Tag Archives: memoir

499. Triple Tease

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Thomas Anderson of Schlock Value has an ongoing love/hate (largely hate) relationship with blurbs. I mostly share his view, but things have changed since the era, mostly the 70s, which he reviews. When Cyan came out, I had the chance to write the blurbs myself. In fact, I was asked to write three blurbs of 10, 25, and 75 words, from which the publisher would choose.

Squeezing a whole novel into twenty-five-words-or-less is an interesting exercise. I decided to try it again on the novel I’m presently writing, Like Clockwork, but with a variation. 10, 25, and 75 is really hard. I’ll wait until the book is finished for that, but I did write short, shorter, and really short candidates.

Here are the results.

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The year is 1850. The year is always 1850. Now it is November and a year’s worth of progress toward understanding is in jeopardy. In a few weeks will come Midwinter Midnight, when the Clock that Ate Time will reset, it will be January first once again, and all that has been gained will be lost from memory.

Snap, who helped to build the Clock and regrets his actions; Balfour who was another man in another life; and Hemmings, formerly a computer, who now figures differently — these three, with Pilar, Eve, Lithbeth, Pakrat, and old man Crump are determined to set Time free again. And if they fail . . .

The year will be 1850. The year will be 1850 forever.

119 words

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The year is 1850 — again. A year’s worth of progress toward understanding is in jeopardy. In a few weeks it will be Midwinter Midnight, when the Clock that Ate Time will reset, it will be January first once again, and all that has been gained will be lost from memory.

50 words

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The year is 1850 in a this alternate London, where time has no hold. There are only a few weeks left to restart the future.

25 words

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How’s that for a tease?

496. Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate

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There is something about blogging that I didn’t expect when I started. Since these posts are opinionated, but not totally opinion, I find myself doing research from time to time to keep my facts straight. That means I occasionally learn things I would never otherwise have known.

It’s a major bonus.

I was aware of Bob Dylan’s selection by the Nobel committee, and his reticence regarding the event, but I didn’t know the full outcome. I wanted to make an off-hand comment about it in another post, but didn’t want to make a fool of myself, so I checked out the facts.

The Nobel committee awarded Dylan the prize for literature last October “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

Can a song be true literature? I would say yes, although rarely; about as often as a poem is or a novel is. Does Dylan’s work rise to that level of gravitas. Again, my answer is yes; the only other songwriter who comes to mind who worked at that level was Leonard Cohen. Paul Simon just misses the cut.

Dylan took a very long time replying to the committee, fueling speculation that he would refuse the honor, but he finally complied, and eventually provided his Nobel lecture, which is the only requirement attached to the prize.

His lecture was also my prize for checking out the facts. It is superb. I’ve provided a link below.

The lecture, actually more of a biographical essay, is written in the same intelligent but not over-educated voice that we hear in his songs. This is entirely appropriate; it is pure Dylan. He tells of the early impact of Buddy Holly, and then of American folk, then shifts to a personal analysis of three classic books, Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the Odyssey. He presents their complexity, their unflinching view of the rough truths of life, and the manner in which each makes statements which require the readers engagement. Much in these books is not spelled out and nailed down, just as much in his songs is not. These three books are offered for their influence on Dylan’s work.

I found the essay intelligent and moving, and instead of providing a blow by blow, I recommend that you use the link below to read it for yourselves.

I will only quote one short passage, from near the end:

Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard.

I hope you will take the time to read the whole essay. Meanwhile, I think I’ll go dig up some of those old LPs I bought while I was in college during the sixties. He has a rough voice and I don’t like his harmonica playing, but oh, those words!

494. We Can Have Archaic and Eat it Too

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Marquart rode into my life on horseback. The day after my epiphany, I had a couple of hours off. I was in the Navy at that time, working as a dental technician in an oral surgery, and we had back-to-back cancellations. I wasn’t a writer yet, just an over-committed reader, but I had written the first chapters of a dozen novels. That was usually as far as I got before the impulse ran out.

