Days of Future Past

This piece irks me, for many reasons...

http://www.salon.com/books/fiction/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/12/16/21st_century_science_fiction

SF didn't run out of things to say; it's just that people stopped paying attention to it.

The Creation

Today was the Chicago Marathon. Great weather for it. Yawn. Great weather all around -- it feels like a summer day, although quieter and milder. Good stuff. I had the boys out at a playground, where they were busy climbing trees. Very cute.

Nearly 40,000 words on the current book. I'm on track to finish the first draft by month's end, which'll be cool. Then a few weeks of revision, and then the slog of trying to find a home for it, which is always rough. Writing is like talking -- everybody thinks they can do it, but few people actually can. Sort of like this...

Dogs are nice.

Very clear and obvious sentiment, right? Anybody could say that. That's where most people are at, when they say "Oh, I can write."

Dogs are nice. Well, maybe not all dogs.

Some people are maybe at that level, allowing for a little more complexity to the mix.

Dogs are nice. Well, maybe not all dogs. Like Moose, the dog that lived in my neighborhood where I grew up. He was a Yellow Lab, a big dog with baleful brown eyes and a bad habit of chasing kids down the street, bellow-barking at them as he went.

Still more can maybe get that far. Maybe not even that well, but they can at least string a few notions together.

Dogs are nice. Well, maybe not all dogs. Like Moose, the dog that lived in my neighborhood where I grew up. He was a Yellow Lab, a big dog with baleful brown eyes and a bad habit of chasing kids down the street, bellow-barking at them as he went. He ruled the block, was the baron of the boulevard, this braying hell hound. The problem was that he lived at the corner of my bus stop, where I would have to catch the school bus. And every morning, I'd have Moose chasing me down the street, scaring the hell out of me. Then, one day, Moose caught me on a bad day, something had pissed me off at school, and Moose came running at me, barking like he always did, and I saw him and I roared at him in rage, arms held out. Moose froze in his tracks -- the look on his face was priceless, like this blend of surprise and horror, a body-wide spasm of terror as he realized that his bluff had been called. For a split-second, we faced off, and then I began to chase Moose down the street, not entirely sure if the dog was going to go at me or whether he was going to run away, and, on that day, not caring (and I don't quite remember why I was so mad). I was gratified to see Moose take off, running away from me -- for the first time in my childhood, great big Moose the Mutt was on the run. He took off, periodically turning to see if I was still chasing him. And I still was. I was completely going after that goddamned dog. I pursued him all the way to his yard, before leaving him alone, breathless, pleased as could be. Fucking dog. He left me alone after that. In fact, Moose wanted to be my friend after that, with the ineffable dog logic going on -- the same dog that had hounded me day after day, once he realized that I would absolutely go after him if he fucked with me again, THEN he wants to be my buddy. I was the only kid on the block who got on Moose's good side. We were pals.

And so on. And on, and on. The above paragraph is only 376 words, and it's a simple memoir-style narrative, nothing even fancy. A novel is at least 80,000 words.

Most people don't write not only because they can't write (let alone write well, or convey ideas evocatively), but they don't have the stomach for it -- the raw thanklessness of it, the endless call of the words, to say nothing of the nature of characterization, plot, description, storytelling, exposition, narration, theme, metaphor, revision, rewriting, etc. -- most people have better things to do with their lives than write -- like watching paint dry, like getting root canals, driving off cliffs -- any number of worthwhile things.

It's comforting from an ego perspective to think "Oh, I could write a novel if I wanted to." Any time somebody says that, I say "Go for it." It's so much harder than you know. And only people who really, really love it will put themselves through it. The same goes for all creative endeavors -- even though creative things make our lives worth living, make them meaningful and rich and fun -- most creatives are not well-valued or even well-compensated. But all human progress flows through them, whether it's realized or not. Human progress flows from the visionary, and the creatives express their visions through their works, benefiting humanity at large.

It's like the anonymous caveman who made the sculpture of the pretty girl, the Venus of Brassempouy. One of the earliest renditions of a human face...

