My reading of Benjamin Parzybok‘s excellent story from LCRW 21, “The Coder”, is live today at the Small Beer Press podcast. I worked hard and I’m quite proud of the result–every one of these readings I do, the audio quality and (I flatter myself) the delivery improve–so please go listen if you have time.

I love this story. I’ve been advocating for it to the Small Beer interns for years. It has this wry bizarro/surrealist tone which fits perfectly with the LCRW/Small Beer ethic, writers like Ray Vukcevich, Alan DeNiro and (yes) Kelly Link who are SBP’s bread and butter. It has interesting metafictional/Borgesian undertones, dealing with the influence of archetypal structure on reality; the cycle of life and death still applies, even in the sterile cubicle warrens of a software company. How to describe “The Coder” without giving too much away? To put it like Bob the annoying geek co-worker might: is it like Office Space meets The Matrix? Is it Funes the Memorious plus The Metamorphosis? Maybe. What I can say is that to me, it’s one of those stories that feels like it’s always existed notionally out in the ether, at least since cubicle warrens and coding began, waiting for somebody clever and talented enough to step up and be the medium through which the universe inscribes its processes on human cognition. Like one of those Michelangelo slaves.

Lots of people have tried to write this story, me included. We try, because they tell us “write what you know”, and what we know best–tiny, pathetic tragedy–is mindless corporate monotony. We fail because who cares?

So maybe what impresses me most is its capacity to turn the world’s most boringest occupation, computer programmer, into something mind-blowingly sublime. Sure, there are instances in film and fiction wherein programmers are made to appear awesome–The Matrix, Tron–but it’s not by writing code. Ready Player One and one million works of high anime follow the same path, glossing past the code in favor of what it produces, the virtual. “The Coder” does just the opposite. Nor am I counting all those scenes in all those thrillers where somebody hacks the CIA: I don’t call that sublime, I call it wankery. Okay, there’s that scene in The Social Network where ye sympathetic-ified zeitgeist-personifying supergenius Zuckerberg assembles a software social-dysfunction-demonstrating device to the sound of post-industrial Trent Reznor. That comes close. Maybe some of the Lone Gunmen bits in The X-Files count. Many have tried–I venture to call it a holy grail of latter-day geekdom–but nobody has pulled it off like this.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand and to a degree sympathize with the sentiment behind those CODE IS POETRY bumper-stickers. A complex thing well-designed to do its purpose is beautiful, and when it comes to software, it’s only the programmers who get to appreciate that beauty. As opposed to, say, suspension bridge engineering. This story gives non-coders a window on that mindset, a way to understand how code can be poetry.

Let it suffice to say that “The Coder” includes two instances, one a pseudo-JavaScript, the other a pseudo-PHP script, wherein code actually is poetry and fits perfectly into the structure and function of the story, revealing the hidden (terrifying?) truth that underneath, all poetry, all narrative, is code.

Now go listen.

I don’t know why I never thought of it before now. To be honest, I probably did think of it, but until now always decided, based on personal insecurities, qualms about walking too close behind Thoreau, that it was a bad idea.

I have intermittently carried my little notebook with me when I go hiking, to jot down notes, fragments. I come up with good ideas in the woods, though they’re most often of the stopgap variety, something that will get me over whatever hump I was banging my head against back at my desk, but fails to help me anticipate the next hump or perceive the underlying flaw that is the cause of these humps. Often I come up with half a dozen stopgap ideas on an hour’s hike and forget all but the least useful one. It was nice recently when I realized I could take notes in my iPod, which I pretty much always have with me. Still, too often I forget to use it.

Until yesterday I had not seriously considered the possibility of actually, committedly writing in the woods, of taking my laptop, sitting somewhere with my back to a tree trunk and knuckling down. I suppose this inspirational windfall is made available to me now because of an advance in technology: I now have a cutting-edge-as-of-Spring-2011 laptop that will reliably last 5 or 6 hours on a battery charge with the screen brightness turned all the way up. Hooray! I have caught up with the future. The technopaganism proponed by Willow in Season One Buffy is suddenly an actual, viable option.

