(Mobile post.) In Portland. Went to Vancouver Island, then Seattle. Lovely lovely time. Now Portland. Identity crisis at hipster over-exposure. Am I like that? One hopes not. Went to a bridge festival, an incredible farmers’s market with talented young hipsters playing hobo ragtime, spent too much at Powell’s, pesto pizza, microbrews and microbrews. Dance show, free play at theatre festival - Will Eno’s “Gnit,” satirical modernization of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt.” Hilarious, thoughtful, made me want to write. Chai and dolmas at Tea Lounge, watched indie band with too much delay on lead guitar, made me sleepy. Today, craft fair, brewfest, free concert on bar patio. Loving this town. It’s like they made it just for me.

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I’m in Canada right now. That’s why I haven’t been updating so much. Our wifi connection in this igloo is pretty tenuous. It’s beamed in from a retrofitted Soviet spy satellite.

It was a fairly pleasant journey, though the final four hundred miles by dogsled were a bit arduous. We lashed our animals cruelly, though necessarily, over the frigid peaks where the iron bones of the earth protrude darkly from their icy blankets of death. We passed the frozen skeletons of less fortunate travelers, the foolish yet brave trailblazers whose deaths made our own passage across that forsaken hellscape possible. The wind howled and tore at us as if it would rip the skin from our bones. Then a short bus ride, and we were in Vancouver.

Vancouver is a pleasant city of about two million, situated on the Frozen Hellgulf, where icebergs crowd the black barely-liquid water. Every day is a struggle against the encroaching ice, a Sisyphean war fought by flameships, battleprows, and, rudimentary yet effective and above all necessary, mere men and women armed with pickaxes. The price of failure is apparent in the frozen towers of old Vancouver, trapped in the invincible continent-wide Mother Glacier; the dead poised there still, caught in endless surprise at the advance of this life-hating behemoth.

Yesterday we swam in Deep Cove, where the pine-covered mountains roll down to the blue sea. The water was bracing, remaining liquid somehow at a few degrees above absolute zero, the temperature of a black hole. I swam out to an iceberg and climbed the pellucid peaks of that majestic mountain, and there confronted and slew the wendigo of Canadian lore, cutting its throat with the only weapon capable of piercing its wooly white hide: its own claw. Too tired to swim back to shore, I fashioned a harness of moose leather and tamed a walrus for my mount.

Now, the aurora borealis dance in ethereal ballet above the snow-heaped lawn, a stunning yet inadequate compensation for the perpetual night with which Canadians are punished for their hubris, their fatal pride in settling where humans were not meant to tread. Soon we will eat a sumptuous and welcome dinner of the remains of the crew of the HMS Terror, whose yeti-mauled corpses the Mother Glacier preserved in perpetuity. Randi fumbles with her last match, her numbed fingers frozen into hooks; she considers removing her sealskin mittens to grasp the match better, but at what cost, payable in the cold currency of frostbite?

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Robert J. Sawyer frets that the full-time scifi novelist will be extinct in a decade. Why? Book sales, those internets, etc. There’s a funny moment where he blames the death of Flashforward (the TV series based on his book) on people downloading it and not on the series being terrible, maligned by critics, detested by viewers. I guess he can’t really say that sort of thing. Then he says that really ambitious, complex works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy can’t really be done on a part-time basis. Maybe, maybe not. There are numerous examples of people who believe so much in the power or worth of their projects that they bring them to fruition under the most adverse circumstances. (Then he mentions his WWW trilogy in the same breath as KSR’s majestic Mars trilogy, which, sorry, no.)

Then Scalzi rebuts that Sawyer’s only fretting about a very small percentage of writers. Only a very few, regardless of genre, regardless of point in time, have made a living at writing. Huh. Now that I think about it, wasn’t Poe the first person to make a living from his writing? That would mean that Austen, Defoe, Milton wrote part-time, or as a hobby. Melville wrote everything in the second half of his career while working in a customs office. T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land while working in a frikking bank. Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov under the most penurious poverty. It seems that if you have inspiration and passion, then you will make it happen. Perhaps Sawyer is worried because he doesn’t have the inspiration or passion to keep writing if he can’t do it full-time.

(Well. That’s not exactly fair - after all, he made it to the big time, back in the 80s. He had to have been  struggling writer once, working on his lunch breaks or whatever. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.)

Continuing on this tangent, there are plenty of writers who claimed that they wrote only for money and would quit if they had enough, or couldn’t make any more - Jack London, for one. To myself, and most writers I think, writing is a thing we do because we like to do it, and we’d do it anyway. There’s a lovely Gillian Welch song, “Everything is Free”, which seems like a reaction to file sharing - “Everything is free now/ that’s what they say/ everything we’ve ever done/ they’re gonna give it away”. Then, “I can get a tip jar/ gas up the car/ maybe make a little change/ down at the bar/ because we’re gonna do it anyway/ even if it doesn’t pay.” Yesssss, thinks I. It’s a simple affirmation of her love for her art form.

Cultures do require excess wealth to produce art, but perhaps we overestimate the amount of excess wealth required. It’s not essential, for example, to have an elite of full-time novelists pushing our prose forward. Primitive hunter-gatherers living at a subsistence level had their cave paintings and their oral traditions. It’s the human impulse to create, to make narratives as a tool for understanding the world or enlivening our experience here, and I’m not at all worried that impulse will go away; simply that the model of a few full-time novelists (representing the very top stratum of novelists, each one resting on top of a hundred dayjobbers) can’t survive. That doesn’t bother me. No mistake: I would love to be a full-time novelist. It’s the one thing I’m good at, the one thing I want to do. But I don’t expect it, and I won’t be devastated if it doesn’t come to pass. I like to think I know better than to build my life plans around the whims of indifferent, overwhelmed New York editors and indifferent, overwhelmed audiences. Maybe Sawyer doesn’t realize this because he’s been a pro for so long, but the traditional publishing model is broken, broken, broken, and it must change to survive; or maybe he does realize this, and he’s worried because he doubts his ability to change with it.

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I don’t mind getting vaccinations, but I wish they wouldn’t use the special corkscrew needles. But they tell me they penetrate bone more easily, so…

Yesterday I got Hepatitis A in one arm and Hepatitis B in the other. This is part of the gauntlet of fun that one must brave when becoming an EMT. Next they will ram a giant spear through my torso to see how I react to giant spears rammed through my torso. Next time you see an EMT, shake his hand.

By the time you read this, I will be in the back seat of my parents’ Honda Pilot, bound for Iowa, the state voted “corn-stubbliest”. Family reunion. I’ll be playing bluegrass with some extended family members. I’ve met some. I’ve never met some others. I’ve not seen yet some others in six years or more. I expect it will be a good time. I’m not sure what it says about me that I look forward to periods of enforced nonactivity, like car rides, when I am free to read or play video games on my sundry portable systems. Can I not make time for these things in normal life? Or can I just not justify spending time on these things in normal life? Dunno.

I’ll be finishing David Simon’s Homicide, the book that he wrote after following Baltimore’s homicide unit for a year. It’s funny, it’s beautifully written, it’s profound, it’s generally all things The Wire is. I wish I’d read it before seeing The Wire; it contains important background information regarding the operation of police departments, stuff that you kind of have to piece together in The Wire. I’ll also be finishing my critique of my friend’s first novel, on which I’ve been taking entirely too long.

And I’ll be playing Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. It’s a more story-driven dark scifi version of Etrian Odyssey, which I will always love, even though it hates me. And I’ve got the Megaman Zero collection to keep me awake when first-person dungeon crawls get too slow.

Steam, the digital distribution service that shows other digital distribution services how it’s done, is having a massive summer sale; I snagged And Yet It Moves, which took all of five minutes to be too hard for my feeble brain - why do I keep buying puzzle platformers? And The Maw, which I might have pirated long ago but never played because I felt guilty about pirating from an indie company so I redeemed myself by buying it on sale for 75% off; and Rocket Knight, which is pure fun shot up the nostrils of my brain. I might also buy GTA IV, which is only five bucks. Five bucks! And the game cost a hundred million to make, sold for sixty bucks a year ago. What a world.

Went to Half Price Books yesterday. Because we’d spent so much on books in the past two months, I’d forced myself to stay away for a few months. My bookshelves were all but full. I could only feasibly hold so many more books in our current domicile. So I waited, like, a month at least before I bought some more.

Got a book by Matt Taibbi. A book on suburban sprawl. A book of Barbara Ehrenreich essays. Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels. The guy at the counter told me, “I tried to get into him. I think you need to be high on something.” Maybe, maybe. Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife, volume four. Someone dumped a bunch of Gene Wolfe, and I snatched it all up, including The Death of Doctor Island and Other Stories and Other Stories, the collection that has such awesome story names: “The Death of Doctor Island,” “The Island of Doctor Death,” “The Doctor of Death Island.” Got China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun. A book by Doris Lessing, whom I’d been wanting to investigate. She won a Nobel Prize, you know. They don’t just hand those out.

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Jens and Randi were in a pleasant Mexican restaurant in a small Texas town. “I’d like a margarita,” Jens told the waitress.

“Oh, this is a dry county. We don’t have margaritas.”

“What is this, freaking Iran? Give me a margarita, you heathen Mohammedan!”

Randi gave their agreed-upon distress signal. Jens desisted.

“Well, then, maybe you can help me with something else,” Jens said. “I’m looking for my friend. His name is Meth. Meth M. Phetamine. Do you know where I can find Meth?”

“Oh, sure, honey, just go down to the Meth Market.”

“I thought that said ‘Math Market’. I guess ‘Meth Market’ makes more sense,” Jens said.

They went to the Meth Market. It was busy. Jens bought some meth. He paid for it with Visa. “Every modern convenience,” he said. “Country living.”

A constable passed. Jens quickly hid his purchase, but the cop saw nonetheless. “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that in these parts,” he said with a chuckle. “We love meth, ’round here.”

“Really? Do explain,” said Jens.

“Meth’s the best thing to happen to this town since the cattle industry!” said the friendly sheriff or whatever. “Meth paid off my ranch house. Meth paid off my F250. Meth is putting my kids through college.

“But the economic argument aside,” continued the friendly lawman, “this here is Real America, Main Street America, Tea Party America. We believe in small government, a government that doesn’t interfere with the rights of the individual.”

“Then,” said Jens conspiratorially, “maybe you can tell me where I can buy a margarita.”

The lawman stiffened. “Sir, I will pummel your fucking face.”

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Jens was at a party. He didn’t want to be. He ate some carrots and carrots and then some carrots.

“I need a new house,” said someone. “My old house is too old.”

Someone else said, “Have you heard about these new houses they’re building out in this town? They’re waaaaaay out, you can almost see this other town from that town. So nice, they’ve got a swimming pool and a golf course and oh my god.”

“Hello! Ghetto!” said the first someone. “When I think that town, I think dump.”

Jens ate some carrots. “I actually think the oil spill is a good thing,” he said.

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Whew! I’m done with draft one! I have hours a day free, and weeks before vacation consumes my time as a hippo consumes marbles. Whatever will I do with myself?

My natural response when I asked myself that question was: drug addiction. I’m unemployed, now would be a good time! That is what people do when they are unemployed, yes? Unfortunately I have no howling void within my soul that demands to be filled.

So.

• Learn how to play bluegrass guitar. I’ve got a family reunion in Iowa in July. Evidently my mother’s side of the family is full of skilled bluegrass musicians, and the reunion is one long jam session. I’ve got a beautiful guitar and a clamorous amplifier. I should put my mouth where my money is, so to speak. TANSTAAFL Pub in town has weekly bluegrass jam sessions. So. Time to practice.
• Read my friend Jason’s novel. I’ve been critiquing it since December. Bad, bad Jens. Finish tout de suite! Especially as we’re visiting him and his wife and kid this July. It would be most embarrassing to have not yet finished. It’s pretty good, and a pleasure to read! But critiques take time take time take time.
• Read. I’ve spent maybe five hundred bucks on books since our return. Time to put my eyeballs where my money is. It is a joy to read with no demands on your time, with no pressure of needing to do other things. Lordy, I better not ever have kids.
• Video games. How is it I am unemployed and still don’t have time to play all the video games I want? I’m hip-deep in The Saboteur, which is glorious though wounded, like a twelve-point buck with an arrow through its liver. Also, Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2, et cetera ad nauseum.
• Go outside some. I went to a state park last weekend, did a trail run, swam, hiked. It was a blast. I am forcing myself to enjoy the outdoors and finding, to my delight, that I do not have to force myself. Tomorrow I am going mountain biking even though no one is making me.

