Make a choice

The choice between these two options: the futuristic/alternative urban utopia/dystopia with a youth, coming-of-age emphasis versus the fantastic past mystery of where is Bruegel, what happened there, who was responsible, and what can be done to un-happen it.

Genre-wise, these sound like (a) a young adult/coming-of-age science fiction adventure, and (b) a fantasy history detective story with some focus on children (the massacre of the innocents). Which am I most interested in writing, which am I most capable of doing, and which would appeal most to readers, assuming that I could pull them off.

What are the research demands of these two projects? The demands of Bruegel seem larger, though that could be an illusion.

To answer question 3, the first project has potentially more readership appeal because of the relevance of some of the underlying themes, and the possibilities of the characters. Also there are possibilities for multiple volumes, since all is not likely to be resolved in one.

I think the Danikiiwin story has more appeal to me as a writer, and probably as a reader. I think it would be easier for me to write because I would understand the genre and the potential readership better than in the other, which I think would require more skill and practice to deal with the complexity. This first one is more simple.

The decision (provisional) is for Danikiwiin.

What's in the basket?

I've been writing about the process of (a) generating ideas and (b) making choices between them to commit to. All of this goes under the heading, how to get started. I've done a little of the real work, which is actually sitting down and writing words that might be called a story or a poem, the first draft. But I've allowed distractions, courted distractions. Probably I should disconnect my computer from the Internet, because the availability of endless bits of information that might inform what I'm going to write is infinitely distracting. This blog, just writing to myself, is infinitely distracting. However, both the "research" and the free-writing about what I'm doing are necessary, it seems. But they can't be the whole pie: where's the fruit and what kind of fruit? Well, it depends on where the picking happens and by whom, right?

The decision I just made was to take one of our bedrooms -- which the kids used to use as their "chill room" -- as my office so that I get some some privacy, from others and my own distractibility. What could be better for the distractible writer who only half believes in his "quest" that the opportunity to discuss with this spouse the placement of furniture or the management of the budget, or to discuss with his children the sensitive balance between what I'm going to do for them and what they're going to do for me? And the view up there is better too. And, for chrissakes, I've been working for thirty years to pay for my own house etc., and here I am in closet, literally, a closet that was once a powder room. Now I just have to do it.

But back to the choosing from the hat, similar to the Hogwart's ritual, where the hat decides who you are and who you will be. Let me keep in mind also that one goal is to make half a living off this writing: a goal which deters any interest in writing a "literary" novel that nobody is likely to read or buy, if even publish, which is connected to my evolving personal taste. I read all of Roberto Bolano's 2666 last month and it was kind of literary, but mostly it was a mystery. I loved that book, it was just so full of interesting stuff and interesting events and people, and a good part of the mystery was, what in the world do they all have to do with one another? Had it just been literary, I would have stopped after about 100 pages, which is what happened when I tried to read Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. It was lovely, but god it just went on and on and I didn't give a rat's ass about what happened to any of the characters.

Yesterday I finished reading Veniss Underground by Jeff Vandermeer which was literary in many ways, but pretty interesting, though the less "real" it became toward the climax, the less engaged I was. It seemed inevitable that Shadrach would actually find Quin and kill him, and sort of Star Trek cliche that Quin would have reduced himself to a de-anthropomorphic blob, even though it made sense in the story. Another brain in a vat figure. I think I would have liked him to be Rudolph Valentino in the flesh, it would have been easier to kill him then. But all said, it was in its imperfection, a highly entertaining and stimulating read, and I'm looking forward to the next one. I don't think I'm capable of the sort of all-encompassing dystopia of Ambergris, and tend more toward the dystopic false Utopia or Brave New World of something like that -- God, does that mean I'll have to read Brave New World again. Clearly, as Hegel wrote, there's nothing new under the sun, or anywhere else either. That's comforting and frightening at the same time.

