Sailing: An Odd Essay

A Little Talk Against the Literary World

I love literature.  I love stories.  Science fiction, fantasy, “literary”, mystery – I love them all.  I’d love to get paid for writing them someday, so I keep submitting to different magazines.  Entering contests.  Practicing as much as I can, as time and energy permit.  One of those dreams which waxes and wanes.  The fact that it refuses to die even as I move into comfortable middle age means I’m more or less stuck with it.  That’s fine.  There are more dangerous and expensive habits than writing stories.

It was a treat when I got a copy of Boulevard in the mail a couple days ago.  I wasn’t expecting it.  I’ve enjoyed the magazine in the past.  I guess a one-issue subscription was included in my entry fee for a contest I entered last year.  So I threw it in my bag and flipped through it on my lunch-break today.

I love stories, but I’m under no illusions that telling a good yarn is more important somehow than, say, building a house or changing a timing belt.  I’ve never forgotten what Lin Yutang wrote in the preface to Moment in Peking:

What is a novel but "a little talk," as the name hsiaoshuo implies? So, reader, listen to this little talk awhile when you have nothing better to do.

Isn’t that a lovely, remarkable, and humble statement?  He’s written a novel and he hopes you enjoy it…when you get around to it.  Novels are polite that way.  They’ll wait.

I don’t mean to say that a good story can’t be life-changing and world-altering, as well as entertaining.  But then, “a little talk” can be all those things at once as well.  (And a new timing belt can get your engine to run for another 200,000 miles!)

“Literary” types, in general, tend to take themselves a lot more seriously than Lin Yutang.  (I suppose if I paid $100,000+ for an MFA in creative writing I probably would too.) 

The Symposium that Boulevard printed in this issue (nos. 71 & 72) made me chuckle.  From the description in the table of contents:

There is a powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe is still the center of the literary world…not the United States,” Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, recently said.  “The US is too isolated, too insular.  They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature…That ignorance is restraining.”  Do you agree or not?

Engdahl’s statement seems so absurd on so many levels, I can see why there might have been a temptation to use of 24 pages of a lovely journal talking about it.  But wait.  No, I can’t. 

I mean, honestly!  People in America are going to write books about Americans that appeal to other Americans because that’s what’s of interest to Americans.  Europeans are going to do the same.  Europe might have its countries crammed a little closer together and so some kind of inter-cultural dialog might come a little more naturally to them.  But to say this makes them the center of the literary world…what the hell is the “literary world?” 

I guess you could say that Europe is the center of the literary world the way that France is the center of the wine and cheese world, China is the center of the Kung-Fu movie world, India is the center of the extravagant musical world, and Japan is the center of the Sushi world.  Doesn’t mean I can’t have some pretty good sushi in Boston.

Engdahl has already said that his statements were "perhaps a bit too generalizing".  That’s fine.  We all shoot our mouths off once in a while.  It’s just a little talk.

Just seemed a shame to give 24 pages of Boulevard over to it.  I mean, my story submission could have been in there, instead.

Congrats to Pratchett

Terry Pratchett has just been knighted.  This is great news!  If you're a fan of his already, you know why.  If you've not heard of him, you have an adventure in front of you which I envy.

The knighthood doesn't make up for the early-onset Alzheimer's, but...  At least we humans know a good thing when we have it, even if God doesn't.

And speaking of God, Pratchett gets my quote of the year award for this gem:

"I'm a humanist, which means I'm an atheist.  The trouble with being an atheist is that it lets God off the hook. You really want someone to blame."

William Gibson's Spook Country and the Modern Age

I finished reading William Gibson's Spook Country today, and enjoyed it, as I have enjoyed his other works.  And I was surprised, upon flipping back to the "Other Titles by..." page at the beginning of the book, to discover that I've read every one of his books, over the years.  What's strange is that this man's entire professional life in fiction has passed through me, pleasantly enough, and I can't remember much more from the books than a lingering mood.

Structurally, his works are all very similar.  Three main characters from differing economic strata get alternating chapters in which to move the plot forward.  They come together somewhere near the two-thirds mark of the book to change the world in a fundamental but quiet way.  The greater public doesn't realize the kind of fundamental change they've lived through during the action of the novel.  The main characters drift off into the white noise of the modern world again. 

