Off Topic

The Books that Go in the Box

To the Future Discoverer:

If you’re reading this, I am long dead. I was no one of consequence. There were seven billion of us at the writing of this letter, and my name was common. My home was a decent place with decent people, people I loved, but none of us rich or holding any real power whatsoever. We left no discernable impact, positive or negative. We lived our lives, we paid our taxes, we did what we could. We protested when necessary. We assimilated when it mattered. We cried and laughed, celebrated and mourned, just like everybody. I don’t know what your life is like; it could be much different. I wonder what your language is, whether there is such a thing when and where you are.

I worry the books you’ve found you will be unable to decipher. I don’t know if that is better or worse than the possibility that once you’ve developed your cipher to decode these messages that you’ll only be able to discern the glossy surface and not the layers of words become flesh below it. Your ability to read me is not the same as speaking the same language as me.  Regardless, this is a message, and I hope you can receive it. The worst that can happen is that your code is flawed and you translate me backwards – this is nothing abnormal or unique; I’ve come to expect it.

My own life is not important, so I’ll skip the details. When I was gray and growing weaker, I took a keener interest in the history and future of humanity. My own future and history were certain and their conclusions drawing near. I lived all of it, mostly loved it. I knew who I was, even if why or how I was was as murky as the histories of our race. When history gave up all its ghosts I turned toward imagining you, Dear Reader, as some image of myself balancing in the sands of time, looking back at me and wondering as though through some cosmic mirror. Lots of things happened before me, the vast majority of it so long before me any fiction created about it is as acceptable as it is impossible. Out of 4.5 billion years, we only have records for 6,000 or so, all of them highly biased and suspect, many of them completely indeciperable. Sometimes it seems there may be only one true record, though people argue and wage wars over which it might be; many assume it to be lost forever; others dig in the earth in search of it. I scanned the documents I had access to, assuming there must be some discernable and absolute pattern (I still assume this.), but the only pattern that emerged was this: history always begins with the burning of a library. Both the unfathomable present and the fantasy of its eventual maturity were truer than things that had already happened and for which there was ample evidence.  Somewhere in those uncountable years were beings like us, though seemingly magic.

In my youth a new mode of communication was developed with the hope that knowledge might be preserved and, I imagine, that a combined and universal knowledge might be made manifest. To date, this dream has not been realized, for though the medium is remarkable and democratic, it can hardly be said that the line between truth and fiction is any clearer. Only the image is clearer, closer to a whole but still subject to memes and mimesis. It wouldn’t be wrong to say it’s a perfection and perpetuation of the prehistoric oral traditions, a way of storytelling via a material both more flexible and solid, more water than wind, and without the eerie esoteric permanence of marks on paper or stone. The spontaneous, decentralized, and anonymous ordering of the universe I found at first very satisfying. Later I longed for books. Books had endings. I began to think there was no sweeter comfort than death and rebirth, no better or truer truth than the dead ends of imagination.

I don’t know if or how you read or tell stories. I don’t know if your civilization developed some infallible mind that can answer all questions or whether you ask questions at all, or live them. I don’t know if your civilization found and managed to articulate the ineffable name and thereby bring peace to the earth – this outcome seems unimaginable to me. I don’t know if you think about the things we thought about. I don’t know if the sky is still a mystery that makes you feel hollow like it was with us. I only know that if you exist there are only three possibilities: we changed, we didn’t, or both. The only other variable is whether you are more or less advanced than we, whether you are at the start or end of your age, whether libraries are being built or burnt to the ground. The technology we invented, our new holographic stone, has numbered days – it’s much easier to wipe that slate clean, as though with your finger you can unwrite history once the chaos of democracy is removed from it.

This is why I bought the boxes. There are eleven others besides the one you found, buried in different places. One I threw in the ocean. None held the same combination of books, but they did hold the same types of books: fiction, so-called nonfiction, an overview of the sciences we developed, poetry, and philosophy. Probably in your time math remains, so I saw no need to include an explanation of our version. Generally, we used a base of ten and assumed a finite universe within which it might operate; as simple and absurd as that might sound to you, this method was very useful and spawned much progress. I didn’t know which order of books was the correct one, except the one tossed from the boat might have been the truest to me. I only hoped that whichever collection surfaced at whichever time was relevant to the finders. It seemed to me this might be the only way to correct the past. But at that mysterious intersection of randomness and order, the distilled remains emerged in a very small number of words; the summation of the books is as follows: you can be a child of light or an agent of darkness; you can create heaven and hell but heaven is real; every age has a hero and a villain; every age confuses the two; faith, hope, and love are the most important; the details of each are the least; when people need help you give it; and above all learn to love anyway.

I hope you find these stories relevant. I hope the truths in them still ring. I hope I put them in the right order for you. I hope you understand the difference between fact and truth. I hope the words transubstantiate correctly and nourish you. I hope by now you’ve stopped searching without and have turned within.

