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In Which China Mieville Is Declared Our Hero

So this is going to be one of those writing projects that I most emphatically do not whip up in a couple of weeks. There's a lot to learn, a number of strings that are reaching out blindly to each other as they search for a way to become a tapestry. How on earth did China Mieville write Perdido Street Station? When you stop and think about the sheer complexity of that undertaking--the economic, political, social and racial ideas at play, and how they all interweave into what genuinely felt like an infinitely diverse and breathing city--it staggers the mind.

I don't even know where to begin researching. Mongolian tribes? Modern american ghettos? City planning? Necromantic beliefs? I think this is actually going to take a long time to coalesce, and my concern is that I become so overloaded with information that it becomes to unwieldy to forge into a clean narrative. One point of view? Several? First person or third?

Still, it's better than an arid of expanse of empty mindscape, devoid of creative energy and mutable shapes. So no complaints here.

Pulling off the white sheet and blowing away the dust

Hello blog. Coming back here after my hiatus feels like entering a closed warehouse and turning on the lights, flicking each switch one by one on a long bank of them by the door. Lots of things under white sheets, lots of shadows, lots of silence. Since I've been gone plenty of things have happened, including a universal shoot down of my last novel, The Grind Show. It went the distance, I'll give it that--both Howard Morhaim and Neil Gaiman's agent, Merrilee Heifetz both asked for the full manuscript (or at least, their assistants did), but in the end, caput. Which is all for the best. Grind Show is so 2008.

But now that I no longer am waiting for responses from agents, I feel free to begin moving again, thinking, stirring and dreaming up new plots and characters. I know, I know--I should never have stopped. But writing two novels in under six months, each taking less than a couple of weeks to write resulted in my being invested in them both, and wanting, needing to see what happened next before writing a third. But now I'm in the clear. A rational, logical writer would start editing the second of those two novels and send it out--but I'm looking to do something new.

So, time to crack my knuckles, fire up the boiler deep in the basement of my mind, and see what I can churn out. I've already got an idea, something that's going to require a lot of research, a direction, if you will. So. Let's see how it goes.

Vampires

Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan opine on the popularity of blood sucking fiends in the NYT.

Late night thoughts

I was falling asleep while standing at the bar earlier this evening, but now, when it is most appropriate to slumber, I am awake. And so I have roused myself from bed, warmed up a mug of milk, and have decided to mull on potential future works, on influences that are currently of interest.

I was greatly struck by The Fountain's layering of different time periods over the same characters, the same souls. It struck me as similar in many ways to what Anubis Gates accomplished, but there was something more there that dealt with mortality, with the soul, with the futility of being human that appealed. Time is but a window, death is but a door, I'll be back. Identity. Past lives. Highlander. Distinct time periods breaking down. Nature versus nurture. Fiction versus our perceived realities. Reality is perception.

I'm also intrigued by what it meant to be 'human' during different time periods, as illustrated by Saramago's treatment of love in The Siege of Lisbon. How our sense of our own humanity, what it means to be humane, is affected by society. What is man when stripped of ideals, of civilization? Would a Phoenician shop keeper have much in common with a contemporary Parisian one?

Jungian archetypes, genetic memory, the movie Altered States. Love as some trump card, over ruling fate, death, limits, time. But what is love but a modern construct, ever elaborated since its courtly conception during the Middle Ages? What was there before this concept of love, if not lust, desire, practicality, solidarity against the world? Could such 'baser' emotions, needs, be allowed to trump death in similar fashion?

Nietzsche was enamored with Poe's idea of Eternal Recurrence - that everything we do over the course of our lives will be repeated ad infinitum, an endless repetitive cycle that we are fated to relive for all eternity. What if these repetitive cycles were not the playing back of one life, but a pattern in history that we experience, are tested by, as we live through each one of our past lives?

Similarly, I love Moore's deft handling of time in The Watchmen, and not only Dr. Manhattan's ability to perceive the past, present, and future simultaneously, but to interact with the world around him even as he does so. At what point does physics become mysticism, prophesy, magic?