Reading Gibson has been compared to listening to Philip Glass.  I agree.  Those interwoven character-threads support the comparison.  And, like Glass, he's all shimmering surfaces, steel and mirrors and plate glass, the little daily struggles and deals that inch us towards the next key-change, like a violin repeating the same major fifth for so long you only notice in retrospect that it's been playing fourths for a few minutes, now. 

His books are accented with neuroses and oddities of modern life, the sorts of things you read about in Wired or boingboing: locational art viewed through VR helmets, a neurological disorder that causes a physical reaction to certain advertising mascots, abandoned urban structures re-purposed for communities of down and out squatters, a Hispanic girl named "Chia Pet McKenzie" because of a television ad her mother watched in the hospital. 

But there's nothing so jarring that we don't recognize this as the humdrum world in which we live, peppered as it is by small miracles.

Reading Gibson is like listening to Philip Glass the way listening to Philip Glass is like riding the subway from one end of a line to the other.  You see so much of the same stuff along the way that it's surprising to step off in a place different from where you got on.

His later works seem gentler than the earlier ones.  There's less shock, less violence.  And whatever conflict lies at the core of the story is buried so deeply that we're carried through to the end uncertain of what was at stake, here. 

Maybe this is the result of an aging author growing more comfortable with his trade.  Or maybe it reflects the fact that the world has changed, quietly but steadily, to more completely match his vision.  It's hard to believe now that Neuromancer, when he pounded it out on a manual typewriter in the early eighties (and where's the eBay listing for that famous machine, I wonder) was so groundbreaking that it actually coined the term "cyberspace".  We're living in his world, now, and his books have changed from edgy science fiction to contemporary thrillers to simply "modern literature."  And it's hard to tell if this is because his voice has changed or the world's categories have shifted.

Whether he can be credited with creating the world we live in, or influencing it some, or just observing and predicting with preternatural accuracy, I'm not sure.  But I'm inclined to go back and re-read some of those earlier books to try and put words to the mood again.  Maybe some of them will stick on the second ride through.  In any case I'd like to take a second look back and see if I can figure out what, exactly, happened.

New Space Opera from Iain M. Banks

I'm a little over halfway through Iain M. Banks's latest offering: Matter.

Banks is perhaps the only author whose books I will buy in hardcover.  (It's not the price as much as the bulk of hardcovers that turn me off.  They're uncomfortable to read.  It's not easy to slip them in a bag to take on the train.  And they contribute to the Dreaded Gross Weight of the Moving Van every time it's time to pack and go.) 

His science fiction is energetic and full of ideas without feeling weighty and pretentious.  He writes in the Space Opera sub-genre, rather than hard, science driven SF.  Think: battles in deep space, sword and laser blaster fights, rogues and scoundrels.  Think big, big toys, dangerous explosive toys, and just enough politics to throw all these toys at each other.  Think The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, but in a future as completely and vibrantly realized as Dumas's past.

Yes, you can have fun and adventure, and literary merit, too!

Banks has created a universe of intelligent machines, ships, and drones which are smarter than people, inscrutable, but working hand-in-hand with humanity to secure our interests and make life as comfortable for us as they can.  It's a much brighter vision of the future than the Vingean singularity which has taken hold in recent SF.   

Banks calls this civilization, quite simply, "The Culture."  Most of his SF novels are set here.  It's a world I'd love to live in the way a Tolkien fanatic would love to wake up in Middle Earth and start life there.

I just like his vision of the future.  Here's his explanation, from Matter, for how he sees societies evolving in the future:

"Avoid self-destruction, recognize--and renounce--money for the impoverishing ration system it really was, become a bunch of interfering, do-gooding busybodies, resist the siren call of selfish self-promotion that was Subliming [giving up on the material universe and opting for a technological, honorary godhood] and free your conscious machines to do what they did best--essentially, running everything--and there you were; millennia of smug self-regard stretched before you, no matter what species you had started out from."

I don't see it going this way, personally.  That's just not how economics work.  No matter how wealthy a civilization grows, people don't feel happy until they have a little more than their neighbors. 

But it's nice to imagine that we might reach a point where we have intelligent machines producing so much that we don't have to worry about money anymore, and we can free ourselves to concentrate creating art and building social capital.  (Cory Doctorow explores this idea too, in the much nearer term, with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, available to read free under the Creative Commons license here.)  So I hope he's right.

