The year in roses.
Whenever I’m out by that side of the airport, I like to stop by Michaels and pick up a silk rose or two. I mean they aren’t really silk.
So as feared we only hit fifty percent of our announced targets in 2010: only three chapters completed, rather than the proposed six. —However, as only two chapters had been completed in 2009, this represents a fifty percent year-over-year increase in output (and 2009 itself represented a one-hundred percent increase). On the whole, we feel confident in once again proposing a target for 2011 of six chapters written and released, moving us considerably closer to our projected end-game.
To that end we should like to break with tradition and just this once point to the wall before shouldering our bat and taking up our stance to knock the leather clean off that mother. Herewith, then:
With the proviso that a plan is that which does not survive contact with the enemy; that this offer is not valid with any other discounts or special offers and is void where prohibited; that all rights are reserved, including but not limited to that of changing our ever-lovin’ et cetera—but real editors ship, dammit, and that I am not an editor nor do I even work with one matters not a whit.
In addition to the above I hope perhaps to announce some additional formats such as ebooks and audiobooks and suchlike, but: story comes first; the rest, as they say, is marketing, and alternate distribution channels.
—posted 5063 days ago
Essay.
Yr. humble correspondent having rather famously a dislike bordering nigh upon contempt for definitions (to say nothing of systems or processes) has nonetheless come as close as he might dare to laying out some of the particulars (neither necessary nor sufficient) that might well make up one view or aspect of the genre urban fantasy, with all applicable rights, privileges, and prerogatives reserved, including but most assuredly not limited to that of changing his ever-lovin’ mind at the slightest whim or pretext.
—posted 5084 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the flow.
GADDIS
Well, this interior monologue you speak of is just too easy, obvious, boring, lazy, and I would agree right up to the last; I always cringe at the word behaviorism. But again it is very much this notion of what the reader is obliged to supply. We go back to McLuhan and his talk about hot and cool media. Television is the hot medium, to which one contributes nothing except a blank state, and the next day you say, What was that show we saw last night on television? It disappears because you put nothing into it. So nothing remains, as Gibbs remarks in JR. In this case it was my hope—for many readers it worked, for others it did not—that having made some effort they would not read too agonizedly slowly and carefully, trying to figure out who is talking and so forth. It was the flow that I wanted, for the readers to read and be swept along—to participate. And enjoy it. And occasionally chuckle, laugh along the way.
INTERVIEWER
But if they read along like that, they may miss a lot.
GADDIS
This is a risk I take, but isn’t that what life is, after all? Missing something that’s right there before you?
— “William Gaddis, the Art of Fiction no. 101”
—posted 5126 days ago
The state of the state of the state.
Between now, and 365 (and one-quarter) days from now, six chapters will have been done (God willing, and the creek don’t rise).
Well maybe God was willing but the creek she rose. Here it is more than a week into the penultimate month and I’ve managed but three dam’ chapters. I keep shipping water like I have been and four won’t be done by Auld Lang time.
I’ve written a paragraph? Of the next number? —But I’m not here to talk about that again. Mostly I think to acknowledge to the City of the City that no things did not go as was hoped, as was promised, that there is better to be done and perhaps next year to do it in. And to reaffirm with a swift kick to my own posterior the importance of sitting down and getting the words out.
No! Sleep! Till Christmas!
You’re a ghost
La la la, la la la la la la
I don’t know; maybe I need to use this end of things more. I’m wary of cluttering this space; there is a balance to be maintained, and while it is perhaps not so delicate as I sometimes fear still one ought not try to fix what probably isn’t broken and all that. The story is what it is and if I wanted to send a message I’d send a message and all that but still we live in the era where the author as such is a commodity as well and King Maw is never satisfied: Content! it bellows. More content! —But I don’t want to start talking more. Not here at least. I mean there’s nothing quite so rank as the smell of an author’s sweat as they try to make damn sure the reader got it. For whatever value of it.
I’m not sure why I suddenly switched subjects like that. There was a plan for this entry, wasn’t there? I don’t know. I just work here.
You’re a ghost
La la la, la la la la la la
Like she says: as soon as you say it out loud they will leave you. Not that I’m really worried about that, about my imaginary toads being gently deflated by tales told out of school. I think maybe I’m just aiming another swift kick: there’s other work to be done which might or might not just help the work hereabouts, and I’ve been dithering on that, too.
Oh but there I go again gesturing vaguely and smiling cryptically and getting up and walking away in a huff at the first pointed question leaving you to—what?
I did mention the Twitter thing somewhere along the way, didn’t I? If you were wondering about the sorts of things I mutter to myself when I’m distracted. Or maybe you weren’t? I don’t know.
I’m the bishop and I’ve come
To claim you with my iron drum
La la la, la la la
La la la la
Ah, forget it, Jake. It’s November.
—posted 5132 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret at the bottom of the garden.
Of course there are f--ries—just as there is Father Christmas. The trouble comes when you try to make them corporeal. They are fine poetic concepts taking us out of this at times too ugly real world.
—posted 5133 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of every protagonist.