Now, I can almost hear Anonymous Caveman's buds going "Gronk? Why you sit there stare at Ooona? Why you make THING with your scraping stick? We busy throwing rocks in gorge. You come! You throw, too!" And Gronk shrugs, hides it from them, or else flaunts it. But Gronk made it, and it survived (they estimate it was made ~25,000 years ago).

Ooona must have been a paleolithic hottie, or at the very least, had bitchin' hair, since Gronk lavished attention on those plaits and/or braids she was sporting (or else the hood she was wearing -- it impressed him). All of Gronk's aesthetic choices are curious to me, how he marked her eyes and nose very clearly, but gave her no apparent mouth, and took great care with her hair, which must've really impressed him. Some cavebabe inspired Gronk, and Gronk did her justice in his creation. Maybe he thought it would give him magic powers over Ooona, or maybe he wanted to flatter her with the piece.

The very human, very wonderful nature of that moment, captured in a bit of mammoth tusk, communicates the delightful power of art, and how the seeming pointlessness of it is precisely its magic -- both of them -- creator and subject -- are long, long gone, but that creation endures and survives them. And, yes, I think it was a guy who made it, like many of those early Venus sculptures.

Not everything that's created is worthwhile, but that drive to create something beautiful, however it is done (and however it is defined) is a vital (if thankless) human process that is necessary for our betterment as a species. If art dies, humanity's soul dies with it.

Anyway, end of the month, I should be done. And then my usual cure when I'm done with a piece -- more writing. Hahah!

Ghostly

So, I'm very nearly done (FINALLY) with "Ghost Story." A few comments before I am done with it...

I feel it’s clunky, and has a lot of shallow stuff thrown in there without much behind it – like a zombie marching band playing a bunch of kazoos (and, sadly, there’s even a peripheral character in the book, Dr. Rabbitfoot, who would likely lead such a band). Stephen King gushed about this book, but I just don’t see the attraction. It's like watching something through glass block -- hell, even that would be more terrifying. There’s only one scene that had any kind of bite for me, and even then, it was more a nibble than a bite – like a case of potential there that wasn’t realized. The whole book is very, very arm’s length, which (at least to me) violates the spirit of what Horror could/should be.

I have a theory, maybe that Straub is a conservative, and this is a conservative person’s Horror novel. Now, Horror is, by its nature, a conservative genre – that’s where the horror comes from, like the outraged sensibilities and the capacity for revulsion and terror at the Other.

BUT, by saying that it’s a conservative’s Horror novel, it’s like it’s ARCH-conservative – now, lest you think there’s some overtly political slant to it, it’s not there. But I can sniff out people’s stances, and my sense is that Straub has this Idea(tm) of Good, Decent People(tm) – MEN, in particular, up against an ineffable, horrible, Female Evil(tm) that upends the Proper Order of Things(tm). Which is certainly a component of classic Horror. I get that.

However, he can’t really properly characterize anybody in it – not the male characters, nor the female menace. They’re cardboard cutouts, and the reader is supposed to be hit by it, like “OMG! What an outrage! How HORRIBLE!” – like bad service in a restaurant or something: “Well, I NEVER—” – that kind of fuddy-duddy, pajamas-n-slippers sensibility. It’s like the cliché of how men aren’t in touch with their feelings – none of the men are really in touch with their feelings; they’re all fucking uptight, totally hemorrhoidal, so the “wild” Evil(tm) just upends things, but he can’t find the “emotional pool” (hah!) to offer the right sell, beyond the fuddy-duddy-ism.

Maybe it hit a note in 1979, but in 2010, I’m thinking “WHERE is the horror, here?” Not finding it. I was really hoping for sizzling slabs of Horror, or even a proper ghost story (I mean, "Ghost Story," right?) But, instead, none of the above -- the baddies are these shapeshifting spirits (?) that basically mindfuck people and make them kill themselves (but you never really properly see this -- Straub "averts the eye" in most of the encounters, which is doubly damning, because the detail isn't much there to begin with, so you're peeking through the glass block of his prose, trying to see what's going on, and just when you think you can see something moving back there, he shifts the scene and you're someplace else). Legerdemain.