Matter is as big and ambitious as his other works.  He introduces Shellworlds: entire planets constructed of concentric spheres, each layer holding up the one above it with thousands of towers, each layer lit by artificial suns (massive mobile track-lights, essentially) and provided with whatever environment that level's species need to survive.  It's a construction on par with Larry Niven's Ringworlds in audacity and scope.  These shellworlds incubate simpler cultures, both human and alien, which haven't yet reached the level of sophistication they need to head out into the stars and join the galactic community.  Shellworlds are administered with a sort of benign neglect: let their inhabitants bumble their way to civilization, and don't interfere unless they start threatening their neighbors' societal evolution. 

So there's room in this novel for sword-fighting, cloak and dagger assassinations, and riding around on (essentially) dragons--as well as deep space battles between intelligent, luxuriously appointed star-liners. 

And it feels fun, not forced.

But it is a little draggy.  Hopefully Banks is still too young to suffer from late-author-itis, but a good editor could have cut down the word count by 25% or so. 

I'm enjoying it anyway for the breadth of vision, the sense of drama on scales from the personal to the galactic, the parallels between his societies' conflicts and those happening between the first and third worlds today, and, most of all, for the understanding that all an intelligence can do (whether it be human intelligence, or alien, or machine) is muddle along as best as possible in an attempt to leave the world a little better than it found it--hopefully keeping its sense of humor along the way. 

And I still want to live there.  That's why I'm going to finish this huge book, even if I'm not pulled through it as deliriously as I was by, say, Consider Phlebas.

But man, would Matter make a great movie. 

Not a lot of books do, especially not long ones. Double-especially not great ones.  (Witness The Golden Compass, where two hours of celluloid just didn't have room for everything Pullman was trying to say and the results were choppy and forced.)

Banks is a master of spectacle.  This book is 95% spectacle.  Banks said in a recent interview that, as soon as he's built something grand in one of his novels, he's thinking of a way to blow that shit up. 

You know what else captures spectacle really well? 

The movies! 

The Culture novels are not sequential.  Readers can start anywhere and have a good time.  I feel, though, that readers unfamiliar with Banks would be best served by starting with his first book, Consider Phlebas. 

But Hollywood should start with this one.  I'm thinking: epic feature film, 170 minutes, 190 tops.  We'd have a blast. 

Just so long as don't make it a trilogy. 

Escape Pod and the Science Fiction Community

Escape Pod has been such a part of my life for the past couple of months that I feel guilty not blogging about it until now. 

It's a Science Fiction short story podcast.  It's produced--and usually narrated--by Steve Eley, who started podcasting three years ago as a hobby.  Most of the stories have been previously published in established markets.  Eley buys one time rights for the podcast, produces it with professional quality narration and sound editing, and then releases it for free.  In addition to reading the story, he provides an intro--talking about what's on his mind that week and how it relates to the story--and an outro that includes user feedback from the Escape Pod forums on the story from a couple of weeks ago.

I burned a bunch of episodes to disk and started listening to them as I walked around the city or rode trains.  Now I play them whenever I'm in my little purple car.  One burned disk provides me with dozens of hours of free entertainment.  (I still haven't sprung for my own iPod.  It feels like an extravagance, when my $35 mp3 diskman works just fine--and I suppose I could use the Asus Eee as an iPod surrogate in the car, too, saving myself the even the cost of a CDR.)

I haven't jumped into the forums myself yet, although I look forward to doing so once I've caught up to the most recent stories.  The greatest pleasure of discovering this project so far along is having 150 episodes to catch up on.   I'm listening to them at the rate of two or three a day.

What's really encouraging is what Escape Pod means for genre fiction. 

I wrote a few months ago about the depressing sales figures for the major Science Fiction magazines.  When you aspire to write for a magazine that sells only a few thousand copies a month (down to about a fifth of their peak, in many cases), it tends to make you doubt the legitimacy of your life goals.  But I haven't been able to let go of the delusion that writing stories can be entertaining, even important.  After all, some people make a living writing fiction.  Not short stories, maybe.  But there's, what, three or four novelists making a go of it, right?  The odds may be worse than achieving rock-stardom, but it's the doing that's important, after all.  Right?  Isn't that right?

Well, the download counts on some of these podcasts blow those magazine sales figures out of the water.  Sometimes by a factor of 10 or more!  Now, granted, Eley's audience aren't paying for those downloads.  And he's only paying his authors $100 for a story.  As he says in one of his metacasts, this isn't rent money, it's beer money. 