Tim Powers is really, really great. I love the trick he pulls in Anubis Gates wherein he solves the paradox of modifying the past by having the present actually be the unwitting product right from the beginning of all the modifications that happen throughout the course of the novel as the characters travel back in time.

In another vein, what I found fascinating about The Historian was not so much the actual action and plot of the novel, but rather its interaction with history. The unearthing of letters, maps, travelogues, reports from ancient times that pieced together a tale. Same with A.S. Byatt's incredible Possessed. The past coming to life as you unearth it, a tale being told in real time due to one's gradual revealing of ancient, forgotten events in sequential order.

There's something here, something in all this, this knotted whorl of questions and musings. I'm not sure what, yet, but I'll keep picking at it until something comes free.

Debut Teen Cover

Following the steps to create my debut Teen book cover, I came up with the following:

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

Courtesy of Genevieve via her Twitter account I stumbled upon this slideshow that - well, it doesn't really tell me anything new, but it makes it all so much more URGENT...

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

Janus, by Ann Beattie

Now this story is more my speed. A seemingly simple story about a woman's deepening obsession - affair, almost - with her prized bowl, and the hold it seems to develop on her thoughts, her life. But, as with any good story, there's more going on under the surface, and the title hints at that.

Her lover had said that she was always too slow to know what she really loved. Why continue with her life the way it was? Why be two-faced, he asked her.

But what's going on in this story? It reminds me a lot of Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe" in which the reader slowly comes to realize that there's a fundamental problem with the protagonist, a weakness, and inability to live fully within their own life. The bowl comes to symbolize her... what? Her desire for a life that is pristine, empty, picture perfect? Here's the last paragraph:

Time passed. Alone in the living room at night, she often looked at the bowl sitting on the table, safe and still, unilluminated. In its way, it was perfect: the world cut in half, deep and smoothly empty. Near the rim, even in dim light, the eye moved toward one small flash of blue, a vanishing point on the horizon.

See what I mean about the bowl being an elusive but intriguing metaphor? She's successful, married to a man with whom she gets along, but there is discontent. The fact that she had a lover attests to that, the fact that she's growing estranged from her husband, that she's projecting so strongly onto a bowl. Ultimately, I think the bowl comes to represent an idealized version of her own self; beautiful, powerful, empty, perfect, still. She's Janus faced in that she's going through the regular motions of her own life, when instead, as her lover pointed out, she's duplicitous, hides herself away, refuses to engage with the very life she's leading.

And oh, it was very nicely written too. Go Ann Beatie!

The Indian Uprising, by Donald Barthelme

This story is crap. Donald Barthelme says:

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straight-forward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straight-forward, nothing much occurs.

And that's crap too.

So this is like Barth's Funhouse story, but without the humor and without the linear narrative. What you get is a very strong style that manifests itself in being ridiculously disjointed, leaping several times within the same paragraph from lists of objects to be found on table tops, or composing barricades, or whatever else, to snatches of dialogue from other characters, to terse descriptions of urban warfare between absurd regiments composed of cabdrivers and the like and 'Comanches'.

Then it was learned that they had infiltrated our ghetto and that the people of the ghetto instead of resisting had joined the smooth, well-coordinated attack with zipguns, telegrams, lockets, causing that portion of the line held by the IRA to swell and collapse. We sent more heroin into the ghetto, and hyacinths, ordering another hundred thousand of the pale, delicate flowers. On the map we considered the situation with its strung-out inhabitants and merely personal emtotions. Our parts were blue and their parts were green. I showed the blue-and-green map to Sylvia. "Your parts are green," I said. "You gave me heroin first a year ago," Sylvia said. She ran off down George C. Marshall Allee, uttering shrill cries. Miss R. pushed me into a large room painted white (jolting and dancing in the soft light, and I was excited! and there were people watching!) in which there were two chairs. I sat in one chair and Miss R. sat in the other. She wore a blue dress containing a red figure. There was nothing exceptional about her. I was disappointed by her plainness, by the bareness of the room, by the absence of books.

