunkiness would have become more evident: the exact parallel of having a hidden commander about whom both sides wonder; the exact parallel of stranding three people on Mote Prime and three Moties among the humans. You can Niven and Pournelle saw this conceit as central to the novel, but it doesn't actually go anywhere interesting or take the reader deeper.

Last week I read Inside Scientology, by Janet Reitman. I've read a lot about Scientology—I find quackery and homegrown religions and hoaxes fascinating—so I already knew a fair amount of what was in the book, though Reitman's information about the current leadership and the Gold Base was new to me. The one thing I feel wasn't conveyed fully was the sense of what exactly happens in "auditing" sessions, the Scientology equivalent of the confession. Everything she said about it, I knew, but I hadn't had, previously, the sense of endless hours people put into the process, and I left without a clear sense of how exactly one spends that time. And though she may have gotten at this aspect, it's pretty clear that such a process, by itself, must do so much to make the recipient susceptible to the mindset necessary to proceed further. Of course, that's the upfront point, but it's frightening to think of how, Stockholm Syndome–like, one's mental defenses must be so reduced by the process, much like the mental defenses of someone who, grilled for hours by police, confesses to something he or she didn't do. I do recommend the book for anyone interested in the subject. Reitman is pretty fair, I have to say: she doesn't just outright say that the practices Hubbard invented are stupid or dangerous; she doesn't damn the "faith" so much as she damns the way it's been run, with Hubbard drifting into megalomania and the current show-runner demonstrating some kind of narcissistic personality disorder (at best).

I've started both Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes's personal reflection on death, and Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe's proto-novel. Both are funnier than I thought they'd be. Defoe's protagonist is sort of an idiot, so far. Barnes's voice is just so marvelously English; an American could not have written these sentences.

I did some work on the final section of "Unearthed" today. It's coming along. Now I have to decide (though it's hardly urgent) whether to post "Clockworks" here as a PDF or format it (and stick a picture of some kind on the front) for sale at Amazon.

Recent reading

2011-10-10T12:26:00.000-04:00

There's little writing to report. I'm waiting to hear back about two short stories. School- and (eldest daughter) wedding-related activities have contributed to a severe slackening in my writing. I did manage to do some reading in the past week or so:

The Mote in God's Eye, the 1974 novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, turned out to be . . . I want to say "pretty good," but I'm hesitant. I'm glad I read it, but it's also, for me, one more nail in the coffin of "classic science fiction novels." I'm at somewhat of a loss to explain why I didn't read it in high school, when I went through a Larry Niven phase, reading everything I could in his Known Space–related books (except for The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, which struck me as having a dull subject), in addition to all of his short fiction collections. This novel may have seemed dauntingly long as well as less interesting due to its non-participation in the Known Space universe. It being a collaboration may also have put me off, though I enjoyed the Niven/Pournelle Inferno. Still, I doubt I'd have enjoyed it back then.

A "first contact" novel, built around the humanity's early interactions with a sentient race from another star system, the book does take the premise and problems of alien interactions seriously. While the aliens aren't all that alien (and the focus on dialogue leads you to imagine them looking pretty much like us much of the time . . . only hairier), the book does finally hinge on incompatible ideas about culture and worldviews.

It took me a while to get accustomed to the writing, which is utterly flat and colorless, though serviceable. It's not bad or clumsy writing, by any means; it's just that none of it stands out, and no passage is particularly thrilling to read. The focus, in consequence, becomes the dialogue, which again isn't compelling, but largely sounds like humans talking and is clear. The book smacks of Star Trek, unexpectedly: several characters have annoying Old Earth accents that just seem ridiculous in the distant future, despite the authors' explanations. Giving the engineer a Scottish-English dialect to speak too obviously would remind any reading of Star Trek's Scotty . . . which should in turn remind everyone that he was faking his accent, making the novel's Scot sound doubly fake.

The book is paced oddly. A dramatic sequence in the book's second act leads one to expect another exciting sequence late in the game. A host of precautions taken against alien incursions during the journey home suggest that the humans have missed something—but they haven't. The end of the book, after some delaying personal scenes that aren't interesting at all, reads like a courtroom drama, with verbal revelations from unexpected quarters standing in for any physical action. The conclusion works pretty well, in fact, but it takes an awfully long time to get there and relies on quite a few people being more thick than they really ought to be.

In addition, portions of the book on Mote Prime, the aliens' homeworld, left me feeling as if I were watching a Saturday morning cartoon. In part, that was the result of the adolescent-level writing, but it also came from the silliness of some aspects that made the proceedings feel less real.

I also read the comic book collection Messiah Complex, a recent X-Men book that crossed among the various X-titles. It was much easier to follow than many such "events," since it didn't rely on other narratives taking place in yet more titles uncollected in those pages, but one still had to know a few things about X-Men backstories. (I didn't know quite enough, in truth, but I was fairly well equipped.) The story read well and consistently, though several writers contributed; the artwork was all over the place, but I came to appreciate the varying styles, even the manga-ish one that gave everyone Japo-Bambi eyes (surely among the most annoying traits of that style). All of the artists tended to overbusy their panels, but at least you didn't think anyone was being lazy. One artist clearly felt the need to make Professor X look exactly like Patrick Stewart, which I found distracting, but the others didn't bother.

Oh, my stars.

2011-09-24T21:35:00.000-04:00

I see that I never posted a full review for Bester's The Stars My Destination. I made some concluding comments at the Asimov's forum, but that has crashed or been deliberately offlined yet again, so I can't access my more immediate responses.

Yes, in the end, it was a waste of time. There are a few fun moments, but the main character isn't much of a character. He does whatever the plot demands of him in order to move itself erratically along, and Bester seems to think the protagonist is somehow worthy of our interest, a common man of note, but he's just a brute, and the story is little more than an adolescent revenge fantasy that drifts into self-importance and forays into the realm of whoa-man cosmic awareness. In classic SF fashion, the female characters are an insult to all females both fictional and living. Both major female figures enter the tale intriguingly, but Bester manages to ruin them. Then there's another who simply serves to be sexually victimized by the protagonist.

Nothing to see here, folks, but the sad missteps of a mid-century genre riddled with self-importance and misogyny.

A brief review of a book briefly viewed

2011-09-21T18:42:00.003-04:00

Blame Twitter, which channelled plugs for Christopher Boucher's How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive as if publisher Melville House were sending secret codes to start another Middle Eastern grassroots uprising. I ordered the book from the library. I read some of it.

I cannot gain traction in this book. It lacks characters and a plot. Aristotle thinks those are important. He also thinks light things fall more slowly than heavy things, but that's because he was afraid that if they didn't, his world would be far-too-rocked. History has proven him right about the plot/character thing. Likewise the diction-and-thought thing. I can do without "spectacle" and "singing" in my novels, though sometimes those make for nice additions.

The author says some funny things and has an amusing way of giving you completely the wrong word for something. He also gives people "kennings" like Chest of Drawers (a guy he knew) and The Lady from the Land of Beans (a former lover). The book reads like an essay from McSweeney's that should have ended after maybe 500 words. That would have been good. One thousand tops. After that, you're reading words, words, words and nothing else. The eyes move like feet upon a treadmill. And it's not even one of those inclined treadmills or one that features a change-of-pace setting. Perhaps later all of this materializes into some beautiful, intact vision, like a Tralfamadorian novel, but it's too insistently incoherent for that. It does seem to be merely a scam.

Done. Moving on.

"The Aleph" and other bits

2011-08-20T08:57:00.003-04:00

At least twice in the past month, I've seen references to Borges' "The Aleph," which I have in my giant Borges fiction paperback. "The Aleph" of the title is not—at least for the purposes of the story—the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, spoken by God (in Kabbalistic theology) into the void to birth the universe, though certain Borges has that in mind. This Aleph is a point in space which, when viewed, reveals all other points in space and time. In Borges' story, this allows a mediocre poet to write an epic poem which spans the globe. A version of Borges himself narrates the story, explaining how his devotion to the poet's late cousin leads him to deeper involvement with the family and to his somewhat traumatic introduction to the Aleph—though he later won't admit to the poet that he's seen this wonder. Though the narrator says little about the dead Beatriz, the name suggests that she serves the same purpose as Dante's Beatrice: a figure that leads the narrator toward some ultimate knowledge. Rather than encountering God, Borges discovers an impersonal substitute, a point of omnipresence if not omnipotence or omniscience. Borges also remarks, as a frame to the story, that he is forgetting Beatriz. What can we know? How can we hold onto it? How much must we know in order to write about something? And even if we could re-view every moment, would that supplant memory and imagination?

Memory is also the subject of the essay ("On liars") I'm reading from Montaigne's Essays (ed./trans., J.M. Cohen). Montaigne begins by announcing that his memory is so poor, he should gain fame due to the profound weakness of this quality in himself. He also suggests that people should be forgiving toward him: he doesn't mean to be so unreliable—it's his memory that the problem, not his intentions, and what can he do about an innately bad memory?

Memory seems to be a theme that runs through my "Old Man" stories as well. It's come up in "Unearthed," and I suspect will be a unifying theme for all of the tales once I'm finished with the series. I wrote more yesterday; my characters are finally underground, which is some kind of achievement. Little do they know what they're heading toward . . .

I'm about halfway through Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination and am tempted to stop. Grandiose title and cover aside, the story, at this point, seems unserious, and the characterization is below the level of a comic book. At the Asimov's forum, I posted my concerns; it was suggested that I have patience and proceed. The book's not painful to read, but I do have the sense of having my time wasted.

For school, I'm continuing to make notes in Beowulf and John Gardner's Grendel, both of which I'll teach early on in my AP classes.

"Unearthed" and reading

2011-08-13T21:40:00.002-04:00

Plugging away at my usual plodding pace on "Unearthed." I have a few weeks to get this thing done and offered to Asimov's before the school year starts. I have, at last, a great deal of confidence in the voice of the narrator, which is giving the story a tone it hadn't previously possessed. My narrator, nicknamed Qwerty, is a young Mohawk woman; she has a directness and frankness in her narration, but she doesn't always say what she's thinking, which I like. I'm a little concerned about the length of this story, though most likely it will only be as long as the previous "Old Man" tale, "Clockworks." I may have to alter the pacing of the key plot points after this draft is done.

Moneyball, by Michael Lewis

I finished this highly enjoyable book a few days ago. The book is somewhat imbalanced structurally, with sometimes entire chapters devoted to individual ballplayers, but each section is enjoyable nevertheless. And it's always nice to hear someone rip into former FOX baseball commentator Joe Morgan. The book felt like it carried lessons for teachers, and I asked some of my fellow teachers whether the book's premises are applicable. At the very least, it made me think—in its ruminations on why some ballplayers succeed and some never make it to (or in) the majors—about how incoming students might be better evaluated for their chances at success, and how we might better those chances.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, by Janet Malcolm

Malcolm's journey into the dark heart of Plath scholarship is really an investigation of the ethics, artistry and compromises built into any biographical endeavor. Malcolm (over)states the case that nonfiction always comes from a place of narrative uncertainty, since there must be many versions of the "truth," whereas fiction possesses greater narrative certainty, since the writer knows what's what; given the longstanding existence of the unreliable narrator—often intentionally—it's odd that Malcolm would describe the contrast in such terms. But I take her point about nonfiction, that what it describes is just as much a product of authorial voice even though we don't like to view it that way. A terrific book, it has sent me back to Plath's later poems as well as to Hughes's Birthday Letters (which I own), the posthumous collection of previously unpublished poems directed (mostly) to his late wife.

Final report on Invisible Man. Plus: Several books at once!

2011-08-06T21:35:00.002-04:00

Ellison's Invisible Man is of that breed of novel that, driven by uncontained impulses, so surges and rages that, at its end, both narrative and reader continue to roil and be unsettled. To me, it brought to mind Moby Dick and Brothers Karamazov—though the Dostoevsky novel it almost certainly aims to recollect is Notes from Underground. Likely someone has assayed and essayed this topic already, but is the narrator who insists, at the outset, that he has no name and sets forth his travails in combating a white world meant to nod to Melville's Ishmael, who names himself from the first and then regales us with the story of a man, not himself, who combats a white whale? There's somebody's Ph.D. thesis . . .

The epilogue, written very much in Notes from Underground mode, disappointed me. It was the one part of the book where I felt Ellison flailing about in search of a rhetorical moment that, to my ears, didn't quite arrive. Otherwise, what a wildly inventive, and just plain wild, book, oddly paced (dwelling for a long time on events in close sequence, then jumping ahead, like a film moving between set pieces), inconsistent in tone, and providing a character whose speechifying voice bore no resemblance to his narrative voice (nor even, in some cases, his ideas, as the narrator's speeches always seemed to get away from him). Wonderfully enjoyable.

A Bradbury story

I reread, after a gap of probably 30 years, Ray Bradbury's "Jack-in-the-Box," from the October Country collection. The story came to mind because I'll be teaching Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle which, though possessed of an utterly different plot, also relies on a tight, insular point of view that locks the reader into a naïve perspective on events. (A little boy has been raised to believe that his father, also sometimes called God, who built a huge, elaborate house, has contained the world in this house and that, as his mother tells him, nothing lies beyond the surrounding trees but the terrible beasts who murdered God.) I didn't recall that Bradbury lets you in on the secret so early, but the story is still a bold little devil, great fun, and solidly written.

Reading now

I'm having a good time reading Beowulf (the Heaney translation), which I'll be teaching this year. Heaney's introduction has helped me think about poems to read (Heaney himself; Hopkins) to demonstrate how something of the Old English sound and poetic structure endured.

I'm also reading Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, the story of how using statistics to ask the right questions reshaped the drafting process for the Oakland A's. Lewis's writing is funny, sharp, and visual, giving us both images of and insights into the characters he presents. He also lets us read some of Bill James's writing. James, who instigated, even if he didn't found, the modern science of analyzing baseball statistics to discover truths (rather than support illusions), is an astoundingly good writer, so good that most writers would be wary of letting James eat up space in their own books, but Lewis humbly steps aside frequently so we hear James's oracular words.

I didn't intend to be reading three things at once, but Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman, about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, clutched at my collar from the first page. I read about Malcolm in . . . well, in something last week. Hm. Maybe an online article? Something about the problem of biography. This is what I get for not taking notes. In any case, I love the writing and I'm fascinated by the subject (both the human beings and the ethical issues involved in writing biography). Malcolm, too, is generous enough (and confident enough in her own strengths as a writer) to stand aside and let other smart writers speak in her book, notably Anne Stevenson, author of the controversial Plath biography Bitter Fame.

"Unearthed"

I did some writing yesterday. During a long drive today, I think I finally heard the narrator's voice. Once that's pinned down, the story will take off. (Wow, that line's a metaphorical mess.)

A story by Justin Torres

2011-07-31T16:43:00.002-04:00

I saw Torres's name in today's paper; a graduate of a local high school, he has his first book coming out, and he has a story in this past week's New Yorker. Given that I habitually avoid New Yorker fiction, with exception made for George Saunders, I had skipped his story.

"Reverting to a Wild State" is quite good, though I couldn't tell you what the title means. It's the story of a relationship that has ended, told in reverse chronological order. Having tried a reverse-order story myself a few years back, I know what a challenge it is, and I think Torres got right the way the story has to feel at both ends like you're at a key moment of discovery. He pulls this off largely by having the narrator back away from the story's conclusion, as if the past is too much to confront given where, now, he knows his story has headed. There's a bit about a golden feather found on a train platform that made the story, at the outset, seem like a fabulist's tale, but that tone was dropped and I don't think the feather—whatever it was doing there—paid off.