And in terms of writing:

• This late summer I’ll be doing revisions of this Aetheria novel (still needs a name) and Khatima. Revisions are fun. No problem.
• Maybe a short story or two before I head out on vacation, and maybe a few more whilst vacationing.
• This fall I’ll be writing a cooperative… collaborative… novel with Talented Friend Alex Burns. We’ve been talking about this for, like, a year now. Can’t wait. We’ll be taking a few days later this month for intense brainstorming sessions. We’ll lock ourselves in a room and not come out until we have an outline. Bread and water will be passed in on trays.

And in the long, long term:

• I’ll be doing another collaborative novel with Niles Bliss, a friend from my time in Korea. He maintains a funny, insightful music blog. I read some of his short fiction, loved it. We like much of the same fiction and have complementary writing skills, I think, so I expect that to be an interesting and fruitful endeavor.
• My novel idea involving HH Holmes and Boston Corbett, following the years of Corbett’s life after he disappears from the Kansas insane asylum. I keep collecting books and ideas for this, and it keeps sounding better and more interesting. The soul of America is at stake!
• This first novel set in Aetheria is nothing if not a series-starter. More to come, definitely, especially considering the ending. Wow!
• Others.

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This morning I typed those two most satisfying words - “THE ENDF” - then I went back and deleted the “F”, which was a typo. At that moment, a weight lifted from my shoulders and I shot through the roof like an ingot of cavorite, en route to the moon from whence I came.

What many people do not realize is that writing is hard work. It is easy to see only the romance, the classic image of a long-haired muscle-bound warrior poet with a big-breasted valkyrie hanging over him while he pounds away at his typewriter; “Voila!” cries he, “C’est ce la!”  and he tears off another sheet of golden prose, which is perfect on the first draft. Yes, that is true some of the time. But most of the time writing is sweat and blood mixed with sweat and tears mixed with blood mixed with sweat and a little bit of vomit. You know, “10% inspiration, 90% perspiration et cetera.” So true. So true.

So when I write a novel, it is three months of hard work, for hours a day, every day. Any day off must be made up for the next day. I drink so much coffee that by the end of a novel I am quite sick of coffee. There are flights of inspiration, where the words drip like molten steel from the corners of my slack lips, burning scars of imagination across the skin of my mind’s face; days when the words come hot and fast and I hit my quota with ease. Other days where the words must be coaxed, where they come as reluctantly as an nonagenarian’s bowel movements. These are the majority of days.

Then, after the torturous two to three hours are over (never less than an hour and a half, I can tell you), when I’m done writing for the day, I’m still not quite done writing. The book stays in my head. I think of what I’ve done and what I have yet to do. I worry about tomorrow’s words, about finding the time, about figuring out what comes next. I live more in the novel than I do in the “real world”. When the novel goes poorly, I am stressed, depressed, moody. When it goes well, I am elated, happy, good company. These figments have a grip on my brain, and they twist it as they will.

The work is difficult, it is time-consuming, it is mind-consuming, it offers little in the way of hope for external reward. God, do I love it. I have found no greater pleasure than writing. Perhaps the misery and anguish of the experience serve to throw the emotional and artistic rewards into greater relief, like this cocktail I had last night - lemon-orange with a dash of cayenne pepper.

I am mortified and thrilled that, even while this novel requires quite a bit of work, at least three other ideas jostle in the birth canal of my brain, demanding to be birthed at once. Thrilled that I have so many exciting ideas; mortified that I must deliver them.

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A mysterious organization kidnapped me and injected me with something. Then, while I rubbed my sore arm, the CEO, a friendly yet commanding short-sleeves kinda guy, explained to me that, really, they owed everything to me. One of his operatives, looking for new ideas to radically change the world, had seen one of my childhood drawings in a museum - a crude representation of the solar system that accidentally put Ganymede, the moon of Jupiter, between Mars and Earth. “It was so simple,” he said, “but we had no idea until we saw your drawing. We simply move Ganymede out of Jupiter’s gravity well and make it the new fourth planet. This will slightly alter the pitch of the musica universalis, and cause all mesons in this universe to reverse their charge. Meaning that anyone who has that injection that we just gave you will gain superpowers. What superpower do you want? Flight? Super-strength? Super-intelligence? Prehensile tail?”

“Flight, please.”

Then I woke up.

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Videlicet, the novel proceeds apace. I’m so very close to wrapping this up. That carries with it the normal sense of triumph that comes with completing any lengthy work, a work that takes multi-months, or “polymonths” to complete. I could say that I began this novel in March, when I started this draft, but it is more accurate to say that I began it in January, when the idea occurred to me and I wrote out the notes; but it would be more accurate still to say that I began it in 2006, when I wrote one-third of an egregious first draft, now scrapped, but nonetheless providing the raw genetic material that would become this draft; and it would be most accurate of all to say I began it in a Waffle House in 2005, tossing around ideas with Joel, and this came up: “Maybe, like, there’s a street urchin thief-type character, and a guy who owns a zeppelin, and they have adventures and stuff.”

The idea has gone through a nonillion iterations since then; I have taken the skeleton of the “street urchin with a heart of gold” cliché and mangled it, forcing it into unnatural positions until, I hope, one can no longer recognize its original state. I have taken the skin of the “band of adventurers and misfits” cliché and crafted it into a variety of household items and fashionable summer garments until that, too, is unrecognizable. I hope. Most stories begin with archetypes; the goal is to move on from those.

So, to digress, this story has been in the pressure cooker of my brain for a long time, and I will be delighted, nay, relieved to have it geyser soupily forth. I expect to report my success within six days. Possibly sooner. Then I can get on with this shambling, makeshift charade that humans call “life”.

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From today’s work on the novel:

They passed the old gates that demarcated the Charnels, iron gates long since rusted permanently open. The slaughterhouses were huge, almost as large as Company superstructures. The stench of the district was powerful, sickening, rotten, the discharge of millions of animals mixed with the rotting remains of millions more; the warmth of the scabbing vats accelerated the decay and aggravated the foetor. Jumbles of hair, shards of bone, hooves, claws, horns, gristle, scales, feathers formed nightmare cryptids.

“Get back!” Cyrus hissed, drawing his pistol and knife. One of the gore-piles was moving, crawling forward, a ghastly slug pulling itself along on appropriated, mismatched feet. Feathers and curved horns jutted from it, and one long skinless horse’s leg protruded from the front, scenting left and right like a butterfly’s proboscis. Skeletal parodies of wings made of ribs unfolded from its back, and yellowed eyeballs surfaced and crawled in the folds of its ragged muscles.

Ain’t that lovely?

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A friend just asked me to recommend some scifi or fantasy books for a reader new to the genres, and I typed out an enthusiastic reply. I think the response is a pretty good primer, so I’m going to post some excerpts here, for the use of anyone just now getting into these genres, the present and future of Literature.

First let me congratulate you on your adventurousness in seeking out new genres, and let me express my hopes that you’ll enjoy them; I’ve always liked genre lit (”genre lit” meaning anything other than “Literature”, be it scifi, fantasy, murder mysteries, romance, etc), and while I may not like all those genres (romance, etc), I heartily believe that each genre is capable of generating Art, or Good Art, if you will, and I heartily disdain the literati who look down on anything because it has spaceships, or monsters, or anything that isn’t “real”; art transcends genre, dammit. If anything, SF/F are MORE able to explore and comment upon our reality, as they have unparalleled powers for allegory that “LITERATURE” lacks; they allow you to examine the world from a wholly new perspective.

All right. First of all, scifi and fantasy are often lumped as one, and they have many things in common, but they are two different things - or can be. The genres have broadened so much and overlapped and grown together that there are works genuinely hard to classify, but generally speaking, scifi books are interested in futurism and, often, science, while fantasy is about the supernatural or mythical, usually in other, fantastic worlds - my tastes generally lie in fantasy, because I’m more interested in historical or cultural issues, which I think are better explored in fantasy than scifi. BUT these are only broad generalizations, and both genres have a lot going on.

Another catch-all term is “speculative fiction”, which can mean works that are both of these things, or neither, but nonetheless contain weird or extraordinary elements.

Within scifi, there’s “hard” and “soft” scifi. For a long time, hard SF dominated the field, but “soft” has enjoyed a surge in popularity over the past 20-30 years. Hard SF tends to care about the details of science and be interested in the nitty-gritty of how the spaceships run, how alien planets are terraformed, etc. Soft SF elevates character and plotting over that. I tend to prefer soft, but I’ve read excellent books in both subgenres. For “hard” scifi, Robert Heinlein’s “juveniles” are very good - they’re books written for teens in the 1950s. The young audience forced him to keep his plotting under tighter control, it seems, as well as his political diatribes. They’re fun, a bit pulpy. I really enjoyed “Starman Jones”. The first Heinlein book I read was “Friday”, about an “artificial person”, a genetically modified human being built in a lab, and her struggles against discrimination and for survival in a crumbling world. It’s good, and good-natured for a Heinlein book. “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress”, about the moon fighting a war of secession against the Earth, is my personal favorite. Disclaimer: the dude was a hardcore libertarian, and his political views are disgusting, and never expressed more strongly than in “Moon”; however, the plotting and characters of the book are good enough to outweigh that. Great book, take with a grain of salt.

Another hard-ish SF I really enjoy is anything by Lois McMaster Bujold. Her stuff is often lumped as “military SF”, but it’s really not; she describes her own books as “novels of character”, and, indeed, her characters are superbly developed. She also has a good sense of humor and an absolutely riveting control of plot and pacing. Currently one of my favorite authors. She has more Hugo awards for Best Novel (that’s SF/F’s highest honor) than any other author but Heinlein, and she will probably surpass him, having the advantage of still being alive.
Her main SF work is the “Vorkosigan saga”, about Miles Vorkosigan, a brilliant though deformed young officer in the Barrayar Intelligence Services; he foils coups, invasion plots, leads mutinies against insane officers, etc. The books are supposed to be readable in any order, but I recommend starting at the start, with “Shards of Honor”. “Shards of Honor” was bundled with its direct sequel, “Barrayar”, as “Cordelia’s Honor”, which is what I recommend buying.
Failing that, try “Young Miles”, which collects “The Warrior’s Apprentice” and “The Vor Game”.

Another excellent series, which bridges hard and soft SF and mixes in a bit of humor, is Dan Simmon’s “Hyperion” series. It’s two books - “Hyperion” and “The Fall of Hyperion”, and they are two halves of one story so you have to read both, but they’re so good it won’t be a problem - and they take place in a far future where seven pilgrims are selected to visit the tomb of the “Shrike” on the planet Hyperion - the “Shrike” being a terrifying, totally alien godlike entity that will kill six of them and grant the seventh whatever he desires. As they travel, they tell the reasons why they came and what they hope to get; it’s like the Canterbury Tales in space. But better. Then, having established the basic conflict and situation in the first book, Simmons pulls back in the second book and shows how the fate of the pilgrims has ramifications for the whole universe. So good.

“The Forever War,” by Joe Haldeman. Haldeman was a Vietnam vet who wrote a deeply allegorical novel inspired by his experiences; but it is so much more than a mere allegory, it’s also a contemplation on how technology changes war and how war changes those who fight. Made me cry. “The Forever Peace,” a much later book, is not a sequel, merely a spiritual successor, and it’s just as good.
Soft scifi - I enjoy Philip Jose Farmer, who was known for his craaaazy ideas. The “Riverworld” books are top-to-bottom excellent, but it’s a four-book series, so a bit of an investment. The first is “To Your Scattered Bodies Go”. I read it in one sitting, it’s that good. All of humanity that has ever lived (some 36 billion people) is simultaneously resurrected along the banks of a 20 million mile-long river. They are now immortal. Who put them there? Why? Historical badasses like Mark Twain and Richard Burton and Cyrano de Bergerac team up to find out why.

One difficulty with SF/F is that it has historically been dominated by white male writers - SF especially. Ursula K. Leguin leaves most of them in the dust, though. Her intelligence is staggering. I recommend her short novel, “The Lathe of Heaven”, about a guy who sees a sleep therapist because his dreams have the ability to alter reality, and he wants to stop that. But the therapist has other plans. DUNH DUNH DUNH! It’s a brilliant exploration of psychology. Her “Dispossessed” and “The Left Hand of Darkness” both won Hugos, but I haven’t read ‘em. On my shelf.

Fantasy! Much of fantasy is typical “epic fantasy” - that is, elves, wizards, dragons, everyone being very serious all the time, giant books or book series that go on and on. “Lord of the Rings” is the original one. The “Wheel of Time” series and George RR Martin’s “Song of Fire and Ice” are other examples. I tend to avoid this stuff, as it can get turgid or boring, but it’s still the most popular form. I understand Martin’s series - “A Game of Thrones” is the first novel - is quite good. Jacqueline Carey’s “Kushiel” series, of which “Kushiel’s Dart” is the first - is supposed to be good, but I tried it, and it wasn’t my thing. But it sells and gets good reviews, so I cautiously recommend it.