Admittedly, the Ghost Story is the hardest kind of Horror story to write -- it really is, but that just requires one to apply oneself harder to it. There's a kind of dueling banjos of ineffability in play with "Ghost Story" -- the main characters aren't fleshed out well enough for their back story to have much meaning, and the villain is so diaphanous and chimerical as to be similarly meaningless. It's kind of my rule with fiction -- "anything goes" is almost the same as "nothing to see, here," bizarrely enough.

I went in with an open mind, but Straub lost me with the overlong and plodding prologue, and he just dug himself in deeper. I mean, I'm glad that the book served him well and let him build a career and a reputation, but I wasn't convinced by this effort.

Poor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. -- his last movie appearance, I think...

"Ghost Story" (1981)

Which took about a paragraph from the book and made it into a whole movie that was mediocre at best. I'd always held out hope that the book would be better than the movie, but I can't really say it's so. The above scene is actually scarier than anything in the book, which says something, right? (and, yes, the hokey nature of that death scene is editorially right in step with the book). Oh, and it looks like they CGI'd up the ghost in the movie, which sucks -- the original looked scarier.

Hmph

I am still not getting why "Ghost Story" had received so many plaudits. I'm just not dazzled by it. Not the writing, not the story, nothing. I've got about 200 pages to go, and I'm still not floored or scared by it. I'm really hoping Straub delivers, but I don't think he has, yet. It's like when people would rave about Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica" -- I remember listening to it and thinking "WTF??" Whatever it's about, I'm not getting. And I try to be open-minded, to approach it without judgment or reservation. It's like the movie, "Inception." That movie was a grave disappointment to me, and I thought "How can people be thinking this is such a great movie?"

Telegraphy

*pant pant* I'm on page 300 of "Ghost Story," still soldiering on. He's doing it yet again, over the span of two pages...

"...craziness..."
"...saw the fractured light in his eyes..."
"...that underneath the 'stayin' sane' kind of craziness there was another, real craziness."
"...saw his eyes gleaming between the lashes..."
"...and his eyes gleamed..." (same paragraph as the first gleaming-eyed bit)
"...grinning maniacally..."

Book Report Voice: I think this character is going crazy.

(cue telegraph operator, dot dash dot dash dot dot dash)

a/c

I keep reading "Ghost Story" because there is some bleakness to it that is intriguing, even if the mechanics of the writing claw at me still. I'm giving him the benefit of a doubt, that the trip'll be worth the destination.

Got the a/c on tonight, as it's a bit warm this evening.

B1 cuted me out -- he said of someone he knows, "She's very reactive; she's just like magnesium!" That made me smile. He also said his name was "like an ocean." I loved that, too.

Ghostwriter

So, I keep soldiering through "Ghost Story." I have a problem with Peter Straub's writing, which feels sort of clunky to me, almost stodgy. And it doesn't have to do with the geriatric characters in the book -- it's his manner of writing.

One thing he does (repeatedly) that drives me bananas is his tendency to restate something. For example, in one chapter, he refers to a particularly character's passivity about seven times -- it keeps popping up while referring to the character, and it makes me want to say YES, I GET IT. SHE IS FUCKING PASSIVE. Same chapter, he mentions that character's "ironic smile" -- over and over again, maybe five times.

It wasn't just that one chapter -- it happens throughout. Now, this could've been fixed with better editing -- had I edited the book, I'd have queried the author and said as much: "Au: You mention her 'passivity' and 'ironic' smile 5-7 times in this chapter; is there another way to put this?" Or something like that.

Similarly, there was a point where he mentioned a group of characters drinking whiskey, neat. And less than a page later, one of the characters is drinking "another cognac" -- I'm like "Buh? ANOTHER? He was drinking WHISKEY." Again, it's an editorial complaint, although, had I written that scene, I sure as hell would've gotten that right.

But he has this elliptically leaden way of writing that goes something like this...

"Martin put his hands into his pockets and found nothing but bits of shredded paper that had been through the laundry, so they were more like paper pills. A car drove past him, splashing oily water in a pothole as it went. An old Lincoln. Martin gazed at the bits of shredded paper and wondered what he'd put on them. Laundry lists? Old receipts?

