The stakes is high.
The camps were pitched long ago, human joy and possibility set against terrified segregationists and eugenicists, but they’ve gone and anted up: anyone who needs medication to get through this thing called life, we’re told, is “a dire threat to the American people and our way of life.” Add them, then, to the lists of anyone trans, queer, not what we’re calling white at the moment, heck, that’s just about me & you & everyone we know. —This won’t end easy. It will take a lot to shame them into hiding away their hate again. Deny this unhumaning; defend yourself, ourselves, our way of life; depose these neo-Nazis, these Christian nationalists, these Republicans, into their fated ditches.
#nodads jokes.
The thing, about Elon Musk’s inability to effectively deploy, or even, seemingly, to enjoy, humor:
He’s not trying to be funny, per se. It’s a show of power, not unlike stupidity: I can say anything, anything at all, he’s saying, and so long as it’s approximately humor-shaped, so long as it appears to be somewhere in the vague neighborhood of a joke, thousands upon thousands of people will laugh, because it was said by me.
This, of course, would be the actual function, the purpose, of dad jokes: because I am the patriarch, my jokes do not actually have to be funny to get you to react to them. But the thing about dad jokes is they’re almost always told with an awareness of and even an embarrassment at that purpose, even if it never manages to be articulated as such—there’s almost always an ironic detachment in the telling of them, and a knowing, groaning performance of disgust in the response.
But of course, Musk is a genius of this brave new age, and has no time for such niceties as reflection, or self-consciousness. Say the thing; bask. Open. Brazen. Naked. Ding an sich.
We don’t stop here.
Well, the way they pick teevee shows is, they make one show. That show’s called a pilot. Then they show that one show to the people who pick shows, and on the strength of that one show, they decide if they want to make more shows. Some get chosen, and become television programs. Some don’t, and become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing.
Mulholland Dr. was originally intended or devised or dreamt up or at least pitched as a television series, a serial along the lines in more ways than one of Twin Peaks (as a for instance)—the film we got was cut together from and with additions made to what had originally been a pilot: a show for the people who pick shows, to see if more such shows would at all be what they’d want.
Turns out, not so much.
But that original pilot is available via the Internet Archive:
The quality’s not stellar, but it’s worth watching. At an hour-and-a-half (just enough time for a two-hour movie premiere, with commercials), it’s an hour shy of the film’s runtime, but a large part of the story’s largely there, scenes playing out much as they do in the film, some cuts here, some extensions there, an extra scene with Robert Forster’s laconic anti-Cooper cop, a phone call with a procrastinating writer whose dog, Murph, is mysteriously menacing, there’s some different musical cues, perhaps the most notable difference: some brashly atonal percussive stings adjacent to the Castigliane brothers; the director, Adam, tools up to the corral at the top of Beachwood Canyon to the drum solo from “Take Five”; there’s a stab at a light-hearted theme for Betty, all tremulous strings and tinkling piano, best perhaps left behind—but, nonetheless, the basic beats play out as they do in the film, right up to the discovery of Diane Selwyn’s body, Rita’s attempt to cut her hair, “Let me do it,” and then the revelation of the blond wig in the mirror: “You look like someone else.” There’s no Club Silencio, and there’s no Winkie’s, though there is the dumpster behind the Winkie’s, and the figure behind the dumpster, far more melancholic, almost placid, than terrifying, sat there, waiting, as the pilot ends.
Not so different insofar as that goes, and yet completely different, because of the context, because of how it’s situated, because of the haunting expectations that cling to it, the mighta beens and what would theys. —A television show, a series, a serial, of which this might’ve been the first installment, it’s episodic, it continues, it’s therefore open-ended, expansive, not elusively claustrophobic, not hermetically sealed, not done-in-one, not—a film. We would have gotten more—but with the terrible foreclosure of the film’s ending, it’s tantalizingly impossible to make any kind of a guess as to much of what any of that more would’ve been.
More behind-the-scenery of the movie industry, sure; more to limn the shadowy armature of power stretching from Mr. Roque and the Cowboy through the Castigliane brothers, and all those unknown, unseen phone callers to the bumblingly competent Joe Messing; director Adam Kesher would’ve been more of a co-protagonist with Betty and Rita—but Rita probably wouldn’t’ve been Camilla, and Betty almost certainly wouldn’t’ve been Diane. The tension of that sort of doubling and reveal, that’s not a long-haul sort of mystery. There’s a necessary finality to it, that just doesn’t fit in a serial shape.
