Let Me Harden Myself With Ten Thousand Hours Of Labor

And finally, done! Every issue of Swill must pay obeisance to the Insect God.

And once again, a comment on someone else's blog ran wild, and turned into a post. Catherine Schaff-Stump wrote about that book on expertise that's got everyone all het up, and I figured that if I was going to accuse a pal of serf mentality I shouldn't do it on her turf. I'll do it here, where I'm familiar with the escape routes and can keep a table between us until I get a chance to explain myself.

I should read this book. All I know about it is what I've heard or read in other's discussions. So really, I'm not talking about the book. I'm talking about the reactions to it that I've seen in a number of creators of my acquaintance.

But there are a few things I wonder about. The premise under discussion is that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert in any given skill. I get the impression that what's meant by 'expert' is a world-class, top-grade, unquestionably significant and accomplished talent.

I've seen a common reaction to the ten-thousand hour paradigm. People see it as a sentence. They are crushed, then they nobly lift the burden up and accept it as part of their load.

Because the idea that this is something that must be done also implies that it's something that can be done. It takes a question that seems unfathomable -- how can I achieve greatness? -- and gives a straightforward numerical answer that is just barely on the acceptable side of impossible. Practice for ten thousand hours, and if you still suck, get back to me. We'll work something out.

Don't get me wrong. I am the poster child for compulsive woodshedding, and I think it's paid off. If you want to be good, you need to put the time in. And I think that a cold, sober look at the amount of time that dedicated professionals put in on their work is a damned fine thing.

But there are a few reactions that I've been developing as I've seen the ten-thousand hours join the hundredth fucking monkey and Catch-22 as part of the law of the jungle.

First off, it implies that there is a distinct point at which one says, "Yep. There it is." Ones skill is undeveloped, then ten thousand hours later it's in full bloom.

My favorite band is the Ramones.

By this I do not mean, "Craft counts for nothing." What I mean is, is that lack of expertise is not always a barrier to achievement. I don't think the world would be a better place if Blitzkrieg Bop had an interesting chord progression and some kinda life to the beat. Which is what would have happened if the Ramones had put in their ten thousand hours before they started working.

So that's the first point. Don't think of what you do as practice unless you are doing a deliberate exercise in order to develop some facet of your skill. If you are working on something that means something to you, you are not practicing.

Next is the ten-thousand hour figure itself. Let me tell you something. Practice is not as clear-cut as it seems. Are you doing the same routine every day, or are you challenging yourself? And what counts as practice? Maybe you spend two hours a day writing, but how many hours a day are you spending thinking about your work, or even just consciously using language? When my observational drawing skills are strong, I can draw without drawing -- I look at a branch and count the leaves, that kind of thing.

That gray area in practice, where unavoidable moments in life are turned to the advantage of art, is crucial. Those are the moments when art is not something you make yourself do, or allow yourself to do. Those are the moments when the artistic process is part of your process. When you've fully assimilated your creativity.

When your art is fully part of your life, everything contributes toward it. It becomes impossible to estimate practice time, because it is all practice. It isn't a chore or an effort, because if it is? You won't do it.

When I first heard about the ten thousand hours, it totally rocked my John Henry. I did a little math and felt better about myself.

In other words, I reacted the way Catherine did. Lots of people have reacted this way. One at a time, each is the result of an individual struggling with questions of dedication and achievement. Seen en mass, I find myself reminded of that Maoist-era toe-tapper, Let Me Go To The Mountain, Mother, And Harden Myself With Physical Labor.

I am not criticizing the concept of practice here. But I have noticed not just in myself, but in most of the serious beginning writers I know, a sense of stern duty, of feeling that we must steel ourselves for the rigors to come. Writing these days feels like a polar expedition, where we expect to lose a finger or nose to frostbite in the process of starving to death while surrounded by bears.

This sense of eternally plowing under gray skies (while wearing thick damp pants that chafe) is not an essential element of art. The grim satisfaction of dedication is a useful tool, but I worry that it has grown too important to too many of us.

Here is the secret of the ten thousand hours. You do not get through ten thousand hours of practice through grim dedication. Okay, you can -- but your work will reflect that grim dedication.

If you are one of the people who is actually going to get ten thousand hours of practice in, most of those ten thousand hours will be spent enjoying yourself. Yes, there are tedious practices and chores and so on, but give me a break.

For those of us who like to spend our evenings carving crude pitchforks with which to maintain our dungheaps, this is a bitter pill indeed. When you embrace the labor of art, you embrace the pleasure of that labor -- which is actually play. The moments when you are engaged, when you are loving what you are doing -- those are the moments when you are learning.

Ten thousand hours isn't a sentence or a guarantee. It seems to be an estimate of how much time people have spent doing something they love by the time they get noticed. And a lot of people do good, interesting work long before they clock in those hours. And a lot of people put in more effort than that without advancing. Practice is necessary, but it can only take you as far as you can go.

Bummer, huh? Once again, quantification proves of more apparent than actual use.

Amazon is Amoral and Complicit

This is written in support of Catherine Schaff-Stump. I make this publicly known, because she is making her position publicly known.

Allow me to quote Helen A.S. Popkin from her MSNBC story, "Amazon defends pedophile's guide."

Amazon issued a statement that will no doubt fuel the outraged comments multiplying on the "Pedophile's Guide" Amazon page. "Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable," it reads. "Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions."

In order to keep this within reasonable bounds, I will be discussing my personal experiences with this issue, and not the many other problems I have with Amazon.

When I worked at a book warehouse, we found ourselves faced with a similar situation. I had an opinion, stated it loudly and frequently, and regardless of my influence we would up handling it the way I thought we should.

The book in question was a collection of essays written by priests in support of pedophilia. It had an introduction by William Burroughs, which really bothered me. I use fucking Burroughs as a resource, he's been a tremendously important and influential writer for me, and the man gives every exterior evidence of being ... Well, shit. You know what I mean. This kind of toxic crap.

There was the initial and major outcry from those who, for whatever reason, needed it to be known that unlike most people they opposed child molestation.

Then came the censorship backlash, the idea that by not carrying the book we were somehow doing something worse than child molestation. People would get a funny look on their face when you got them to admit that that was their position, but they usually stuck to it. See the above Amazon statements for their basic position.

Here's what I said.

"If I pick up that book and put it on a cart and take it down to the packing line and send it on its way, then my energy -- my muscles, nerves, and brain -- are acting directly and conclusively on behalf of that book and its message. Censorship is the act of preventing people from creating and distributing work. Refusing to help people who are opposed to your ideas of right and wrong is something different. It's called discrimination. You fucking idiot!"

If you act as a distributor without discriminating, that does not absolve you of responsibility for the effects of the works you put out in public. And it certainly does not absolve you of complicity when your resources bring financial aid to those who act decisively against the best interests of our society.

Neutrality is amorality, and amorality is complicity. Amazon has taken the book down, but that does not lead me to believe that they are any less amoral -- if you poke a dog with a stick until it stops biting you, that doesn't mean you can throw the fucking stick away.

I don't like Amazon. I don't trust Amazon. And I don't think I'll be buying much from them after this. The MacMillan debacle kept me away for quite some time. This might do it for good.

That Really Stupid Essay in the Times

Further refinements and a touch of color. I don't like the black corners; only the streetlamp and lines should be black.

Note the subtly varied color -- I've found that by using layers of transparent gradients, I can get a much more interesting, much less 'dead' result than a straight-up from the box gradient. Bringing life to digital art is the real trick.

I thought I was going to be able to avoid writing about this, but I've been obsessing on it to the point where I've been losing sleep. This is retarded, but this is what it's like to be crazy. How crazy?

Crazy enough to care about the state of intellectual discourse in the US. I mean, you've seen crazy from me before, but not on that scale.

Here's the article I'm addressing.

If you ain't up for it, dude is saying hey, shouldn't we be thinking about how we can eliminate meat-eating? As a behavior? In animals everywhere? Like, just get rid of the carnivores because they're real mean.