I haven’t thought nearly enough about technopaganism. It seems the time may be ripe? More on that in the near future, maybe.

So today I went into the woods to write. It was too cold in the morning, but by noon, it was sunny and the temps hit 60, so rather than chicken out and end up hating myself after drooling all over myself with excitement at the idea the evening prior, I packed a lunch, laptop, book, cane, camera, mushroom-hunting kit, water bottle, hoodie and scarf and ventured forth.

So far it has gone amazingly well. Turned out I didn’t need the scarf. I was perfectly able to regulate my temperature as long as I kept in at least partial sunlight. When I got cold, I got up and took a walk. When I ran out of ideas, I took a walk. Or I picked up Little, Big and read a scene, or even two sentences, and bam, I was off again. Honestly I cannot think of a more appropriate, serendipitious book to be reading at the start of this experiment. Maybe it’s what gave me the idea.

The other benefit, the one that is so completely obvious I feel like kicking myself it took me this long to notice, is the surroundings. I sit at my desk in my office. It is packed with books and interesting supposedly inspirational objects I have picked up in my travels. But I’ve stared at all these books and doodads for thousands of hours by now. They have lost their inspirational capacity. Anyway, they sit there in the same office at the same desk while I’m writing computer code the other 80% of my life. It just doesn’t work anymore. So–I go out. I go to a cafe with a kickass view and good beer, like the Bookmill. I go to a big, old library with weird nooks and corbeled vaulting. Yes, these places are better. There’s new things to look at, different things, and I have made the effort to get there, so I might as well knuckle down. But in these places, there’s people buzzing around everywhere. There’s the internet. So I resort to my computer desktop background. Sigh, yes, it is a last resort. Yet it does give me solace, because it’s something I can change at a whim with no effort to give me something new to stare at. I hit the F11 key and gaze off into whatever woodland scene or mountain peak I last stood on with a camera. Sometimes I put my hands up around my peripheral vision like blinders and try to pretend I’m there. Then, sigh, I hit the F11 key again and go back to the blank page.

Are we seeing the obvious solution here? Is it absurd that I have not thought of this in 15 years? Yes, yes it is! Why would I not just go to that place I have been imagining myself to be, such that when I run out of ideas, instead of staring myself cross-eyed at pixels, I can look away from the screen and see an actual, 360 degree, fully olfactory and tactile woodland scene?

Also, not insignificantly, the woods do not have internet.

In the four hours I’ve spent in the woods since noon, sitting in 5 or 6 different locations–blood-red sumac grove, sun-bleached picnic table amid wildflowers, boulder, silver birch on hillside overlooking swamp, different sun-bleached picnic table under dead apple tree–I have written some 1500 words. Doesn’t sound like much to you big city writers, but for me I normally can’t hit that in a week.

Huzzah. Baby steps.

It won’t work in the dead of winter. It won’t work in the rain or the burning-bright, mosquitoey summer. But in late summer/early fall, when the sunlight is warm and the shadows cool and the bugs are singlemindedly absorbed in finding those last flowers to nectar up at before frost hits….

I think I may write a novel in the woods.

Honey mushroom, Armillaria mellea, found growing at the base of a dead oak, Bald Mountain Recreation Area North Parcel, Lake Orion, MI.

This is what I had for lunch yesterday, sauteed with garlic and tomato on toast. It’s the mushroom my Italian great-grandmother Domenica referred to as “the good-a kind-a”, the kind she used to take her children and grandchildren hunting in the woods around St. Moritz Ponds in Quincy: i.e. the kind that was most abundant, easiest to identify, tastiest. My grandfather has been nagging me to try this mushroom for years.

Funny, then, that of the 4 books I’ve consulted (including an old field guide of my grandfather’s), only one referred to it as a choice edible. The Peterson Edible Wild Plants doesn’t even mention it. I am warned that honey mushroom has several dangerous near look-alikes, and that even when it is positively identified, it doesn’t agree with everybody.

I thought it was delicious–four generations of my family have thought so. But that’s all the more reason for me to give you the same warning I always give: don’t go eating any mushrooms you find in the woods just because I did. Do the research first. Find an expert. And if you’re going to do it anyway, cook them first at the very least. Please?