Then there’s sword-and-sorcery, which is the low-rent cousin of epic fantasy, the nitty-gritty stories where there are no heroes, just a couple of bastards fighting each other. I love this stuff. Conan the Barbarian is the most famous example, Fritz Leiber’s “Fafhrd and Grey Mouser” series is also prominent (and excellent), Michael Moorcock’s “Elric of Melnibone” is another - I understand that is the edgiest of all, though I haven’t read it yet. Post-modern, brutal, fantasy intended to challenge the reader. Got ‘em on my shelf. But this subgenre, I acknowledge, is pretty masculine, definitely not for everyone.

There’s also an astronomical rise in popularity of “urban fantasy”, which strictly means anything fantastic or supernatural in a modern setting (such as Jim Butcher’s “The Dresden Files”, but usually means “self-insertionist protagonist has boring or ridiculous romances or fights with vampires or werewolves.” The dreck of this, of course, is the execrable “Twi—–” series, but also includes such bestselling bottom-feeders as Charlaine Harris. You can do better than this. Humanity can do better than this. I consider the subgenre as a whole polluted.

I recommend, though, unreservedly, everything by Fritz Leiber. He is intelligent, hilarious, satirical, poised, confident. He writes across several genres - horror, SF, fantasy - and his experiments in each are always rewarding. His Fafhrd-and-Mouser “Lankhmar” stories were hugely influential, and always fun. I highly recommend, too, “A Specter Is Haunting Texas” - a guy who grew up on the moon comes down to Earth a few hundred years in the future for some reason or other, and most of North America is now part of the country of Texas, where genetically-modified enormous white Texans drive huge Cadillacs and monstrous horses and maintain a weird feudalism over their genetically-stunted Mexican slave races; the hero finds himself an unwitting messiah-figure for a Mexican rebellion. The book is laugh-aloud funny cover-to-cover, and gripping, and tragic.
Also, “Conjure Wife”, his first novel, about an anthropologist whose wife takes up witchcraft. A smart, incisive look at the interplay between people who read fantasy for fun, and those who study it for a living.

Lois McMaster Bujold, the McMaster of my heart, has lately jumped genres and started writing in fantasy. I haven’t read them yet, but they’re cleaning up Hugo awards and selling like hotcakes. She has the “Chalion” trilogy, of which “The Curse of Chalion” is the first, and the “Sharing Knife” series of four novels. Haven’t read them, but if she exercises her usual mastery of character and plotting, they’d be worth reading.

One of my favorite writers currently is China Mieville, a British Harvard- and Oxford-educated socialist/D&D nerd who writes “new weird” fiction. It is putatively fantasy, but has heavy tones of horror and steampunk (which is basically Dickens-flavored scifi, fantastic stuff with Victorian trappings). He has done more in the past decade to break boundaries than any other living writer. His stuff is smart, well-plotted, and not merely “edgy” but actually EDGY. His books stick with you. Wildly original. Brilliant stuff. He wrote a loosely linked trilogy in his fantasy world, Bas-Lag, which begins with “Perdido Street Station.”

Finally - I recommend Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy: “The Northern Lights”, known in the US as “The Golden Compass,” “The Subtle Knife,” and “The Amber Spyglass”. These are supposed to be young adult books, but they are dense and weighty with delicious themes and indelible characters. His plotting is superb, his fantasy worlds are rich and fascinating, and the books seriously, no kidding, improve page by page from the beginning to the end, the final book being three hundred pages of constant emotional high. Stunning books.

Finally, an author that falls into none of these genres but is merely regarded as “speculative” - Harlan Ellison. He wrote many of the more famous Outer Limits and Twilight Zone and Star Trek episodes, and is one of the few authors to build his career almost entirely on short stories. His work rewards a random sampling, but some recommended stories are “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and “Mephistopheles in Onyx” and Djinn, No Twist” and “Send Not to Know for Whom the Lettuce Wilts”. He’s funny and often savage, and his stories are bite-sized. You can’t go wrong with a “best of” collection.

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Jens, the smartest person in the world, was at the Public Health Center.

“Can I help you?” said the nice lady.

“I would love a tetanus shot,” Jens said.

“Do you want to finish your Hepatitis A shots while you’re here?”

“I don’t know. Is that a very common disease?”

“Every time you eat at Taco Bell!”

“I’m a Bueno man, so I guess I’m good. Are your needles clean?”

“Jens!” said Randi. “That’s offensive!”

“Sorry,” Jens said. “Are your needles clean, sweetheart?”

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Reading:

• The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler. I’ve been reading his blog (the aptly titled “Clusterfuck Nation”) for several years, and even read his novel, World Made by Hand; this is the book where he lays out his ideas for the future, and how the problems of peak oil, compounded by global warming and geopolitics and the collapse of petroagriculture and the super-economy, are going to dramatically affect our way of life. Where Kunstler is normally quite polemic on his blog, he reins it in for this book; you can tell he believes in the importance of his message.
  As for the actual content, Kunstler’s knowledge of the subject matter is near encyclopedic, and his analytical ability is quite impressive; he does tend toward doom and gloom - but, again, not nearly as much as on his blog - with some predictions seeming a bit too apocalyptic, such as the US splintering into several countries within my lifetime. One takes the book with a grain of salt. That said, most of his facts check out, and his assertions seem accurate. It makes me want to move to Oregon. It’s a book everyone should read; even if his worst assertions never come to pass, it forces you to reconsider your place in this country and this country’s place in the world.
• The Martians, by Kim Stanley Robinson. A collection of short stories that fill in some blanks of the Mars trilogy. I’ve said several times that the original trilogy is one of the best things I’ve ever read, regardless of genre, and this is a welcome return to this world. Only two stories in, and I am stunned on every page at Robinson’s intelligence, his unsurpassed grasp of character, his psychological depth, the beauty of the worlds he creates.
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote (on audiobook). The famous “nonfiction novel” of the 1959 slaying of a family of four in a small Kansas town. Its alleged inaccuracies aside, the book gives a bone-deep portrait of the killers and their victims, crawling into their heads and raking over every detail of their pasts, so that their tragedy becomes your tragedy; Capote’s eye for detail and character is amazing.
• Nickel and Dimed: on Not Getting by in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. A middle-class Harper’s writer “goes undercover” for a year, working the worst kind of blue-collar jobs and bringing back her experiences to share with us, the monocle-wearing cognac-sippers. Haha. It’s actually not condescending at all. It fills me with intense horror at the kind of jobs I used to work, but had forgotten about. I hope three years of sinecures followed by a year of unemployment don’t wreck me completely. Good god, our society is so rich, the richest that has ever existed in history, and still so few people barely scrape by, and many of us in the middle class still find time to feel sorry for ourselves. Go to Cambodia, you jerks, and see what real poverty looks like.
• Next: Homicide, by David Simon, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson… etc etc ad nauseum.

Playing:

• Assassin’s Creed II. So good. I’ve never played a sequel so improved. The first game was all right, it had some good ideas and some amazing design, but they had no idea what to do with it, leading to the tragedy of having big, detailed worlds with nothing to do. The story also got a little drunk on its own importance from time to time. The second game has a better script, a better story, amazing levels, delightful gameplay, varied and interesting missions, and tons to do. Bring on the third. And set it in outer space or something. Just kidding. Set it in Arlington, Texas! Just kidding. That would be horrible. People would ask, why did Ubisoft spend millions of dollars building this suburban wasteland? For that matter, why did Arlingtonians? Ha ha! We live in a car-dominated void utterly bereft of community or beauty! Ha! Seriously, though. The games are unique for bringing to life the world’s great cities, the unique locations that humanity has raised into history, so it is amusing to imagine our horrible cities receiving that same treatment. You have Florence and Venice, havens for and repositories of art and genius and the spirit of human inventiveness, and then you have Arlington, which has more fast food chains per capita than any other city in the world.
• Bioshock 2. It would raise nerd ire to assert that this game is far superior to the first, if anyone really cared that much. But, dammit, it is. The story is better. The gameplay is more polished. The moral decisions are more complex and interesting. Everything is better. It only lacks the originality of the original, for obvious reasons.

Watching:

• Season 3 of Breaking Bad. This show matures, getting more complex and richer with age. The third season is even more rewarding than the second, which stands as one of the greatest narratives ever told in the medium of TV. Best show on the air right now.
• Season 5/32 of Doctor Who. No one knows about Matt Smith yet, but I think Steven Moffat is doing a good job of running the series. So far we’ve had a handful of great episodes, some pretty good ones, and one or two clunkers - but it’s always been fun.
• I still have to watch the finale of Lost. Can’t wait to be done with this show forever, and to exorcise my bile by writing a vicious retrospective for RevolutionSF.

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“Hello,” said Jens, to the earnest young clerk at the Super Target, where he had no choice but to be. “I regret that I must register a complaint.”

“Uh?” the bright young go-getting clerk said.

“The sign advertising this display of bathing suits says, ‘More fun. Less rays.’ I’m sure you know that, since ‘rays’ can be described discretely, the sign should read, ‘More fun. Fewer rays.’”

“Oh.”

“Perhaps you would like to notify the management, to avoid embarrassment in the future,” said Jens.

“No problem,” said Jens.

“I think your haircut has gone all the way to your brain,” said Randi.

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I didn’t get much work done today, because this morning my mind exploded with possibilities.

Tobias Buckell’s blog is in my morning RSS diet (even though I don’t like his books very much), so I read his latest entry, about an attack piece from Publisher’s Weekly on JA Konrath. Who’s that? Some writer. Never heard of him. But he’s the kind of guy you should know about, because he’s making almost $500 a day selling self-published e-books online.

I spent the morning reading through his supremely encouraging blog and got his story: he spent forever breaking into traditional publishing, amassing over 500 rejections, writing and rewriting many many novels before he finally got published. His initial sales were okay, and then worse than okay, until, as happens to too many writers, publishers started passing. Not wanting his books to go to waste, he stuck ‘em online, sold ‘em on Amazon for the Kindle at low, low prices. And now he’s rolling in dough.

He’s often described as an outlier by other novelists and publishers, something that not everyone can do, and, yeah, that’s true. Your book needs to  be good. It needs to have an eye-catching cover, and you need to work to promote it. He also prices his books incredibly cheaply. Many ebooks produced by major companies sell, incredibly, in the $6-12 range. JA Konrath prices his at $2-3 and makes up for it with volume - volume and the amazing 70% royalties Amazon pays.

Think about that. 70%. Most traditional publishers pay the author a criminal 15% - granted, 15% of $20 or so. But $2 is the “Well, why not?” range. More people are likely to try your stuff, and advertise through word of mouth. If it’s good, of course.

Another criticism against Konrath is that he already had a fanbase before he tried e-publishing, so he didn’t have to get noticed amongst the sea of dreck. Maybe. Certainly that wouldn’t hurt. But here on his blog he talks to Karen McQuestion (great name); she began with no prior publications, no website, nothing, and in nine months sold 30,000 ebooks. Damn.

It’s no secret to anyone who’s spent any time looking at the procedure of getting published traditionally that the traditional system is decrepit, obsolete, slow, and maddeningly unfair. My novel has been stuck in slush for sixteen months now. It passed the first round, quite quickly, and went on to round two, where it would take “quite a while” to make a decision. Sixteen months and counting. No one has this kind of time, but publishers think nothing of sticking someone’s work in a stack and ignoring it for a couple of years. Oh, and don’t you dare submit anywhere else at the same time - that wouldn’t be fair to the publisher. Jesus.

And then, if I were lucky enough to get accepted, I could wait another year or two for editing, layout, printing, and finally distribution, when it fits into their schedule. And then I’d be on my way to 15% royalties. Great. In my recent trip to Barnes & Noble, I noted how few of my favorite authors had books on the shelves - which are physically limited, after all - and how much dreck was on the shelves with them, and how was good stuff supposed to stand out?

Currently e-books only represent 6% of all book sales. But, as Konrath points out, the e-reader market is nowhere near saturation. Lots of people are buying ipads, iphones, etc. etc. Many markets, many illimitable electronic bookshelves to fill.

Konrath actually gives away his books for free on his webpage. He encourages piracy (good publicity). No DRM on his stuff. Spread the word, spread your books.

It’s powerful, it’s democratic, it’s good news for authors. It may be the actualization of POD. Print-on-demand, of course, is rarely ever profitable because you still have to put the books on paper. Yes, it’s democratic, anyone can do it, but the cost of physically printing the books put them into a prohibitive range for many people - who wants to pay $25 for a poorly printed paperback? $2 for a digital, though - well, why not?

Workers control the means of production!