As usual, the New Yorker has run a story by someone with a book coming out; regardless of the quality, this always makes a story look, to me, like the tie-in action figure included in a Happy Meal. According to my local paper, the Houghton Mifflin publicity engine is firing on all cylinders: Torres has another story coming out in Harper's next month (congratulations) and will find himself mentioned in a host of high-profile magazines.

New submission

2011-07-26T23:03:00.002-04:00

"You Have No Idea What I've Forgot" has been submitted to the Normal Mailer Awards, run by the National Council of Teachers of English. It's open to high school teachers.

They'll announce the awards in September.

I'm pleased with my work on that story.

Next up: Finally getting back to "Unearthed," the next "Old Man" tale. I have to get it in good shape before school starts up again.

Some work to do

2011-07-21T17:45:00.002-04:00

An error that must be fixed (identified by a reader) in "You Have No Idea What I've Forgot" and some other areas to address for my own satisfaction when I take on another revision this evening. (I have to wait till the day's heat passes.)

How to Write a Sentence (and How to Read One), by Stanley Fish

I'm finding good ideas for my teaching, ways to simply launch students into sentence writing without having to think first about the terminology I'm teaching. However, the book so far (I'm halfway through) seems inconsistent, as Fish counsels that we avoid technical language while using technical language to describe what he's up to. There's also some sloppiness (his four-word-long "three word sentence" notably). Colleagues and I are reading this for the summer.

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison

I'd read the early chapter that Ellison published separately as "Battle Royale." The scene is altered slightly for the novel, but it's a poor fit. Yes, the subsequent scenes also have their surreal moments, as the poor narrator enters one Kafka-esque, dreamlike trap after another, but they don't match the battle royale scene in their wildness and weirdness. The book is pretty goofy, willing to spend enormous amounts of time—à la Don Quixote—fixated on somebody who isn't the protagonist, so there's a looseness to the narrative that I didn't expect. Enjoyable and strange so far.

Some recognition; some work

2011-07-19T20:04:00.002-04:00

"Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" (available at your immediate right) earned fourth place in the Asimov's Readers' Awards for novelettes. It also joins a host of other stories given honorable mention in Gardner Dozois' 28th annual "best of" collection.

Finished a quite good draft of "You Have No Idea What I've Forgot." A reader is giving it the once-over, and I'm sure I'll be beating it into shape a little more before submitting it to a contest in a week.

Faulkner! Faulkner!

2011-07-17T13:48:00.002-04:00

There are two kinds of Faulkner novel: accessible and not-so-accessible. Absalom, Absalom! seemed in the second category, slipping over into inaccessible or maybe just not-worth-the-effort. I set it down at one point, feeling rebuffed by the novel. But a brief step into a contemporary novel left me feeling as if I were experiencing a fictive world that lived only on the surface, and so I returned to Faulkner, though the text was challenging, because at least you're immersed in an actual experience that's working its way through your system like a virus, and that swims in your brain like a dream from which you can't quite awaken.

Is Faulkner joking? At two points, the characters Shreve and Quentin remark on how similar their stream-of-consciousness—styled talk sounds to the discourse of Quentin's father. Of course it sounds similar: No matter who is narrating, they slip into this Jungian overmind–sounding prose style built of clause piled on clause and page-long parenthetical digressions and grandiose meanderings. Everyone sounds that way once they get going. Surely Faulkner is making fun of the style . . . ?

The story plays out like a Greek tragedy, but in American terms. Not only is the Sutpen family cursed, they're cursed because of the South's great sin of slavery. Thomas Sutpen comes from rough beginnings, but the sight of a white man lying in a hammock on a plantation, and his treatment at the door of the big house by an old slave, gives him a sense of mission, a vision for his own life. He doesn't factor in the moral aspects: that such a life is built on injustices large and small. This blindness to the profound failings of Southern culture, a culture that must inevitably destroy itself, leads Sutpen, and all like him, on a quest for something they never should have wanted in the first place, and, like the rest of the South, Sutpen is tripped up by issues of race.

The novel suffers enormously due to Faulkner's complete inability to get inside the head of a black character, or to even see the black characters in anything more than symbolic terms. They are not people, but lessons or obstacles. Charles Bon, partly black, is something of an exception, but we never quite sympathize with Charles, whose role is more to create problems for others, and his death is not felt by any character nor, it would seem, by Faulkner. The book is notable for how often Faulkner employs "the n-word"; I can't recall any other book using it so persistently (when often he could say something else) or with such a sense of otherness inherent in the term. Sutpen's slaves are "wild" (they would have likely eaten the escaped architect of Sutpen's dream house if Sutpen hadn't stopped them); the black man who stops young Thomas Sutpen at the plantation's front door is, repeatedly, "a monkey." Black characters are sometimes nameless, always figures meant to disturb the white characters. It's a problem.

The book's structure is almost a visual trick. You can read much of a chapter and find very little happening, like a train you see in the distance that remains so far off, its size changes little even as it approaches. Then, abruptly, the train is on top of you. Faulkner suddenly accelerates the narrative, allowing half-stated ideas and vague images to finally take shape and find their proper words as a chapter winds up. It's a startling effect, and it happens at both the micro and macro level of the novel.

I read it over the course of several days and read nothing else most of the time. Even so, I completely lost track of a character that had been previously introduced, and so the ending left me confused until I looked up a summary of the novel online. I didn't think I'd been inattentive, but the character had been dropped, and the novel doesn't aim to reassure you of narrative integrity throughout, so it's up to the reader to hang on to some of the threads Faulkner sets aside.

Next up: Ellison's Invisible Man.

Also, I'm working to finish a revision of "You Have No Idea What I've Forgot" for a contest.

Unvanquished

2011-07-10T16:27:00.003-04:00

So tempted, I was, to set down Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! about 60 pages in. Repetitive, elliptical, circular (yeah, that's two shapes), and evidently never-to-veer from a structure in which ridiculously voluble people who don't talk like humans give us pieces of a backstory we're to slowly construct. It didn't feel worth the effort.

Then I picked up Carolyn Cooke's Daughters of the Revolution, which I'd seen praised. Yet the prose felt flat in the early going. The opening chapter, which probably started life as a short story, had a few shining moments, but several awfully cliché and awkward moments, and several elements that didn't feel credible. I don't know whether I'll continue reading it, but I now felt drawn back to the Faulkner because, look, it's an utterly immersive experience, a kind of vivid dreaming in which you know you're in a dream but you want to follow it through to the end. So now I'm on page 110 of Absalom, Absalom! It's crazy, it's wearying, but you know you're having an experience you're going to be glad you lived through.

Meanwhile, having finished an apparently unsuccessful draft of "I Tell You, They Have Not Died, But Live" and set it aside for a few days, I'm back to rewriting "You Have No Idea What I've Forgotten." The key, while reading Faulkner, is to avoid picking up any of his habits. Both of these have to be finished by the end of the month to be entered in contests. That gives me August to rewrite "Unearthed," which I think will be grand.

Highly recommended movie: Happy-Go-Lucky, one of Mike Leigh's cast-and-crew-constructed films. You leave it having felt you were in the company of actual people, not actors, which is a credit to everyone's talent as well as Leigh's way of building the movie out of improvisation followed by rehearsal. It's beautifully shot, too, and in a gorgeous, eye-popping palette that makes the real world (mostly) beautiful.

Line by line (Pt. 2)

2011-07-08T17:59:00.001-04:00

That was exhausting. And all for 2000 or so words. Who are these "novelist" people of whom I've heard tell?

Line by line (Pt. 1)

2011-07-07T11:44:00.004-04:00

Still moving some pieces around in my new fictional something-or-other, "I Tell You, They Have Not Died, But Live," but I've also got a full line-by-line stalk-through to do. Getting there. Just just sure where "there" is or what the weather is like.

Finished The Man of Bronze. It's a good thing I read it after fully plotting out and quasi-drafting "Unearthed," because I have several elements that touch on the original novel, and if I'd read the novel first, I wouldn't have put them in. Instead of direct references, we've got synchronicity.

Read some bound issues of the late Dwayne McDuffie's Justice League of America (The Injustice League). What makes the story stand out is the small stuff: clever exchanges between the characters that give you insight into motivation; sharp dialogue that reflects intelligence on the part of (some of) the villains and heroes alike. McDuffie was one of the few black writers in comicdom. You can tell when he's around. During his run on the Fantastic Four, the Black Panther took control of the team for awhile. Here, Green Lantern John Stewart, who is black, takes charge while Hal Jordan is away; Black Lightning plays a major role; other black characters show up; and, most tellingly, more than one discussions touches, comfortably, on issues of race. Still waiting for McDuffie's Static Shock to come for me from the library.

Trying Twitter

2011-07-03T13:23:00.001-04:00

I know, I know . . .

But I have some ideas in mind for it. My user name is wmpreston.

Aristotle, for starters

2011-07-02T17:33:00.002-04:00

That Aristotle. I'm reading his Poetics. Quite entertaining. His genius lies, even when he's clearly pulling something out of his ear and making an unsupported opinion sound like a fact, in categorizing everything, which at least has the effect of making you look at something in terms of its parts rather than its entirety. It's too bad his only points of reference are prior to the fourth century BCE; this tends to limit you when every time you want to give an example, you say, "Let's consider the Odyssey . . . " I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower

With such a cool name, you'd better not be just a public relations invention! He's not. I've only read the first story in this collection, "The Brown Coast," but it's a winner. Great writing, witty observations, and one of those situations that does what Aristotle says tragedy should do, evoke pity (for the character) and fear (that this could happen to you). A guy who's been thrown out by his wife is given by his uncle a make-work task of fixing up a run-down house that's been in his family but that no one has taken care of for years. What he thinks will be his salvation, the presence of the ocean, is undone by the sheer ugliness and foulness of the coast, but still he finds moments—and strange creatures, human and otherwise—full of grace . . . and awfulness.

Still reading Lester Dent's The Man of Bronze, the initial Doc Savage story. I'd thought Dent's personal history as a traveler and kind-of adventurer would intimidate me into feeling utterly inadequate in my descriptions of what befalls "The Old Man," my homage character. However, please note my surprise. Dent does pepper things with the occasional detail that gives you the vague sense he knows what he's talking about, but much more often, the narrative flails about so spastically, it's evident that verisimilitude is the last thing on his mind. (Near as I can tell, in the last scene everybody on Doc's plane was shooting at someone on the beach—while they were still inside the plane. [Dent doesn't seem to have noticed.] Only later did they climb out and, obviously foreseeing the next scene, in which a plane would dive at them, set up a machine-gun on one wing.) Anyway, I now feel like any realism I've brought to these stories, including in the action scenes, stands up far better than I'd first thought.

I'm now working on three stories somewhat simultaneously. (I'm increasingly inattentive.) Two of them I hope to enter in contests. I think they all sound quite different, but I could be wrong. Much to my surprise, two have ended up as first-person pieces (though they didn't start that way). It's good to have deadlines (end of July).

The executives

2011-06-29T18:56:00.002-04:00

Reading Marjorie Garber's The Use and Abuse of Literature, I came upon her brief discussion, in her introduction, of Auden's poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" (1939). Garber uses the "Poetry makes nothing happen" as part of her discussion about whether literature is or should be "useful"—and here she's addressing it through Auden and Yeats, both of whom had political, social and moral impulses guiding their work. I looked up the Auden poem in my copy of his Selected Poems:

. . . Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its saying where executives

Would never want to tamper . . .

That line about "executives" rang a bell. I half-remembered a line and thought it came from a poem by Robert Bly. I have a dozen or so of his poems in a hip 1975 collection of poems, Contemporary American Poetry, edited by A. Poulin (and owned previously by my former sister-in-law). Didn't find it there, but dug out the line using Google (I must have the poem in some other collection). Here's the complete poem:

Romans Angry About the Inner World

What shall the world do with its children?

There are lives the executives

Know nothing of:

A leaping of the body,

The body rolling—I have felt it—

And we float

Joyfully toward the dark places.

But the executioners

Move toward Drusia. They tie her legs

On the iron horse. “Here is a woman

Who has seen our Mother

In the other world.” Next they warm

The hooks. The two Romans had put their trust

In the outer world. Irons glowed

Like teeth. They wanted her

To assure them. She refused. Finally

They took burning

Pine sticks, and pushed them

Into her sides. Her breath rose

And she died. The executioners

Rolled her off onto the ground.

A light snow began to fall from the clear sky

And covered the mangled body.

And the executives, astonished, withdrew.

The inner world is a thorn

In the ear of a tiny beast!

The fingers of the executive are too thick

To pull it out.

It is a jagged stone

Flying toward us out of the darkness.

I'd like to ask Robert Bly: Did you have that line about "executives" from Auden in mind when you wrote this?

In which I talk only about The Quantum Thief

2011-06-27T18:02:00.003-04:00

I finished Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief which was, I must agree, an impressive debut. For a string theorist, he writes well. (Joke. I have a daughter who's a physicist.) As other reviewers noted (I only read them after reading the novel), the book is rather laden with invented jargon, especially in the early going, which makes following the details quite a bit of work. Sometimes, you know what he means; sometimes, I'm convinced even he doesn't know what he means; I do think he's sometimes just having fun with us. (Really, she has a thermonuclear reactor in her hip?) I was unsure whether to take anachronistic phrasings (a computer-ship comments, "You go, girl!") as a sign that the author was being intentionally goofy or just careless. That character of the ship is perhaps too much of a common device, and it plays exactly the expected role once it's clear what that is. Therefore, much of the jargon and quasi-science serves to distract you from the more ordinary parts of the plot, though the plot as a whole is clever and interesting. And there are several intentionally silly moments—two otherworldly gamers dressed as Batman and Robin; the main character playing a part in a dance-death that spells out "memento mori"—along with sly genre references that let us know Rajaniemi is in on the joke.

Had I known it was part of a trilogy, I wouldn't have picked it up; I though I was signing on for a single book of not-extraordinary length. A lot gets resolved—the book mostly stands on its own—so I don't feel like I have to know "what's next." And it's not as if the characters made me want to stick around. The one interesting character, though, may be the subject of the next novel, if The Fractal Prince means who I think it does.

Clearly, too many books at once.

2011-06-21T15:30:00.002-04:00

Details on each book are available on my Shelfari shelf, at right.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

I have about 80 pages left, but the pace has slowed considerably. Maybe it's me, but I think it's the book's structure, as Marable has lapsed into a day-to-day recounting rather than providing overviews. Is all of this necessary? Not by my lights. My impression is that he's breaking the story down this way because he's got Malcolm's diaries to rely on, as well as news accounts (during Malcolm's final journey to Africa and the Near East).

More Jim Shepard

Read another story, "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You," from the collection You Think That's Bad. Again, you see in the details about four scientists studying the nature of avalanches in the Swiss Alps Shepard's research-backed approach to these stories, and in this one, I think he gets the balance right, with a moving story about the protagonist's loss of his brother in an avalanche years before and his reconnection with a young woman they both loved. Everything's just right until the end . . . or including the end, depending on how you look at it. The ending fits the story perfectly, but it's the same ending (jumping ahead in time to see his looming fate) Shepard employs in another story in the collection (a device also used in his previous collection), so, having read those other stories, the conclusion feels like an easy stunt. Too bad.

The Land at the End of the World, by António Lobo Antunes

I tried. Some beautiful writing; gorgeously long sentences. Nothing happening in the first chapter, however. I didn't have the energy.

