The Coevas are a group of Italian writers and musicians — they call themselves a “band literature,” and that’s how they write, as a group under a single name — who spin crazed sexual dreamy prose like William Burroughs cutting up Jean Rhys channeling Orpheus.
I need to get more of my own novel excerpts up so they can see how much we have in common — except for prose itself since I write nothing like them — but, angry women, mythic creatures, desperation, and Italy: we’re like twins separated at birth. They even blog-rolled Szymborska’s “Woman’s Portrait,” a poem my mother loved so much she took it on herself to translate it for me before she died.
Also I shout because they are my best online marketing class — they were the first writers to find my site and follow it, and it looks like that’s how they’re getting their word out, talking to one kindred spirit at a time. For a long time the Internet was the information superhighway, with all of us locked in our own subcompacts trundling along listening to crappy DJs and bad commercials. Now it’s a train station cum block-party for us bloggers, and The Coevas pointed the way for me. Thanks!
Hi Coevas! Rock on.
Category: ad-pre-2021
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Shout out to The Coevas
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Buying a Philip K Dick book (almost totally true)
Friday night after my son went to sleep, I walked up to Dupont Circle, to buy a Philip K Dick book as a birthday present for my friend V___. I gave her a copy of my novel too. It’s a rash and adolescent thing, to include one’s own writing along with Philip K Dick’s, but I did. Got punished in advance.
It was a warm summer night and I was dressed sloppily, shorts and mocs and a black T-shirt with a Triumph car logo over a Union Jack.
As I crossed P Street, a brown-haired white man blocked my path, clipboard in hand. This happens weekly. Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, US PIRG, Human Rights Campaign, all panhandling for virtue. But, I stopped.
“Excuse me,” the man asked, “but do you know where I can find an optometrist that is open twenty-four-seven?”
I looked him over. Isthmi of sweat on his black polo shirt. Gray jersey sweatpants in this heat. No non-profit badge. Crazy? Tourist?
“No,” I said. “We’re too liberal for a Wal-Mart around here. There’s an excellent hospital just a few blocks –”
“Yes, but I need an — I need, you know –”
“An eye doctor?”
“Yes!” he said, entirely too relieved that I understood him. Then the design on my T-shirt completely absorbed his attention. “Excuse me, but are you British?”
“No-oo. If you need a hospital, go down to 23nd Street and left five blocks –”
“But would they have any way of treating synethesia?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Drugs, maybe? I need to go –”
“Oh but thank you!” he said. “I really feel you helped me out. Is there some way I can recompense you? I don’t have –”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Just pay it forward.”
“Oh! Well. You know, I wish I could but I don’t have a sixth sense or anything?”
Ha. The Sixth Sense and Pay It Forward both starred actor Haley Joel Osment. ‘Method in it’ maybe, but I take the baby monitor after ten PM, and no one wants to be some sweaty loon’s Polonius. I walked away.
He shouted after me. “Don’t you think there should be seven senses, at least? Like, one of humor?”
One day non-profits will attack street performers for pissing off the bleeding hearts with schtick. Andy Kaufman was lucky to go first.
The bookstore was big and bright. I had hoped to buy my friend V___ a copy of Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, about an alien con man using a virtual-reality hallucinogenic chewing gum to become a messianic cancer. (Read it before you buy your wife a genetic upgrade.) Alas the only version in stock was one of four novels, in a staid black shrinkwrapped hardbound Library of America edition.
Doubly problematic. As a gift, one novel is thoughtful, four is peremptory. As a giver — OK, bear with me. I collected Philip K Dick books in my high-school days, long before he became respectable. I searched out all his yellowed paperbacks in any used bookstore I could find across America and Europe, less to own the complete set than to read his every fevered word. I am very glad he is being preserved for everyone on acid-free paper now, but for me, a Philip K Dick book without a luridly-colored cover misses an essential part of the experience, like an espresso in a sippy cup.
