| Competentest Self-Promotion Ever |
[13 Jul 2009|07:48pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Heh.
I was so busy arranging my weekend of Readercon and chapbook and family reunion running about that I forgot to come on here and mention in advance the fact that I got to participate in two readings while at Readercon, not to mention stand about at the Small Beer table chatting up the fancy folk.
One of the readings was for Interfictions 2, which I am not in, but for which they were nice enough to let me read anyway for some inexplicable reason.
The other was for Beneath Ceaseless Skies, wherein when I preambled the bordello scene from “Of Thinking Being and Beast” with the fact that it was set in a world where centaurs had conquered the American West, the people in the seats actually applauded. Who would have thought? Not I… even though I must confess the seats were somewhat packed with ringers.
Also: the hotel pub had Sam Adams Brick Red on tap. Mmm.
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| “May the devil’s head-cook conjure my bumgut into a pair of bellows” |
[06 Jul 2009|01:11pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. For the stories in our second chapbook, each of us at The Homeless Moon chose as inspiration a fictional setting. Here’s the first scene of mine, “The Cannon and the Prophetess”:
One Kestrel pronounced the last phrase of the sonnet he had been reciting for the Duchess of Ennasin, and the crowd of loungers who made up her court erupted in applause. Acknowledging their flattery, he lowered himself to one knee.
“No, no,” said the Duchess, twiddling her manicured fingers to indicate he should arise. “You mustn’t prostrate yourself. Your primitive origins are of no consequence—you outrank me, Your Majesty!”
The assembled nobles tittered at their hostess’s kind condescension.
With an abruptness inappropriate to tact—but which he had come to know would be expected, secretly desired, of an educated savage such as himself—One Kestrel surged to his feet like a predator ready to strike. The bones and beads sewn in his robes of state rattled satisfactorily, the brilliant feathers of his royal headdress rippled, and he allowed his eyes to flash just so.
The nobles gasped, recoiling; this time, the nervous laughter of the Duchess betrayed an underlying terror. “My dear Captain Saturno, you are to be commended on such a magnificent find! If only you would allow me to purchase him from you.”
Captain Saturno took a knee himself. Resplendent in his shining steel cuirass and waxed moustache, he made a flourish, and taking her offered hand, placed his lips to her ring. “Your praise is acknowledged most humbly—but I am afraid King Kestrel cannot linger, for he is called away on an engagement at another court—and I’m sure Your Eminence could not wish to sully His Majesty’s reputation by making him late.”
“At the very least,” the flush Duchess begged, “allow me to offer His Majesty a parting gift—a boon. Name anything! It shall be wrapped and placed in his flagship’s stateroom, where my court’s generous donations to his cause already await.”
One Kestrel drew back overeducated lips from filed teeth, and throwing a ravenous glance at his master and keeper, uttered that too-familiar entreaty with which he’d caused himself to be expunged from so many a court. “There is one small secret I dearly desire. I can only
further impose on Your Eminence’s hospitality in this: if you would, provide me with your military’s recipe for gunpowder.”
Amidst the ensuing uproar, Saturno clutched One Kestrel by the elbow and propelled him from the court. His face was bloodless, blank—but whether with rage or something else, One Kestrel didn’t know.
Once they were safe aboard the caravel Constança, Captain Saturno barked orders to throw off the moorings and get underway. He escorted His Primitive Majesty One Kestrel, King of America, to his sumptuous, gift-strewn lodgings in the brig, shoved him inside, and slammed the door.
And here are the relevant lines from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, from which I took my inspiration:
Pantagruel then asked what sort of people dwelt in that damned island. They are, answered Xenomanes, all hypocrites, holy mountebanks, tumblers of beads, mumblers of ave-marias, spiritual comedians, sham saints, hermits, all of them poor rogues who, like the hermit of Lormont between Blaye and Bordeaux, live wholly on alms given them by passengers. Catch me there if you can, cried Panurge; may the devil’s head-cook conjure my bumgut into a pair of bellows if ever you find me among them! Hermits, sham saints, living forms of mortification, holy mountebanks, avaunt! in the name of your father Satan, get out of my sight! When the devil’s a hog, you shall eat bacon.
