Better hit ’em on they ansible
Four weeks ago it was unconscionably hot. Remember? The heat dome squatting over the Pacific Northwest, and temperatures inside our shaded breezy house rivaling the usual outer bounds of high temperature outside for a day late in June. —When our internal temperature finally dropped below 80°, I could once more turn on my elderly Mac without fearing it would melt, and open up the file to see how far I’d got. (I do have other ways to write, but when it’s 110° outside and only twenty degrees cooler within, one would much rather lie on a bed without thinking rather than strive, diligently, to unstick oneself from one’s ways.) So I opened up the file to see I was only just barely quite halfway through the first draft of no. 38: the barker had only just started his (completely rewritten) spiel. —That was four weeks ago.
Since then: the gates have opened; we’ve been exploring the centerpiece of the whole dam’ thing (which didn’t snap into focus almost until I was upon it) (and then there’s the whole new character it turns out I didn’t need, who I have to go back and unwrite, sorry Nick)—but: but. I still haven’t gotten to Gun Street. I’m not sure no. 38 will be done in time to appear in August. I think I’m gonna miss the deadline. (Whoosh.)
No. 38, “ – Ekumen ain’t everything – ”, lines up if you like with the fifteenth card of the Major Arcana, Old Mister Scratch his own dam’ self: dark sides and shadow selves, forbidden thoughts released, the ties that bind made manifest to be tested and indulged: when snowballs don’t stand a chance, as we prepare to take our leave of the realm of fucking around, and our first steps into the world of finding out. —Perhaps that’s why picking my way through’s been so infuriatingly slow?
Sure. Let’s blame that.
Structurally speaking, this is the last of the wind-up installments: the next, no. 39, sits in the very middle of this volume, the apex of its rising action: decisions will be made, positions staked, irrevocable actions taken, perhaps even a blow or two to be struck. And then the four falling, unwinding installments, echoing and reverberating, and the final climactic novelette, no. 44, that will end the volume and the season. (Should I have tagged this with a spoiler warning? Do you feel spoiled? Apologies.) —Maybe that also has something to do with it.
If you follow the Pixelfed, you’ve already seen the cover reveal: a photo taken in the middle of the Tilikum Crossing, which the kid once said is like the sort of bridge they have in Pokémon cities. It won’t, insofar as I know, appear in the novelette itself. —Go, then, and prepare thyself for the Dog Days. They’re a-comin’.
—posted 1215 days ago
(Originally posted on the Patreon.)
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of ornament.
His argument was that the name we give to that supposed author disguised a bias modern folk have for writing and against listening. In Kanigel’s words, literary critics of the twentieth century associated reading and writing with “advanced civilizations,” and disliked the “repetition and stereotype” that characterizes oral poetry, a leaning that “blinded them to the fecund richness of illiterate cultures.” Although this theory had been modestly proposed by a number of scholars before Parry, and the groundwork was laid by the French scholar Marcel Jousse, who himself grew up amid the oral songsmithery of a largely illiterate community in France, Parry’s innovation lay in the scientific way he proved his inklings.
Using numerical methods, he counted exactly how many times the “ornamental epithets” so characteristic of Homeric epics—γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη (bright-eyed Athena), πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης (loud-roaring sea), and so on—appeared, and, crucially, where in the dactylic hexameter of the poem’s lines they cropped up. Such epithets were not, Parry showed, functionally descriptive at all; they tended to provide no new information about whatever story was being told, but instead existed for what he called the “convenience” of people performing the song. The epithets showed up in “prescribed position and order,” he wrote, essentially filling in metrical gaps wherever they occurred, “giving a permanent, unchanging sense of strength and beauty.”
—posted 1237 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of modernity.
Modernity becomes a nonteleological category when used to describe multiple, overlapping lifeworlds, sexual norms, and self-understandings produced by an unevenly developing world system. Those lifeworlds and sexual norms that characterized an increasingly residual world of feudal peasantry, small proprietors, urban artisans, and noble classes combined and came into conflict with the emergent norms and lifeworlds of cities, proletarian populations, and ascendant national bourgeoisies. Thematizing this unevenness and conflict establishes the disjunctive temporality and shifting borders of change without representing the historical process as some unilinear succession or archæology settled into impassable, sedimented layers.
—posted 1269 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of a good breakfast.
It must surely be more stimulating to the reader’s senses if, instead of writing “He made a hurried meal off the Plat du Jour—excellent cottage pie and vegetables, followed by home-made trifle” (I think this is a fair English menu without burlesque), you write “Being instinctively mistrustful of all Plats du Jour, he ordered four fried eggs cooked on both sides, hot buttered toast and a large cup of black coffee.” No difference in price here, but the following points should be noted: firstly, we all prefer breakfast foods to the sort of food one usually gets at luncheon and dinner; secondly, this is an independent character who knows what he wants and gets it; thirdly, four fried eggs has the sound of a real man’s meal and, in our imagination, a large cup of black coffee sits well on our taste buds after the rich, buttery sound of the fried eggs and the hot buttered toast.
—posted 1285 days ago
Aughtfold.