Sincerely,

A person thoroughly integrated into the soil beneath you.  

 

 

The Necessity of Symbols

And by extension metaphors, stories, pictures, and math. During my lunchbreak today, I read about Kurt Godel, a mathematician close friends with Einstein. The story was about Godel's discovery of a flaw in the US Constitution that would allow the government to shift to a dictatorship--this flaw he began to explain during an interview for US citizenship. This fun historical nugget led me to learn other things about Godel, the most intriguing of which was his mathematical "God proof." 

Before we go on, let me explain that my lunch break is often filled with a sort of random and fragmented search for entertainment and knowledge, and one never knows where one will end up. This takes just enough of the mundanity out of the day to make it bearable. This mathematical (ontological) proof was succeeded by a YouTube video explaining Graham's number, inexplicably larger than the inexplicably large googolplex.

Mind effectively blown, this was followed by a quote found via Wikipedia while attempting to understand the ontological proof better, a quote by mathematician Georg Cantor that in such a strange way tied the other two discoveries together. What follows below was a quickly typed up explanation to myself so as to make the connections.   It rambles a bit, and likely the logical leaps are perilous without being in my head or without the proper time to pound it out. It became for me a kind of validation of my path choices, of my obsession with words and symbols, and thus a validation of my choice to be a writer and storyteller. Explaining to yourself on paper is something I suppose writers do. 

The explanation to myself begins with the Cantor quote.  I make no guarantees as to the accurateness of the newly discovered information, nor as to the tightness of my logic. I'm not sure I even vouch for the sanity of it.

“The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type.”  -- Georg Cantor, mathematician

Mathematicians struggle with infinity because math doesn’t work so well outside of finite (created) bounds. This led Blaise Pascal to say some crazy shizznit like: "Nature [God] is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” This fries his mathematical noodle and he is launched into the metaphysical abyss (see Borges's "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal"); you just can’t do good, end-game math in a world like this.

For example, a googolplex is so large a number that there isn’t enough space in the observable universe to write it out one number per atom.

 Graham’s number is crazy bigger than that, rendered in certain ways, like below, though these aren’t the only ways because nobody can find the right symbol to represent it. Graham's number hold's the world's record for largest number used in real math.

The number's so big we only know the last 10 digits, and we know it ends in 7--the rest is a mystery, or as I render it: 

…2464195387

In Graham's language, it looks like this: 

 

 In another, similar language, like this: 

 

 

 

 

 

And yet another: 

 

Naturally, there are in infinity higher numbers, existing currently only in computer science and apparently represented as TREE(n). TREE, it appears is magnitudes larger than G (Graham’s number) and also larger than another computer number magnitudes larger than G: A^A(187196)1. Whatever that means.

You see the absurd symbolization difficulties we get into when we try to stretch our chimpanzee math out into infinity, then, right? Once we reach certain numbers—which certainly are real if incomprehensible—we reach equivalent god planes that must be rendered in other absurd symbols like G-O-D. Real but inconceivable. Expressible, but not. 

Now, this Godel character, Einstein’s pencil-neck buddy, wrote in weird math logic Greek symbols what translates as the following:

"God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist."

 Just happens to be a nearly exact match of the argument of an 11^th Century Catholic Saint named Anselm of Canterbury.

Anyway, you might say we can’t conceive of a bigger number except within contexts we have created, and even though the context is imaginary, the bigger number is real because we must be able to count into infinity. God exists in our minds, but we could conceive of a greater existence than just in thought, which is in reality, and God existing in reality would be the limit of how we might conceive him, the inconceivable and real number. Bang, thanks to the holy semantics of ontological word play and the laws of argumentation by definition, God exists within this weird paradox, one where imagining God to exist creates the existence in perpetuity represented by inadequate symbols, one where God is composed literallyof everything, and the standard scientific requirement that a demonstration of a posteriori negative proof is necessary to prove an existence—if indeed existence can be proved--is moot because a thing that is everything naturally encompasses its impossible opposite, which is nothing, because even the tiniest essence of nothingness is immediately a somethingness and God; circular as it is--with a finite circumference arrived at via infinite constant, i.e., pi), here we are again at the limit of that which we might conceive, which is where God and some absolute infinite lives.

In other words, see John 1:1, which says in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God; and note the Genesis is brought forth with (not literally) speaking the universe into existence, in essence telling a story, in essence slapping symbols (metaphors) on that which is beyond symbols, which is what writers, poets, storytellers, musicians, artists, and mathematicians do in pathetic and plastic imitation. John used a generic symbol, "word," to stand in for what cannot be expressed. Before and after him, thinkers, storytellers, and mathmaticians have done the same by substituting their own symbols.  