I’m not going to make any attempt to synthesize one with the other; chances are it would turn out a disaster, and anyway I’d much rather just encourage you to read the story and form your own opinions.
So instead, I’ll close with Gustave Doré’s utterly demented evil jester illustration to Rabelais’ prologue, which starts like this:
Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings)….
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| 200 Chapbooks Equals Heavy |
[02 Jul 2009|02:24pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Particularly when they are twice as big! Last year’s Homeless Moon chapbook weighed in at 44 pages. This year’s: 80. The poor woman working the register at the printers nearly killed herself trying to get them up onto the counter.
Two weeks remain until Readercon and the “official” release. In the meantime, we will be sending out a few advance copies for review and/or to wedge under your chair legs so they don’t wobble. I am setting ten copies aside for ye F&SFesque blog promo. If you want one, and are willing to write a bit of a blog entry about what you thought of it, ask. If you are not the eleventh person to do so, you’ll get one.
Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait the two weeks and paypal me the two bucks for shipping. Less than that, even, if you’d prefer the electronic version. Not sure exactly when that’ll come off. But soon–in the next couple days. When it does, you’ll see it here.
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| Hemlock Varnish Mushroom |
[28 Jun 2009|10:13pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. 
Ganoderma tsugae
Mt. Toby Reservation, Sunderland, MA
These are smooth and soft to the touch, firm like a piece of cork. They grow pretty exclusively on hemlock—living wood or rotten. They’re inedible, but are ascribed medicinal properties when taken in the form of a tea or extract. Have not tried that yet.
I also read of one guy who puts it in his homebrew. Haven’t tried that either.
Before they get bigger, they look like this. This is from the other side of Mt. Toby back in May.
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| Gloomy Russians Looking Awkward at the Beach |
[22 Jun 2009|02:28pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Liz Hand closed her summer reading LJ post the other day with an ironical apology for the absence from her list of any Proust, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky. What means this? thought I, who happened to be reading Anna Karenina. I’ve heard of War and Peace referred to as the end-all antithesis of mindless beach reading. And I have no doubt at one point or another performed similar pseudo-intellectual self-flagellation with Crime and Punishment. But I didn’t exactly pick up Anna Karenina for that purpose—it was more just one of those spur of the moment things, at a loss for reading material before a bookshelf assembled for other tastes than my own. And you know, I don’t actually feel particularly oppressed by it. Granted, I haven’t attempted to get anywhere in the book while using it as a sun-shield on the beach. But for someone who reads as slowly as I do, it actually has been flying right by. No comparison to Dostoevsky, really, either for the bleakness of the material or the density of the prose. It might even be easier to decipher than somebody like Jane Austen, who among ye classic 19th century novelists is much more likely to be stereotyped as a beach reading option.
I’m not very well-versed in Tolstoy. I’ve read “The Death of Ivan Ilych” a few times, which strikes me as being much more tongue-in-cheek satirical than Anna Karenina, more influenced by Gogol. The main intent in Anna Karenina, rather than sending up the ills of a society as a whole or attacking its hypocrisies, seems to be to illustrate, in painstaking nuance and verisimilitude, the series of core character types and variations on the core that make up society and cause it to function as it does. So we get a lot of extensive, internal character sketches, an incredible number of and an incredible willingness to shift between POVs. The elements of plot and conflict seem very deliberately designed to provide opportunities to show us these characters in all possible lights and from all angles. Which I guess makes it less titillating, less of a page-turner, than say a Pride & Prejudice or Crime & Punishment, if either of those works can be said to possess any such quality. But it also means reading Anna Karenina requires less vestedness from the reader, allowing it to be picked up and laid aside with surprising carelessness. And since what I’m reading for isn’t the next twist in a gothic romance, but rather the next facet of a wise and exhaustive survey into human nature, I feel much freer to dally and skim as suits the moment and my mood. So—not your typical summer reading in the usual sense, but for me, at least, it works really well.