But.  Each of those downloads represents someone who has listened to the story (probably), and become, at the least, a passive part of the community that has sprung up around these stories.  And that means, at least, that these stories matter to a decently-sized chunk of people. 

And maybe some of those listeners will fall in love with an author's work and, you know, go down to their awesome local genre-fiction shop and buy a book. 

Stranger things have happened.

In many cases I find the intros, outros, and reader feedback to be as interesting as the stories themselves.  They add tremendous value, and they generate a feeling of participation, discussion, and community.  It's like sitting among people who are real fans of this stuff and learning about their tastes and opinions, seeing how they match up with yours, where you agree and disagree.  It's a conversation about literature, and when's the last time you've had one of those outside of an academic setting?  When's the last time you had one for fun? 

I'd like it if he devoted a little more time to these discussions, especially the in the outros.  People who get bored by them could just skip to the next story, after all.  While those who wanted to see how our reaction to a story compared to other fans' can linger and listen.  (I suppose I could linger over these discussions in the forums.  But I can't web-surf in my car!)

Eley funds the project--and his authors--with sponsors in part, but mostly through donations.  I'll be making one soon in hopes that this doesn't go away.  Things look good so far.  He's expanded his efforts to create a horror podcast, Pseudopod, and a fantasy podcast called PodCastle which is launching April 1st. 

So if you haven't been a podcast listener before (I wasn't) this is a good place to start.  Self-selecting communities are one of the biggest pleasures of the internet, and with Escape Pod Steve Eley has created a great one.

Declining SciFi Journals

Cory Doctorow links to a rather sad article discussing the decline of science fiction magazines.  Or rather sad for me, at least, as it seems the journals I’ve been aspiring to write for don’t have many readers left. 

Cory’s arguments, as usual, have to do with making more material available to more people for free, and I agree with him.  The general rule for culture in the internet age, it seems, is that you have to give it away to keep it.

I think the biggest impediment to the magazines' sales is that there's no easy way for people who love the stories in them to bring them to the attention of other, potential customers. By the time you've read the current issue and found a story you want everyone else to read, the issue isn't on the stands anymore and the best you can do is to try to get your pals to shell out to pay for an ebook edition.

Contrast this with the online mags, whose stories stay online for months -- sometimes forever. If you love a story in Strange Horizons, you can paste a quote from it into your Livejournal, use the first line as your sig, email the URL to your brother, print the first page and tape it up in the toilet at work.

 
When I read Greg Egan’s mind-blowing story “Dark Integers,” in the latest Asimov’s, I immediately wanted to share it with a mathematician friend of mine, but I hadn’t read the rest of the stories in the magazine yet.  It wasn’t online (although you can read the first half of the story here) and my printer/photocopier was out of ink, so I ended up taking a razor to the spine of the magazine and giving him the first half.  It seemed a shame to butcher my copy - especially now that I realize how few of these things are printed.  But I was having the kind of experience I come to science fiction for, that feeling of wonder that you immediately want to share with friends, and getting the story into his hands was more important than maintaining my collection. 

Ironically enough I haven’t subscribed to a science fiction magazine (or any magazine) in years.  It’s too much fun to browse them at the bookstore, pick up Asimov’s this month, Fantasy & Science Fiction or Interzone next month.  And since I’m at the bookstore, cafe, or library every day writing anyway, I’m actually picking up magazines more than ever.  The fact is, I don’t mind paying for them at newsstand rates*, even if the material is available online for free.  They’re fun to collect, easy to carry on the train, and you can write notes in the margins with a pen.  And you don’t have to read long passages of prose from a computer screen.  But it would be nice if they were easier to share, digitally.

* I probably would save money and time if I just subscribed to the lot of them.  But then I wouldn’t get to walk to the bookstore and browse them first.  And as Kurt Vonnegut said, “The purpose of life is to fart around.”

S.M. Stirling's "Dies The Fire"

I’ve spent the last several weeks immersed in S.M. Stirling’s Dies The Fire, as well as it’s sequels The Protector’s War and Meeting at Corvallis.

These remarkable books start with a simple premise: What if most of the technology we rely on every day just stopped working? A wave of mysterious change sweeps across the earth, and in its wake all electrical devices fail, as do guns, internal combustion engines - in fact any high energy reaction.