My futuristic dystopian utopia or utopian dytopia is provisionally called Danikiiwin, which is Ojibwe for community, or village, or town. Given such a setting, the genre is roughly urban fantasy or science fiction or fantasy, but I like to think of it more as an imaginary or alternate history. My Danikiiwin is an urban/rural location in the northern prairies (where I live now) some time after or next to the present. It is a post-petroleum world with a sort of communitarian/liberal government (of geographically separated city-states) grounded in the theory of John Rawls, "justice as fairness," and a policy of Service wherein young people at the age of 18 are assigned randomly an alternate physical existence with blocked memories of personal past and sent out to do service for some number of years, after which they are restored to their previous being. This experience is meant to inculcate Tolerance and Appreciation, for others and for other work. So, that while not subscribing to communism, but rather to an enlightened entrepreneurial liberalism, Service is supposed to dispose the Citizens to more enlightened and less rapacious individualistic behavior. My original plot, derived from a conversation over beer in Istanbul with Michael Merry and Alyce Kuenzli, had to do with what happens to a group of service workers, confronting the "realities" of Changing Back, of Corruption, of Identity, or the Outside. It sounds a bit like one of Lois Lowry's parables, which I've never particularly liked, but maybe this could be better, or less dated, or something, and a less moralistic. I don't really have an ideological axe to grind, or a political or ethical moral I'm dying to get across, or a desire to persuade anyone of anything. So, in this case, the structure could be more like Bolano. Anyway ...

But I could also, in the alternate history rather futuristic vein, do something with Breugel's Massacre of the Innocents, which is itself an historical imaginary, since it depicts the imagined despoiling of a contemporary (1560) Dutch village by the Spanish, under the guise of the biblical parable from Matthew 2:16-18: "When Herod saw how the astologers [three Wise Men] had tricked him [by not reporting back to him the child's location] he fell into a passion, and gave orders for the massacre of all children in Bethlehem and its neighborhood, of the age of two years and younger, which was the time he had been given by the astrologers [for the birth of the child who was to become king of the Jews.] So the words spoken through the prophet Jeremiah were fulfilled: 'A voice was heard in Rama, wailing and loudly lamenting; it was Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing all consolation, because they were no more.'" 

Bruegel was born in the town called Bruegel in Holland, which could very well be the town where the children were massacred. It's between Utrecht and Liege, one of which is Belgium, and maybe Breugel was Belgian. Didn't he speak Flemish? What is this were a real even if magical event -- corresponding neither to the painting or the biblical verse -- and there was one surviver, Bruegel himself. Though of course every repetition is equally true (viz. Benjamin's theory of mechanical reproduction). So there's a mystery, there's a world or two of three to be made, there's some history.

A collection of notions

I am not going to put myself off by the continuing production of ideas, because it is not until I have filled my basket that I will be able to make a decision to commit, knowing that the writing of a first novel, or a series of novels, is a long-term project. Having gone of half-cocked -- a term derived from the faulty safety mechanisms of flintlock and other rifles that made them prone to "going off" before they were meant to go off -- has not yielded me much as a scholar except a large store of unfinished manuscripts and large library of books on many different subjects. I have to decide between old ideas that haven't died, and young ideas that haven't gone stale. And I have to take what's useful from one idea and graft it on to other ideas. For example, writing an historical (fantasy) novel about Poland and Slovakia is probably not very practical, given the distance from Beloit to the Dunajec River, and my inability to read Polish or Slovak. So doing that would require a much larger commitment than, say, writing an historical (fantasy) novel based in the Great Lakes, which are seventy miles away. The conveying of a good, like salt, from place to place happens everywhere all the time. It's a great trope, appealing to me, but we have the Ice Age Trail running through town. No need to get on an airplane or learn another language. Just a little imagination is called for, whether it's history or fantasy or whatever.

But let me sum up for myself. I'm attracted to history, but history turns out to be more or less the same as world-building and immersion. Thanks, H-G Gadamer for that insight! Combinations work very well. I like the young adult hero/ine, but my writing style might not be well-suited to YA readers. But perhaps it could be: neither Tolkien or Pullman, for instance, write down to a less literate readership, as is the case with many others. And when I was a kid, I liked best what was written with sophistication: If I want fast action and stupid dialogue I can watch movies.

