Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the saga.
The novel, through its protean variations from Proust to the detective story, is almost always analytic: it would be truer perhaps to say that it nearly always employs analytic processes from time to time. But the saga is never analytic. The novelist is often introspective: the saga never.
—posted 3395 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of cities.
Cities attract both those down on their luck and looking for work, and those on a hot streak, looking to celebrate. They attracted the naïve urban planners of the early 20th century who believed a more symmetrical city grid could undo poverty, and at the same time they attracted those who aimed to exploit the poor and disenfranchised through predatory housing schemes. For every art gallery there is an underserved community. For every park, a shelter barely able to serve the people it was built to protect. The truth is that cities offer us a promise that is not always kept. But the promise is vital.
—posted 3399 days ago
’Zines to the left of me, ’zines to the right.
A brief update, as I toil away on no. 26; I’ll be at the Portland Zine Symposium this weekend, with books and badges and chapbooks and a six-year-old who’ll have some prints, if you like.
Fifteenth annual, huh? —Dang, I’ve been going to these for a while.
And also, here’s what it looks like when I’m assembling Patreon packages:
There’s still some work to do to live up to the most recently met goal—getting the site mobile-ready—but there’s also all this writing I need to do? —Anyway. Events as warranted by further bulletins. —Oh! And no. 24’s coming up. How’s July 27th for you? Good?
—posted 3425 days ago
Epideixis.
(We begin with the ritual disclaimer: I am no good at self-promotion. This is how we apologize, for taking up your time: to do something often is to become good, or at least adept at it; that we are no good at it must therefore mean we do not do it often; that we do not do it often means please, understand, we are making what is for us an effort; that we are making, for you, this effort, might just predispose you toward us? Perhaps? —I am no good at self-promotion, QED.)
In just three weeks’ time, the next season of stories will begin, as no. 23, “ – the thin ice – ”, premières. I’ll be celebrating with not one, but two public readings:
Thursday, June 18th, 7 PM at the Spritely Bean;
Wednesday, June 24th, 7 PM at Reading Frenzy.
And while the format will be much the same—a reading, a bit of signing, old books and new zines available, and badges handed out freely—the content will be different: some old, some new, a bit perhaps not entirely finished, but no repeats, guaranteed. Come to both. You know you want to.
Meanwhile, I’m editing no. 25, and writing no. 26. Patrons have had a chance to see the full set of chapter titles for In the Reign of Good Queen Dick; they’ve also gotten to see the covers of nos. 25, 26, and just now, 27. —Which reminds me. I need to figure out what 28 should be.
While I’m about all that, do forgive me this spot of self-promotion, if you might. I’m no good at it, you see. No good at all.
—posted 3468 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
There are more secrets to the epic
than we were meant to know.
INTERVIEWER
Epic literature has always interested you very much, hasn’t it?
BORGES
Always, yes. For example, there are many people who go to the cinema and cry. That has always happened: It has happened to me also. But I have never cried over sob stuff, or the pathetic episodes. But, for example, when I saw the first gangster films of Joseph von Sternberg, I remember that when there was anything epic about them—I mean Chicago gangsters dying bravely—well, I felt that my eyes were full of tears. I have felt epic poetry far more than lyric or elegy. I always felt that. Now that may be, perhaps, because I come from military stock. My grandfather, Colonel Francisco Borges Lafinur, fought in the border warfare with the Indians, and he died in a revolution; my great-grandfather, Colonel Suárez, led a Peruvian cavalry charge in one of the last great battles against the Spaniards; another great-great-uncle of mine led the vanguard of San Martin’s army—that kind of thing. And I had, well, one of my great-great-grandmothers was a sister of Rosas—I’m not especially proud of that relationship because I think of Rosas as being a kind of Perón in his day; but still all those things link me with Argentine history and also with the idea of a man’s having to be brave, no?
INTERVIEWER
But the characters you pick as your epic heroes—the gangster, for example—are not usually thought of as epic, are they? Yet you seem to find the epic there?
BORGES
I think there is a kind of, perhaps, of low epic in him—no?
—an interview with Jorge Luis Borges
—posted 3479 days ago
Three on a match.
Well that took longer than was hoped.
The first draft of no. 25, “ – two sweetest passions – ”, clocks in at 18,300 words, and took 83 days to write, if we don’t count the abortive first stab back in (checks calendar) December, yikes. If we don’t count that (and we aren’t), that’s averaging 220 words a day, and again the ouch. I’ll need to bring in no. 26 at about twice that rate of speed if I want to also have no. 27 drafted by the time we kick things off in June.
Still, it’s doable. And there’d be five in the pocket by the time we launch. I could be releasing a chapter a month into October!
—Sorry. I like laying it all out like that. Logistics, you know.
The problem, or part of the problem, was with this one scene, one of those where five or six different emotional vectors crash into an epiphany, but instead of cohering they were clanging, taking entirely too much time and too many words to lay themselves out in sentences that kept having to be unravelled and reknotted, so. What’s there in the draft is at least the shape of something to come, I suppose, but it’s weak and it’s tender and it makes me wince when I poke it. So I don’t; so I let it lie fallow a bit, while I press on to figuring out the broad strokes of what happens next, and then on after that.
(And it’s really all my fault: of course it is, but: the unrelenting drive to tell it slant. —I mean, if you come right out and just say what’s going on, and why, you might as well just write a cover blurb. —But there’s slant, and there’s staggering from lamppost to lamppost, and I’ve ellipticated about all this before.)
At least I know the opening line of no. 26: “There’s two ways this can go.”
—Which is a lie, but hey.
—posted 3515 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of new things.
