I've just finished reading The Magicians, by Lev Grossman. I'm not going to write a review of the novel, so if you're looking for book reviews, check out the 355 reviews already on Amazon (as of the date this post was written). You'll see that the reviews fall roughly into three categories:
1. OMG!!! This is NOT AT ALL like Harry Potter, and so it sucks!!! 2. OMG!!! This is SO MUCH BETTER than Harry Potter, and so it's awesome!!! 3. Meh. It had some good parts, and it had some bad parts (most these reviews were quite dull-polarizing comments are more interesting).
Although I liked the book quite a bit, I'm not going to do a standard review. If you want a reasonable proximation of how I felt about the book, take the enthusiastically positive Amazon reviews, strip out the praise that says it's superior to the Potter books, leave in the praise about how fun it was to see the author playing with genre tropes, and there you have it.
What I do want to talk about in this post is the book's internet marketing. I have no idea who came up with the idea for the marketing, and who built the marketing websites, so I'm not sure who I'm critiquing, but it doesn't matter. If the author writes to me with a broken heart, I will invite him to my house for tea, and gladly have a talk about marketing I *do* like, and I will cook him a moan-worthy meal that will rock his socks. (Lev, you're invited over. Or you can send the marketing team. But I'd rather meet you, because I think your writing is awesome.) What I would say to whomever showed up, in this infantile dream scenario is the following:
You tried to do something cool. I see where you were going with it. But it could be so much better. Actually, I think it could be incredible.
Back to my reading experience. When I finished the book, the first thing I did was Google "Fillory" on my Android phone to see what would come up. You never know what you'll find these days, what the marketing will be, and what the fans are doing. The first thing I thought when I read the last page was that it was possible for the book (and the author) to develop a cult following. Fillory and Further is the name of the series of novels within the novel. Fillory is Grossman's magical land that parallels C.S. Lewis's Narnia. Instead of the five familiar Pevenseys (Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy), there are five Chatwins (Martin, Fiona, Rupert, Helen, and Jane). Instead of a wardrobe, there is a grandfather clock. The Chatwin children are not the stars of the story. The protagonist is Quentin Coldwater, a teenager summoned to attend a magic school whose environment is more suitable to a Holden Caulfield than a Harry Potter. Quentin has been obsessed with the Fillory books since he was a young and neglected boy growing up in the outskirts of Boston. The conceit of the books is that the story within the story, authored by a man named Christopher Plover, is real (not really real, real within the context of the novel, real). The first five books of Fillory of Further (The World in the Walls, The Girl Who Told Time, The Flying Forest, The Secret Sea, and The Wandering Dune), which roughly parallel the Narnia books, describe events that really happened (again, within the context of the novel). The sixth book was never published, and within the context of the novel is a major plot point. Quentin discovers that Plover was writing embroidered non-fiction about the "real" Chatwin children having "real" adventures in a "real" parallel world called Fillory. Got all that? Good.
Back to the critique of the "Internet Special Features."
At very first glance, it all looks pretty neat. But then you step into what looks like a majestic lake and find yourself standing a shiny puddle about an inch deep. The author's website has some decent graphics, but a little clicking around shows that it's a thin veneer. The best features are the map of Fillory, and the link to the "first chapter" of the novel within the novel The World in the Walls. I didn't discover until later that this is pretty much the crown jewel of the Internet marketing plan, and I doubt other chapters will appear, as the writing would merely be an entertaining exercise in channeling C.S. Lewis. If you click on the book covers thumbnails, all you get is an enlargement of the book covers. If you click on the "Contact" button, it takes you to the marketing website (really disappointing). Two tiny links will take you to the "fan site," and the "college" website for Brakebills, the magical institution of higher learning Quentin attends. The fan site is fun for a little bit, with its attempts at mimicking other mawkish fan sites (crayon drawings of the characters, a precocious fannish voice narrating the content with mispellings and other cute tricks), but there is no fan forum, no blog content, nothing to show that it's active in any way. It's a cardboard standee, deliberately so I think, but ultimately emphasizing the lack of actual fan engagement. The last of the marketing pages I visited was for Brakebills, and the content there was even thinner, as if the design team had gotten tired at the end of business, and said, "Good enough. Course curriculum, yadda yadda yadda. Nothing that isn't from the book. Summarize in three sentences or less, and then we drink." Devastatingly, the contact button of each web site takes you to the main marketing website. Surprise! It's all a fake!
Maybe this is super cool for most folks; I don't know. You tell me.
For me, I think the marketing plan fails because I've been hideously ruined for all lesser marketing plans through my worship of Jane McGonigal (not Professor McGonagall, ), author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Makes Us Better and How They Can Change the World (OMG, Jane, don't stop this crazy thing!) and her paper "Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming." (Unfortunately, when I try to download the PDF of "Why I Love Bees", the file won't load. This may be a problem with my Mac, so if you're interested in the article, you try and let me know if you get it.)
The article explains how ilovebees, one of the first Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), was built and what sort of community the game led its fans to create. Okay, how dare I compare a harmless little internet marketing scheme to ilovebees. That's just not fair. It's not. It's like comparing a tent to the Taj Mahal. Both keep the rain off, but the latter uplifts your soul. The one thing is not mean to be the other, can't have a comparable effect, and I get that, thanks. ilovebees started out as a viral marketing campaign for the video game Halo2. Those who saw the weblink flash at the end of the movie theater trailer for the game and went to ilovebees.com were invited to play a game like no other game. A game where players were required to band together in a mass of determined, fanatic collective intelligence in order to solve the unfolding puzzle the game masters developed only a few steps ahead of the problem solvers. In an extreme example, players discovered a set of GPS locations, where they gathered on a certain day, at a certain time, to receive clues in the forms of recorded messages from pay phones at those GPS locations. Crazy! Unbelievable! A game that would call you at a pay phone, or even at home! A game that was a game, but invaded your reality, if you dug deep enough! A game that blurred the line.
Why am I going on about this? I guess because I loved The Magicians and because its novel-within-a-novel-and-the-novel-inside-the-novel-is-actually-real-conceit fairly begs to be an Alternate Reality Game. I'm having the same sort of experience as the protagonist, where my passions are so vivid, and formed at such an early age, fed by millions of words of fabulous fiction that reality can't keep up with my desperate yearning for escape from the mundane. When I click on those sites, I want more to see. I want to find the Neitherlands, and I want to jump in the pool and be transported into an alternate reality. I want to go on a ride into a greater experience.
Oh. Wait a minute. Maybe I've been invited to be a student at Brakebills and I've just spectacularly failed the entrance exam. Oh, I hope that's it! Because, you see, if you're not meant to find Brakebills, you won't find the college campus, which is situated on the Hudson River, but hidden from regular people by spells and wards and things. If you're not meant to see it, the campus just won't show itself to you. You can wander for days, even weeks, in the surrounding forest, and you'll just end up pissed off and hungry and lost.
Oh, all of a sudden, I feel like such a fool. It was right in front of me the whole time! I guess it's time to go back to those deceptively simple websites and start poking around. If I just poke hard enough, maybe they'll let me in! Maybe they'll let me in, and I'll get to go to Fillory, and I'll be a queen and frolic with naiads and centaurs, and try to figure out the clock trees, and defeat the Watcherwoman, and meet Ember and Umber, and live happily ever after!
My kingdom for a trip to Wonderland, to Oz, to Narnia, to Middle Earth.
Here's a story from the trunk. I like it well enough to post, but not enough to put back into play.
Endgame
We recline crown to crown on the grass, faces silvered by starlight. We’ve played this game together since we were Boy Scouts – the two of us lying head to head in the yard, mirror images, collecting the sounds of the night. If this were just an ordinary night, I would be able to pick out even the subtlest ingredients of the twilight hour’s ambient soup - the bulldog rip-snoring on the patio next door, the purr of the power lines overhead, an eighteen-wheeler moving down Interstate 5 two miles away. On a clear night I could name all the bug sounds and bird sounds by species, identify the rustling of the surrounding trees by name; birch, magnolia, walnut, live oak. But tonight I’m on edge and I can’t hear a thing over the swelling tide of his breath, the air sliding over his lips, across his palate, past his trachea, into his lungs and back out again to mingle with the air that makes a similar journey through me. This is my best friend in the world, my other Me. My consciousness is fickle, fragmented, oscillating madly through my aural choices; there are the shushing particles of his breath that I might be breathing, and the crinkling of our mingled hair, the beating of my heart in the circular patch of heat generated by our contact.
All our lives he'd been mine, then hers and mine.
And, as of tomorrow, hers alone.
We came out back to play the listening game as soon as his bachelor party was over and the last of the guests had tottered out the door sobered up on cribbage and coffee. (One bull-moose of a man was unashamedly weepy, mumbling about the sanctity of marriage and all that shit) and all I can think is – I’m glad it’s summer – or else dew from the lawn would be seeping into our clothes at the points where our bones are pressing against the earth. But below these bland little minnow thoughts, I am aware that my concern about the season is a load of crap, and that I’d lay there in the middle of a monsoon just to feel the top of his head pressed against mine one more time while we play our boyhood game in the darkness.