I took that two hours to write Marquart and his companion’s entry into the Valley of the Menhir. You can see what it eventually became over in Serial today, but it took a long time to reach that level of sophistication.

When Marquart first rode into the valley, forty-six years ago, he was riding a horse. It was all very medieval because I hadn’t done any world building. All of the religious aspects aspects of the story, enreithment, the relation of souls to bodies, and both to ai — even the existence of ai — were nowhere in my mind. It was just a bunch of soldiers in armor riding horses into a valley populated by deer and dotted with oaks. The only fantasy element was a werewolf. I didn’t even know then that shapeshifters were not native to the world of the menhir, having been brought in through the Weirwood menhir from the world of Lorric by the Shambler. I didn’t even know there was a Shambler, nor any of the other gods that you met during the last two weeks.

After two hours I had a short chapter, and the next customer knocked on the door, ready to have his wisdom teeth extracted. I put the chapter in a drawer. I wasn’t a writer then, and had no intention of becoming one.

Three years later, I decided to give writing a try and got hooked. Two years after that I pulled out that chapter, dusted it off, and started world building.

All this was about the time of the fantasy revival led by Ballantine, and there was no lack of books on how to create fantasy worlds. Purists were arguing that a simply medieval world hardly qualified as fantasy. I could see their point. Although it never kept me from enjoying fantasies that did not rise to that standard, I decided that horses just weren’t going to work for me.

During those Navy years I had lived near the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. On one trip there I had seen okapi, had fallen in love with them, and now added them to the book. That lasted about a week before I realized that I needed a true fantasy creature, not just a real one most people had never heard of, so I created kakais in okapi’s much jazzed-up image. Their heavily sloped backs — much sharper than okapis —  gave me the need and opportunity to design strange saddles which would require unusual practices for troops in the field. They also gave me reason to design a harsh culture for the riders of the plains, the Dzikakai (literally, men of the kakai) who were going to be the perennial enemies of the people of the Inner Kingdom.

Okapi.

Eventually, I populated the world of the menhir with a mix of “normal” and created critters. Besides kakais, I brought in tichan as bovine substitutes, added krytes (described and used for plot purposes)  and jaungifowl to my list of birds, made my bears red, and kept ordinary squirrels and deer.

Plot building, world building, and language building all took place as I wrote successive drafts. I don’t recommend the technique. Not only did it take me decades to finish the project, but I ended up with at least a hundred thousand words of text that had to be cut out as the project grew out of hand. Maybe a few chunks of that will end up in Serial late this year, but most of it will never be read by anyone but me.

Still, I doubt if this particular fantasy could have been written any other way, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. At least that’s what I tell myself.

During all this, I went to Westercon 33 in Los Angeles in 1980. I sat in the audience of a lugubrious discussion of what the magic horses in Lord of the Rings ate, and whether it was Tolkien’s responsibility to tell us. (My answer, unspoken as I gritted my teeth, was, “No, you damned fools, it wasn’t!”)

This was followed by a spirited but deeply nerdy debate on the use of language in fantasy. The language of the Inner Kingdom in VOTM was just beginning to come together for me, so I perked up my ears. The idea of archaic language was floated, and someone said that it should only be used as a spice in regular English. The concept spice morphed into general food terms, and the metaphor had become almost embarrassingly labored when one member of the audience stood up and said:

“Are you trying to tell us that we can have archaic and eat it too?”

I wish I had said that. Maybe sometimes we do try too hard.

493. Lost Classics

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I have been cleaning out a house where I used to live. It’s a little like archaeology. This was the house where I wrote some of my early novels, and it is the place I have been keeping the older and less often accessed half of my books. Every place I go in the house, a good memory looks back, and every box of books I open brings a forgotten smile.

I found an old A Common Reader catalog. I wish I had kept all the ones I received in those days, but who knew that A Common Reader would go out of business and make them irreplaceable. I’ll tell you about it in a future post.

One of the odd books I ordered from that odd catalog also turned up, Lost Classics by Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding, and Linda Spalding. You only need the first name to find it on Amazon, but fair is fair. I quote from the introduction:

A book that we love haunts us forever . . . it is in the act of reading, for many of us, that forged out first link to the world. And so, lost books . . . gnaw at us.

