Small fish

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 . . .

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

The failures of U.S. colleges

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

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

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

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

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

"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"

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

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 . . .

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!

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?

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.

More to read here

Since Fictionwise has now stopped selling the March 2010 Asimov's (thus ending the six-month embargo on my use of the story), I'm posting a PDF of the tale over to the right. If you missed it before, have a look now. I figure it's useful to provide for anyone who comes upon the next story, "Clockworks," and wants to see the other existing component.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.