And then I hear a faint noise like rippling velvet and he whispers, “Owl” and at the sound of his voice, my chest burns with a sudden fire both choking and sweet. Silent, I fumble the box of toothpicks out of my breast pocket and knock one out onto my chest. Breaking the time-honored rhythm of the game, I grasp his prize between thumb and forefinger and hold it above our heads where he is sure to see it, even in the darkness. A break in protocol; I’d always made a game of flipping the toothpick over my head to see if I could arc it into the hoard he kept in the dip of his solar plexus. But tonight, on this last night, I need him to take it from my hand so I can feel something of him, if only the force he’ll generate through the slender fragment of wood.
The toothpick remains unclaimed.
Either he has his eyes closed and doesn’t see it, or his eyes are open and he’s trying to figure out why I’m changing the game, the rules of which we’d established by the age of twelve. (Box of toothpicks for each, the sounds of the night identified down to the whisper, the slim bits of wood tumbling through the air to mark a point lost or a point gained. Then the boisterous counting of coup, the ribbing and the bragging and the giggling promises of retribution.) I imagine I can hear his brain cells clashing together and I wonder if I can tell him this and win a point, so I can punch a hole through the thick silence.
Without warning, his fingers are on the other end of the toothpick and the sudden contact crystallizes my sinews, turning the muscles of my arm into frozen meat. He doesn’t pull his prize out of my grasp, but holds his end between the knuckles of his fingers like a cigarette and we are suddenly one creature, albeit conjoined by the most tenuous of physical connections. I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can only grip my end of toothpick like a helpless idiot, listening with rising panic to the sudden alteration in the pattern of his breath. The toothpick twists in my fingers as he rolls onto his belly and the crown of my head is all at once very cold. And the toothpick twists again as I roll onto my elbows to meet him face to face.
The night has washed all the colors from the world and I see him in newsprint, a black curl of hair against his white forehead, dark eyes agleam beneath his curving black brows. And although I am his opposite in coloration, no doubt he sees me the same way, a grayscale reflection joined to him by a splinter of white birch. I want to hold onto that bit of wood with all my strength, to conjure forth an endless summer, a succession of card games and bike rides and skinny-dips. I want to crush him into the earth with my body and sink in afterward, and lie with him under the grass and rehash every inane conversation we've ever had in the twilight hours on the back lawn. I always want to breathe his breath into my body and be boys forever, amen.
There’s an unexpected softness around his eyes and then he smiles like he can see right down into my protons. Let's walk the roofline, I expect him to say. Let's let all the air out of Suri's tires and run away, drive your Jeep to Mount Diablo, and look for meteors like we did when we were sixteen. He struggles to speak, knowing he should say something, anything, to keep me from exploding into my constituent atoms. Tomorrow's wedding vows will be a formality; this is the moment that counts for me, for us, as boys who once mingled their blood over a campfire.
But then the toothpick snaps and we are laughing, as if words are no longer necessary, but I want to moan and tear my hair, pour ashes over my head and mourn. There is nothing in the world I can do but roll over again, pressing the top of my head to his, and try not to detonate.
And finally, he thinks he knows what to say.
"I hear you," he says. "And I'll hear you tomorrow in St. Ann's. There'll be five hundred people kneeling and standing, and I'll hear you. Do you understand?" He reaches up, over his head, tucks his box of matches into my pocket, giving it a pat. "Do you?"
I curl a trembling hand over the matches. I've won them all, but in this matter, there is no winner, can't be. Not me, not him, and certainly not Suri. Do you understand, he says.
Tonight, with some trepidation, I go to review my inventory of unsold stories to see what lives and what dies. Part of being a writer is managing submissions; unless you are only writing for yourself, and don't submit your work for publication, you have to cope with the necessity of sending your work out to be evaluated by other people, and accepted or rejected for whatever product they have in mind. The activity I'm about to embark on isn't unique to people who are getting back into the writing life; no matter where you are in your writerly development, you need to look through a story before sending it out, to make sure it represents your best work, and that you would be proud (or at least not embarrassed) to have that story read by others. If you don't think it's suitable for sending out, you have a hard decision to make. To revise, to throw out, or to allow the story to mildew or ferment for decision later. This is part of the process, and it never goes away. Circulate, or abandon. There will never be a time when every story you write will magically find a home and not require resubmission. Sometimes, a story will find a home on the first try. Most of my favorite stories have sold to the first market, on the first try. But sometimes, a story will find a home on the twentieth try. And some, at least at my level, never sell at all.
Getting back in the saddle after a three-year hiatus presents me with the same problem, but a different perspective on the stories themselves. I'm still going to have to read through each story before resubmitting, but there's an additional issue: most of my unsold stories were written in 2007, 2008, and 2009. In the latter half of 2009, things fell apart for me, writing-wise, and so my newest stories are two years old. Some unsold stories are ten years old. I'm anxious about looking at these stories, because I'm afraid they suck. When the writing is hot and new, it is the best you can do, and so sometimes the newness sparkles so brightly you can't tell the story sucks right away. It needs to mellow in a drawer. When you manage to forget how hard it was to write, when you no longer remember crying over the keyboard or reading the same damn opening paragraph ninety million times, when you have read another dozen great stories written by someone else, then you can approach the piece with an improved ability to see it for what it is, not what you wished for when you were writing it.
Some people say you should never revise a story once it has been sent out. You freeze it in carbonite, and it succeeds or fails as the beast you originally birthed. They say revising is like trying to turn a lump of coal into a diamond by wishing for it hard enough. You can't wish coal to be anything but coal. Sorry, move on. Others refuse to let go of ideas, and will revise a story around a core idea as many times as it takes to express that core idea properly. This method says that the core idea is already a diamond, and it just needs the right setting. The first writer will circulate the story until it doesn't pass the embarrassment test, then will retire the story to wherever such stories go (fire pit, trash bin, Permanent Archives of Failed Stories). The second writer will circulate the story, get it back, tinker with it, send it out again, get it back, tinker with it, send it out again, chipping and polishing it like Michaelangelo freeing a sculpture from the marble. The first writer thinks the second writer is wasting his time. He should move on, and write a completely different story, and get on with it. The first writer thinks that the Magic Juice is in the first version, and if it ain't there, it ain't there.
What I'm wondering, though, is if the first writer isn't doing exactly what the second writer is doing, and calling it something else. Sure, throw the manuscript into the trash compactor, roll a clean Word document onto the screen, and write a new story. Sure. That's different, right? Different characters, different viewpoint, different names for everything. It's different! It's a totally different story! Only, maybe it isn't, always. Maybe it's a story about rubber chickens instead of robots, but it's probably still grappling at the core issue, whatever that is--that diamond. It's still about the futility, or the hope, of love. It's still about the morality of starving the lumberjacks to save the owls. It's still trying to figure out why the author's father never showed up for a single jazz ensemble concert, even though the author begged, and was really really good on the sax. This is to suggest that most authors have a varying number of Special Issues on which they focus. Some have a dozen. Maybe others only have one, and they keep telling that story over and over again, hoping to "get it right."
If the second writer is revising a story over and over again, and in the process of revision, throwing out the alien robots and inserting the rubber chickens, I'm not convinced that he is doing anything measurably different than the first author. It depends on the scale of changes, how much the second writer is willing to throw out. If he throws out EVERYTHING other than that thing that moves him to write the story to begin with, is he really wasting time in revision? Or does it just look a little different, overwriting a document, instead of opening a new document? Using the same character names over and over again, hoping Julia or Malcolm will finally do something meaningful? I hope it's clear what I think.
I do think there's a danger in getting frozen in revision hell. You get one set of comments from one person, and make some tweaks. You get another set of comments and make some tweaks. You get a third set of comments, and tweak it back to the way the story read before the first reader commented. This is what I call "resume tweaking." Resume tweaking isn't revising. Revising isn't something you can do with a resume, really, unless you have enough work experience to create entirely different versions that will get you completely different jobs (some people CAN do this, and some can't, but let's not get derailed). For a story, resume tweaking is proofreading or light editing, and you certainly can fall down that black hole and never write anything new again. I've fallen victim to this, and I'm steeling myself not to fall for it this time.
This time, I've got a hard drive full of stories that are two to ten years old, and some of them have been rewritten so many times, I forgot what I was trying to say. I have to evaluate the benefit:risk of mining that story for its diamond, or trusting that if it's important, I'll say it in the next story. I have to fight a natural instinct to obsessively hoard the old words, like that one guy who drank a case of beer a week and refused to throw away any of his beer cans, ending up living in a malty, crushed aluminum warren in his apartment, pictures of which you can find on the internet. Ask anybody: I open my mail over the recycle bin. I've gotten rid of 40 boxes of books in the last five years. I put perfectly acceptable and usable items on the curb so someone else can use them, instead of stashing them down in the basement for a rainy day. This is why I have a lawn now, but no longer have a mower. I'll have to trawl Craig's list and get a replacement. I can ditch a lawnmower on a curb, but I find it tremendously difficult to throw away my words. Find a sheet of pictures from when your oldest child was seven, the one with a single print hacked out of one side with dull scissors, the smile missing a tooth, and try to throw that sheet of photos away. Everybody already has a copy who wants a copy, and the 8 x 10 is proudly displayed in the living room next to pictures of your kid from ages zero through six, but still, that sheet of photos has the spirit of your child in it and it seems a desecration of the institution of parenthood to throw that thing away.
