Patchwork farmland west of Antigua.

Everybody should visit a third world country at least once, if only so they can come to a more round understanding of that term. I don’t know how I ever got on without having been to one.

Prior to visiting Guatemala, I had operated under the not-entirely-inaccurate assumption that “third world” referred to a region of the planet whose human inhabitants suffered, in varying degrees of severity, reduced access to economic infrastructure including but not limited to sewer systems, utilities, clean water, health care, education, technology, and/or rule of law. As compared to the status of said amenities here in the “first world”. I understood, if only on an abstract, liberal-educated, political-correctness level, that the term “third world” was to be considered flawed in its one-sidedness, its inherent superiority, and its general lack of empathy.

What I didn’t understand until I went there was that none of the above in any way impedes the daily functioning of a society.

I didn’t encounter a single traffic light anywhere in Guatemala outside the capital city, and I traveled a lot. Shockingly, traffic doesn’t screech to a halt at every intersection for lack of a traffic light. Drivers tap their horns three or four times in quick succession, as a warning or a greeting, rather than leaning on them uselessly for minutes at a time like we do here. Then they go with the flow.

Wrecked cars and buses are a common occurrence on the sides of highways; trash is more common–heaps of it, collecting in corners shielded from the wind. Most people’s houses are of flaking stucco: a few low rooms, inadequately windowed, with a sheet of corrugated tin for a roof and rainwater running freely over the floor. Nobody has a lawn. Even the locals can’t drink the water from the taps without boiling or filtering it first, because it contains e. coli bacteria, the result of poor waste management and inadequate sewage systems.

Nobody seems fazed by any of this.

And–after a day or two–I’m not fazed by it either. Clean water running from the tap isn’t such a hard thing to live without. Lots of people have rainwater collectors on their roofs. Lots more have big, terracotta water filters in their kitchens, like Brita filters, only you don’t have to keep buying more of them, and they serve an actual health purpose. Seatbelts–can’t say I really miss those. Have you ever noticed how people, not just in this country, but in Canada, Britain, Europe–pretty much everywhere I’ve been in the “first” world–are afraid to touch each other? On subways, the Tube, public buses, passing in the street, waiting in line. God forbid you give me your cooties. That taboo doesn’t seem exist in Guatemala. One time I spent an hour on a really ridiculously packed chicken bus between Dos Encuentros and Chimaltenango, standing just behind the driver, hanging onto the luggage rack for dear life as we careened around mountain turns, my huge backpack pressed against the shoulders of a dude sitting on a bucket in the aisle, my legs completely enclosed to the point of immobility by the knees and calves and hips and packages of six mayan ladies on their way home from market all crammed into the first row. A little baby napping in her abuela’s lap kept kicking me adorably in the shins. I kept glancing back over the sea of faces in the rows behind me, and every time I did, I found a different kid staring at me with big, brown, liquid eyes, breaking into a huge, shy smile when I caught her gaze. And when it was over, when the dude on the bucket got off and I got to sit down for a minute before we finally made it to my stop, the mayan ladies all started chattering about what a good sport this big galumphing gringo boy had been, standing up all that time on those sharp mountain turns, and how sorry they were they couldn’t have made more room. When I got off, I was pretty much in love with those ladies.

A chicken bus outside Ciudad Vieja, with volcanoes.

There are stray dogs everywhere in Guatemala–not in any sort of evil, ravening pack mentality kind of way–they’re dirty and fleabitten and bone-skinny, and nobody tells them what to do or where to go, but they don’t beg constantly, and they only bark and howl and run around like hooting hordes of ancestor ghosts in the dark of night, in the distance. They’re much more patient, more respectful, than you’d expect any horde of stray dogs to be. Mostly, they just seem tired. For me, it was somehow uncanny to see a long-faced brown mongrel with eight full dugs swinging and ribs standing out against her sides ambling past me down a dusty cobbled street, like the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. And after the fact, I’m actually more unsettled that I could have become sufficiently detached from reality that the sight of a pregnant dog could come across as something so alien.

The cheap beer, in this third world country? It’s not cheap beer at all–it’s good beer, cheap! The national brew, Gallo, is a thirst-quenching, medium-bodied amber lager with a fine refreshing fruitiness. Gallo makes Corona cry. And I can’t even begin to articulate how badly it beats the tar out of ye great American workingman’s brew. And you know what really blows me about it? They reuse every single bottle they ship out. They don’t throw away their glass. They don’t recycle it. They don’t have to. Every morning, the Gallo truck shows up outside the cantina, drops off full bottles, picks up empties, and takes them back to the plant to be cleaned and refilled. Where the $*%& are we on that, first world?