Martin looked at the old Lincoln at the stoplight, waiting for red to go to green. The pothole water stilled, oily-brown. Then he looked back at the paper pills in his hands, and wondered what he'd put on them, and how he'd forgotten to take them out of his pockets when he'd done the laundry. Because he was usually rather fastidious. The light turned to green, and the old Lincoln drove away, leaving Martin wondering what he'd written on those paper pills in his pockets that he'd laundered."

Now, I'm just winging that, but just imagine hundreds of pages of that, sort of looping and backtracking and looping, almost like Straub was trying to remember where he was going while writing it. Again, a better editor would've queried it and tightened up the prose. Given that the book was written in 1979, when fiction editing was still a credible profession, I'm sort of surprised by it.

Had to run through that one chapter, since I wanted to take a highlighter to it (but, it being a library book, I abstained, naturally, Gentle Reader)...

"Her mouth was bracketed by two faint lines of irony."
"...the faint lines beside her mouth twitched as if at a private joke."
"...to mark an intense passivity."
"...like a princess in a tower."
"...the ironic, tactful passivity of the beautiful..."
"...her passive self-sufficiency."
"...a soft, almost invisible irony..."
"...the princess locked in the tower of her own self-regard."
"...the veneer of disinterested irony."
"...essentially passive."
"...an androgynous quality to her passivity..."

And so on (and it does go on).

Now, Straub is writing as another writer in the scene above, so one might think he's adopting a "style" by inhabiting the novelist character, but the problem is that this kind of backtracking occurs throughout the book, where the reader is bludgeoned into submission by the repetition of those details.

I prefer not to force-feed the reader with literary foie gras. I think that everything in a scene should matter, every detail, and if you're forced to backtrack, it's a problem of the original setup of the scene. The above is like telling a joke repeatedly to the same audience member -- each successive pass of that same "joke" offers diminishing returns, until the audience gets frustrated and annoyed.

But the above is really an editing problem; the fiction editor should've noticed this tendency and queried it, tried to get him to get his point across without using the same words over and over again.

And, no, I'm NOT going to tell you what Martin put on those shredded bits of paper. ; )

Wetday

Man, another rainy morning. Storms and such. No big deal, but it's wicked humid and rainy. I had the boys all dressed for it and ready, and wore my slicker, so it was all handled.

I got a library card again yesterday, after work. I picked up Joshua Ferris's "And Then We Came To the End," a much-ballyhooed first novel circa 2007. It was third on my list of to-get books from the library (the other two weren't there, were at other branches). Anyway, for a book that was roundly hailed as a masterwork, I dunno. I'm reading it, but it's not sending me into the stratosphere. Some of the narrative choices he made in the book are like itching powder to me. But I'll soldier through it.

Speaking of soldiering, I stumbled onto "The Ruins" on FX last night. I had read that book years ago (hadn't liked it overmuch, and had issues with some of the ways the writer had set things up). But anyway, it was damned gruesome -- the movie kept pretty close to the story, and the gore was particularly skin-crawlingly icky. The crowning irony of our censorious society -- violence is fine, but no sex -- so you can show somebody carving themselves up with a knife, but don't show tits and ass. Anyway, I'm pretty jaded where horror movies are concerned, but some of the stuff they showed was still damned icky.

I cooked a terduchen last night! Ha! I saw it at the grocery store, and had to snag it -- turkey stuffed with chicken and duck (and pork sausage -- so does that make it a terduchenpor?) Anyway, it was good, a lot milder than I thought it would be. It was a total meat bomb, however. I had some and thought "Wow, that was almost a deadly amount of meat." And practically had meat-overload-induced aphasia. Exene was amused, said "You've lost the power to speak?" Before going into a mild food coma, I managed to stammer out that it was an ideal dish for her family, that I could see them tackling a 15 lb. terduchen and digging it mightily. I'd not make terduchen a regular part of my diet, but it was pretty damned good. I had to try it. Has that same over-the-topness of something like Beef or Lamb Wellington.