So, like me, you have crates of those sheets in your basement. You have negatives of pictures of family picnics, from back before you had a digital SLR or took pictures with your phone. In my basement, those crates are sitting next to crates full of old spiral notebooks and binders full of childish, sixth grade handwriting. Stephen King says, in his book "On Writing" to kill your darlings during the editing process. But I don't kill anything. Like the little boy in the Twilight Zone episode, I send them to the cornfield. Like Miriam Blaylock in the Hunger, I keep my darlings in boxes in the dark, and let them whisper there, impotent, discarded, but still loved.
Listen to yourself complain, and then watch your feet.
Do you accept yourself for who you are? Are you where you want to be? Are you doing what you most want to do with your life? If so, I'm envious and I want to know how you made the decision, and how you got started. I want to know about that moment, if there was one. I want to hear about your epiphany.
If the answer to any or all of the questions is, "No," then I feel a little less alone. No, I don't accept who I am; are you kidding? I'm not sure if I'm where I want to be. I'm not sure if I'm doing what I want most in life. I listen to myself complain about the things I wish I could be doing, but my feet often tell me something else. Much of the time, my feet are telling me I don't want to do anything but work, keep house, and exchange hugs. Not a bad life, really. What's to complain about there? My feet also tell me other things sometimes. That I want to see the world, try new things, and write about those things. I don't write with my feet, but my feet take me to the library, to the bookstore, to my chair, to my computer. My hands do the rest, but "feet" are only a metaphor for action. My hands speak as well as my feet.
One problem is that sometimes my feet don't let me do any of the above. Sometimes, they plant me in a bed, or in a chair, where I do nothing but think, write, and talk about things I wish I had more time to do, and don't do. When I think about this, I'm embarrassed. It seems obvious that time's a-wasting when I'm thus occupied. Stop talking and move the feet, I say to myself. If you spent the same amount of time doing the stuff you say you want to do, and less time complaining about wanting to do it and not being able to figure out how, you'd have walked all the way around the world by now. What's the deal? Are your feet broken? What keeps you frozen in space and time, wishing, instead of doing? Instead of acting?
I can only imagine that fear keeps me pinned in place, frozen in my safe routines, trapped in my anxiety. My anxiety, strangely, keeps me safe from things that are too scary. You would think anxiety itself was scary, and I'd do anything I could to get rid of it. But that part of my brain is always on the lookout for ways to keep me away from the really scary stuff. It's less scary to spin off on a thousand anxieties than to see a way to get your feet moving, if you're afraid that in doing so, you'll end up unloved and alone. Who'd want to hang out with a person who does X? Who'd want to hang out with a person who is XYZ? Better not be that. That's unattractive. Be that, and no one in their right mind will stay in your life. No one in their right mind will like you, much less love you. Be that, and the Alsatians will break in, and snack on your corpse once you die of loneliness. What a crap defense mechanism, anxiety. It not only takes away your choices; it takes away everyone else's choices too, because it keeps you from giving people the information they need to make decisions about you. Sometimes it keeps you from seeing the information you need to make decisions about them. Look at the flashing light. You're getting sleepy.
What if you could suddenly, one day, pat the little babbling thing on the head, forgive it for trying to protect you, and Get On With It? What would that feel like, to hear it going squeaksqueaksqueak like a chipmunk on amphetamines, and Get On With It anyway? It would maybe look like a yard raked of leaves, or a page full of words, or a ticket to China or Australia. If you weren't afraid of making a mistake, of being imperfect and unlovable and unloved, where would your feet take you? If you weren't terrified of what They think of you, terrified They'll find out the Real Truth About You and pop their parachutes, you would do something wonderful, wouldn't you? I bet you're bursting with ideas that you'd act on, if you weren't scared of looking stupid, or selfish, or boring, or ugly, or whatever your worst anxieties tell you is Really Under the Surface and If Other People Could See It They'd BAIL. If you didn't have to burn so much energy hiding yourself in plain sight, maybe you could do some of those things you keep wishing you could do.
Rational thinking says that if people will bail on you for being you, they should. Hasta la vista, baby. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out! Rational thinking tells you that the world has billions of people swarming around on it, and that at least ten will give you the time of day, if you walk down the street and just smile. Rational thinking is a bummer to anxiety. It says you will probably never find someone capable of pouring an infinite amount of love into you until you feel loved, that you can't satisfy an insatiable need for love from the outside; and that's not the purpose of other people anyway. (It also says disapproving things about the word "never", but some "nevers" are more rational than others.) The best you can do is wave down the bottomless pit, acknowledge it's there, and Get On With It. Rational thinking is a bright, flashing beacon over the truth.
It says that the only sanity is something that sounds insane. To develop the capacity for change, first you need to accept things as they are. Accept reality as you see it. There it is! There are the facts. All the judgment in the world about what those facts should be--all the wishes in the world that the facts were different--won't alter them in the slightest. If you sit and judge and wish, nothing will change, you'll just be too tired to Get On With It. You'll spin yourself into knots and eat your tail, and stay frozen in time. Giving up on change doesn't help either, though! Give up on change, and it won't happen. Grasp at it, and it won't happen; you'll be too busy flailing to do anything worthwhile. Look at your feet, accept what they're doing when they're doing it, where they're going while they're going there, while working toward pointing them somewhere else.
I'd like to be able to do this. I need a tree to sit under for a month, or maybe that's just renaming the need to be loved. I need to read a hundred more self-help books, or maybe that's just renaming the need to be loved. Or I need to burn all the self-help books in one glorious statement of "I need to be loved!" I need to ask for what I want. I need to stop asking for what I want. I need to do something. I need to do nothing. (Snicker. Anxiety is sneaky, isn't it? Now it has me sitting here in a cafe trying to figure out how to stop figuring things out so I can figure things out. Oh, I know the answer! It's turtles, all the way down!)
It's okay, feet. Do your thing. While you're doing your thing, and keeping me anxious and safe, I will also be taking risks and putting writing time on my Google calendar, in the little pockets between the commitments I need to keep. Just keep going around and around if you want to, feet, but still, I'll move the fingers across the keys, I'll keep my feet pointed in the direction I keep saying I want to go. I'll walk around in circles AND I walk straight ahead.
I watch the feet, and move the feet, and I also ignore the feet.
I look, while not looking. I accept, while opening to change.
These are the sounds I make when I eat dumplings. I love dumplings. Yum yum yum. OMG OMG OMG so yum yum yum! This post has nothing to do with writing whatsoever, and everything to do with dumplings.
According to the 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, a dumpling is "small mass of leavened dough that is either boiled or steamed and served in soups or stews or with fruit. Dumplings are most commonly formed from flour or meal bound with egg and then simmered in water or gravy stock until they take on a light, cakey texture. Many recipes call for herbs, onions, grated cheeses, or chopped meats to be rolled into the dough before cooking." Okay. Yummy already, and I haven't even gotten started.
1. Soup dumplings. On my first trip to Manhattan, I stayed with Mary Robinette Kowal, who told me if I ate anything in the city, I needed to go to the Shanghai Cafe and have the soup dumplings. I'd never heard of such a thing. I had a little trouble ordering them because the words "soup dumplings" weren't on the menu. There were several dumplings, but none of them specifically said "soup dumplings." The server resignedly straightened me out, and quickly slapped a steamer full of dumplings on the table. I was immediately perplexed. I was clueless. My first thought: "Where's the soup?" I ignored the OBVIOUS CLUE of the Chinese style soup spoons served with the dumplings, picked one up, and bit into it. I found the soup. There was a gushing, lip-melting gush of soup down my face and shirt as I discovered that the soup was inside the dumpling. Duh! The good news was that I did not burn myself so badly that I couldn't collect my wits, look around me at how OTHER people were eating, and catch a clue. One delicately picked up a dumpling with chopsticks, laid it in the bowl of the soup spoon, nibbled a hole in the dumpling, BLEW into the dumpling to cool the soup, sip the soup, eat the dumpling. A painful lesson. A heavenly dumpling. Eat them. Carefully.
2. Gyoza. I don't have a restaurant recommendation for these, because my favorite are done in my own kitchen. This is not a photo from my own kitchen, because I made a different kind of dumpling for dinner tonight (which I didn't take a picture of, d'oh!). I purchase frozen gyoza from an Asian market, and I pan fry these at home myself. I've figured out just the right amount of time to let the frozen dumplings sit in the oil, turning crispy and golden on the bottom, before throwing a sheet of aluminum foil over the pan and tossing in a tablespoon of water to let them steam until perfect. Crispy, golden, and yummy on the bottom; chewy, soft, and luscious on the top. I usually buy the pork and scallion, but have also bought the vegetable (with black mushroom) and the shrimp, which are both tasty. Dipped in a combination of soy sauce, white vinegar, spicy sesame oil, and slivered green onion, these are delicious.