More:

Some writers view this as a means to an end. Boyd Morrison’s books did so well on Kindle that Simon & Schuster offered him a deal, and now he’s a “real” author. John Scalzi gave away “Old Man’s War” for free on his website for years, until it got enough buzz for Tor to pick up; now all his books are published traditionally. He says he wouldn’t advise the giving-away-for-free method as a way to break in. He also came out against self-publishing in an amusing and long blog post that I can’t be bothered to look up right now - basically, you self-pub, you hire your own editor and artist, spend a lot of time on marketing and junk that your agent is supposed to do for you, so much time that you can’t write on your own. Nice. Great. Yes, that’s true, if you’re a freaking professional author already. For those of for whom writing, sadly, is a side gig, for those of us whom the agents reject (if they even bother to answer letters), we’ve already got stacks of books doing nothing, being read by no one at any price. Why not? Well, why not?

Posted in Writing | 2 Comments »

Jens and Randi went to Super Target. They had to.

“Excuse me,” Jens said to the snack counter girl at the snack counter by the entrance. “I’d like an Icee. No. I want a Rice Krispie treat, an M&M cookie, a cheese pretzel, and a brownie, extra icing, all blended together in a blender. And for the solvent, America’s favorite beverage, Coca-Cola.”

“We have Pepsi,” said the snack counter girl.

“Disgusting! Just give me an Icee.”

To the helpful-seeming clerk, Jens said, “Excuse me. I’m looking for a cafetière à piston.”

“A what?”

“I don’t think everyone knows what that means,” said Randi.

“I’m sorry. I’m looking for a cafetière à piston kinda thing,” Jens said.

“He means a French press,” Randi said.

“Oh,” said the clerk, “they’re right over - ”

“Never mind, I found them,” Jens said. “Now, where are your shoes for straight men?”

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From an interview on Strange Horizons:

LJ: Where do you see space exploration going in the next 50-75 years? From all that has been found out recently about planets like Mars—and now the research interest in Pluto—do you think our exploration of space can possibly help us deal with the environmental crises on Earth?

KSR: Well, comparative planetology is a powerful tool for investigating how Earth’s biosphere behaves, so going to Mars and studying it would be a great thing to do. Even if most of the big lessons from comparative planetology are already learned (if not applied to Earth yet), still the news of people on Mars would emphasize every day that we too live on a planet, finite and capable of crashing ecologically. So space exploration still has a defensible place among the human projects, I think. None of it is going to go very fast, but that’s okay too. It would mean that significant space travel would be occurring in the context of a healthy global culture.

Yes….

And then:

LJ: What are your views on globalization and the so-called global village?

KSR: Globalization seems to be one name for late capitalism’s enmeshing of every culture on Earth, and the biosphere itself, into its system of strip-mining for short-term gain. I think globalization should be understood to be a malignant process, like a social cancer.

The “global village” on the other hand strikes me as real, for the fraction of the world’s population that has access to the global media, and potentially very good for world history. Not everyone is in the village, but it may be a really big fraction; and maybe almost everyone is aware of the rest of the world, more or less fully. It’s an information cascade that has touched everyone not living in isolation. That awareness of everyone else on the planet can very easily lead to the conclusion “we’re all in this together,” which while frightening for the currently privileged to contemplate, may yet be a spur to action by all, and to a general support of justice applied worldwide. Permaculture as the global project of the global village; as opposed to globalization, which is a kind of Taylorization of all humanity.

Oi. This guy gets it. I’m remembering from the Mars trilogy how he describes that humanity (in a few hundred years) has ample resources and incredible command over the natural world, and now they can begin the real work of humanity: building a decent society.

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I was looking at a photo gallery from the recent Nebula awards, and the appearance of Eugie Foster, an Asian-American, suddenly threw the utter whiteness of everyone else into sharp relief. Wow.

I’ve read before that scifi is generally considered a white man’s genre, and while I won’t speculate on why that is, because I’m busy, dammit, the numbers certainly bear it out. A clear majority of the authors in these photos are white men and women, with two non-whites: Eugie Foster and Saladin Ahmed. (Unless I missed anyone.) This isn’t remotely representative of America’s population.

Let’s see. Part of the under-representation of minorities might be merely ignorance on my part. I can name two African-American authors - Samuel R. Delaney and Octavia Butler - one Asian-American - Eugie Foster - and absolutely zero Latino-Americans.

(Fortunately, women have made significant headway in the genre - the pictures of this year’s Nebulas have many more females than they would have thirty, forty years ago.)

Like pretty much everything else, science fiction would benefit from diversity. We need more kinds of stories told. More experiences. More variety.

It may not be as bad as all that. A quick google search might help me discover more authors of various races. But my internet connection is shit. So I’ll do that later. I did buy a paperback containing three Octavia Butler novels, and I look forward to reading it. I also bought Delaney’s The Einstein Intersection; here’s hoping it’s readable. I wanted to like Stars in My Pocket so much…

Expansion: Of course this is a well known problem in genre literature. I’m only noting it today because I was looking at the Nebula pictures this morning and it came to mind. The problem has been well discussed before.

Kind of tangentially, Kim Stanley Robinson in an interview once said that “science fiction is the appropriate genre for the US”. He also mentions that Latin America and Asia do magic realism much better than North America, postulating that magic realism is a “way to speak about Latin America”. Scifi is appropriate for the US, magic realism for Latin America, high fantasy for mid-war Britannia. Okay. Why is scifi appropriate for North America? It’s progressive, it’s rational, it’s in love with the future and the same attitude of inevitable human progress that has defined America since World War II. One could note that this defines White America; unfortunately, many of the minorities in America have been historically left out of that grand futurism of the fifties to seventies that we used to think would lead inevitably to Star Trek fantasies. The experience of Asian, African, and Latin Americans in those decades was quite different.

This doesn’t mean that there’s not room for those cultures to participate in science fiction, only that it needs to grow away from its middle class white male roots. Maybe the growing dominance of Asian Americans in our technical fields will lead to more authors from those genres. But then you can view it as a microcosm, that the problem with diversity in scifi is a problem with diversity in America overall.

Expanded expansion: Alex wondered in the comments if there’s much pressure on minority writers to write “minority” fiction, even when it’s genre fiction; whether they’re pressured to “represent” their minority, or if the publishers may try to market their books accordingly. I don’t know. Might be able to find out by poking around on the internet or, you know, talking to some minority writers. I know I’m always under pressure to chronicle the novelty of the white male experience.

But seriously. I find myself taking pains to include in my books female characters and characters of multiple races. This is not some kind of tokenism or because I’m bored of imagining white guys all the time, but an effort to bring diverse points of view into the narrative. Of course we must remember that it is not only our cultural backgrounds that make us diverse, but also our individuality, viz., we are much more than our race. China Mieville, who is good at so many things, is quite good at representing diverse cultures in a fantasy world, with such depth that it reflects our integration of multiple cultures in our own world.

Expanded expansion of the expansion: Alex, like KSR, mentions magical realism by way of Sherman Alexie. I love magical realism - though I’ve only read Jorge Luis Borges and Salman Rushdie - and while on its own, in its native context, it is an original creation, I view its acceptance by the academia and mainstream of North America as the final triumph of speculative fiction over people who have no more ideas. It is one thing to originate magical realism or be part of a culture that does so, and consider it on its own terms; however, when you turn up your nose at comic books or fantasy or science fiction as being “unreal”, and then embrace a book where, say, a British Indian actor becomes the avatar of the devil on Earth, and a woman psychically/mystically commands butterflies, then you, sir, are an ass. I am delighted to see Borges and Garcia Marquez taught in the universities, and can’t wait for them to be supplemented by Gene Wolfe and Harlan Ellison and Lois McMaster Bujold.

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Sometimes thunderbolts, the kind that come out of a clear blue sky, are nice, and the grievous effects of electrocution - of one’s fortune! - are very pleasant, even lucrative, and the flaking skin - of happiness! - is - I give up. [Metaphor aborted.]

So, a year ago, I sent “The Vicksburg Dead” to Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. It was a good story, and I thought it deserved more exposure than it got in its initial printing (and no slight to that initial printing, which was well edited and well published, but it was an indie anthology, and those can only be so successful). This was one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written, and I wanted more people to see it. So I sent it to IGMS as a reprint, and - a year later - it was accepted. It had been so long that I didn’t even know what the email was talking about until a few sentences in. A thunderbolt.

It’s my first pro sale - six cents a word, and a large readership. Two more and I can join the SFWA. And this one sale, one hopes, will wedge agents’ doors open just a leetle further when I write to them about my beautiful novels that only need an audience in order to burst into luminous sun-shattering literary rockets.

Phhffew. Now I need to come down a little bit. I’ll just contemplate for a while how a shrinking readership and rising printing and distribution costs make it virtually impossible to make a living as a novelist in this day and age. Ha! Ha!

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We saw Iron Man 2 last night. It was what we expected. It did an adequate job of distracting me from the problems of our crumbling society, our failing republic, the general existential dread that permeates all thinking creatures as cat urine permeates a mattress.

I have difficulty getting excited about movies any more. When I was a kid, special effects seemed genuinely new and interesting. I remember being amazed at Terminator 2’s effects, thinking how they changed my world, blew my mind. Now they are expected. They are distracting. They are annoying. We have so many special effects-driven blockbusters every year that they become meaningless; regardless of their actual quality, one fades into another. I barely remember Dark Knight. I know that it was better than Iron Man, but who can tell these things apart anymore? I have to make room in my memory for Iron Man 2, for 2012, for Robin Hood, for Avatar, for the next goddamn forgettable action-blast that nonetheless cost $200 million to make. How freaking disposable is our pop culture?

That said, Scarlet Johansson is - so hot. It was a bad idea to put her next to Gwyneth Paltrow and ask us to be attracted to Gwyneth Paltrow.

I also have trouble getting excited over movies because they are a mere two hours long. I don’t understand people who devour trailers, who talk or write excitedly about seeing [Whatever] because it will a two-hour experience. You see it and are done. You honestly don’t need to see Iron Man 2 twice. If you need to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3: Subtitle more than once to unpack all its subtleties, then you, sir, are an imbecile. I don’t even feel like I need to see Dark Knight twice, and it’s the densest, most cerebral summer movie we’ve had in years.

Movies are probably the most short-lived form of entertainment we have. They cost so much more to produce and take so much less time to consume than books, TV shows, video games. You pay your seven to nine bucks and see Iron Man laser-blasting robots for a little while, and you are done. It is hard to say that the experience lingers in one’s mind.

Structure structure structure structure. You can bet that there will be an initial battle where our heroes learn the nature of the enemies or their powers or whatever. Then there will be a bigger battle. The heroes will appear to be doing pretty well, but the bad guys will turn the tables and appear to be able to snatch victory from the heroes at just the last minute. It has to look like the heroes could lose at any moment, though you knew all along that they’re going to win. The same story, interchange the suit of armor or pirates or Hulk or whatever. I am bored bored bored. I want to see Iron Man succumb to alcoholism, real messy alcoholism that alienates Pepper Potts and wrecks his car. I want to see Jack Sparrow dragged to hell. I want to see the Hulk try to kill himself to free himself from his nightmare, but fail due to his invulnerability - and that failure makes him so angry that he hulks out and bites Betty in half. I want to see Spider-man forced to abort the abomination in Mary Jane’s womb - with punching. This sadism isn’t born from any misguided 80s-inspired belief that darker = deeper. It is because summer movies have made me so fucking numb that only brutal lacerations of the spirit can get me into the theatre anymore. I am sick of protagonists. I want victims and monsters.

(But I don’t want to see horror movies. Those are just awful.)

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For three years in Korea, the only English bookstore we had was a scrappy little store in Seoul called Whatthebook. Its prices were a bit steep, for used and new alike, and its sorting system was so haphazard as to be almost useless; Terry Pratchett would be filed under “Fiction” in the new book section, but under “Fantasy/Scifi” in the used books. Neal Stephenson, the opposite. So the lines were a little blurry.

Now I’ve been hitting all the old bookstore-haunts pretty hard: both Half Prices in town, the Book Rack (a sprawling derelict paperback depository in the poor part of town, the old lady captain going down with the ship), a new used bookstore with no name and a worse selection and today, finally, the Barnes & Noble megalith. We had a gift card, so we went.

While perusing all the used stores I was thinking, “I want to buy Book X; it isn’t here; it’ll probably be at B&N, albeit at a higher price.” I built my mental checklist, and in the process, I think I elevated B&N’s inventory to impossible standards, for they turned out to have very little indeed. I’m talking about big names, big important titles in genre lit: Urth of the New Sun - any of the New Sun/Long Sun books! Only China Mieville’s Bas-Lag books, no King Rat or The City & The City - only two or three Lois McMaster Bujold titles, and not a one of them a Vorkosigan book. What the hell? These are the heavy hitters of modern genre fiction. Bujold has more freaking Hugo awards than anyone other than Heinlein. Yet, almost nothing.

Gad, that made me despair. As a novelist, I hope to one day have a fraction of Bujold’s success. Does that mean my books won’t be on shelves at all?