So about two weeks ago I was about to start in on the last scene, and here I am, two weeks later, just about to finish it. —This is not so much a bad thing; in those two weeks I essentially rewrote the entire first draft, soup to nuts, and it’s tighter, each scene with its purpose at least in mind if not revealed, much closer to what I usually consider to be my level and standard of first draft: tight, clean, purposeful.
But it’s not so much a good thing, either: I’m falling behind what passes for a schedule around here, a passing fancy I’d been managing to keep to for the first time in a while.
I’m still ambivalent, aren’t I. —Among the 22 novelettes that (will come to) make up Spring; Summer, this one, no. 37, lines up with the Temperance card: the angel, sat upon the bank of a river or a crick, engrossed in pouring water or liquor from the one cup to the other, waiting, perhaps, for the corpse of an enemy to float on by, I don’t know. Balance. Moderation. Patience—but also neither fish nor fowl. An April 25th type of deal, which isn’t nearly as amusing on a May 14th without much rain.
The lesson to’ve been learned from writing this thirty-seventh novelette would seem to’ve been that it’s one thing to know what needs to be said, and to whittle and shape and reframe until you figure out how it’s going to be said; it’s another entirely to have a flavor in mind, a taste in the head, a how that some as-yet unknown thing ought to be said, and to flail about in the finding of what it is that ought to be said in this way. (At least, you flail enough, there’s something there to be whittled and shaped and etc. —Appearances, and there being enough thereof.) —I believe, rather late in the day, I’ve finally settled on the order of the scenes; now, I just need to do that final editing pass, and then get the copies finaled and polished for the patreons, and then, and then—
But! I (still) don’t mean to alarm anymore than I do to exult. It’s doable, yet, or it yet looks doable from here: to have no. 37 done and dusted before Memorial Day. You’ll be kept posted. —In the meanwhile, here’s the photo that’s going on the cover. Enjoy!
—posted 1289 days ago
(Originally posted on the Patreon.)
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the Photographer.
Ruslan Lobanov is one of the most popular artists in the post–Soviet Union space. He isn’t a classical author of art photography. It’s something more than that. Нe defines his genre as a cinematic photography. Uniqueness of Ruslan’s photos based on analog technologies that he used for their realization. Mystery and elaborate elements of female nakedness, which blend harmoniously with collectible accessories, handmade costumes and attentively selected locations, are embodiment of the Photographer’s perception of the World. Ruslan Lobanov compares photo with a puzzle. The main satisfaction for creator is a final result, which is admirable by fans.
—posted 1293 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the pickle barrel.
If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be?
In The Dispossessed, I would mention the communal pickle barrels at street corners in the big towns, restocked by whoever in the community has made or kept more pickles than they need. I knew about the free pickles all along, but never could fit them into the book.
—posted 1303 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of now.
Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring.
We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don’t live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.
—posted 1332 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of being wrong.
I knew that I wanted it to be a little wrong. I’d like to make this, like, a little bit funny. Take this a little too far. So I did the tie-dye, which was pink and purple on the pants, I went a little further with the Home Depot chains. There’s gotta be something wrong about anything that you do, otherwise it’s just plain old cliché.
—posted 1340 days ago
Enneoddity.
Here we are: the next chapbook is about to hit the shelves, just about two months since the last one was published. It would appear that such a schedule as exists is finally being kept! For now.
If you were to accept, for a moment, for the sake of play, the discredited notion that the reason why I decided upon 22 chapbooks per season (11, per volume) is because there are 22 cards in the Major Arcana of most tarot decks (and not, as is well known, because there used to be 22 episodes, on average, in the seasons of old-skool Yankee television shows), well. If you then were to set the chapbooks of this season (Spring; Summer) next to the cards of the Major Arcana, as if the one somehow had something to do with the other, well: this next chapter, no. 36, “ – so powerfully strong – ”, would be right there next to Death. —Make of that what you might.
The first draft came in at 17,044 words; the (nearly) final cut’s a trim 15,250, though just last night I cut five words, and significantly altered the trajectory and velocity of a major character’s path through what’s to come. We’ll see what else might happen before it’s published.
Patreons have of course already seen the cover, and will shortly be getting their ebooks and ’zines; everyone else will get a chance to see the cover when it’s posted for sale, but: if you follow the Pixelfed, you might’ve seen the underlying image. —I was walking home after one of Tonkon Torp’s annual parties—the one, in fact, where I’d spontaneously shot the cover of Good Queen Dick from a corner of their lobby—and as I made my way on foot down a freshly washed Hawthorne, I happened to see where the rain that had occasioned that bow still beaded the tables that had been set on a sidewalk outside a club, and so. —An image of a another world.
No. 36. Three chapters in, just over a quarter of the way through this volume. The free installments will appear on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, beginning April 12th; in the meanwhile, there’s no. 37 to begin, and finish. That one would be laid against Temperance; perhaps it’s best we keep our enthusiasm in check. After all: if we can’t be mirrors—or is it rabbits?—we’ll be friends.
—posted 1352 days ago
(Originally posted on the Patreon.)
