“Beneath our feet,” he says, “there is a forest. Nearly four hundred trees sunk in the cold mud, bearing up the weight of this end of the bridge.” He looks back to her, over his shoulder. “Stripped of leaves,” he says. “Shorn of branches. She may have granted you an office, Gallowglas, and charged you with a duty, but she is no more the Queen, nor has been, for many months.”
There’s a feeling, a notion, a risk that you take, when you’re writing about a specific place, which is when you mention something that exists in that place at the time you’re writing, and it’s there, and it’s fixed, and you go on, writing more, perhaps, but time’s passing, as it does, and as it does that something changes. Write enough, often enough, and mention enough specific things, and you’ll end up unable to escape this notion that your pen is cursed, that to write something into what you write, to take notice of it and try to fix it in this way, is to doom it. —Mention the Danmoore Hotel in the background of a long walk home; it’s demolished to make way for a church’s parking garage. Carefully site a camp out by the airport based on satellite photos and on-foot reconnaissance; the threatened development suddenly finds a buyer and sets to laying out and walling up its 157,185 square feet. Set a scene in the downtown Meier & Frank; the brand’s bought out by Macy’s, the building’s gutted, turned into a hotel, and a minimalist Japanese retailer sets up shop on the ground floor. Mary’s Club wasn’t gutted by a fire, but it did have to hustle across the street to what’s effectively another part of town, and the Wesson brothers drive through a famously confusing intersection that doesn’t exist anymore. Shadow Unit shoots its television pilot in a food cart pod that’s now just another luxury high-rise. And that drowned forest beneath the Burnside Bridge?
When the bridge was first built in 1926, the two piers in the river were placed on 380 tree trunks, driven into the mud. They’ve held up remarkably well. But in an earthquake, the soil could liquefy and make the trunks fall over like pick-up sticks. The trunks will be replaced by several 10-foot-diameter concrete, steel-reinforced columns sunk into bedrock.
One more metaphor unmoored, and onward marches heedless time. —And yes, yes, there’s all the stuff gets mentioned that doesn’t change, or fade, or die, but not yet whispers the notion, and sure, there’s all the stuff that’s dead and gone that you never even thought to write down in your little story, but somehow, whispers the notion, that’s worse, don’t you see? Who will care, now, if you ever do manage to figure out how and why and when to work in a magical night at La Luna? —And there’s even the fact that you can work this curse against itself, tear down the Goat Blocks as if they’d never been, undo a suspiciously timed fire, let a grocers’ warehouse live at least a few years longer, give John Varley’s apartment to some other writer, unroll a lawn on the roof of it, but it’s all in the end just words, only words, I mean, words.
Such a terrible, awful notion. Unwanted. Unsought. And yet.
Posted 581 days ago.
I’m being overly harsh, I know. But I do feel that New Prolixity, as a school of writing, is a dangerous trap for the weaker writer, exacerbated by the fact that writing on a computer is much more facile, just practically speaking, than (say) writing on a page of paper with a pen. The words just come tumbling out, and there they are on the screen: they even look, thanks to the wonders of word processing, like a finished page of a printed novel! Should we revise? Nah.
James E Miller has speculated that the Jamesian “late style” was a consequence of the master moving from writing with a pen to dictating to a typist, something he started doing with What Maisie Knew in 1897. And so his circumlocutionary anti-rhodomontades spooled out, and so the rat-tatting efficiency of his mechanic amanuensis pinned them easily to the page. The easier it became to empage the words, the more orotund and elaborate and lengthy the sentences grew. I wonder if that’s true.
Posted 598 days ago.
It occurs to me that while I have revealed the cover of the forthcoming volume 4 to Patreons, and celebrated it on varyingly multitudinous social media platforms (Mastodon; Pixelfed; Bluesky), I actually haven’t placed it here, in the pages of this commonplace book. And so:
As a bonus for everyone here, I took one of those large language models out for a spin, prompting it with questions about that which I already knew. Here, for instance, is what it made of the relationship between the Duke and Orlando:
The relationship between Duke Leo Barganax and the Mooncalfe is a complicated and tragic one. They are both characters in the urban fantasy series City of Roses by Kip Manley, which is set in Portland, Oregon.