3. Pot stickers. I might have this all wrong, but I'm going to go for it anyway. In my experience, gyoza have thinner skins and potstickers have thicker skins. Sometimes potstickers are pan fried like gyoza, and sometimes they are steamed or deep fried. In Massachusetts, these are usually called "pan fried ravioli," but they're very often deep fried, which makes them deliciously bubbly all over. Sometimes, pan fried ravioli have skins that are so thick, they're almost doughy, but I like the medium thick skins instead because they stay crispier. These dumplings usually have pork in them, and scallion, and I see the same kind of sauce served with them as with gyoza, although the Chinese places in Massachusetts will also put duck sauce on the table, which I consider heresy unless accompanied by actual duck. Try putting a bit of fresh minced garlic into the pot sticker sauce for an extra treat.
4. Har Gau. These are steamed shrimp dumplings that are different from shrimp gyoza or shrimp pot stickers. These have a more translucent skin, and the shrimp is usually a smallish "crystal" shrimp, which is usually more moist and delectable than the kind of shrimp you're used to seeing in your shrimp cocktail. These sometimes have tiny bits of vegetable, but nothing much to detract from the main ingredient. These are just lovely in addition to being tasty, with a finely scalloped edge that seems impossible for a machine to make.
5. Shumai. These are among the smallest of the dumplings I've eaten, and like the gyoza, I prefer to cook these myself. I've never had shumai at a restaurant that were any better than the ones I cook at home, because I'm fairly certain that I've never had shumai that was made at the restaurant. From what I can tell, they use the same frozen ones I do, and usually don't have the patience to do much more than microwave them and slap them on a plate (while charging me double what I paid to buy them frozen myself). For these, I do the same treatment as for gyoza, with a combination of pan frying and steaming. At some point, I will purchase a bamboo steam basket and try steaming them myself (on the stovetop, not in the microwave). I've had several flavors, but the shrimp and crab shumai are my favorite.
6. Momo. New to my dumpling repertoire is the Tibetan dumpling, called "momo." My first taste of momo was at Martsa on Elm in Somerville, MA. They arrived at the table freshly deep fried, arranged on paper in a basket. They were punishingly hot, crispy, bubbly, and beautiful. Stuffed with pork, these were immediately classified the Best Dumpling Ever. However, I've also had momo at Tashi Delek in Brookline, MA, and realized that the fabulosity of momo depends on where you get them, and what kind. I had the sampler platter at Tashi Delek, with two ricotta and spinach, two chicken, and four beef momo. This was definitely tasty and worth the trip, but my eyeballs did not roll into the back of head the way they did at Martsa on Elm, and so there's momo, and then there's momo. The Martsa on Elm momo were much more like gyoza, and the Tashi Delek momo were more like pot stickers. Tashi Delek served the momo with a fresh tomato relish, into which the server encouraged me to pour soy sauce. That was delicious.
7. Samosas. Is India part of Asia? Yes! Is a samosa a dumpling? It's leavened dough stuffed with something, and fried. The definition says "boiled or steamed" but there are an awful lot of other dumplings that are fried, so I'm calling this a dumpling. My favorite Indian restaurant in the vicinity is called A Passage to India and the samosas there are tasty. They typically come stuffed with potato, peas, and ground lamb, seasoned with caraway. The dough is typically flaky and falls apart like good pie crust under the fork. The edges are actually pressed with a fork, as they typically show the characteristic hash marks. I like these with any of the chutneys they serve at Passage: mint, onion and tomato, and spicy tamarind.
8. Soup wonton. When I lived in California, one of my favorite things to get at a Chinese restaurant was the "wor wonton soup," which I translate as "the wonton soup that has everything but the kitchen sink thrown in." There were greens, sliced pork, all kinds of vegetables and these gorgeously corpulent wontons with whisper thin skins drifting in savory broth. I loved chasing the paper thin skins around the bowl; the drifting dumplings looked like jellyfish, and for some reason, I'm not disturbed by the image. I'm talking about the beauty of the jellyfish, not the taste, which I wouldn't know about, never having eaten one. Soup wontons are delicious.
9. Fried wonton. These are not quite the soup wonton thrown into the deep fat fryer, but they're a close cousin. They use eggroll wrapper, and they typically have either a flat triangular shape or the cook has turned the wonton and pressed the tips together to make the shape in the photo. These are typically served with the orange pineapple-like sweet and sour sauce (not duck sauce, which in MA tends toward apple-apple). In MA, there is little difference between a fried wonton and crab rangoon, which is pretty much fried wonton stuffed with cream cheese and crab.
10. Chocolate soup dumpling. Maybe this is cheating. Is this really an "Eastern" dumpling? It came from a restaurant in Manhattan called Rickshaw Dumpling Bar and it's a ball of mochi (rice wrapper) filled with chocolate, rolled in black sesame seeds, and deep fried. Wahoo! I did not know what to expect, but it was a sublimely creamy dark explosion of choco-melty sesame squishy goodness. I always eat way too much when on vacation, and the day I went to Rickshaw was no exception. I was already NOT HUNGRY by the time I got to Rickshaw, but the chocolate soup dumpling was still fantastic. It's not chocolate soup; it's just delicious melted chocolate. I think I could probably do another 10 Eastern Dumplings, but tomorrow, I head West.
On Facebook the other day, I found a comment where a writer was poking fun at writers in Web 2.0 culture. Paraphrased: it's easier to talk about writing, and interview each other, and write reviews about other people's work than to actually write something. I agree with this, wholeheartedly. It's way easier for me to scribble out 1500 words about an existing work than to pull 1500 words of fiction out of my head. This led me to wonder if reading and writing about writing, and talking about writing, and writing reviews is productive, or (not to put too fine a point on it) wanking instead of working (my apologies to any professional wankers who might be reading this blog). I admit that as the days go by, it is becoming more difficult to find something to write about so I can keep doing my writerly push-ups. My natural anxiety tells me I should use this time wisely, and do meaningful exercise, not the writerly equivalent of the 12 oz. curl (which for me would be sitting on the couch, re-watching episodes of Buffy and "reviewing" them by rehashing plot and doing the fangirl gush instead of sitting at the desk and writing a story).
What is the value in talking about what other people write? What value the conversation? What's valuable, and what's a waste of time? I'll hazard my opinion that there's a risk of frittering your energy away if it's misdirected, and I think arguing with people on the internet is usually misdirected. However, meeting people on the internet, meeting and talking with other writers, looking at their websites, reading their blogs, reading their work and corresponding with them about it, seems to have value to me. There's the networking, of course. If you don't dive into the conversation, you'll miss out knowing about that anthology where the editor is only taking submissions from people she knows. You'll miss knowing about someone's reading, and miss out becoming a face, or even a friend, to another writer instead of a name and a profile photo. Maybe most importantly, you'll miss the opportunity to jump into the pool of influence, and figure out how to contribute to the conversation and "the conversation," i.e., the body of work being produced right now, in a way that's meaningful to you and others.
I don't want to talk about writing for an audience versus writing for yourself. I do want to talk about "the conversation" and how it fills you up with things that sit in your brain for however long, mix with the catalyst that is you, and gets spit out as story. I guess there are people who don't read who try to become writers, and maybe some of them are successful; I don't really know. What I see, however, are my favorite writers reading and talking about their favorite writers. I see my favorite filmmakers watching and talking about their favorite filmmakers. Here's Guillermo del Toro talking about his "top 10" favorite Criterion films. If you look at the films he picks, and you've seen his films, you can pick out his influences. I suppose this is what just about any film study class is about, so I'm not breaking any new ground about the importance of immersing yourself in the conversation in which you'd like to participate. What I'm suggesting is that although you can most certainly waste a lot of time and gain absolutely nothing from participating in certain kinds of conversations online about writing, with a little bit of work, you can still tease out bits of the "conversation." All it takes is understanding where the people hang out and have helpful conversations and hang out there, and, conversely, to discern which places and conversations to skip. I've developed my own methods for figuring out what to skip to save my time, and my sanity, and it's not the same for everyone.
In the field of "speculative fiction," there's time-wasting conversations and "conversations" going on all over the place; all you need do is put out your electronic butterfly net and see what you catch. These conversations happen at writing conventions, writer's workshops, creative writing programs, and in-person and online writer's groups. Writers are congregating in social networking environments like Facebook, public and private forums, Twitter, and others. I have to admit that I don't have the savvy right now to understand how to participate in any conversation on Twitter; right now I just use it to post links to my blog posts, but I'm starting to understand how it works a little. It's a bit like spinning the dial on a radio station, or surfing satellite TV channels. Something catches your eye/ear and you tune in, wait to see if there's value, and make your decision whether to stay or move on. There's the risks of drowning in the information, risk of getting pissed off and wasting time arguing instead of moving on, and I don't have any advice on how best to separate the wheat from the chaff, other than to suggest that you don't forget who's holding the remote control. You are. It's up to you to prospect for the programming that helps you tune into the "conversation," and it's up to you to change the channel or turn off the TV altogether if all you're finding that day is "reality TV" shows about people eating gross things, or sitting around in a house pissing each other off. My apology to anyone for whom this is the "conversation." It's not my conversation, any its primary value to me is to provide a target for satire, but to each his own.