My favorite parts are the occasional, brief tidbits of generalization Tolstoy interjects to explicate a character action or tendency we have just been shown, but which in almost every case can be applied with equal ease to every situation ever encountered, in real life or in fiction, among people of the type being discussed. Because Tolstoy is just that perceptive.
This, for example, is the reaction of the tortured, true artist Mihailov to the idle hobbying of the bored, wealthy Count Vronsky. One of the bitterest instances I’ve come across, but I like it.
He knew that Vronsky could not be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew that he and every other dilettante had a perfect right to paint what they liked, but it was distasteful to him. A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to take his doll and go and sit down in the presence of a man in love, and start caressing his doll as the lover caressed his beloved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Mihailov had just such a feeling of distaste at Vronksy’s painting: he was amused, irritated, sorry, and affronted.
I’m pretty sure I’ve been on both ends of that feeling.
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| We Do It Again |
[08 Jun 2009|04:24pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. The Homeless Moon is making another chapbook. There isn’t much to show for it yet except for nebulous intangibles such as this here non-final cover:
However, from where I sit, I am pretty sure this one is going to blow last year’s out of the water. Conspicuous absence of marauding robot spiders aside.
A chapbook, in case you were wondering, is an embodiment of the do-it-yourself spirit in ink-and-paper form with a long and storied past. The term may in the near future become obsolete, once all our short story reading material comes to us in the form of iPhone periodicals, but it’s been around nearly as long as the printing press, used to denote any cheap, loosely-bound, disposable printed material intended for the edification and entertainment of the masses. Basically, a chapbook is a step up from a pamphlet, a step down from a zine. Pamphlets, as I understand it, are designed to convince people of something—for example, that fire and brimstone await if they don’t change their evil ways. A zine, on the other hand, is art—of the underground, fist-clenching rebel variety. I think we of the Moon will be satisfied if our chapbook manages to entertain.
I hope that clears things up.
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| Black Rat Snake |
[31 May 2009|02:25pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. 
Elaphe obsoleta obsoleta
Bull Hill, Mt. Toby Reservation, dry hemlock and white oak forest.
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| Satyricon |
[25 May 2009|02:30pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Titus Petronius Niger, the man scholarly consensus seems to agree is the author of the scandalous, fragmentary narrative of debaucherous and decadent abandon known as the Satyricon, was a consul in Nero’s senate in AD 62; subsequently, he became something akin to Nero’s personal social director, granted the unofficial title “Arbiter of Elegance”. Tacitus, in his Annals, describes Petronius as a man who treated idleness as his profession, “one who made luxury a fine art”. “In the end,” says Tacitus, “Nero’s jaded appetite regarded nothing as enjoyable or refined unless Petronius had given sanction to it.”
In AD 66, after a rival poisoned Nero’s affections against him, Petronius made effort to flee Rome, was thwarted, and so decided to preempt his likely torture and execution with suicide. He threw an extravagant dinner party, during which he opened his veins and bled himself slowly to death to the accompaniment of feasting, wine, music, satiric poetry, and pithy conversation.
There’s a dude who stuck to his principles.
I think I’ve been aware of Petronius as a historical figure for a while, but had until not so very long ago considered him among the ranks of Machiavelli, the Marquis de Sade, and Nero himself: egomaniacal pretend intellectuals championing amorality for no other purpose than to further their own fame—the people who brought us Charles Manson.
I have to admit, though, that hedonism, at least in a watered-down form, has gained a certain abstract appeal for me. Pseudopagan pantheism does seem to lend itself to a philosophy of pleasure. And the ideas involved do have a great deal of practical relevance for me, if not necessarily as a human being, then as a writer. What with the centaurs and all.