I know the feeling. Although, to be honest, I try not to lose my favorites, which is why it takes two houses to hold my library.

Lost Classics comes from Brick: a literary journal. In 1998, the editors ran a Lost Classics issue, and thereafter they were inundated with additional material from their readers. This was collated into the volume on the desk in front of me. You can still get it from Amazon, even though it came out in 2000.

Seventy-four writers provide short essays on somewhat more than that many lost books. They range from slightly forgotten to seriously obscure, but they all fascinate. Searching the index, I find that when I first read Lost Classics nearly two decades ago, I had already read two, The Highwayman by Phillip Noyes (one of only two which really weren’t lost) and N by E by Rockwell Kent. A couple were on my to-read list, and I made a point of finding and purchasing Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright. On full disclosure, it was too dense to penetrate.

That leaves nearly eighty unaccounted for, and that is the point. These are books you will probably never see, but the joy here is reading what they meant to those who did read them.

These are strange people, but I think they will be familiar to you. I will give you just one example:

I cannot find the book and the two or three people to whom I might have lent it have no memory of it, have never heard of it. But I have a clear memory of a Saturday in the summer of 1990, during the year when I tried to live one month in Dublin followed by one month in Barcelona and managed not to live much at all . . . the book hit me hard. I started reading . . . and I am still recovering, in certain ways, from what I learned.

Which reader was that? Which book? I won’t tell you. You will have to find a copy and seek it out for yourself. If you like old things, or odd things, or obscure things, you owe it to yourself.

Take Me With You

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A few days ago the local cattle drive went by. Because it is timely, and the novel excerpt was already in place, I’ll just shoehorn a brief observation in between Cost of Empire posts.

I have mentioned the drive before; it is an institution in the corner of the foothills where I live. Every spring about this time a local cattleman drives a few hundred of his cattle from pastures here in the lower foothills to others higher up the Sierra. Local cowboys and would-be cowboys (and cowgirls) volunteer to ride. Wouldn’t you?

A few dozen of us who don’t have horses always line up to watch. Every spring, and every fall when they return, my wife and I jump into the pickup, watch the herd go by, the drive backroads to leapfrog their progress and watch again. We usually manage a third time before they move out of range.

It may seem like cheap entertainment to you, but I grew up on a dairy farm, and every farm boy wants to be a cowboy. No exceptions.

This year, on our third stop, about a dozen dairy cows in an adjoining pasture ran to the fence, bawling, to watch the herd go by. It was almost as if they were saying, “Take me with you!”

I had a vision of a half dozen ill-dressed farm kids in the 1860s, standing outside their sod schoolhouse, watching a covered wagon moving west and wishing that they could share in the Great American Adventure. I’ll never write it, but I’ll bet there’s a good novel in there somewhere.

Symphony 136

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John Teixeira stared at his son, slowly shaking his head.  He said, “Son, I am proud of you. Why haven’t you been doing this kind of work all along?”

“Now,” Neil interjected quickly, “the favor you offered. I’m taking you at your word, and asking one. I am asking you, ‘Don’t spoil the moment.'”

John reached out for his son’s hands and said, “Of course. I am just surprised — and pleased,” he quickly added.

“Do you remember the last conversation we had, about how Oscar wants to be proud to be Chicano. Today he was, and if you were proud of him as a Chicano, I don’t think he’ll ask much more.”

John Teixeira swallowed hard and smiled to cover his feelings. He said, “I am proud of my son as anything he really wants to be, as long as he does his best at it.”

Oscar Teixeira looked eleven years old and eleven feet tall.

# # #

Carmen came to relieve Janice at the wheelchair, and managed to push him across the playground with one hand on the handle and one hand holding his hand. The children were milling around with their parents or wandering off toward the buses. Most of them had already come by to say hello to Neil, but a few more drifted in to welcome him back. There was much hand squeezing and hugging. It made him uncomfortable; it always did. But at the same time, it thrilled him.