You control the horizontal. You control the vertical.
My task, right now, is to figure out how to take part in the conversation that's happening in the fiction stacked in my favorite corners of the bookstore. From what I can tell, even the "literary" fictioneers are convening online now. Internet conversation isn't just for science fiction and paranormal romance writers any more. The genres are still setting up silos, but they seem to be more permeable these days than they used to be. Right now, I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm not sure what I'm writing. I do know that I'm exploring the channels, looking for what I like, tracing influences, and writing about what is meaningful to me. I'm using this blog as a repository for my adventure notes. To abuse a well-established metaphor, this blog is my compost heap. I throw everything in here and let it softly rot.
At some point, I will open the hatch and rake out the black gold.
It's one of those days where most of my thoughts are repetitive and boring, and thus mostly going into my paper journal, where no one except me will be bored to death by them. One of my primary obsessions is pondering my writing life: most specifically, how to prioritize my day to day activities. How to make choices. How to ask for help or support. How to take responsibility. How to share responsibility. How not to take anything or anyone for granted. How to trust, when someone offers to help you, that it will be there when you need it, and won't vanish suddenly when no longer convenient, sending you plummeting to the earth when you were promised a net.
I've spent some time pondering what inspires my faith and trust, and I think I've zeroed in on integrity. To me, integrity is not about keeping all of your promises, or never making mistakes. It's not about being perfect. I'm certainly not perfect, and I make mistakes all the time, and sometimes I make commitments that I have to renegotiate when I get new information. I don't expect people to be more reliable than I am. How do I claim to be reliable if I don't keep all my promises, sometimes make mistakes, and sometimes change a commitment? I think it's because I have a system for decision-making that I wear like a sign on my back. Or maybe like my heart on my sleeve. It isn't perfect, because I'm not perfect, but I can hand you a written Operational Manual that details my principles, my values, my beliefs, and I think by reading it, you could make the decision for yourself whether you'd want to be my friend, or trust me to look after your kids, or want me to be your partner.
Let me repeat that I'm not perfect at it, but it's important to me to live according to this Operating Manual. It's a living document, so doing so is pretty tricky on the fly sometimes. But if you've read it through a couple of times, and seen how I make decisions on stuff that isn't in the Manual, you can eventually discern a method to my madness, and I become predictable. I am repelled by spiders, but I consider it part of my parental duties to teach children to cope with spiders (or scorpions, which was the case in Texas). It might easier to deal with the spider myself, and my kid might think I'm a hero, at least hate me less for not forcing him or her to cope with the spider, but I think it's important to teach a child how to cope when there's nobody else available for spider removal duty. I'm not married to a method; at times I've gently relocated the spider, and at other times, I've heartlessly vacuumed up the little bugger and let him croak somewhere in the innards of the vacuum, but the method doesn't always matter. What matters is the lesson for the child. You can take care of yourself. You can be strong and brave and take care of things yourself, even if it's really difficult.
Fear seems to be the place where integrity is tested, for most people. Where I find it difficult to trust someone is if they hand you their Operating Manual, which says they make decisions based on certain ideals, but the actual choices are all over the place, because when fear crops up, the ideals go out the window, and fear gets into the driver's seat. Yes, I believe in teaching a child everything he needs to know in order to be a self-propelled, capable adult. Except, uh oh. She's angry at me, and if I press on this, she might hate me, then we won't be able to have a peaceful day at the water park. So, USUALLY I think it's important to teach, but only if I don't need to risk losing anything. I'll squish the spider this time, and maybe next time, and at some point, when it's not so risky, I'll teach THEN. Only, you already have taught a certain lesson by then, and it wasn't the one you intended. You've said, hey, kid, teaching you integrity is less important than having fun at a water park.
So, I don't mean to define integrity for anybody else, only to explain what it means to me, and to explain why it's tough for me to trust people if they don't show it. The really funny thing is that I can trust somebody who's cowardly, or deceitful, or self-righteous, or whatever. It all depends on the amount of up-front disclosure and what I'm trusting that person WITH. It has everything to do with the information I have, and the benefit:risk scenario. Everybody has character flaws, but that doesn't mean you can't trust them with anything. Maybe someone shades the truth because they're worried about maintaining a certain image. I might not make decisions based on that person's reliability in a social situation, but I might be perfectly willing to let him cook me dinner, or help me with household chores. But if that person can't tell the difference between sugar and rat poison, and incidentally keeps both in the same cupboard, I'm probably not going to eat any cake he might bake. For me, this issue wouldn't preclude having a relationship, it just wouldn't include taking turns baking a cake.
There's a spectrum of trust I put people on, based on what I know about them, and what I know about their capabilities and their integrity. It's a sliding scale, and people travel up and down the scale. Based on my own Operating Manual, I will never sentence a person who slides all the way to the far end of the trust scale to death. No death penalty for me, thanks. No matter how many mistakes you make, according to my Manual, you are always a human being, and it's never too late the make an improvement. But if you slide too far down the scale, I won't ask you over for tea, either. If you're an unrepentant, un-rehabilitated murderer, I won't ask you to my birthday party, to break the pinata with the kids. I might not invite you to my birthday even if you have been rehabilitated. It would depend on what you did. If you have broken a promise to me for a certain kind of support, or promised a certain kind of support, but don't show an intention or the capacity to follow through, I will probably stop asking you for it. I might still invite you my birthday party, and might still be close friends with you and tell you my secrets, rely on you for emotional support. But I might not trust you to help me pay my bills.
I guess what this means is that you start out somewhere on the scale, say, "friend" and you can move up the scale to "lover" or down the scale to "acquaintance," or you can stay in the same spot on the scale, and just lose the opportunity to bake a cake and expect me to eat it. You start with a certain amount of trust in the emotional bank account (thanks, Stephen Covey) and you slide along the scale based on how many deposits and withdrawals you make. Because it's in my Operating Manual, there's no way to cheat this system. You start with a certain amount of trust, and that's all you get. You don't start with more, or with less. If you teach me your Operating Manual, and you live according to it, you can move up the scale. If you tell me your Operating Manual, and you don't live according to it, or you don't have one to begin with, you might slide down the scale, and/or get stuck somewhere along the scale you prefer not to be. Once you've slid down the scale, how much "trust on credit" you get depends on how expensive the withdrawals have been. I'm open to reestablishing credit once you're overdrawn, but sometimes it takes longer than you have the patience for, and that's just the way things are.
I used to think it was loving to give unlimited credit, but I've come to realize that unlimited credit (in involvement, not in compassion), like unlimited funds, tends to have a negative impact on everybody involved. Eventually, words are no longer worth anything, and you can pour them in an endless stream into the emotional bank account, and nothing at all happens to move the marker on the sliding scale.
In my world, to have integrity is to do what you say you're going to do (if you're not a brave/honest/thrifty/reverent person, don't promise to be one!) apologize when you don't do what you say you're going to do, and accept that if you violate what it says in your Operating Manual, or what you told me it says doesn't match what you do, it might take a while to settle the overdrawn account. You may need to accept that settling an overdrawn account is an aggravating process, and you have a choice whether or not to keep expecting someone to eat that poisonous cake you keep baking. You may need to accept that they just won't eat it, no matter how many times you promise you have thrown away the rat poison. You may need to accept that if you want to treat them to something, you may need to take them out to a bakery instead.
Settling accounts, building integrity, and establishing or reestablishing trust takes courage, will, tenacity, and faith.
Current health plan: no smoking (don't anyway); no drinking (hard liquor is touch and go, the wine has to wait, and NEVER any malt beverage); 1300 calories per day (nothing spicy, limit flour-based and acidic products); no chocolate (I sometimes cheat, and pay dearly); and no caffeine. Not decaf. No caf. Alternate stimulants also not okay. Care to be taken with herbals, many of which are acidic. This means no coffee, no decaf coffee, no actual tea of any sort, black, green, decaf, yerba mate, or many herbal teas. And me, surrounded by tea paraphernalia. What is a lover of infusions to do?
Rooibos (or rooibush) and honeybush are my salvation. Otherwise, it would be me and Evian, getting married. (Diet even says I shouldn't have bubbly water. Stupid diet.) So, here's my current array of things I can drink, and my favorite online tea source is Tea Gschwendner because SpecialTeas was purchased by Teavana, and most of their rooibos mixes have too much stuff in them. so, here's what's in the teapot now:
1. Rooibush Cream Caramel: contains rooibush tea, creamy caramel bits, and "natural flavor." I'm a bit suspicious of the "natural flavor" but I seem to be able to drink this, and it really does taste creamy even though I add no cream. This brews up a nice chestnut brown liquor and just gets better the longer I leave the bag in. It's also nice cold, which is good because I don't have teapot cozies and the tea gets colder faster than I can drink it.