And I really don’t know how Naomi Watts’ incandescently saccharine performance would’ve worked in weekly installments, without that counterbalance. Her audition—closer to the end of the pilot, rather than the middle of the film—suggests a direction, of course, but the plucky kid detective, at once Laura Dern and Kyle McLachlan, becoming in her own way very much like the woman who stumbles, injured, from the woods, is a very different story than the one in which the pluck turns out already to have stumbled, on her own, and no detective anywhere in sight.
I like a continuing story. There’s something about a soap opera that’s fantastic because it just keeps going and going. Theoretically, you can get very deep in a story and you can go so deep and open up the world so beautifully, but it takes time to do that.
How the sausage gets made.
“The Passport Bros are one of those phenomena confected at the intersection of rumor and aspiration, lent substance on TikTok and Reddit, consolidated through T-shirts and stickers sold on Etsy, Redbubble, and Shopify, with e-books and conferences and paid consultations over Zoom, until finally they have become what we call a thing.” —Adrian Nathan West
The sin of empathy.
“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” he exhorts us, this mustachio’d Utahan; “This snake” (referring to a photograph of the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde)—
This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.
She is not merely deceived but is a deceiver. Your eye shall not pity.
As a bit of bait, his exhortation did the trick: ten thousand replies, ten thousand retweets, four point seven thousand likes, two and a half thousand bookmarks, twenty-one point nine million views, as of this morning, to the extent those numbers mean anything anymore. And certainly, I now know far more about Ben Garrett, Deacon, candidate for Elder, and podcast co-host, than I ever would’ve intended otherwise. Screenshots have washed up at Bluesky, racking up thousands of likes and retweets of their own; people will gawk at the Nazi bar’s grafitti. “Commit the sin of empathy,” these pass-alongs exhort in turn. “It’s actually the most important emotion of all.” “If your religion says ‘Do not commit the sin of empathy’ you chose the wrong religion.” “Google search ‘The Sin of Empathy’ and you’ll see Evangelicals using it unironically.” “Probably time to talk about fascism and moral inversion huh.” —Which, leaving aside for the moment the all-too-real shortcomings of dunk culture, is all well and good—fuck him up socrates, as Darryl once said—except, I mean, for one fundamental flaw—
Empathy is a sin.
Oh, not the way he means it, this aspiring patriarch, this amateur demonologist. He’s a misogynist fascist, lashing out at a woman in a position of traditionally male power, a woman who’d recently dared to embarrass his chosen Daddy-come-home figurehead by asking the President to have mercy. —It’s important to note that Deacon Garrett isn’t responding directly to anything the Right Reverend Budde said, with his exhortation not to commit the sin of empathy—she spoke of unity, dignity, honesty, humility, diversity, and of course and most controversially mercy, but said nothing of empathy: the closest she gets to that is compassion. —No; his interest in warding us off empathy is purely instrumental. He’s only here to gin up his outsourced two minutes of hate against a designated target. Empathy makes it harder to hate, and so it must be done away with. Your eye shall not pity.
When pressed on his echthroic ethic—how can empathy be a sin?—Garrett directs his audience to the writings of Dr. Joel Rigney, ex-president of a seminary and devotee of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson. Rigney’s been a Main Character before, for precisely his writings on empathy, and compassion: cod-Letters from an ersatz Screwtape on how best to twist these supposed virtues from the Enemy’s loathsomely benevolent purpose. —Rigney posits empathy as a totalizing perversion of compassion, a complete immersion in the feelings of others that overwhelms one’s own judgment, one’s fundamental sense of right, and wrong, one’s very self, a feeling-with fusion that terrifies his puerilely pathetic individualism: thus, a sin.
He, of course, has it all completely and utterly backwards.