Well, that's it for now, toodle loo.

The Salt Road

In May we went for a short rafting trip on the Dunajec River in Slovakia, on the border of Poland. Our guide told us that the stone road along the river, through the gorge, was part of the salt road from Krakow to Vienna. The giant salt mine of Wieliczka is Krakow, up the Dunajec to where it joins the Visla. I've never been in the salt mine, but the rest of my family has, and there's a great description in Booker T. Washington's The Man Farthest Down. But that's all I know about his salt road. (I don't have the photos on this computer, unfortunately, so I've stolen somebody else's. It rained our whole trip down the river.)

A few weeks earlier we had been to the Slovak National Museum, an skansen in Martin, where they have put a lot of 18th and 19th century buildings from around Slovakia, and there was one building, an inn with stables that I found particularly interesting. This was where the guys moving stuff from place to place by horse-drawn wagon would stop overnight. They and their animals would get out of the cold, get something to eat and a place to sleep.

Perhaps because on both of these visits it rained and the sky was close to the ground, there was a feeling of unreality. Northern Slovakia is a place for magic anyway, with its castle ruins on every hilltop. And I could imagine quite clearly the commerce on the mountain roads that connect the East to the West, and the North to the South. And Slovak is a rough language, but a language of secrets. Finally, the Roma are everywhere, heralds of the other world, their hovels could be portals to someplace we normals can scarcely imagine. It was in Martin the home of the  Slovak National Movement and the Matica slovenská, a voluntary cultural institution which also had political significance. It was abolished by the Hungarians in 1875. Martin today is sort of post-industrial scrubsvilled with beautiful mountains all around. It was here that our computers were stolen.

After our visit to the skansen we went to a remote castle out of town, where the mountains really begin. Sklabina. I don't know anything about this castle but we had to wonder how the world must have changed for someone to have built it here, in a mountain valley far from anything of "importance." The adjoining village consists of two streets dead-ending at the trail heads for the Mala Fatra mountains and national park.

So there's a combination of settings, and an arrow toward an historical period (mid-19th century, with connections in other times) in which some sort of epic magical historial tale could be told. One premise is simply the taking of a magical object or person as part of the salt trade, from Krakow to Vienna. One would not even need to alternate history of Paul Park to make this neck of the woods and this period supernatural. The journey might take several millennia to complete, in fact,

The beginnings of the Wieliczka salt mine are connected to an apocryphal story and an enigmatic figure, St. Kinga, born in 1234 in Esztergom, Hungary, and given by her father the King of Hungary to Prince Boleslav of Poland as a bride. As a wedding present, Kinga asks for a salt mine. She throws her engagement ring in a salt mine in Hungary, and it is dug up when she commands the excavation of a salt mine in previously salt-starved Poland (near Krakow). Kinga and Boleslav ("the chaste") lived together in virginity and Kinga became mother to ALL the children, and eventually removed to a Poor Clare Monastary in Stary Sącz, on the Dunajec River near the border of what is now Slovakia. Stary Sącz was also on an important road to Hungary (and Austria). Salt itself is a sort of magical element.

Cooking for the octopi

King and queens were child's play, just toss some red meat of a soon to be extinct quadruped on the plate, lightly flamed with an Asian glaze, and they think they've died and gone to heaven, again. I've garnished with rabbit eyes wrapped with rapini and gotten goos and gahs. It's work for a monkey really, but someone has to pay to sharpen my knives.

One morning I got a message, bull pigeon flying through my window, I would have opened it had he knocked but you know how they are, in love with the sound of breaking glass. A new client desirous of a dinner party for visiting family, something to communicate subtly the successes of this former prodigal child, gone missing these many years, my client. I would very much like them to go home and
talk about this meal for a thousand turnings of the tide, the note said. Hold nothing back, what you present need not so much appeal to the senses and shock them. Surprise me. My new client, it turned out, was not some ordinary dignitary with cash to burn, but rather a denizen of the deep -- well endowed with sunken treasure I was led to understand -- a htapothi, in fact, what the silly Brits used to call octopus before we trod them underfoot and made them squawk for their suppers like gout-stricken guinea hens.