2. Rooibush Vanilla: contains rooibush tea, natural flavor, and vanilla pieces. Before my strict diet, it was common to brew this is the evening and add a little ginger liqueur (a companion's genius concoction) for a hot toddy. Now, I just drink it hot and enjoy the mellow woody vanilla flavor.
3. HoneyPie(tm): description says "all the aura of the original Honey bush tea plucked from the wild." Brew a whopping 10 minutes. You can't brew black tea that long or it will burn a hole through your stomach to the center of the earth, but this is the bark of some African shrub and needs a good hot soak. Honeybush is different from rooibos. It has a different woody taste, maybe more cedar-like. It's nice to have the variety.
4. Smooth Strawberry Dream(tm): description says "discover new depths of sweetness. Caramel and strawberry swirl effortlessly with South African Honeybush for a guilt and caffeine free dessert blend. Ingredients: Honey busy tea, pieces of caramel, natural flavor, strawberry bits and leaves. At this point, I'm just going to have to confess that I have a sweet tooth for beverages. I will drink a "dessert tea" with any meal, at any time of day.
And so my diet changes. It's always been nonstandard anyway, so changes aren't necessarily a killer. I never really got into breakfast food, though I do sometimes like a nice breakfast on a special occasion like vacation, or Christmas. Otherwise, I've been known to have a salad for breakfast, or cold pizza, or reheated Chinese food. I know I'm supposed to like sweet bready things for breakfast, but I don't. I know I'm "supposed" to like dry red wine, and drink only dry white wine, because those are the "good" wines, but I only briefly bought it, and don't buy in any more. The driest red I like is a Pinot Noir, and you know that's hardly a dry wine, though it's technically not sweet. I don't care for any kind of dry white. When I toured the Beringer Vineyard in Napa, I was the only one who raised my hand when the crowd was asked who liked white Zinfandel, and everybody looked at me up and down as if to place me solidly in the Big Mac crowd, which makes me laugh, because I may like cheap 4-dollar sweet white wine, but that doesn't mean I'm not a foodie. My favorite red wine is Banfi's "Rosa Regale" and my favorites wines are pretty much all of the sweet German varietals. I do like the Golden Arches, sometimes. I've also been to Morimoto in Manhattan.
I'm glad I'm an omnivore. If my dietary preferences were narrow, a restricted eating plan would quickly get boring, and I'd lose part of life's joy. Instead of mourning the loss of coffee, tea, and chocolate, I'm looking for creative blends of what I can have, and embracing the beauty that is caramel. Come on; who doesn't love caramel? You have panna cotta, creme brulee, toffee, etc. on and on. I'm a little sad once in a while, but I don't stay sad for long. There's enough stuff out there that's tasty to make up for what's off the menu now.
Tonight's meal will be Tibetan momo, and I'm saving up the calories for a bit of a binge, because I love dumplings, and momo is my current favorite dumpling that I can get locally. So crispy! So very savory! Ah, but a post on dumplings another time.
Here's one of those days where the blank page is your enemy, and you're a day behind already.
I think it was the Very Productive Weekend that drained the sap out of me. I was manic for a whole weekend, and then there was the crash. It had something to do with the shattering of that peace. I was productive for two days, like a tidying whirlwind, in the quiet, cooperative house, and I went to bed two hours early, with everything buttoned up and beautiful. Then the house filled up again, and life happened again. Gone, the reprieve.
Now, the garden is full of leaves and I've been sick, and I'm too chilled to go out and pull the leaves out so the sun can reach the soil. It's late March, and it's still snowing intermittently. Every time I see flakes, I feel betrayed. One day I walked home from the train in the snow, and I went directly into the bathtub and tried to get warm again. A woman at work poked gentle fun at me for sitting at my desk wearing my knit cap. I feel bad that I couldn't be cheerful for her, that I couldn't just tell her I wore the cap to be jaunty. Instead, I was honest. I told her I was sick. Not feeling so well, sorry. She slunk out of the office quickly, after her questions were not answered in the spirit in which they were offered. No, I didn't still have a chest cold. No, I didn't have mono. The viral thing had aggravated some other health problems, and I left it there.
I feel the itch of fiction, but I am not moved to write, yet. My mind is not yet convinced that it's allowed to run free and use the time as it will. It has grown rusty with disuse, and can only spew journal entries, blog entries, nattering on about this or that I've been occupying myself with. Listening to music, hanging pictures, repairing a bookshelf, and alphabetizing the mass market paperbacks. I once had ninety boxes of books, and now I have half as many, bags, boxes, and armfuls left here, there, and everywhere. I was leaving them on the train until chastised by some leaflet from the train company not to abandon my items. I was leaving them in boxes out on the street, leaving boxes at the library for the book sale table, leaving them at work at the book exchange. Everywhere I go, leaving a trail of unwanted books.
I think I'm doing that old-person thing of getting rid of the clutter. Most of the older people I know hit some sort of moment, where they look around and think, "Oh, shit. Why do I have all this stuff? What's the point of having all this stuff? My time is limited, and when people come to drag my body to the curb, they're going to find all this random stuff, and that's just not ok!" I don't know. Maybe I'm full of it, and it's just a yearning for simplicity that can hit you at any age. Or maybe it's the OCD and I'm shaping some defenses to make it somehow ok. I am getting rid of things that I don't want, but I'm also buying new things, so it's not really the urge for simplicity as much as the urge for perfection, or the urge to surround myself with only the things I will use. Goodbye books I will never read again. Books I will someday read again, you may stay.
Maybe my mortality is at war with my hedonistic celebration of life and beauty. On my dresser, to the right, I have a selection of perfumes and lotions. And if there's a less useful item in my house than perfume, I don't know what it is. I spray it on in the morning, no one really smells it, and then I wash it off. What's the point? But I keep it, because it gives me pleasure. I'm slowly replacing my sturdy black stoneware plates with fancy pieces of china from a junk shop in town. Four dollars, I paid for a bread plate with pansies and a frilly gold edge. For my oldest sister's wedding, she had her reception in someone's front yard, and the tables were set with mismatched china, because the man of the house was a china salesman and the kitchen shelves were full of samples. I've never forgotten how beautiful that was, to see the long reception tables set with all that mismatched china. It was the most decadent inexpensive wedding reception I'd ever seen. I'll bet other people have paid thousands of dollars and not had a reception so gorgeous, set with fifty different china patterns all competing for most lovely. I've gotten rid of kitchen gadgets I don't use, but I drink out of a Russian style teacup, solid robin's egg blue on the outside, white with gold filigree on the inside.
On my dresser, to the left, I have a selection of vitamin supplements. Lysine, glucosamine, acidophilus, vitamin D, evening primrose oil. Soon to be followed by another three supplements, meant to boost the immune system, clear the body of crap. Until a few years ago, I never had much in the medicine cabinet. Something for headache. Something for upset stomach, cold formula of some sort, and a mercury thermometer. Now the house is a hospital, and I've counted no fewer than five mercury thermometers, two digital, one for the mouth and one for the ear. There's a pill for every ache and pain, and a supplement for every shortage of natural vitamin or mineral. There's tea tree oil for the bath. There's a stack of CDs and books by the door, more things to get rid of in honor of my mortality, and yet I will shop again at the junk shop and bring home another lovely tea cup and saucer, another lovely plate until all the boring black plates are obsolete.
Part of me is simplifying, and part of me is luxuriating. You don't need so many plates, but let the plates you have be gorgeous. You don't need so many books any more, but let those you have burn brightly. Let them be the ones that made you sigh in the night and shiver with recognition. Let the music be that which makes you cry, and set out the stuff that never caught on down to the curb for someone else. Let nothing in your life be ordinary; do not let the ordinary accumulate. Use cheap shampoo and expensive perfume, cheap toilet paper and expensive draperies. Choose special when it matters. Choose cheap when it doesn't.
Let simplicity honor your mortality, let decadence honor your life.
Whenever I start gearing up to write again, I read short stories. That's what I write, other than poetry. I write short stories.
This is a strange thing, that this is what I write, because I find short stories difficult to read. Not all short stories are difficult to read, but many are. Maybe not difficult for everybody, but difficult for me. There's a density about short stories that is not typical for novels (and novels that have the density of short stories are really hard for me to read).
Maybe I've told this story on this blog already, but if so, it was a long time ago, and I don't feel bad about repeating myself. When I first started to write, I started with novels, because that's what I read. I wrote novels in longhand in spiral notebooks, and I wrote a lot of them. When my father bought me a typewriter, I started typing the stories. And when he started bringing home portable computers from work (some of them were beastly big), I started storing my work on floppy disks. I rarely finished any of these novels that I started. They rarely ever went anywhere that would allow for a sensible ending, so if anything, I'd just end a chapter, call it the end of the book, and commence writing the sequel, in a sprawling, never-ending space opera. That's what most of the novels were, when I was twelve. Space opera.