You know what this is going to be about.

Readercon is my favorite convention. It’s the one I’ve been to the most, the one where I am least scared of the rest of the attendees and feel least obligated to front. It’s the best-organized con I’ve ever been to. It has my favorite people at it. And it’s the closest con to the place where I was born.

None of the above, I realize, will prevent me from learning to love and rely on some other con as much, if it comes to that, and as a number of ultimata from upstanding pillars of the community have begun to threaten. No, what will prevent me is dread of being forced to undergo all that horrible social conditioning again. To my relief, I am perfectly aware that my threatening the same thing—never to attend Readercon again if you don’t change your tune and follow your own damn rule—would have zero effect. But when your stubborn refusal to follow your own zero-tolerance policy costs you the attendance of Catherynne Valente and Jeffrey Ford, it should be obvious even to you that you’re self-destructing the reputation you’ve built up for your wonderful con over all this time. If this keeps up, you’ll lose everything that made people like me want to come to your con in the first place.

Reverse your ruling. It’s not too late to get back all that credibility you had until two weeks ago. But if you don’t hurry up, it will be.

Update: They did it! Hooray.

I took a coach bus from Boston to Manchester, New Hampshire. I don’t normally take buses in this country—either I have a car or I ride the train. New England was once my home but is no longer; after only a year, I recognize its beauty as transient; I perceive it as a place existing in contrast to other places: hilly, richly wooded, old. These strangenesses, combined with the impact of ugly fluorescent-on-blue patterned fabric on seats and ceiling, too-cold air conditioning and an uncomfortable narrowness of seats palpably not on an airplane, rendered in me a displacement.

When I glanced up thus detachedly from drowsy study of my lap as the bus wheeled sharply out of a park-and-ride lot in Londonderry, NH, and a low hillside knotted with bleached shrubs spun into view, I found myself for an instant transported to roughly equivalent conveyance pulling out of a dusty motel parking lot on the outskirts of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. In a moment that low stucco wall would appear: the one with the graffiti mural of the feathered serpent. The pickup truck in the next lane would pull away and be replaced with another 30 years older, half its size. The blood in my head would begin to expand from the altitude. And the unconscious potbellied man encroaching on my elbow room in the seat beside me would become, though dressed wildly differently and dreaming in a different tongue, perhaps no less inscrutable.

Manchester is a run-down city, an old mill town. I had considered it an ugly city. Between brown concrete high-rises, gradually, imperceptibly, the empty brickworks refill with boutique manufacturers. Absent windowpanes are replaced with new glass. Massive raised highways, long since displacing streetcars, divide and circumvent.

I disembarked and walked for miles to destinations I’ve visited many times, always by car. Again, the exhaustion, the pack sweaty on my back, enforced a mindset I have previously reserved for foreign lands. Permitted the abundance of time and necessity to traverse the city on foot and at length, I discovered neglected Victorian graveyards, ponds, hillside neighborhoods in need of paint, an overgrown railroad track, bridge abutments enriched with graffiti. Between the Piscataquog and Merrimack rivers I found the city’s old French-Canadian quarter, untouched by urban renewal, the main street lined with pawn shops, barber poles, diners. I visited the library. I sat in empty parks on rusted benches, reading.

The impatience and familiarity of home would have prevented me doing any of this.

All of which is just to say again, I guess, that in order to come home, you have to go away.

Back from Readercon, we return you to your regularly scheduled environmentalist ranting.

I was just reading Bill McKibben‘s new Rolling Stone article about how we all got bored of global warming in 2009 but it kept happening even though we stopped looking at it and now we’re square f’ed. I’m disappointed the rhetoric isn’t firier or the content fresher—I’ve got a lot of hopes riding on that guy. The gist is predictable. Record high temperatures, oil companies hell-bent on destruction, money = speech = control = horrible juggernaut negative feedback loop of doom. Need I explain? The more we (the angry/helpless) do to discourage reckless consumption, the more expensive reckless consumption becomes, the more appealing it becomes, the more money the producers make, the better able they are to pay for control of the regulators and the regulations, the angrier and more helpless we (the angry/helpless) become.