I don’t know - I’m sure authors and actual industry people can tell you - but how many sales come from people perusing shelves and thinking, “This looks good” and picking it up? And how many sales come from fans seeking out an author’s book and ordering it off Amazon? The latter is fine for an author if they’ve already got an audience; but how far can you expand your audience if you aren’t on store shelves? I do not know! But it worries me.

Anyway, it reminded me of the argument of the validity of the F/SF “ghetto”. Heinlein is often described as the author who did the most to lift the genre out of the “genre ghetto” and give it credibility. Sure, okay. And I remember reading an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, about his (fanfreakingtastic) The Years of Rice and Salt, which is a fairly straightforward alternate history that could pass for nongenre fiction. The interviewer asked if he’d maybe like to step outside the genre and start writing mainstream fiction. His response was basically, “Why the fuck would I want to do that? I’m a scifi titan, I don’t want to be surrounded by shitty pretentious mainstream titles in the pursuit of the literati’s idea of credibility. I have an audience and plenty of fans in the ghetto, thank you.” And KSR is probably the most “literary” SF writer alive. There’s no doubt that he could succeed in the mainstream, but he’s not interested.

So I am often caught between wanting the mainstream to recognize the validity of the art form in which I work, and learning to be satisfied with doing what I do. I wouldn’t want to be in the mainstream section of the bookstore, for sure. I wouldn’t want my fans to have to sift through fifty copies of Shopaholic Contemplates Suicide to find my books. I’m sick of literati and academics who turn their noses at a work because it has spaceships, or tentacles, or tentacled spaceships; I just need to remind myself of their irrelevance.

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I have a website? What?

Egad, it’s been a week and a half. Since my last post, we had a grueling journey - not as bad as it could be, but far from a thrill. I finished Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. We were reunited with friends and family. I began Iain M. Bank’s Against a Dark Background. I built a new computer. We drove throughout our hometown, shaking our heads in resignation. We had a wild homecoming party that wasn’t actually meant to be as wild as me, Joel, and Ben made it. We played drunken badminton and somehow I cut my feet quite badly.

Let me tell you about that. I have no memory of it occurring, nor did I notice the wound the day of, but the next morning I saw that on my heel a quarter-sized flap of thick skin had been peeled back, and all sorts of black gunk had collected under that flap. I put a bandaid over it and thought about other things for a day, but, to my dismay, it had not gone away this morning. I took a pair of narrow surgical (I guess) scissors and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and went to work.

First I cut away as much of the dead skin as possible. It didn’t hurt; it was dead. However, I did have ample opportunity to observe and remark upon the amazing toughness of my heel-skin. I go barefoot quite a bit. I have cut through leather boots more easily. I considered saving the skin, but couldn’t think of a use.

Then I scraped away what gunk was now exposed. It was a mucilaginous decoction of mud, rotten leaves, sticks, and insect fragments. I carefully removed it from the raw red skin with Randi’s toothbrush. A good bit remained, packed tightly under fresh, living, tough skin that I hesitated to cut away, so I probed under the fleshy overhang with the narrow scissors-point, removing the bio-slurry speck by painful speck, flicking the bloody mud solution into Randi’s contact lens case. Finally, the foreign slime gone, I flooded the whole bloody gash with hydrogen peroxide, watched it foam, grinned at the lance of pain jabbing my heel, thinking, “I am a sinner, and this is my punishment.”

But you don’t come here to read about crude home surgery, dear reader, or at least I hope not, or you’d be disappointed more often than not. (Do you? I can try. I’ve got something stuck in my other foot that I’m looking forward to excavating, and if I know you’re interested, I’ll take notes.) You come here for my meanders on writing and politics and junk.

Ah, writing. I remember when I used to do that. These days, I’ve been concentrating on increasing my physical muscles; indeed, the effort has been productive, and I now resemble one of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches. But my mental muscles have atrophied. One must write every day, you know. The simple act of putting words on page becomes easier with practice. You are able to get into the zone more quickly and be more fruitful once you get there. However, as I am lazy by nature - no, wait, I mean “laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy” - I am only able to write when I arrange my entire life around it. I must have a routine, I must have the same designated time every dang day, or I will find excuses to put it off and do other stuff, other more quickly rewarding stuff. So, about three weeks ago, when life got difficult, I put the book on hold. And there it’s been. Now I’m out of excuses - reasons, rather, there are always plenty of excuses - reasons not to work. Dammit. Tomorrow. We’ve unpacked, jet lag is gone, I’m doing it.

Now I would like to tell you a bit about cheese. The day after our return to the states, we went to Kroger, not a store renowned for its cheese selection. And yet we managed to buy no fewer than six cheeses: cheddar, pepperjack, goat cheese, parmesan, fresh mozzarella, gorgonzola. A few days later we returned to buy cheese for the party: havarti, emmental, and more pepperjack.

It’s good to be home.

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Last day in Ko-town. Last day in the Po. Three years in this town. Three years in the same area of a few blocks, bounded by the Jin Mart, the park, the fish market, Beer Hunter, Song’s Beer, Beer Funny, and other bars with great names.

We’ve been here so long; there’s no one left who came at the same time as us (barring a few weird, reclusive lifers). Our oldest friends are gone, and most of our other friends are making plans to go. There are new kids, weird alien creatures, skinny youths with their tattoos and their rock and roll. We don’t know them and they don’t know us. The old guard has dwindled. It is time to leave.

When we came to Korea, it wasn’t America we left, but Bush’s America, with its reeking paranoia and contempt for common decency and its oil obsessions. We hoped a stay abroad would give us some perspective on the homeland, and Lord Almighty, how it has! We fell in with a radical crowd here, young seditionists, anarchists and bomb-makers, vegetarians and poisoners, absinthe drinkers and polycrats, Bohemians and Luddites, Marxists and Canadians, and our politics evolved from exposure to new ideas and new people. We understand, on a level deeper than that which can easily be attained in Arlington, Texas, the many paths that the human experience can take; that there are marked differences between, say, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean culture, or even south South Korean and north South Korean culture. We’ve traveled to China, Laos, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan, twice, and this job and our oft-troublesome residence in this country enabled that travel. For the travel alone, it was worth the time here.

Life in Korea has often been marked by difficulty, frustration, or our ridiculous western standards of privation, but it’s also been full of good times, good experiences with good friends, or negative experiences with good friends that become good in retrospect. We love and detest many things about this country, and while we are glad to return to the US and our friends and family there, we can’t help but feel melancholy at this place we’ve made our home. I won’t miss its misogyny, its racism, its ageism, its callous treatment towards its own youth, its 1950s understanding of fulfillment and happiness; imagine a country that never had “Death of a Salesman” or Rabbit, Run or even “American Beauty” to tell them what is so obvious to us in America. They need a sexual revolution, pronto.

Oi. To digress. We got some distance from our country. Through intimacy with a foreign country, we became more aware of our own country’s faults and virtues. America may be riddled with crime, corruption, political paralysis, but at least most of us openly acknowledge that misogyny, racism, and xenophobia are wrong; we acknowledge not only that homosexuals exist but that theirs might even be a valid way of life; we have freedom of speech not only in letter but also in practice. Korea doesn’t have any of those things. But Korea does have excellent public transit, a dearth of guns and gun violence, low crime, and almost no drugs. Their Christians, while rabid, aren’t as obnoxious as America’s Christian right, and they’re sufficiently hypocritical/impious/realistic that I wouldn’t worry about being shot to death by one of them for, say, being an abortionist or a secular humanist.

In short, I have realized that not only is America fucked, but Korea is equally fucked in different ways, and, indeed, possibly every country has its fair share of crippling problems. Though I laugh when I hear Canadians fret about, say, the government giving too much aid to its native Canadian (First Nation) (Injun) population, or that their free health care has problems; come on, guys, you don’t have three million people behind bars, or a southern neighbor on the verge of total collapse, or a global empire to sustain in the age of diminishing oil! Quit yer bitchin’, Canada!

So we return to America with a better understanding its social problems. We know now that it is possible to have a cheap, effective health care system, or to have high speed trains, or universal broadband. That not having guns in the hands of every drunk or lunatic or drug dealer doesn’t equal the eradication of personal freedoms. Et cetera.

It’s a messy country to which we return. The economy is even worse, and the politics even more toxic. We’ve got a billion dollar football stadium in our hometown, the sight of which I detest. We’ll have no choice but to drive everywhere, in cars. But we’ll also have so many cheeses….

Let me tell you about cheese deprivation. You may know that in the States I was co-founder and president of the Kaleidoscope of Cheese, an august assemblage of turophiles. We convened regularly to sample and discuss new cheeses. We found new horizons, new landscapes of culinary pleasure in bries, edams, soft cheeses, crumbly cheeses, hard pungent cheeses in wedges and wheels, spread on crackers or brushed on bruschetta.

Korea is a dark land for cheeses. “Pizza cheese”, an ersatz mozzarella, the 1960s Soviet Union version of mozzarella, is ubiquitious. It seems to be a wad of plastic or wax shot at high speed through a wire screen. They have “American cheese”, too, which is even more vile than back in the states. Some lesser bries and camemberts are available. If you pay $20 you can buy a block of Kirkland cheddar, an underachieving cheddar at best.

My palate yearns for sharp, creamy fetas, for the pungency of a blue (or bleu), for the reassurance of Muenster or edam, the hearty, stolid, unassuming excellence of emmenthal. I have two young nephews who are rapidly shooting through childhood, and I miss them, but - the cheese.

And the beer! Korea has three main brands, with respective clever nicknames: Hite (Shite), Cass (Ass), and OB (Only Barf, Onerous Ballyhoo, Obnoxiously Bathetic). There is a stout variation of one of these. Never have I had a beer that tasted worse or hurt more the morning after. The taste is awful - it’s easy to make a terrible beer, I’m sure - but how do they make the hangovers so bad? DDT is the key ingredient. Give me a Shiner, anything from St. Arnold’s, anything from New Belgium. Microbrews! Heaven. Over the past three years, I have often confronted the possibility that, if I must keep drinking Korean beer, I may one day no longer like  beer. That is a beast no man should have to stare down.

To digress. Again. Our feelings for this country are complex and conflicted. I’m glad to leave, and I’ll miss many things. I can’t wait to see friends and family and cheese and beer again, but I will miss the friends I have accumulated here. I will miss the conveniences and peculiarities. It will be difficult to resume a lifestyle of car-slavery, and it will be difficult to keep from annoying my friends with sentences beginning with “In Korea…”

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I know I’ve been using English’s most versatile word a lot in my titles, but there’s no other way to describe this. (Sorry, Mom.)

1) Everyone has heard, I’m sure, about Texas’s shameful right-washing of the history books these past few months, a blow against integrity in education that will ripple outward through the country, due to Texas’s proportionately huge buying power in the textbook industry. Thomas Jefferson is gone, the importance of Latinos in western culture is minimized, et cetera et cetera.

2) Now Temple, Texas, a horrible little highway wallow where I once got a ticket for an out-of-date inspection (on my Dad’s car, no less) is bringing back corporal punishment. Wonderful. Lovely. I’m sure that teenagers these days, with bills to pay, kids to support, drug habits to satisfy, just need a paddling to steer them straight. Christ. I’ve worked for three years in a country where corporal punishment is widely, casually used, and I can testify that it is not only ineffectual, but it encourages misbehavior.

A blow is quick. You go ahead and give your elementary antagonist the finger, or pull her hair, or scream in the hallway or whatever, take your lick, rub the wound, and forget about it as soon as it stops hurting. So the teachers apply worse and worse beatings or humiliations until the kids die. Or simply commit suicide because their teenage brains are not equipped to process such cruelty from authority figures.
Corporal punishment creates a culture that condones pain as an acceptable means of dealing with undesirable behavior, which breeds callousness among the teachers and the students - and the parents. It takes the moral high ground from the authority figures, leaving them their authority not because they are right but simply because they are the authority. I don’t think this is a lesson we want to teach our kids.
(Temple parents, believe it or not, requested the revival of state-sanctioned abuse.)
(Examples of the inefficacy and casualties of the system: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. There’s more, but we don’t have all day.)

So there is the moral argument against corporal punishment and the argument from efficacy. It simply does not work. It is more for the satisfaction of the teacher than the correction of the student. And even there it is subject to diminishing returns. It poses the teachers and students very much in direct opposition; few enough students are able to understand that teachers really do want to help and really are there to help them, that education is not a struggle between authority and individuality or laziness or apathy, but a cooperative effort between teacher and student.

A step backwards for Temple and Temple youth.

3) And this - this is just sickening. Texas suffers from a teacher shortage.  Not officially - most schools are able to fill all jobs posted, but aren’t able to post all the jobs they may need; witness swelling class sizes, soccer coaches teaching history. An effective learning environment has fifteen to twenty students. More than that, and the teacher must divide his time and energy and is less effective. Take it from a guy who’s taught classes size four to forty. The average high school class in Texas has about thirty kids, too many to reasonably control. Why can’t they hire enough teachers to get class sizes to manageable levels? Because they’re broke. Everyone is broke these days. Okay then.