A dinner setting for eight, with sixty-four arms and hands. How many forks, how many spoons? Are knives necessary or would they prefer rustic tearing and gnashing? What limbs go under the table and which stay up top? A table, probably not a table at all. I was unfamiliar with the protocol and the physics. Leave that to the maitre de. My task was culinary not flower arrangement. For my antipasta, I decided on raw geoducks -- precious nestlings of the mollusk clan -- floating freely in their shells, bathed in a sauce of samphire mignonette, their hanging siphons tinted phosphorescent. The primo must be like a grand gate to the entree, not humble, even perhaps grand and ostentatious, but only the way through to the palace of the truest delights.

[only 364 words .... more later]

The secret: I'm going to write a novel

For some reason, I don't say this to people, and not hardly to myself, for fear I suppose that it will come to nothing, or that I will be thought silly or something worse for not just doing my job and all the other things I am meant to do, like cleaning the kitchen. So let me say it to myself, dear reader, I am writing a novel. That I don't yet know really what it will be about will not deter my from my chosen path. That sounds like the main theme of Stephen King's Gunslinger, which like The Book of Eli, "looked cool" but was really thin when it came to whatever else a novel or film out to include.

[I just removed a gadget from my writing space. Whew, that felt good. Like washing the jars that will eventually hold and exhibit my incredible collection of beans and grains that I rarely cook. Maybe I will put a little sticker on each jar that says, "COOOOOOK ME!!"]

My problems today with being a writer are: (a) feeling that cleaning the kitchen is more important than writing and acting on that belief, (b) being persuaded by everything I see that THiS is what I should write about or how I should write it, and (c) the lack of a first word (or a fifth or twenty-third word) in the story.

Analysis. The kitchen really does need to be cleaned for a number of personal and hygienic reasons and it's almost inspirational, such as the need to display my beans and grains, there's an idea there, waiting to grasped. I just found a site called History Pin which has me thinking that I really should go back to the story of my grandfather, for which I have a great many photos from the 30s and 40s, plus a white whale of a story, the real one and the one I've made up. And I do love history, but I am very daunted by the task of writing history, and getting lost in history. More on that later. And the third one is an anxiety of an illusion, since I do of course have many words written, just not in the same direction or with the same goal. So the delusion of not having started is connected to the fear of being seen as having started, and the anxiety of not arriving, or being able to explain where I am going, except toward the big beyond. When I was young there was lots of future time to store all the things I might do, but now that I've arrived at that future the work of clearing out that space of stuff that's never going to be done, at least not be me, is sometimes overwhelming. Thus the urge to simply burn the house down. That, of course, is a good premise for a story itself.

Back then to Billy and Dodo, a "novel" I have been working on for many many years and going pretty much nowhere. The true story is compelling. Sailer goes to London at end of WWII to work in some kind of espionage, leaving wife and son in D.C. to further the war-at-home effort, experiences the blitz, becomes involved with aristocratic lady, lives several secret lives, determines to run off with aristocratic British lady, goes to Germany post-war to hunt Nazis, dies suddenly of heart attack. Meanwhile wife at home drinks, works at one or another charity, attempts to bring up baby the best she can, while the baby (a teen) drifts off into never-never land. All that would be good enough but then there's the grandson who in world of true history would be me (or my brother I guess) who is alienated from his father (the never never boy) and does not believe that his grandfather died at all, but that it was a sham, or that he is in fact his own grandfather. He sets off to prove this hypothesis. He is a bit crazy and his sister is in pursuit to keep him from falling off the edge of the world and to find out what there will be at the edge of the world. The supernatural element resides partly in everyone's belief that there is nothing supernatural going on, and that whatever doesn't fit is a function of the sailor's moral depravity or the reincarnated sailor/grandson's psychosis. But what is what he imagines turns out to be more or less true?