Duke Leo Barganax is a mysterious and powerful figure who claims to be the Duke of Southeast Portland. He is an ally of Ysabel Perry, the daughter of the King of Elfland and the Queen of the Seelie Court, who is bound by a geas to find her true name. He is also a former lover of the King of Elfland, who betrayed him and left him for dead.
The Mooncalfe is a mysterious and beautiful woman who appears in Leo’s dreams. She is actually a manifestation of the King of Elfland’s magic, sent to seduce and manipulate Leo. She pretends to be his true love and convinces him to help her escape from the King’s prison. However, she is actually working for the King and plans to betray Leo once again.
The relationship between Leo and the Mooncalfe is full of deception, passion, and violence. They have a twisted bond that transcends reality and dreams. They are both obsessed with each other, but also hate each other. They hurt each other physically and emotionally, but also crave each other’s touch. They are both victims and villains in their own story.
How disappointingly heteronormative. —I had it list some other characters:
Some other characters in City of Roses are:
- Ysabel Perry: The daughter of the King of Elfland and the Queen of the Seelie Court, who is bound by a geas to find her true name. She is the one who hires Jo as her courier and protector.
- Beaumont: A mysterious and powerful figure who claims to be the Duke of Southeast Portland. He is an ally of Ysabel and has a history with the King of Elfland.
- Annie: Jo’s best friend and roommate, who works as a waitress at a diner. She is unaware of the magical world that Jo is involved in, but she is loyal and supportive of her friend.
- Tommy: A young man who works as a bike messenger and has a crush on Jo. He is also a friend of Annie and often hangs out with them at their apartment.
- The Gallowglas: A mysterious assassin who is hired by the King of Elfland to kill Ysabel. He is a master of disguise and uses various weapons and gadgets to pursue his target.
- The Soames Twins: A pair of twins who are part of the Unseelie Court, loyal to the Queen. They are mischievous and cruel, and often cause trouble for Jo and Ysabel.
Annie? —I do find it half-fascinating, the extent to which certain—tropes? clichés? habiliments?—are so well-trod the grooves of their tracks can’t help but direct the statistical generation of seemingly plausible text: all power is mysterious; relationships are usually complicated; that which is mischievous is also cruel, et cetera.
But the game quickly palls. I asked it one more question, about myself:
Kip Manley is an author, blogger, and queer activist based in Portland, Oregon. He is best known for his urban fantasy series City of Roses, which is a serialized epic very firmly set in Portland, mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose. He has also written a novel called In the Reign of Good Queen Dick, which is a historical fantasy set in Elizabethan England. He writes about various topics, such as literature, politics, culture, and personal experiences, on his blog kiplet.net. He identifies as queer and has created a diverse and inclusive cast of characters in his works.
And there you have it. —Here’s one more image I’ve shared out there, but not yet placed here, for safekeeping: the feuilletons of volume 4:
Posted 667 days ago.
If by ownership you mean the ownership of the things that would allow you to reproduce your own existence, a separation from that, not bourgeois property ownership, it becomes a very interesting story. It is a story about migration out of family structures and into places like cities.
I think that there’s something really interesting there in Chris’s work about how the homosexuality that we either see or project onto the past—see in it our own projection onto the past—is like a vector for actual and potential forms of life and ways of building community that have anti-capitalist potential, almost less than the fact of the sexuality itself. But the way that those migrants see that within the family they are superfluous, capitalist production means they are no longer needed to maintain the farm, and that they must go survive some other way in the city, leads to a life where you encounter other people in a similar situation and experience forms of intimacy that, whatever sexual acts they may entail with other men, create the possibility of envisioning or living, in small ways, differently to the dominant ideal.
Posted 725 days ago.
I’m stuck on the hand, which makes no sense, I mean, except for the fact that it came out of nowhere. But it gets me where I need to be to set out for where I’m going, or so I’d think, and yet here I am, staring at the dam’ hand, unable to move past it.
Usually at this point I rip out what’s stuck, down to the studs, and rebuild it, but the whole edifice of this one is already terminally shaky; my hands have been writing one fix-it-in-post check after another that my fundament may well not be able to cash.
And I still have no idea how it exactly ends.
It’s possible, maybe—this volume has been the one I’ve most, I don’t want to say tightly, but, that I’ve outlined in the most detail, and maybe writing to the structure has distracted me from writing to, y’know, the story—that ol’ thing—but even as I set the thought down in words it clunks all hollow. I’m telling myself a story. This isn’t the problem, either.
