Things to keep in mind:
The secret of plot.
This book has its beginnings in an image and some scraps of dialogue that presented themselves to my mind rather abruptly one day. There were two figures on a road. Men, women? Age, nationality? Hard to tell. The light was poor, their cloaks were wrapped around them, they were hurrying along. What language were they speaking? I don’t know, but I seemed to understand them perfectly, the way we understand talk in dreams. I also knew, without being told, that they were traveling to consult an oracle.
One of the figures said, “What if it doesn’t say anything?” The other said, “It won’t say anything; it won’t just give us simple instructions.” The wind rose; clouds scuttled across the moon. The first figure said, “What if it says just what we want to hear?” The other said, “What do we want to hear?”
Much later, when the night was almost completely dark, and only shifting shadows were to be seen, a voice said, “What if it’s closed when we get there?” Another voice said, “Closed? You mean like a museum or a library or a shop?” The first voice said, “Yes. Or like a ruin or an abandoned house.” The second voice said, “Well, I suppose we would have to tell the story of our journey, what we saw on the way there and the way back, and why we came.”
—posted 5471 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of reading.
The student who is generally superficial may, for a special reason, read some one thing well. Scholars who are as superficial as the rest of us in most of their reading often do a careful job when the text is in their own narrow field, especially if their reputations hang on what they say. On cases relevant to his practice, a lawyer is likely to read analytically. A physician may similarly read clinical reports which describe symptoms he is currently concerned with. But both these learned men may make no similar effort in other fields or at other times. Even business assumes the air of a learned profession when its devotees are called upon to examine financial statements or contracts, though I have heard it said that many businessmen cannot read these documents intelligently even when their fortunes are at stake.
If we consider men and women generally, and apart from their professions and occupations, there is only one situation I can think of in which they almost pull themselves up by their bootstraps, making an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth. They read every word three ways; they read between the lines and in the margins; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and implication; they perceive the color of words, the odor of phrases, and the weight of sentences. They may even take punctuation into account. Then, if never before or after, they read.
—posted 5484 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the f--ry tale.
In its written form the f--ry tale tends to be a prose narrative about the fortunes of a protagonist who, having experienced various adventures of a more or less supernatural kind, lives happily ever after. Magic, charms, disguise and spells are major ingredients of such stories.
—A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory
—posted 5488 days ago
Amuse-gueule.
“Beauty” is done I’m afraid, and so we’re once more lying fallow as I write the next little bit. —Perhaps these sneak peeks at the months ahead will help to tide you over?
No. 9: Giust
No. 10: Surveilling
No. 11: Rounds
No. 12: Innocency
—Perhaps not. Ah, well.
—posted 5492 days ago
Walk this way.
Welcome, Oregonian readers!
Here’s how it all works: as each issue’s completed, it’s printed as a 36-page zine and made available to the fine local establishments noted in the article, and then it’s serialized online in its entirety over the course of two weeks, with new bits appearing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. —So no. 8, “Beauty,” begins to appear here Monday the 2nd and ends Friday the 13th.
Or, if you’d rather not wait that long, you may order paper copies directly; they will also be hitting the shelves starting this very afternoon. Hie thee to Reading Frenzy, Guapo, or Cosmic Monkey.
Meanwhile, everything you need to get caught up is available through the Table of Contents. If you’d like to see some of the photos used as zine covers and some renditions of some of the characters by some of the best cartoonists in the Western Hemisphere, you may peruse the Gallery. And please don’t hesitate to drop your humble author a line! We do so love to hear from folks.
And thanks for stopping by!
—posted 5509 days ago
So turn, turn your stallion’s head
Till his red mane flies in the wind,
And the rider of the moon goes by
And the bright star falls behind.
Oh what the hell, right? Let’s haul out the calendar, throw a dart, pick a date:
Ladies, gentlemen, readers gentle beyond the telling of it: I am more pleased than you could possibly know to announce that no. 8, “Beauty,” will have its online première Monday, November 2nd, and appear Monday – Wednesday – Friday through November 13th. Its paper première will be less certain, as there’s no exposition or symposium to mark the occasion. Rest assured, I’ll let you all know the moment it’s available for order.
This, by the way, is by far the shortest amount of time between chapters. —Might I break the record again with no. 9?
—posted 5526 days ago
Your author, in repose.
Shing went and made me a monster. —This is why, children, you should always answer internet questionnaires.
—posted 5529 days ago
Radio silence.
It’s been quiet since the end of no. 7. It usually gets quiet here, after a chapter (or a fit, or an episode, or—), but not this quiet.
I’ve been meaning to write something here, honest. I just—I start to think about what I’d say, and I get distracted and write some more on no. 8 instead. Which is good for the story, but not so much for the audience, maybe. (The audience cries from the peanut gallery: we just want the story!) —Is it enough, just to put out the chapters to sink or swim? Is it enough just to show up every now and then and read what’s here? Not that I’d ask anything more of anyone. And the last thing I’d want is to open my mouth and get in the way of whatever it is you think is the story.
Hey, any fanservice requests out there?