I shit thee not.

I tried to imagine that this is some kind of put-on but if it is, this guy puts Andy Kaufman in the fucking shade. I really think he means it. Red wine? Pot? Both of the above, maybe a little medication mixed in? Because these just do not seem like the thoughts of a sober man.

Let's get this straight. I don't think Jeff McMahan is a bad person. And for all I know he's done work that would blow me out of the fucking water. But as I write this, I will abuse him as a fool over and over and over again because this essay is stupid as shit -- which is bad -- and it was published under the rubric of the New York Times. This is fucking nuts. Isn't that the paper of record? Are those guys huffing thinner? What the hell is going on?

Okay. I don't want to spend time on this. I want to spit my bile and move on. Since that's how I'm handling it, my writing is going to be fucking awful, so I won't make a big deal out of how...

Rob once sent out a rejection letter where he accused the person's manuscript of having been 'rat-fucked by academia.' If you're wondering what that means, go read the essay. 'Too stuffed to jump' is another phrase that comes to mind.

Anyway. On to the meat. First off, the core of his position is this statement.

"It is relatively uncontroversial that suffering is intrinsically bad for those who experience it, even if occasionally it is also instrumentally good for them, as when it has the purifying, redemptive effects that Dostoyevsky’s characters so often crave."

I'm sorry, but that's a load of stupid you need a wheelbarrow to move. It is not at all uncontroversial; rather, it is the exact opposite of the truth. Anyone with the most infinitisimal grain of sense or experience knows that suffering is an absolutely necessary and unavoidable part of life, and that exaggerated attempts to avoid it cause grotesqueries that bring suffering of themselves. Without the experience of suffering it is impossible to truly understand the suffering of others.

Life exists in a dynamic situation of contending forces. Pleasure is the way our organismic selves guide us toward things that have proven beneficial to the meta-organism in the past, while suffering guides us away from things that have proven harmful. To the species, not the individual, please note. Suffering is not a source of harm; it is a warning that harm is being done. To struggle against the real sources of suffering is a noble thing. To attempt to eliminate suffering itself is like tearing out your goddamned smoke alarms. Jackass.

Are you familiar with the fate of those who do not feel pain? They, and those around them, must be constantly inspecting their bodies for unnoticed injuries. They frequently die young.

Get me?

And starting off with that muttonheaded Schopenhauer quote -- “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.”

What kind of idiot actually thinks that is a reasonable picture of life? I rather doubt it was one who had any experience of animals and how they live. Note the pleasure/pain dynamic above. It is tuned, so that a typical animal under typical conditions will of course experience more pleasure than suffering because that is how the relative functions of pleasure and suffering balance. Mild pleasure lets you know you're doing okay, suffering tends to indicate special circumstances. An organism that suffers more than it experiences pleasure is not a typical organism -- it is unfortunate.

And as for the specifics of one animal eating another. This is squeamishness, plain and simple. Would you rather be eaten by a shark or die of AIDS? Neither will be pleasant; the first will be much faster.

It also may not be as bad as you'd think. When David Livingston was attacked by a lion, he reported a dreamy sense of disconnection; anyone who's handled animals injured by cats has seen something of this.

Listen, McMahan? Most animals don't die of predation. Most animals die worse deaths. Most small animals die of pneumonia. Think of all the tiny mice and birds laying on their sides and quivering as they drown in their own snot and then tell me how cruel predators are.

Goddamnit.

Next up is this little doozy. In reference to the notion that it may be possible to some day engineer carnivorous behavior out of the ecosystem, he says, "Rather than continuing to collide with the natural world with reckless indifference, we should prepare ourselves now to be able to act wisely and deliberately when the range of our choices eventually expands."

So let me get this straight.

If we ever get magical superpowers, we should already have our wishes lined up. Is that what he means?

The idea that we should invest thoughts in hypothetical situations like this does have a place. It is in fiction. And if McMahan had plotted this out with the intellectual rigor used in the best science fiction, he may have come up with something of interest to say.

But that would mean speaking from a position of knowledge. He would have to say something meaningful about how predation operates in the ecosystem, how we'd manage birth control for moths and so on. He would have to really think, not engage in the outgassing of an intellectual colon.

Doing this kind of half-baked wambling about does not have anything to do with real thought. This piece consists of words and half-understood emotional impulses chasing one another around a cranium that is either permanently fuzzy or temporarily pixilated.

To prime oneself for possible action based on guesses made from a position of profound ignorance is a terrible, terrible idea. Jesus, McMahan! What the hell!

Okay, I'm sorry. That was uncalled for. But it really, really pisses me off that this kind of vague dopey slop -- and sorry, McMahan, I'm sure you're a nice guy and this isn't representative of your work, but this honestly does read like the transcribed ramblings of an over-educated stoner -- is being placed before the public eye and given the gloss of credibility that comes with The New York Times. This is the pathetic state of discourse. And here I sit, stewing bitterly in petulant insignificance. Unread save for the true elite.

(If for incomprehensible reasons McMahan is reading this, that was for you -- I am a spiteful nobody. Go ahead and dismiss my ravings. Plus, really, I'm irked because you want to get rid of all my favorite animals.)

Listen up, US of A. This is a warning. I'm watching you.

Think better.

Or else. I mean it.

Not Buying Comics

This is a panel from Secret Wars II number three. The day I brought it home I also had copies of The Badger, Megaton Man, and Flaming Carrot. I think there may even have been an Ambush Bug in there. I had no idea the funniest comic book ever was gonna be a mainstream Marvel release by Jim Shooter and Al Milgrom.

While there are some clear intentional jokes like the one above, the thing about the series is that it has an oddly perverse innocence to it, as though done by someone who's only heard about grownups third-hand. I have no idea whether Shooter was a genius or some kind of terrifyingly huge toddler. If I ever run across a cheap copy of The Essential Starbrand, I might get a chance to find out.

And while I try to avoid snark, superhero comics are a very weird area of graphics having little to do with conventional draftsmanship, a self-referential world only recently breached by the larger world of art and design. Those who worked in previous eras were certain to have comic books as their main or sole creative influence, and the results bore strange fruit.

In that small and decrepit hothouse, its windows peppered with mold, Milgrom's work stands out by virtue of a singularly uncompromising ugliness of which the above is but a paltry sample. Reading a full comic of Milgrom's work is like eating Shredded Wheat -- the sheer burden of discomfort leaves one feeling virtuous.

(Honestly, some days it's all I can do not to just throw everything up and go Dorothy Parker and make a career out of being mean.)

I haven't mentioned this, because when the traumatic decision was made I had other things on my mind. I've recently broken what is nearly a life-long habit, beginning with issue two of Jack Kirby's Omac, One Man Army Corps. (I've got a theory that cyberpunk should have emerged at the same time as regular old punk rock, supported mainly by Omac and K.W. Jeter's Dr. Adder.)

I am a stone comic book geek, and while I am not above pulling out Lynd Ward and Une Semaine de Bonte and the pictographic origins of the written word and all that happy horseshit, I've got a whole mess of shelf space devoted to the hijinks of chesty melodramatic retards in leotards. My life has revolved around the day the new comics go on the shelves since I began buying regularly as a teenager.

That came about as a side-effect of D&D. I'd been bitching to the people I played with about the people in my high school who were deep in the dungeon and had never cracked a fantasy book. This was back when the only sign of the shape of things to come was Terry Brooks (I was given a copy of the galleys for The Sword of Shannara as a child, and the initial thrill followed by the slow, almost diagrammatically visible rape of The Lord of the Rings in perfectly dreadful prose was a key point in my ongoing loss of innocence), and those horrible fucking Xanth novels, which I hope hurt as much to write as they do to read, back when fantasy was rare, eccentric, and not infrequently literary.

So when we started playing Champions, a superhero role-playing game, they gave me shit for not reading superhero comics.