To simplify: It gets hotter. We buy more air conditioners. Repeat.

Until I go completely nuts like Manny from Black Books.

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Sadly I can only be at Readercon this year for Thursday and Friday. I’m missing a lot of great stuff, including the Odyssey reading on Saturday afternoon at 2. And it looks like there won’t be a Homeless Moon chapbook this time around.

On the other hand, they’ve given me what may be the perfect single day con schedule: on Friday afternoon I have two panels on the intersection of fiction writing and ebook publishing, and in the evening a solo reading where I get to read a story along the same theme. This never happens to me: an excuse to hit my talking points. An excuse to appear as though I have talking points! Huzzah.

Update: I think I’ll put my panel notes up here so people can find the few links I’ve got in there and struggle to follow along if they like. See below.

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Urban Green Man is the both the title and intended subject matter of a forthcoming theme anthology from Edge Publishing for which I’ve been invited to submit a story. Considering all this moss that’s been creeping from my armpits and between my toes of late and the details of my living circumstances over the past couple years, you’d think this would be right up my alley, right in my hermitage, so to speak… but for some reason I’m really having a hard time at it.

The below ramblings on nature and the city are the result of an attempt at writing-avoidance aka “brainstorming” in order to figure out what the green man myth could possibly mean in an urban context and in the modern age.

Some variety of blue lobelia, best guess Lobelia kalmii, Franklin Park Wilderness, Roxbury, MA.

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Thunderbird, on a 19th-century Cheyenne drumhead, Detroit Institute of Arts.

The co-opting of Native American culture makes me sad. For years I thought a thunderbird was a car driven by greasers and meatheads and Pontiac not a doomed, desperate tragic hero of the Ottawa but a disreputable manufacturer of cars. If it weren’t for the automotive industry, though, would I ever have even heard these names? I guess we owe them for keeping the memory alive, in however twisted a form.

And there are instances of co-opting that make me unashamedly happy. There’s a really nice Mexican lager called Bohemia brewed by cervezeria Motecuzoma Cuauhtemoc in Monterrey which I would never have tried if it weren’t for the portrait of Motecuzoma they use for their logo. I could do without Mel Gibson, but he put native Yucatec Maya speakers in a big-budget film. When I heard Johnny Depp was playing Tonto in an inexplicable remake of The Lone Ranger, I was as annoyed as everybody else until I remembered Dead Man… that long, wordless opening scene, a bespectacled, comically pale-faced young Depp staring out the window of the train at the landscape of the West as the grim faces of passengers shift and fade around him, visions of his own death in the wilderness pass before his eyes, and that brutal Neil Young noise riff gnashes over all. Just thinking about it makes me want to go watch that movie right now….ahh, but I have shit to do. Anyhow–however trumped up Depp’s one-sixteenth Cherokee blood, I give him credit for caring about Native American culture, to the point that I’ll probably see The Lone Ranger.

And so on and so forth, with mixed feelings of reverence and liberal guilt. I am not really supposed to talk about it, being as how I am a white male.

Which brings me to the point of this. I have co-opted Native American culture. Part one of my novella “Death and the Thunderbird”, featuring those lovable, culture-raping centaurs; a locomotive powered by sorcery; and yes, a thunderbird, is live today in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #97, opposite the excellent Tina Connolly. I labored long and hard over it and am proud. If you’re a fan of the centaurs, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. But I doubt it will win any awards for cultural sensitivity despite my best intentions. By way of beginning to atone for this, I share below a brief bibliography of American culture-rape. As usual, I would almost rather you read the source material than my story. But read the story too, if you have time.

• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown. The same terrible, sad story told many, many times in different variations. Look up your town in the index. If you’re lucky it won’t be there.
• 1491, Charles C. Mann
• Black Elk Speaks, John Niehardt. If Jim Jarmusch hadn’t read this book when he was writing Dead Man, I’ll eat my ten-gallon hat.
• Shamanism, Mircea Eliade. Not all about the Americas but amazing for background.
• Changes in the Land, William Cronon.
• Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American History, Culture, and Life From Paleo-Indians to the Present, Frederick E. Hoxie.