Then he saw Lisa Cobb. She was standing with two strangers, waiting by Carmen’s car. As he rolled up, Lisa stepped forward, very proper and terribly embarrassed. She put out her hand for an adult hand shake, and Neil used it as a lever to pull her in for the hug she really needed. She backed away, biting her lip, and simply said, “Thank you.” Then she rushed to the woman and hid her face in her skirts.

The woman enfolded her in the kind of totally safe embrace that Neil could never provide. She said over Lisa’s head, “I’m Mrs. Bowman. The county uses me as a short term foster mother, so I see it all. Lisa told me a lot about what happened. She is one lucky little girl that it was stopped before things went any further. And she is lucky to have people who care for her like you two.”

“We are lucky to have kids like Lisa to care for,” Neil said.

“Coming here today was completely her idea. She didn’t know if she could go through with it. She’s still embarrassed by the whole thing. I told her the sooner she started living a normal life, the better. Then when she saw you, she had to talk to you even though that embarrassed her worse than anything.”

Lisa slipped under Mrs. Bowman’s arm and stared at Neil from its shelter. He said, “How do you feel, Hon?”

“Okay. I’m okay now.”

“How is your mother?”

“She’s getting better. They let me see her yesterday.”

She dropped her head and said, “I’m sorry about your jaw and all.”

Neil said, “Look.” He drew back his lips and showed her the wax covered wires. “I never had braces before.”

She giggled and then slipped around behind Mrs. Bowman, looking very young indeed.

# # #

On the way back to his apartment, Carmen said, “You just added another member to you fan club.”

“Jealous?”

“You just hurry up and get well, and I’ll show you how jealous.”

finis

Symphony 135

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As they crossed the playground, the Cinco de Mayo celebration was just getting under way. Neil said, “I want to sit next to John Teixeira.”

“I don’t see him.”

“Keep looking. I sent word to his wife to have him here no matter what.”

Janice looked curiously at him, but their relationship was newly repaired and fragile. She did not presume upon it to ask questions. Instead, she searched the grassy area where folding chairs had been set up until she saw John and Sandy Teixeira.

She parked him beside them and pulled up a chair on the other side, still puzzled.

John Teixeira met Neil’s eyes while they measured each other anew. It was almost as if they were meeting for the first time. Neil put out his hand and John shook it without hesitation. He said, “I heard what you did for the Cobb girl. If there is anything I can ever do for you, just ask.”

“There may be. Just watch the show, and then we’ll talk about it.”

In the center of the open space in front of the folding chairs, the children had constructed a cardboard fort. Carmen and Gina had arranged for a PA system with two mikes. Stephanie Hagstrom stood by one; Rosa Alvarez stood by the other. They read the narration, first Stephanie in English, then Rosa in Spanish.

The year was 1862. Using independent Mexico’s debts to European powers as an excuse, France had decided to invade Mexico. The French General Laurences arrived:

“So this is Vera Cruz,” Stephanie read. “What a beautiful country Mexico is!”

“Asi es Veracruz,” Rosa echoed. “Que campo tan hermoso tiene Mexico!”

The French army arrived in construction paper hats, carrying broomstick rifles, and attacked the fort at Puebla. Regular Mexican troops and Zacapoaztla Indians rose up from where they had been hidden behind the walls and defended it. Three times the French attacked. Three times they were repulsed. When the day — Cinco de Mayo, the fifth of May — was over, the French invasion had failed. Never again would a European power invade the Americas.

When the applause had died down, Neil said, “What did you think?”

“It was very good,” John Teixeira admitted. “You must have put in a lot of work on it.”

“Not me. I was in the hospital.”

“Mrs. Wyatt then.”

“Not according to the reports I got. She said she just sat back and let the person in charge do his job.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. Here comes the person who wrote, produced, and directed the whole thing. He did the research; he organized the kids. He harassed them until they learned their lines and got their costumes together. He made it work.”