I wasn't unfamiliar -- a kid I babysat for had a bunch of Marvel and DC stuff, including reprints of classic Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four that blew the top of my head off. The image of The Fantastic Four confronting Galactus, and he's so freaking cosmic that he doesn't even notice them... The Negative Zone and my man Annihilus (God, I love that ugly bastard.) I'd seen Batman. Read a hardback compilation of Superman stories.

I loved the form of comics, but my introduction came from underground comics -- I've got an autographed copy of what may be the very first underground comic, Lenny of Laredo. The artist, Joel Beck, was a close friend of the family, and through my childhood regularly delivered doses of R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. And when my grandmother, a children's librarian, rejected copies of Asterix the Gaul, she passed them on to me, and they left a serious art mark on me.

Newspaper comics were also important to me, especially Peanuts and Doonesbury, but I read everything our library stocked. (The cute chubby naked nymphs in old New Yorker cartoons proved particularly interesting. As usual, the classics provide ample excuse for a little luxury-grade T&A.)

But at that time, the only comic book I read, he said with some small measure of pride, was Cerebus. Cerebus was, when I started buying it, a funny fantasy comic starting to show some real wit and some real draftsmanship. It later turned out to be honest-to-golly-gosh big-A art. Whose creator turned out to be a fairly classic schizo who went celibate upon realizing that females drain men of their creative energy. Whee! I'd mentally put superhero comics on the short bus.

So I had no idea what I was getting into when I stepped into the middle of Cockrum's second run on the X-Men. I will confess that the sheer abominable horror of Chris Claremont's dialog inspired me to pass my Claremont-era X-Men on to my nieces, but back in the day his blend of science fiction and soap opera was exactly perfect.

So then I was reading Cerebus and X-Men. And some of those other comics looked interesting. And I became obsessed. I was there to watch everything change -- my first Alan Moore was his second Swamp Thing, and that set me hunting down old copies of Warrior. Weirdo and American Spirit were pointing the way to something more interesting, and then pow. Maus.

What with all the manga and graphic novels in all the bookstores, with the art-book reprints of classic newspaper strips, with the fucking San Diego Comic Con routinely getting mainstream coverage, it's easy to forget just how far off the beaten path comics used to be in America. When the New Yorker reviewed Maus, the miserable pinheaded baboon who wrote the piece more-or-less said, "This ain't comics. Because it is good. And comics are never any good at all. By definition." (Jackoff.)

Anyway, I'm getting detoured. What I'm saying here is that comics are very important to me. And for years, my main vice has been the weekly purchase of a stack of illustrated pamphlets. And that's how my money goes -- I spend my recreational funds on intoxicants and information. Books, music... and especially comics. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I learned to write and draw because I wanted to be a cartoonist, preferably a comic book cartoonist. I am an artist because of comic books.

It wasn't just the comics in themselves, though. It was the way their purchase and consumption punctuated the week. "Did you have a good comic day?" is a question the missus would ask me every time. It's good to know that you will have a small pleasure. These kinds of small treats are extremely useful tools for getting a fundamentally miserable bastard like me through the irritating business of life.

But times are fucking hard, you know? And right before I left to attend the Taos Toolbox writer's workshop, I had to make a choice. Show up literally penniless -- or stop buying comics for a while in order to save the money for the trip. It was one of those perfectly obvious choices that aren't choices at all, and it didn't hurt as much as I'd anticipated. Cutting off Warren Ellis's Supergod was the worst. But I've got a full run of Hellblazer -- not anymore!

What's hard is the lack of treat. I've stopped drinking by myself for the most part, so there goes one of my little rewards. Now comic books are gone. I'm pretty much down to yard sales. Which is good. A struggling artist needs to live lean, and skinning back my expenses gives me more time before the terror sets in.

But it gives a thin feeling to the daily grind. A faint, pervasive sense of denial. I chose to stop doing something I loved, that I've done routinely for longer than my entire adult life, and I did it specifically because I needed my novel to be a better work. That was the reason, and that was the choice, and there is a certain stoic pleasure in reflecting on it.

The pleasure of deferred gratification. I'm trying to develop a taste for it. The book is a study of maturation, and in a certain sense its creation is a long ritual intended to bring me into adulthood. And these are the kinds of mechanisms by which this magic will be worked.

When I have a real income, I will go back to buying comics. Until then, acting like a grown-up will have to be its own satisfaction.

Woo

Of course it's horrible to make fun of someone's spiritual beliefs, but we've already established that I'm a horrible person. I mean, if you read this blog you have some idea of how awful it must be to live with me. The moodiness, the financial issues, the intoxication, the so-called 'zone of destruction.'

The thing to remember is that the missus can be every bit as frustrating as me. Two wrongs don't make a right, but sometimes they make parity.

Let me give you an example.

The other morning we were discussing the issue of my eyes. This will come up later, probably, but here's the basic deal -- my eyes have gotten hell of worse over the last couple of years, and my deteriorating eyesight has given me a lot of unexpected grief. An idea I had for spectacle technology a number of years back has actually come into production (you'd be amazed at the frequency with which that kind of thing happens), and it's a specific for my condition. They look amazing. So we've been discussing the possibility of my getting a pair of fucking nine-hundred dollar glasses.

So in the midst of the conversation, the missus says, "I know it's woo, but I want you to try this." And she pulls out the laminated diagram shown above. "Now put your nose to Amma's feet."

"No," I said. "I'm just not going to do that. It's not going to happen."

So, y'all heard of Amma? She's the huggin' guru. The good news is that her organization is not yet showing signs of being riddled with corruption, she seems like a decent enough sort so far, and she's responsible for a goodly amount of charity work.

The bad news is that she spreads plague. I suppose it's unfair to say that she spreads plague personally, like she travels with jars of the stuff, but still. If your spouse had something like this on their record, would you just let it go? You would not. Because it is hilarious.

Of course, it's important to maintain perspective. See, when I describe the missus's spirituality to a third party, I call her a serial cultist. Because she is. Here's one of our standard conversations.

The missus is on her way out the door.

The Oaf: Culting it up tonight?
The Missus: It isn't a cult.
The Oaf: Well, enjoy the dogma and charismatic leadership.
The Missus: Fuck you.

Look, Amma is pretty fucking harmless at the moment. But the missus has been involved in shit like The Miracle of Love. (Hey, cultsters! She got out when Kalindi started crapping everything up!) Honestly, I'm willing to bet that she was in the Process and the Family and she just hasn't copped to it yet.

I'm thinking when she made the switch, her decision-making process was kind of like this. "Yeah, Miracle of Love is an internationally recognized menace to decency, but they just aren't spreading plague. There's gotta be somebody spreading plague." Then she googled plague gurus, got the forms, and signed up with Amma. (Do cults have an entrance exam? I'll have to ask the missus.)

So anyway, back to my poor old eyebones. The missus hands me this card and says, "Here, put your nose to Amma's feet."

This is part of an actual graven image intended for purposes of worship, and the stuff all over her feet is probably curds or ghee.

On the other hand, it is a cult, I have no idea what they do, and this really, really, really looks like a gross jiz shot from chubbygurufeet.com. "Put your nose to Amma's feet," my ass.

And I said, "No. Not happening. No can do."

"And then look up, and down, and left, and right..."

"It isn't going to happen. This will not pass."

And she glares at me. "You are so narrow-minded."

That nailed a certain dynamic in our house. Because the last idea she had regarding my eyes was that if I put pee and cod liver oil into them the lenses would become more flexible. My refusal to even give this a try was held up as evidence of my essential pessimism. "He wouldn't even try."

So that is the level of discourse. To dismiss the possibility that marination in a hellish vinaigrette of fish-0il and urine might be good for my eyes, to abstain from ophthalmological idolatry, is to be 'narrow-minded.' 'Negativistic.' 'A poopy-head.'

I don't care. I'm still not putting my nose to Amma's feet.

Thoughts On Fantasy

I decided to take photography because I've been using photographs as a basis for doing my Dada/Surrealism-influenced fantasy art for Swill. Unfortunately, I seem to be developing a taste for photography in itself. Great. Just what I need. A new form.