Namwali Serpell, writing about the shortfalls of empathy as a saving grace of literature, has much more interesting insights into what might be sinful about it all. She quotes a passage from Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, in which the narrator hires two black men to shoot at him with blanks, re-enacting the murder of a black man with which he’s become, shall we say, obsessed:
My two assassins took their time in killing me. The slowed-down pace at which they raised and fired their guns, the lack of concern or interest this seemed to imply, the total absence on my part of any attempt to escape although I had plenty of time to do so—all these made our actions passive. We weren’t doing them: they were being done. The guns were being fired, I was being hit, being returned to the ground. The ground’s surface was neutral—neither warm nor cold… When I let my head roll slightly back, a bollard hid all these words except for one of the two Escapes. Would my man have seen this, just before the life dribbled out of him towards the puddle? Escape?
and then uses it to question the utility, the very purpose of empathy:
The possessives, “my two assassins” and “my man”; the conscription into a willful passivity; the mechanical quality of the sequence, absent of concern or interest or survival instinct; the supposed neutrality of the usurped ground; the ironized “Escape”: Isn’t this creepy, fugue-like occupation of the dead a truer picture of contemporary empathy than the older cliché of walking a mile in another’s shoes?
The fact that it’s a rich white man taking a poor black man’s death for a spin is no coincidence. The empathy model of art can bleed too easily into the relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it. It’s a gateway drug to white saviorism, with its familiar blend of propaganda, pornography, and paternalism. It’s an emotional palliative that distracts us from real inequities, on the page and on screen, to say nothing of our actual lives. And it has imposed upon readers and viewers the idea that they can and ought to use art to inhabit others, especially the marginalized.
The sin of empathy, then, is not that one will lose oneself, and the crucially God-given sense of right and wrong one would impose on some other, by indulging the notion that one ought try to feel the feelings of that other—it’s that one’s imagined sense of those feelings, licensed by the indulgent term of empathy, risks overwriting the actual feelings and experiences of that other. —Unless tempered, by experience, by some of those other virtues mentioned above, humility, honesty, dignity, mercy, then empathy all too easily slips over the brink into something one might well call sin.
The there that is there.
This is precisely the sort of thing we like to see; more like that, please.
To be or become light, shine, to be illuminated, to become lighted up, to give light, shine, to illumine, light up, to kindle, to make shine (of the face):
friend of the pier Rich Puchalsky has started the year with a lovely gesture, writing a brief monograph on the use, in the epic, of “owr” (the word, not the substance, though the substance is implicated by the word). I’m terribly fond of both the care and playfulness he brings to bear—this is how one wants to be read; I’d only add, as avenues of possible exploration for anyone so inclined, that the stuff from which the owr is derived is (usually) called “medhu”; that its appearance (viscous, milky, touched with just a hint of warm yellow gold) is based (in part) on childhood memories of the occasional tub of spun honey we’d get, as a treat, incomparably luxurious—but also (moreso), on this, and, yes: it is, indeed, a bodily fluid. To the extent that “body,” and “fluid,” make any sense at all, at this ontological level.
Eikositriophobia.
Eight thousand four hundred and one days ago, I riffed on an article I’d found on Plastic.com, about Gordon Sinclair’s device designed to fling a haggis across Calgary’s Bow River, turning it into a brief knock on the concept of patent trolls; thus, blogging. —Eight thousand, four hundred and one: twenty-three rounds of three hundred sixty-five, plus six February twenty-ninths: happy anniversary. Gifts of silver plate or imperial topaz are appropriate.
Twenty-three years, and Plastic.com has been dead and gone for twelve of them; it looks like that original news site link rotted away in 2006. But! The pier’s still here! If a bit quiet, over the twenty-second year of its existence: there was this little thing, which I still quite like, and I set down the definitive version of this bit of history, and, ah, I overthought a recent animated hit? —I mean, I also put out a book, but that’s over there, and what have I done for this, lately?
I mean, besides the complete refit and re-design. Since it went so well over at the city and all, I figured I’d tinker hereabouts, too; those who’ve been around a while might well remember what it is I’m nodding toward.
Eight thousand four hundred and one days past, and three days left to go, and then, I guess, we’ll see what we will see. Sláinte, tip your server, and please enjoy whatever it is you do enjoy.
How it’s going.
I’m trying not to borrow grief from the future, as the saying advises, but the terms are so damn attractive.
(still) Bringing blogging back.