The Man of Bronze

Till now, I've avoided rereading any Doc Savage adventures because I didn't want them influencing my homage to the character in my "Old Man" stories. I needn't have worried, at least not where this first Doc novel is concerned. Everyone runs around in a rather silly way; even in the opening scenes, the thing is borderline incoherent, the logic of how one scene connects to another absent as the narrative is obviously being constructed on the fly. As a figure, Doc is interesting—or rather Doc's abilities propel the story forward. Doc himself has no consistent voice. Dent seems unfamiliar with the slang of his own era, as Monk talks like someone trying out expressions. (Rudolph Fischer captures New York black slang beautifully in his stories, by contrast.) I've lost count of how many times Dent has referred to Ham as "waspish." Nearly every time the character's name appears, so does the adjective. Awful. The constant appearance of cool inventions and the kind of falling-down-the-stairs progress of the story do make it entertaining.

The Quantum Thief

This is one of those SF books in which you just have to keep up with the terms-for-things-that-don't-exist, as the narrator avoids info-dumping. I think I'm getting a fair amount of it, but, really, I'm not understanding some key concepts. I haven't done adequate reading in those futures in which everyone is uploaded or downloaded or whatever. It's fairly short, and it won a lot of praise, so we'll see how it goes. I'm about 30 pages in.

Barnacle Love

I can't decide about this book, though I'm halfway through. Each chapter takes place in a discrete time of the main character's life: he's a Portuguese sailor who was lost at sea, landed in Newfoundland, and stayed, partly by his own wish and partly by the machinations of others (though I found confusing exactly why he's such a victim). There's a gap between each section that's jarring; the thing needs more contiguousness, I think. After the last jump, I felt burdened by knowing I'd have to labor to fill in the space again, and I'm not sure I care enough to do so.

And as for writing . . .

I've gotten back to "Unearthed," now from the point of view of the character Qwerty. I haven't quite caught her voice yet, but it'll come. Switching to first person will allow me to have her think things that she won't have to reveal to "the Old Man" (in this story known as "Little Boss"), and I can maintain that narrative distance from him that's necessary to keeping him enigmatic, even as we see more of his humanity this time.

What is this thing?

2011-06-15T18:58:00.003-04:00

Not sure what I'm writing. It's called, at present, "I Tell You, They Have Not Died, But Live." The piece that developed out of some story notes I dictated, it may be part of a larger project entitled Only Child. I'm looking to see whether any existing (draft) stories, such as my oldie "When We Have Our Mansions in Paradise," might be a part of the larger scheme.

"Unearthed," meanwhile, sits untouched lo these many months. I'll get back to it once I've polished "I Tell You."

A few weeks ago, I sent "My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth" to Stone Canoe, run out of Syracuse University. We'll see what they think.

In the Mail

Arriving in the mail today were George W.S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context (frequently mentioned last year everywhere I turned, including by writer Mark Pontin) and short story writer Christine Sneed's collection Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry (recommended by my friend—and "Old Man" fan—Scott Johnson). Additionally, under separate cover from the folks at Radio Archives, came (on the same day!) the first volume of the Doc Savage reprint/reproduction magazine, containing the novels The Man of Bronze and The Land of Terror. I've avoided reading any Doc Savage stories so as to keep my "Old Man" character distinct, but everything I have in mind for him now is quite clearly my own invention, so I think I'm comfortable now reading (or rereading) one of the original stories.

Still to come in the mail: In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems 1955–2007, by X.J. Kennedy. (Note my proper use of the en-dash.)

Reading

Still reading the Malcolm X biography. As he heads towards his assassination with every action he takes, my frustration builds: I want to catch his attention from out here in the future and warn him away from the coming bullets. But he seems to know what the future holds, and still he grips the wheel.

Reading some other things, too, but enough for now.

Recently: Mostly Malcolm

2011-06-02T22:11:00.002-04:00

Much of my reading recently has been in the late Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention; I'm coming up on halfway through. The book moved me to look at some videos of Malcolm online. The man impresses. How is it that I've come to discover him so late? My education—what was provided to me and what I've sought out—has clearly been lacking. And not only should we still mourn the loss of the man, we should also mourn the loss of the kind of intelligent public discourse he exemplified when at his finest.

Marable's book is quite good, though I have to triangulate more by reading the Autobiography and some more texts about the era.

Schmitz, two stories.

I read two James Schmitz science fiction stories, "The Witches of Karres" and "Novice," the latter featuring Telzey, a young girl of many gifts who appears in other Schmitz stories. Schmitz's stories are fun, accessible for young people yet written cleverly enough for adults. "Novice" recounts how Telzey's manipulative aunt schemes to take away the girl's sentient, endangered cat for government purposes. Telzey and the cat team up to undermine the plot and change the balance of power on this alien planet. "The Witches of Karres," which was later expanded, jumps through its plot hoops rather quickly, and the descriptions are so thin, you never get a strong sense of most of the settings. A ship's captain ends up taking possession of three young girls, each of whom has special powers, with the aim of returning these former slaves to their home planet. He's a paper-thin creation of utterly unclear motivations, but the mischievous girls bring life to the story, and their home planet introduces some nice twists to the tale.

Shepard and Atkinson again

2011-05-22T18:11:00.002-04:00

"Happy with Crocodiles," Jim Shepard

I enjoyed this one quite a bit, a tale of an American soldier heading into certain doom against the Japanese while he replays in his head the confusing circumstances of his girlfriend situation back home. The title is a metaphor for "thick with danger" or "surrounded by enemies," which he is on the battlefront and homefront. The ending, with its projection into a terrible future, leaves you unsettled and trapped.

Case Histories, Kate Atkinson

Just brilliant. Some complaints surfaced late in the book, as chapters flipped back in time to gather events from different perspectives, but each time I felt this device slowed things down, I saw how necessary it was to the narrative's secret progress, so that the final chapters, hurling us back to the beginning of the book, become a perfect complement as well as key to unlocking the last mysteries. A complexly organized novel, written in striking prose that could be laugh-out-loud funny, simply smart, wonderfully off-kilter (as characters' attentions wander) or unbearably sad from moment to moment. What a terrific writer. I must read more of her work.

More Shepard; new novel reading

2011-05-20T12:50:00.003-04:00

In the midst of various forays into fiction writing, I've also started work on a play. At this point, I'm just trying to see whether I can pull off the particular conceit that drives the narrative. It's tricky. More on this eventually.

More from You Think That's Bad, Jim Shepard

The strength and potential weakness of Shepard's fiction—in his most recent two collections, at least—is the depth of his research. The stories work when the research add illuminating details or enriches something deeper about the story; the stories don't work when the research overwhelms or unbalances the narrative. "In Cretaceous Seas" starts with a heap of information about Cretaceous critters; Shepard's use of language makes the details exciting, makes the lost era live. But after that first page, the four-page tale, a contemporary story of a sad sack of a man, loosens its narrative grip, and the opening never comes back to us as a necessary piece. "The Track of the Assassins" is much better, but the tale of a young English woman's journey to find the ancient cult (while simultaneously reflecting on the catastrophe that is her broken family) doesn't end satisfactorily, never paying off on the promise of all the historical and geographical detail that pushes the tale forward. In addition, whatever connection Shepard was after between the two narrative strands was lost on me.

Case Histories, Kate Atkinson

I believe I ordered this book from the library based on a reference somewhere to the author's talent. I had no idea what kind of book it was, and even now, I don't know where it's heading. It starts off (a bit languidly) as a family drama, but once the first chapter ends, you know that's not what you're dealing with. With each chapter, your sense of the book's intent shifts, as tragedy piles on tragedy. And then a detective is introduced, though so casually, it seems as if he's just another domino in the sequence. Apparently, the novel is "a mystery" (one in a series), and the novelist is renowned for her mystery novels, but this doesn't read like a mystery; not only is the book literary and finely constructed, it doesn't tip its hand to indicate that the author is working within a particular genre. So far, it's immensely enjoyable, and contains of the saddest passages I've ever encountered.

Not exactly writing; plus, Jim Shepard's latest

2011-05-14T22:43:00.002-04:00

I've long noticed that, when teaching, or simply conversing, I make sharper connections, better metaphors, and more interestingly phrased statements than I do on the first drafts of my fiction. There's something about working with that speed, with an audience, or bouncing off somebody else, that brings out better rhetoric and greater focus. As a consequence, I've considered writing my first draft orally, recording them onto the computer and then typing (and revising) from that. Today I got to try that with a larger story idea (or set of ill-formed ideas, really) that I've been batting around. I think it went well. We'll see whether this leads to something.

"Minotaur," Jim Shepard (from You Think That's Bad)

The cover of Shepard's latest collection of stories features a photo of a contortionist doubled over backwards so that, it must be said, his head is only microns away from being shoved up his butt. It got me to laugh, anyway. I'd thought of ordering this collection, but it was at the library today, so it came home with me. The first story concerns a man who's spent years working in black ops for the military; this night, he reconnects with a colleague who went even deeper underground three years ago. Oh, how he's missed this man. And it's a connection that the protagonist's wife doesn't understand and that she comes to realize is perhaps more significant than the connection she has to her husband. Like the fabled minotaur—and like the mysterious military program of the same name—these relationships involve labyrinths and monsters who stumble about in the dark. Great little tale.

Delany. Thon. Together for the first time anywhere.

2011-05-13T22:00:00.002-04:00

"Aye, and Gomorrah . . . " and "Cage of Brass," Samuel R. Delany (from Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories)

I've previously read a few stories from this collection (which I think I picked up at a library book sale). "Aye, and Gomorrah . . . " is one of those I've read before. It's a tale of spacers and the people who love them. Really. "Spacers" are astronauts; given the radiation and other rigors of space travel, they've all been neutered (and they have other oddities about them from birth which make them prime candidates); some people, "frelks," find themselves profoundly attracted to spacers. Rather than simply making the attraction like that someone might have for a eunuch, Delany concocts and wonderfully goofy psychiatric explanation having something to do with freefall. The story follows one spacer in a small group of them bouncing from planet to space and tasting the joys of Earth in their unique, alienated way. One particular encounter with a woman is described. It's a smart story that demonstrates one thing Delany did well even in that novel of his that I thought so dreadful (Nova): he articulates into being another world. "Cage of Brass" achieves this as well, though entirely through dialogue. Our "hero," Jason Cage (a comic-bookish name, unfortunately), has been dumped into a self-regulating prison ("Brass") on another world. In this prison, you stand in total darkness, largely submerged in a gel that tends to your body, leaving your tiny cell one hour a day to exercise in yet another dark space. But Cage is, fortuitously, able to talk to two nearby cells, and the men share their stories, the other two men briefly painting their worlds, Cage detailing the architectural wonders of Earth. It's a smart tale that relies on Cage's past to make sense of the present.

"Girls in the Grass," Melanie Rae Thon (from Girls in the Grass)

Sharply observed first-person tale of ninth-grade girls taking risks, playing Truth or Dare, experimenting with themselves and each other. Alcohol, sex and pills come one after the other in quick succession (each leading to the other, as the drinking grants them permission for sex and the next day's discomforts lead to the protagonist filching pills that do God-knows-what for her mother). It's one of those modern stories that doesn't have an ending that ties up dramatically; rather, it ties up rhetorically, which a biting final image. Still, it's satisfying and well told.

Blogger was down . . .

2011-05-13T16:52:00.002-04:00

. . . so I didn't get to post yesterday about Samuel R. Delany. Later tonight, I'll post about both him and Melanie Rae Thon.

Another world

2011-05-11T20:30:00.000-04:00

Today's short fiction review:

"Blue Light in the Sky" and "The Bizarre Wooden Building," Can Xue (from Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories)

This book's presence in my collection is the result of shelf-surfing at the former 2nd Story Bookstore, now known as 2nd Story, the owner now "out of the book business" and doing well selling coffees, sandwiches and soups (and a few literary magazines). The story never carried much stock, but what they carried was interesting, not Barnes & Noble fare (and a few times I ordered books from them just to give them my business). This book would never have appeared on the racks at a giant chain.

Xue's stories connect with readers in a way Jung would appreciate: her worlds are dreamy (or actual dreams), slippery, uncertain, hostile. "Blue Light in the Sky" concerns a girl who cuts her foot, an event that leads her unpleasant older sister, who tells her she'll likely die of tetanus, to construct a plot to take the narrator's prized (and stolen?) set of woodblocks. What's dream and what's not is unclear for much of the story, and by the end this somehow works. The work clearly owes much to Kafka. "The Bizarre Wooden Building" is even more labyrinthine, with a less solid set of relationships and images that provide the creeping sense that the author is up to something even more parabolic or allegorical, though I'm at a loss to say more than that about the meaning. A man marvels at a very tall building made of horizontal wooden pieces; he goes upstairs to find a man, huddled in a quilt against the cold, seemingly expecting him. An arrogant boy shows up who challenges our narrator and presents a confounding view of how to interact with the man of the place: by merely thinking of stories from the outer world, which he collects on pieces of paper kept stuffed in his pockets. Our protagonist is finally chased from the place, and looking back from the street he finds the upper floors obscured by mist.

Xue's writing is simple and compelling, the stories unsettled and unsettling.

What people? White people.

2011-05-10T18:34:00.003-04:00

Today's short fiction review is of . . .

"Nativity, Caucasian," Allan Gurganus (from White People)

My first exposure to Gurganus came via the radio program Selected Shorts, which broadcast a reading of his story "The Doctor." (I think that's the title.) While the story was simultaneously obvious and unlikely, I appreciated the way the tale was told and the clarity of vision. Some years later, I ordered this collection. There's not much to "Nativity, Caucasian." It's the story of the narrator's birth, taking place in the middle of a contract bridge party. The host's Pekingese is doused with birthwaters, dishes and women fall to the floor, ambulance and fire truck collide en route, and two doctors knowing nothing of childbirth arrive late to the scene from the nearby golfcourse and attempt to attend to the wrong (albeit unconscious) woman. It's an amusing set-piece, finely told, and a record of a people and time.

Mansfield Monday

2011-05-09T19:45:00.002-04:00

All I have is a short story review:

"The Woman at the Store," Katherine Mansfield (from Stories)

As "The Garden-Party" has long been a favorite story of mine—for its subtlety, power of observation, and moral irony—I bought this book at a library sale a year or two back, but I haven't probed it, near as I can remember. This story lacks the elusiveness of "The Garden-Party" and is told in a more straightforward style, with a more formal resolution. The tale involves three people, at least two of them siblings (the female narrator one of the siblings) riding on horseback through a hot and barren region. They stop at the store Jim has mentioned, Jo picturing a lonely beauty of a woman waiting there, per Jim's description. The woman is nothing like her description, the geography and loneliness having taken their toll, as her husband has gone off shearing for a month—a story everyone doubts. There's a child drawing pictures she shouldn't, and Jo making romantic moves. And the ending, with a drawing and its implication of violence, mirrors the "slate" sky of the story's first paragraph and the red-flecked (as if with blood) kerchief of Jo one paragraph later. A fun story, solidly told, with haunting moments and suggestions.

Today's short fiction review

2011-05-08T20:26:00.005-04:00

I've got to get back to regularly reading short fiction. Forthwith (Am I using that word correctly? I've never used it before . . . ) I'll read at least one short story a day, mostly from collections I have at hand but have never finished reading.