The consequences are pretty easy to imagine. Automobiles crashing, planes falling from the sky, all that great apocalyptic Revelations stuff. And in the aftermath, food stores are going to run out, and anyone who can’t get their shit together and start feeding themselves in some old fashioned way - hunting or farming, basically - isn’t going to be long for this world. Not only that, but without working firearms in the hands of the military and police, people are going to have to learn to defend themselves with swords, bows, and arrows. After all, it’s a lot easier to kill the farmer and take his harvest than it is to grow it yourself.

This isn’t really giving too much away, as the premise of these books is laid out pretty clearly at the start. It’s no surprise that city-dwellers are doomed, as are 99% of the planet’s human population.

What is surprising is the complexity of the world Stirling conjures out of the aftermath. He’s spun a trilogy of 500 page doorstoppers out of this idea. They’re not the kinds of tomes I’m inclined to dive into. (In fact I picked up the first book unaware that there were two sequels.) Yet I’ve read with childish voracity, fighting sleep for hours at a time, and then had dreams about this world. This is straightforward, entertaining, narrative fiction at its finest, and no less educational or thought-provoking for all that. Think sword and sorcery but with a more plausible basis and a modern sensibility, with a good deal of Wild West thrown in, plus political philosophy.

What’s particularly satisfying is watching how the social patterns that we take for granted are destroyed at a stroke, and then built up again, step by step, over the ten years following the Change.

The characters who thrive after the Change are people we consider a bit wacky in the modern world: wiccans, civil war re-enactors, Society for Creative Anachronism and RenFaire types, bow-hunters, Tolkein fanatics. A world without technology is going to reward an atavistic skill set; when the guns stop working you’re lucky if you can shoot a bow. The books could have descended into wish-fulfillment, here, as if an author obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons were saying, take that, world, I’ll just tweak you so that my kind of people are successful! But there’s too much detail here for that, and too much honest richness and hard work.

And as these characters struggle to put their society back together, I was left with a new understanding of how we got where we are, in the modern world. Let’s give peace a chance, sure, but for most of human history we had to carry weapons and be ready to fight for what we built. And isn’t it a strange state of affairs it is that our biggest problem is having too much food and getting too fat? It’s not that long ago, historically speaking, that most of us were pulling plows, and lucky if we could keep an ox or two to help out, and really lucky if we could afford to eat an ox, once in a while.

Out of these simple biological pressures emerge patterns that seem perplexing in the 21st century: tribes and nations to divide the labor; warfare; hero-worship, legend and religion to provide social cohesion. Stories and myths are instructions, patterns that help us survive. (This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ argument that there is an Artificial God, but he’s no less real for the fact that we made him.) Battles between us and them are really arguments about patterns for living. Warfare seems ridiculous in times of plenty, but not when you’re struggling to bring in the harvest and the nation next to you is stealing your citizens for slave labor.

And it’s fascinating to watch characters born in the modern world looking to old patterns as they struggle to adapt to a truly post-modern world.

Stirling gets into a lot of politics and alternate history here, and he’s obviously a well-read and painstaking historian. None of that would matter if he didn’t also have a tremendous talent for character, pacing, and suspense. Not to mention kick-ass, gritty swordfights.

I’ve already bought two copies of the first book because I keep lending them out. Go buy your own.

* * *

UPDATE: I just noticed on Amazon that Stirling is starting a second trilogy set in this universe.

Claustrophobia

It is amazing to me that there is enough room in the world for everything in it, sometimes.

Like, I’m sitting in the library, and there’s hundreds of thousands of books here, rows upon rows, and I know that there’s floors above and below the one where I’m sitting with more books, and then there’s that whole other half of the library where all the books that aren’t out on public display are stored. And this is only one metropolitan library out of thousands in the world. And that of all the books that have been printed throughout history, this is but an infinitesimal sampling.

And I know that most of these books were probably pounded out on a keyboard like this one, and most of the older ones probably went through multiple drafts on paper, or maybe were written longhand. And as someone who’s attempted to write a few books himself, I know how much time and effort it takes, and how much paper can piles in the form of notes and drafts and correspondence, and how many meals are eaten and days go by and cigars are smoked in the production of even one of these books.