Here’s a list of blog-shaped things to read, and keep reading, from Liz Henry, one of those people I’ve “known” online for what seems like forever, and I very much approve of the notion of information garden parties, seeing as how I’m very much for reasons feeling the scroll fatigue and leaning into and falling back on the notion of just saying what I can to those of a mind to hear, which statement, I must admit, rang out a little more definitely in my head that it does on the screen. —Thus, the nature of writing. —I’ll add a link to the shells Aaron Bady’s putting in an orange, for your consideration; I’ll also point you toward what Adam Kotsko had to say about the real meaning of time travel. As a couple of other folks I’ve “known” ditto.
Crass commercialism.
As you might’ve heard, I have a book coming out next week. —Since it’s volume four of a long-running serial, and as has been noted, sequel fatigue is a thing, let’s do what we can to help folks over that hurdle: from now until Tuesday, October 22nd, you can use the links below to purchase paperback copies of vols. 1, 2, and 3 for the rock-bottom price of twelve dollars each—but. Now that the date is passed, the links below can be used to purchase copies of vols. 1, 2, 3, and/or 4 for the still below-retail price of only sixteen dollars each. Go! Get yourself a city!
Rossumovi divoci roboti.
I found myself in a darkening theater last week, about to see a movie I’d been previously unaware of, based on a book I’d never heard of, which, as a practice, has a lot to recommend it. I’d figure out how to do it more often, maybe, the seats were comfortable, those new recliner-thingies they’re putting in, but wearing a mask for a couple-three hours is never fun, so I don’t know.
It’s not entirely true to say I knew nothing: we were there because the Kid and the Spouse and Barry, the Cartoonist, they all wanted to see the new Chris Sanders movie, and I’m adjacent enough to the fields of cartooning and animation to know that Chris Sanders co-designed an co-directed Lilo & Stitch and How to Train your Dragon, both of which I’ve quite enjoyed, but also that Harrison Ford Call of the Wild, which I haven’t seen, but yikes. —And of course I knew the title of what it was we were about to see: the Wild Robot.
And it’s a very very very pretty movie, and there are stirring and thrilling bits, and I will aver it’s the most #nodads film I can think of, recently, but nonetheless none of this happens to make it a terribly or even a rather good movie. (I should note I was in the minority among our viewing group with this particular take; Kid, Spouse, Barry all enjoyed it much more than yr. humble curmudgeon, grain of salt and all that.) —Thrilling and stirring moments happened because at this or that point in this sort of movie something thrilling or stirring is supposed to happen; convictions appear, but, lacking attention, much less courage, wander off; foundational metaphors are cracked, poorly mixed, introduced in a muddle and then abandoned, as plot or logistics require. It is, on the whole, a sumptuously gorgeous, thoroughly half-baked mess.
But here I am, thinking thoughts about it.
(As I’ve nibbled at this, it’s been pointed out to me that Film Crit Hulk went and made some cogent points, so go, read that, come back, I’ll talk about some other bits.)
So, yes: gorgeous, but that’s part of the problem. —There’s some cartoonish expressionism in the various animal-forms, especially when they start in with the talking (crossing the obscure limen from set-dressing impediment antagonist to CHARACTER); the backgrounds are rendered with flawlessly painterly art direction; but—the light, the air, the water, the weight, it all moves and shifts and changes with such unnoticeably uncanny verisimilitude that one is lulled, despite those expressionist touches. It’s quite a triumph.
And yet but also: there’s, at the start, a refreshingly clear eye toward animals, and danger, and death—the eponymous wild—things get eaten, and stay et, and what did the eating isn’t villainized, or even wrong, it just—is. Death is quotidian—
—but then there’s the swarm of raccoons that chases our protagonist, Roz, the eponymous robot, up a tree that bends, precipitously, with their combined weight, until our protagonist is able to lightly step from the bent-low tip-top of the tree, and the mass of raccoons, suddenly aware of their predicament, beg and plead as the weight shifts, lifts, lets go, the tree, suddenly unburdened, springs upright, and dozens of raccoons are flung across the island over a cliff into the crashing sea, and this is a classic Warner Bros. Tex Avery gag, right? Only, the waves crash, the stone’s weightily there, the afternoon light is perfect and the trees sway as they would (only excepting the one bent alarmingly low for the bit) and death, as we’ve noted, the wild, has a presence—all very much at odds with expressionistically classic Warner Bros. Tex Avery slapstick. Expectations and reactions must be constantly recalibrated, because mimesis and cartooning get in each other’s way, and the movie never bothers to realize it has to reconcile them.