And that, my friends, is perhaps for me the incarnation of Borges's "Vindication," of which he wrote the probability of finding was zero. I write because stories and symbols are how we find God, who lives inexplicably within and without us.  

See This, Love?

See this love, Love?

See this?

See this heart as it melts in the torrid onsen of your mouth, this

Downdown floating on the hallelujah hymns of prostrated pinwheels

See how I part the air between us and you pop me hard like a blister

See how raw how open how heart-swallowed how tethered how hinged on your happiness is my soul?

See this sweet devastation, Love?

This absence filling the outside world when I am inside its terrifyingly close awayness, this

Puppy dog poop and circumstance in the purple hours of poppycock—you can I know you

See how high and mutual the stakes how heavy the bags how costly the worth-having is—our souls

Mated in the grinder of being, minced together, love, and rejoined, and rejoining slow

Just as we had asked, had demanded—we sent up our prayers of unity—we said to God: you comin?

And God said to us: See this love, Love? See this?

This loss of self so painful? This is going to hurt what you have asked of the hourless night

Is going to hurt what you have asked us

See how lofty how reaching how lusty how precious how wise how much refined for asking is your soul?

See this iron on iron sharpening, Love?

One is what you wanted, you said

And One you will be granted

Over time and circumstance and impassable distances of wounded wingnuts one-wing-ed flying, you

Thought merging would be easy, you thought beauty was a Christmas ball, you thought

Perfection was perfectly painless, but you see this love?

You see?

Ousia

That which is formless only takes form at the speaking of form

That is, the Essence of Isness,

The Isthmus of Thisness or something else untongueable

Will dwell in the hearts of men who seek in themselves their madonnas—

Will dwell in the crook of Her arm, the ell of it,

The glimmer of some being beyond form in form

And the tenderness therein will shatter the child within—

Elousia flitting off into the ineffable swelling up—

This is an Is that yearns To Be

This is an Is that I Am Too

This is an Is that unweans the suckling, pulls it down

And (trans)forms its blind reaching mouth, stretches

The lips all the way to zero and (trans)substantiates the vacuuming voids—

Into Something—

Reach, child, with your mouth for your mother

Reach across the Nothing to your Salvation

And pull it in and drink from it and be healed

Be satisfied, be reassured, be comforted

That fear and desire are beginnings and middles and temporal phantoms leading you to                                                                              

                                                                                                                                                                                             The Real

Be

As I Am and She Is: a tower, a book, a rock, an icon, a valley, a metaphor, ah, honey,

Be

Response to the Critic's Critic

Nobody likes a critic. I knew that before I became one, and it was also not surprising that a recent (only half-negative) book review I wrote was not well received by the book's author. I totally understand; you work so hard, you have such high hopes, and then somebody just comes and pops your balloon. I hope one day to be in a similar situation to this author, who took time out from his book tour to weather a not-so-glowing review. I took no pleasure in the criticism--because I do sympathize. The first email had the tinge of hurt I expected and dreaded back before I decided honesty and journalistic integrity were more important than sweet talk and empathy. The book's author, to the editor, said:

"...kinda laughable. is this kid right out of high school? all he can reference to wrap his head around the novel is catcher in the rye and stephen king and postmodernism, which doesn't even mean anything and which he fails to define. are you planning to review, to give the book a more legit read? it's not a book for kids, after all. I'd love it if you'd direct this guy to [another review] in [another mag], which digs in deeply and gets what's going on. "

The message didn't sting as much I thought it might. I took it as the words of someone with hurt feelings. I hoped he felt better. But then, a week later, there was a second message with the same theme, and I wondered at this point what exactly the author was now trying to accomplish. An admission of wrongness? Of not getting "what's going on?" Of being a stupid and half-literate kid? Did he want the review scrapped and retraction issued? Would this be considered honest/professional? The second message read as follows:

"I know it's bad form to dialogue with 'critics' who, um, reference Catcher in the Rye (high school), Stephen King (pablum) and 'postmodernism' (without ever explaining it?)... for starters... so many holes in this so-called review... I don't have time or interest in getting into it, honestly, but I'm on a break for a minute from the tour, compiling reviews for the web site, and I just had to say that it's clear to me that a certain level of maturity and, I guess, life (not to mention literary) experience is needed to read [my book]. I hadn't considered that before, but... well, check out the links below, if you like. These writers dig in deep and manage to understand and explain the book on its own terms. Literary Criticism 101. Feel free to share these links in the comments on your site, you know, for balance. Let your readers decide."

Hmmm. Condescend much? Assume much? Still I wondered if I should dignify with a response. I've been hit before. Heck, in the past there've been whole campaigns launched against me, death threats from CEOs, blog comment lynch mobs of teens angry with me because I didn't like their band. And after years of grad school and professional rejection, I've become thick-skinned enough to handle somebody getting pissy or not liking me. My pride wasn't scratched by the comments--obviously they are ridiculous and immature comments--but the author was suddenly very irritating. I hadn't mentioned in the review that same irritating tone in the book, where the narrator seems to look down on others for not liking the "right" music, though I did mention the constant authorial lecturing as one of the primary downfalls. I got it just fine, especially with all the dumbing down and explanation this author seems to think lots of people need. 