"Unterseaboat Doktor," Ray Bradbury (from Quicker Than the Eye)

I've read a few stories from this collection, which was a gift. Starting in perhaps ninth grade, I was a huge Bradbury fan, reading everything he'd done. Even by the end of the '70s, however, the downward shift in the quality of his writing (which varied wildly in any case) was evident. I've long said the Bradbury learned the wrong lessons about his work as he went along. His dialogue was never strong, but, perversely, it came to predominate, and eventually most all of his characters sounded like him: breathless, bombastic, rich in not-terribly helpful allusions, and in love with their own voices. And the spare, Hemingway-influenced prose that shaped some of his finest work either took on that same voice (first person) or felt forced. Those problems mar this story, which could have been fun and smart, but which falls apart at every potentially interesting moment, Bradbury letting voluble chatter stand in for a telling description or two. The story is about a former U-boat captain who becomes a therapist; his office contains a periscope that shows . . . I'm not sure. Everyone's unconscious gunk? His own? Bradbury just gives a heaping list and fails to explore its significance. The narrator is a patient who sees this secret periscope and spills the beans to others, causing some kind of unclear crisis. And throughout, I kept wondering why the doctor only uses the German term for "under" but not for the rest of a submarine: Unterseeboot rather than Unterseaboat.

"The Ugliest House in the World," Peter Ho Davies (from the collection of the same name)

I've read this at least three times over the years (first in an annual "best of" collection which led me to seek out the writer; at least once since purchasing the book; now again) but the story always drops from my brain. That's good, since it always surprises and impresses me. (It's not good because of what it says about my brain; I have no recollection of whether I've read other stories in this collection.) The story concerns a young English doctor whose father has returned to the place of his origins, in Wales, moving into a somewhat dilapidated place next door to the "ugliest house" of the title. In London, the doctor doesn't fit in because everyone picks on him for being Welsh, and in Wales he doesn't fit because he's so emotionally remote; until the dramatic pivot around which the story turns, his father, contrarily, does fit in, in his odd way. The story starts funny. Later, it's quite sad and moving. Fine work.

Talking vs. writing; recent reading

2011-05-07T16:32:00.004-04:00

Writing as a physical act—by which I mean typing—feels uninviting to me right now. Not sure why. If I had the place to myself, I'd try composing by recording myself, see if that got me somewhere.

I'm perhaps coming to associate typing with all of the tasks I do for work (I even type the comments for major student papers); speech, however, is where I find myself being most convincing. In class, I can spontaneously ramp up the level of rhetoric with such ease, typing/writing consequently feels like it taps a duller part of my brain.

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, by Barry Deutsch

A delightful and clever graphic novel that ends too soon. Mirka's an Orthodox Jewish girl from a small village, and she wants to fight a dragon. Instead, she encounters a witch, a curse, and a troll. (I was disappointed that the dragon never entered the narrative.) Yiddish words abound (and are defined in footnotes), and the book is saturated with the culture of a particular (albeit indefinite) time and place that's tied with the plot. The visuals are terrific, very much in comic book mode but inventive nonetheless, with a clean, sharp style. Excellent.

Incognegro, by Mat Johnson

Speaking of graphic novels: Incognegro is a great story from the era of the Harlem Renaissance and Jim Crow. The protagonist, a black man pale enough to pass (like the author), has made a career of covertly reporting on Southern lynchings for his New York newspaper, but he'd like to retire his "Incognegro" byline and get some personal recognition for his work. One last story that he must cover—for personal reasons—comes his way, and he heads southward again with a naive friend in tow. There's humor, violence, fear, suspense, mystery and sharp observations about the era. Great, gripping book with fine artwork.

Pym, by Mat Johnson

And as long as I'm on the subject of Mat Johnson: Pym is among the strangest novels I've read, largely because the type of book it is, exactly what kind of story it's telling, shifts from chapter to chapter. This, like everything else int he work, is intended as a nod toward Poe's original story, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Johnson takes the herky-jerky, abruptly concluded and casually bigoted tale and flips it, repeatedly, as he dissects race relations, blackness, whiteness, politics, genocide, junk food, kitsch (nice to see someone so directly take a whack at what exactly is so wrong with Thomas Kinkade) and the age-old question of why six black people on a boat just can't get along. Some lines are laugh-out-loud funny, and the plot is increasingly goofy and harrowing at the same time. An enjoyable work that doesn't quite exceed the sum of its parts (I wasn't surprised to see Johnson say in his acknowledgements that he'd considered abandoning the book several years into it), Pym nevertheless has plenty of fine moments and twists to remember.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, by David Lipsky

I love Wallace's essay on David Lynch, but his fiction puts me off and other essays of his bog down for me. The late writer has been in the news recently because his editor put together an unfinished novel of Wallace's—an idea that seems, to me, lacking in merit. In addition, Jonathan Franzen's essay in a recent New Yorker dealt with Wallace (and Robinson Crusoe and rarely seen birds), so Wallace is in the air, which led to begin reading a road trip/interview book about a writer I don't typically enjoy reading. (I also watched on youtube Wallace's last appearance on the Charlie Rose show; I liked it, though the voice of that man doesn't seem like the voice of the interviewee in this book, leading one to ask which pose is closer to the actual person.) I got about a third of the way into the book before feeling I'd taken from it much of what it would likely offer in its remaining two thirds. Problematizing the text was that, though the author used it as the basis of an old article for Rolling Stone, this raw version is peppered throughout with references to Wallace's suicide, so that every grim moment becomes an omen. We know Wallace lost his struggle with depression, and hearing him in this book seems less a glimpse of a man burning brightly than a man inhabiting the valley of the shadow.

All Quiet on the Orient Express, by Magnus Mills

I loved two other Mills novels; Explorers of the New Century is shockingly good (and good 'n' shocking) and Three to See the King is stunningly strange. Like those novels, this one is parabolically told, the narrator's flat affect unable to conceal with the world is somehow bent even more than usual. The title doesn't do much—I get it, but it's not particularly clever—and the devices by which the story proceeds are somewhat too familiar by this point (though this is his second novel, after The Restraint of Beasts; I'm not reading his work in sequence), and it's somewhat less successful because, unlike the others I read, it doesn't take you to a new world. Instead, it takes you to rural England, which already seems creepy if you've watched the old TV show The Avengers or seen any British horror from the 20th century. We know what these people are capable of, we know little towns have secrets, we know the traps in place for a man alone. Mills's contribution to this narrative of British complicity and passivity (these seem to be the traits he's attacking) is different, though: the thing that entices our traveler from elsewhere to stay is useful work accomplished with some handiness. Planning only a holiday, he instead becomes, through his unpaid (or is it?) labor, integral to the town and a participant in an economy of clutching dependence. Enjoyable and disturbing.

Old Man image

2011-04-30T13:03:00.002-04:00

Here, from the Russian magazine ESLI, is the image that illustrated my "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down." It illustrates the climactic scene, with my protagonist, pursued by soldiers, hurtling up through the Arctic ice atop a high-powered snowmobile.

I'd write the name of the artist, but it's in Cyrillic.

Some books: reading and ordering

2011-04-16T16:35:00.002-04:00

Reading

This morning, I read parts of two books: The Girl in the Song: The True Stories Behind 50 Rock Classics (Michael Heatley & Frank Hopkinson) and More Prefaces to Shakespeare (Harley Granville-Barker).

Granville-Barker was an actor, playwright, director and critic who began writing prefaces to Shakespeare's plays back in the '20s. He addresses issues of the text, casting, performance and directorial decisions in these prefaces, which, while academic, possess a lively tone that's smartly conversational. When explaining what one must cut from the text of Macbeth, he writes, "Hecate may be ruled out with hardly a second thought. If this be not true Middleton [the playwright who revised Macbeth], it is at least true twaddle, and Shakespeare—though he had his lapses—was not in a twaddling mood when he wrote Macbeth."

What The Girl in the Song lacks is a CD, or some sort of implanted device that would allow you to hear each song as you read about it. The premise is simple: What female (in same cases, girls rather than women) inspired such-and-such pop/rock song? Each article is two or three pages; there are pictures aplenty; the tone is simultaneously gossipy and circumspect, treating writers and subjects alike with kindness even while giving us the lowdown on sometimes notorious events.

Who knew there was an actual "girl from Ipanema"?

Ordering

This happens regularly: I pick up at the library a book I've ordered some weeks before, having no idea what prompted the order. (Sometimes it's one story or essay in a collection, or one song on a CD.) To avoid this, I'm going to keep track of the originating events.

The New York Times review of David Foster Wallace's posthumously published The Pale King includes this passage: "I have to say, I’m with Dad here: the world of analytical philosophy appears to me as so much bean-counting — or, rather, enumeration of the ways in which beans might be counted. Literary types tend to be drawn more to the poetic visions of a Heidegger or a Blanchot than to the logical conundrums of a Russell or an Ayer," leading me to ask, "Blanchot?" My public library has one book on Blanchot—Foucault, Blanchot—which seems to be authorless, so I don't know whether it's an analysis of those two philosophers or writings by them or both.

I also ordered a Magnus Mills novel, All Quiet on the Orient Express. I love the two Mills novels I've read, Three to See the King and Explorers of the New Century. The NYT review of the Wallace novel was by Tom McCarthy, who, his byline explains, is the author of the new novel C. I'd seen a previous McCarthy novel on the shelf at the library and wondered whether he was the same Tom McCarthy who wrote and director The Station Agent (one of my favorite films) and The Visitor. Nope. Not the same. A review of one of McCarthy's novels left me a bit cold, but put me in mind of the ever-reliable Mills, thus leading to my ordering another of his works.

Aren't you glad you asked?

Swamped, but I sent something out

2011-03-28T21:49:00.002-04:00

Schoolwork is keeping me busy right now. I started to read Who Fears Death, by Nndedi Okorafor—a fantasy that takes place in the shadow of African ethnic violence—but I haven't gotten very far, and read none of it today. So far, it's quite good.

On Fictionwise, the current Analog and Asimov's sit atop the best-seller list (I wonder how many they sell). Perusing the rest of the list, I saw another Dell Magazines digest, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. I linked to the mag out of curiosity, then realized it might be the perfect place for "My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth," a piece I've tried for years to place in mainstream literary journals without success. Last year, I streamlined the tale quite a bit, removing one of its voices. Yesterday, I sent the story electronically to EQMM. I hope they like it. I'm even thinking that the main character, a mildly retarded man, living in a group home, who needs to solve a mystery, might be a character I could employ again in a similar way. We'll see.

In addition to friendly notes I've received about my latest story, Andrew Salmon has posted a kind review of "Clockworks" at All Pulp: here. Additionally, over at the Asimov's forum, John Rogers has judged "Clockworks" to be his tale of choice in the April/May issue. He writes:

Second Old Man entry - though here he's simply the man, the big man or the man himself. Not the old man "just yet." He's a sort of complex, gray-shaded Doc Savage. A Doc Savage for grown-ups. For those who need to peer deeper into the abyss.

Unusually layered powerhouse of a story - employing both the soft strokes of an old timey SF homage and the hard lines of a serious exploration into who and what people are - focusing on the emotional, perhaps even - given things - spiritual, journey of a first-person archvillain who has undergone an apparent rehabilitation via involuntary surgery at the hands of the man himself.

Once again we are faced with the disturbing problem of the man's methods. From one standpoint, he is close to as savage (so to speak) a criminal as the narrator - the former Doctor Blacklight. An officious, almost high-handed - albeit graced with commanding presence and sureness of mission - actor - taking criminals into personal custody and "fixing" them - without state sanction. That's a frightening concept for a mature reader. A little boy reading a gee-whiz pulp in the sixties will nod in delight at the idea. That same reader reading that same passage at 50 in 2011 shudders in apprehension. For - truly - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The God or Jesus connection is stronger here than in the first story. The man's group seems even more disciplish. His followers are dedicated to "The Work." They trust the big man. "Whatever he says to do, it's going to be right." He's seen as a sort of distilled ultra-man - Man as he shouldhave been (before the Fall?) - or, as Birdy puts it, "the only fully intact human I've ever met." Not perfect - but the perfect man.

Is he more than that? Something divine? Just a brilliant, genetically-blessed megalomaniac? A charismatic supernut? A savior? Who can say?

And the man's methods seem even more Christlike - repairing the wayward - giving them "choice" - not changing who they are, but altering their "moral capacity" - making it "possible for [them] to be good." But not interfering in the ways of kings.

One wonders just what "obscure texts" the man relies on to take these actions, make these "repairs."

The clockwork theme of the tale resonates. Delicate machinery - be it a clock, a mind, an interdimensional death portal, can both be repaired and, as the case may be, disrupted (with sufficient courage and sacrifice). They are only as strong or as broken as their weakest spring, their loosest dial.

The man repairs the clockwork of the protagonist's mind, the protagonist halts the deadly clockwork of the apparatus. And so on.

The little boy in me loved the arctic base, the interdimensional rift, the time machine and Hopi village stuff. The grown-up loved everything else.

Truly masterful work.

POV, of course

2011-03-18T19:47:00.002-04:00

Naturally, looking at the ragged draft of "Unearthed," the first thing that seems wrong is the point of view. It's got to pull back more. My tendency is still to ride hard on that limited-omniscient train, sitting on the shoulder of my protagonist. If I'm going to do that, I might as well write in a first-person perspective. So, this revision will entail, among other things, a stronger, more omniscient voice.

I toyed with the possibility of allowing my POV to drift into others' thoughts, including that of "the Old Man," but on further reflection I think that level of intimacy with the "hero" of these stories needs to wait for the final chapter, "Once More." At that point, it'll make sense.

I've read some stories from the Rudolph Fischer collection (see Shelfari's "shelf" to the right); both funny and tragic, the stories excel at capturing voices, and they let us in on the racial hierarchy that exists with black Harlem at the time of its "renaissance."

Last year, for a buck, I picked up at the library sale a volume of Sherlock Holmes stories—all of those that ran in The Strand, which includes The Hound of the Baskervilles—with the original illustrations. I do wish the collection contained A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four. I've read (or reread) several tales; in retrospect, it's hard to see why exactly the stories were so popular, because the mysteries aren't terribly good. Holmes, I suppose, is the draw. I appreciate also how, from the beginning, there's this metafictional aspect to the tales, with Holmes's critique of Watson's storytelling, and Watson explaining to his readers why he's chosen to tell us what he has.

I've also been reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, which has contributed to my feeling the thinness of the narrative voice in "Unearthed."

I've also been reading essays, about which more in the next installment.

Morrison = Shakespeare

2011-02-26T14:28:00.003-05:00

Toni Morrison

While simultaneously reading, for the classes I teach, Toni Morrison's Sula (first read 30 years ago) and Beloved (new to me), I found that my brain was being exercised with labor and joy in much the same manner it is when reading Shakespeare, and so I thought, "Toni Morrison is as good as Shakespeare." There is just so much—too much—going on at any one time in a sentence or chapter of her work, much as one feels when reading Shakespeare. Pace Eliot, time past and time future are contained in time present, so that each moment of the book sends you hurtling back while you know you're being thrown forward toward events that will hearken back to the page on which you find yourself. This is greatness.

Jasper Fforde

In other news, I finished Something Rotten and hereby pronounce it eminently enjoyable. It's the fourth in the Thursday Next series, but the first I've read. For someone with more time and who reads more quickly, I suggest beginning at the beginning (with The Eyre Affair). The volume I read is full of inventiveness, fun storytelling, and a host of references only appreciated by the at-least-moderately-well-read.

"Unearthed"

I've got 11,000 words, many of which will be tossed utterly or simply replaced or perhaps shuffled. Still, several thousand words are required to fill some narrative gaps, but I'm happy to report that I know what goes in the gaps, which makes for a welcome change. Most likely, a great winnowing will occur to make the whole thing tighter at some later date.