Tonal disjunctions like this extend throughout the movie, catharses unfounded, as Hulk notes above: one of the (several) climaxes, say, hinges on the rescue of the animals on the island from an unprecedented winter storm, dragged whether they will or not to the shelter Roz had built for herself, piled cheek-by-jowl, predator with prey, a powder keg already sparked by this fight, that tussle, and Roz finds her (solar-powered) energy dangerously depleted—an unbearable tension resolved with an inspiring speech pulled from the ass of nowhere by our deuteragonist fox, Flick—a speech as cringe as Morgan Freeman’s astoundingly inadvertently hilarious “Be decent” speech from (the film version of) the Bonfire of the Vanities: the foundational basis of eat and get eaten overturned by a plea for common sense; wildness tamed, and thus, forgotten.
(I should’ve been—I was—clued in by an earlier, tossed-off joke, the opossum mother and her hilarious litter of tagalong infants, all pretending quite theatrically to die [“Meningitis takes time!” insists one], all to lampshade the importance of motherhood, or rather parenting, by pretending this role is thrust upon all of us equally, a thing to which to become inured, like the weather, never noticing, much less questioning, the labor demanded to reproduce what of ourselves is necessary for the labor. —“Here I am,” says the opossum mother, “with my seven children,” and there’s a bloodcurdling offscreen scream, “my six children,” she sighs, without missing a beat, and it’s bleak and it’s funny and it works in the moment, to be undone in the next: “I’m okay, Mom, I didn’t really die,” says the opossum kid, almost unseen—a suit’s note scribbled in the margins of the screenplay, realized as imperceptibly as possible, still managing to wreck the bit.)
And that’s not something they do to protect kids (i feel like it mostly makes kids feel weird and that feeling feelings is stupid). I think it’s something they do to protect adults.
As for #nodads, well. I mean. #nodads. —Fleeing a bear (don’t worry, they’re friends later), our protagonist robot falls, smashing a nest and its resident geese, and is left with an egg that soon enough hatches into the sole survivor, for which Roz takes responsibility: task oriented, she breaks this monstrous burden into three tidy, realizable goals: teach the gosling how to eat, how to swim, and how to fly, and inadvertently brings him up between and among what she does to set about fulfilling them. This isn’t coded as motherly, or mothering (Brightbill’s occasional modes of address notwithstanding); it’s just the work that needs to be done, when an infant is about. There’s no hint of authoritarian discipline, or patriarchal diktat, or any juvenile rebellion thereagainst. Other role models and caretakers abound among the animals on the island, all of them played by men, but not a one gets anywhere near striking distance of a father-figure: big brothers, tutors, mentors, rapscallions, nary a dad in the bunch.
But I can’t say the movie comes by its #nodads honestly: Roz, short for ROZZUM Unit 7134, is played by a woman, Lupita Nyong’o, and while there’s nothing remotely gendered or sexed about Roz’s design or presentation, femmebots are nonetheless very much a thing in the current imaginary: our AI assistants and helpful robots are coded as female far more often than not, clearly subservient, chipperly servile, selflessly available, and though Roz very much grows out of this role, the role is nonetheless there to grow out of. The movie can’t present a father-figure directly to Brightbill; it would throw Roz and that role into stark relief, and so what #nodads might be found isn’t by design; it’s at best an epiphenomenon of good intentions, a reflexive reaction to having slipped without thinking into another trope altogether (rather like the unfortunate echoes that ring in the only other roles played by women: the aforementioned opossum mother, and the slinkily manipulative third-act villain). It’s not anything the movie was trying to say; it’s what the movie didn’t realize it was saying, as it didn’t rise to the irony of stranding a soi-disant wild robot in such a domestically comedic situation.