Of the others, the best choices were VALIS and The Man in the High Castle. I read pages of each. Both are gnostic texts, separated by two decades, showing Dick’s progress from a writer obsessed with the hidden to an ecstatic to whom truth was revealed. In The Man in the High Castle the Axis won World War Two, but one writer uses the I Ching to discover his world is a false one. VALIS is a thinly-veiled fiction of the visions Dick endured in the 1970s, which (after diagnosing his son’s inguinal hernia, which doctors missed) revealed a veil of false time had been drawn over humankind since the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 72 AD/CE, keeping us from the return of the Messiah.
I went with VALIS, mainly because it’s a more desperate novel, and also because it had a Roberto Bolaño blurb which would speak better to V___.
On my way out I saw the guy with the clipboard, heading to the children’s section, talking to a bookstore staffer. He spoke with a British accent now.
Some books just leak crazy, irrespective of space and time. An essential part of the experience. I walked home wishing what I’ve wished since childhood, that I could write half as well as Philip K Dick did without suffering quite so much. I worry that I can’t. I worry that I already have and missed it. -
Dark Consciousness
I have decided to come clean. I am not an atheist.
People who note the Abrahamic and Gothic mythologies behind my novel might be a little surprised to hear I ever thought I was an atheist. Thing is, they’re my mythologies too. I’m as entitled to use them to tell my difficult tales as the wonky Athenians were when they took up PTSD through the lens of oracles and furies.
But I thought I was an atheist. I evolved (I mean, a priori). I’m embarrassed by human religions, all illogically animist, perniciously tribal and desperately placatory. The bit in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, where the school choir sings “Oh Lord, please don’t burn us / Don’t grill or toast your flock”? Nutshell. I’ll give Christ points for trying but he got disillusioned hard — I suspect more by the carnival of Palm Sunday than the crucifixion that followed. Building your church on the guy who thrice denied you to the cops, and calling him your rock? That’s one bitter parable.
But I digress.
I just can’t in good conscience call myself an atheist anymore. It’s not even conscience. I recoil in my gut. It’s not merely how self-satisfied they are, from their eloquently brutal public advocates to the know-it-all kids in so many blog comments. It’s that they think they’re just as cosmically right as theists, and they’re not. There is more to heaven and earth, as Hamlet says. I know it in my bones, and to tell me I am wrong to trust this knowledge is as much a con as what the religious try to sell me.
I’ve been checking out agnosticism, which is slowly developing its muscles (and thanks to the wonderful Aldous, I’m open to any idea that comes from a Huxley). Again, the terms of debate all seem to rest on God’s presence or absence. Why must it be so reductive? Why begin with a God, a monolithic spiritual source — or its absence? Even matter changes rules from the very small to the very big, and “matter” itself seems to be a subset of things-that-are-not-energy. Such fecundity and contradiction in things we can see and touch, yet the immaterial is or isn’t in just one way?
I am declaring my own path, and maybe I’ll find fellow travelers. Here’s the map:
I know there is something beyond the physical. I don’t know if it moves mountains but I believe it moves crowds. I believe one day we will have words for it and a form of evidence-based science to explain it — at least as much as our little primate brains can hold. One day maybe our robots will intercede with it for us, as they do with planets now.
I suspect it is, or is found through, an emergent property of humanity or consciousness, just as consciousness is an emergent property of the systems that regulate the disparate organs of single living things. Or not, or also: maybe a kind of life encompasses our own, as we encompass E. coli; maybe it inspires us to write holy books and seek oracles so we treat each other nicely and don’t poison it.
And, sometimes, inevitably and probably usefully, it gets nasty and horrible in the worst ways, echoing and expanding the damage of our own puny venal selves. As all our burning hydrocarbons make tornadoes and hurricanes, as supernovas kill their own worlds and make new ones.
Something is there. What it is, I don’t know. I am OK with that; I even think it a strength. I can contemplate it without preconceptions. I can break bread with the religious, in its generous spirit, learning the peripheral truths of their myths, without being bound by miserly dogma — and without the burden of contempt.