But not too broke to build a $60,000,000 football stadium. Let that sink in. Sixty million dollars. That is more money than you or I will ever ever earn in our lifetimes. The economy is spaghettifying in a limitless black hole. Unemployment is through the roof. The history class may have fifty kids in it because they can’t hire another teacher, and the school lunches may be all but carcinogenic because they can’t afford decent food or people to cook it; the schools may go unheated in winter and uncooled in summer, but they by god will have football. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. How the hell am I going to live in this state?

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Everyone agreed that it happened during the day.

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Did you hear? The end times! The end times! Obviously, 2010 is the new 2012. Theorist nuts are not content to wait. Why can’t we have 2012 in 2010? For that matter, why couldn’t we have it in 1999 - plot twist - WE DID. We’ve been dead this whole time. The fireball is the reincarnation of Virgil sent to guide us through hell on an ecstatic journey of the soul.

Kidding! The fireball is global warming. Yes! How could you warm the globe and not expect to get freakish flashes of light over middle America? Get used to it! Earthquakes, too. The Haiti quake - Chile - China - the Iceland volcano - global warming! You raise the temperature of the atmosphere a degree or two celsius and OF COURSE the earth is going to tear itself apart along the fault lines! I think we can expect trenches where the Himalayas and Rockies are currently. I am buying future beachside property in Wyoming. They laugh - now.

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Recently:

• First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung. Blatant false advertising. The father isn’t killed until almost halfway through the book. Just because you’re a genocide survivor doesn’t mean you can lie on your book cover, Mme. Ung! But it was a good read nonetheless, and by “good” I mean that it was so harrowing, it painted a portrait of a very recent and modern real-world hell so vividly that I felt a rush of liberal guilt all over again, just like the very first time I heard where Chiquita Bananas really come from. Ha, but seriously. There was nation-wide starvation and brutal mass murder at the same time as we Americans were watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show and complaining about high prices at the pump. I’m not saying that we should feel guilty for things we weren’t aware of, remotely complicit in, or even existing during - but, Jesus, it puts modern whinging in perspective, non? The next time you hear a Tea Partyer worrying about the safety of his social security and the risk of high taxes, beat him over the head with a legless Cambodian child’s prosthetic and explain that he has not yet begun to suffer. Apply the lesson to yourself, as well, the next time you complain about your job, your poor cell phone reception, or your botched dental surgery, and slowly, you will become a better person. FACT.
• Beyond Heaven’s River, by Greg Bear. He’s a famous scifi writer! I first tried to read Moving Mars but found it so frightfully dull that I could not penetrate beyond the first chapter. River was better; a WWII Japanese pilot is nabbed by aliens and lives in captivity for five centuries, forced to reenact a tumultuous period in Japanese history; he is then discovered by the rest of the weird, wild galaxy. What ensues is gripping, melancholy, and bizarre, and ultimately adds up, somehow, to much less than the sum of its parts. Bear presents a fascinating future setting, but he barely seems interested in it. He gives us good characters, but doesn’t really do much with them.
• Theatre, by W. Somerset Maugham. This can be described as “a novel by W. Somerset Maugham.” That is a good thing. Great dialogue, meticulously developed characters, a captivating depiction of life on the stage back when theatre meant something.

And currently:

• Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. I’m reading his Bas-Lag novels in reverse order. I am saddened that this is the last one for the foreseeable future. It is so so good. I’m 140 pages in. The characters are better than in The Scar, and the plotting better than Iron Council. The city of New Crobuzon, a better character than any of Mieville’s actual humanoids, is front and center, and the book benefits with a bustling, humming energy not found in the more sedate, leviathan Scar.

Playing:

• Bully, on PC. It’s a lot of fun! Rockstar Games are known for their fun, perhaps the first requirement by which games should be judged. The GTA formula translates with surprising explicitness to a high school setting; refreshing, too, is the fact that the protagonist is not a cold-blooded killer, and that the game is, at its heart, pretty good-natured even when it’s nasty.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor on DS. I’m playing this because I can’t get a copy of Strange Journey, but this is pretty dang good in its own right; a strategy RPG where you summon and control demons, set in modern Tokyo. The plot is interesting, the characters aren’t as annoying as JRPG standards, and the gameplay is fun, deep, and challenging. Can’t wait to play Strange Journey, though. This is my first entry into SMT; I should probably have started with a Persona game or whatever, but - whatever.
• The newest Sam and Max hits tomorrow or the day after, methinks. I preordered the season way back when. Can’t wait.

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And everyone. Just leave my teeth marks in the world. My teeth, dispensing truth and justice, poised like thirty-two ivory Batmen in my mouth; my tongue the salivary lash; chomp, chomp, THE AGONY OF TORN FLESH, and your mistakes are corrected! You see clearly for the first time!

No need to thank me; but I don’t mind if you do.

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This is the sort of thing I mean when I say things like, “It is impossible to underestimate how thoroughly Protestantism has screwed this country.”

The gist: in Wisconsin, it is illegal for minors to have sex; they can be charged with sexual assault. So sex ed teachers who teach anything other than abstinence-only education can be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, the state attorney, who happens to be a Republican, warned them.

His logic is that this sex education “sexualizes” children and encourages sexual interaction between them. Obviously, without sex ed, kids would wait until marriage to have sex; there would be no rapes; sex would not be used as a weapon, or as a tool, or for pleasure, but purely procreation, just like in the good old days, that mythical 1950s without the Bohemianism, black people, poor people, or drug use in which Republicans want to live and in which they think everyone else wants to live.

Let’s pick apart this ball of fearhate. (My brain can’t seem to recall a word that means “hatred inspired by fear”, but one would be very useful in describing the right.)

1) The main qualification of a teacher is whether they are a good teacher, not whether their opinions conform to the political majority. A good sex ed teacher teaches… sex ed. They are not charged with crimes for doing their jobs.

2) Sex education teaches the idea of sexuality as something not to be ashamed of, but an integral part of the human experience, as fundamental as breathing; goddammit, it is reproduction, a biological fucking fact, you delusional assholes. Sex ed doesn’t necessarily glorify the act, but in a matter-of-fact discussion of an oft-forbidden topic, it removes or at least lessens the stigma - a stigma around something that is almost certainly going to happen. To think it will promote sexual assault by “sexualizing” kids as “early as kindergarten” is a gross and harmful falsehood.

3) How can it be illegal for minors to have sex in any state? What sort of 17th century law is this? How can people against big government justify interfering in a biological function? (Simple - as with so many of the cognitive dissonances that characterize the right, it is because they no longer have any stance on big or small government that they follow as a matter of principle, but merely argue for or against it when it is convenient to their personal desires/neuroses. I.e., “Stay out of our bedrooms, government! Unless they are the bedrooms of gay people.”)

At the bottom of this you find the classic fear-of-the-other that has overrun the undereducated poor whites who constitute most of the Republican party these days; fear of homosexuals; fear of sexuality; fear of women; fear of immigrants; fear of African-Americans; fear of the poor; fear of free discussion of important topics because they know their ill-built structure of belief will not withstand it. All of human progress has been a march away from fear-of-the-other, and every step of that march has been opposed by mainstream religious institutions and the political parties most intimately tied to them.

Fortunately, kids hit university and they learn that sex is an even greater pleasure than self-denial and self-righteousness; maybe they can put down their hypocrisy and teach their kids that that pleasure doesn’t necessarily need to be sneaked or stolen. Every generation gets us a little closer to meeting the bare minimums of decency.

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No updates in two weeks, and for a good reason; life is batshit insane right now. We have three weeks left in Korea, where, you know, dear reader, we have lived for three years, and we are tying up the loose ends of those 1095 days and packing them in boxes to be slow-shipped back to the states. There are books and books, there are knicks and knacks, priceless objets d’art collected on our travels that we are now wrapping in scarves and tuks and shoving in the bottom of cardboard boxes to brave the Pacific. One hopes they will catch up to us in the states.

I am forced to reflect on the clutter of our lives, on how unnecessary much of it is, and, yea, verily, much is left behind or given away. One considers not only, “Is this Lego set or harmonica case worth shipping?” but also, “And do I want it around my house for the next forty years?” My scythe is discriminate but cruel and unsentimental when it strikes.

I am whittling myself down to a mere ten books for three weeks, which induces a sort of background panic, a worry that I might finish my current book and then be left with uninviting choices. Nominally, every book on my shelf is something I want to read at some point, but when you’re in the mood for say, George MacDonald Fraser, Georgette Heyer will not suffice. I like to keep my options open.

I once read an article in Real Simple magazine (when stranded on a desert isle, nothing else in reach) about uncluttering one’s life; “Do you have a lot of books to prove that you’re well read - instead of simply being well read?” To which I said, “Fuck you, Real Simple, fuck you to hell and back.” There are many reasons for keeping masses of books, and they are reasons that vary on a personal level. To whit, mine are (aside from the obvious, that I have them so I can read them, or the obvious joy of collection):

1) Memory hooks. After finishing a book, I revisit in my memory, regurgitating and chewing it for extra nourishment indefinitely; but my mental cud sometimes needs stimulation. I have read so many books, and so many good books, that it would require a disproportionate chunk of my brain to remember them all. So I have the titles on my shelf. I can pick up The Brothers Karamazov, with its heavy cloth binding, and the tactile sensation stirs memory in me; I remember where I finished it (Iris Bagels); I leaf through the illustrations, I read bits and pieces, and, most of all, the smell of the book - scent being the sense most powerfully associated with memory - conjures exactly the feelings of reading the book. Whenever I ride a ferry, I remember As I Lay Dying, because my copy lay in someone’s trunk for so long that it reeks of diesel fumes. And vice versa. So I can run my hand along the spines and images flood back into my mind, the closest thing we have to some sort of Philip K. Dick-ish memory-computer machine that inevitably backfires and scrambles your brains but is really just a metaphor for technological dystopianism.

2) Reference. Good writers borrow, great writers steal. I don’t know enough about music to write beautifully on the subject, but Thomas Mann did a hell of a job in Buddenbrooks. I’ve never had a transcendent mystical experience, but passages of Years of Rice and Salt make me feel as if I have. Writers learn from reading, and I might be writing and recall, “How was it XXXXX described a sunset?” Flip to the passage, and, ah, yes. I wouldn’t use those words exactly, but they may give me a push in the right direction, hint at some avenue of description I hadn’t thought of. And, obviously, nonfiction books are valuable for reference as well.

3) I might want to re-read them someday.

So. That’s why I must keep all the books I’ve ever bought.

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Reading:

• First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung. With a title like that, you’d think you’d know what to expect. But what happens first? First they have a nice lunch.
  I bought this from a one-legged kid in Cambodia. He was a virtuoso salesman, playing my liberal guilt, book-love, and frugality like alternate strings on a violin. “I don’t need I’m sorry, I need you buy!” (Displays missing leg.) (Continues to stare while I try to mentally justify why I might spend twelve dollars on a massage but won’t give him five dollars for a book so he can eat.) (I buy the book.)
  A lot of the books these legless or armless kids sell in Cambodia have to do with the Khmer Rouge; makes sense. That and Angkor Wat are what we know of the country, and where most English-language literature has been written. But, oi, one gets tired reading the backs of books and the myriad ways publishers condense and sell stories of horrific genocide. So we only bought the one, and the other legless kids were out of luck.
• The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman. Listening to this one on audibook - I think I enjoy it more. The production is excellent, with occasional music and different voice actors for every character. The story is more quickly gripping than in the first part of the trilogy.
• Gotham Central, by Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka. A police procedural set in Gotham City. It must be tricky to be a cop in a city with supervillains and masked vigilantes. How can you justify your paycheck when Batman can do your work for you, much faster and more thoroughly? How can you do good police work at all with the Bat around? This street cop’s view of Gotham is a fresh perspective, sensitively written, nuancedly charactered. (That was a new adverb and a new verb I just invented. I gift these to you, world.)

Reading (just finished):

• The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Occasionally I read something so big, so remarkable, that I don’t want to talk about it for fear of diminishing its grandeur with my stupid words. This is the greatest example of that. Let me say that it is hands-down the best speculative fiction I have ever read - better than Gene Wolfe, better than China Mieville - and among the greatest works I have ever read regardless of genre. Over its 2000 pages, it forms a vision of humanity and history so complete that it supersedes the real world, and you put down the book and have to remember, “Earth… oh, yeah, I live on Earth.”
• Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. This book is invaluable not only for its writing on our nation’s food industry - which is insidious, corrupt, riddled with injustice and unhygienic practices, and I will never eat fast food again - but also as a drama-in-miniature of how our government has enfeebled itself, groveled, demeaned itself to industry over the past thirty years. The government has systematically defanged itself for the sake of powerful meat-packing industries, lowering OSHA standards and FDA powers further and further until we’re recalling millions of pounds of beef, spinach, and peanut butter due to e.coli contamination and just can’t seem to figure out why. It is the government - the right side of it, mostly - groveling at the altar of money, sacrificing our national health in exchange, particularly poignant in this time of attempted health care reform. Thanks, Reagan, for creating our modern hell.

