Anthony Dobranski Online

Tag: Dracula

  • Older words for the Internet

    Older words for the Internet

    I recently posted about a Japanese novel that a friend told me about more than twenty years ago. Another friend commented on the post with a small correction and a name — which has led me to the novel itself, Nogami Yaeko’s Hideyoshi and Rikyū, translated only four years ago. It’s been ages since I read any Japanese fiction so I am delighted to have this to read. (Review to come, but it has a cast of characters at the start so I already love it.)

    It’s this ability to tap into our friends’ and even strangers’ knowledge — what we already call the “hive mind” — that even after two decades still reminds us how wonderful the Internet is.

    As I also mentioned in that same post, some of my inspiration for my current book came from old novels. I’ve been struck how our age repurposes words with complex valences into positive ones. Wonderful, as used frequently in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, is always interesting but never joyful, with an edge of amazement and dread — maybe not mysterious, but much closer to uncanny. Now it’s a word for happiness, not reckonings.

    Maybe our culture insists that something known and witnessed can’t be scary — even if some things, like disease, are no less scary when exactly known. This faith, in the inherent goodness of understanding, has made wonder and amazement and fantasy and miracle, as nouns and adjectives, all upbeat in our time.

    We might want to revisit that.

    The Internet is wonderful in the Victorian sense, a intimidating marvel, disruptive of certainties. The recent saga of struggling retailer GameStop, preyed upon by few wealthy short-sellers who were in turn preyed upon by many not-wealthy small investors, is the latest example. The same hive-mind that happily breathes new life in the memory of an old conversation also lifts up the veils under which rich players make their money, exposing them to the same financial consequences they cause.

    Having someone’s fork and knife stabbed into their fat bellies is certainly wonderful, in that we’re all wondering at it. Good or bad, though, depends on where at the table you sit.

    Long ago, William S. Burroughs said something I admired, but never felt I fully understood: “Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.”

    I continue to wonder what the second part might mean. The first part is happening, and already it destabilizes certain cozy financial arrangements, not to mention our entire body politic.

    The Internet is a hell of a thing. We need older words for it.

  • How writers read (sometimes)

    How writers read (sometimes)

    After a month focused on marketing and promotion, I am back to writing my maddening current novel, a science fiction set in a future war-ravaged Budapest.

    It’s maddening because I set myself goals that are hard to square. For one, or one pair in opposition, I want to give the book a pre-modern European patina, but I also want to keep it short and pointed — the formal elegance without the pastiche.

    I clearly needed a little inspiration. I’m intuitive when it comes to getting what I need. Like Philip K Dick’s Golden Man, I have no forethought; only an inadvertent method-acting, the way that some travelers unthinkingly restyle their hair to local norms. I really don’t know myself, at all. Existential panic notwithstanding, it’s a huge timesaver.

    Anyway. Without wanting to or planning to, I’ve lately been drawn to books and audiobooks that feel pre-modern.

    I started with Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris, a heady book with lovely imagery, but I didn’t go far in it. I love VanderMeer’s work but I wasn’t reading to read. My artistic needs were guiding me, and Ambergris‘s thickly-layered lavishness was going to bust open my style if I lingered too long.

    A conversation led me to the audiobook of Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, a novel told from the diaries of two feuding late 19th-Century British magicians.* This might seem the perfect inspiration — my book is also a diary, and its writer discovers a secret — but honestly it wasn’t planned. Despite the interesting excerpt in the bookstore, I actually bought the audiobook wondering why the hell I was doing it; I had work to do and other books in my pile. Eventually I understood.

    The end of my intuitive tour was a very fine audiobook of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which I haven’t read since adolescence, but know well in memory. By now you’ve probably caught my drift — a diary of a trip to a remote castle in Hungary! the discovery of a dark secret! the need to find hidden resolve! Just the hairstyle I needed! I won’t finish it, now that the sailing ship Demeter* has brought its vampire passenger to England. I have work to do, and honestly, Lucy Westenra is annoying.

    It’s terrible to use books this way. If VanderMeer or Priest ever read this, they’ll likely feel like Salieri meeting Mozart in Milos Forman’s Amadeus — bitter and angry at some punk saying “a funny little tune, but it yielded some good things.”

    Alas, I’m just a writer. And, you know, it is what it is. It has always been.

    Long ago in Tokyo, a colleague and friend once told me about a novel she enjoyed,*** about the friendship between a shogun and an aesthete. The scene she retold sticks with me, and I think of it often:

    The shogun gets word that the aesthete has grown a magnificent garden of gorgeous chrysanthemums. The shogun sends word that he wants to see it. When he arrives, he finds all of the flowers have been hacked down. Furious, he marches into the house — and there finds one chrysanthemum, the best chrysanthemum of the whole garden, in a vase.

    Life is cruel but it’s got nothing on art. Cruelest of all, is need.

    *Priest wrote a short book slagging Harlan Ellison for sitting on The Last Dangerous Visions for what was then twenty years (and now will be forty-five when J. Michael Straczynski finally issues it this year). Then, Priest wrote a book about a destructive feud. I wonder if he picked a fight for his own inspiration…

    **My book’s protagonist is named Dömötör, the Hungarian version of the name. This happens to me all the time. Any writer who is not a mystic makes a fetish of empiricism.

    ***Alas the novel had not been translated, I don’t know Japanese, and I have forgotten the title and author. Also forgotten, where I put my own diary of my trips to Japan.