So I’ve been reading the Satyricon—in a used Penguin Classics edition, translated by J.P. Sullivan, which is a lot of fun in that it couches all the homoerotic innuendo and hypermasculine grandstanding in the terms of stiff-upper-lip 20th century British slang. And it really is a pleasure. The characters are actually quite reasonable people, even wise, in their approach to their debaucheries. As a window on the culture and period, it’s utterly fascinating, an unplumbable resource. And the parallels with modern culture—and by extension, with human culture across geography and era, whenever a society has passed its peak—are just astounding. For example, certain passages—street chases and a vicious love triangle between two men and a boy—remind me very much of the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. The wealth of pithy witticisms evoke Oscar Wilde, the party scenes Rabelais. Even the scene structure and pacing seem to prophesy a good few thousand years into the future.
All these parallels with later stuff are so numerous and engrossing, it took me awhile to realize that the Satyricon also looks a lot like a prose reinterpretation of the epic poetry form. There are nested stories, comparisons to the exploits of gods and legendary heroes, and points at which the narrative is temporarily arrested for a long soliloquy on aesthetics or philosophy—though, in the case of the Satyricon, such soliloquies are as likely to be about the etiquette of sharing a nubile youth among a roomful of older men as about the death of art.
In short, I highly recommend it to anybody with the capacity for patience and detachment necessary to look past all the gorging and fondling and see the Satyricon for the solid gold it is. If you appreciate the centaurs, I think you’ll be as fascinated by it as I am.
To close, a piece of ageless wisdom on the plight of the struggling writer from Eumolpus, the Satyricon’s sexpot poet:
‘No doubt about it. If a man sets his face against every temptation and starts off on the straight and narrow, he’s immediately hated because of his different ways. No one can approve of conduct different from his own. And secondly, those who are interested in piling up money don’t want anything else in life regarded as better than what they have themselves. So lovers of literature are sneered at by whatever means possible to show that they too are inferior to wealth.’
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| Fiddleheads |
[18 May 2009|08:11am] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. 
Fiddleheads are actually the immature young curled-up tops of Ostrich fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris, so-called because the fronds look like ostrich feathers when full-grown.
I found these on the Long Trail ridge in central Vermont at about 2,500 feet elevation, in rocky soil among hemlock, beech and gray birch. They are 2 to 4 inches high, and the fiddle part is about 1 inch in diameter. They grow inside a fibrous brown casing, which you’re supposed to submerge in water and scrub off before eating. I tried some as they were, picked right from the trailside (which apparently you’re not supposed to do—carcinogens bah) and they were quite tasty, like a lemony spinach, though the brown stuff made them somewhat scratchy going down. I also had some for dinner the other night, steamed, then sauteed in butter and garlic. After cooking they lose some of the citrus flavor and become nuttier.
If you’re going to pick fiddleheads for eating, by the way, los eeenternets inform me that it’s best for the plants if you only pick 2 or 3 fiddles from each, so as not to damage the population for the future. You can see in my picture that there are five little fiddles in a bunch—apparently, underground they all come from one plant. I picked two, the tallest ones, and left the others alone.
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| Turn of Phrase |
[04 May 2009|09:38am] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Nancy Kress had an interesting blog post the other day about her actual moment-by-moment process of constructing a paragraph: hashing out a couple of sentences, then shoving off the ones that come out of chronological order, cutting the excess words, fixing the sentence structure so it feels natural/fresh, fixing the language so it feels appropriate to the character and setting. A lot of what she says is pretty universal—which I think is one of the things that makes her such a great teacher of writing. She can point out the nose on your face, and somehow it comes across as a revelation, because you’ve never looked at it in quite that way.
Another of Nancy Kress’s great strengths is her economy of language, how she can build a subtle, complex story out of so little.
Thinking about this as I go along with my own writing, it occurs to me there’s one element of this sort of in-the-trenches prose styling that she hasn’t touched upon—possibly because there just is no way to codify it. It can be a painful thing to think about for those of us aspiring writers reading every how-to book we can get our hands on, hoping to someday write as well as Nancy Kress, but there’s always going to be a part of the writing process that’s ineffable, that can’t be fully grasped by rational means. There are too many words and too many subjects, too many unplumbable depths for the mere mind to fathom. Call it the unconscious, the minor deity of inspiration, or pure, dumb randomization, but at some point, you’re going to be hammering away at a sentence, and out will come something astonishing. Call that thing “turn of phrase”.