What next? If it's dance, I might have to kill myself.

Well, if you didn't think I was an overweening ass before, this might just change your mind. I've got a couple of hours before I have to leave for school and nothing pressing that I can actually do, so I thought I'd write a bit about my philosophy of fantasy, how it evolved, and how I apply it to my own work.

As a child, my introduction to fantasy came when my parents decided to read the Hobbit to me. My maternal grandmother, Jean Bishop, was one of those who fell in love with Tolkien's work as it was first published, and she passed that inheritance on to my mom.

The Hobbit obsessed me. It let me live in another world, one far more satisfying than my own. My life seemed -- how does it go? -- flat, stale, and unprofitable. More than his words, Tolkien's illustrations gave me a sense of uplift, of expanded life, a sense that there was (despite the fears and suffering he portrayed) a better place than mine.

I think that in many ways, the pleasure we take in stories of other times and places, of fantastic people, creatures, and events, derives from the same roots as the impulse motivating religious belief. For many, religion gives them the same thing Tolkien gave me -- an escape hatch.

So throughout my childhood and teen years, I searched out as much fantasy as I could -- and my criteria for approval was distance from conventional reality.

This eventually led to my explorations into religion, the occult, spirituality, Forteana, and so on. I wanted that imaginary escape hatch to be real, but the more I looked for it, the more I realized that it didn't exist. If I hadn't pursued the numinous with intellectual rigor, I'd probably still have a vague belief that there's a supernatural influence in life.

This led me to ignore many of the strongest virtues of much of my favorite fiction. Lord Dunsany --

A few words before we go on. Lord Dunsany is the single most influential figure in fantasy. The two main schools of twentieth-century fantasy are the Weird Tales writers and the later Inklings, who included both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. He was in many ways a better writer than those who followed him, more mature, more original, more humorous, more wise in the ways of the world.

Most of those who followed him were enchanted, as I was, by his use of words, the way he summoned up an atmosphere of other worlds. His writing, especially his early writing, was consciously influenced by the Bible. This added a strong whiff of the Orient (apologies for the use of an outdated term, but in our cultural history there's a difference between the Orient and Asia) to his work. He recognized that the Bible, however much it's influenced the Western world, was a work of Eastern folklore and folk history, one whose essential mindset is exotic to the West.

As an adult, when I read Dunsany I still appreciate that exoticism -- but more than that, I'm conscious of his sense of irony and satire. When appreciated in full, his escapism is grounded firmly in the reality of the human experience.

Dunsany's awareness of mythology is congruent with Tolkien's fascination with the folk literature of Northern Europe. What I'm saying is that fantasy has its deepest roots in religion and folklore -- in stories that people really believe in. It's that sense of conviction that allows us to experience escapism. I've always read myths and fairy tales and so on with the same mindset that I bring to fantasy.

As a kid I was distressed to hear the speculation that The Lord of the Rings was a parable for WWII, with Sauron playing the role of Hitler. It seemed to make the whole thing a cheat. But when I read more of Tolkien's personal history, it seemed to me that the War of the Rings drew more from his experiences during WWI, and that many of the emotional beats in that story seemed to come from Tolkien's life, I had the opposite reaction.

The connection with reality made the story deeper, richer, more personal.

Look, these days I find the Lord of the Rings absolutely unreadable. And I've tried. The first volume begins entertainingly, but by the end I wanted to beat the living shit of of Tom Bombadil, and I hit The Two Towers like a bullet hitting Lexan. But I still respect Tolkien and wish happiness to those who truly love his work. I just don't see this as a novel written with a readership in mind. It's intensely personal, clearly the product of a deep-rooted compulsion, and for most of us it's inaccessible.

My growing feeling that escapism functions best when firmly rooted to the human experience was reinforced by the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories of Fritz Leiber. Leiber is a highly variable writer; he's done some absolutely dreadful stuff but at his best? He's one of the best. Honestly, he should be recognized by the Literary Establishment. I will flat-out say that Our Lady of Darkness is one of the two most direct influences on my novel The Ghost Rockers. (The other would be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The Ghost Rockers isn't that much like either of them, but the influence is there.)

My absolute favorite Fafhrd and Mouser story is the farce Lean Times in Lankhmar. It is fucking hilarious, the supernatural just barely peeks in through the window, the satire of religion is pitch perfect. And yet it's set in another world that's clearly realized to the point where you smell it, you taste it, you feel cobblestones under your ass as you sit and listen to Fafhrd sing.

Edward Eager was another strong influence for me, and later John Bellairs. They both specialized in the intrusion of the supernatural into daily life. In Eager's works, this led to comedy, and in Bellair's, this led to horror. As much as I loved works like the Oz books and The Phantom Tollbooth, the way the fantastic and realistic elements were neatly separated from one another disappointed me. Either there is an Oz or there isn't -- and if there is, Dorothy isn't going to be the only person or thing traveling between the two worlds. That sense of separation seemed to make the fantastic elements of the story into a dream.

Or a lie.

You may notice that I spend little time discussing current fantasy. The fantasy I love is the product of a singular and eccentric mind, and most of what was written after the clearly plagiarized Sword of Shannara has been product. I'm certain that much of it is good product but it just isn't what I'm interested in.

I suspect that Dungeons & Dragons has much to do with it. Hey, I was rolling polyhedral dice back when you had to buy them from TSR and they were made out of shitty plastic that made them look like a Transformer's venereal scabs. I still read RPGs even if I don't play them.

But they gave people a clear model for creating a fantasy, a series of methodical steps that lead to the production of a world, characters, and a narrative. And that's what this stuff looks like to me -- the product of a method. All perspiration and no inspiration.

So when I set out to write a fantasy, I had a number of clear goals in mind.

1) It should offer escapism -- it's my job to show you amazing things that you will never see anywhere else.

2) It needs to connect strongly with reality in a way that makes the real fantastic and the fantastic real. The world of daily life and the other world are the same fucking world, even if it takes a while for the characters and the reader to see this. You ever think that virtually all humans throughout history would regard the way you live as exotic, magical, fantastic?

3) It should be personal and honest. There is a longstanding tradition of writer's putting elements of themselves in their characters, especially in Sword and Sorcery fiction. There's a lot of Robert E. Howard in King Kull, a lot of Moorcock in Elric, a lot of Leiber in Fafhrd. And to be honest, I'm a hell of a good character. Early in my current drive to become a writer, my sister and brother-in-law told me that my best fiction was the stuff I wrote in my own voice, my conversational voice. "It makes me feel like I'm in the presence of an incredibly powerful mind that's totally devoted to not being a psycho killer," was what my brother-in-law said. I've kept that statement in mind while writing.

4) It should be true to my time, place, and culture. I want to write a piece of epic fantasy that relates to my people, and derives from current folk culture. So while I'm trying as hard as I can to write real literature, I am consciously drawing on everything from popular music to movies to comic books, along with the deeper well of world mythologies and religious traditions.

5) It should be absolutely convincing. I'm thinking of Lovecraft's dictum that a horror story should be as carefully planned and executed as a hoax. It is my goal to have the fantastic elements of the book be the kind of thing that some people might actually believe in, no matter how bizarre they might be. To have the supernatural elements ring true to a degree that would have allowed me to start a cult based on them if I hadn't used them in a novel.

6) Finally, and in many ways most importantly, I wanted make this something that was truly unique, a real one-of-a-kind, and so I turned to sources of inspiration outside the fields of genre fiction. I brought surrealistic techniques to bear, I used direct observations from life, I started out by writing completely intuitively before organizing the material into a cohesive narrative. Dreams and visions (I'm crazy -- I get visions) and music and art and even evolutionary science play more of a role in what shows up on the page than Tolkien and Howard do.

Whew.

Sometimes I suspect that I think too much about this stuff.