That's a story.

The long run

That's a song by the Eagles and not one of my favorites, and it's not even about what I'm taking it to be about, but there you go. When I was in college we played a game when we got high that consisted of making up new uses for common objects found around the room. That's what my story is about, but not what I'm saying now.

What I'm saying now is just literal, "we'll find out in the long run." What was most frustrating, and amounted to the final straw, in my career in academic writing, is the distance between an idea, even a great idea, and it's publication, it's sharing with readers. By the time it got shared, the editors had changed it into something that wouldn't look out of place in their living rooms, and I couldn't even remember what I was thinking when I started, or how I got to where they finished with me. Pouring my life down the drain really.

So I don't want to get stuck between the temporal and cognitive illusion that there's less time between now and then there has to be, like thinking you can fit into a parking space that way too small just because you want a parking space right now. And I don't want to be slave to the illusion that the longer I wait, the longer I work, the better it will be. My SAT word for the day is attenuate: "to reduce in force, value, amount, or degree; weaken." There's a thousand sayings, all of them true. Strike while the iron is hot. Stupid, but then you get the image, the burning ingot, the hard hammer and anvil, the sweat in the eyes, the work of entropy ...

Where and why is the car park

In Budapest we had a space for a few days in a very vertical car park, a term a I like better than parking garage. There was an in-door, electronically controlled on one street, and an out-door on the parallel street, plus a pedestrian door. It had a tiny elevator and a set of stairs going all the way to the top. Every floor had some windows, so it wasn't always completely dark, but it was never more than half-dusk. The ramp was quite steep and the turns were sharp: it was hard to get around the corners in our little SUV without some going forward and backing up, especially when someone had put their motorcycle in the little crannies by the curve. There were not distinct floors, just really flatter parts of the ramps, one going up and one going down, so you could look across the from 4A to 4B which was going up while you were going down. If you built a house in there is would have been a split-level, like the one I lived in in Lake Oswego, OR, in the late 1960s. There were cars at every level, but plenty of empty spaces too. The car park did not belong to any one building, it was a rental space used by pensions in the neighborhood and by residents with cars.

What happens to the car park when there's not enough fuel, or it costs too much, to operate a car. What kind of thing does a car become? My thought was that the car park might become a squat of sorts, then a village, or a neighborhood, in the larger post-car city. The demise of cars would probably produce more centralization of population, as commuting became less viable -- this gives me another story to think about with respect to the suburbs returning to "nature." Homesteading was an American tradition, sanctioned by the government as a way of civilizing the world. Squatting now is condoned insofar as it reclaims space often used for ill, and gets some number of folks off the street, where they are unsightly and a danger to themselves and others. Someone with a car that couldn't be driven would probably just live it in the park, rather than incur the expense of moving it somewhere else. So living in the abandoned cars would be a form of recycling. If one had an enlightened government, and we need to assume anarchy, then squatting in the car park could be condoned if not even supported in some way, perhaps just passively.

So the setting is a post-petroleum city, but not a post-energy city. And certainly not a post-digital city, meaning that global communication remains feasible while global travel is more difficult, though perhaps not impossible. That's the premise.

The story question is what sorts of social and personal challenges might be involved in this pioneering, and who would be involved. I'm thinking of three groups of people: the Gypsies, the art&musics, and the magic. The specific problem I was thinking of had to do with kids and their recreation, tangled up in the virtual v. real.

So the plot comes from a game that the kids create, partly from a video-game. Skating and skate-racing, all because someone has a copy of some skate game software the kids have found, and have started playing. There's even some online playing between those on the top of the park and those on the bottom. But band-width is a limited resource, so some of this playing is a violation. Then some kid scrounges a board, and others start producing, or scrounging more boards. Eventually there are kids skating from the top to the bottom, a dangerous and exciting and annoying to the adult resident thing to do. So here's two conflicts: the social conflicts about using limited resources, about unregulated and risky play, and between those who prefer the real and those who prefer the virtual. This requires four or five adolescent characters and some related adults.