Oscar came walking up as Neil was speaking, with a smile that threatened to break out into a grin — or to go away altogether. Neil reached out and shook Oscar’s hand gravely. He said, “John, meet the one who put it all together while I was in the hospital. The boss. El patron.” more Monday

Symphony 134

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He thought back. “I guess I didn’t. I felt my jaw give way when he hit me, so when I woke up with my mouth wired shut, I thought I knew the whole story.”

“It was more serious than you realize. The doctors tell me now that you will be fine, but we didn’t know that at first.”

Carmen took both his hands in hers and kissed his knuckles. She said, “I love you, Neil McCrae. When I thought I was going to lose you . . .”

Neil put his arm around her and drew her close. He ached to kiss her. He said, “You don’t have to lose me. Ever.”

He swept the hair back from her forehead. He admired the shape of her mouth, and the dark depths of her eyes.

“Bill offered me a job,” he said finally.

“I know. I knew about it yesterday.” She paused as if she were afraid to go on, then asked, “What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything. It all depends.”

“On what?”

“On your answer to my next question.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to go on teaching at the same school with you, if you turned me down when I asked you to marry me.”

# # #

After Carmen left, Neil lay back thinking of the one irony everyone had either missed, or had chosen not to comment on. When it came down to blood and dust, he had believed Lisa instead of Jim Pollard. He had never even made a decision; it had been automatic. Just as automatic as the decision the community had rendered against him in Oregon a year earlier.

# # #

Bill had been right about how long it would take Neil to recover. By Friday morning he was still seeing double and he could not stand up for more than ten minutes at a time. The blows to his head had been a terrible shock to his system.

He badgered his doctor into letting him out by promising to stay in a wheelchair so he couldn’t fall and re-break his jaw if he passed out. It was nearly eleven by the time he had finished the paperwork. Janice Hagstrom picked him up at the hospital entrance, and stowed his folding wheelchair in the back of her station wagon.

He said, “Thank you for picking me up.”

She laughed self-consciously. “If ever there was a case of ‘the least I could do’, this is it. I still don’t understand why you don’t hate us all for the way we treated you.”

Neil closed his eyes against the brightness of the day and said, “That’s easy. You were just trying to protect your children. How could I hate you for that.”

“I would think it would be easy to hate us,” Janice said as she pulled out, “but I’m glad you don’t. Is it true what we hear?”

“What do you hear?”

“That you are going to keep on teaching here, and that you and Ms. de la Vega are getting married.”

“Yes and yes. June fourteenth.”

Janice took pity on his obvious exhaustion and let him sprawl quietly in the front seat all the way to the school. There she pulled out the wheel chair, and then had her hands full keeping his kids from trampling and battering him with greetings. more tomorrow

Symphony 133

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Neil said, “Oh.” He wasn’t sure that he liked a teacher as popular as Gina filling in for him. “I’ll be back on my feet in a day or two.”

Bill chuckled. “That’s what you think. You feel good because you are doped to the eyebrows. Wait an hour or two until the codeine starts to wear off and tell me how soon you will be back on your feet. You just stay here and recover; we’ll take care of school.”

“Do me a favor, then. Tell Gina to let Oscar Teixeira have his head. He is in charge of a student committee that is going to put on the Cinco de Mayo celebration. She needs to trust him, and give him all the freedom he can handle.”

“Oscar Teixeira? Are you out of your mind?”

“Trust me on this one. I have something brewing.”

Bill shook his head. “Don’t you always? Oh, by the way, we had a special board meeting on Sunday afternoon. They were naturally interested when you caused a brawl in my office.”

“No doubt,” Neil observed dryly.

“While I had them together, I made arrangements for shifting some teachers around next year. The state finally acted on Glen Ulrich’s request for disability retirement. Now he can get away from kids and rest his ulcer. Carmen has a math credential, so she agreed to take his place. Gina will be taking her sixth grade core back. That leaves me needing a teacher for seventh grade core. Do you want the job?”

Neil had to turn away to hide the emotion in his face. Did he? How could there be any question? He would miss the maturity of the high school students, but in his five years of teaching he had never grown so close to any children as he had here. They had been like babies when he got them. He had led them through puberty. He had seen them grow taller, stronger, more confident. To teach them for another year, and watch them grow further . . .  He could not express it.