Writing a novel, then, isn’t the expression we should use to sum up the intention preceding a spokesperson’s or post-exotic author’s work. Because it’s more, for him, composing a book that brings together several writing processes—quasi-novelistic, para-novelistic, poetic, sometimes theatrical, specifically post-exotic—with the goal of publicly producing a work that can be read like a novel, which is to say continuously, with a unifying thread, images, characters, and voices that structure and approach a story. Without theorizing here, the goal of every post-exotic author is certainly to give the public a way into, and certainly a stay within the novelistic domains barely or not yet explored by official literature. One concern of these authors is to diminish as much as possible the discomfort their readers might encounter as they enter unknown lands. The spokespeople, our spokespeople, who bring together the often disparate components of our writing community’s multiple voices, try to emphasize in this way the novelistic dynamic. With these fragments, these images in narracts, these Shaggås, these haikus, these rantings, these dream-tales, they create works that resemble novels, they make novels. For them, the idea of the novel is associated with the impressions they have made of those who will receive their stories: prisoners, at first, attentive and infrequent listeners, within these walls; then, second, a large public of bookstore readers, outside these walls. Sympathizing or not, these readers demand something particular of the book they’ve gotten hold of: specifically, I think they’re preparing for a dive. They hope to immerse themselves, beyond their world, within another world, and for that immersion to be enjoyable—or even just possible—and they need friends and travel companions to guide them in their crossings, characters. They’re waiting for a dialogue, both conscious and not, between their memories and those which propel the book, between their memories and our own. They hope that a distinct narrative thread will ensure the narrative’s continuity. Whether this continuity obeys a linear or oscillating or circular sequence doesn’t matter: in just about every post-exotic work, this continuity begins on the first page and goes straight to the last. Above all, post-exotic authors never go into creating things that can’t be experienced. Gratuitous literary experiences have always bored them as readers. Which is why they care that their books’ contents amount to the ingredients of novelistic cohesion, and why they pay attention to images, stories, dramatic arcs, and this forward march to the end. Ultimately, all post-exotic authors are attached to the form commonly known as the novel. Since time immemorial they have harbored affections for this form and, even if they knowingly introduce variants, if they modify its architecture, they genuinely believe that they are enriching it rather than pushing it around, disfiguring it, or betraying it.
—posted 3526 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of pride.
The myth is that some transient guy painted these things, but you see him in this picture, and he’s a very proud-looking man. He’s holding a stop sign. It’s like his ghost came back to save the columns.
—posted 3569 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
Another secret of the epic.
The Warren Report lays down certain essential characteristics of the clandestine genres. The first is hyperbolic length. Simply put, the literary output of the national security apparatus is not made for reading. This isn’t a straightforward question of classification; the brute fact of a 15-volume report denies access, classified or no. This is true of the mammoth pile of Pentagon Papers and true too of the 6,000-page Senate report on CIA interrogations, of which only the 600-page executive summary has been made public. A telling anecdote: there are exactly 11 words on one page of the Pentagon Papers that were slated for redaction but which the black pen accidentally overlooked. Are they any less secret for it? Hardly. Length obscures, dissolving guesses, facts, and half-truths into a murky stew.
—posted 3600 days ago
Where I’ll have been;
What I’ll have been up to.
So dull and grey and gloomy it’s almost March outside, which is good? I need to start shooting new covers. Which is worth mentioning, perhaps, but not yet itemizing, as there’s nothing as yet to show for it. But! In more substantial news:
Imprimis, the Patronage: I’ve started a Patreon! Go, take a look, pledge if you’re so moved, share the word if you can. —Thanks to some remarkable generosity, I’ve already met the first goal, which means I’ve (finally) updated the software managing things under the hood hereabouts. There may be some hiccups and short-circuits in days to come, as I re-work an organization system designed for a handful of chapbooks into something at once beefy and nimble, that can handle chapbooks, volumes, and seasons, and still give five cents change after turning on a dime. —Take note: if we do manage to reach a level of two hundred and fifty dollars a month, I’m gonna have to figure out how to make audiobooks.
Item. the Personal Appearance: Next weekend (23rd – 25th January) is WizardWorld Portland, or the Portland Comic Convention, or whatever it is we’re supposed to’ve ended up calling it? —The Spouse is a guest of the show, which means I’ll be tagging along, and since prose serials have at least as much to do with comics as Karl Urban, I’ll bring some chapbooks and paperbacks and badges along with me. No details as yet as to the specific location; if you’re lost, look for roses being flung into the air by a six-year-old.
Item. Karl Urban: The somewhat snarky aside in the above is in no way intended as any affront to Mr. Urban, whose career has been a delight ever since his early days as Julius Cæsar and Cupid, and also I quite liked that Judge Dredd movie.
Item. Progress: Having stalled briefly in the middle of drafting no. 25, I did what I do when that happens: went back and started revising. No. 23 is now finalized, and no. 24 almost cut down to size, and I know better what happens next, in nos. 25 & 26. We’re still on track to have four done, if not five, by the time the season premieres in June.
Item. Premiere: Oh, yes: in case I hadn’t mentioned. Free online serialization of season two, Spring into Summer, begins Monday, June 22nd, with the premiere of no. 23, “ – the thin ice – ”. If, however, you find it difficult to contemplate so long a delay—
Item. Perquisites: —I am compelled to reiterate the Patreon, mentioned above: pledges at certain levels, you’ll note, receive electronic or even paper copies of chapbooks as they’re completed, months (or, sometimes, weeks, or, yes, days) before they’re released online. —Never pose a problem for which you cannot then offer a solution, as they say.
And so! But yet. Covers. Hmm.
—posted 3603 days ago