So sitting in a place like this I have to wonder - with this many books in the world, how is there room on the planet for anything but authors? And how hasn’t every available square foot of the earth’s surface been covered over with storage boxes of manuscripts?

Something similar occurs to me going through the programming guide on cable. There’s thousands and thousands of listings, just for what’s playing right now. And even more equipment, labor, and space goes into the production of a television program or movie than into a book. With all these people and places we see on our screens, how is it that every city street isn’t closed off for the capture of a few seconds of action for some production? And when you consider how many man-hours goes into the production of one episode of one sitcom, how is it that there are people in this world who don’t work in the production of media? And how are there any offices and homes and apartments left that are not part of a film set? How is there room in our landfills for anything except for discarded film equipment, cameras and tripods, and reels and reels of celluloid?

And yet outside the library it is difficult to locate a reader, never mind an author. And over the past year in Boston I’ve witnessed naught but one film camera. Really, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff going on too, on a small globe that you can fly around in just a couple of days. Lots of people rushing around doing stuff I can’t even understand. And this has been going on for quite some time. So how is it that this tiny planet has room for anything other than graveyards?

John Hodgman Reading at Brookline Booksmith

We got to hear John Hodgman give a reading from his book, The Areas Of My Expertise, last night in Brookline.  Hodgman is the slightly dumpy, boorish but lovable character who portrays a Windows PC in those ads for Mac computers.  He's also been a guest and a commentator (the "resident expert") on the Daily Show with John Stewart, as well as worked as a newspaper columnist and literary agent. 

His Wikipedia entry, which includes some great mp3 links, is here.

If you haven't checked out his book yet, give it a browse next time you're at the Barnes & Borders.  It's a fictitious almanac of obscure facts and random history (with lots about hobos) that are entirely made up, but sound as if they should be true.  Written with the same dry humor and told with the same straight face as he brings to TV, it also happens to be hilarious.

I think his brand of humor works so effectively because it mocks the generation we are just starting to forget, a generation which is recollected more fondly in joke and parody than in "real" history.  Because the generation just reaching adulthood now - people (gulp) younger than me - have never lived without electronic conveniences, medical and scientific wonders, and handicapped-accessible psychological counseling.  Further, they probably have never personally known anyone that hasn't, either.

And this is a good thing, I think.  Moving towards comfort and rationality has, for the most part, brought a great deal of happiness to the vast majority. 

But our grandparents can remember a time when their grandparents told them about hobos, or impressed upon them a fear of science, or made them memorize and recite something very like the "Six Oaths Of The Virtuous Child"  (which include I will forever make Science my Enemy) - the kind of pure nonsense which, through the power of repetition, came to influence their behavior for the rest of their lives.

And so how strange their grandparents' behavior must have seemed to our grandparents, who could not remember a time before battleships and automatic-transmission automobiles? 

By the time this knowledge came to rest in the rarely accessed portion of our own consciousness (of people like me and younger than me), it took, without our realizing it, the form of this parody of knowledge both extra-old and too-serious.  So when John Hodgman chronicles and points this out to us, it's ingenious.  All he had to do was take a bunch of our preconceptions out of the closet, dust them off, and show us how funny they are.

We're not laughing at hobos so much as we're laughing at how we've always thought about hobos. 

The cozy community setting of a basement bookstore book-reading was the perfect "old-fashiony" venue to share this sort of work.  The crowd was standing room only by the time we arrived, and we were packed down there in violation of several dozen fire codes, but it didn't ruin the atmosphere of a bunch of folk getting together to enjoy the wisdom of a wise but approachable, celebrity.  The presence of a guitar-wielding, coonskin-cap-wearing troubadour added to the old-timey, village gathering feel.

Hodgman shook things up at the end by conducting the question & answer portion of the evening via walkie-talkie.  (Reminding us how absurd that recent technology already appears.)  And his ability to answer any question on the fly with his convincing nonsense, was remarkable.  He's patented his own, wryer and drier version of Stephen Colbert's Truthiness. 

Someone asked him why water, which is odorless and colorless, always darkens the fabric it is poured on.  His answer had something to do with super-sharp molecular prisms, and it segued into the revelation that the earliest silhouette cutouts were created through a technique involving wet fabric.  When he was done, the audience broke into applause at the sight of a master at work.  This man could tell us anything, and we would love to believe it.