Sometimes, I think I'm too nice. I tried pretty hard to be diplomatic in the review, tried to cushion the blow as much as possible, you know, out of sensitivity. I wonder how he would have reacted if I had been harder than I was. Even now I'm too nice because in this instance I've refrained from naming names or criticizing directly; and though I've penned a snarky response, I sent it to the editors first to let them decide whether it should be sent on. Holy smokes, I hope they do. That response is below, sans identifying language:

Dear Mr. ___________,

I wondered for a while if I should respond to your concerns. I thought maybe you were just upset. I understood that. A guy writes a book, wants people to like it, and some idiot craps all over it. But since you emailed a second time, I thought maybe I should explain myself so you might feel better.

But you know, being a recent high school graduate, I’m not sure there’s much I can tell you that you don’t already know. Maybe this will be a “from the mouth of babes” moment, since we’re busy assuming anyway. I’m sorry I compared your book with the great Catcher in the Rye. I was wrong to do that. Your book is positively nothing like it. It was just that the iconic book was fresh in my mind from Senior English. I went to an odd high school, one where students graduate in their mid-30s with an MFA. And unfortunately, I became one of those southern statistics: married young with kids before finishing school, and writing book reviews barefoot while wiggling yet another loose tooth. Getting learned has been difficult, what with trying to keep my jaw un-slacked during dissertations.

In general, I share your distaste for Stephen King’s writing. The eighth-grade level his stories are written on can be fatiguingly lofty and verbose, and the man has zero sense of rhythm—I wrote about that in my critical essay “Quantum Fiction,” where I tried really hard to apply the theories of quantum mechanics to message transmission via prose rhythm; I even BSed it well enough to get it by some snooty Harvard types I studied under. Sometimes I wonder how such an inaccessible writer like King has sold so many books. I mean, that story about Lard Ass and the pie eating contest kind of rocked, but what was he on when he wrote The Langoliers? Not that I read either of those stories. Thank God for Hollywood, you know? But anyway, what does King know? Just because a writer spends two consecutive decades at the top of the New York Times best-seller list doesn’t mean he knows squat about anything. Haven’t both Sarah Palin and Snookie been on that list, too? Rest assured, Mr. __________, you and your book will not be associated with the likes of them.

And correct you are that “postmodern” is not so well defined. I hear Derrida (who I’m told was like the authority on postmodernism) had difficulty defining it, too. Maybe it’s like when Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, when asked to differentiate art from pornography, said he knew [obscenity] when he saw it. I share that viewpoint, I think, as well as the ability to know trash when I see it. In high school (just last month!) we were talking about postmodernism, and the best the teacher could do was point to certain patterns and certain authors and say things like, “Well, Stephen King’s not one of them.” During these discussions, writers like Faulkner and Borges and Barth were brought up, and I like them very much, but I have to admit (sheepishly) it was embarrassing for me not to share the enthusiasm of my classmates (many of whom have finished their own books recently) for writers like Carver or Murakami or David Foster Wallace. I knew I was supposed to like them, but invariably, I’d end up saying something stupid and naïve like, “But how great was JD Salinger?!” Obviously, as you have pointed out, this was a ridiculous thing to say.

Often I seem to run into this problem of differing tastes; so often are my personal preferences just plainly incorrect. All my life, I’ve tried to correct this, to adjust my taste to suit others. My mother always insisted I eat my toast with my eggs and not after them, and wouldn’t accept that I didn’t like cole slaw. Recently, because it was Father’s Day and I thought I could get some marital leeway in movies to rent, I brought home and enjoyed very much the modern re-warming of the A-Team saga; my wife clearly stated this was such the wrong kind of thing to enjoy; we had a similar conversation about the movie Precious, but in reverse. It happens as a parent, too. I’ve tried to be a very cool parental unit, Mr. _________, but when my stepson plays Christian “death core” music I’m tempted to join a satanic gospel choir, but most of the time just go to the other side of the house and crank up some Jason Mraz.  I know I’m not supposed to like him, but the young man can really scat, you know?