But, that third-act villain—
The migration of the geese off the island and south, Brightbill in tow, was the first time since the opening, before the animals got verbose and the plot kicked in, that the movie took a breath and delivered some pure goshwow eyekicks. A shot of the weathered Golden Gate Bridge, deck aslosh with seawater, beautiful and wordlessly, terrifyingly implicative (that’s a 75-meter rise in sea levels): the movie cannily gives us a taste of what we hadn’t realized we’d wanted from it, in one of those moments thrilling, and stirring, but also earned. And the few-enough other hints we get, as to the state and condition of, well, us, in this world, ROZZUM robots crossing the oceans on container ships, headed for idyllic Syd Mead suburbs, the isolated and terribly compact farming outpost, that deploys a robot SWAT team to deal with an incursion of geese, the unindicated entity—Universal Dynamics? some nation-state, or city-state? an aggrieved, gunned-up farmers’ cooperative?—that sends an overpowered dropship with another robot SWAT team and the aforementioned slinky manipulator, all to fetch back a single stray ROZZUM unit: it would appear that human civilization, reeling from the ravages of a far more destructive warming of the globe than predicted, has retreated into heavily militarized enclaves, lashing out with overwhelming firepower to bigfoot the slightest hint of threat or variance. It’s not unrealistic when you put it like that, I suppose. But the movie does seem to present us with the first known example of solarpunk dystopia.
And yet, here’s the thing: all this tech? It all just, works. The various artificial intelligences, and Roz’s limitless power supply (unless the plot requires an outage), and the wingless levitation of the dropship and the villain, and the radio transponders (mostly), and the water-logged marketing decks, and, and, and I know, this isn’t what the movie is about, it’s all set-dressing and atmosphere and the occasional plot-point, it’s fine just to trust the tech as you let it enable you to tell the story you want to tell, but, but: that catastrophic sea-level rise, the isolated farm in the middle of a desert: isn’t just trusting the tech how we get to there?
Let’s face it: robots these days, in the current moment, are bartending mechanical Turks operated by untipped mixologists backstage at an Elon Musk launch party; artificial intelligence is a power-gobbling nonsense machine in some occulted service to the scammy shell games of ludicrously paper-wealthy fintech bros. They very clearly don’t just, y’know, work, not at all, and to a ruinous degree, and it’s not that every story with a robot in it has to address this fact, puncturing or at least punctuating the hubris of such tinpot Titans, but it’s nonetheless weird that a story so otherwise suffused with climate anxiety would, when it comes to the tech that’s shoving us into all this hot water, would just, y’know. Trust it?
It’s of a piece with the lashing out, sending a laser-powered SWAT team to take down a flock of geese: a default setting, unthinkingly assumed, a disjunction in the final work. So, when Roz sat herself down in a gorgeously rendered clearing to listen and observe the interactions of the animals about her, grinding away until she could learn how to talk to them, the better to sell herself and her services, all I could think of was the LLM she presumably depended on, hosted in some distant cloud-computing center, and all the power and water flowing to support it as it trained up on this vibrant new dataset. It was distracting. Exhausting, even. Dispiriting. —It’s all very pretty while it’s happening up on the screen, there. But.
As robot forces lay siege to the factory, Helena reveals she has burned the formula necessary to make new robots. The characters lament the end of humanity and defend their actions, despite the fact that their imminent deaths are a direct result of their choices. Busman is killed while attempting to negotiate a peace with the robots. The robots storm the factory and kill all the humans except for Alquist, the company’s Clerk of the Works (Head of Construction). The robots spare him because they recognize that “He works with his hands like a robot. He builds houses. He can work.”
I made another thing
and you are hereby invited to spend some money on it, thank you.
Promotion.
I mean, emails, of course I’ve sent emails, I’ve been sending emails since (checks) December, yes, but see, the thing about December is, in December I was still writing the forty-third novelette? of forty-four? And though I was pretty sure I’d finish it all within the year to come, I mean, writing an epic is hardly a precision enterprise, it’s not like I can point to a section of the back wall and hit a home run over it right there, bang, so, see, those emails that I started sending in December? They all said the next book would be coming out at some point most likely in 2024 but that was as specific as I could get and, the thing about the sort of people who coordinate reviews? who prepare lists of eagerly anticipated titles, and arrange thoughtfully chewy interviews to whet appetites? Well, that sort of person tends to prefer a little specificity in their dealings, some actionable detail in the announcements and releases, in the emails they receive. There’s just not that much to be done with “coming soon, within the year, most likely” unless you’re already inclined to be generous, and who has the time or space for generosity, these days?
