ALEUTIA

Not as slick as the crank laptop, and it costs a hell of a lot more, but it allows the user to escape the clutches of Microsoft, Intel and (yes) Apple, not to mention the power company—collectively, if you will, the Man.

My guess is the solar panel probably works a lot better in the tropics. I wonder if they could set you up with the panel AND a little wind turbine for twice as much money. Then I really could operate out of a cave in Western MA like it says in my bio. Oh, to dream.

One of the convictions I came to about the core of my writing process in 2005 at Odyssey was that the kernel of any story I sat down to write, the notion from which all the rest of it sprung, had to be theme.

Now, this never exactly worked as a hard and fast rule. Often, the actual spark of a story comes to me in the form of an image. For “The Utter Proximity of God”, my initial mental picture was of an old draft animal falling dead in the middle of plowing a field, which image I actually lifted (as I often do) from the lyrics of Grateful Dead songs: “Brown-Eyed Women” (“Gone are the days when the ox fall down / he’d take up the yoke and plow the fields around”) and “New Speedway Boogie” (“I don’t know but I been told / if the horse don’t pull you’ve got to carry the load”). But those two references alone immediately evoke, for me, a whole web of meaning surrounding the myth of the working man, including the tragic death of Boxer the horse in Animal Farm, the parable of the sower, Millet’s iconic painting elevating the peasant class, faith, damnation, the redeeming nature of toil, Marx’s Platonic idealization of the proletariat, etc, etc. From that one image, I leapt almost automatically through all these interpretations to what I knew the story had to be about: the potential conflict and harmony between faith and practicality in the face of adversity. The same process happened with “Hope and Erosion”—I went from an image of a sandcastle washing away to the futile quest of a hermit crab hero.

I love this method. It’s very visual, and it gets to the heart of what interests me most about writing fiction, which is the ideas. But lately I have perceived a drawback to it that makes me want to try to force myself to choose story ideas based on plots, not themes. My theme tends to become my guiding force–it’s what I look to when in doubt about anything else in the story, plot & character included. So I think there are a lot of situations in which my love for theme becomes a crutch. And in reaching for it, too often I abandon or lose that other essential element, without which theme can only come across as a boring-ass lecture: that element being the capacity of a story to grip the reader, make them care, make them want to engage with and understand the story on the same level at which they engage with their own lives.

That in mind, as soon as I can clear away the considerable mess of projects already cluttering the desktop of my mind, I think I’m going to try forcing myself to come at a new story from a different angle. I’ll allow myself to start from an image, maybe–but I’m going to try to make those usual intuitive connections on a different web than usual. Try to draw from the classic plots, rather than from the usual half-baked philosophical notions.

It strikes me this endeavor may go somewhat against Justin’s art teacher’s notion about doing what’s fun. With which I do agree wholeheartedly, and too often forget to follow. I will try to keep that advice in mind as well as I proceed.

The art of writing too often resembles the art of keeping half a dozen pots simmering low on the stove all at once, stirring them two at a time, half at random, while once in awhile popping open the oven to drizzle juice over the roast. And sipping a pint on the side.

This is some kind of serious glacial anomaly I came across after getting my socks soaked in Chesterfield Gorge. The picture doesn’t really convey the size—the rock is maybe 9 feet across and at least 3 feet tall (not including the part of it that’s submerged in mud). It doesn’t match any of the rock of the surrounding gorge, as you will note from the next picture. It’s sculpted so smooth by the water it almost looks like carved marble. I wonder how it got here.

The usual local rock, sedimentary shale.

Horse Mountain, Haydenville, MA. The white fuzzy stick-animals are alpacas.

“You must realize,” [don Juan Matus] said, “that it is our cognition, which is in essence an interpretation system, that curtails our resources. Our interpretation system is what tells us what the parameters of our possibilities are, and since we have been using that system of interpretation all our lives, we cannot possibly dare to go against its dictums.”

–Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity

It’s a funny thing, my addiction to Carlos Castaneda. He’s not even a particularly good writer, really. I think if you gave me any one of Castaneda’s books and a red pen, I could go through it the same way I would any manuscript of my own and cut 10-20 percent. And it’s not as if his books are long to begin with–I doubt even the hardcovers ever get much past 300 pages.

Most of what I read ‘for pleasure’ can be ascribed by one means or another to my overarching goal of becoming a better writer. Normally, this means reading great writers of fiction, great prose stylists. I went through The Active Side of Infinity with an eye for interesting excerpts I could cull for the purpose of this entry. But I had a hard time at it, because his prose makes it impossible to pull out the meat of any idea without dragging some element of klunk along with it–passive voice, repetitive structure, superfluous wordage–some of it’s forgivable as a form of teaching strategy, but a lot of it feels like the rookie mistakes of a writer less interested in writing than in what he’s writing about.

I wonder about those mistakes. Clearly Castaneda was making bank for some editor somewhere. His stuff has a cult following like no other. Why, then, did that editor choose not to put a little more work into cleaning up the language? Was it a conscious choice? Did this editor believe, perhaps, that not bothering to produce a cleaner manuscript would contribute to a sense of authenticity which, in the case of a crackpot anthropologist writing about the teachings of a fantastical native American sorcerer, was sorely wanting?