Also, as far as I experienced it, the entire nation of Guatemala has already switched over from incandescent to CFL bulbs. I didn’t see an incandescent bulb while I was there. And they did it without needing a massive PR campaign or even a giant self-stroking internet site where people can congratulate themselves for accomplishing some kind of change.

All in all, it’s kind of refreshing to see that, yes, life actually can and does go on in the absence of antibacterial cream, small claims courts, individually-wrapped sanitary towelettes, subsidized insurance coverage for antidepressants, styrofoam coffee cups, laws regulating windshield cracks, twenty-four hour news networks, the grocery store, or even a ratio of at least two branded napkins to each food or beverage item purchased. You don’t need any of that stuff to live, or even to be happy. You don’t need phones or the internet or TV either.

All that being said, having been back safe and coddled in the states for a week, with the Haiti earthquake heavily in the news, I am painfully aware that my envy for the lifestyle of the average Guatemalan is at best problematic, and seriously flawed. I went down there with money. They hadn’t just suffered an earthquake, nor were they engaged in civil war. If they had been, I’d have been much more aware of the absence of hospitals and clean water, and the danger of those mountain roads. And I’d have been a hell of a lot more scared of all those dudes with guns.

But the main point, I think, still holds: there’s no third world and no first world. There’s the world. What we do affects them, what they do affects us. More importantly, there, but for the grace of a giant, complicated mess of circumstance and stuff, go we. And vice versa.

I don’t know that it’s a sentiment I can fully convey, without just telling you to go there and see. But okay, how about this? Have you ever had one of those conversations with a dedicated doer of recreational drugs, ecstasy or lsd or mushrooms or even weed, wherein said day tripper gushes about how all the world’s problems would be solved if only the leaders of the world could be introduced to the recreational drug in question?

That’s how I feel about going to Guatemala.

Trouble is, all those world leaders I want to teach a little empathy (or a lot) have probably already been there.

A coati in the gardens outside Tikal.
Nasua narica

So I went to Guatemala the other week.

I don’t get to travel that often. Travel costs a lot, and my life strategy has been to spend just barely enough of my time working to keep myself alive, so as to have as much free time for writing as possible and not much else. I have heard this strategy questioned more than once exactly on the basis that it doesn’t permit me to travel. “How can you have anything to write about,” goes the conventional wisdom, “when you haven’t done anything?” My college advisor asked me that, among others. It sort of pissed me off. I’d like to give more credit than that to the imagination: sure, you can’t write compelling fiction in a vacuum, and yes, uncountable great writers spent their lives wandering the earth. But it’s a matter of how you look at the world, not what you’re looking at. Thoreau never left New England. Emily Dickinson barely left her house. There are new and unique things to see, even in things you’ve looked at a hundred thousand times.

That said, every time I do manage to abroad, I come back with ideas spilling out my ears–like what happened when I went to Yucatan. The conventional wisdom isn’t wrong, it’s just narrow. And it presupposes a certain level of financial independence, doesn’t it? Travel is hard–not just emotionally and physically (as I have well learned), but financially. So is writing. Just ask Nabokov, Lord Dunsany, or Anthony Bourdain: it’s a lot easier to bum around the world telling awesome stories when you don’t have to worry where your next meal is coming from. But nothing beats experience.

Upon returning from Guatemala, I have gained the following:

• Exactly 25 angry red mosquito bites, mostly on my ankles, hips, and the backs of my knees, that will not f’ing go away.
• Stomach parasites.
• A persistent, atmospheric lightheadedness that, for a few moments before waking, makes me believe I never left. Or else that I’m entering the preliminary stages of a mushroom trip. Whether this has something to do with the aforementioned parasites, maybe in the style of those freaky bugs that alter the personality of rodents to make them more inclined to commit suicide by cat, I know not.
• Enlightenment.

Was all of the former worth the latter? Yes.

So for a little while, this blog is going to turn into a travelogue.

A colossal ceiba tree that grows at the gate to Tikal.
Ceiba pentandra

More next week.