I became so concerned when you pointed out other positive reviews of your book from contemporary fiction critics who seem to “get it,” I went and read every one of them because I’d like to be hip and with it too. It’s possible I don’t have enough maturity, life or literary experience—as you mentioned—to understand them all the way you do. I wasn’t sure what to make of [this one critic’s] review (in the link you provided), for example, for though she recommended the book for readers of contemporary fiction, she also, in that introductory paragraph, indicated she didn’t know if the story was narrated from jail or the grave, or whether it was a thinly-veiled autobiography or what. Wow, you’d think a person who calls herself a “critic” would know things like that. I didn’t know those things either, but didn’t want to reveal my ignorance. Guess I did anyway since I didn’t get it and referenced Salinger and King. I’m not sure what she meant by “stroke book” either, but after consideration of the context where she contradicts the idea by talking about “decidedly unappetizing” sex scenes, I’ve decided it must be something filthy and sinful—and that she must be some kind of repressed prude.

This other reviewer I found must be equally as naïve and ignorant as [this one critic] and I. Plus he cusses a lot and only goes by [blog handle]. He has the audacity to say what I said about it: “Thing is, story-wise, [this book] just kind of hangs there for two hundred pages then abruptly ends.” All set up, no pay off, he says. Bet he liked the A-Team movie, too. Moron.

Anyway, thanks for pointing out my personal shortcomings. I hear nobody likes a critic, and I know we’ve never met, and I’ve never until today told you the least bit about myself, but you sure are good at guessing how people really are based on the tiniest bit of information. Some might call that a ridiculous amount of insight! I wish it wasn’t too late to retract everything I said about your book. People might get suspicious about our journalistic integrity, even though it’s clear I’m completely wrong for not liking it. You’ve taught me a valuable lesson, Mr. ________, and a green quote-unquote critic like myself needs all the life lessons he can get. Next time, whether or not I like a book I’m reviewing, I’ll pretend like I do so nobody gets upset. And if anybody says to me some book I recommended was crap, I’ll just reply, “But the author meant for it to be good.” Because, I mean, clearly some people (Snookie,  Ann Coulter) write books they know will suck from the outset. And only those types of authors should be punished with tepid, mixed, or negative reviews.  Besides, as an aspiring novelist myself, I found your book incredibly instructive. Thanks for that.

So my advice to you is just ignore me and my silly point-of-view. Just collect the positive commentary in a basket and float forward as though so-called critics like me don’t exist. The only advice a guy like me can give you for the future is this: Send a quick email to reviewers to see if they softball their reviews out of respect or whatever. If they say no, just move on until you find a person who strokes you like you like it. That way all will be Skittles, Mr. ________.

Sincerely,

 

Jason Lee Miller (recent high school graduate)

 

 

PowerPoem #2

Middle Management Directives

    Coping Strategies (a.k.a. Reality Avoidance Mechanism (RAM)) 

•         Analyze redundancy, inflate necessity, sell sell
•         Design flowchart to show flowchart value
•         Develop (d)(mn)emonic acronyms, pretend reason's obvious
•         Implement teambuilding strategy, reinforce paycheck unimportance
•         Evaluate morale, walk the lie upstairs

 

 
For clearer image, click below:
 Download Corporate Poetry_001_002

 

PowerPoem #1

At work I learned that when creating a PowerPoint Presentation, one should follow the "rule of sixes"--six words per line, six lines per slide. And I thought this is the closest the corporate world gets to poetry--because, you know, poetry requires a soul. I also thought that all it needed was a third rule--six syllables per line--and you'd have the Devil's presentation crafted according to the rule of 666. The first in this PowerPoem series (an experiment) doesn't follow the rule of 666, but expect the CEO of Evil's presentation once his demonic little lackees make one for him. This first one is titled, "Best Practices."  I'm trying to figure out a way to post it without it being blurry. (Thanks Microsoft! You do this to me at work too.) There's a download link below, where it may look better. 

  Download Corporate Poetry_001_001

 

    
 

 

On Self-Publishing (a.k.a. Pride and Prejudice)

Not too many weeks ago, at the Brown Hotel in Louisville where some fine writers periodically gather, a seasoned and beloved writer and mentor conversed over beers with a small troupe of beginning and emerging writers about the prospect of self-publishing. He relayed how he understood but gently rebuffed his son’s hammering on the simple business of ROI, because, he said, “I still have my pride.”  Or maybe I said that. Somebody said it. I’ll pretend he said it. He said something like that, and the level of respect I have for him prevented me from waxing self-righteous about there being no place for pride in art; after all, this is the same man who, after I attempted to defend my fiction, told me “the truth is no excuse”—besides, obviously, I felt the same way. But I wonder if this feeling—this aversion—is akin to preferring a horse and carriage to these faddish “automobiles” a century ago.

I want to say this debate, like capital punishment or abortion, is done to death, and we should find some new thing to argue about. But here we are anyway, groping around in that amorphous and awkward In-between. Amazon says e-books are now outselling even paperbacks. A literary agent, not too far from the Brown that day, cautioned that Amazon doesn’t go into enough detail about those numbers. Newspapers are still gallantly and romantically fighting the cancer of a new age, and still yet other romantics mourn the hefty scent of aging paper as though submerging their noses into the lingeringly aromatic pillows of lost lovers. It may indeed be time to bury them and go on with our lives though pride and sentiment hold us close.