"Clockworks"

Still awaiting reviews. Though a prequel, it's quite different—in voice, plot, structure and themes . . . and arguably in genre— from the story it's meant to proceed, so I expect different responses.

Point of view; Fforde; Jay-Z

2011-02-21T08:48:00.002-05:00

Writing

During this week off from school, I hope to finish a first draft of "Unearthed." Yesterday, I felt my head bumping against a low narrative ceiling as I described an interaction in one scene, and I realized I was running into a problem with my old nemesis "point of view." Since my most recent work has been told by first-person narrators, I haven't had to give any thought, in my own work, to anonymous (or "third-person") narration. I talk about it all the time in class, but point of view was a hurdle for me some years ago, and I was surprised, yesterday, to see that it still could give me trouble.

My problem is a stylistic one, a tendency rather than, strictly speaking, an error. My anonymous narrators focus on one person to anchor the point of view, but as a consequence, I get locked into that character's perspective and have trouble—in cinematic terms—hauling the camera back for a longer shot. I get too tightly bound to the protagonist's perspective. This morning I figured I'd either read a bit of someone who uses a more objective narrative voice or pull out John Gardner's The Art of Fiction to help me think through my problem.

All it took, it seems, was a glance at the Gardner, who talks about how "third-person subjective" narration has become (from his perspective in the early 1980s) a default voice for writers. What he describes isn't exactly what I do, as he demonstrates a narrative voice that, while anonymous, uses the language and interior monologues of one character to anchor the tale. My authorial voice is more distant than that. However, I rely on the senses of one character to hold a scene steady. This gives me the difficulty I ran into yesterday, of not allowing a character to see something that's happening in the room with her because she happens to look away. Again, this isn't wrong, and I don't want to, in a short story (and certainly not in these "Old Man" stories), move to what Gardner calls the "authorial-omniscient," in which I delve into the thoughts of various characters; however, I need to loosen up my narrative and—again thinking cinematically—let the camera move about more. I need to step outside my protagonist so people can see her more clearly, which requires, from me, an effort of will.

Reading

Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten is tremendously smart and funny. The fourth novel in the Thursday Next (that's a character's name) series, of which this is the first I've read, the story takes place in an England not entirely like ours, a place where the fantastic and mundane get muddled together in a particularly understated yet comic English way. Thursday is a literary detective, a rather famous one, due to the events in the previous novels, who can intervene in fictions to make sure their characters behave; her husband was removed from the present timeline by an evil corporation, and her father, too, is somewhat of a temporal uncertainty. (Her mother thinks he might not have existed.) This novel concerns Thursday's efforts to a) thwart a dictatorial takeover of England by a fictional character, b) restore her husband to life and c) find some good childcare. Fforde does a great job getting the reader up to speed in this odd world while moving forward his clever and entertaining plot.

In shorter packets of time, I'm reading Jay-Z's autobiography, Decoded. The writer is smart and insightful, and he provides footnotes to help unpack his lyrics. He takes the craft of writing seriously. I also admire the book's design, interspersing images and text, and I'm wondering whether (in a later paperback edition) I might want to assign the book to 11th-graders.

New Asimov's has arrived

2011-02-14T21:43:00.003-05:00

WAY before it hits the newsstands, the issue has arrived in my mailbox. There seems to be a pattern: my name is on the cover on alternating appearances (my first and third stories to run there). Ah well. Too many names to fit on this big double issue anyway.

Find it in your bookstore on March 1.

More fun things

2011-02-03T18:12:00.002-05:00

My interview at The Book Cave podcast is available here. I have little memory of recording this, as I was going on several nights of too little sleep in the midst of many days of grades and comments.

The online image for the current issue of If, the Russian science fiction magazine, is here. I have no idea what they mean in their reference to the Old Man's "Russian namesake" (or, as my student from Ukraine termed it, his "counterpart"). What did I stumble into in this story? I suppose I could send a note to the editor and get back to y'all.

Finished Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone. Marvelous story, marvelously told; I'd certainly read more by him. I have no idea what was going on with the "Fist of Gods"—apparently some kind of old Ozark-y religion . . . ? I recall from Chris Offutt's short stories a rampant supernaturalism among his "backwoods" folks, but this seemed of a different order and bound up with a mysterious history of displacement and warfare. Aside from those odd elements . . . well, the story still was odd, with families all making meth and mischief. A few times, I thought the protagonist's voice slipped (I could never hear her saying "man" in the way Woodrell wanted me to hear it, for example), but the character was vivid.

Small fish

2011-01-26T21:59:00.002-05:00

When "Clockworks" appears in the April/May issue of Asimov's, it will be surrounded by works from some impressive folks, as you can see here. What grand company!

Out of curiosity . . .

2011-01-24T19:33:00.001-05:00

. . . which Canadian just visited here this evening to check out "Close"? My old student-filmmaker contact?

The failures of U.S. colleges

2011-01-18T14:21:00.002-05:00

Per the blog Inside Higher Ed:

"If the purpose of a college education is for students to learn, academe is failing, according toAcademically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, a book being released today by University of Chicago Press."

See the rest of the article here.

We certainly expect more from the students at my high school (and at our middle school) than it seems is expected at some U.S. colleges.

Woodrell's writing; my writing

2011-01-15T17:01:00.002-05:00

Along with books I'm reading with my students—The Plague and The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald makes the most surprising choices when it comes to adjectives; you have to dwell on them)—I'm moving happily through Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. Recently adapted into a film, it comes to me, however, as an unknown entity; I knew nothing of the story or writer before picking it up, but the film had received strong reviews by people constructing "year's-best" lists, and a glance at the author's credentials told me I should read this fellow.

The work reminds me of Robert Olmstead's writing. I read his Far Bright Star last year. There's that same dense style, an insistence on not giving way to weak verbs, the decision to write a fragment when an independent clause might force you into expected syntax, and the use of words in ways they haven't been used before. This means you must absolutely read each sentence; each is cut from a separate chunk of granite, so there's not always the kind of flow that just tugs you through a narrative. This isn't a criticism, but an observation. It's beautiful writing, yet it doesn't overwhelm the people we've met so far, who are all vividly set forth and alive.

My own writing:

I put in work today on the first section ("Collapse") of "Unearthed," my next prequel in the "Old Man" sequence. One piece of it remains incompletely thought through, but I'm satisfied with the shape this has taken, though a lot of reading (of books and papers) for school will keep me from accomplishing much more any time. Any progress, though, is progress. I'd like to have the opening smoothed out so that I can read it, along with the opening to "Clockworks," when I'm interviewed by the guys at The Book Cave. They interviewed me last year about "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down," though the interview came after the story had been out for a while, and so the print Asimov's was gone from the shelves. This time, I'll send them the story before it sees print, and the interview will come out prior to publication. Subscribers will see the April/May Asimov's starting mid-February; everybody else will see it a few weeks later. The interview should air in early February. I'll be sure to mention it here.

Some reading not previously mentioned

2010-12-29T17:32:00.004-05:00

Recently, I read Greg Bear's Hull Zero Three. The only Bear I'd read before was his short story "Blood Music"; I didn't read the novelized version. If you're interested, I give a full critique of Bear's latest in this discussion at the Asimov's forum. In short, the book was intriguing but disappointing, busily racing from one thing to another as if the writer, and not the character, were pursued by unearthly beasts. It's too bad, because Bear certainly had adequate material for a rich and complex novel, had he let it become fully enfleshed. It did move quickly, in any case, whereas some other sf I've read in the past few years—as part of the loose readers' group at the Asimov's forum—has disappointed but also been enormous work to get through.

As I'm on break, I felt compelled to order several comics collections (they aren't graphic novels, these) from the library.

For decades, I've heard about Marvel's famed "Kree-Skrull war." I own two of the Avengers issues in which the war takes place, but never had a full sense of what happened. Well, not much happened, as it turns out, and the storyline is borderline incoherent. Had this been a modern story arc, like Marvel's "Civil War," I'd suspect that what's missing is the narrative threads from the dozen or so other books implicated in the tale, but nobody did anything like that back in the '70s, and aside from some information and characters coming in from earlier stories in Thor, Fantastic Four and adventures with Captain Marvel, the tale is meant to appear intact in the Avengers. There's terrific buildup, especially in the penultimate, Neal Adams–pencilled issue, but the conclusion is something of a mess, with heroes from another age emerging from the head of Rick Jones . . . for about two panels each. Also, Rick Jones is sort of the Wesley Crusher of '70s Marvel: you really wish he'd move on or finally get killed. His catch-phrase? "Faaaan-tastic!" Not sure who's to blame for that, Stan Lee or Roy Thomas. Of course, all the characters speak too casually or pseudo-hip-ly, except Thor, who is utterly joyless. The collection has a new Adams cover which, for some reason, was chopped in half and stuck on the back cover of the paperback, which makes Roy Thomas's essay about it approximately 50% confusing.

Also read a Bruce Jones–scripted Hulk collection. (Everyone who gets killed comes back. I guess there's an explanation in a later collection. I've got more coming.) In addition, I read the first volume of Thor's return from the netherworld. I like the new costume. Looking at that, then going back to those old Avengers issues, you can see how hard Neal Adams had to work at not making Thor look like an idiot. The Buscemas were far less successful at this.

A black man in Asgard

2010-12-24T17:29:00.003-05:00

Here's the news:

White Supremacist Group Boycotting Thor; Because of Elba Casting

"The Council of Conservative Citizens attacks Marvel for giving the role of the deity Heimdall to Idris Elba, star of The Wire."

The CCC is calling the casting of Elba "left-wing social engineering"—because of course the portrayal of a Norse god will have some effect on the actual society of Asgard, which, as we know, exists in a realm reachable by the rainbow bridge but not the Rainbow Coalition.

When I saw Idris Elba as Heimdall in the Thor trailer, I was thrilled, because Marvel was doing what the narrow minds behind the Lord of the Rings movies failed to do, moving past the definitions established by the myths. Keep in mind that that's what we're dealing with, myths, not historical dramas.

Sticking with Lord of the Rings for a moment, it doesn't matter how Tolkien saw his characters—and certainly he saw the hobbits and elves and all of the good guys, all the "races of men" on the side of right as white people, because he's thinking of Northern Europe and the Eddas and a particular kind of world. But when you translate those tales into images in the 21st century, how can you not see that only white folks were on the side of goodness? Every indigenous actor who showed up to audition: you're getting covered with dark stuff and made an orc. Some other people, we'll give them dark complexions, dress them as Arabs and stick them on elephants or on pirate ships. Did no one notice this sharp line? There was no need for it, because "black and white" wasn't part of Tolkien's calculation, nor was it essential to his tale.

Must every god in Asgard be white because the Norse were white? If the Norse mythology is true, and all people of all colors are their people, wouldn't the gods also share that variety? And that argument aside: it's all made up. They can look however we want! I mean, shouldn't they all the male gods have beards? Any good Norseman would, after all.

At least bigots continue to make it easy for us to find them.

At last

2010-12-20T22:59:00.002-05:00

I have the climax of "Unearthed." Half I'd known. All right, a third. Now that it's clear, I've written some of it and left much to fill in. It all seems perfectly logical (in a dreamlike way), the right outcome for the story and my protagonist, and so I have to recraft everything around where the story is heading.

Rejection, submission and fortuitousness

2010-12-08T19:21:00.002-05:00

"The Dearness of Bodies in Motion," a realistic fiction tale, came back today from Alaska Quarterly Review, which is located in New Jersey, since no one actually lives in Alaska. After some research (and factoring in the relevant data that a street in my childhood hometown was called Sycamore), I sent the story on to The Sycamore Review.

I realized a day or two ago, though I then forgot, only to later recall, that a male character in my story "Unearthed" should be female; it made the character's presence much more plausible and opened up the story in other ways. This led to some research which turned up facts that made my choice of a this particular female protagonist (who is a Mohawk; and who was a Mohawk when she was a he) in this particular occupation even more perfect than I'd known, and this led me further to a legendary tale related by Canadian Mohawk writer Pauline Johnson that fit my story so perfectly, I had a bit of a scare. How strange and wonderful, and now I feel more confident about my tale.

"The Life to Come"

2010-12-05T15:08:00.002-05:00

In the space of less than two weeks, I wrote a new short story, "The Life to Come," in response to an anthology (which shall remain nameless for now) request. Once it was finished, but before the final run-through (every sentence said aloud), I sent it to my friend Berry, who heaped it high with praise or tossed it atop a heap of praise or praised it heapishly or something. He found one dud line that had been a line that stuck out to me as well. All right then. Cleaned it up, sent it off, and now I wait. I think it's solid and does what it's supposed to do. I had a hard time judging it, since I knew where it was going from the outset, and since it's short--a little more than 3K--it doesn't contain the number of surprises for me that my recent longer works have contained. Still, I think it's properly packed and concise and sounds good throughout.

I had been reading Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories for a few weeks. I have a giant compendium from the library. Struck the other day that I'd had the book out for so long, I checked my library account: the book isn't signed out. Guess somebody's electronic scanner wasn't working right that day. Anyway, if you read them, I suggest spacing them out. Early on, Bertie Wooster himself concedes the formula of the tales: if a problem arises, tell Jeeves and he'll sort it out. That's pretty much the length of breadth of the business. Jeeves serves as a kind of deus ex machina for the stories, so that, as with many a Sherlock Holmes tale, the fun is in the setup more than the resolution. Holmes always notices something no human would have noticed to solve the case; Jeeves always knows somebody who gives him a piece of information that resolves the difficulty. Priceless, though, is Bertie's voice, slangy and marginally self-aware of his purely comedic self and absurd world.

Subscriptions and a new opening

2010-11-18T23:00:00.003-05:00

Money comes on my birthdays. Back in September, I chose to spend it on, among other things, subscriptions to Asimov's and Locus (the sf review and interview magazine). Asimov's took perhaps six weeks to kick in. Locus still hasn't shown; I'm told it mailed Oct. 18. I do believe one could have thrown the magazine from the moon and had it reach here sooner.

I had a lovely opening for "Unearthed." But then it took much too long for anything to happen, since a lot had to be explained after my two protagonists meet at the beginning. Realizing that that was boring and a poor structure, I broke into my talk-filled intro with some action, bringing in much sooner another plot element that I hadn't meant to have intrude until nearly the end. So now I had a nicely time barrage of gunfire. Still, there remained too much to explain, too much information to share between my two main figures (one being "the old man"--though since it's 1925, he ain't old yet--and the other, Qwerty, a Mohawk somewhat out of place at a South American mine). The solution was to back up somewhat, providing the mysterious precipitating event rather than simply referring to it in retrospect. I wrote some of that new opening tonight, and I like it quite a bit. It kicks off the story well; afterwards will come some of the other pieces I've written. I hope to get some work done on this over Thanksgiving break, and I would love (though it's only faintly possible, given how much I revise) to have a solid draft in place by year's end. Schoolwork makes this difficult.

If you've read one of my stories . . .

2010-11-08T21:20:00.002-05:00

This is especially for the folks who've visited via Coming Attractions or All Pulp: Let me know what you thought about what you downloaded. (I know I've probably missed a lot of people who've already blown through, judging by the blog stats, but perhaps I'll catch some.)

I hope you enjoy the work. More is on the way.

Galley-ho!

2010-11-05T20:47:00.002-04:00

I received the galleys for "Clockworks" this evening. Like their contracts, Asimov's now sends these as PDFs; though I had to print out (in order to sign) and mail back the contract, the story itself will remain in e-form. I've been reading it aloud, certainly the best way to catch mistakes or simply moments that might be improved. All I've noted in the first five pages is my using the word "before" in two sentences in a row, which I'll fix.