It's like he took The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, shattered it into a million pieces, swept it all up into one big jumble, threw in some random psychology and a penchant for anal retentive lists and purposeful obfuscation. There is no story. All you have is an extended mishmashed dream sequence from which you can barely glean the narrator's preocuppations, love interests, fragmented world view.

Barthelme is clearly trying to be complex. There is a purposeful striving for complexity in this tale, and I can imagine him leaning back in his chair between writing sentences, smoking a cigarette, and feeling very proud of his abstruseness. At best, you could say this is an impressionistic rendering of a man's insecurity in regards to the women that have passed through his life, his own worth in the world, and his inability to grasp what's of worth in the world itself.

I don't like it. It's purposefully and thus annoyingly recondite, and all you walk away with is the impression that Barthelme must have been an insufferable prick at parties.

Lost in the Funhouse, by John Barth

Let's cut to the chase here. No beating around the bush. Right in the intro to this story, it says:

The title story, "Lost in the Funhouse," like his other short experimental pieces in the collection, suggests that Barth is self-consciously concerned with what happens when a writer writes, and what happens when a reader reads.

What this means is that this story is really damned meta. Flaubert went on record saying that the author should be like god in the world, everywhere present and no where visible. John Barth clearly holds no truck with Flaubert, because you can't go two lines in this story without running into him.

This is what I'm talking about, from the very beginning of the story:

For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion. He has come to the seashore with his family for the holiday, the occasion of their visit is Independence Day, the most important secular holiday of the United States of America. A single straight underline is the manuscript mark for italic type, which in turn is the printed equivelent to oral emphasis of words and phrases as well as the customary type for titles of complete works, not to mention.

See what I mean? However, you quickly adjust to the tone, the style. 'Oh,' you think, 'Mr. Barth is forcing us to become aware of the story as medium, to become aware of the very act of our reading his story.' And, that realized and accepted, you're off, following his tangents and asides, his questions and doubts, and somewhere in the middle of all that, Ambrose's story.

Does it work? For the most part, yes. The third quarter kind of dragged for me. By then the novelty had worn off, and since it's about 17 large pages worth of small type, it became a bit of a slog. But Mr. Barth (can I call him John?) is pretty witty, light on his feet, and you find yourself following his existential tap dancing with interest. He often stops and asks himself where his own story is going, if it's on topic, or irretrievably off; he is madly in love with fragments, with saying things for effect, and then stepping back and admiring his own words, italicizing them so you can't miss the stylized and artificial nature of what he just said.

It's like he read Ulysses, was super impressed, and gave his own crack at it. The result is interesting, mildly annoying, amusing and perhaps could use a little paring. 'Ha ha!' you say, then again, 'Ha ha!' Mr. Barth turns and gyres and amuses and winks, and you keep on chortling until you kind of get tired, and then you're going, 'Ha ha, got it, okay already.'

But it's good. Mr. Barth builds some genuine sexual tension (and creepily keeps on insisting, for effect, that all these young girls are remarkably physically developed for their age). You really get deep into Ambrose's head, and Mr. Barth achieves, at the very end, a wistful sense of estrangement, of Ambrose peering at the rest of humanity through a window, screened off by his own sensitivity and insecurity.

It's as if Jim Carey had written Joyce's The Dead, really. A ton of seemingly frivolous, over the top detail and asides that set up the rug to be pulled out from under your feet, leaving you with a serious epiphany. Joyce himself defined an epiphany as:

a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself.

It is in the trivial moments of life, when things are vulgar, common, that a chasm can open up under your feet and reveal to you some inner truth.

Mr. Barth clearly took this to heart, drank seven Red Bulls, and then wrote Lost in the Funhouse.

Sheeple by XKCD