I pull down from the shelf the five Castaneda books nearest to hand. From the bindings and front matter, it looks like the two mass-market paperbacks are both from Washington Square Press. The hardcover was put out by HarperCollins, and of the two trade paperbacks, one is Penguin, the other Simon & Schuster–which I believe are the same thing now anyway–but the point is, that’s a lot of imprints. A lot of different hands in the cookie jar. I imagine Castaneda might have made himself rather a difficult talent to work with, what with his insistence on concealing his source, his mysterious disappearance, not to mention the complete irrational implausibility of most of what he asserts to be the truth.

Could something have occurred between Castaneda and his publisher, back before 1968, akin to the conversation that must have taken place between James Frey and some shrewd, impatient businessperson at Random House sometime in 2002?

“Damn, this is a great story. I can’t believe this stuff actually happened to you.”
“Well, it didn’t actually. This is a work of fiction.”
“What? I didn’t buy a work of fiction. Nobody reads fiction anymore. You’re telling me none of this is true? Why the hell didn’t you say that in your cover letter?”
“I was trying to get a foot in the door. I thought I could hook you better if you thought it was true. I mean, it did happen to me. Some of it.”
“Well, you were right. So right, in fact, that I’m not buying it unless you swear on camera in front of God and Oprah and everybody that everything you wrote in that cover letter was true.”
“Uh. Okay. Guess I can do that.”

Of course, I don’t really like this hypothetical. I’d much prefer to assign all the cleverness to Castaneda, just as much as I want to believe there really was an 80-year-old Yaqui sorcerer called don Juan Matus who taught this obsessive, insecure academic how to silence his inner monologue, expand his perception, gain control of himself, kick ass, take names, and transcend time and space. But it’s impossible for me to know one way or another. I can doubt the existence of don Juan all I want; I can even doubt Castaneda the man, at least as his books present him. But there remains a possibility that all of it is real. And that ambiguity is actually a big part of why I keep reading.

I read him for the opportunity to see the line between reality and fiction move. To learn how such things are achieved.

He had said that everything I did had to be an act of sorcery. An act free from encroaching expectations, fears of failure, hopes of success. Free from the cult of me; everything I did had to be impromptu, a work of magic where I freely opened myself to the impulses of the infinite.

King Philip’s Rock aka South Sugarloaf, from River Road in Whately, MA. This is only one of many rocks purportedly belonging to King Philip between here and the Atlantic. Not unlike inns proclaiming “Washington slept here”–except of course that all those rocks actually did belong to King Philip, aka Metacomet, a sachem of the Wampanoag.

I’m thinking of doing a little climatological observation. I took this the last week in October. Every three months I’ll take a photo from the same spot. I wonder what will happen.

Everybody please go have a look at Erin Hoffman’s excellent post on The Homeless Moon about the future of the print fiction magazine in the genre market. She addresses the realities of the situation with a frankness and practicality I haven’t seen–and it’s an undertaking I think deserves real open source treatment.

I have been pretty bitter of late about the state of environmentalism as a cause. Ostensibly this might seem an odd or even indefensible reaction to anyone for whom this cause is not directly hard-wired to the soul, as it is for me. George Bush admitted publicly that global warming exists. Al Gore got a Nobel Prize for convincing him. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president (who has been cozying up to Bush like Putin before that whole missile shield spat), said the following to Bush’s face:

“Those who love the country of wide-open spaces, of national parks and nature protected, nature reserves, expect America to stand alongside Europe in leading — I repeat, leading — the fight against global warming that threatens the destruction of our planet.”

Yeah.

Sadly none of this makes me feel any better because then I see corporations jockeying for “green” position with giant ad budgets and no actual effort. I see a whole lot of nothing being done about that completely demented farm subsidies system we have, or, you know, mandatory fuel efficiency standards, because nobody’s really committed enough, no matter how many Nobel prizes they give to Al Gore, to actually push anything through congress. I see environmental policy not coming up in the presidential primary debates. And meanwhile there’s the California wildfires, the Georgia drought, the great Pacific garbage patch, the coal apocalypse in China, and meanwhile it’s mid-November and in Boston there are still green leaves on the trees and gardens producing tomatoes, and the Boston Phoenix puts out one “green” issue printed on recycled paper, and apparently that’s enough reassurance to keep everybody complacently trundling along to their tech jobs and cooing to themselves about living in the most progressive city in the country.

But to rant and rage was not my object. I have seen a ray of light, and it is the crank-powered laptop. Yes! You have heard of such things before. For $200, a poor kid in Africa who can’t afford rice can now own a laptop. You wrote it off as a stupid idea. Why not just send them $200 worth of rice? Give a man a fish, I say, and he eats for a day. But give him a laptop and teach him to perform a low-end tech job, and he’ll give India a run for their money.

Ok, so I’m not completely serious about that. But education is a wonderful thing. And nobody in Africa’s going to be able to get by on subsistence farming once the real droughts kick in. Which they will. No ice on Kilimanjaro means no water anywhere else.