So, yes. I’ve sent emails. I’ve been sending emails, and one thing I’ve noticed on this go-round is there are fewer places to send those emails. Not that I have hard numbers to back this up, it could all just be subjective, personal experience, you know, anecdata at best, and you should take into account the fact I’m tired, you know? I mean, eighteen years (and more), I’m just not as game as I used to be, maybe, but still. And many of the fewer places have specialized. Everyone’s more discriminating now, settling into as they define this niche, or that, so I have to weigh and balance : is the epic a political fantasy? Sure? An anticapitalist fantasy, even, heck, anarchist, I could make that argument, but is it also as well a dark fantasy? unsettling? per se? —And the epic is very much concerned with queerness, along a number of axes, and yes, I do, however primly, identify as queer, but : as a queer author? of a queer epic? —It helps, it does, already having a place to stand, well-lit, finely appointed, a striking lectern on a goodly podium, a rostrum, even, a pulpit, so that attention knows where to look when you begin to speak, but any such already space brings with it constrictions, restrictions, preconceptions, and if you don’t fit, not entirely, not expectedly, not as such, well. The sharp-elbowed arriviste and the shrinking wallflower are equally fatal postures in this game, so one—or at least I—more often than not will end up demurring.
But even if one finds a place to fit, and I have, you then find out they only publish fiction that fits your niche. Or if they do maintain some sort of critical apparatus, it’s not the sort that solicits manuscripts and ARCs and books and looks them over, then reaches out to match them up with someone who might be interested; it’s instead the sort that solicits critical pieces already composed or at least conceived, by critics already invested, and so the email I’m to send to get noticed by the place doesn’t go to the place, but—where? Everyone who’s written for them before? Anyone who someday might? —It saves them no little time and bother, I’m sure, but abdicates some portion of the steering function they are presumed to fulfill in the critical conversation; curation gets dispersed, along with that time and bother, to many more divers hands.
So, yes. I’ve sent emails. I’ve been sending emails since December, and the moment I finally felt I could point to a section of that back wall where I was gonna hit a homer I did, I sent out honest-to-God press releases, save the date, but by that point which was (flips back) July, the problem wasn’t anymore of specificity, but quantity, because, see, from July 9th to October 22nd, that’s only a hundred and five days, barely fifteen weeks to clear space, commission a review, read the book(s), think of something cogent to say and get it written, it’s less than four months to find someone cognizant enough to ask the sort of questions that might be chewed, to place judiciously and appropriately on this list, or that : there are so very many books out there in the world now, and more of them every day, but only ever so much time, and never enough attention, I get that, I do, so yes, I’ve been sending emails, but I haven’t sent one of this sort of email in over a month now, I mean, I’ve sent a lot, well for me it’s a lot, and some of them to the same place more than once, and anyway, we’re running out of time, as noted, and I wouldn’t want to be a bother, no, and anyway, I haven’t gotten a single email back.
Only now I have to go and spoil the punchline because I did just get one back! In response to an email sent in (scrolls back) August. They want a physical book, which won’t go out till next week, at the earliest, two weeks to go, barely enough time to say hey, nice cover, so I’m not sure what that might mean for their production schedule, or my marketing plan, such as it is, but what the hell, right?
And there are reasons for this (relative) silence? Most notably, given the nature of the epic itself : sequel fatigue. —There’s any number of reviews out there of volume one, because who doesn’t love to catch a thing in its early, promising days; there’s a sparser scatter of chatter on volume two, because by that point you need to read (some of) two books, not just one, to have anything to say; and as for volume three?
Let’s face it : by the time a fourth volume rolls around, by the time you get to (tots up) six hundred and fifty thousand words, by the time it’s (closes eyes) eighteen years, the lift’s too great, the mountain’s too high, the mass is just too much. If you aren’t already being talked about, you won’t get talked about, and while, I mean, I’m in conversation, after my fashion, to be sure, I’m yet to ever be of it.
So here I am, laying one word after another in the epic, inching as I do so ever further out along a branch that all the while grows more slender, and the forest below so (almost) entirely silent, and not, I don’t think, with breath-held wonder; we’re well past the point when most publishers would’ve looked at the numbers and cut the branch for firewood. —Luckily, I guess, maybe, I’m not most publishers?