Voila, the premise of a story. How does it resolve? In my first paragraphs, I said it led to a death, but I didn't say and didn't know whose or under what circumstances. Or what the consequences of the death might be to the game or to the world.

The parking garage

The first ones to move in to the parking garage on Peet were the Gypsies and they settled on the first floor, in three camps, each organized around a giant guzzler: a sky-blue Cadillac that probably hadn't seen the road in fifty years, a Mercedes with flat tires, and Dodge minivan with entertainment center and baby barf still crusted on the floor mats. Other people maybe thought about the garage as housing but they were still singing the private property hesitation blues, what's mine is mine and what's yours is yours. The Gypsies didn't bother with those old tunes, they were completely contemporary and advanced harmonic. And they took their sweet long time figuring out how to open up the cars without breaking the glass. Four of the boys ran some electrical and ether up the elevator shaft -- the car had stopped once and for all on level three B so they cut a whole through the ceiling and the floor for the wire -- and hooked up to a rehabbed solar and a dish on the roof. So they had some lights and they had one old digital to hook up to the wherever. One day a girl brought back a camera she'd grifted and they sent off some snaps to their relatives in Novy Svet. There they were, sitting on the imitation leather seats under the number 16 heating up some grub over the sterno.

The second ones to move in where some music&arts and their tagalongs, but they chose the top floor, closer to the sun and the moon they said. But a long dark walk from the Gypsy camp down on street-level. Security was easier up top too, though the Gypsies were not insecure. Either they invited you in for grub and offered a Chevy up the way for slumbering, or they thwunked you with a piston rod if you looked untrustworthy or called any of the old names. The music&arts tried for a while without electric but first they asked to share with the Gypsies -- politely declined -- and then they asked the Gypsies to hook them up -- politely accepted for payment in kind to be determined later. A chit was produced. That was the bare beginning of business that sometime later made the first floor corporate and very well-lit, with official reception and work orders. There weren't so many vehicles up on the top floor but there weren't so many musics at first and some of them liked to sleep out on the roof where the cars were showing serious weather wear and didn't make for good permanent habitation. They played songs and sang and painted the walls of the garage chalk white. There were two innovations: one man who like a little more privacy found himself a winch somewhere and pulled up new wheels from the floor below and he lived in it alone. Two women scrounged another winch and some pulleys and dropped a line down the elevator shaft to haul stuff up and down. And here was an old guy who played the harmonica who started thinking about other ways of moving water than dragging it up the line.

For a long while the back and forth between the music&arts and the Gypsies was limited, business and howdy-do on passing, but the kids started the races and that brought everyone together, for rule-making, cheering on, non-capital improvements and injury treatment. What brought them together last and for ever was the first deaths in the garage and that's what this story is about, the dying and the subsequent coming together. How they all knew is was a message like the others that they had ignored because this they couldn't ignore and the metaphors were instructive. There were eight kids and they liked skating, and the story is about them.

Problems in living

There are men and women, boys and girls, who have problems with living. For them, life is an ill-fitting suit of clothes that must be worn despite the chafing, despite the unrecognizable, unattractive figure the mirror shines back at them. They talk to themselves, they are lost in the world, to the world. Their complaints are always loud but rarely acknowledged by those whose clothes fit more comfortably. But I have been in a position to hear and see the very worst of it. They are here, locked inside my thick walls, wailing and keening like prehistoric birds in nests permanently empty. Not all the worst troubles are suffered by my patients, because misery is epidemic, and some of the helpers, who sought to hide their own pain in the gaping maw of the officially afflicted, find themselves instead the subjects of the longest, deepest hurt, deceived by the hope that feeling the pain of another is the same as taking that pain away.