But actually, the benefits to the poor kids in Rwanda who can barely afford school fees to me are only half of it. Just go have a look at the crank-powered laptop’s tech specs: laptop.org. This thing is amazing. It is a marvel of engineering. It runs on 15 watts of power, can be charged up by a pedal, a crank or a pullchain, has a screen that can be viewed in full daylight, a built-in wireless router, Linux, and the durability of a tank. Frankly, it uses exactly the kind of innovation we ought to be devoting to cars, phones, construction, public transportation, and yes, computers, over here in the first world: lower capacity, lower cost, smaller footprint. Sacrifices for the greater good, as opposed to egomaniacal insular money grubbing nearsightedness. See the Sarkozy quote above.

What I’m saying is, I want one.

Ok, sure, my livelihood depends on high-powered graphics rendering capability and enormous disk space. I can’t ditch the computer I have. But every time I go out to the cafe or the library to sit and write fiction, I’m using ten times the electricity (or more) to do the exact same things I could be doing on the crank laptop. And what about the other people sitting in that cafe? Whether it be the cafeteria at Whole Foods or the bar at the Lady Killigrew, I am going to be fostering some mad green tech envy. This is Western MA, where owning a hybrid car makes you a capitalist hero, helping to prove the economic viability of not fucking up the earth. Pretty soon, everybody will be wanting a crank-powered laptop!

Just think: with a little bit of effort and mechanical ingenuity, I’m willing to bet I could figure out how to hook my laptop crank up to my bike pedals. Then I could be charging up my computer on the way to the library–so by the time I get there and get cozy, I won’t be using any power at all. It blows the mind.

The people making the crank-powered laptop are offering a deal, starting today and ending on Black Friday (ie the day after Thanksgiving), where if you buy one for a kid in Africa, you get one of your own.

laptopgiving.org

Mochica Headdress-Condor – This is a public image (see rules)

What an absolutely beautiful and flabbergasting thing. I’ve been staring at it awhile and I keep seeing it in new ways. The Moche were a pre-Inca Peruvian people, around 300 – 800 CE. Their pottery is amazing, and until now I have to say I preferred it to their goldwork. But this thing….

How am I to interpret this? My first inclination is to turn it sideways and read it as a condor perched atop the sun, gazing at its reflection in the sea. Then it occurs to me that the baldness and bulbosity of that angry dude’s head makes him look a lot like an Olmec head–one of those monolithic stone heads from Mexico–which sort of evokes that semi-mythical ancestor race of the Americas, the Atlanteans or whatever you want to call them. Makes me think these condors, those immense, indomitable scavengers, represent survival, that the Moche have outlasted their progenitors and at the same time preserved their craft and wisdom. Then again, it looks a lot like a Moche head too. And I keep wondering about those things that look like horns, trying to justify that they represent a rock the condor is perched on, or else some kind of headdress, and not in fact horns. But maybe they are horns. Maybe this is a figure I’m supposed to recognize, a god or demon, in which case I’m pretty much lost. The condors are obvious, but there are only a few gods that consist between cultures, and many, like the old man god/aged maize god/ancestor god, called Itzamna by the Yucatec Maya, are amorphous and archetypal enough to be unrecognizable from one incarnation to the next. Maybe it’s a man-crocodile-jaguar-bird hybrid. Stranger things have happened. The breadth and complexity of precolombian culture humbles me. I am scratching at the door.

I found my way to this piece of art, by the way, via an article fragment that seems to be all that thus far has been shared with the English-speaking press regarding a recent find in Lambayeque, Peru.

With the kind participation of some wonderful writers, I have cobbled together a podcast of the INTERFICTIONS story teasers that were performed aloud at Readercon 18.

The November episode features, well, me–Michael J. DeLuca.

Subscribe using RSS

Or use your RSS reader’s subscribe feature to add the following URL: http://mossyskull.com/podcasts/interfictionspodcasts.xml

To subscribe with iTunes, choose “Subscribe to Podcast…” from the Advanced menu and paste in the above URL, or click below to visit the INTERFICTIONS Podcast page at the iTunes Store:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=263967559

Links to the MP3s podcast thus far (right-click to download):
“The Utter Proximity of God” – Michael J. DeLuca (7.0 Mb)
“Hunger” – Vandana Singh (7.5 Mb)
“Black Feather” – K. Tempest Bradford (8.4 Mb)
“A Dirge for Prester John” – Catherynne M. Valente (7.9 Mb)

Enjoy!

I recently had the privelege of spending an entire morning reading page proofs for Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 21. I have to admit that I don’t always agree with Gavin and Kelly in their publication choices; their picks tend to be less accessible than mine would have been, stories that demand more from the reader in order to yield up their rewards (at times more than I’m wiling to give). Also they seem to like things a bit more open-ended. Both those trends are still present to a degree in issue 21–but I thoroughly enjoyed it, maybe more than any other of the issues I’ve read. Benjamin Parzybok’s “The Coder” and Alice Sola Kim’s “Night and Day at War” were my particular favorites, profound and startling as well as hilarious–but really I was quite impressed by the issue all around.

I wonder if this means my reading level has improved, or that this time around they have in fact chosen stories more suited to my meager comprehension.