I didn't wait around for him to sign a copy of the book - mostly because the store sold out before I got to the counter.  It seems people really enjoyed participating in this nonsense.  It's a form of play we don't have occasion to use very often.  But when someone with a suit and a straight face stands up and tells us it's okay, everyone can have a good time.

 

I Would Give Everything I Own To Be Rid Of Everything I Own

Most days I would, at least when I'm feeling down.  This is the wish that has kept me up at night.  To be rid of houses, to unload that bulky old piano, to come out from under the ponderous weight of so many books, to flee the maintenance obligations of the boat that trouble my conscience every weekend.  By weight of by volume, there is little I would keep.  A hobo-sack, barely.  I could slip away in the night with it, unnoticed.  I'd keep one car, one laptop computer, six changes of clothes, and my wallet loaded with a library card.  Give me a bare apartment, painted white, with a futon, a table and chairs, one set of simple dishes.  Maybe I'd keep a TV for the video games - but no, my Xbox is starting to make a grinding noise and I barely use it anymore.  I've been pining for a digital camera for months, too - probably it's the only thing I'd spend money on at this point - but now I think I've sucked all the savor out of that purchase by anticipating it too long, like chewing an unlit cigar until it becomes too soggy to fire up.  So I don't want a digital camera; it's just another expensive toy to break down or lose. 

I might keep ten of my tobacco pipes and my copy of the Riverside Shakespeare. 

I suffer from Raistlin's curse.  That's why I don't want any stuff.  You can give me a shiny new toy and all I'll see is peeling paint and the wheels coming off.  I'll think, "great, another trip to the dump."  Raistlin was a character in a long series of novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, "mind-dribble fantasy," as Harlan Ellison would call it. It was part of a marketing machine for a series of Dungeons and Dragons modules.  The novels must have been good, though, as they're still in print, and there's even an annotated version of the original trilogy available.  If I wrote a trilogy today, do you think I'd get to see an annotated edition within my lifetime?

Anyway, I read those books somewhere between elementary and middle school, around the time we moved to the Cape, near a pond, around the time I was given a used aluminum canoe for my birthday.  Around the pond grew several good trees for climbing.  There was one in particular that leaned out over the water and then branched out into a 'y' shape, but a nice beefy 'y', with a flat space in the middle of the crotch for sitting.  On the land side of it, the tree was surrounded by a narrow strip of flat space without too many briars or too much brush, but then that space was surrounded by lots of brush and lots of briars growing on a hill that rose between the tree and the distant dirt road.  The space was inaccessable except by canoe.  Private.  Some summer days, my mother would ask me what I did all day, as I headed out with the canoe and a sandwich and a book.  I could tell her the truth because I knew she could never find me and put a stop to it.  (Children had a greater sense of personal sovereignity in those days, I think.  Now if they need their own space they have to go to myspace, and parents don't even want to allow them that danger.)  What I would tell my mother was this: I climb trees, but most especially one tree.  I think.  I savor the motion of the tree as it sways out over the water.  I watch ducks floating or fish swimming around the roots of the tree and sometimes throw them the crusts of my sandwich.  I read, mostly, but when the wind blows I listen to the sighing of the leaves and wonder how much pleasure can really be expected of a day like this.  For happiness, with me, is always tainted by the certainty, of losing it.  There was no doubt the leaves would soon fall, the land would become someone's private property and get developed, a big shiny house would perch itself on the hill and then slowly decay and crumble.  This was coming.  So today I would force myself to stay and take what I could from the place, reading until it got too dark to read, and even feeling a little guilty that while I was losing myself in the world of the book, I was missing out on the fleeting happiness around me. 

In the book, though, Raistlin was a wizard (those in the know would call him a mage).  In some kind of wizard boot-camp (they hold it in a tower) he picked up a curse that turned the shape of his pupils to hourglasses, and from that point on he couldn't see anything but decay.  He'd look at a beautiful woman and see her breasts sag and her skin wrinkle and, eventually, her hair fall out while her eyes putrified and dropped back into her skull.  If he looked at a tree, he'd see it wither and die, topple, and get consumed by termites.  I wasn't sure, as I read this, exactly how this would work, although I imagined that the world looked like a bunch of racing time-lapse photography movies to him.  But did the animation of decay begin the moment he cast his gaze on something, and then proceed from there?  If he looked away and looked back, would this reset the vision?  Would it decay from scratch?  Could he blink to reset it?  Could he, by batting his eyes at the beautiful woman, behold for a fraction of a second of each blink her true and present freshness?