I saw one young attendant -- he was fond of bow-ties, wore his hair slicked straight back with Macassar oil scented with lemon, and always had a pocket full of Turkish Delight -- fall down dead in the hallway between wards C and D just as daybreak slivered through the window, having given not a single sign of impending mortality. It was unnaturally cold that morning and the branches of the hackberry trees were cracking under their weight of ice. The sound was not unlike the laments of one old man who has lived most of his lives in my shelter. He was admitted originally in a state of catatonia, unable or unwilling to respond to the world at all except by continued breathing and heartbeat. His cure consisted of adopting the complaints of others, like stray cats he gathered them up. He, himself, the doctors concluded, was entirely lost, though I suspected that somewhere existed "the gatherer" himself, unlost. The young attendant, who had spent some of the small hours of that morning in the company of this old man, did not understand that the pain the man expressed was not his own, but was obtained second-hand. He attempted compassion, empathy, but the old man's store of misery, after so many years on the ward, was bottomless, and the attendant was swallowed up. Though the post-mortem speculated about heart failure, I wondered. Had this young man known that all the pain he was taking on was not original to the old man, not something that caused the old man himself distress, but rather was the source of his animation, would he have approached his task of caring differently? Would he have survived this encounter?

How teenagers saved the world

When I'm not considering how to write the historical psychiatric novel, I think about creating some new teenagers and children to save the world. Because, despite Frodo, Lyra, Harry Potter and many others, the world still needs saving and the adults are clearly not up to the task. A couple days ago I watched The Road, which I had read previously, but I hadn't taken away one of the more obvious morals of the story, which was that the burden of salvation and redemption is on the child, not the father, who does his best but eventually succumbs rather unceremoniously. Mom had already checked out, of her own volition. Leaving it all to the boy.

Of course I recall being that boy (in my own mind) and I have a live boy of my own, but neither that past-I nor the present-he seem good candidates for saving even themselves, let alone the world. Though my son detests organized religion and prejudice ... perhaps a good start on redeeming the sins of the fathers. On the other hand, he sees the world in the mirror and can hardly manage to put out the trash effectively. The fantasy of the mostly male, grown-up authors of these teenage-saves-the-world is perhaps that they, we ourselves, might have been different than we were. That we might have acted out our ideals and desires instead of getting a college education and a mortgage.

As a teacher, I am continually assaulted by my desire to reward those students of mine most for not growing up, at least not growing up to be one of the unattractive, self-involved, materialistic, spirit-less philistines who surround me. Thus, the writing of these sagas of redemption is itself redemptive -- like duh. Whereas, the writing of the historical psychiatric novel would probably be more about self-discovery and disclosure. Both are versions of the "cure" -- neither have much prospect of putting coins in the coffer.

a part-way through review: the city & the city

I've read two China Miéville books before, or at least most of two. I really like Perdido Street Station, but I never finished The Scar (the one about the floating city.) This new, shorter book reads pretty much like a police procedural, but it is set in the doppel-cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma. It has interesting characters, of the detective sort, though not especially unique characters. The conceit of these two overlapping cities and their proscription of crossing over and seeing/unseeing is really interesting, but halfway through the book and I still don't quite get it. There are many descriptions of the elaborate training that tourists and newcomers must undergo in order to behave properly and understand the rules of Beszel and Ul Qoma, much of which have to do with not seeing what's in front of you, and watching that you don't go into places you're not supposed to see. Not surprisingly, there are lots of politics related to this situation, and a perfect setup for a murder, done in one place, discovered in another. So I'm enjoying the story, just as I might enjoy reading Ian Rankin, though Miéville just isn't as good with this genre as writers like Rankin and others. Though the touch of Calvino is intriguing. But still I feel like one of these tourists who doesn't quite understand where I am, and how things work. If I were critiquing this from a sci-fi point of view, I might say that the alternative world is not quite consistent in its operation, or that some aspect of its essential characteristic has not been clearly communicated. It's a little like Men in Black, I suppose, without the gizmo that cleans memories. Of course, I need to finish it and find out who done it and why.