I'm not sure when I read my first short story, and I'm not sure when I wrote my first. I do know that the first thing I ever sold was a short story, and it made a pretty big splash for a little fish like me. There was an award, and a trip of Los Angeles, and shaking John Travolta's hand on the roof of the Scientology Celebrity Center. I didn't join up, if you're wondering. I became a Unitarian instead, years and years later. On that trip, I suffered from a strange malady that caused me quite a bit of pain at the time, but I now know isn't unique to me. I was writing so many short stories by then, I suddenly lost the ability to read. Not just short stories. I lost the ability to read anything at all, for about two years. It was among the hardest two years of my life.
When I was a kid, I wasn't the most diligent or rule-abiding kid in the world. I was smart enough to get good grades without trying very hard, so I didn't pay much attention to school. What I lived for was reading. My birthday is the 3rd of December, and we always used to go to the same house for Thanksgiving, at my dad's friend's house (the one with the winery in the basement and the roses out back that the deer used to eat). When we went there for Thanksgiving, my auntie always gave me my birthday present, because why not? My birthday was always just around the corner anyway. She didn't give me kid's books; she gave me big, fat Stephen King books. So, I'm going to guess that my first short stories that I didn't have to read for school were Stephen King collections. Now, I don't recall back then being able to read a short story collection all the way through. I remember, even way back then, while I still read books like most people breathe, that I needed a break after a couple of short stories. I guess it's sort of like needing a break from eating something really rich, sort of the same reason why dishes at very fancy restaurants are so small. After a few bites, your palate is tired from all the fireworks, and it's time for a different taste of something else.
I did eventually regain my ability to read. It was an embarrassing time to lose the ability to read, when my first short story was out in a collection that had something like twenty-five other contributors, and everybody spending time between workshops just eating the collection up and talking to each other about the stories. I couldn't join in, because I couldn't read any of them. I tried, oh, good lord, I tried. My story took a second prize, so it's not like I was the best writer in the world and thought every other story stank compared to mine. That's not it at all. After I regained my ability to read, I went back and read the collection cover to cover, and there are some good stories in there. The first prize winners deserved their awards. Everybody deserved their awards, I think. But there was something about the density of the stories suffering under my analysis engine that kept me from being able to read the stories and make any sense of them.
The analysis engine can't follow a story for fun. It's too busy crunching data to appreciate what the data collaborate to create. It's too busy looking at sentence and paragraph structure. It's too busy making its own connections from one word and concept to another. It's too busy playing games, and tasting consonants, looking for poetry, replacing words with more precise words it likes better. It's too busy critiquing, sifting, trying to figure out what words to take out to make an image SNAP. It's too busy to let the story in. This is why I never lost the ability to listen to music or watch a film. I haven't the foggiest idea how to analyze either thing. There are songs and films I like, and there are songs and films I don't. I never, ever stop hearing a song and busy myself figuring out how it could be perfected. I just say, "Well, that's not my favorite," and I move on to something else. There is nothing there for me to get a grip on. But a short story, yes, I sort of know how sentences go together, and I sort of know how a character is developed. I forgot how to read a good story, because the engine was busy comparing every story to the Platonic ideal of a short story, and poking at its cracks. It was trying to analyze why each story wasn't Marquez's "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," or Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," or Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper."
I'm not sure the analysis engine is my friend when it comes to reading or writing. It makes me a slow reader, and sometimes I can't get into a story the way I used to, where I'd spend nine hours reading until I got a headache because I couldn't put the book down until I found out whether or not Jack Sawyer saved his mother's life in The Talisman. Sometimes someone will try to show me something out of book they're reading, or show me an article online, and they have to go somewhere and cut their nails while I take fifteen minutes to read something they can skim in two. The analysis engine reads every word. It does not skip words. It does not skip letters in words, filling things in the way the brain can and does. It does not skip around in a paragraph to find "the point." It reads every word, every sentence, every paragraph, and tries to figure out how it goes together like a puzzle or a long calculus problem. The analysis engine makes me a very, very slow writer. Instead of novels, which scare me, I write poems, short stories, creeping up on the novel by writing longer and longer short stories that I can't sell, because the length doesn't fit anyone's guidelines. The analysis engine is annoying, and has caused me a lot of grief, but sometimes, very rarely, it does its job.
I will get a sudden picture in my head of a story, broken into thousand word acts. The engine scribbles this structure down on a piece of printer paper, dividing concepts into neat packages that, strung together, make a story. It sits my butt down in the chair and moves my fingers across the keyboard. I'm not there any more when the engine is in charge. I'm a channel and the engine is pushing material through the channel. It's spitting out its connections, its word associations, its structures, its idea of men with wings, sacrificial lambs, yellow wallpaper. Occasionally, the tumblers click and the lock opens, and the engine turns on and gets going. It builds something.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have it. I wish I could just sit down and hammer down some random crap and polish it into a story, the way other people can do. Sit down whether you feel like it or not, spew out something, hammer and reshape it into some kind of order, and make a story. That looks like real work to me. What I do doesn't look like real work to me. I sit and listen to music, and doodle, and read, and natter in my journal, and cut the dog's toenails, and take notes, and watch movies, and work in the garden, and drink tea, and let the engine do its slow, frustrating thing on its own time.
I have not figured out how to harness the engine to the plow and make it pull for me.
All I know how to do is wait to for it to call me, and then let it drag me somewhere.
This is it; the last installment of the Murder Ballads series. I've been procrastinating because each installment has been difficult to write, because in some ways, music confounds me. I love poetry. I love song lyrics. But as soon as you add music, it's like adding photography to a story to make a film. I understand words and how they work, but there is something simply magical about music and film that I don't understand. People who can compose or write a film that doesn't look like wooden dolls spouting unnatural, monotone, non-fiction-like dialogue are mystifying to me. I love film, but I don't have a clue how to tell a story with images (though I've been told I often write cinematically - I don't understand what that means, altogether). I love music, and I love to sing, but I don't know how a composer changes key signatures, or makes a bridge, or creates any of the musical stuff that I can tell is very special, but can't understand. So, when I analyze a song, I'm focused on the lyrics, but there's also rhythm, and tone, and instrument choice, and all of that stuff that I don't know how to describe with smart and appropriate musical terms. Each of my descriptions ends up being a little stroll into the wilderness of "I don't know if it's good, I just know what I like." Here are four last attempts to understand violence, death, murder, through poetry and the magic of music.
Series lead-in:
Let me preface by saying that Nick Cave has an entire album called Murder Ballads, and three songs on my list come from that album, but that this playlist includes songs I consider murder ballads, because they meet my own criteria. If you have a song I should add to the list, please tell me the title. Please also note that I find the song "Strange Fruit" as abhorrent and fascinating as any number of films that depict the tragedy of racial atrocities.
Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.
1. Mr. Eddy's Theme 1 - Lost Highway Soundtrack 2. County Death Song - Violent Femmes 3. Song of Joy - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 4. Johnny - Violent Femmes 5. Strange Fruit - Siouxsie & the Banshees (most famously sung by Billie Holiday) 6. Sycamore Trees - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Soundtrack 7. Red Right Hand - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 8. 1963 ('94 version) - New Order 9. Shankill Butchers - The Decemberists 10. Ted, Just Admit It - Jane's Addiction 11. The Mariner's Revenge Song - The Decemberists 12. John Wayne Gacy Jr. - Sufjan Stevens 13. The Curse of Millhaven - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 14. Where the Wild Roses Grow - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 15. Mr. Eddy's Theme 2 - Lost Highway Soundtrack 16. The Rake's Song - The Decemberists 17. Sniper - Harry Chapin
14. Where the Wild Roses Grow. Only one other song on this playlist has more than one singer; that was the Mariner's Revenge Song, and the female voice only comes in for the chorus, to lend pathos to the story of the vengeful widow. The story isn't about her; it's about her son, who has dedicated his life to avenging her death. The song Where the Wild Roses Grow is a duet between a man and a woman (the sultry female part sung by Kylie Minogue - and I wonder what she thought of Nick Cave after they were done recording - I like to think she maybe had a weird crush on him that she didn't quite understand, that made her shiver in the car on the way home), and their stories are parallel; each story is complete. Together, they sing a black love song about a woman's seduction and murder. The man sings, "From the first day I saw her I knew she was the one/As she stared in my eyes and smiled/For her lips were the colour of the roses/They grew down the river, all bloody and wild." The song is in ballad form, and is told in three parts, much like a fairy tale, where things tend to come in threes (three wishes, three wise men, three little pigs-perhaps not all technically fairy tales, so my apologies). I'm left wondering if the story is just a ballad about a romantic serial killer obsessed with roses, or if it's also an allegory about the inevitability of beauty's decay. "On the last day I took her where the wild roses grow/And she lay on the bank, the wind light as a thief/As I kissed her goodbye, I said, 'All beauty must die'. And bent down and planted a rose between her teeth."