Ah, don’t worry. I’ll figure it out. I always do. Right?
Here. Have a cover shot.
Posted 741 days ago.
But when I think of this history, it’s not the forces of oppression I center. Instead, I focus on the radical visioning of communities of color who were able to dream themselves into futures barred to them.
There’s a historical through-line here, too, from logging families in the multiracial, multiethnic community of Maxville in the 1920s in Eastern Oregon to current organizing by groups like the Portland African American Leadership Forum over the “right of return” for communities displaced by gentrification and discriminatory housing practices. The fact that Black communities exist here at all is incredible: we were never supposed to take root. That we did is due entirely to resistance, vision, and sheer force of will—and our ongoing commitment to care for each other in a place trying to destroy us.
Doing this work around the state has taught me that when you take the historical long view, the concept of justice becomes much simpler. The idea of “civil” discussions that give the same weight to all sides fades away. There are, in fact, really only two sides to history—the right side and the wrong side. We need to take the long view when thinking about our actions, and our work. What will be written of our actions (or our inactions) in 100 years? How will the future judge us?
Posted 771 days ago.
This is maybe a bit of an idiosyncratic view, but i’ve always understood the “point” of poetry to be in the demonstration that the image-arrangements or “argument” of the poem are already laying “in the language as such” in ways that are evidenced by their expressibility in rhyme and meter.
This is basically the old Emersonian point at the top of the page: a “poem” is when an argument is so much itself that it can simply appear, and take a metrical form as an indication of its always-already having been present in the language, but just not organized into a poem yet. What the poet does is notice the concatenation of the geometric “fact” of the poem’s possibility within a particular rhyme-and-meter space, and point that out. This is why I have always considered poetry to be a version of nonfiction: the poem is the words that are there where there is a pointer labeled “poem.”
Posted 855 days ago.
The mediocre, the false, the пошлость, can at least afford a mischievous but very healthy pleasure, as you stamp and groan through a second-rate book which has been awarded a prize. But the books you like must also be read with shudders and gasps. Let me submit the following practical suggestion: literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed; then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
Posted 865 days ago.
At first glance, it seemed an absurd way to make traffic safer, and Mockus was ridiculed in the press for pursuing it. But gradually, by making fun of drivers and pedestrians who didn’t follow basic rules and celebrating those who did, the mimes managed to transform the entire traffic culture of the city, successfully infusing Bogotá’s streets with common sense—or, rather, a sense of the commons.
The construction of the urban environment, a duty usually reserved for engineers, architects, developers, and the like, became, under Mockus’ mayorship, the responsibility of all urban inhabitants. His programs for Bogotá viewed citizens as political beings who are always already participating in the construction of their city, either with their good or bad attitudes.
“The mayor’s genius,” suggests Raymond Fisman, “was in recognizing that writing harsher laws or hiring more gun-toting policemen would be futile when confronted with a law-breaking culture. Instead he enabled Bogotá’s citizens to make change themselves.” Or as Mockus himself explains it, “Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules and are sensitized by art, humour, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change.”
Posted 873 days ago.
Rushkoff’s aim is partly for the reader to see these billionaires and their projects as absurd, even silly. Again, I can see the attraction in such an approach. I have found it difficult to avoid snark and sarcasm in my own writing about some of these characters. But it strikes me in this instance as missing the mark. For one thing, while it may be that their most grandiose visions are highly unlikely to come to fruition, their point may not be to achieve their most ambitious ends but to take advantage of the opportunities created along the way—opportunities that involve further privatization, increased wealth disparities, and social exclusions of the kind we already see. The spectacle is part of the grift. It is no accident that organizations such as the Seasteading Institute incorporate their opponents’ ridicule into their sales pitches. When the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots (2019 – present) did an animated short mocking “exit” strategies such as bunker-prepping and seasteading, the Seasteading Institute referenced the ridicule in its promotional materials.
Of course they would: being dismissed as quirky delusionaries is central to the narrative that tech escapists like to tell about themselves as misunderstood dreamers and unappreciated geniuses. It is, moreover, a kind of sales pitch sleight of hand. They count on us being too busy staring agape, laughing at the absurdity of the vision or lamenting the betrayal of tech’s emancipatory possibilities, to notice the conventional stench of extraction, dispossession, and colonial sleaze wafting in the air.
Posted 881 days ago.