I'm quite enjoying this tale. It's been long enough since I wrote it that I remember almost nothing.

In the next entry, I'll talk about what I've been reading.

Who ARE you people?

2010-10-28T21:54:00.002-04:00

Perused my stats for this blog just a moment ago. (Had never before noticed the map feature.) So who is checking in here from Russia, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Malaysia, Bulgaria, Poland, South Korea, and Mexico?

Stand and be recognized! (I'm just so curious . . . )

A sorrow, isn't it, for those who've come from so far (albeit instantaneously), that I have so little to say? This week, much mental energy was expended on school. And then, of course, there was the OK Go concert Tuesday night. (No, that didn't tax me mentally except as a consequence of my getting little sleep that night.)

At some point this week, I did write a page of the sixth "old man tale" (I'm supposed to be working on the third tale in the disordered sequence). Coming up with a cool opening now for that final segment makes the whole thing look much more possible. Not that the completed series seems impossible, but the slowness of my labors (and incompleteness of my knowledge about every remaining tale) makes the process seem like a function more of time than of effort—that is, I know it'll eventually happen, but it's as remote as a promise to yourself that you forgot you made.

Did that make any sense? Too much narrative uncertainty in my life, what with "The Secret Sharer" and Wuthering Heights on my lips and banging about my brain.

Roth's Nemesis: I'm not feeling it.

2010-10-09T20:29:00.003-04:00

Before setting down my own thoughts on Roth's new novel, I checked out the two reviews run by the New York Times. Two questions, I have: Why did you both give away nearly every plot point? Why did you both ignore the book's weaknesses? Kakutani at least allows that the final section is melodramatic and the entire plot unsurprising (so that makes it okay to reveal it all?), and the reviewers are right to praise aspects of the novel, but neither Kakutani nor Leah Hager Cohen gives the full picture.

The plot (I'll spare you the details you shouldn't know) involves morally upright Bucky Cantor, phys ed teacher and playground supervisor, living through and with the outrage of polio in the summer of 1944 in Newark. Weak eyesight has kept him from the war, and he wishes he could be a heroic man like his two friends fighting in Europe, but his life forces upon him other choices which might prove heroic. Complicating matters is his girlfriend, who wants him to join her at a summer camp a safe distance from the Newark outbreak.

The novel is short, though one problem may be that it's not short enough. Roth's narrator (who remains hidden by the narrative for a good long time, though Roth's purposes with this construction feel inconsequential or even poorly considered) is repetitious. In a short book, you don't have to keep reminding me about the girlfriend's favorite song or mention that he'd just heard it the other day, because I just read that. That's a persistent issue, as the narrator, representing Bucky's thoughts, lets play out circular arguments that simply aren't that well composed. The language is flat—except for some lovely descriptions—and made me long for the lines of powerful writers who could bring some rhetorical heft to a character's thoughts. A much tighter book would have been better. Even the third act, though relatively short, is told in such a circumlocutious way, it feels like an early draft—and, again, raises the issue of why this particular narrator is of any use.

Roth does capture an era well, and the book is full of beautiful moments, though quite a few of them get pounded into the ground. It's a sentimental book, but the sentiment clouds its seriousness, so that the questions raised don't feel like real questions. And the questioner, Bucky, seemed less real to me as the novel continued. For some reason, he remains more a set of behaviors than a real human. Kakutani, too, says that he's flat. But he's the center of the story.

I wanted to like the book, but from the reportorial opening to the overwrought middle to the not-terribly-credible blather at the end, Roth let me down. At its core, I think there's a great novella, but instead it's a meandering essay on the burden of conscience.

Creeping along

2010-10-06T22:53:00.002-04:00

During the school year, it's tough to make much progress with either reading or writing, except during breaks. As such, here's the slim report:

"Unearthed"

A little bit of writing on this today. Now pretty sure it's taking place in 1925. I wrote about a page two days ago, realizing that I needed to stop doinking about and actually produce some text. As a result, I now have something resembling an opening page, and I moved some things around to give myself a fair sense of how the opening scenes will develop. Still, large chunks of this story remain a mystery to me. In order to take on their necessary flesh, they'll likely become pretty sizable, so I won't be surprised to have another novelette on my hands. (I think each of the "Old Man" stories should be a novelette, but every time I begin, I start with rather slender elements.) For "Unearthed," and for another story (or set of stories, or perhaps a novel--all set in an alternate world), I've been drawing some inspiration and information from . . .

The Day We Found the Universe, by Marcia Bartusiak

An excellent book so far, it details the history of modern astronomy and astrophysics, focusing on events that led to the 1925 announcement of certitude regarding the actual (and once unthinkable) size of the universe. To realize that, only a little more than a century ago, most people thought the Milky Way was coequal with the universe is to enter such a profoundly different way of thinking, and Bartusiak then makes us feel the shock when the wide world gets immeasurably wider.

I also started, just yesterday, Philip Roth's latest novel, Nemesis, about the polio epidemic coming to a small New Jersey town. The story is interesting, so far, but the writing feels flat. Roth has never done much for me, and I've been amazed for some time how he's become a kind of literary elder statesman.

Laird Barron

2010-09-24T21:12:00.004-04:00

I grabbed his book Occultation and Other Stories at the library, in large measure because he won a Shirley Jackson Award (this being mentioned on the cover).

First I read the second story, "Occultation," because it was short and because it was the collection's title (thus suggesting some conviction that the tale can carry one's expectations for the entire book). It was duly creepy, but at the end it felt like all that had been accomplished was a juxtaposition of disturbing imagery and a set of cheap shocks rather than a coherent story. This reminded me of two things: poetry by John Ashberry and the "language" poets (on my mind because of an essay in last month's Poetry); and the short fiction of Kelly Link. Sure enough, the back of the book sported praise by Link, whose work has always seemed to me more like an acrobatic stunt than real storytelling. Also, a story with similar imagery but infinitely superior workmanship and far more satisfying fright appeared decades ago with John B. L. Goodwin's "Cocoon" (1946), reprinted in Bradbury's tremendous anthology, Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow. Find it and read it.

Next I tried the collection's first story, "The Forest." The writing didn't exactly sing (and I suppose neither he nor his editor knew the difference between uninterested and disinterested), and the story slogged along through clumsy sentences and cliché characters. Then there came the interesting part that didn't make sense—but was, at least, interesting. This was then left behind for an embarrassing, um, climax. 'Nuff said.

What bothers me most is that this writing is associated with Shirley Jackson (through the award in her name). Jackson is not merely a fantasist or horror writer. Jackson's theme, typically, is what people do in uncomfortable situations, be they mundane or terrifying. And Jackson's prose is always clean, smart and precise. She is, for me, one of the premier stylists of American prose. Work in her name should go to the finest writers. Perhaps Barron has better work. Given that I'm moving on from this book, I doubt I'll come across it.

In praise of limestone

2010-09-21T21:14:00.002-04:00

Prodded by some errant ideas and a mention of my yet-unwritten story on last week's "Book Cave" podcast, I did a tiny bit of writing this evening for "Unearthed." The text accrues drip by drip. I've become a literary pointillist, writing the smallest components on the way to making my stories. Later in the process, I smooth it all out and connect the pixels, but in the meantime it's nothing but a bunch of dots.

Books bought

2010-09-19T18:33:00.002-04:00

A spittle's-worth of writing in the past week, and so we speak of other things.

Books purchased at the annual library sale ($1.50 for hardbacks; $1.00 for papers; $.50 for mass market paperbacks (the penny dreadfuls of the sale)):

Amos Oz, Where the Jackals Howl and Other Stories (hardback; dust cover like a paper grocery bag)—stories Oz wrote in the '60s and revised in the '70s; this English first edition came out in 1981

Michael Cunningham, The Hours, (hardback, signed)

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (hardback, hefty, contains "all 356 original illustrations [from The Strand Magazine] by Sidney Paget)

Angela Carter, Saints and Strangers (paperback; Carter is a gap in my reading knowledge, and my colleagues have recommended her)

Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier (paperback; I know nothing about this novel, but I like the title and the style of the cover)

ed. Nick Caistor, (The Faber Book of) Contemporary Latin American Short Stories (hardback, 1989; seemed useful to add to my international reading knowledge)

Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Collected Stories (paperback, but solidly built; I have the collection Crown of Feathers, but in a smaller, weary paperback; this has more in a better package)

Katherine Mansfield, Stories (paperback; given that I just taught "The Garden-Party," a favorite story of mine, this past week, this seemed a fortuitous discovery)

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (paperback with something sticky that must needs be removed from the back cover; I've never read her, I confess)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Vintage paperback; I've been meaning to reread this (I must have read a borrowed copy in college) ever since reading Pnin and seeing again Nabokov's greatness, so now I have it)

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer (hardback, a load; a few years ago, I bought this same edition over eBay, but its binding is loose, the cover roughed-up, and many of the pages marked; this copy is beautiful inside and out, and thus certainly worth a buck-fifty)

All of the above: $13.50 plus a three-mile walk and running into various friends. A good day.

To Russia, with love

2010-09-02T11:29:00.002-04:00

I keep forgetting to mention: "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" will appear in ESLI (translation: If), Russia's oldest science fiction and fantasy magazine. The editor contacted me recently to express his interest in reprinting the story in translation.

I love the idea of Russian readers (and a Russian editor thinking well of the story), and I hope some of those readers will let me know what they think.

On stories; Lasdun; Lloyd; my stuff

2010-08-25T21:40:00.002-04:00

I was disappointed to see, in a book on literary terms I’ll be using with the AP Lit. students, that the opening attempt to describe short stories harks back to Poe’s language about “total effect.” It’s not that I disagree with that definition per se (though it’s only applicable to a certain kind of story, perhaps), it’s just odd that we haven’t moved farther in our thinking—especially given Poe’s unreliability as an authority on, well, anything.

In any case, quite often when I read a collection of short stories, I think, “Really? That’s a short story?” There might be that total, unified effect, but it’s subtle. Or it doesn’t add up to anything. It seems to me that, at the very least, you need an entire story.

With this in mind, I read, some weeks ago, two stories in James Lasdun’s latest collection, It’s Beginning to Hurt. The stories seemed to end either too soon or too vaguely, but a friend of my oldest daughter’s told me she’d taken a class with Lasdun and that I should keep reading. I did, eventually increasing my pace until I finished the whole thing (a rarity for me with new fiction collections). I can report it’s a terrific book. Most of the stories really are stories and set us up for some small adventure on the part of the protagonist. A large majority involve infidelity. They all have the same tone of the sadness of middle age and heaps of regret and a kind of amoral inactivity with regards to the world. No one is particularly likeable, though that doesn’t bother me. There’s a light touch, a good way with the prose, and a somewhat bitter humor throughout. The one stylistic problem I have is that Lasdun, in nearly every story, takes on the voice of a teller of a tale, giving me background information in a solid paragraph or—as an approach that accomplishes much the same via different means—has a character reflect overlong in too detailed a way. The tale-teller voice is simply a matter of taste; I don’t care for it at the start of a story, but I got used to it in Lasdun’s stories, even as I felt he often didn’t need it.

A disappointing collection, which I did not finish, is David Lloyd’s Boys (I had ordered it from the library because Lloyd directs the writing program at nearby LeMoyne College; I was curious). The book is, purportedly “Stories and a Novella,” but the dozen stories are all placed under a single heading, and few of them is are intact stories. Their vignettes. Only one, as I recall, truly gave us a complete “gesture,” and even there, I wanted much more. What Lloyd has done seems easy. The writing is fine, but a story is a hard thing. I did not read the novella, as I was worn out with being thwarted by the other bits.

As for my own writing, yesterday I finished a draft of “Not What They Imagined,” a piece of realistic fiction. A friend provided a good critique of it today, so I have a good sense of what I need to change. It feels fixable.

I also wrote a little on my next “old man” story. I’ve begun reading One Hundred Years of Solitude (yet another insanely good book, following on the heels of Wuthering Heights) and the novel suggested to me a solution to one of the problems with my story. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Golding

2010-08-14T09:24:00.002-04:00

In the midst of reading Wuthering Heights, Entering the Stone (see the Shelfari link at right), and slices of various other things (gave up on Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit about a quarter of the way in: though I agreed at the start with her thesis that a liberal arts education is necessary for a vibrant democracy, she made broad statements that kept returning to the same details for support, jumping back and forth between Dewey and India's Tagore for her sole touchstones, so the whole thing felt like a weak undergraduate paper), I'm reading large pieces of William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (was there ever a worse subtitle?), a new work by John Carey.

I read most of what there was about Golding's childhood and his teaching career, but none of the chapter about the war years, being more interested in how his writing career took off. Lord of the Flies is a testament, it turns out, to having a terrific editor. Charles Montieth happened to see Golding's novel in the rejection pile at Faber & Faber, and he became a champion for the book. He had Golding strip away several sections that weren't in Golding's first manuscript but that Golding had added (the set-up for the novel; an air battle at the halfway point; a naval battle at the end); he actually removed much of the explicit religious and theological weight of the novel (mostly centered on Simon) so that the book had a more realistic core and understandable motivations on the part of its characters; he helped Golding tighten the writing.

Golding took those lessons about writing into his next two books, The Inheritors and Pincher Martin, both of which I've read and both of which are marvelous. Now I want to read more Golding. The more I come to know of him, the more I appreciate his work. His Nobel lecture, here, reshaped my view of Lord of the Flies, expanding it to see a greater soul than I'd realized behind the work.

As I work on my latest short story, I'm also emboldened to push the narrative into odder places. Its ordinariness had been bothering me in any case. Hopefully I've come upon a stronger structure and story engine.

Story sold; book read

2010-08-06T19:05:00.002-04:00

"Clockworks" has been sold. It should appear in Asimov's in the late winter or early spring, about a year after my last Asimov's publication.

Gotta pick up the pace on those. The next one in the sequence (also a prequel) is stalled because a) I've been working on another story and b) I have quite a few questions about both the plot and the physical details. It's a challenge.

I finished The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize–winning novel. I hadn't read Fitzgerald before. I have a novel (unread) of hers that I picked up at a library book sale, and I've seen her name listed often enough among the great English writers. She came to writing late, it seems.

I knew nothing about the novel before getting it from the library except that it was highly recommended. (I'm looking for contemporary novels to add to my AP Lit. class.) Had I known the plot, I'd have probably balked; knowing nothing (which is how I like to approach a book), I instead was drawn in by the story and the voice, having no idea where the thing was headed. It's the story of Fritz von Hartenburg, a real-life German poet of the late 18th century; he took the name "Novalis" as his pen name. Rather than a description of his career, it's the tale of his first love. It's also the story of the people around Fritz, family and friends who are mystified by his attraction to young Sophie ("my Philosophy," as he comes to call her); in addition, it's a vivid rendering of a time and place, the era of Goethe (who puts in a brief appearance) and a time of civil upheaval. It's a wonderful novel that defies categorization.

What's done, what's undone

2010-07-31T11:35:00.003-04:00

Regarding Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, I'll quote from my post at the Asimov's forum:

Finished yesterday. I think it's a brilliant novel. Whether or not a particular reader enjoys it is a different issue; the thing is a great work, both entertaining and challenging, making me both feel and think. The resolution does tie together everything--and you see it coming, that Bulgakov is going to pull the past and present together somehow--and is a prompt for further discussion.