These were the sorts of things that used to keep me up at night: wondering just how these magical powers and curses would manifest themselves, logically.  As I got older, I thought that maybe the eye-curse just gave him an awareness of decay, and that the actual vision of things breaking down was supplied by his imagination, his subconscious.  It would have to work this way, or else he would have been rendered functionally blind as things decayed into stumps and were not where he saw them. 

But no, this psychological explanation will not stand.  I remember a scene where he met in immortal princess, some special subspecies of elf, and was amazed that, as an immortal, she did not wither and decay in his gaze.  This means that his problem could not be psychological.  It wasn't a depressed mind just assuming the doom of each moment and extrapolating future decay.  His eyes were actually seeing the future of each thing he looked at, or at least the destruction coming in that future.  He saw no decay in the princess because she would not decay, and he saw that before he knew that.  If there was a psychological component, it was simply dwelling on the ugliest aspents of everything's future.  (For in watching the decay of a tree, could he not have taken some pleasure in the thriving of the termites?)

I wonder, though, if in our world Raistlin wouldn't have made a good investor?  Couldn't he look at the stock page of the Wall Street Journal and watch the numbers animate and dance into the future for him?  Even if it was only the doomed numbers that dropped and disappeared, even if the curse only showed him the worst of what lay in the future for all of us, he could still invest in the other numbers, the still ones, and lose no money.

But no, the numbers would not dance for him.  They'd sit still, as printed numbers do, and beneath them the paper would yellow and crumble and blow away.  Such is the nature of depression.

It seems that these were really good books, now that I really get to rememberin' on em.  Raistlin had a brother, Cameron, I think, who was Raistlin's opposite in Dungeons and Dragons terms: high STR and CON and low to middlin' INT and WIS.  He was a warrior thick and dumb, but he had a heart of gold and gave up everything for his brother, who as a mage was vulnerable but would ultimately command a lot more power than any of the other characters.  (Have you seen some of those ninth level spells?)  Cameron was devoted to his brother despite the fact that Raistlin was bitter, cynical, depressed, caustic, and acerbic.  You can understand why he'd be like that, with a curse like that.  But he was also, increasingly, evil.  I'd say his alignment worked its way, novel by novel, from neutral-good to chaotic-evil.  If I hadn't given away all my old D&D modules I could look this up.  But this raises a big question: how far do you go to support someone who is mentally ill, when that mental illlness makes them evil?  Does the bond of brotherhood make it right for that Bulger brother to protect Whitey if Whitey committed his crimes because of some mental instability?  Does the bond of marriage make it right for a woman to protect her depressed husband after he's abused their kids?  Would it be different if her husband's evil stemmed from his upbringing, or schizophrenia, or something else beyond his control?

The thing about the Dungeons and Dragons, you had your alignment right there, you printed it on your character sheet: good, neutral, or evil.  Whether real evil exists in the real world (and this athiest thinks that it does), we could posit for the sake of the game that it does, and from that point on it was a definite, mathematical quantity we could wrap our heads around.  It made it easier to kill hobgoblins and mind-flayers.  They were evil; it said so right in the Monster Manual.  By being set in the world of this game, though, these novels showed that even if evil was a definite quantity, even if it was stamped on your character sheet like a tattoo across your forehead, you could still have a brother who was dumb but good in that sincere way dumb people have of being good (because they have no room in their heads for disingenuousness) who would still love, care for, and help you.  Maybe he loves you for what you used to be.  Maybe he cares for you because he hopes you'll be that way again.  Maybe he helps you because he doesn't realize the depth of your evil.  He's trapped in a game of D&D and can't step out to the level of the dice and the naked hanging lightbulb over the table and look at your character sheet and see what's stamped there.  Life would be simpler if you could read somebody's character sheet, I think.  Heck, life would be simpler if you could read your own.

Cameron did what he could for his brother and it drove him to the bottle.  Meanwhile, Raistlin, in his disgust for the rotting world around him, rose to the height of his powers and brought the world to a globe-shattering cataclysm.  This happened in the second trilogy.  I never finished it, because Summer ended and school started back up.  Maybe it's because I stopped there, in those books, that I've since felt that good meaning people have done a lot of harm by helping the evil people they love.