Something is there. We have only known about dark matter for a couple of decades, and all we know for sure is that without it, the universe doesn’t hold together.
Call this, dark consciousness. I believe in it. I have faith.
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Progress Report
I’m sorry to have gone dark the whole summer but I was busy. We’re building a house, my dad had heart surgery, we even had a vacation — but mostly, I’ve been working.
With the huge help of star editor Kathryn Johnson I finished the third draft of my novel, retitled it (another post to come on that alone), and got some marketing pitches ready for the amazing grueling AgentFest, a speed-date of three-minute pitches hosted by ThrillerFest in New York City.
ThrillerFest was somewhere between a game change and a Hail Mary for me. I wrote a literary fantasy about globalization, not the most natural fit for a thriller convention, but it worked.
As a science-fiction fan, I know and respect genre writing, for the devotion of its fans and for the energy of its writers. It makes for a powerful combination. Genre is the farm-team of literature, where what the literary-minded will read in a decade is going on right-right-now. See Cormac McCarthy for Westerns, Neil Gaiman for fantasy, William Gibson for increasingly less fictional fiction, just to name three. (We already live in Philip K Dick’s world, of course.)
I also engaged the publishing world on its own tough terms and not in some fantasy of gilt-edged pages and brandy. You get that later but only if you get yourself out now. Agents have narrow specializations but they are not capillaries; if they can work a paranormal thriller, they can sometimes work a meta-paranormal-thriller — if it’s worth the reading.
And, I learned my book was still too long. I had already trimmed a lot of fat and rearranging the chapters got rid of some scaffolding. But the writers who generously shared their time, both at and away from the lectern — big thanks especially to Steven James — made it clear that publishing can be as brutal about size, as modeling. There’s no one piece of writing in my novel I valued more than getting published.
For the last six weeks of summer I cut a minimum of thirty words a page. It added up to 19,000 words.
Sometimes it was easy, albeit humbling. A robot needs to know that opening the door requires turning the knob first, but a person doesn’t. The This of the That became the That’s This more than I care to admit. Sometimes there was just some fine metaphor that alas wouldn’t get a character to the next moment worth tweeting. Once in a lucky while, I found some bits that were still confused or plot-holed, and the work was no longer shaving but sculpting.
It’s done now, and another post will detail the surprising post-partum depression behind those three words. Of course it won’t be “done” til it’s on a shelf or an e-reader following a transfer of funds, but I’m now finally at the point where the only reason agents won’t like it is because they don’t think they can sell it.
For the next month I am finally making this blog into a thing of substance, and sending out a whole lot of queries. Wish me luck and come back tomorrow! -
Worms made the world and the world is their art
I have written in the past about my wonderful compost and its happy population of worms, which do much more of the work of composting — pretty much all of it, in fact — than I ever suspected when I threw a few into the container.
A recent Science News article on fossilized worm burrows thus struck me deeply. The fossils from the Ediacaran period, 550 million years ago, may be the oldest example of animals turning the ground to look for food — and may have created new environments and new selection pressures. The idea is unproven and still controversial, but these burrows may be evidence that worm burrowing started the Cambrian explosion, which produced most of the major animal groups around today.
The idea is charming and resonant. What if I and all the world I know around me are some great art grown by worms, tilling and tilling, for hundreds of millions of years? What if the Anthropocene era is simply the latest of their fads and genres, the slam poetry to their gymnosperm sonnets and dinosaur operas?
In Proverbs of Hell, William Blake wrote “The cut worm forgives the plow.” He may have been righter than he knew. Perhaps their forgiveness is not fortitude or patience, but the indulgent parent forgiving the biting three year old, the reader forgiving a paper cut. -
Political naiveté and general uselessness
A little while ago I posted a thought that perhaps the Republicans might see their way to backing some form of congressional voting for DC, with an eye toward upping the party’s standing among the moderate and meritocratic citizens of our nation’s capital.
My, I am naive.