Lovecraft And Me

The Oaf presents his best wishes to the Terrible Old Man on the Occasion of his One Hundred and Nineteenth Natal Anniversary.

The other day I was out walking with the missus, and I mentioned to her that H.P. Lovecraft was the literary figure with whom I most closely identified. And more than that, he'd had a direct influence on our relationship.

"He married a woman named Sonia Greene -- she was Jewish, too -- and moved to New York. He had a hell of a time there and they wound up divorcing. I can't help but wonder how things would have turned out for him if he'd stuck it out. Back in the bad old days, there were a few times when I wondered if our relationship was good for us. Then I'd think of poor old Lovecraft, giving himself cancer with his cornflakes and canned spaghetti diet, dying poor and alone, and then I'd feel grateful for what I had even if it wasn't perfect."

I first encountered Lovecraft as a child, I'd guess in the second grade. Maybe first. It was in an anthology of monster stories, I believe edited by Peter Haining (I wish I could remember the name because I wish I had a copy; it had the chicken heart story and Ballard's giant-corpse-on-the-beach story and...).

The story was The Outsider. When I was done reading it, I had the same kind of reaction I'd have years later when I really listened to Hank Williams for the first time. "That son-of-a-bitch has my number. He knows where I live."

I tried to find as much of his work as I could. I scoured the library for him. His vision of mankind's fragile tenure in an essentially hostile universe was one of the seeds around which my view of the world crystallized. But as the years went by, I found that there was a lot more to Lovecraft than horror.

When I found the Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition of The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath, it was a revelation. While it hasn't stood the test of time for me, the dizzying visions of a genuinely fantastic fantasy world, a world that was wholly the product of the mind, captured me absolutely. I read it and reread it, and when I tried to find out more about it I found myself drawn to other writers such as Lord Dunsany and Clarke Ashton Smith who have been more directly influential on my work.

It was during my first miserable year of college that I found out about Lovecraft the man. The library at UC Santa Cruz was very kind to me. A complete set of Dunsany first editions! Who's this Edward Gorey guy? He's great! And what are these black-bound volumes with the gold lettering on the spine?

The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft.

I'd known about the Lovecraft circle. Part pen-pals, part writer's group, part proto-internet, many of the most influential American fantacists of the early twentieth century were correspondents with one another, and Lovecraft seemed to be the center of it all.

Reading his letters brought home to me the contrasts he represented. His mind held the universe and more; he lived a life of poverty and limitation. He spoke of the essential hostility of existence and yet he was a genuinely lovely person to his friends. I came to regard Lovecraft as a brother I'd never meet.

The discomfort he felt with himself and the world also made me feel a sense of connection with him. While I'm not in a position to completely understand him, I truly feel the forces both internal and external that led him to lead such a limited life. His example is one of the reasons I continue to struggle to find a place in the world. If I grow weak, I too will shut myself away and die of poverty and self-neglect. But as long as I wish that there had been a way to save Lovecraft, I won't stop looking for a way to save myself.

A few years back, Michel Houellebecq wrote a book on Lovecraft. I did not think highly of it. When I ran across its listing on Amazon, I went to the trouble of writing a negative critique. Here it is. This was something I could do for Lovecraft's memory.

Here's to you, Howard. I wish we could have met.

Why I Hate The USA: The Early Years

I've decided to make this the default image for posts where I spend a lot of time complaining. Consider yourself warned.

Okay, let's get this out of the way. The main reason I hate America is because I am a hateful person. I am filled with hate and it has to go somewhere. I'd hate any country that I lived in and frankly, it wouldn't take much effort to come up with a fairly convincing list of grievances against any nation on the planet.

I am a US citizen. My family's been here from the start of colonization, and the odds are good I've got Native American blood. This is where I'm from. Don't assume that my hatred of the US means that I'm in favor of anything else. You may as well think I'm a duck as think I'm a Marxist.

That said, there's something... special about the US. Special in the short-bus sense of the word.

Here's the bit of news that set me off a few minutes ago. We have members of the Supreme Court speaking out in support of the execution of the innocent.

Let's be serious -- if Scalia was a tapeworm-riddled hunk of dogshit, all the other tapeworm-ridden hunks of dogshit would justifiably regard him with moral loathing. Fuck you, Scalia. The Constitution does not specifically forbid cracking a dog's skull open with a hatchet and fucking the cleft in its brain. That doesn't mean you have any grounds for defending the act.

Oh, yeah -- the Holy Sacred Glowing Constitution. There are three kinds of people who venerate the Constitution. People who are members of the privileged classes. People who identify with and support the privileged classes...

... and people who haven't read the fucking thing. If you actually sit down and read the Federalist Papers and the Constitution (the original Constitution, pre-Bill of Rights), it's pretty clear that the purpose behind the so-called Revolution (more on that real soon) was to establish a social structure similar to that of England, with the noble class deriving authority from wealth rather than heritage.

(Of course, wealth is inherited, which is how we get our USAnian dynasties.)

The type of democratic egalitarianism we are taught to think of as American (and I use the term American ironically, with full knowledge of the fact that there are other fucking nations in the fucking Americas) is in no way directly supported by the Constitution.

Rather, it is a set of principles primarily intended to keep the rich rich and to make it easy for them to get richer. The Bill of Rights definitely puts a different complexion on things, but if you look at the history, there was a lot of resistance to the very notion of those rights. The Constitution can be called on to support worthy causes but in order to bring it to bear you have to beat it like a government mule.

If you disagree with me, then give me your arguments based on the texts in question. Not on opinion or emotion or appeals to patriotism. If it ain't on the page, then fuck your outrage.

And as for the American Revolution. As I mentioned above, America is not the name of our nation. We're the United States of America. And as for Revolution, go look the fucking word up in the dictionary. A revolution changes the central government. The American Revolution was actually the US Rebellion. Which would be a great name for an aircraft carrier, don't you think?

Look, the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution are two of the most gloriously inspirational passages of prose the world has ever seen. But they don't really tell us anything about the actual rebellion in question. I mean, what would have happened if the rebellion hadn't occurred? Aw, look at poor Canada, Australia, New Zealand, groaning under the brutal yoke of British imperialism -- all with better health and educational options for the average citizen than the US offers. Fuck the American Revolution.

There was never more than 1/3 popular support for the war. It resulted in drastically increased taxes for the citizens. And most telling of all, within the first few years after the rebellion there were two populist revolts against the federal government, Shay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion.

King Washington put one down through use of a secret society, the Brotherhood of Cincinnatus. (Doesn't that sound like a crazed conspiracy theory? Again, look it up or shut up.)

In response to the other, he personally led an army as big as the one he fielded against the British in order to extract usurious taxes from a bunch of subsistence farmers. The fact that Washington owned a lot of land in the area that appreciated in value after he put down the Whiskey Rebellion might have had something to do with the enthusiasm of his response...

Oh, my golly gosh. This post is already running long and I haven't even gotten past Washington's administration. I'll let it go for now, but lemme say this.

It may seem as if I've got a bug up my butt about the origins of my country. Well, lemme tell you this.

That ain't nothin'. I'm really pissed about the current state of the nation.

Thoughts On Genre 2: On Literary Fiction, As If There Could Be Any Other Kind

Here's the finished version, finally ready to print. I might be bold and print it large on good paper for a change.

Well, that title's a little off unless we define 'fiction' as referring specifically to prose fiction. That said, yeah, I mean it. The notion that there really is no real fiction outside of the world defined by magazines such as the New Yorker or Granta or the small press literary magazines like (ahem) Monday Night is indefensible. To claim that popular fiction is outside the scope of interest of a serious writer...

(A series of profanities alternating with vicious and complicated physical threats, punctuated by the sound of battered fists pounding wallboard.)

Oh, it drives me nuts. The thing is, is that the current conception of 'literary fiction' is one that has been shaped to a great degree by its need to distinguish itself from genre fiction -- which turns out to include virtually all popular fiction, which effectively means dramatic fiction.