Foucault’s Pendulum is an 800-page novel about the representatives of a vanity press, hell-bent on fabricating historical conspiracy for profit, who discover too late that they have fabricated truth, or something sufficiently indistinguishable from truth in the minds of its beholders to be worth killing for. The Name of the Rose is a 1000-page novel about the catastrophic failure of an investigation into a series of murders committed in a repetitive, mazelike library devoted to absurdly complex, meaningless religio-bureaucratic apocrypha.

Borges never wrote a novel. He wrote sketches for novels, two- or three-page treatments, spare and ephemeral, yet which laid out the bones of ideas so fathomless and colossal that, coming to the end of one, my thoughts are pulled in as many directions as though I had just completed something four hundred pages long.

I remember reading a comment of his upon this preference, in which—with that typical combination of self-effacing humility and absurdist ambition—he judged himself both unskilled or undisciplined enough to muster the great effort required to go from sketch to novel and consummately uninterested in the task, since another idea just as immense was always waiting. It was the creation of such kernels, the ambiguity and the possibility of them, that interested him most. Or so I recall him having said. Perhaps I am projecting. I’ve read so much Borges, in so many obscure, pencil-thin editions with titles varying endlessly upon the motif of tigers multiplied by optical illusion, dug from wonderful book-glue-mildew-smelling university library stacks where I had no business being, that I’ll likely never find that precise quote again. I have a vague impression of it coming from an introduction to someone else’s work—a heterogeneous anthology or a collection by Bioy-Casares…. But it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that at the end of this passage forswearing the long form, Borges encourages other authors to do with his ideas what he will not: make novels of them.

And so we get these labyrinthine, Borgesian novels of the real and unreal, of conspiratory mass-self-delusion and headlong dives into the carefully-delineated infinite, things like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Carlos Ruis Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, to name two distant poles within that spectrum. And we get Umberto Eco.

And me. I hope. Someday.

The newest entry in my occasional blog series on homebrewing is live on the Small Beer Press site.

In this one, I go on a pine-needle eating spree, brew some beer with spruce tips in place of hops, and then proceed to party like an 1830s New England housewife.

And by the way, just in case anyone is actually syndicating these, the location of the Literary Beer RSS feed has changed to the following:

http://www.smallbeerpress.com/?tag=literary-beer&feed=rss2

So here we are. We know what we know. There are certain givens: time, matter, energy. We come out of them, we plod and stutter through them, we go back to them. There are also unknowns, and of these—their quantity, their breadth and scope—we haven’t got a clue. But we progress. We live. We add to the knowns. From within them, our discoveries seem vast. Yet our carvings away at the unknown, which ought to correspond in moment and consequence, after contemplation, after living, emerge as imperceptible. Death, God, Fate, Consciousness. We can be overwhelmed by these unknowns, we can proceed in spite of them, we can ignore them to our peril. We can fall back on what we know. Time, matter, energy. But more likely, more often, we fall back on what we are. Consciousness. Ephemeral, yes. Indeterminate, yes. But there. Present. A focal point of known and unknown, a pinhead upon which angels and mortals dance even though it can take them nowhere but where they are.

What is all this, exactly? I suppose it’s an argument against fear, and for striving. I look across the table, across the gulf from screen to screen, and there I find identities in the same situation, existing at the same summit of incomprehensible, familiar, unknowable, and inevitable. And sometimes I’m shocked at the far more tangible gulfs in ideology and apprehension that result from what is essentially the same. And other times I’m shocked any of us manage to communicate at all. But we’re all going to the same place: death. And we all came out of the same set of resources: matter, energy, life, the past. And we’re all trying to occupy the heads of our own pins with recourse only to those same resources. Trying to maintain equilibrium and to progress at the same time.

Sometimes I wish I could pull off my head, pull of my worldview, my set of both rational and irrational connections to life, matter, energy, the past and the unknowable, and plunk it on top of somebody else for a little while. On the other hand, the prospect of somebody, anybody, doing the same thing to me—no matter who it is, Ghandi or Dr. King or Einstein or Tesla or Marx or Erin or my father—frankly, terrifies me. I try to overcome that. I strive. Just like I take what I can get when it comes to the head-popping-off, head-hopping, etc. And I consider myself lucky, when it occurs to me to do so. And other times I hate myself, because it isn’t luck at all, it’s how you use what you’re given.