It’s hard to identify that thing in other people’s work, just because no matter how effortless and flawless a phrase or sentence seems, there’s no way to know the author didn’t agonize over it for hours, going through dozens of word choice options until they found the perfect one. The feeling I get when I come across such a phrasing, however, is unmistakable. And at that point, it doesn’t matter to me whether it came to the author in a flash of divine comprehension or not. Because even if I can’t pinpoint and identify the processes by which such a flash can occur (and if I could, I contend that the writing of fiction would cease to be art and become something soulless and mechanical), I can still train myself, by identifying that flash in the work of others, to recognize it when it comes forth from my own hands. And then, through everything I have managed to learn about the craft of fiction by studying the work and the teachings of masters, I can nudge and tweak and twist the rest of the sentence and paragraph and page to fit around it, carve away and slough off surplus until it stands out like it should.
This is why I keep seeking out great prose stylists in spite of the frustrating fact that whatever powers they possess may never be mine.
“A good strategist concentrates on what he can change,” says the divinely-touched sculptress to the brooding, crippled, chess-playing boy in Vandana Singh’s “The Room on the Roof”, which I happened to be reading over breakfast when this notion came upon me. That’s a wonderful line, and one of those truths of the human condition that are, for me, what writing is all about. But it’s not the line that stopped me in my tracks.
But sometimes a hopeless melancholy possessed her, and she thought the rain would never end, and that she and her brother and parents would never be happy or free, that beyond one wall there were others, an infinite concentricity of walls. Up in Aparna’s room every evening, she felt joy and yearning like a fever. and underneath it the fear that all she had gained was temporary, that one day the sculptress would leave them and the magic would go out of their lives. Sometimes she caught herself holding her breath, waiting for the change.
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| Show Not Tell |
[20 Apr 2009|09:18am] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. I just stumbled onto possibly the best object lesson in showing, not telling in fiction I’ll ever get.
In 2005, I wrote a story called “Hope and Erosion”, about a kingdom living in a sandcastle threatened by the rising tide. It was the second story I’d ever sold, to a Christian fantasy e-zine called Dragons, Knights and Angels. I was very proud of it at the time. At the time, it was the best story I’d ever written.
In 2004, all unbenknownst to me at the time, Jeffrey Ford wrote a story called “The Annals of Eelin Ok”, which was published in Datlow and Windling’s The Faery Reel, and won the Fountain Award for that year (and on whose website it can still be read for free). It’s based on the exact same premise: a tiny, fantastical being living out his life in a sandcastle made by human hands. His story is way better. I just listened to it on a Podcastle show from a couple weeks back, read by Rajan Khanna, who may be my new favorite podcast reader—his voice is understated, quiet and calm and eminently listenable, but somehow capable of hitting just the right emotional notes with the strength of a clapper striking a cathedral bell. It almost made me cry.
Here’s the lesson: everything about a story is more powerful when you’re experiencing it right there with the character. “Hope and Erosion” is told like a parable. Hermit, the hero, is a hero in the classic fairytale sense, the way Sir Gawain is a hero, or the Red Cross Knight. Which is fine, but there’s no understanding that kind of hero as a person. He’s away up there on the pedestal of myth.
Eelin Ok is a fairy, but he’s a person. His whole life is there on the page, his heart is open, and you’re in it.
I suppose this lesson may work better on me than on you, gentle reader, since you may not have had the luck to have written the exact same story as Jeffrey Ford. But if you feel so inclined, you might could get a similar effect if you read the two stories side by side.
Read the Jeff Ford story, anyway, if you haven’t. It’s awesome.
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| I Got Nothing |
[30 Mar 2009|05:31pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. I could pretend like I had given blogging up for Lent…and facebook and livejournal and twitter and various forums et cetera…but I doubt it would be very convincing.