—Honestly, some days I think I just won’t be happy till ship-to-ship combat breaks out over City of Roses characters.
—posted 5530 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of Schenectady.
I’m not sure about this, but I’ve got Oblique Strategies loaded into my Twitter feed, and this afternoon when I happened to look up it was saying “Give the game away.” So.
When we first moved to Portland we lived in a house up on Northeast Killingsworth and we had no money. So we did various things. Barry and Sarah transcribed the voicemail messages people left about shoes. The Spouse cleaned newly built houses that were subsequently condemned. I—well, I managed a phone bank. (That’s not the game. Be patient.) Charles delivered pizzas. And at one time or another most of us sold plasma.
Barry and the Spouse went multiple times, to raise money for Photoshop and a wedding dress. I only ever went the once. It was a place in Old Town on the bus mall, back when the Pearl District was nothing but redrawn maps and marketing collateral: a jackleg clinic tucked behind an empty storefront with dingy windows and a sunfaded logo: Alpha Therapeutics. (I may be extemporizing some color in that. It was a whiles ago, after all, and we all have our Romantic tendencies. —I also remember bright fluorescent lights and gleaming clean silvery steel implements, but this is the furniture my mind supplies when I think of “clinic,” and is as well untrustworthy. Some middle ground, perhaps?)
You went inside and checked in and filled out paperwork and attested to various things about your medical history and were given a jug and led through the plasmapharesis room to the first available nice brown couch with a complicatedly comfortable headrest and long padded armrests. The jug was—was it plastic? Glass? Pyrex? I don’t remember it being heavy on the way in, but I do remember worrying about dropping it and breaking it on the way out, but I wasn’t exactly in my right mind then. But I do recall it was hashed down the side with lines denoting milliliters and such.
They helped you lie down on the nice brown couch and get that complicated headrest right enough so you could watch the movie that was playing on the TV screens that hung from the ceiling without lifting your head and then they stuck a silver needle in your arm that was attached to a clear plastic tube that went through some pump apparatus and then they hooked the other end of the tube into the neck of the jug. And then your blood is pumped out of your arm through the tube into the apparatus—but what’s pumped into the jug isn’t blood-colored at all. It’s just water and various proteins. Your blood cells are sent back into your arm.
I didn’t really watch that part. I watched the movie. Jim Carrey. The Mask. I remember wondering just how they managed to get Cameron Diaz’ skirt so short. CGI, I figured.
They tell you you really shouldn’t feel anything, but I got colder as it went on.
They had to tell me I was done. The gauze was already on my arm and the movie was something else. I got up off the couch and nearly fell over. They gave me the jug and it was—warm. And I walked out of the plasmapharesis room and up to the front counter with this jug full of something that had been inside me, that had been me, that was still warmed by heat leeched out of me, and I put the jug on the front counter, and I got a good look at it—
“Straw-colored” is the common epithet. Milky white. Thinly viscous. Frothy at the top, slicked with tiny oily bubbles. A hint of warm yellow gold.
And they gave me an envelope full of cash and took the jug away into the back room and I shivered all the way home on the bus. —In some respects it was the most honest job I’ve ever had. You could go back up to twice a week, I think, but I never did.
Now the thing about Schenectady is there’s a post office box. You write to it, the price is still two bucks (content, the king, is cheap), and you remember your SASE, and you get back an idea neatly typed up on a single page of onionskin paper. But the thing about Schenectady is this: it was a couple of years after that trip to Alpha before I ever started wandering about the city at all hours figuring out how the first glimmers of this and that bit of the City of Roses I’d found typed up on that single sheet of onionskin would work. And it was a couple of years after that before I ever started writing the story down for reals. And it was a couple of years after that, over a year or so ago, in the fallow period between nos. 5 and 6, when I found myself thinking of, heck, remembering that weird trip to Alpha for the first time in a very long time, and the weight of that jug of myself—and that’s when I figured out where that one part of the idea’d really come from—
See, Schenectady cheats.
(And it was only a few months ago—I never said I was the sharpest knife in the drawer—that I figured out the implications of why it is the plasma’s the color that it is, what’s there, and what isn’t, and when I sussed it all out I started to laugh. Schenectady cheats, but you always get your money’s worth.)
—posted 5599 days ago
A bellyful a you an that Leavenworth stuff.
Christ but that took a while. Quarter to two this morning in Wilsonville and I look up and say, that’s it?
Apparently it was.
Paper copies of chapter No. 7: “Gin-soaked,” debut today, right here: the Portland Zine Symposium at PSU’s Smith Memorial Ballroom. I’ll have the full run of chapbooks, naturally enough, plus photo prints and some nifty little buttons so you can show which fifth of Portland you happen to’ve fallen into. (All thanks to the Spouse for which.) Look for the table with the roses. —If you can’t make it to downtown Portland, order it here and I’ll put it in the mail for you. Or you could always wait until August 3rd when it’ll begin to appear online.
This one’s an odd one. I usually have no idea if something works right after I’m done with it, but I have no idea if I’ll ever have an idea whether this one worked. Ah, well! Up and on to the next.
—posted 5607 days ago