I've got to say something here. I'm not going to be able to write about literary fiction with the same confidence with which I address so-called genre fiction. That's because I'm less interested in it -- its rewards can be deep, but its scope is narrow.

But can I defend my claim that 'literary fiction' is a genre?

If you accept my definition of genre fiction, then yes.

Does it have a label? Yep.

Does it have a self-identified readership and a market to serve them? Yes, indeed. They may not go to conventions -- but if you want to go looking for them you can find the Cheever T-shirts.

Does it have a set of traditional forms? Oh, hell yeah. The stereotypical example of this type of fiction would describe an individual engaged in routine activities coming to an emotional epiphany. To say that this describes all literary fiction is horseshit, of course.

But as a genre literary fiction tries as hard as it can to be all bread and no circus -- because the circus is low-class. (And if you think that the desire to define oneself as having literary tastes isn't a class issue you're nuts.) This strikes me as a weakness in any form -- when you start defining yourself by what you ain't instead of by what you is. And while literary fiction acknowledges the presence of drama in life it would prefer to show how people react to it rather than show the moment when the drama occurs. (Just as dramatic fiction can be cheesy, literary fiction can have a dry bran-muffin quality.)

And does it have a body of jargon associated with it? Well, if I describe something as a 'New Yorker-type story' you've got some idea of what I mean. Epiphany. Denouement. Yeah, I think we got us some jargon.

Interestingly, there seems to be a bit of a divide between academically-approved fiction, which is chasing after postmodernism and multiculturalism (the first an interesting blend of insight and nonsense, the second of great importance and utility when regarded from the perspective of inclusionism, a pain in the bee-hind when used as an excuse for the rejection of works of proven value). Literary fiction takes a lot of its leads from academia but it still is intended to be read -- which is anathema to current cultural theory. Academic literature has a strong bias for works which require analysis, which are tough enough to support hours of classroom discussion and pages and pages of critical writing.

Let me be clear. You wanna give me a Thurber, a Jamaica Kincaid, a Yannick Murphy? Great! Bring 'em on! My objections to literary fiction (like my objections to science fiction) are based on the culture that defines the genre, not the works done in it.

It's the self-righteous parochialism of many readers, writers, and critics that makes 'literary fiction' a term of abuse in some circles, some of which I frequent. The phrase itself seems to cast all work outside the charmed circle into the subliterate depths. When you run statements like this --

Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.

The reason this statement is so offensive is that it implies that genre fiction is at a dead end. Never mind that genre fiction is a very, very broad term. Never mind that the vast majority of short form fiction, especially novellas and novelettes, is genre fiction. Never mind the steadily increasing importance of genre fiction in popular culture. Never mind the influences that genre has outside of fiction, extending into music, fashion, design, and on and on...

Genre fiction must be dead; serious writers have buried it.

It's very frustrating for those of us who are aware of the vital literary tradition that has been part of genre fiction from the beginning and which is currently thriving. The best genre writers have always been aware of and influenced by the larger literary tradition -- and they are a valid part of that tradition.

I have to say, this statement was probably made for effect, since later on the writer (Ruth Franklin, in Slate.) also states --

With The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Chabon has finally made the only use of genre fiction that a talented writer should: Rather than forcing his own extraordinarily capacious imagination into its stuffy confines, he makes the genre—more precisely, genres—expand to take him in.

She's absolutely right -- but her statement applies to the extraordinarily stuffy confines of literary fiction as much as it does to any other genre. Hell, it applies to any given art form. It's a truism, but it's not a bad thing to state a truism every once in a while.

But there's something weird happening in the literary world. The kind of broad reading that I've practiced all my life seems to be popping up in some fairly elevated circles -- there's a volume of H.P. Lovecraft in the Library of America collection. The third volume of Clarke Ashton Smith's collected stories has an introduction by Michael Dirda.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is altogether appropriate -- much as I love and have been influenced by the Weird Tales writers, Lovecraft's prose is dreadful and the fun of Smith's is that it goes past purple and well into ultraviolet -- but I can only approve of anything that breaks down the barriers between genres, that allows readers and writers more freedom and more access to works and traditions that will bring them pleasure. In the words of a murderous phrasemongering tyrant, "Let a thousand flowers blossom."

The various tropes, methods, and forms developed in the trenches of genre fiction are tools that can be very useful. However there is one aspect of genre fiction that really is too specialized to be widely useful. I'll be talking about that one tomorrow.

Next time I'll talk about what I like about genre and how it's inspired my own writing. Specialization can be a curse but it does have its benefits...

Thoughts On Genre 1: What The Hell Is It, And Where Did It Come From?

And thusly I have gone from this to this.

I've decided to take the blur off of the lake -- thank goodness for smart filters -- but it really doesn't look this tacky at full size. Now I need to go start work on a Psitticosaurus.

Rob Pierce, writer and publisher/editor of the purchasable magazine Swill, made a comment on yesterday's post. It was full of fire and defiance and one of the key statements in it was this:

The whole idea of "genre" fiction is some snob's categorization anyway. Dostoevski wrote about crime. Kafka wrote fantasy. Shakespeare wrote romance, crime and fantasy, a noirist for his time. Then someone with credentials decided only certain types of stories were "literary" and everything else was "genre." Oh, unless the fantasy can be retagged as something like "magical realism."

You might want to go read the whole thing.

Anyway, there's a lot that I agree with here -- but the central premise is not one of them.

Before I throw myself into the fire, let me say that many fans of Latin American magic realism might be surprised to find out that North America and Britain have strong literary traditions that both foreshadow and influence their favorite reading -- names like John Collier and Fritz Leiber and a number of others I'll mention later spring to mind. The stories published in Unknown Worlds magazine would please them -- if they were to hold their noses and creep into the science fiction section of the bookstore.

That's actually a good illustration of what I hate about genre, and what I think Rob was speaking against -- when it turns into the equivalent of a caste system, where it's possible to dismiss or diminish a work by slapping a label on it rather than actually reading it. I've said any number of times that given the amount of romance fiction published the odds are pretty good that there's work being done in the field that I'd love that I'll never find out about just because I'm not going to go looking for it.

(I should revise that last sentence; instead, it shall stand as a grim monument to a moment's lapse of genius.)

But genre exists in the minds of readers, in literary tradition, at conventions and on the shelves of bookstores. It is one of the dominant influences on modern fiction. And I think it's worth examining. Genuine scholars of literature would not doubt disagree with me on many points; kindly correct me when I'm wrong.

Let's start with the history and origins of genre fiction. Which means thinking about literary tradition in general, because that is what a genre is -- a literary tradition, a set of forms familiar to both the writer and her intended audience.

Now since most writers working in most times were the products of cultures that believed in the supernatural, most written works predating the industrial revolution have some element of the fantastic to them. Does this make them fantasy? Not as I'm defining it here. (It does mean that a smart fantasist has some knowledge of folklore and religious writing.)

The traditions of genre as I understand them go back to the nineteenth century. The works of a number of authors, including Edgar Allen Poe, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne, provided the templates of what would later become a variety of different genres. Poe in particular gave us the essential forms of much of the short fiction to follow -- he wrote what now seem to be detective stories, horror stories, and science fiction.

But at that point in time they were not labeled as such. They were just fiction.

The label is one of four elements which define a genre. The other three are a self-identified readership and a market to serve them, a set of traditional forms, and a body of jargon that applies specifically to works regarded as being of that genre.

And there seems to be one man who is responsible for all these things -- Hugo Gernsback. He was an inventor and radio engineer who decided to start a magazine called Amazing Stories devoted to fiction that contained scientific elements.

Right from the beginning there was a clubhouse atmosphere to what was to become science fiction. The letters columns of his magazine allowed its readers to network -- guess where this led -- and they began to publish their own small magazines.

The success of Amazing Stories led to the founding of other magazines with similar themes -- and then magazines with similarly specialized areas of interest. Mysteries, horror stories -- the focus of these popular magazines grew more and more specific. (Spicy Western Air Romance, anyone?)