Watching:

• Mad Men, season 3. Wish I were smarter. I can’t describe why I like this show; the pacing is glacial - that was okay with The Wire, but The Wire was a clear-cut tragedy with obvious dramatic arcs. Mad Men plots drift in and out on a weekly basis, sometimes drop, are often not resolved at all. But the subtle characterization and the stellar performances and Christine Hendricks’s amazing rack keep me coming back.
• Looking forward to finally catching up on the second season of Dollhouse, and resuming Randi’s The Wire education; we’re up to season 4, one of the best. Well, they’re all the best. One of the top five of The Wire’s five seasons. David Simon’s new show Treme is about to launch, to great clamor. From me. I also have four seasons of The Sopranos to watch. So much TV. So much media.

Listening:

• Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me. Musically more approachable than Ys -anything is more approachable than Ys, a rabid polar bear is more approachable than Ys - but so damned big that it’s hard to listen to. I’ve started it ten times, never finished it. It’s a triple album, you know.

Playing:

• Resident Evil 4. Catching up on all the PS2 games I missed on account of only buying a PS2 last year. This is a modern classic, but probably only because of the incredible gameplay, the inventive level design, the freakish and horrifying monsters, the gripping momentum. Certainly not for the dialogue, which sometimes makes you wonder if the characters are actually trapped in parallel but non-intersecting dimensions and their words are passing through some distorting planar barrier. Huh. There’s a story idea…
• Odin Sphere. Beautiful, beautiful game, lovely sprites. Fun though shallow gameplay. A surprisingly good story, a dark anime-fantasy, with darkness that actually feels justified. But does it need to be fifty hours long? Goddamn. The game suffers from sameness. I’m thirteen hours in, love the hell out of it, but don’t know if I’ll finish it.
• Bully. Actually playing this on my PC, because only two years into its miserable little life, it cannot run any modern games. So I’m playing four year-old PS2 ports. That said, it’s a good time, with the GTA formula translated surprisingly explicitly to a high school. Ah, I love this game. It’s a blast to cruise around town on a bike, throwing eggs and firecrackers at squares and lame-oids alike.
• After I finish RE4, I’ll be giving either Metal Gear Solid 3 or the first Yakuza game a shot, while plugging away at Odin Sphere. I might also start Dragon Quest VIII. I’ve played IV and V on my DS, and enjoyed them without qualification. And I might play Condemned on my PC if I tire of Bully; I started it some years ago, but got distracted by something. And soon Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journeys comes out for DS, a title I’ve happily anticipated for months, followed soon by the remake of Dragon Quest VI. Hoot hoot! We are what we do.

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Proceeds apace. 25,500 words. I can’t wait for you to read it. (For $11.95 paperback or whatever.)

It is both a challenge and an easement to write something plot-driven. Papillon was episodic, picaresque, Khatima was - ah, let’s say, “character-driven” - but this book, which I was not a good enough writer to finish four years ago, is what you may describe as a “nonstop roller coaster ride of thrills and chills.” There are points A and Z and twenty-four points to hit in between. Ordering those points was a challenge, and there will certainly arise further problems as yet unconsidered; I’ll screw those bridges up when I get to them, eh wot? But for now I know where the plot is going, I know just what to write next. I filled a notebook with notes of excruciating detail, and that preparation is paying off; witness last year’s Piccolet, an attempt to write a novel with no preparation whatsoever; yes, let’s say that it was an improvisatory approach to writing, an attempt to infuse literature with the quality of jazz, to let the pony of creativity run unbridled and poop where it may; let us say that, rather than it was the product of laziness and inadequate foresight. Yes, much better.

Anyway. A challenge to plot, but easy to write once that challenge is overcome. When there are things to be done, the words spill out. My plot does not seem terribly complex nor is it terribly original. But it does what I need it to do. I am satisfied with it. Were it a lover, I would cook eggs for it the morning after - but not biscuits.

Today I wrote about horrible people doing horrible things. I tried to consider how one can be virtuous in a world that tries to crush virtue. Then I wasn’t sure I had succeeded, so I had a naked woman shoot off a man’s fingers.

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Kim Stanley Robinson, whose work I worship, is often accused of utopianism. I’m finishing up the (titanic, amazing) Mars trilogy, and I see it. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, though, as his utopias are earned. (Earned like hell, after two thousand pages.) They are reached through long long processes, and they are subtle and meticulously built. They are feasible, realistic, and, more, they seem to have significance. I’ll try to explain.

In the Mars trilogy (mild spoilers), there are two main factions on the planet - the Reds and the Greens. The Reds want to keep the planet unspoiled and as lifeless as possible, everyone confined to living in tents. The Greens want to terraform the planet, create an atmosphere, seed it with plant and animal life - make it another Earth, basically, with all the good and bad that entails. The Reds disagree. Great, another Earth, humanity spreading like bacteria, building everywhere - who wants it?

(And here’s the spoiler.)
At the end, the Greens win by default, because the mere presence of humans, in tents or no, adds BTUs to the atmosphere and would slowly terraform the planet even if they didn’t take other aggressive measures, which they do. After a few hundred years, it’s green, the atmosphere is breathable, a large ocean covers much of it. Great, another Earth. Or it would be, but for something incredible happening in the transition.

By leaving Earth, the settlers break free of their old societies. They are no longer bound by old governments or societies or their respective mores and customs, and they are able to lose many of their old prejudices. They are also thrust into a situation that requires assimilation. Many third or fourth generation Martians are of untraceable ethnicity; one character has Trinidadian, Japanese, Anglo, Greek, Polynesian heritage. Most people are also highly educated. They are able to pass a quite liberal constitution, with heavy elements of socialism. They are able to guarantee health and even wealth to most of their citizens. They do not totally eradicate war or crime, because it’s not a fairy tale. But Mars is the best place in the solar system to live.

Then something really cool happens - they aroform Earth to a limited extent. Their constitution’s emphasis on the rights and worth of the individual, their verification of the sanctity of life, their quasi-socialist yet highly successful economy, their joint responsible stewardship of the land - Earth sees how successful these practices are and begins to emulate them, breaking up many of the huge transnational corporations into employee-owned cooperatives, spreading wealth around. So that the terraforming of Mars is not merely the creation of “another Earth”. It is the creation of a utopia that teaches the rest of humanity how to achieve utopia, a gift for humanity beyond reckoning.

It made me think of what I want for humanity, and whether we could achieve something similar. I think that, given unlimited time and resources, we could achieve utopia. Unfortunately we have neither. Oil will be gone in forty or fifty years, gone for all practical purposes (that is, popular purposes) in twenty or thirty, and with it our modern industrial economy and our modern petroagriculture, the only thing that ever allowed the Earth’s population to pass two billion. And then - a Malthusian crisis beyond imagining. (Great! Just in time for my old age.)

It’s sobering to think about, when so few seem to see beyond the immediate concerns. The panic over the economy is the panic of the wealthy (and, yes, I mean America’s lower class, because even they are wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world) to retain their wealth, being unable to understand that economic values are not the only values. Likewise the rabid opposition to anything that whiffs of socialism. Yet in this economic failure we are seeing the failure of those values. This is one of those little growing pains that civilizations go through, a crisis of change. The goal seems to be a return to business as usual, but business as usual was a rancid, moribund cultural stagnation; no, we won’t go back to business as usual; after this crisis, we will be one step closer to utopia or dystopia. Robinson, insightful as always, said in an interview that humanity always seems to be in a race between utopia and catastrophe.

But one must consider the perfect world built by unrestricted capitalism (as, say, Heinlein seemed to want so badly). Everyone is rich. That is all. Everyone has enough to eat and cars in the garage. Well, not everyone, because capitalism requires bottom bricks in the pyramid of wealth. But surely you would be rich, because you’re an honest, hard-working American. I thought of it when I was in Singapore, one of the richest countries in Asia. There are miles of high, glossy shopping malls, and they are all packed, all the time. Singapore’s prosperity is the product of ambitious capitalism (tightly controlled by the government, so, so much for that). They have made everyone rich. (Well, not everyone, as the gulf between the rich and poor is widening and widening in that country, and they’ll face a Malthusian crisis of their own soon enough, this little country where everything is imported. But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Singapore is the successful product of unregulated capitalism, because it’s probably the best example we can find in the real world.) Everyone is rich, everyone seems happy. But the government can’t give them meaning; it can only give them money, and hope that they can find meaning with the corresponding freedom that entails. I don’t know. I can only look at so many towering Prada stores before I get a little nauseated.

Korea - same boat. Successful government-driven mega-capitalism, and a hugely materialist youth. The insane suicide rate suggests that they are not satisfied. Japan, too. It isn’t enough for governments to strive for wealth if we are to achieve utopia. But striving for ideological fulfillment is a vague thing and hard to do. No one knows what they want, and few solutions work for more than one person. Read some books, I guess.

Unfortunately, self-actualization is antithetical to the powers that be. The government does not want it because then you will not vote how they tell you to. You may realize how much you’ve been getting shafted and demand your rights, and then they’d have to do something. The industrialists do not want it because then you won’t buy their products. The religions do not want it because then you’d stop going to church. If you learn to dispense with created needs, you’d have no use for these things, and then where would they be?

Education does want self-actualization, but education is an arm of the government, and it has been enfeebled correspondingly for commercial interests. It’s hard to walk around the UTA campus and imagine your classmates burning draft notices or organizing protests. Man, that’s one thing I love about Korea. The protest culture is freaking insane. It’s hard to overstate how crazy it is. Part of this is because everyone now middle-aged grew up under a military dictatorship, and the only way they got democracy was by taking to the streets. That is the way they get stuff done here. It leads to the world’s most violent legislative body, sure, but it means that Koreans care passionately about their politics. They will burn and disembowel themselves. They will drop their pants to protest a soccer game. They eat flags. They throw manure on imported beef. They rip apart live pigs. They chop off their fingers. They chop faces off dogs. They behead mannequins and cover themselves in bees.

Doesn’t that make you feel lazy? Cover yourself in bees - for change!

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The AV Club has a surprisingly enlightening interview with Chris Avellone, lead designer of Planescape: Torment, perhaps my favorite game of all time. I’ve played it through at least four times - original, daring, never since repeated. And they talk about converting The Wire into a video game. Huh.

I’ve always been a fan of Obsidian’s work; it ain’t their fault that Lucasarts and Atari screwed up their two big titles to date by pushing them out early. Technically, they have difficulties sometimes, yes, but the content is more interesting and more provocative than anyone else’s. This personality is important, as Bioware descends more and more into blandness.

And Cracked has an amusing article about explorers and their lies that changed the world, which I mention here only because I have two comments that are incredibly erudite and that I do not want to submit to the comment maelstrom of the page itself:

1) The headless men described by Walter Raleigh are almost certainly based on the blemmyae described in the Die Schedelsche Weltchronik, and so not invented by Raleigh, and

2) I’m sure Marco Polo actually went to China. I’ve read his book, and it’s too damned boring to be fabricated. If he lied about everything, he’d have more interesting things to say than, “These people use paper money and are subject to the Great Khan. Their exports are foodstuffs and textiles.” About a hundred times. Per chapter.

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I did it. Read ‘em all. Then, I read three more books, not pictured here:

• Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie.
• The Scar, by China Mieville.
• The Northern Lights, by Philip Pullman.

Let us now discuss these books, in the order that I read them.