Another way to think about these two depictions is to ask whether the universe of the story recognizes the existence of persons. I think magic is an indication that the universe recognizes certain people as individuals, as having special properties as an individual, whereas a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process is describing a completely impersonal universe. That type of impersonal universe is how science views the universe; it’s how we currently understand our universe to work. The difference between magic and science is at some level a difference between the universe responding to you in a personal way, and the universe being entirely impersonal.
—posted 5164 days ago
Moondays and Thursdays.
I never saw the Moonday T-Hows. I have seen the T-Horse, though not in a good long while. And I’ve been to Share-It Square and I can walk down to Sunnyside, though it’s a bit of a hike. —Heck, I was at the city council meeting where Share-It Square got the official approvals and variances and all that other pesky whatnot.
But I never got to see the Moonday T-Hows.
The Next Thursday Teahouse is not by any stretch of the imagination the Moonday T-Hows. (It’s larger, for one thing, and somewhat more permanent; it probably cost about $300 to make, instead of $65.) Nor should my fictional Michael St. John Lake ever no matter how dark the alley be mistaken for the quite substantial Mark Lakeman. —There’s many places where the City of Roses isn’t Portland, and this is one of them, resemblances notwithstanding; Next Thursday comes from a very different place than Moonday, and will do very different things when it goes: they each play very different roles in the city-stories they’re part of. Remember to keep in mind what Mr. Ford said about magic, and always keep an eye on the Duke.
Still. Aren’t they both so pretty, the light streaming out through the reclaimed windows and the branch-framed plastic sheeting like that?
Anyway. A while back—thirteen years ago, oh my—I wrote an article for Anodyne magazine, which is a place to start if you want to see what the Moonday T-Hows did, here in the city of Portland.
—posted 5183 days ago
The Tenth Annual.
Stepping in briefly to let you all know I’ll be tabling at the Tenth Annual Portland Zine Symposium this weekend (Saturday August 28 and Sunday August 29, 10 – 4) at the Peter W. Stott Main Gym at PSU, with copies of No. 10 and No. 11, plus Nos. 1 – 9 and also some badges and photos and other possible surprises and suchlike. Stop by! Say hi! Check out the glory and the majesty of DIY print culture! Get in out of the partly cloudy weather!
—posted 5209 days ago
The dragons be yonder today.
Elsewhere a certain discussion’s begun which may be of some value; though it has not yet managed to hack its way to where we are here, I am assured it should eventually touch on matters of some interest to those who are interested in this sort of thing. (As opposed to that sort of thing. Which one would be by definition. Wait—)
Anyway! The discussion’s currently hingeing around maps, and it so happens there’s a scene upcoming in no. 10 with a map in it. So, then, for you, because you are so good to me, a taste:
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” says the little guy, coming barefoot from the bathroom, wrapped in a white towel. “Ten hours sleep and this is as close to a vacation as we’re ever likely to get on this gig.” He climbs up onto one of the two queen-sized beds and scoots back against the padded headboard. He reaches for the remote on the nightstand. “Don’t,” says the big guy.
“Don’t?”
“Still tuning up.” His black jacket draped over the back of the chair the big guy’s sitting at the round table by the big picture window at the front of the room. Spread out on the table a map. Plastic letters scattered across the map, refrigerator magnets in bright and simple colors, a yellow Y at the edge of downtown, a blue P over the freeway, a red Q above them, an orange B on the other side of the map away across the river, down by 39th and Hawthorne. In his hand another letter turning over in his thick and hairy-knuckled fingers, another B, a green one. “What’s that for?” says the little guy.
Mr. Keightlinger looks down at the letter in his hand. “Bunny,” he says. He snaps the letter onto the map at the foot of the northern freeway bridge over the river. Mr. Charlock snorts. “You think they’re involved?” Twirling the little sprig of hair curled almost precisely between his brow and the top of his skull.
“Don’t know,” says Mr. Keightlinger.
“Sure we do,” says Mr. Charlock. “It’s Southeast, fucking with Southwest. Mechanicals ain’t even in the mix. I’m telling you, if Leir would just listen to us on this,” and Mr. Charlock leans forward, blotting his forehead dry with a corner of the towel. “Instead of riding us for something proofy he can take to fucking Agravante. Christ, man!” Mr. Charlock slaps the bedspread. “You’re fucking with the vacation vibe here. Put it away so we can watch us some teevee.”
—posted 5226 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of Grossman’s complaint.
On the one hand, new(ish) forms such as pornography, advertising, video games, and gambling, have taken up the neurological tricks long resident in narrative and brought them right to the profit-generating center of the works produced. On the other hand, literary modernism and its aftermath seems in this light a movement in fiction centered on the disavowal of the technologies of narrative addictiveness: a resistance to the traditional rhythms of plot is combined with a diminishment of the sense of authorial (and thus vicarious readerly) control. The phrase “misjudgment of utility” maps crookedly though provocatively onto, say, Adorno’s discussions of modernism’s uselessly utopian attempts at autonomy. Modernist fiction is that fiction that does not tease you into thinking that you can win. Which is of course better than video slots, but also… perhaps politically pernicious in a deeper sense.
—posted 5237 days ago