The truth is, all that other stuff I put in my Beneath Ceaseless Skies bio has sort of taken over my attentions, as it is wont to do come spring to Western Mass. The last chunks of ice are as we speak dissolving from the shadows in my backyard, the bizarre array of seeds in the flats on my windowsill are mustering their energy to sprout, the yeast in my pail of Belgian wit is fermenting merrily away, the maple beer is delicious, and so is the bread. And the writing isn’t going all that bad either. The centaur research, in particular, is fascinating. I just can’t seem to scrape together the time or the brain cells to share any of it here.
Instead, I shall direct you to Justin Howe’s recent series of blog posts on Tor.com, all of which are way more interesting than anything I would have said here anyway.
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| The Legendary Black Beer of Aaaargh |
[16 Mar 2009|04:55pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. My newest Literary Beer article just went online over at the Small Beer Press blog, in which I suggest hops might not be all they’re cracked up to be, and consider some truly medieval alternatives. The story of how hops came to be used in beer is actually pretty cool—and a worthwhile thing to know for all you fantasists interested in medieval settings.
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| “Of Thinking Being and Beast” Podcast |
[11 Mar 2009|09:39pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. As of midnight tonight, the Beneath Ceaseless Skies fiction podcast will be featuring “Of Thinking Being and Beast”. With an “explicit” rating. Yeah. That’s right: you were fooled by my huggable fuzzy crunchy tweed nature. I am dark and ominous.
This is a human kneeing a centaur in the crotch, from a section of the Parthenon frieze depicting the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs (torn down by misguided imperialists and now residing at the British Museum).
Foolish human—that’s not where centaurs keep their genitals.
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| What the hell is a sun machine? |
[09 Mar 2009|03:48pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. This question occurred to me thanks to the shuffle switch on my ipode, which, on a long, lonely drive through Vermont in a wet snowstorm, presented me, all out of context, with “Memory of a Free Festival”: the distantly trippy, elegiac-in-the-face-of-joyful, seven-minute final track off David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Ostensibly, it’s a jangly-organ folk ballad celebrating free love and boundless hippie optimism, with a hint of the wonderful irony for which I so love Bowie:
We claimed the very source of joy ran through
It didn’t, but it seemed that way
I kissed a lot of people that day
But all that stuff trails off around the three minute mark, and for the final four minutes we get a wild cacophony of toy-piano tinkling, trombone-kazoo-clapping and distant fairy laughter, over which Bowie and a chorus of euphoric voices chant, over and over:
The sun machine is coming down and we’re gonna have a party
Which I presume we are to interpret as a return to our regularly scheduled glammed-out alien space messiah Bowie. Take the green acid so when Ashtar and the Aquarians get here, they’ll know you’re one of the enlightened and you’ll get to ride off with them on the crystal ship.
Goofy velour pantsuit cliche notwithstanding, however, this was kind of a revelatory moment for me. Growing up, I had a completely different association with the term “sun machine”, based on a Percy Hill song of comparable epic length, but a very different aesthetic: a white boy jam-band soul-funk anthem, which goes like this:
I don’t care if the world may end
I’ll be just fine inside my sun machine
I cannot say my friends
when I’ll put down this foolish game
I hope it never ends
And time will never tell
Hallucinogens and benevolent alien abductions? Yeah, maybe. But that’s not what I thought at the time. I always assumed it was a reference to Ray Bradbury. In Dandelion Wine, a loving suburban husband, father of two, and inventor cribbed straight from the American Dream, sets out to build a Happiness Machine in his garage, basically a phone booth full of visions of everything you most desire. It nearly destroys him and his family.
His wife was quieter now. “Leo, the mistake you made is you forgot some hour, some day, we all got to climb out of that thing and go back to dirty dishes and the beds not made. While you’re in that thing, sure, a sunset lasts forever almost, the air smells good, the temperature is fine. All the things you want to last, last. But outside, the children wait on lunch, the clothes need buttons. And then let’s be frank, Leo, how long can you look at a sunset? Who wants a sunset to last? Who wants perfect temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after awhile, who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, let’s have something else. People are like that, Leo. How could you forget?”