I have been reading Geoffrey Kabaservice’s excellent and elegantly-written history Rule and Ruin (full disclosure: Geoff’s a friend and a groomsman), which explains the how and the why of what the media has christened the rightward tilt of the GOP in the past fifty years. As Kabaservice makes fascinatingly clear, it was not a tilt but a putsch, a dedicated effort by devotees one school of right-wing thought to gain complete control of the Republican party. To call these people — and by these people I mean the activists, not general-purpose registered-Republican voters — conservative is to redefine the term for there is nothing conservative about them. They are nearly anarchist, with a frontier mentality that views with suspicion anything that is not a fence and denies any sense of a shared commons.
Anyway. I see now the only way the Republicans want DC in their fold is as vassal.
Rule and Ruin is one of two texts lately that have given me some new food for thought. The other, lighter but also more pointed, was a New York Times magazine column (sorry, “riff” — really, the Gray Lady’s getting a little too hip) by Steve Almond, on how liberals are so busy indulging in right-wing political commentary, in order to enjoy their dudgeon, that they are failing to counter it by meaningful and useful acts.
I suppose I have been party to this — not to the point of listening to Fox News, but by watching satire shows and the circumlocutions of politicians on Sunday talk shows. (Really I listen to the rebroadcasts on CSPAN Radio — easier to do while gardening or ironing, and with no commercials — and much less now than I used to.)
It’s making me wonder if there is any value per se in being a well-informed citizen if I don’t do much about it. Certainly in uppity DC, as in most other places in the country, my value as a voter is meaningless thanks to the electoral college.
I need to find my inner Norquist on this one. -
Hey Republicans – show DC some love!
My hometown of Washington DC has a poor tradition of executive governance — or a tradition of poor executive governance — for many historical reasons, from patronage to developer money to strong social divides.
It also hurts us to be so monolithically of the Democratic Party. Last Tuesday was the primary election, which is effectively the outcome of the general election once the Democratic slate is chosen. Of that slate, more than half the council ran unopposed, and the one candidate suspected of gross campaign finance fraud won after his challengers split the rest of the vote.
I’m not going to go so far as to blame Republicans for this state of affairs but I think they are missing an opportunity. For all that they inveigh against Washington-the-symbol, Washington-the-city is a natural environment for Republicans. Some of us are wealthy and many of us are well-educated. We are reflexively meritocratic and more religious than most people expect. Want a Jewish trial lawyer who feels government has grown too intrusive? Want an articulate protest against gay marriage from a black Baptist who marched with Dr King? I’d be surprised if Republicans didn’t.
But local Republicans will never get traction here if national Republicans refuse to face the “statehood” issue. According to the Constitution, the District of Columbia is not a state, and thus has no vote on the floor of Congress. (By agreement our delegate can vote on House committees; we have no role in the Senate.) Making us a state would give us one representative for our population and two senators for our statehood, an outcome Republicans wisely don’t want.
I honestly think that most Washingtonians don’t want that either. Sure, our population equals Wyoming’s, but DC can barely keep its municipal house in order. That our local grandees would step onto a national stage and usefully discuss statecraft, presidential appointments and interstate commerce is not likely, and we know it. Instead of ignoring the issue Republicans should bluntly state why it’s a pipe dream and a non-starter. The columns would attack but columns are just paper. At least half of the city would agree.
If Republicans could find a way to make our delegate a full representative voting on the House floor, all but the most caffeinated of our activists would declare victory on the spot. All the win would go to the Republicans.
Years of courtship and prickly chaperons to follow, of course, but good governance and some respect would mean a lot to Washingtonians. In less than twenty years, I guarantee, that vote in the House won’t be the Democratic lock it is today. -
My hero Grover Norquist
The cost of the new extension of Metro mass transit trains out to Dulles Airport has ballooned and will continue to do so. A well-designed bus system would be as efficient but cost vastly less.
Buses are cheaper than trains, with volume sources for parts and no need for expensive rails. With dedicated lanes, a bus line would never have traffic jams. As in rail stations one could pay on entering the station not the vehicle. Buses could be triple length, like the segmented tractor-trailers that use Western highways, and so much cheaper that we would have many of them. One even has a choice of fuels, from gasoline to natural gas to electric batteries, and improvements can be incorporated quickly, unlike hard-to-adapt custom trains.