I mean, hell, this is supposed to be a digital age blog post, and I’m too busy thoughtfully essaying to do it right; and by right, I mean quick and dirty. I still have my pride.  I still have decades of (mostly 20^th century) teaching and skill development pressing on my psyche. I have a fancy degree and letters behind my name. And that means I can’t just slap some words down and push the publish button.

Silly, right?

That same agent told a story about a well known writer leaving his publishing company to do it himself. On the same day, a writer who’d built a large internet following by self-publishing took the aforementioned writer’s place at the same publishing company. This appears to be the modern state: a free-for-all of flux. Meanwhile, across the Web somewhere, as new literary mags pop up all over, CJ West, who has five books under his belt already, writes that giving away his latest ebook for free on the Internet boosted sales of his other books six fold.    

I’m sitting on two chapbooks of poetry. Aside from cover art and formatting, they’re ready to go. I’m ready to go, ready to ship these children off into the mean world and make new babies. I don’t know if the books are any good, what literary philosophy is behind them—they are what they are: my creations— if anyone would buy them, if anyone would take the financial risk to print up a few hundred dollars worth and pimp them. Up until this point, I understand I’ve been all art and no business, all pomp and no street smarts. And street smarts in this day and age might mean signing up with Amazon or some other DIY company and believing in yourself and your work instead of waiting for somebody else to do it, so long as you’re not too worried about the next time you meet up at the Brown and have to face the question: Who’s your publisher?

Because saying you are your own publisher is like listing your mother as a reference on your resume. Would my pride be able to stand it?

As of this moment, my pride is beating me to death. I haven’t sent my collections anywhere yet—well, once, last summer, to a chapbook contest. I lost. So I can’t really speak to the horrors of publishing the old-fashioned way if I haven’t really tried. Of course, there’s also some psychological protection inherent in that, the kind of psychological protection a young man gets by not asking his secret crush out on a date. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, but nothing ventured, nothing hurt, either.

And, well, silly, right?

There may be some consolation in the nature of poetry publishing, a safer ground than, say, the ground fiction publishing rests on, at least for now. Poe self-published. I chatted with one young representative of a small, indie press who told me her only goal was to sell enough chapbooks to cover the cost of printing: about $250. Naturally, she has to put in a lot of sweat equity, running around pimping her new authors. Poetry still seems the most purely artistic of the genres. There’s no money in it anyway, it’s especially prone to modern styling and philosophy and the austere judgment of the adherents of those styles and philosophies; and I imagine poets carry with them the same weighty acceptance painters do: the possibility of languishing in obscurity until death, and by the cruel irony of art, then they make it big.

So what’s your pride worth, anyway? Is there really that big a gap between pride and $250? My family spends that much on weekly groceries, and chances are digitally self-publishing will cost far less, depending on the price of your pride. In the end, it may just be a matter of how effectively you’re able to market yourself and how effectively you can believe in yourself despite the down-the-nose looking you fear. It’s a new world, man, a vain world, a (hopefully) screw-the-Man world where the fabled Machine of the 20^th century is choking and sputtering its last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bone Silence Review Live at Gloom Cupboard

My review of Peycho Kanev's poetry collection, Bone Silence, is up at Gloom Cupboard. First paragraph is below, to whet you're whistle:

Peycho Kanev’s poetry collection, Bone Silence, evokes a theme repeating throughout: Our bones outlast us and remain our only testament in the world, even the greatest of us. Over time we are forgotten, our words are lost, and in the soil a story bones can’t tell. The writer pushes against death, strives for immortality in a temporal and zero-sum world, or as the author puts it: “as the tomb rock rolls among/the skulls of the geniuses of the past.”

Prologue?

I keep rewriting an intro for my never-finished novel. I've probably written a dozen of them. The beginning is the hardest part, I keep hearing. The middle and end, too. I've got most of the middle, not so much of the end, and an ever evolving beginning. This morning I wrote this new beginning. I'm not sure if it is a beginning, or a separate thing. Aint that how it goes?

Prologue:

I danced for the Lord.

Earlier, I lay on my grandmother's sofa, feeding the dog chocolate, considering the televegangelized tears of the preacher. He was moving me. I was stirred. He asked the souls where he was and the souls at home if they wanted to be better, if they wanted God to bless them, if they wanted God to lead them, if they wanted a new life and a new soul and a new heart. I did. Raise you're hand if you do, he said. And I did. I cried with him. My grandmother smiled, told me chocolate would kill the dog, so I stopped feeding him. I cried with him, and then I went outside and I danced for Lord. I danced naked for that was how David danced. I was happy. He was moving me. I was stirred.