Ok. Must stop myself. Enjoy! Be edified.

Only tenuously related to the Yes album of the same name, widely considered the most navel-gazingly pretentious prog rock album ever recorded. (No, I will not attempt to relate the Shastric scriptures to Mayan prophecy. Maybe another time.) The Roger Dean cover, however, is awesome:

See the Castillo over there on the horizon above the Nazca monkey?

The other week I was back in Yucatan. It’s been six years. Not much has changed. A lone wind turbine has sprouted over Quintana Roo Highway 308 south of Cancún, and a dozen new all-inclusive resorts have elbowed out another few hundred thousand acres of coastal swamp, though you’d hardly know it from the road except for the twenty-foot white concrete faux-Mayan monoliths marking the entrances surrounded by landscaped agave and coconut palm. The real ruins are all still there, the big ones a little more harried maybe what with the approaching end of the world, the less impressive sharing the sun-baked empty stretches between hotels with more recent ruins, failed tourist traps abandoned a year or a decade ago, their pale dirt parking lots filling with trash like alluvial silt from the underground rivers.

The coastal reef, second largest in the world after the Great Barrier Reef, hasn’t recovered–it’s still all bleached and apocalyptic, like the ash-caked girders of a collapsed skyscraper a hundred miles long, an aqua-tinted desert broken only by occasional tiny, mind-blowingly colorful fish flitting in and out of gray-blue darknesses. If anything, it’s getting worse.

Still, the apocalypse feels just as far away (and just as close) as anywhere else I’ve been. Even Detroit. Even though the entire Yucatan Peninsula is so low-lying and flat it will likely be underwater as soon as Micronesia and Manhattan, and it’ll look even more like the Yes cover than it already does.

By the way, for those of you who haven’t seen it, a recently discovered Mayan mural at the Xultún site in northern Guatemala includes explicit references to dates after December 21, 2012. So the world isn’t ending. Which means we’re going to have to live with what we do to it.

But I’m not here to preach about the end. I’ve done that enough. I’m here to share a bit of the beauty before it’s gone.

These are not the pictures I would have taken of Tulum in 2006. Maybe the difference says something about the person I’ve become in the years between. Because the place hasn’t changed. Salt wind and time have done what they can, at least for now. And all of Antarctica would have to melt before the Gulf will make it up those cliffs. Who knows, maybe that’s part of why they built it here.

One of three offeratory altars on the cliff below the Templo del Viento–not unlike another shrine I found years ago, ten miles to the north. The coastal Maya had a lot to thank the sea god for, not least the reef, which made a natural breakwater for hundreds of miles along the shore, allowing easy trade between cities.

Masked face, Templo de las Pinturas, southwest corner. One of the last Mayan structures built before the conquest and the best preserved at Tulum. This is the building with the seven-fingered red handprints I so lamented not having photographed last time. But you’ve seen those.

I’d love to know who this mask depicts—Itzamna? Don’t have the research at hand, unfortunately.

East face of the Castillo, the large central pyramid, the side that faces the cliffs. The architectural style at Tulum is unique…of course that’s true of every Maya site, and Tulum benefited from trade with both the Mexica (the Aztecs) and the Toltec-influenced Maya of Chíchen Itzá…but the skewed lines of the temples here are different from either. There are no right angles anywhere, hardly even any straight lines. It’s like something out of…Dr. Seuss, crossed with Lovecraft. It’s awesome. The first time I was here I didn’t appreciate it—after the mathematical, acoustical perfection of the Castillo at Chíchen Itzá, it seemed sloppy, a sign of a civilization in decline. This time, after gawking at those beautiful masks for awhile, then at the Templo del Dios Descendente,
I realized it could be something else: a sign of a civilization passing its peak, developing into decadence, developing a higher (wierder) aesthetics. This curve…it echoes the sea, obviously. All of Tulum is about the sea, really: the location atop the cliffs like a lighthouse, the protected beach below, the temples to the morning star. The sea was their livelihood, their garden, their connection to the outside world.

The curve of the Castillo wall distills that to one calligraphic gesture, a sweep of a brush.