One has to discard traditional theological notions, given that Satan/Woland isn't evil and the Pilate/Jesus story is laden more with philosophical and humanistic concerns than religious ones (in fact, religion is avoided in the novel); however, I see a straight line between this narrative and Milton's. Just as Satan hopes to undo God's plan (and for reasons Milton helps us understand) in Paradise Lost, so Woland seeks to undo bureaucracies, systems that stifle the artist, selfishness and even rationalism. He inserts himself into the Soviet scheme and, with his wilder associates, damages whatever he can.

The novel is subtly structured, with its protagonists slowly revealed and its agenda unclear for much of its length. The writing, especially in the sections supposedly written by the Master, is at times beautiful but at all times skillful. The narrator, both in the book proper and in the Master's tale of Pilate, is very much a presence, sometimes apologizing for what he can't explain or perceive.

It did take me a long time to read the book. It's not a page-turner, but it's well done throughout and worth the time. Only one section, "Satan's Ball," felt like it needed a trim. What a strange, strange book.

I'll have something to say about my story "Clockworks" next week.

Tangentially, given that both "Clockworks" and "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" contain a character who is an homage to Doc Savage, I want to mention Warren Ellis's Planetary, a comic book series. I read the first volume a few days ago. Sadly, my library does not have all of the subsequent volumes. In any case, Planetary contains a character named "Doc Brass" who is clearly based on Doc Savage ("The Man of Bronze"). Visually, he's the spitting image of the James Bama version of Doc on the Bantam paperbacks. There's no mention of "thanks for the trademark steal" in the front of the book, but I suppose Wildstorm Comics, owned by DC, had permission to use it, given DC's flirtation with the character over the years.

I've been reading short stories by James Lasdun.

I mostly finished a draft of a new story, "Unimagined." It is not a "genre" piece. A few gaps in the narrative remain, though I know what goes where. As often happens, I'd started the story thinking it was about one thing, but once I figured out who the characters were, it became about something else and ended in a way I didn't see coming . . . which is partly the point of the title.

A book gone wrong

2010-07-07T15:02:00.002-04:00

What went wrong from conception to execution with historian Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History? The premise is simple enough—perhaps too simple and ill-formed: history is, to borrow a phrase, everyone's "last refuge," used to promote peace, fight for justice, defend indensible actions and make claims for land or power. One could easily make the same argument for religion, which might make for a more interesting book since in religion you're with with elements inherently open to interpretation. MacMillan doesn't exactly say that "history" has the same plasticity, as events themselves can't be argued with, but people and principalities are selective with their history . . . when they aren't outright distorting or elliding facts to shape the narrative toward their benefit.

Hardly a thesis against which one can argue.

The issue, perhaps because of this loose thesis, is with the book's structure. Each chapter seems aimed at approaching a different way history is misused, but I couldn't identify any difference between the chapters. There's repetition, as MacMillan goes to the same historical events for her examples, and the chapters become laundry lists of how countries (and un-countried populaces) manipulate their people by how their tell their histories. The process by which the book was assembled comes into question when you read the same aphorism twice within a few pages. Too, it's obvious who's buttering her ideological bread, which weakens the tone.

MacMillan is a Canadian professor whose book Paris 1919 won praise and awards. It has to be put togethere better than this, which reads like an inflated essay.

More submitting

2010-07-03T17:26:00.002-04:00

A third story is out for consideration: "My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth" is at TriQuarterly, which is now an online-only journal. I made a dozen minor alterations before sending it out.

Short story reading; Verne's journey

2010-07-02T22:50:00.002-04:00

From Thomas Lynch's Apparitions and Late Fictions, I read three short stories. They're something of a blur to me, and I've returned the book to the library, so I can't summon the titles. The blurriness is due to a commonality of tone and a similarity of subject. Lots of deaths and funerals. The author has written a book about the job of running a funeral home, so this materials has infiltrated his subsequent fictions, it seems. The writing was good, and one story, which had won a mystery award, had a nice way of delaying its surprises.

From James Lasdun's collection It's Beginning to Hurt, I read his prize-winning "An Anxious Man." A few moments and descriptions struck me as common, and some observations seemed obvious, but the story grew on me, the protagonist, a weak soul, shaped the events and outcome nicely, and the narrative became troubling, then harrowing. I wanted something more from the ending. Lasdun suggested some of that "more" with a late line meant to echo and earlier moment, but I didn't find the resonance convincing. Lasdun is English, but now lives here.

I finished Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. I've seen the old movie version (James Mason and Pat Boone? Is that right?) and recall: the large, quiet Icelander who assists the professor and his nephew; them being trapped in a large chamber; their expulsion from the volcano. I was surprised to find the book actually ended that way. Verne spends a great deal of time being very precise and scientific (though of course the scientific theories were shifting even as he wrote, and he added a goofy scene to the book to accomodate new information), which is why the utterly preposterous moments seem even less believable. And there are plenty of preposterous moments, usually involving tremendous falls, racing at great speeds, or being propelled upward. Had he been writing in the present day, he'd have had his characters outrun a fireball. They all should have been killed many times over (or at least lost their provisions a lot sooner). What Verne does get right is a kind of feverish tone for his narrator, who is either terrified or excited much of the time. His fears, and his experiences of vertigo, are captured well, and are the best moments in the tale.

2010-06-28T22:48:00.002-04:00

Still waiting to hear back about "Clockworks." I'm expecting to hear this week.

Sent "The Dearness of Bodies in Motion" to Glimmertrain for its June contest. I'm quite pleased with that story.

Over the weekend, I finished the short novel Roadside Picnic, by the Strugatsky brothers, late science-fiction-writing siblings. The translation was awful, loaded with weak verbs and redundancies, and the PDF itself was riddled with errors. Some terrific speculative and spooky elements in this tale of a future earth that's been "visited" by aliens who left behind, well, stuff--like interplanetary travelers who stopped to have a "roadside picnic" and didn't clean up their trash. The story is less concerned with the facts of this visitation than with the "stalkers" who make a living by sneaking into these forbidden zones and steal items for the black market. The logistics of the story are nonsense: people creep in and out at will, despite supposed oversight by the government; decades have gone by since the "event," but no one even has good overhead images of the layout of this particular zone; there's little sense of what effect this has had on the larger world. Too much is left off stage or to the imagination. What's there is fun, if undeveloped, and the ending isn't prepared for well.

I'm one-third of the way into Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Amazingly, our travelers still haven't set foot below the surface of our world. That's frustrating, but otherwise the story is excellent, entertainingly told and, as with all Verne, careful (and overelaborated in spots) in its details.

On Yoon, dinosaurs, other bits

2010-06-22T22:09:00.002-04:00

Some interesting moments in the Yoon book (Naming Nature), though the writing could have been a lot tighter. The editor should have stopped her at the 300th use of the word umwelt. Less of the conversational tone would have helped considerably, as would sections within the chapters to keep them more narratively focused.

At one point, Yoon brings up dinosaurs as an example of how young children love to find diverse life-forms to organize (or, in terms of the book's subject, to fit into a taxonomy); she sees it too in the Pokémon craze. Something struck me as off in this. Yoon says a child in the wild would bring into its natural ordering tendency the various wildlife of that place. City-dwelling children have only dinosaurs. I grew up in a rural area. I suppose I could have organized birds. I had a book of natural history that I loved looking at, and, in addition to living organisms, I was interested in rocks and minerals, which I collected. Like a lot of children engaged in creative play, I systematized my toys. But dinosaurs' pull is unique, I think. They're extinct, so playing with little dinos--even just thinking about them--makes them live, and gives a child some control over these monstrous things which, because they're not truly present, become non-monstrous. Playing with dinos is a lot like talking about comic books. Mastery of dinosaurs and superheroes gives one a kind of outsized power. And the species names possess a kind of magic, don't they?

Reading some Skrulls-taking-over-the-world comics from Marvel's "Secret Invasion." Fun. Last week I read a Red Hulk comic sequence. Much Hulk-smashery.

Enjoyed some Billy Collins poetry from Picnic, Lightning, but he gets thin after a while. What's most effective are his poems that focus on the quotidian, and self-conscious about the nature of poetry writing, and then turn in some way to probe something in Collins or the reader. When he leaves this sly (it's always surprising) formula, the work isn't as strong. Reading him did push me to draft a few poems, my first in a while.

No writing on my latest short story today, though it's on my mind most of the time. Even some ideas from Yoon have crept in.

Nature; new story

2010-06-14T21:34:00.002-04:00

Started reading Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science, by Carol Kaesuk Yoon, who writes for the New York Times. It appeared on the new book shelf at the library, and concerns a topic that had been on my mind recently, namely the system of classification for living things. Yoon posits that the scientific approach shouldn't simply trump our (evolved) approach to categorizing living things, and she walks us through the history of classification.

I have out from the library two books on caving. Haven't started them yet. They're to be resources for the next short storry in my "Old Man" set of tales, to be titled either "Unfathomable" or (looking more likely today) "Firmness of Earth." This is another prequel to "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down," taking place in the 1920s.

My process for these stories is increasingly non-linear. Maybe I've discovered how I think. Or maybe I just have zero attention span for writing. I've typed up three pages containing summaries of scenes, bits of dialogue, one coherent paragraph (that almost certainly won't end up in later drafts), some background notes, and a rather detailed description of . . . some creatures. While doing dishes just now, I figured out something about the theme and a few more plot points that are essential.

Still waiting to hear back about "Clockworks."

Fischer; Bishop

2010-06-07T18:03:00.002-04:00

Last night I finished Rudolph Fischer's The Walls of Jericho, a satiric novel of the Harlem Renaissance. Fischer's lightly elevated prose perfectly captures the machinations and meanderings of the various characters involved therein, and his dialogue demonstrates a great ear for not just black speech but for individualized speech. The story revolves loosely around Joshua "Shine" Jones, who is overseeing a pair of at-each-other's-throats comedic types moving a pale-skinned black man into a white neighborhood when he espies a lovely young woman. It's not clear how exactly the various lives and lines of plot will connect, and Fischer doesn't push the narrative into too solid a form, allowing each scene to serve an internal function as well as gradually advance the larger story. The one faltering, to this reader, is that Fischer allows too much sentiment in the relationship between Shine and Linda; he's aiming to be humorous there as in other places, but it comes off as merely sincere, instead. Still, it's a fun novel with smart dialogue and great insights into a time and place that Fischer seems to know, even as he's writing, will soon be past. I may order Fischer's collected short stories; that's how much I liked this.

From Michael Bishop's collection At the City Limits of Faith (picked up at a used book store), I read the first story, "Beginnings." It concerns one of the theives crucified alongside Jesus; still alive, he sees Christ taken down from the cross, which recalls to him a telling encounter with the infant Jesus. The story is beautifully and strangely told, a tale about how our ends are prefigured in our beginnings. Bishop is a science fiction writer, for the most part, but he works outside the genre as well.

Submitted

2010-06-02T22:53:00.001-04:00

"Clockworks" is completed and sent.

Now we wait.

Writing; Farmer; Borges

2010-05-31T21:55:00.002-04:00

The writing: "Clockworks" is back from my reader. Now I'm convinced that it's good.

Philip José Farmer: I picked up Riverworld and Other Stories at a used book store last week, thinking the story "Riverworld" would be Farmer's introduction to the planet on which everyone who ever died on Earth finds themselves resurrected. Farmer's confusing introduction to the tale, however, reveals that, seminal-seeming title aside, the story was written a decade after his first foray into Riverworld, and is just one of the many novellas that make up the story. The other novellas are collected in the "novels," which aren't novels.

It starts off like a joke: Cowboy film star Tom Mix, Jesus, and an Israelite woman named Binthia are in a boat . . . The story doesn't actually improve upon the set-up. Jesus is named Yeshua, which is correct (that or Yeheshua would be the Aramaic form of the name; "Jesus" is the result of running it through Greek, Latin and English), but evidently Farmer assumed his readers wouldn't know that this character is Jesus, since none of the other characters can figure it out. Farmer keeps dropping huge hints, but still no one puts it together. It would be one thing if this weren't crucial, but it turns out that the whole story is about how no one figures out who he is (and he's miserable about who he is anyway), which lets Farmer finish the story with a pretty lame punchline that's only good if we didn't figure out the man's identity 80 pages earlier. It's like a print version of The Sixth Sense. Five minutes into that movie, I was saying, "This can't be the whole deal. I mean, obviously that guy's dead, but there's going to be more to it that that, right?" No. There wasn't. What torture.

Farmer's writing is adequate, but what's more frustrating is his inability to address any interesting topic that comes up. A host of fascinating problems are alluded to, but Farmer's got a supposedly rollicking plot (it isn't) to attend to. Maybe the books are better.

As for Borges: My eldest daughter's reference in a magazine piece to a Borges quotation has led me to some questioning. In his essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," Borges informs us that Wilkins's entry has been, sadly, removed from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wilkins, a 17th-century clergyman (of course) and author, created a universal language; this leads Borges to reflect on various systems of classification. In particular, he refers to Dr. Franz Kuhn's mention of a Chinese tome entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which classifies animals into categories which include "innumerable," "those that are included in this classification," and "those that have just broken a flower vase." Hilarious, but it sounds true enough to be possible. My daughter says Borges made it up. I did some checking. Kuhn is real, known for translating Chinese novels into German. However, Borges appears to have made up the book to which Kuhn refers—which didn't stop Michel Foucault from referring to it.

Ah, Borges.

Pullman's latest; etc.

2010-05-29T10:05:00.002-04:00

Finished Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, a book that had me wondering throughout why Pullman had bothered. Then I read the blurb at the end that explained the book was part of a series of books by well known authors tasked with revisiting familiar myths. I suppose Pullman seemed like the obvious (in which "obvious" is a synonym for "most likely to provoke controversy") choice for a book about the life of Jesus because Pullman is vocally opposed to organized religion. Fair enough, but could he have at least approached the material with somewhat less transparent aims and a less silly premise?

In rewriting the tale of Jesus, he posits a twin brother named Christ. (See, so when people later talk about "Jesus Christ," it's ironic because the religion is really the result of both of them. Get it? There should have been a third brother named "H." . . . ) Jesus gets in trouble a lot as a little kid, and his brother Christ talks him out of these troubles by glibly using his familiarity with scriptures. Later, when Jesus takes up a public ministry, Christ, who has tried to talk his brother into the practicality of forming a "church"—never mind that that's not a Jewish term—is approached by "an angel" who persuades Christ to write down everything his brother says and does. This leads to some discussion about the difference between truth and history—truth winning out, in the eyes of the angel and Christ, who revises some of Jesus' statements to make them fit in better with the narrative he's constructing.

Jesus is still doomed to the cross, but since Christ is his twin brother . . . well, you can see early on where this is going.

Pullman spends a lot of time picking on the idea of "church," of organized religion. It's certainly as easy target (though even Pullman has to admit that the presence of the church in history has been a force for individual good as often as it's a force for institutional evil), and there's even a not-veiled reference to pedophile priests, but it's a clumsy aim for the story, which would have done better to focus on notions of how narratives get constructed from history. Why the twin is of use is questionable, as Pullman could have had any character fill the writer's role. Christ's implication in his brother's downfall (and "resurrection") just feels forced, especially since it's clear the brother doesn't believe what he finds himself saying. Pullman spends a lot of time simply retelling the gospel stories without their miraculous trappings, treating this as a new idea (as if Thomas Jefferson and a host of others didn't do the same thing), and he seems to think he's radically stirring the pot by proposing non-miraculous views of seeming miracles, as if that weren't an old and familiar way (among progressive branches of Christianity) of looking at the Bible. There's a nice scene in the Garden of Gethsemani with Jesus talking to God's silence (a conversation his brother never hears), but even that is hardly new.