• The Last Colony, by John Scalzi. Pretty okay. The plot wasn’t as riveting as The Ghost Brigades, nor the world-building as interesting as in Old Man’s War, but the characters and the humor were consistent. The ending is ethically and structurally satisfying.
• The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber. Always impressed by Leiber. His erudition, his wit, his grace, his ease in telling complicated stories. The Wanderer is scarcely over 300 pages but it felt longer - an impressive cast of characters, a tale that covers a lot of ground.
• Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. So good. I can describe it merely as “the second book in the Mars trilogy,” and if you have read the first book, then you know that is a recommendation beyond comparison.
• Lovedeath, by Dan Simmons. The novella is not his native form. In the introduction, he says that, because of the length, every sentence must have “double - no, triple - meaning,” a boast that, upon second thought, doesn’t actually mean anything, and does not bear up after actually reading the novellas. Simmons is better in the novel, when he has space to expand and let his prolixity flow.
• The Scar, by China Mieville. The renowned imagination is on display in full glory. His style has not yet reached the beauty and power of Iron Council, but his development of characters and plotting is assured. About a hundred pages too long, though.
• Ringworld, by Larry Niven. Okay. Underachieving. Good characters, good sense of humor. But it takes the biggest concept imaginable and somehow makes it feel small. A do-nothing plot, a premise that promises great revelations yet delivers few. I could read the sequels, I guess, but I don’t really want to.
• Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett. How did I ever dislike this guy? I laughed aloud numerous times, and the plotting and resolution were so smoothly machined that I got chills. I can’t wait to read more - but I will, because I don’t want to get burned out again.
• Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman. I cried. I wrote the author an email and told him just that. He has yet to write back. The same night I was splashed with pigs’ blood. A beautifully told story - a bit tedious in the narration at times, but blossoming into this most beautiful, lyrical creation by the end.
• Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie. (Not pictured because I bought it in Bangkok.) Why doesn’t this man have a Nobel Prize? If Orhan Pamuk can get one for his turgid, self-important novel-shaped things, then by Jiminy give one to Mr. Rushdie for his bold, uncompromised visions. Ye gads. This book wrenched me left and right. I can’t wait to read more of this guy. (I suppose his Booker prize, his knighthood, his rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres are some consolations for the lack of a Nobel.)
• The Golden Compass/The Northern Lights, by Philip Pullman. (Also not pictured, bought it in Koh Samui.) The hype. Etc. It was fine. It did not annoy me, a virtue in a children’s book. I suppose I’ll read the sequels, but I’m in no hurry. I liked the armored polar bears. Those were the best part. And the Texan with the moustache and long-barreled pistol. I love it when Brits write Texans.
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. Heinlein’s world is different than the real world. In his world, every human is a strong, independent demigod who would be able to realize his full potential if only he didn’t have to pay taxes. One must only destroy government to bring about a utopia where human rights are protected not by courts and laws, but by brutal and swift frontier justice. And everyone is happy.
  Of course, the fact that in the real world, with real people, this scenario would quickly devolve into a Darwinian nightmare is irrelevant to the purposes of this libertarian manifesto. Did Heinlein realize that, and not care because of the unlikelihood of his vision being realized? Or did he honestly believe that people would behave as he imagined? If so, he was possessed of a weird optimism bordering on delusion, a cognitive dissonance where individuals are saints but governments (viz., individuals in groups) are demonic.
  I am satisfied that the modern day is disproving so many of the things he adored - privatization of public services? BLAMMO! Deregulation? BLAMMO! Unrestrained capitalism, economic values as the only values? BLAMMO BLAMMO BLAMMO DEAD
  Satisfied, too, that the right is so changed from the right that he loved. They are no longer the rugged individualists that he liked to think built America. They are now a bunch of undereducated whiny illiterate asses who want unemployment checks and Medicaid handed to them, but will firebomb City Hall if taxes go up. These clowns, and the corporate overlords who drive them into poverty while riling them at the real villains, that is, the brown people and homosexuals. I laughed aloud in this one scene where the libertarian moon-men vote down a prudish woman who thinks the moon’s new constitution should rigidly redefine marriage, outlaw polyamory, etc. “Why the hell can’t people mind their own business? That’s the good old [Republican] way.” Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! I’ll remember that next time the right bans gay marriage. Ha! Ha!
  The book? The book was pretty fantastic. I loved the hell out of it. Politics aside, I have not read a better Heinlein book. The plot was gripping, the characters unusually well rounded and sympathetic. When my eyes weren’t exploding in clouds of red mist at the absurd politics, I enjoyed the hell out of the book. Read it in three days. But how many more Heinlein books can I read?
• The Spirit Ring, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Conventional wisdom is that this, the author’s first foray into fantasy, is the weakest of her novels, that Baen only published it so she would write more Vorkosigan novels, that the critical and commercial reception was “not enthusiastic”. But I love Bujold, figured I would read all of her books sooner or later anyway, and since I happened to have this one in my possession, I might as well get it over with. It wasn’t bad. There were faults, oh, yes; the characters were a bit broadly drawn, and the dialogue was clunky as hell, which was probably the result of going from realistic dialogue in her scifi to a high medieval/Renaissance style. You can hear her bending over backwards not to salt it with thees and thous. The result is stilted, silly. But, the plot ticks along quite nicely, and there are a lot of good ideas on display here. I would be pleased if this were my worst book.

Then I bought a copy of Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, by Samuel R. Delany, whom I’ve wanted to read ever since I saw Kyle Cassidy’s amazing photo of his office. (How the hell did he take that? Did he go up to the attic and drill a hole through the floor?) I was set to read it when I saw a copy of Blue Mars in the Kuala Lumpur airport, and started that instead. Stars seems all well and good, but it was not Blue Mars. Few books are. Actually, only one book is.

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Well! Well indeed!

We’re back from vacation. Two months is a long time to brush your teeth with bottled water. We ate biryani - or is it briyani? - in Singapore. Drank a Singapore Sling, too. Swam in waterfalls in Malaysia. We explored a shipwreck in Thailand. We violated immigration law (also in Thailand). We kayaked raging rapids in Laos. I learned things about raging rapids the hard way, namely rapids = rocks, and they are not to be charged at full speed in hopes of doing a wicked sweet jump, or whatever I was thinking.

I read a lot, wrote a lot, wrote the notes to an entire novel, in fact, which I’m writing now. I’ve got less than two months to write it, too, before we return to the states and my writing schedule goes all cattywumpus. To accomplish this I must write 2000 words a day. The only reason this is remotely possible is because the novel is thoroughly plotted, outlined to a depth of five levels - that’s where you use lower-case roman numerals, bitches! I’m exuberant because I’ve never been there before. This novel is outlined so minutely because I wrote about a quarter of it before, in 2006. I had no experience and no concept of writing and no discipline and good ideas turned to shit. Now I’m a million words older and ready to take another crack at it. It is good to scratch long-festering sores and release the baby spiders of creativity within.

Anyway, the novel is four days and 8700 words long. It’s dynamite. It’ll be a challenge for me because it balances multiple points of view and narrative threads. The plot is fairly straightforward and the themes are fun ones - corporate greed is the big one. (I decided to return to this novel on the day the Supreme Court mortgaged America’s future to corporations.) But there’s also good stuff on how to create meaning in a meaningless world, etc., etc., I’m bored already. Huh. Well, there’s also a cardiogolem and neurogrenades and press-on curses. That stuff is fun.

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… if you base it off Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides and hire demigod Ian McShane to play demigod BLACKBEARD. Holy hell, Hollywood, are you going to do something right?

I was lukewarm on Powers until I read the mind-blowingly great Anubis Gates; now I am enthusiastic. And Ian McShane elevates anything he’s in, even Kung Fu Panda. He should be in everything. EVERYTHING. And playing Blackbeard? How badass is Blackbeard? Example: (in history) when he was killed, he had six gunshot and seventeen sword wounds on him. The seventeenth took his head off. Then they threw his body overboard and it swam to shore. No fooling.

Yes, this could be a good movie.

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At EDF, a few weeks ago - I didn’t notice, and they didn’t tell me. But here it is! I see from the comments that many people didn’t get it, which is about right.

Am I alone in that I find it okay for art to confuse or mystify me? In that I even enjoy it when art provokes that reaction? In that I do not think difficulty equals pretension?

P.S. Back from vacation, updates to resume soon.

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Did you see this one on Thousand Faces? No? Et voila.

Tears of Clobbersaurus
By Jens Rushing

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, designed by the masterful Tadao Ando, is that city’s foremost cultural treasure. Its five shining concrete-and-glass pavilions are surrounded by a glittering reflecting pool, beyond which the skyscrapers of downtown thrust into the blue prairie sky. The Modern’s galleries hold some 2,600 works of art by the likes of Picasso and Pollock, Serra and Serrano. The high glass walls are designed to flood the galleries with natural light; they are not designed to repel an attack by Clobbersaurus.

Two blows from his scaly fists sufficed to shatter the tall front doors, even though it was the first Sunday of the month, when anyone can enter for free, even half-ton lizardmen. A sweep of his spiked tail destroyed a stand of reasonably-priced Yoshitomo Nara collectibles. Anselm Kiefer’s masterwork Papst Alexander VI: Die goldene Bulle hung on the far side of the entry gallery; “Monstrous pile!” snarled Clobbersaurus, and ripped the canvas in half with his powerful claws. “Flee, ye sons of man!” he shrilled in his lizardly voice, and the patrons did just that, streaming through the destroyed doors and to the safety and security of the nearby Kimbell Art Museum, which displayed works no later than the Post-Impressionists. Its limestone vaults were built during the Cuban missile crisis; Clobbersaurus would be no threat to them.

From the top of the obscenely ugly forty-three story Burnett tower, the Lone Wrangler brooded over his city. As near as he could tell, all seemed to be at peace, and – Land o’ Goshen, was that the sound of forty-foot glass walls shattering?

The Lone Wrangler dove off the tower, clicked his thrustospurs together, and rocketed westward along 7^th Street. By Gum, the east wall of the Modern was down, the shards reflecting in the reflecting pool like so many shredded goldfish, and someone was mangling his favorite Josef Havel sculpture.

“Clobbersaurus! I shoulda known! All right, ya varmint, drop that there exquisite leadcast and let’s get to fisticuffs!”

“Wrangler! My quarrel is not with thee, but with this so-called ‘art’. I would fain wipe my crevasse with this Diebenkorn’s Urbana #6, but since my transformation, I no longer excrete, so the act would be symbolic rather than practical – I will settle for spindling and mutilating within my mighty talons! Urbanal, more likely! Ha!” And he shredded the hapless painting.

“All right, Mr. Saurus, you step away from the neoplasticism, nice and easy-like. Let’s step outside and have us a tussle. I reckon I kin whip you six ways from Sunday.” Keep his gums flapping, the Wrangler thought, and get him away from the priceless art. “Let’s settle this like man and lizardman. If’n ya ain’t yeller.” His hands moved slowly to his pair of 1876 Colt Laser Action Revolvers.

“My quarrel is not with thee, Wrangler, but with the masters of De Stijl! Regardless, I will not hesitate to pulp thee into pallid palimpsest, shouldst thou seek to cross swords. Avaunt, varlet!” And before the Wrangler could draw his guns, Clobbersaurus vaulted to Carl Andre’s Tau and Threshold sculpture, which he hurled at the Wrangler with all his might, smashing through Dan Flavin’s irreplaceable Diagonal of May 25, 1963. “My true objective awaits upstairs. Harry me not, for I smash for the greater good!” Clobbersaurus tromped upstairs, flinching briefly at Andy Warhol’s self-portrait.

The Wrangler clicked his boots together and rocketed up the stairs, crashing into Clobbersaurus and knocking him forward, where he sprawled beneath Rothko’s Light Cloud, Dark Cloud. The Lone Wrangler’s heart sank. Once confronted with abstract expressionism, Clobbersaurus would enter a killing rage.

“Maybe we ought to parlay a little,” the Wrangler said, leveling his Laser Actions at Clobbersaurus’s head. “What’s got yer hackles up?”

“These execrable canvases,” Clobbersaurus growled. “Look at them! What have we here? Three rectangles on an orange background, rendered with the consummate skill of a palsied six year-old! How many millions did the museum pay for this dreck? Once art sought to uplift, to eludicate, to move! Now it only confounds, confuses, obfuscates! It creates barriers where it ought to pierce them. It corrupts where it ought to beatify; it is an elitist exercise in absurdism that destroys hope and the quest for meaning, engineered with its own extinction!”

The Wrangler considered the piece. “I always understood Rothko was about the interplay of colors and such-like.”

“And Rembrandt isn’t?” said Clobbersaurus bitterly.

“Well, now, that’s just backwards-lookin’,” said the Wrangler. “We got to move forward.”

“We are under no obligation to innovate for its own sake. So-called innovation gave us this abortion!”

The Wrangler scratched his head. “Well, I don’t know about that…”

“Allow me to phrase it this way. Wrangler, what is the income of your everyday persona?”

“I do okay. Maybe forty-five big ones a year.”

“And Messire Rothko splashed this dross out in a month, and earned seven million for it. You could do this. Your child could do this, could he not?”

“Well, yeah! It doesn’t seem fair, really! How do they get away with it?”

“Obfuscation, Wrangler. It is a stranglehold on our creative throats. It is an insult to the intellect of a nation. It is injustice on a national scale. For every Joseph Beuys, there are a thousand unburied corpses.” And Clobbersaurus shed one crystal tear.

The Wrangler holstered his guns. “Get on up, Clobbersaurus,” he sighed.

“Thou wilt not stand in my way?”

“Shucks! I’ll help you! Then I’ll take you to Jamba Juice and buy you a smoothie.”

“The Blueberry Blaster is rich in antioxidants,” Clobbersaurus rumbled, raking his talons across the canvas.

The End

Yes, I hate all art. Next week we’ll have a story about cowboys.

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