A beginning (really) -- Sheppard Pratt

I am by nature reluctant to speak of events outside my own experience. But like all men -- and I feel justified in calling myself a man, though certainly my understanding on that matter might deviate from yours  -- I harbor curiosity about my beginnings, about my forebears, about the act through which I was conceived. Where do I come from? What kind of thing am I? Do I have a purpose beyond my mere being in the world? Even though I have been on this earth for several normal human spans, perhaps I am only just now reaching adolescence now, just now poised for independent life. Perhaps I am just a toddler wondering why the sky is blue and what my parents do when they close the door. Who can say how long history will last or what our place will be? In any case, to lay claim to an independent life, and the status of adult, must require a fuller knowledge of what one is becoming independent from, and that knowledge lays outside one's own to and fro. Consequently, when time has allowed, I have engaged in some historical research relative to my origins.

Starting to start to start to ...

Seriously now.
Seriously.
Really, seriously.

I begin with the desire to write, but without a clear idea
of what to write or for whom.
Was that ever a problem for James Joyce? Hard to imagine
that.

I find myself writing about prose in verse
lyric nonsense where there ought to be
hard-edged facts, well-drawn characters
places so real you forget where you are
reading or writing or sitting.

Is it best to begin by enumerating one's strengths or one's weaknesses?
What I could write, like what hill I could actually climb,
or what I would like, imagining that I could learn
to climb better and higher with some practice,
some magic, some silly Keith Urban songs?

I'm reading now a book by China Miéville
that I think would be called urban fantasy,
but it's really a police procedural just set
in some sort of alternate city -- haven't got too far
so I don't know what to make yet of the people
who are there but not there. Undoubtedly
it will all be tied together.

So this is just the kind of book I could write,
perhaps not so well as Mr. Miéville, who has had
much more practice. But it is the kind of book
I would want to write? One of my other projects
is a detective story set in the 1960s, maybe just the same thing,
setting something in the past and setting something
in the future or some alternate present.

Why still this pretense to verse? When it's just prose
and prose not in any way special, line breaks
intrude, comma splices permitted, no need to save
paper. I have a couple other books from the library
that are novels told as connected stories
with various narrative personae and location
all of it adding up to a whole story
but bringing the ordinary reader along.

So that's something I do want, an ordinary reader,
even a teenager, not an aspiring literary critic or
college literature teacher in search of deep meaning.
However deep the meaning might be.

I can write anything I want, but I can't lose my voice
even when disguised by character and plot and setting.
Seriously now.

How to write a novel or something like that

I had this idea of changing my life
as if it would not do that on its own
as if I was fucking Captain Nemo
and he just let me have it my way
and dream that the dream was my own
and not his offhand invention.

So back to changing my life
by becoming a writer, aw shit,
that sounds like something I would have said
longer ago than I can rightly remember
but still, still, still, I can pretend
and it seems that I live on for another day

so why not, 'drive, I sd
for christ's sake, look
out where yr going.'
It doesn't matter where you go,
just get going somewhere, looking
back only to make yr way
forward.

time is on my side

but space is not
on my side

sit up lie down sit up breathe

and breathe

(a recipe, not mine, for tom yum paste --
add shrimp or not
depending on how you feel about the little buggers

• 2 lemongrass stalks, cut into 1" pieces and smashed a bit (about 1/3 cup)
• 6 lime leaves (1 tablespoon), torn with center vein removed
• 2 tablespoons galangal sliced thin
• 1 tablespoon coriander roots, about 2 roots
• 2 tablesoons shallots, whole with skin removed (1-2 shallots)
• 1 cup tomato (about 1 medium tomato), sliced into 6-8 pieces lengthwise
• pinch salt
• 1 1/4 teaspoon fish sauce
• 1 1/2 teaspoons roasted chili paste
• 1 tablespoon lime juice (or more to taste)
• 1 tablespoon coriander chopped

)

and sit up and lie down
and breathe

now this is muscle and this is fat

Continuing to begin

it's out of synch
the time it takes to begin and the time is takes
for the word to reach my fingertips
and what's left at their end
is what has already happened, stopped
and must now be restarted

gone are the days too when you could count
on strangers stopping
a set of jumpers under the backseat
and the free time to give you that jump
you need to get going

or the push down the hill
hope you know how to use a clutch