In the end, this felt competent but dashed off, an easy buck for Pullman.

In my own work, I'm nearing completion of a readable copy of "Clockworks," which I hope to send to two readers this weekend.

Vacillation

2010-05-21T22:06:00.002-04:00

Never ceases to amaze me: how one can move between polar positions on a story in progress. Even within the course of a day, I can't wait to get to work on it again, so hopeful do I feel, and (contrariwise) I account it rubbish. It's nothing so virtuous as humility, this second position. Its rather a species of doubt informed by fear. Thinking something is pointless is not the same as wondering whether oneself is the best person for the job.

And so: Back to it.

2010-05-19T08:52:00.002-04:00

"Clockworks" continues to expand (and deepen, I believe). Heading for 14K words. It's possible that the piece will get tighter at the next revision stage, but I wouldn't be surprised if, for everything I remove, more materials shows up. At this point, the climactic scene needs the most work, as it still contains some false starts and uncompleted actions.

2010-05-15T17:40:00.003-04:00

Still working toward an intact draft of "Clockworks." Some sections have seen multiple revisions. Some remain sketchy. Most of what needs to be tossed has been tossed, but some (small, I think) pieces are missing, and nothing is in close to final shape except perhaps the first page. I'm at about 12.5 K words; the final piece will be around there, it seems. However, I wouldn't be surprised if some new moments that suddenly seem needed bubble up in the course of revision. I'm looking forward to having this phase completed so I can go over this creature line by line and word by word. There'll probably be two go-rounds of that before I send it to the friends who've helped with the editing in the past.

Meanwhile, I've started reading Philip Roth's The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, which directly (maybe) confronts (kind of) the issues of one's biography in the construction of fiction. To this point in the book, Roth has been addressing himself to Nathan Zuckerman, the fictional version of himself from some of his novels.

Oh: And hello to any folks from the Pulp Factory who stop by!

Passing

2010-05-08T12:56:00.002-04:00

Finally got around to finishing Nella Larsen's Passing. A writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Larsen produced only two novels and a few stories. The short novel reminded me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, a book full of thoughtful revelations that has too many essayistic qualities to be a fine novel. Larsen's book is actually better, in that there's a narrative arc derived from the interactions of particular characters, but much of the book's dialogue involves the stating of ideological or ethical positions. Very little happens in the book, which moves slowly, much of it taken up with interior reflection by the narrator, and said reflection involves pausing the course of events to let thought processes be fully spelled out. The male characters are not credible. The protagonist never stands back enough from herself to allow us to see the particularities of her own situation. Though the title of the novel refers to how American blacks "passed" among whites, the narrator, Irene, spends more time observing with horror how her friend Clare has passed than detailing how, at times, she's done it herself. She makes oblique references, in conversation, to how blacks can not only identify one another but also how they can't spot an "ofay," a white who's trying to disguise his or her racial identity; however, the narrator never lets us in on the finer points of how to remain hidden or how to find the fakes. It does offer, at least for this white reader, some fascinating insights into a cultural moment, but it doesn't say as much as it should. (In this, it's weaker than Gilman's "first-wave feminism" novel, which, though bogged down in exposition, is more bold and direct in detailing the differences between men and women and the difficulties in their attempts to live together. Gilman's book also has the fun conceit of a land which has seen no men in centuries.)

The Patience Stone

2010-04-24T21:00:00.003-04:00

Over the course of three days (though it takes only a few hours; it's very short), I read The Patience Stone, by Afghan author Atiq Rahimi. The story is simultaneously realistic, a piece of absurdist theater, a monologue, and a parable. Some moves seem false, but only, I think, if the reader requires this to be one particular type of tale, when in fact it's several types of tales. It's even a meta-tale. The "patience stone" is a fabled stone that absorbs everyone's sorrows and that will, at the end of the world, explode. The reader becomes a "patience stone" as we're forced to listen to a woman pour out her previously unspoken sorrows to her husband, who lies unconscious with a bullet lodged in his neck. The entire book takes place in one room and, as if we were watching a play, we are never allowed to see beyond this room, though we hear sounds from beyond it. Certainly the story takes place in Afghanistan in a time of war, but it might be Iraq or another Muslim nation just as easily. (Though a few minor details probably fix it in Afghanistan, the country is never stated.) The author is male, but he effectively "vents" a host of female grievances and leaves us with a full picture of the possible roles for women in this society (all of which are viewed in the protagonist or through women she mentions).

Interviewed, among other things

2010-04-16T07:41:00.002-04:00

I was contacted this past week by Art Sippo and Ric Croxton regarding "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down." Both are pulp and comics fans, and they run a site where they post interviews with people who have something to say about either or both. My interview is "Book Cave Episode 70." (I think it can be saved rather than just listened to through iTunes, but I couldn't get that to work earlier.)

http://thebookcave.libsyn.com/

Still enjoying Lost Books of the Odyssey.

I'm also reading John Dominic Crossan's The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story, which I picked up from a friend who wanted to get rid of a few books (out of many thousands) before she and her husband moved to a new house. It's been years since I read Crossan. I've appreciated some of his books; one in particular, The Cross That Spoke, ended my reading of him, as the theory at its heart (that the goofy "cross gospel" is a precursor to the relatively tame Easter narratives of the gospels) seemed not credible, at least from a literary standpoint.

Also reading Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms, by Gloria Ladson-Billings. More about that once I'm farther along.

2010-04-02T16:50:00.002-04:00

Finished In Cold Blood a week ago. Outstanding. What Capote achieves is rich insight into the minds of the killers without at any point granting validity to their reasoning. He presents it and explains it—as they see it in themselves and each other—but doesn't suggest that their reasoning is, in fact, reasonable. Rather, we're witnessing a kind of amoral Rube Goldberg device that results in the killing of the Clutter family. For me, what's most fascinating and trouble at the same time is the sense of how many such people move among us, those whose essential selfishness provides no brakes to their actions. Rarely does this result in murder; the consequences are, I think, more ordinary.

Such issues fit well with the considerations at work in "Clockworks," still on hold as I complete the revision of "My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth." I'll finish that tonight. It's much stronger now, having lost the second narrative voice and a large chunk out of the middle that had come from an early and far different version.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is well crafted and thoughtful. Each small story (it is not, despite the claims on the cover and in its marketing, a novel) employs both the elements of ancient tale and (post)modern short story.

Good stuff

2010-03-26T22:35:00.002-04:00

Alternating between The Iliad and In Cold Blood.

The Fagles translation of Homer surges with energy; there's a wonderful pulse to the writing, even when Homer's merely detailing the troops arrayed for battle. I haven't read the book before. It's been a gap in my learning.

About In Cold Blood, I perhaps know too much already, having seen the film Capote and read the Capote in Kansas graphic novel. Nevertheless, Capote's style—even though it's now a commonplace of novelistic journalism—feels like a revelation. You can sense him inventing the structure of this new form. He's done an outstanding job using details both lovely and disturbing to evoke dread in the reader.

In writing: "My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth" came back (after 10 months!) from StoryQuarterly. The rejection contained positive comments as well as a suggestion to cut "judiciously." Since they provided none of their own judiciousness in this comment, I'm having to make do with my own. I hadn't looked at the story in probably two years; it obviously needs some trimming. It'll be much stronger after this. I've already marked it up.

Giving up on le Clézio; moving on

2010-03-18T21:52:00.003-04:00

I did try with Desert. I had stopped after the first chapter (I nearly stopped on the first page, in truth) because the style seemed so intentionally resistant to forward movement. The author appeared to be announcing with every phrase, "I am writing literature--not a story." It reads like an anthropological study rather than a tale of actual people. In any case, I tried another chapter, but found myself defeated by the book's insistence on inertia as a narrative principle.

Maybe Fagles's translation of The Iliad is next.

Also, I've made additional notes for expanding some scenes in "Clockworks" and jotted down a few starts for other stories. Don't know when I'll get to those.

I learned today that "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" was praised in the latest Locus magazine.

2010-03-14T21:34:00.002-04:00

It's going to be a challenge, now that I've finished Conrad's The Secret Agent, to move on to a book that's less brilliant. With a (Henry) Jamesian attention to psychological detail--and an ability to simply stop a scene and analyze it from every angle--Conrad takes a tale of would-be terrorists and anarchists and makes it into something rich and strange. At no point did I have any clear idea where the story would go, and Conrad plays at misdirection so that the tale's true protagonist (and I think it does have one) is revealed until near the end. Conrad lets us be misled even as many of the characters are misled.

The tone differs from what I remember of other Conrad works: for every character except one (plus a minor character), the narrator demonstrates outright disdain. He makes a show of revealing the thought processes of every major character, but even as he defends them, he makes them absurd. The narrative is laced with sarcasm as Conrad sets about eviscerating both anarchist and "servant of the law" alike, and such is the specificity of psychological complexity, each person is awful in a different way.

You can see how this novel sets the stage for everything Graham Greene would do with the spy narrative.

I also read Capote in Kansas (subtitled "A Drawn Novel," by Ande Parks and Chris Samnee), a graphic novel that was well done but which didn't seem to need doing. Haven't we heard this story way too many times recently? I quite enjoyed it, but its only contribution to the tale is a layer of fiction, having Capote interact, awkwardly, with the ghost of the girl who was murdered. I do now want to read Parks's Union Station, also based on actual events.

I read the first few pages of Simak's classic Way Station, but it's a deep drop from Conrad. Maybe I'll try again on Le Clezio's Desert, which started slowly (and at too much a remove from its characters for my taste).

2010-02-28T18:30:00.003-05:00

Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl disappointed me, in the end. The third act collapsed into much bloody running around, easy hero/villain situations, and a plot device (a dead man who won't leave the story) that might have been good if used sparingly but which is here a huge miscalculation. The story becomes, due to all these components, less serious and less capable of being taken seriously. The world Bacigalupi imagines is coherent and interesting, and some of his characters were truly worth the time. I fault either the editor who didn't push him in the right directions or whatever force it was that drove him to take short stories (two of them went into this book) which were reportedly excellent and expand them ill-advisedly.

I read A Reader's Manifesto (see my bookshelf), by Myers, which I quite enjoyed. Though I didn't agree with every aspect of his criticism (he goes after several acclaimed authors who, he feels, are unduly praised), the grief he takes from book reviewers reveals--what any good reader should have already detected--a defensive culture of mutual promotion and the desire to believe that some new great thing is always being released.

I'm writing. Baffled a bit, but writing.

2010-02-21T17:51:00.003-05:00

I finished Auster's In the Country of Last Things several days ago. Reading it while reading Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl proved to be somewhat problematic, in terms of getting my head into each text, since both took place in the profoundly wounded cities of dysfunctional futures. Both feature characters wandering through those cities in search of meaning and assistance. Auster's novel uses this—even on its face—metaphorically, and the "facts on the ground" shift from one day to the next for our protagonist, Anna Blume. Bacigalupi's tale has several protagonists, and certainly part of its agenda is to suggest that their city joins them while it separates them at the existential level, and none of them is seeking the same sort of satisfactions. The styles of prose differ radically: Auster is spare; Bacigalupi somewhat self-consciously ornate, though one could argue that it fits the exoticism of the novel's locale as much as Auster's honed prose fits the deprivations of that novel's world. Auster's tale is a fable and Bacigalupi's science fiction, but both are grounded in realistic appraisals of character.

Did a fair bit of work on my story "Clockworks" this past (vacation) week. I'm feeling confident about it. I just need to somehow apply myself to the work in the days ahead, as I return to teaching.

2010-02-14T17:23:00.002-05:00

I like revising. Working on "Clockworks." It's like organizing a room, but in this case there's a place for everything you need to keep and the trash is easy to take out.

Also: reading Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things, Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl and . . . some Green Lantern comics.

See Shelfari (at the right) to link to the books themselves.

2010-02-01T10:49:00.003-05:00

Lydia's Davis's book of short fiction, Varieties of Disturbance, makes for a unique reading experience. I picked this up because a friend of my eldest daughter's had given her the book and I'd read James Wood's piece in the New Yorker about Davis's collected stories (which he considers as important a collection as Flannery O'Connor's collected fiction; quite a judgment). Some pieces are as short as a sentence, which makes the transition to her ordinary-length stories akin to a forced march after a stroll across a room. The pieces are all funny and often possess a detachedly ironic tone, a kind of weariness with language even as language makes profound demands.

I finished Ekaterina Sedia's The Alchemy of Stone a while ago. I liked the main character, or at least was intrigued by her; a "female" automaton, she's tasked with finding a way to transform her home city's living gargoyles into flesh. The book is shy with its details, so the world Sedia has created doesn't feel (no pun intended) fleshed out; rather, her focus is on the way in which one thing becomes another—the servant robot becomes free, metal learns to feel, stone becomes flesh, the living enter death, a city's government is transformed. The writing needed to open up some, I felt; the simple style fit our automaton's perspective, but the gargoyles' interior narrative sounded identical, and as the story increased in drama, the prose should have been reshaped, but instead felt flat. And through it all, I never had a strong sense of how exactly the automaton looked; the narrator held back, and I felt something more tactile would have helped. Some very nice moments in the piece and some surprising scenes that took the story and main character into unexpected narrative crannies.

Just started John the Revelator, by Peter Murphy. More on that another time.

I've been reading poetry, mostly, since that's what I'm focused on now in the early weeks of the creative writing class I'm teaching.

My story at Asimov's is getting positive responses from people. If only I had time to do more writing.

William Preston

SF, Wells, Conan Doyle, storytelling

A few more SF stories read

"Unearthed"

Books abandoned; stories read

Love the writer, hate the editor

So Far Gone

Plowing

Workin'

Against obliteration

Revision, first steps; Philbrick's Moby-Dick

"Clockworks" posted

More about "Mote": other stuff as well

Recent reading

Oh, my stars.

A brief review of a book briefly viewed

"The Aleph" and other bits

"Unearthed" and reading

Final report on Invisible Man. Plus: Several books at once!

A story by Justin Torres

New submission

Some work to do

Some recognition; some work

Faulkner! Faulkner!

Unvanquished

Line by line (Pt. 2)

Line by line (Pt. 1)

Trying Twitter

Aristotle, for starters

The executives

In which I talk only about The Quantum Thief

Clearly, too many books at once.

What is this thing?

Recently: Mostly Malcolm

Shepard and Atkinson again

More Shepard; new novel reading

Not exactly writing; plus, Jim Shepard's latest

Delany. Thon. Together for the first time anywhere.

Blogger was down . . .

Another world

What people? White people.

Mansfield Monday

Today's short fiction review

Talking vs. writing; recent reading

Old Man image

Some books: reading and ordering

Swamped, but I sent something out

POV, of course

Morrison = Shakespeare

Point of view; Fforde; Jay-Z

New Asimov's has arrived

More fun things

Small fish

Out of curiosity . . .

The failures of U.S. colleges

Woodrell's writing; my writing

Some reading not previously mentioned

A black man in Asgard

At last

Rejection, submission and fortuitousness

"The Life to Come"

Subscriptions and a new opening

If you've read one of my stories . . .

Galley-ho!

Who ARE you people?

More to read here

Roth's *Nemesis*: I'm not feeling it.

Creeping along

Laird Barron

In praise of limestone

Books bought

To Russia, with love

On stories; Lasdun; Lloyd; my stuff

Golding

Story sold; book read

What's done, what's undone

More reading than writing

A book gone wrong

More submitting

Short story reading; Verne's journey

Roth's Nemesis: I'm not feeling it.