Twenty years ago I read an article in Scientific American about Curitiba, Brazil, a city in need of mass transit but with no money for rail. They designed a bus system for city streets, like a trolley car system but with no tracks or overhead power cables. If they could do that twenty years ago we could easily create a nice cheap bus system.
We Americans are too fat’n’happy to be satisfied with such a solution even as we rail against our wasteful national habits. I don’t mean to be a scold though since I was too fat’n’happy to raise the issue.
What if I had become a crank and sent photocopies of the article to every politician in the Metropolitan Area for the last twenty years? Might have come to nothing, at the expense of a little time and a little ego, but might have saved me more money in taxes in the long-run. I’ll never know but I should have tried.
In this spirit that I offer a tribute to Grover Norquist. Norquist is the head of Americans for Tax Reform, which has committed most of the right-wing leadership of the United States to a brutally simple pledge never to raise taxes, ever.
Though he attacks the slightest deviation from his orthodoxy, in interview Norquist is patient and tolerant, unconcerned with petty issues like comfort or dignity. I have seen him face down extraordinary mockery from liberal television satirists without raising his voice or losing his smile. His eyes are on his prize with a focus we would laud if it aimed at world peace or animal cruelty. He is the Dalai Lama of lower taxes.
I say with all sincerity, I hope to be the Grover Norquist of my own life. I hope that I can stare down all the no voices with such unflappability that I will make yes of them. -
Interleaving
In a marathon session a week ago I interleaved the chapters of the manuscript. As I posted earlier it was Kathryn Johnson’s idea. Until now the points of view alternated in long chapters of 8,000-10,000 words. By alternating individual scenes from these chapters I now change viewpoints every thousand words or so. A few chapters resisted interleaving but most folded into each other neatly. I am excited to try a new structure this late in the process.
The work of interleaving was programmatic: copy and paste, merge scenes for pacing. My weird obsessive ordering with numbers for each part helped hugely. The work had its own rhythm, in great part repetitive, so there was a benefit to sticking with it all afternoon. Still I am surprised. Clearly its structure was compatible, without my ever once making it so. I had been noodling with it for several days and here it just came together.
One help was to realize I didn’t need to renumber the chapters. Modern editing tools map heading lines but keeping the chapter number is extra information that people can use. There is even a hypertext element. My wife suggested having two different tables of contents, one where the reader follows the alternating scenes, the other where the reader alternates large chapters. -
Zombie corn
For the past three years I have composted our household plant waste. Coffee grounds, tea bags, kitchen scraps, forgotten vegetables gone bad. Our pet rabbit’s nitrogen-filled litter. We keep 3 gallons a week out of the waste stream, I have given no leaves for autumn collection since I started. Living lighter on the city land.
It has taken three years to fill, since in the compost the plants’ carbon shells dehydrate. All life is dust without water.
The compost is a green ventilated plastic cylinder 3 feet tall and wide. It has no smell when closed. Most people ignore it. Inside is a dense heavy loam, rich with concentrated organic matter. It has a thriving colony of earthworms and in warm weather is active with insects. Molds blow across like storms.
For the autumn Jackie hung dried corn cobs on our door. When the corn gave way to a wreath I broke the cobs and added them to the compost. The cobs were dry, the kernels stiff as cardboard. They had been washed in purple dye. I worried about chemicals but we had bought them at an orchard.
For a long time they didn’t decompose. Were they plastic? Just tenacious. One is now sprouting, nourished in total darkness by our rotting discards. It is a heady thing to see such life, too much for our scaly urban exteriors, when tickle becomes squirm. Perhaps this is the true collective fear that we stroke with zombie stories — the potential in our waste.
Rick Santorum has it wrong to say we should not serve the earth. It is a creation larger than we are and it houses us. It will be here long after we are gone and our kids will need it too. It is more deserving of love.