Bill withdrew his hand and said briskly, “Got to run. I’ll tell Gina what you said, and I hope you know what you are doing. You won’t be wanting to see me for a while anyway.”

Neil turned to see what had changed Bill’s attitude, and saw Carmen standing behind him. She was hustling him out the door.

She came over to sit beside him and he lay quiet for a moment, just drinking in the sight of her.

She leaned over and kissed him ever so gently on his swollen lips. There were tears in her eyes again. She said, “I wasn’t very nice to you the last time I was here. I was too flippant, and I didn’t take the time to tell you how very proud I am of you.”

“For getting the crap beaten out of me?”

She winced. “I don’t know why I said that. I was just so relieved to see that you were going to be all right.”

“All he did was break my jaw.”

“That’s not true. You were unconscious for twenty hours from the blow. From both blows, actually; the one on the jaw, and one when Pollard threw you against the wall and you hit the back of your head. They took E. E. G.s and a dozen other tests before they would even set your jaw. They were afraid to administer anesthesia.”

Neil said, “No one told me.”

“You probably didn’t ask.” more tomorrow

Symphony 132

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His memory was there, but it was like a jigsaw puzzle that had been dumped on the floor. A lot of it was just scattered pieces, but large chunks here and there retained their structure. He remembered Lisa’s distress; he remembered talking with Bill about what to do, and arguing with Mrs. Cobb and Jim Pollard.

He remembered the fist coming in and the feel of grating teeth. That was very clear. But the rest of the fight was a complete mystery, and he would have to wait until nearly four to get his answers because Carmen and Bill were both at school.

# # #

When Bill came in, Neil’s first question was, “Where is Carmen?”

Bill laughed, pulled up a chair, and said, “Well, thanks. I guess you are getting better. She had a conference with a parent, but she will be along in a half hour or so.”

Bill reached out and took Neil’s hand, like a father taking the hand of his son. Neil squeezed his fingers. He said, “Where is Lisa?”

“They put her in a foster home. I don’t think she will be there long. Her mother is in counseling, and I think Lisa will be able to go home in a few weeks. With Pollard out of the picture, she will be able to think of her daughter again.”

Neil said, “I don’t have a clear picture of what happened after Pollard broke my jaw. I do seem to remember jumping him and hanging on.”

“I’ll say you did. That was the only thing that saved us. He’s right down the hall now, and when he leaves it will be to head for the county jail.”

“What happened?”

“It was the strangest thing. I was trying to get out the door to go for help when you came back to life, jumped on Pollard and dragged him down. He thrashed around like mad, but you had him in a grip that he couldn’t break.

“That’s when Judy Cobb went crazy. She had been standing there like she didn’t know what to do, but when saw him down, struggling and helpless, she started screaming curses and jumped right on him. She beat him with her fists until he shoved her off, then she hauled back and kicked him as hard as she could right in the crotch. That took the wind out of his sails.”

“She put him in the hospital?” Neil asked in awe.

“Not exactly.” Bill looked embarassed. “What she did, she got his attention and let me get to the next room. I grabbed the fire extinguisher and put a dent in his skull. That’s what put him in the hospital.”

Neil grinned, then cried out in pain. His eyes watered as he got control of himself again. “Don’t do that to me, Bill,” he said, “I’m in no condition to move my mouth.”

“Sorry.”

“So! You accused me of being a hothead. It seems you still have some steam in your boiler, too.”

“I have to admit that seeing a good friend getting beat up started my adrenaline pumping.”

You never called me that before, Neil thought.

Neil raised his hand and Bill took it without embarrassment. To change the subject, Neil asked, “How are my kids taking it?”

“Fine. Gina Wyatt came back to fill in for you. She says she misses teaching and was glad of an excuse to get back into harness.”

Neil said, “Oh.” He wasn’t sure that he liked a teacher as popular as Gina filling in for him. more tomorrow