The market's demand for stories to fit into these niches led to the development of traditional forms and formulas which allowed writers to quickly produce works that would satisfy their specialized audiences.

These specialized audiences are with us today. There are people who read mysteries. There are people who read science fiction. There are people who read romances.

And a lot of them don't read anything else. Harlequin romance readers can plow through two or three of those things in a day -- and they do. There are a lot of folks whose commute is made bearable by the latest S Is For Sequel mystery.

And this is the source of my own distaste for much genre fiction -- it is product, created to scratch a certain itch. The good writers doing this kind of work have that itch themselves and scratch it well and honestly. But to write and read the same thing over and over again...

To my mind, that's like saying, "I'm eating frosting from now on." I have no interest in a frosting diet -- but I will say that this kind of market constraint can produce some damned interesting frosting.

But it also produces a lot of nasty frosting. And that's how genre fiction earned its bad reputation -- the vast majority of work produced to fulfill the needs of a genre market is horrible.

While fiction with these kind of themes has always been published in the more mainstream and literary markets, after a certain point (Did it happen in the twenties? The thirties?) genre congealed -- and if you published a story that featured these themes it was regarded as being part of a genre and thus a second-class piece of fiction. And much of the time this judgment is accurate -- to the detriment of many writers working inside of genres and the wider readership who would appreciate their work if it was made visible outside the genre.

As the tropes and formulas of these genres became more clearly defined a body of language grew to describe them. The arcane language describing exactly how explicit the sex is in a given romance novel, 'cozy' versus 'hard boiled' versus 'police procedural' mysteries... And in science fiction the jargon has moved inside of the fiction, giving us 'blasters' and 'hyperspace' and so on.

So now I've defined genre for the purposes of this discussion. Next time I'll talk about how literature fits into this -- and how literary fiction became a genre every bit as restrictive as Spicy Western Air Romance. Let me give you a hint -- it involves a label, a self-identified readership and a market to serve them, a set of traditional forms, and a body of jargon.

Crit List 3: Journal Of A Sad Hermaphrodite

Well, I hadn't intended to post another critical piece so soon -- but when Journal Of A Sad Hermaphrodite showed up in the mail, courtesy of James Benstead of Tallis House, it demanded my attention.

I knew going in that I wasn't going to be reading another Borribles book. And honestly, there's no point in referring to the Borribles when discussing Journal. They're opposite works in just about every conceivable way, quality aside.

Journal Of A Sad Hermaphrodite is a mature work. Its prose is polished and lucid to the point of being virtually invisible. (High praise in my book.) It's about writing, about the importance of art in life, about ambition -- in other words, it's about many of the questions that are currently occupying a good deal of my attention. I found it thought-provoking, frequently beautiful, genuinely useful, technically fascinating in its approach, and at times frustrating and disappointing.

But despite that last caveat I know this is a book that I'll return to. It's a wonderful thing for a writer to read. The author clearly sees the act of writing as an essentially heroic one, and the way the book has been constructed makes a convincing emotional argument for this position. It makes me want to write more and to be more ambitious -- and to take pride in ambition.

It would be an act of hubris for an author to make that thematic statement if they seemed to be holding up their own work as an example of greatness. But this isn't the way de Larrabeiti handles things. This isn't simply a novel; it's also an anthology of great writing in both poetry and prose, all carefully selected to support the story and its deeper meanings.

If I'd heard about this in advance I'd have been very dubious. But it works -- and as a result this book is rewarding on a number of different levels. Just as a collection of writing it's wonderful. But that writing has been put to use that isn't clever -- rather, it's deep and heartfelt.

Normally I'd read a book of this length in two or three hours. This one took me all day because I read many passages slowly and repeatedly, savoring them. There's writing contained in this book that is as good as writing gets -- and it's all in service to de Larrabeiti's statement. I'm very ambivalent about appropriation and name dropping in fiction but I loved this.

I mentioned that this book is good for writers; there are passages on how to write and on the enemies of literature that I'm considering tattooing on my forearm for convenient reference.

The plot is slight; it's in service to the theme of the book and as such is serviceable -- but it is badly hampered by what I see as the book's central flaw.

The plot deals with the relationship between a teacher and a gifted student; the book is broken into three interwoven sections -- notes from the teacher, quotes from the student's diary, and selected literary passages.

I found the sections written from the student's point of view to be thin and unconvincing. She remains nameless throughout the book -- and while I suspect that de Larrabeiti did this in order to emphasize her importance as a muse or an anima figure (one of the book's strengths is its use of classic mythology, which is fully and naturally integrated into the story), it seems to be part and parcel of her existence as a plot contrivance rather than a living, breathing person.

This wouldn't matter if everyone in the novel were cut-out figures but this isn't the case at all. She's a perfect foil for the protagonist -- and nothing else, and as a result her portrayal weakens the book substantially for me.

And unfortunately this is exacerbated by trick typography. Each of the three threads in the novel has been given its own typeface. Since the quotes are in the italic version of the protagonist's font they work together perfectly; the student's passages are in a sans serif font that would work well as a display font. It makes brutal reading when used for body type. It just looks ugly on the page -- and as a result it offended the visual artist in me.

I found the typographical experiment to be a failure; it made me all too conscious of the reading experience and not in an enlightening way. On the other hand, who's to fault the decision to make an experiment? I'd rather see a failed experiment than a conventional success, and most of the experiments made in this book succeed.

Despite these petty complaints I really, really liked this book. As I said, I know it's one that I'll reread in the future. If you are interested in the relationship between art and life it's well worth a look. Few perfect books are this good -- de Larrabeiti aimed high and achieved well.

(As an aside, a description of the myth of Narcissus made me conscious of how often our culture has misread mythology. In the myth, when Narcissus fell in love with his reflection he believed it to be the face of a nymph -- he wasn't self-obsessed, he was cursed with features that inspired love. And that made me think of Oedipus, who didn't have a mother fixation -- he just happened to wander into a bad situation. Now I'm gonna have to re-examine all the familiar myths I run across...)

A Truly Horrid Idea and Applebee's Is Just Plain Nasty

You used to be able to get these Japanese felt-tip brush pens -- they had a terra cotta-colored rubbery exterior and a fine brush on one end and a thick brush on the other. When they started going dry you could pull them open and dose 'em with more ink. I loved those pens. Where did they go?

This piece was fun to do -- just whip it out in ten minutes or so. Working fast was the point. No sketching, no preconceptions -- just let the hand do what it will. I need to start sketching again.

It used to be that the words used for verification of hominid status for purposes of spam blocking -- the kind you find on comment pages and so forth -- were usually just smears of random consonants.

But a while ago they started sounding like words -- usually the kinds of words you'd see used in really bad fantasy or science fiction novels, the kinds that come with a map and a glossary.

When I mentioned this over on Glendon Mellow's site he called me on it and said I had to write that book. God help me, I think he may be right. So I've started saving the verification words in a document on my desktop.

I've got four words so far. Bactrin, Flediton, Plogu, and Pulas. See what I mean?

This can't possibly lead anywhere good. And it's not like I need another project -- but there are times when something reaches out and beckons to you irresistably. God only knows I read enough of the bad old stuff in my youth -- I've always loved pulp fiction and as a youngster I wasn't what you'd call discriminating.

This could be the start of something terrible.

Speaking of repulsive messes, I had one of the worst meals of my life today.

I cook. I'm a good cook. My food tastes better than what you can get in most restaurants. My grandaughter won't eat eggs unless I make them, when my sister was married she asked me to make stuffed mushrooms even though the event was catered. The caterers ate almost all of them before they got set out for the guests. My brother-in-law has been known to call me the day after he's eaten one of my meals and try to talk me into going into the restaurant business.

So today when I was taken out to lunch at Applebee's it was, quite literally, the first bad food I've eaten in years.

I mean, I had forgotten what bad food was like!

It's going to take me a long time to forget this.