At church they told me to stop dancing. God didn't like that. I listened. I stopped. I wanted to be better. I wanted a new life and a new soul and a new heart. I wanted God to bless me. I picked up my guitar and I played for the Lord because that's what David did. I played my song and I sang. I was happy. He was moving me. I was stirred. I took my guitar to church, and they told me to smash it. I didn't smash it, just put it in the closet and started writing poetry. I was happy. He was moving me. I was stirred. I told them David wrote poetry, danced naked and played guitar, too, right in front of everybody. They told me poetry was nice. The Bible was full of poetry. Poetry was nice, they said, so long as it honored God. David played the lyre, and nobody danced naked anymore because what David did was sinful. Anyway, it was a different time, and guitars and tritones now were of the Devil. Go home and write, they said. Honor God in verse. Sometimes poems are prophecies.

Well, that's true, my mother said, stroking my hair. But you can dance in your room if you want to. She told me stories, my mother. She told me stories of love and chivalry. She told me one day I'd be a gentleman, that gentlemen were modern-day knights. I asked why. She said because of love. Knights believe in love. And ride white horses? Yes, and ride white horses, and open doors for ladies, and write them poems. I asked why. Because God is love and love is poetry. And sometimes poems are prophecies. Prophecies of what? Of what should be. Of what will be? No, she said, hardly ever of what will be.

My Plans for Sunday, 5/22/11

Drive round the steeples of the world

Wonder which reasonable explanation

                Has bound the peoples of the world from showing

Wonder if they went up or went home

                —If I’m still here, it’s foretold I will be—

Ponder what it means to be tethered to the ground

And leave them behind

Or pass beyond them in the beer aisle

Give my money

                —There’ll still be money, right?—

                        To some lonely mother defiling the Sabbath

Ask her if she misses them

Listen as she says misses who

Tell her I’m going home over yonder

                A place all are invited who can love enough

Go there, leave my door open to the least of lovers

                —And if they come by—

Scan the sky for soles and the paper for coupons

Check the tube and ask Brian Williams

Listen as he says he saw nothing

Laugh at the stupidity of it all

Cry at the stupidity of it all

Go on with my day

And hope this is the end of the end of the world

The Creative Spirit

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."--Stephen King

Over at Plumb, Rosemary Rhodes Royston estimates that writers are psychic. I don't think she's wrong, but I think the category should be extended to a more general “artists.” There's plenty of historical, theoretical, experimental, philosophical, and theological evidence for this. I'm not sure it's limited to writers and artists, but often the practitioners of the craft—who always have been led by the Creative Spirit—are adept at tapping into what some call the Universal Collective, or at least are tuned into what Plato called “the Real,” what many others have simply called Truth, even if what they are creating is fiction.

Theory: Artists live in the realms of the Subconscious, the biographical, experiential part of the psyche, and the Unconscious, the aspect of the psyche Jung theorized was biological, genetically and physically embedded with universal symbolism. In addition, as though philosophers in different tunics, artists dwell on humanity, what it is and what it means, noting its tendencies and mapping those tendencies along with their consequences on paper or canvas. When the chord is struck just right, it rings loudly, clearly, and devastatingly. When the chord is struck just right, it exists outside of time, seems to apply to all humans, and the product of the artist becomes immortal, far greater than the artist herself/himself. You can read, therefore, and find yourself in King Solomon's existential crisis in Ecclesiastes, in the tale of love and terror in the Gospels; you can laugh at yourself in Erasmus's Praise of Folly, suffer with the sinners and saints in the Divine Comedy, tremble with fear at the prescient similarities between the time you live in and the time laid out in Orwell's 1984. This isn't clairvoyance as much as it is getting in touch with the Self, as it is knowing thyself and being gutsy enough to shine a light on that.

Rosemary cites Carl Jung for support, and as a fellow Jungian, I think that's appropriate. Trying so hard to remain stoically scientific and rational, Jung soon found himself fighting his own romanticism on the divergent roads of the Psyche, where he discovered the Breath of God, and that breath was composed of symbolism—of metaphors—constant and universal within humans, seemingly implanted there in the womb. That may sound crazy, ye scientists who still proffer the recently outdated trope that science and spirituality are incompatible, but consider this: In a recent experiment with birds (forgive me, I'm not taking the time to find all my sources), scientists discovered what appeared to be “ancestral memory.” Male birds learn their mating songs from their fathers—Dad teaches his boys how to get the chicks!—and the researchers wanted to see what kind of songs offspring would sing if separated from their fathers before they could be taught the mating song. The songs were measured electronically, and the first generation of separated offspring produced some unmelodious and arrhythmic and pathetic verse. The second separated generation (the offspring of the offspring) did the same. But a few generations down the line, something incredible happened: The great-great-great grandsons found their special family rhythm again and produced mating songs identical to their original forefather.