And yet. But still. It would be best for all concerned to simply do the work and set it out, here, it’s done, make of it what you will, and none of this pushing or cajoling, the endless sleeve-tugging and half-considered brand-building and (shudder) influencing and and and, I mean, just do the work. Do the work, and let it speak for itself.
(But : to whom? There’s two reasons, largely speaking, why it might’ve gotten so quiet as one crawls further and further out along an oh so slender branch, and one is the inertia mentioned above, the fatigue, into which we can mix a much larger pool of people who just don’t know, who’ve no idea there’s even a book, you’ve written a book, how about that, because, as we have noted, there are so very many books out there in the world, and more of them every day, but only ever so much time, and never enough attention. —The second reason? Would be that they do know. They’ve been informed. They see you, up on that creaking branch, the work that you have done to get there, they’ve read it, and they’ve decided : eh. Why bother.
(So you send the emails. Because the notion of the first silence is preferable, by far, to the second.)
The people want only their due.
Trying to avoid the whole thing where the posting here on the pier withers away around April or earlier, only to return in fits and starts as the year once more draws close, but I’m also trying to finish my fourth book already, and you can see how the two efforts might conflict. But here’s a moment where the two might work in harness: you can now support the epic through the collectively owned Comradery platform, and read more about it over at the city.
Bookkeeping.
While we’re on the subject of money, and things people have said, let’s note these all together, shall we?
It sounds so odd to phrase it this way that I’m a bit nervous about saying it, but here goes anyway: fantasy doesn’t make different stories possible, but sometimes it makes different outcomes possible, through the literalization of metaphor that is one of the key things fantasy does. Moral strength can change the real world—and a good thing, too—but in a fantastic story it can make dramatic, transformative, immediate changes. The idea that such transformations always have a price is what keeps fantasy from being morally empty—magic may save time and reduce staff requirements, but it offers no discounts.
The magic in any particular story will do what it will do, regardless of what it ought to do. Sometimes I like a magic that brings order and redistributes resources in almost exactly the same way money does, and sometimes I like a chaotic magic that’s reminiscent of another effect of money… (If we’re going to look at power dynamics within fiction at least let’s keep an eye on all sources of power!) So it all depends.
When I was writing the book and trying to build a framework for how magic might operate, I found myself thinking about how often magic feels like a metaphor for access to a lot of money. Money and power. I don’t love this idea—that magic functions as a kind of credit card—but you can’t get rid of it.
This is why Fantasy is filled with aristocrats and warriors, or at the least of hobbits of independent means: with travellers and questers (which is to say: with holidaymakers) and so on—as, also, with rascals, thieves, rogues etc. And I suppose sometimes with students, at Hogwarts’ or the Unseen University and whatnot. The point is that Fantasy cannot be written in the John Berger, or even the Zola mode: not because of the generic mismatch of Fantasy as le naturalisme, or not only for that reason, but because Fantasy is a realm where work as such is always transmuted magically into magic.
Wealth management.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” 1926
I am getting to know the rich.
—Ernest Hemingway, to Mary Colum,
lunch with Max Perkins
The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.
—Mary Colum, to Hemingway, ibid.
The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.
—Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 1936
If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it into a book would you mind cutting my name?
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
—Fitzgerald, to Hemingway, correspondence, 1936
They have more money. (Ernest’s wisecrack.)
—Fitzgerald, notes
Fitzgerald had said, “The rich are different from us.” Hemingway had replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
—Edmund Wilson, footnote explaining Fitzgerald’s note,
The Crack-Up, 1945
Everyone knows the famous exchange between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway refers to it in his story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and Fitzgerald records it in his notebook) in which, to Fitzgerald’s remark, “The very rich are different from us,” Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” It is usually supposed that Hemingway had the better of the exchange and quite settled the matter. But we ought not to be too sure. The novelist of a certain kind, if he is to write about social life, must always risk a certain ambiguity in his social attitudes. The novel took its rise from a sense of a disrupted society and from the interpenetration of classes, and the novelist must still live by his sense of class differences and must be absorbed by them, as Fitzgerald was, even though he despise them, as Fitzgerald did.
—Lionel Trilling, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,”
his review of The Crack-Up, 1945
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
—William Gibson, Count Zero, 1986