15. Mr Eddy's Theme 2. Mr. Eddy is back, with a sudden entrance, sudden blasts of horns against a backdrop of tinging cymbals. Then a sneaky, snaking bass clarinet theme that sounds sly, dangerous, seductive. No lyrics, no introductory dialogue. Just dark, blaring horns, and some sort of electronic flutter of increasing pitch and rhythm that flaps behind like a moth caught in the strings of a violin. It's a scary, startling song, a skin-crawling kind of song. A song that promises more violence and murder, more danger of being forced to the side of the road by a car, pistol whipped and kicked, and threatened for some minor offense. It's that feeling, of watching that film where something bad happens to some ignorant but hapless person, and they just aren't smart enough to extricate themselves from a situation that goes from bad to unbelievably bad. A situation that any person with a half a brain would recognize and run away from, and never look back.
16. The Rake's Song. This is one of my favorite songs on the list, and the only song I've seen performed live, twice. The first time was at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston, when the Decemberists were on the mind-bendingly brilliant concept tour called The Hazards of Love. The second time was at a smaller venue, the House of Blues, also in Boston. This time, I stood about eight feet away from Colin Meloy-so close I could see him spit while he sang something particularly ferociously. This song has two things going for it: a fiercely charming and unapologetic anti-hero, and a violent, heart-thumping, tom-tom drum beat that gets into your bones and stays there. The titular rake recounts the story of how he made the fatal mistake of marrying young, succumbing to marital lust, happy "until her womb started spilling out babies," the last of which killed her and died, itself, on delivery. He describes the children, in turn, and then asks a chilling rhetorical question about the remaining three, "What can one do when one is a widower/Shamefully saddled with three little pests?/All that I wanted was the freedom of a new life/So my burden I began to divest." Wasn't his fault, you see, that his carnal desires had such an inconvenient outcome. Dead wife. Three brats. Time to take care of the "burden". And just as he'd introduced the children one by one, he murders the children one by one; one poisoned, one drowned in the bath, one who fought back, but was eventually beaten to death and burned "for incurring [his] wrath." This song, like many of the others, is actually kind of darkly funny. What makes it funny? The Country Death Song is not funny at all; not one little bit. It's the despair and self-hatred that strikes a chord in your heart, listening to the Country Death Song. But the rake's story is different. He says, "That's how I came your humble narrator/To be living so easy and free/Expect that you think that I should be haunted/But it never really bothers me." Total disregard. Total dehumanization. Not children, "the burden." The oblivious, careless self-righteousness is so outlandish that it's actually funny.
17. Sniper. I actually had to go back into this post and remember to write something about this song. I did mention that I'm not sure it'll stay on the list, although it does certainly qualify. This song is based on Charles Whitman, who climbed a tower in 1966 at the University of Texas and shot several people before being killed by a SWAT team. The song alternates between descriptions of the sniper and his victims ("One got Mrs. Gibbons above her right eye. It blew her through the window wedged her against the door. Reality poured from her face, staining the floor"), second-hand accounts of the killer's personality, including opinions from his own mother ("He was kind of creepy, Sort of a dunce. I met him at the corner bar. I only dated the poor boy once." "He was such a moody child, very hard to touch. Even as a baby he never smiled too much. No, no. No, no."), and the killer's philosophical pondering on the reality of his own existence. Turns out that's why he's up in the tower. The bullets he shoots from the tower are his questions about his existence that he poses to thirty-seven people. (If I'm alive then there's so much I've missed. How do I know I exist? Are you listening to me? Are you listening to me?" and the answers are the bullets that are return-fired ("Just about then the answers started coming. Sweet, sweet joy. Thudding in the clock face, whining off the walls, Reaching up to where he sat, their answering calls.")
The killer doubted his own existence in part because his sense of self was erased by his mother. "You bug me, she said. You're ugly, she said. Please hug me, I said. But she just sat there With the same flat stare That she saves for me alone." He might have been a child who was hard to love, and the mother may not have been up to the task. A self-perpetuating, downward spiral of devaluation, where the unlovable child is rejected, and then becomes less lovable while needing love even more. How do you break a cycle like that? How do you find enough compassion in your heart to love the unlovable, because it seems that fake love won't do; it needs to be real, to prevent tragedy, to save lives, or even one life. The killer is overjoyed when the bullets rain down on him, because they tell him he DOES exist. He does matter. "Mama, won't you nurse me? Rain me down the sweet milk of your kindness." But the answer was no, and so he's happy to have an alternate source of acknowledgement: "They're coming to get me, they don't want to let me Stay in the bright light too long. It's getting on noon now, it's going to be soon now. But oh, what a wonderful sound!" And because the attention tells him he's alive, the killer is happy to die. Oh, how horrible. Oh, how tragic. Oh, how terribly human. Maybe I have doubts about keeping this song on the list because it's the one that scares me the most. The song that so horribly illustrates the possible consequences of inadequate nurture of the young.
Catharsis. I've been to dozens of concerts now, and I tend to like musicians who have at least one of these dark little nuggets of gloom in their playlists. And fans want to hear these songs. When John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats plays a show, fans yell over and over again for the song called, "No Children," where he sings about the love and disgust and frustration and passionate hatred he feels for a once beloved spouse: "I hope when you think of me years down the line/You can't find one good thing to say/And I'd hope that if I found the strength to walk out/You'd stay the hell out of my way/I am drowning/There is no sign of land/You are coming down with me/Hand in unlovable hand/And I hope you die/I hope we both die." And the crowds screams in recognition of this hatred people feel when they've been heartbroken, when they've been betrayed, and abandoned. When they've been weighed down by unexpected responsibility. When life has just evaporated in a moment of careless passion. When they slam into the wall of consequences, and despair. When they sin, and need to know that everyone sins. That the worst sinner is still a human being, a complex creation that although capable of great evil, is also capable of profound compassion and beauty.
Today is not the day I hang the curtains, so the dog has a little bit more time to bask in the sun. I have to say that my dog has more to do than many other dogs of my acquaintance. You see him here having a much-deserved break after spending the entire day yesterday warning me of strange sounds and supervising the art project and the chores. Wherever I go, so must he go. If I go down the basement to do laundry, he must go down there too. If I go back upstairs to hang more art, so must he go. If I call downstairs to my daughter, he must also call down the stairs. He is a busy little guy, and when he flops down in a sunbeam, boy, he deserves the rest. I did purchase curtain tie backs so that basking in the sun will not be completely impossible. But as we live on the third floor, it will not be wise for me to let the midday sun into my bedroom, just so he can bask. Also pictured is the drapery ensemble I spend two-and-a-half hours assembling at BB&B (also known as Big Bucks and Bankruptcy). It's my fault, that last thing (and no, I did not go into debt--paid cash). But I did buy into the whole "double drapery rods are good for layering" concept, which means I did not just buy one rod, some hardware, and a few panels. I purchased a double rod, fancy finials, drapery rings, four energy efficient panels (two in cream, two in deep claret), five sheer panels (three in gold, two in cream), and two sheers embroidered with flowers and vines for a scarf style "top treatment". I won't open the last things right away, because I might not want that many layers, after getting up the solid panels and the sheers. I also purchase two super swanky drapery tie-back with crystals and tassels, and two bath towel hooks to loop them on. I preferred the bath towel hooks to the little tie-back hooks because they are both prettier, and sturdier for the extra heavy insulated panels. I'm looking forward to getting the drapes up so the room will be finished, but also so I can put away the power tools.
Weeks ago, I also purchased a curved shower curtain rod, which I have not yet installed, because my tub is not the standard size. It's short. So, I need to cut a couple of inches from each end of the curved rod so it will fit the tub. Yesterday, I did go purchase my first cloth shower curtain, because I'm sick and tired of buying the plastic ones, which end up mildewing, no matter how well you let them dry after a shower, and I think that's unpleasant. I purchased a color that will not suffer from bleaching, and I'm hoping the curtain will last a good long time. I also need a cupboard to go over the toilet, because the bathroom is tiny and storage is at a premium. The medicine chest is about fifty years old and is about an inch deep. We end up balancing all of our routine products on the toothbrush holder, the soap holder, and the toilet tank, because there is no vanity. Just a little pedestal sink. It was probably pretty luxurious when it was first put in, but now everything seems very little compared to the kind of fixtures you find in modern bathrooms.
Did I say this was another post about art? Somehow, it became a post on home improvement.
The art portion of this post, which is where I intended to go all along, will happen when I cruise through my Aperture archives to find two photographs to send to Ritz camera for 8 x 10 prints. I have two empty picture frames left after the orgy of hanging yesterday, and I'd like to pick something I've photographed myself. It's a little strange that I have five thousands pictures in my Aperture archive, and none of my own work in my gallery. It's probably gotten to the point where it's just too hard to make the selection. It's just too much work. But what does that say for my three cameras, three tripods, and all of these cables and digital gizmos everywhere? If I'm never going to print and hang any of my shots, then what's the bloody point? Just posting them on my blog? I suppose that's important. Blog entries are more interesting when they're illustrated, but I think I've been experiencing some weird feelings keeping me from making the effort to frame and display my own work. I have a lot of lovely art on my walls. Am I sure anything I've shot is really good enough to be framed and hung next to those pieces?
Here is the short list, two from Carmel and one from Martha's Vineyard. I will print all of these and then see which ones look best framed.