Jung was right. All of us are connected by some strand of memory or symbolism, and a writer tapping into that effectively comes off as one stepping into your own head. The four archetypes, the universal metaphors, are present in all stories, all art stemming from the Unconscious realm. The Shadow: the dark but fascinating figure who thrusts the world into chaos, the one who must be defeated, the one very recognizable in others but frequently denied in oneself; Anima/Animas: the male and female aspects of the Soul; Syzygy: the divine couple, the (re)union of the aspects; the Self: also called the Real, the Truth, the Pneuma, or the vital, creative wind that carries us to God.

I'm surprised how many people I talk to who don't know much about Joseph Campbell, whose writings I think need to replace some of the Victorian twaddle still assigned in American schools. But they should know, especially if they're Star Wars fans; George Lucas gave express credit (and a private screening!) to Campbell for inspiring the iconic trilogy. Campbell considered himself a successor to Jung, and perhaps taking a cue from Jorge Borges, who said, “Perhaps universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors,” he dug around the myths pervasive throughout modern human history to see if he could identify those universal metaphors. And of course, he did. He found lots and lots of them, stretching across Middle Eastern messiahs, Chinese Cinderellas, and Native American Noachian floods.

Campbell discovered and wrote and said lots of interesting things before he died, and among them, the most interesting for me, was that as the modern world loses its rites of passage, as the modern Church fails to provide metaphors younger generations will be able to accept, as humanity strives for new metaphors with new (the same!) meanings, poets will become the shamans of mankind. And that's pretty retro, if you ask me, the idea we return to verse, but I suppose it makes sense because poets provide the metaphor, the deep layers of meaning within which we not only find ourselves, but the breath of God. Poets give us the symbols required for the Psyche to unlock the code. The writers of the Bible knew this. The Vedics did, too. Or how about this noodle-frying verse from John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And then Jesus commences to telling stories.

Here too, Campbell displays the divine couple: the poet and the storyteller. The poet reaches up into the realm of inexpressibility, overlays imprecise symbols that come only very close to interpretation, and brings the inexpressible down to expressible earth, which was, it is said, spoken into existence, and the storyteller lays out the routes upon which incarnated characters will live out their questions and live out their symbols. We rely on parables—on finding ourselves in the story—to reach God because the ultimate Truth is this: Every single thing we know about the Universe and Ourselves stems from a story someone told us and the odd and loose amalgamation of metaphors, both experiential and biological, we use for understanding.

Writers aren't anymore psychic than anyone else. We just have the gumption and curiosity to dwell in abstract and spooky gardens of truth, and we have hubris and courage enough to present those truths to sometimes hostile listeners. We don't pave roads, and we don't build cars. We only draw maps, and if we get lucky, the maps lead someplace real.

My Poems Are Live at the Copperfield Review

Three poems find themselves in some really good company, honored to have a place:

The Copperfield Review

Drew Lackovic's Response to "Submission"

Drew Lackovic comments on the submission process:

There are few things I loathe more than spending several hours prepping and submitting stories for publication. I hate doing it more than taxes -- at least with doing your taxes you usually get some money back at the end. With the submission process I always end up feeling a combination of pissed and nauseous for having wasted so much time in doing something that has a 1 in 100 or so chance of doing anything for me.

That being said, I just finished my first stint doing an open reading period for Ontologica, and it was a very different experience. Since it was our first open reading period, the slush pile wasn't really all that huge-- I had about 40 stories sent to me over a two month span -- but the thing that struck me the most is that a lot of people submitting (I'm also guilty of this) don't really read submission requirements and/or the mission statement of the journal. With Ontologica being an essay first, fiction, poetry and art second kind of girl, you wouldn't really expect fiction submissions to outsell everything else, but over half of our submissions were for fiction, and all but three of them were rejected, largely for not fitting with the direction of the journal. What I'm getting at, is that if we as writers spend more time doing what editors suggest, reading some of the journal we want to submit to, we can all reduce the amount of chaff going into submission slush piles, and increase response times, hopefully reduce the amount of form rejections, and ultimately spend less time trying to place our stories.

For this to happen though, journals need to do two things: 1. make some back issue stuff freely available for people looking to see if the journal is a good fit. 2. journals need to really spell out what they want -- something I'm definitely going to work on a little more for my next reading period. 3. for Journals to streamline the submission process -- totally on the same page with you there, Jason. There is nothing worse than having to port 5 versions of the same story because you're working on simultaneously submitting.

You Can Reach Me at The Copperfield Review

I'm happy to announce my poems, "Julie Shrooms the Black Doombloom," "Smoke," and "Foottapping at the Door," will appear in The Copperfield Review on May 2. I really like their Hemingway quote at the top of their webpage:

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."

Much thanks and happiness.

 

Update: I'd be remiss if I didn't link to Julie Nord's painting, "Impending Doom," which inspired "Julie Shrooms the Black Doombloom."