But Dandelion Wine is about time and memory and regret, not neon angelic visions. In 1957, when Bradbury wrote it, LSD existed and was legal, but I don’t think it was nearly the pop phenomenon it would have needed to be for Bradbury’s readership to get the reference–particularly in the context of the half-remembered halcyon summer 1928 suburbia of the novel.
So I don’t know. Maybe there’s no connection between Bradbury, the Bowie song, and the impossible dreams of my youth.
Or maybe, just maybe, this is another one of those monumental metaphors that has always been and will always be waiting somewhere in the back of every human consciousness, waiting around for the dawn or the re-dawn of the industrial age so it makes sense again, waiting for somebody to write a song or a story to invoke it so it can share its universal, esoteric wisdom with the world.
Because I go and google “sun machine” and look: there’s a band, three different albums by three other bands, a computer company, a german heating company, and look, even a grandiloquent hoax perpetrated at the 1904 St. Louis World fair, all operating under that name!
Jeez, I wonder if everybody else is referencing this thing?
Wouldn’t that be cool.
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| Building Blocks and Knitting Needles: Little, Big Again |
[16 Feb 2009|04:54pm] |
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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. I’m having one of those afternoons where everything I’m made of seems to come apart and lie there spread out on the carpet for me to rummage through like plastic pieces from three dozen different building block sets I’ve been accumulating since I was three. And the turning world rolls a sunbeam across the whole angular mess and up the wall and then gone, and I sit here trying to get back to what I was doing—writing, trying to get the legos back up into their towers and buttresses and balustrades—but all I can do is keep pulling them down, turning them over, thinking This is what I am.
So I’ve been reading Little, Big. Probably not the safest thing to be doing in this kind of mood.
Some books are so good they drive me back to the blank page with sticks and lashes, shouting, “You can do this, you have to do this, do it!” Other books, better books even than that, make me stare at the page and feel the world rusting, shouting, “You’ll never do that.” This afternoon, Little, Big seems to have made its way into a third, still more rarefied and elite subcategory, whose members, if I really wanted to depress myself, I could probably count on two hands: books that are a distillation of existence—of everybody’s existence, but of mine in particular—books that maybe happen to come at the right time and be about exactly the thing that occupies me at that moment in my life, or else maybe they’re always like that for everybody, because they are what life is about. Books that seem to know me better than I do.
“Kill the fatted calf,” Momdy said, the only one there to whom the phrase would have occurred. “And fricassee it.”
Every few pages, something like this leaps right up off the page and stabs me with a white-hot knitting needle. Then there’s a lull, a chance for me to catch my breath and quiet my bawling. Then it happens again.
They stared at each other wildly, all questions, no answers; and at the same moment saw that. Smoky clapped his hand to his brow. “But how could you have thought I… that I… I mean wasn’t it obvious I didn’t know…”
“Well, I wondered,” Auberon said. “I thought maybe you were pretending. But I couldn’t be sure. How could I be sure? I couldn’t take a chance.”
“Then why didn’t you…”
“Don’t say it,” Auberon said. “Don’t say, Why didn’t you ask. Just don’t.”
“Oh, God,” Smoky said, laughing. “Oh, dear.”
Auberon sat back on the floor, shaking his head. “All that work,” he said. “All that effort.”
This stuff is taken out of context, obviously, which probably deprives it of the power to do whatever it’s doing to me. Consider yourself lucky. But I suppose the force of the impact comes from that it’s archetypal and it’s real at once. It’s saying something universal, using ancient forms, but doing it simply and intimately, without barely even having to draw on the ancient or the universal at all, because it’s been building up a mountainous reserve of all it could ever need for the past four hundred pages.
This is why novels win over short stories in the end. On most any other day, I never would admit that. There are many, many short stories I’ve read that fit into tier one and tier two: they drive me to write, they drive me away from writing, they drive me back. But in tier three—I don’t want to have to count what’s there on my two hands, and I hate to admit it—but none of them are short stories.
I guess I just thought I’d gotten past the point where this kind of thing could bite me. Thought I’d taken enough classes in psychoanalytic theory and read more than enough fantasy and metaphysics and aged enough to make me immune.
Not so.
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