And that’s what striving is. We do what we can.

Forgive me. I realize I’ve been stating the obvious here, and just because I’m formulating it in these vague, mystical terms doesn’t make it any more meaningful. There are parts of this argument I’ve been having with myself that I can’t formulate except in my head, and occasionally, when the moment’s right, in person.

Ask me about it sometime.

Tonight at midnight, “Between Two Treasons”, the second in my hopefully never-ending series of short stories about those lovable, man-eating, gun-slinging, ten-gallon-hat-wearing, prick-devouring centaurs goes live in issue #23 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

It is not for the faint-at-heart. Or the underage.

But please go read it anyway.

And the first one too, if you like—which is here.

This is some gloriously beer-addled 17th-century monk’s copy of a copy of a long-lost ancient jewelry engraving depicting a cloven-hoofed centaur residing at the center of the labyrinth of Daedalus. Whoever that monk was, if I ever manage to hunt down his moldering skull, I will give it a fat, wet smooch.

My near-future-apocalyptic magic realist short story “Starlings” is now live in Abyss & Apex #31. (Which issue also happens to feature a very cool poem by LCRW author Daniel A. Rabuzzi—lucky me!)

“Starlings” is a story about climate change, tech withdrawal, and memory—themes all very near to my heart. With the possible exception of “Construction-Paper Moon”, in no other story of mine have I laid my own emotional evolution so open on the page.

Please go read it, and enjoy!

For the stories in our second chapbook, each of us at The Homeless Moon chose as inspiration a fictional setting. Here’s the first scene of mine, “The Cannon and the Prophetess”:

One Kestrel pronounced the last phrase of the sonnet he had been reciting for the Duchess of Ennasin, and the crowd of loungers who made up her court erupted in applause. Acknowledging their flattery, he lowered himself to one knee.

“No, no,” said the Duchess, twiddling her manicured fingers to indicate he should arise. “You mustn’t prostrate yourself. Your primitive origins are of no consequence—you outrank me, Your Majesty!”

The assembled nobles tittered at their hostess’s kind condescension.

With an abruptness inappropriate to tact—but which he had come to know would be expected, secretly desired, of an educated savage such as himself—One Kestrel surged to his feet like a predator ready to strike. The bones and beads sewn in his robes of state rattled satisfactorily, the brilliant feathers of his royal headdress rippled, and he allowed his eyes to flash just so.

The nobles gasped, recoiling; this time, the nervous laughter of the Duchess betrayed an underlying terror. “My dear Captain Saturno, you are to be commended on such a magnificent find! If only you would allow me to purchase him from you.”

Captain Saturno took a knee himself. Resplendent in his shining steel cuirass and waxed moustache, he made a flourish, and taking her offered hand, placed his lips to her ring. “Your praise is acknowledged most humbly—but I am afraid King Kestrel cannot linger, for he is called away on an engagement at another court—and I’m sure Your Eminence could not wish to sully His Majesty’s reputation by making him late.”

“At the very least,” the flush Duchess begged, “allow me to offer His Majesty a parting gift—a boon. Name anything! It shall be wrapped and placed in his flagship’s stateroom, where my court’s generous donations to his cause already await.”

One Kestrel drew back overeducated lips from filed teeth, and throwing a ravenous glance at his master and keeper, uttered that too-familiar entreaty with which he’d caused himself to be expunged from so many a court. “There is one small secret I dearly desire. I can only
further impose on Your Eminence’s hospitality in this: if you would, provide me with your military’s recipe for gunpowder.”

Amidst the ensuing uproar, Saturno clutched One Kestrel by the elbow and propelled him from the court. His face was bloodless, blank—but whether with rage or something else, One Kestrel didn’t know.

Once they were safe aboard the caravel Constança, Captain Saturno barked orders to throw off the moorings and get underway. He escorted His Primitive Majesty One Kestrel, King of America, to his sumptuous, gift-strewn lodgings in the brig, shoved him inside, and slammed the door.

And here are the relevant lines from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, from which I took my inspiration:

Pantagruel then asked what sort of people dwelt in that damned island. They are, answered Xenomanes, all hypocrites, holy mountebanks, tumblers of beads, mumblers of ave-marias, spiritual comedians, sham saints, hermits, all of them poor rogues who, like the hermit of Lormont between Blaye and Bordeaux, live wholly on alms given them by passengers. Catch me there if you can, cried Panurge; may the devil’s head-cook conjure my bumgut into a pair of bellows if ever you find me among them! Hermits, sham saints, living forms of mortification, holy mountebanks, avaunt! in the name of your father Satan, get out of my sight! When the devil’s a hog, you shall eat bacon.