Bradbury on Writing

This clip of Ray Bradbury is enjoyable, although he grew up in the golden age of short speculative fiction, where there were plenty of venues for short stories of the type he writes/wrote. Not saying it can't be done, but it's a lot harder in genre fiction to find homes for your work, let alone paying gigs (where, paradoxically, more and more writers are competing in fewer and fewer venues with ever-diminishing readership/circulations, for less and less pay). The kind of Horatio Alger story Bradbury actually experienced is a much unlikelier tale these days.

I banged out 3000 words this morning on the new project -- I never call it a "book" when I first start it, because it's not a book until it's done. But it was nice to get that much down on the front end. I'm going to try to get back to my old turnout level of around 3000-6000 words a day. When Exene's out of my daily mix, I should be able to get even more words down.

Wah wahhh

Something about a published novelist writing an online article whining about how hard writing is irks the fuck out of me. Any creative endeavor is all about a huge investment of energy and time. Writers write. Simple as that. Do it, and deal with it, and count yourself very fortunate that you manage to score a book deal for your troubles. So, it took you ten years to get it done? Well, so what? At least you have something tangible to show for it. I soldier on because writing is fun for me, and rather than it being hard NOT to write (alright, I write constantly, one way or another, so maybe this doesn't quite come up for me), but I understand that there's no penalty whatsoever to not writing, except the understanding that I'm not writing. It's integral to my happiness that way. I never whine about it; I just do it.

And for somebody who managed to actually see their book published? What the fuck is there to complain about? As someone who many disparate readers tell me routinely that I'm a really good writer who is also perennially rejected by editors, were I to actually find a home for one of my books, I'd do a happy, happy dance. I'd count my lucky stars. But this gal decided to whine about how long it took for her to get her work done? You know what you do to stop that? Write more. There's a certain narcissistic romance some writers engage in with the whole "Oh, if you only knew how I suffered!" kind of bullshit -- like ink-stained fingertips or a trembling hand on a sweating, aquiline brow leaving an inky smear upon it. To create is to swoon. Oh, the humanity. Give me a break.

There's no penalty for not writing. You do it because you're compelled to do it. And there are few true satisfactions in it (at least in terms of appreciation, recognition, and reward). But do it I always will, because it's just who I am. If a book takes ten years to write, maybe that's how long it took to sort out that particular story's problem. Or maybe you don't have that much to say as a writer, and it didn't inspire you. Who knows? The only cure for writing is more writing, and that can be said with any creative endeavor, and only creatives get this. Non-creatives may think it's a waste of time, or may think they can do it, but they can't (and don't and won't -- you all know who you are, you "idea havers" and so forth who have a great idea you never actually write or create). The ones who can simply do it. Ideally, you make something worthwhile, something you enjoy, and better still, something beautiful that others can appreciate, too, and still better, something others will buy from you, for fuck's sake, so you can carve out the time to do more and more of what you love. But it's really the process that drives it. That's the furnace within that stokes the creative spirit.

Maybe this writer in that article is really privately worrying that, having sold one book, one that took her a decade to write, that she's got nothing more to say. Who knows? She is right that reaching an ending is vital. Get it done, or else it's just an open wound. And please, please don't whine about it.

Gnash gnash

This makes me gnash my teeth and stomp my hooves. Of course, the guy's pedigree (Iowa Workshop AND Harvard) no doubt helps, it still is killing me. Especially the reference about publishers scooping up paranormal tales -- which publishers?! AAAAUGH!

*GNASH*

"Bohemians Behaving Badly"

This title made me snicker. Not the book, but the SALON article title.

Hemingway on Hyenas

Saw this blurb in a SLATE piece on hyenas, and it made me snicker. Ernest Hemingway on hyenas...

"Hermaphroditic, self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, foul with jaws that crack the bones the lion leaves …"

I love it, especially "potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept" -- bahaha! I imagine him drunkenly penning that, trying to get just the right flow. The above feels like a grumbly trail of invective -- it makes me want to describe various people I know in pithy sequences of description like that.