The missus has a broker. Her old broker would send her chocolates and champagne every year. Her new broker just sent her a twenty-five dollar Applebee's card. When we walked in the door there was a sign on the outside of the building that said that the purchase of one of those twenty-five dollar cards would get you a bonus five-dollar card. Which figures.

Jesus, it was disgusting. I knew I was in for a disaster but I'd hoped it would be like eating a sack of chips -- you don't feel good about yourself but you keep eating it for the taste. Nasty, regretable, and yet oddly pleasing.

There was no pleasure. There was no taste, aside from the buffalo wings, which were actually frozen chicken nuggets bathed in this sauce... plastic? Cigarette butts? There was a harsh chemical tang to the red-orange glutinous paste that clung to the horrid little wads of breading and the look on the missus's face when she took a bite of one justified the entire meal for me.

The midget bacon cheeseburgers were utterly without flavor of any kind. No onions, no mustard or mayo. No flavor to the bacon. How do you get bacon with no flavor?

The side salad came with stale croutons and a huge mound of cheese and more of the soul-free bacon. The whole thing was assembled as if the people working in the kitchen hated food. When they were kids they saw food kill their dad and they've been seeking vengeance ever since. Or something. You couldn't get food that bad without a motive! And a can opener. I swear, the lettuce was from a can. Every dish was assembled from packaged processed foods. It wasn't a meal, it was a fucking industrial byproduct.

The idea that we were surrounded by people who had come here expecting a good meal was depressing. The idea that they thought they'd been served one was appalling. Partway through the meal I whispered to the missus and granddaughter, "Hey, do you think our waiter would eat out at a place like this?"

NO.

It doesn't matter how many Rachel Ray recipes they put on the back of Triscuit boxes, it doesn't matter how much truffle oil they have at Costco. If a restaurant like Applebee's is flourishing in America then our national palate is a shame, a sham, and a disgrace.

Time to slowly sip a quart of water and reflect on tomorrow's lunch -- which, with luck, will be at Bo McSwine's barbecue. Brisket, blues, and Belgian ale will wash the last pasty oligineous taint of Applebee's from my mouth and restore my parched and weary soul. And if it ain't at Bo's, it'll be at a decent burger joint, Al's Big Burger or The Red Onion.

Please, oh please let it come to pass.

Crit List 1: The Borribles (expanded as of 12/16/08)

These covers were painted by Don Maitz. If there's any objection to my posting them by anyone associated with the books, I'm happy to take them down.

When I started this site I intended to do a fair amount of reviews and criticism. When I did my piece on Jurassic Fight Club I wound up backing away from that. First off, I found that I was doing the standard web snark attack -- and I found that I didn't like being that kind of person. When I realized that my snotty remarks were being read by creators who had worked hard and honestly it made me feel like a shit.

And the fact that it garnered me more hits than anything else I'd done took me aback. First, I want people to come to this site to see my work, not to read amusing slams on someone else. Second, I'm kinda self destructive and when I saw that I was achieving some kind of success I scuttled away from it as fast as I could.

See, this is a site about being a creator and about trying to make the move to being a pro. So any reviews or critical pieces need to be done from that perspective.

So I'm going to throw myself back into the fray and talk about a series of fantasy novels that have been a source of pleasure to me for decades. They've also given me a lot of help on my novel. Let me tell you about it.


When I was a kid there was one fantasy series that my family was familiar with -- The Lord of the Rings. It was my grandmother's favorite. She was one of the few who read it when it was first released and it was her favorite book. The Hobbit was the first book I had read to me as a child.

But as important as J.R.R. Tolkien was to me, he never really spoke to my life. That was part of the pleasure -- he took me entirely out of my world. But even as a child I was disgusted by the nationalism and classism inherent in his work. (How can anyone not cringe at the relationship between Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins?) That's not to say that he was a bad person -- but his world view was not one that I could accept without criticism.

When I was in high school, I found a fantasy book that took place in a world that was very, very close to the one that I lived in. That was Michael de Larrabeiti's The Borribles. This was a fantasy contemporaneous with and parallel to punk rock. It had heart and it had guts and it spoke to me in a way that no classic fantasy novel ever had. It was bitterly satirical, strewn with trash and covered in graffiti. This was a world where I belonged, where my friends belonged. It was fantasy in the gutter, in the alley, in the dumpster. It was grim and ugly and violent -- but it was redeemed by humanity and love. This was a world I could live in.

The basic idea behind the series is that children who for one reason or another live on their own and take care of themselves turn into creatures called Borribles. Borribles don't age, they don't grow. They can be recognized by their pointed ears, which they usually cover up with a watch cap or long hair. While they sometimes mingle with normal children they've established their own society, a varied collection of tribes usually organized along racial or cultural lines, named for the territories they inhabit.

Their enemies are the forces of conformity and heirarchy. Specifically the police (having grown up in a predominantly black community where the police force contained a racist gang who called themselves the Cowboys, I could relate to this) and the non-human Rumbles. If you have any familiarity with the Wombles of Wimbledon you won't have any trouble recognizing the Rumbles...



Here's a dirty little secret. Writing -- or, rather, editing -- fiction has ruined my appetite for reading. I read everything with an eye toward how it could be improved. Commas, dialogue attribution, point of view -- I can't let go of the technical side of writing.

But a few months back when I was in the thick of writing my novel I reread the Borrible books and found that they sucked me right in and still moved me. I was conscious of the crudity of the prose -- I wished I could take a red pen to them. The point of view is an omniscient one broken up by passages told from the perspectives of various individual characters and the shifts in POV frequently seem capricious. There are any number of moments where emotions that are made clear by the speech and actions of the characters are explicitly described by de Larrabeiti.


But as I read the books I dropped my mental red pencil as the simple power of direct storytelling over-rid my critical stance and swept me away.

A big part of this has to do with the intensely imagined quality of the work. The characters and settings are tangible, vivid, odiferous -- the continual appeal to all of the senses immerses you in de Larrabeiti's world.

His sense of action is very instructive to anyone who anyone who writes adventure fiction. His fight scenes are absolute classics -- if he hadn't been in a few fights himself I would be greatly surprised. At the end of volume two there's a scene I've jokingly described to friends as the greatest shovel fight in world literature. It's actually in strong competition for best fight scene, period, right up there with the fight between Flay and Swelter in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast.

Spoiler Alert! For those who are interested, James Benstead of Tallis House publishing very graciously sent me this manuscript page from the third draft of the above-mentioned shovel fight from The Borribles Go For Broke. Caution -- contains climax!

But most importantly, the characters were all acting from strong, believable motivations. With a few plot-enhancing exceptions you know exactly what all the characters are doing and you know exactly why.

And that helped my novel. Here's how.

In the Borribles the motivations for the various characters are so clean-cut as to be diagrammatical. The bad guys want to either take advantage of the lead characters or they want to crush any sign of social deviation. The values that the good guys (and these books) hold dear are simple ones: Make a name for yourself. Live free. Don't let anyone get away with fucking with you. And above all else take care of the ones you love. Any death, any suffering is preferable to failing to live up to that creed.

If you've got a problem with those values, I have a problem with you. Those who think these books inappropriate for children must imagine that being a young person guarantees a life without hard decisions, without threats. This simply isn't true. I'd rather the kids I love be ready to face the world with open eyes, strong hearts, and a willingness to either stand tough or make sacrifices when the situation demands it.

When you put those motives together in opposition you inevitably get a story that's clean, involving, and moving. It's mathematical, mechanical -- and yet organic.

So after re-reading these books I went back and asked myself what my characters wanted, what their values were -- and how those values would bring them into conflict with one another. It brought my book to life.

The Borribles trilogy is available in both individual volumes and a single-volume compilation from Tor Books.

Michael de Larrabeiti died last April. I wish I'd had the chance to meet him and say: Thank you, Mr. de Larrabeiti. Don't get caught.

(Click here for a look at Journal Of A Sad Hermaphrodite, a very different and more mature work by de Larrabeiti.)