I’m not going to make any attempt to synthesize one with the other; chances are it would turn out a disaster, and anyway I’d much rather just encourage you to read the story and form your own opinions.

So instead, I’ll close with Gustave Doré’s utterly demented evil jester illustration to Rabelais’ prologue, which starts like this:

Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings)….

Particularly when they are twice as big! Last year’s Homeless Moon chapbook weighed in at 44 pages. This year’s: 80. The poor woman working the register at the printers nearly killed herself trying to get them up onto the counter.

Two weeks remain until Readercon and the “official” release. In the meantime, we will be sending out a few advance copies for review and/or to wedge under your chair legs so they don’t wobble. I am setting ten copies aside for ye F&SFesque blog promo. If you want one, and are willing to write a bit of a blog entry about what you thought of it, ask. If you are not the eleventh person to do so, you’ll get one.

Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait the two weeks and paypal me the two bucks for shipping. Less than that, even, if you’d prefer the electronic version. Not sure exactly when that’ll come off. But soon–in the next couple days. When it does, you’ll see it here.

Nancy Kress had an interesting blog post the other day about her actual moment-by-moment process of constructing a paragraph: hashing out a couple of sentences, then shoving off the ones that come out of chronological order, cutting the excess words, fixing the sentence structure so it feels natural/fresh, fixing the language so it feels appropriate to the character and setting. A lot of what she says is pretty universal—which I think is one of the things that makes her such a great teacher of writing. She can point out the nose on your face, and somehow it comes across as a revelation, because you’ve never looked at it in quite that way.

Another of Nancy Kress’s great strengths is her economy of language, how she can build a subtle, complex story out of so little.

Thinking about this as I go along with my own writing, it occurs to me there’s one element of this sort of in-the-trenches prose styling that she hasn’t touched upon—possibly because there just is no way to codify it. It can be a painful thing to think about for those of us aspiring writers reading every how-to book we can get our hands on, hoping to someday write as well as Nancy Kress, but there’s always going to be a part of the writing process that’s ineffable, that can’t be fully grasped by rational means. There are too many words and too many subjects, too many unplumbable depths for the mere mind to fathom. Call it the unconscious, the minor deity of inspiration, or pure, dumb randomization, but at some point, you’re going to be hammering away at a sentence, and out will come something astonishing. Call that thing “turn of phrase”.

It’s hard to identify that thing in other people’s work, just because no matter how effortless and flawless a phrase or sentence seems, there’s no way to know the author didn’t agonize over it for hours, going through dozens of word choice options until they found the perfect one. The feeling I get when I come across such a phrasing, however, is unmistakable. And at that point, it doesn’t matter to me whether it came to the author in a flash of divine comprehension or not. Because even if I can’t pinpoint and identify the processes by which such a flash can occur (and if I could, I contend that the writing of fiction would cease to be art and become something soulless and mechanical), I can still train myself, by identifying that flash in the work of others, to recognize it when it comes forth from my own hands. And then, through everything I have managed to learn about the craft of fiction by studying the work and the teachings of masters, I can nudge and tweak and twist the rest of the sentence and paragraph and page to fit around it, carve away and slough off surplus until it stands out like it should.

This is why I keep seeking out great prose stylists in spite of the frustrating fact that whatever powers they possess may never be mine.

“A good strategist concentrates on what he can change,” says the divinely-touched sculptress to the brooding, crippled, chess-playing boy in Vandana Singh’s “The Room on the Roof”, which I happened to be reading over breakfast when this notion came upon me. That’s a wonderful line, and one of those truths of the human condition that are, for me, what writing is all about. But it’s not the line that stopped me in my tracks.

But sometimes a hopeless melancholy possessed her, and she thought the rain would never end, and that she and her brother and parents would never be happy or free, that beyond one wall there were others, an infinite concentricity of walls. Up in Aparna’s room every evening, she felt joy and yearning like a fever. and underneath it the fear that all she had gained was temporary, that one day the sculptress would leave them and the magic would go out of their lives. Sometimes she caught herself holding her breath, waiting for the change.