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.”
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
Foreword.
There’s this cartoon by, oh, let’s say Don Martin: a comedian on stage holds up a sign that says I’M FUNNY. —Noncommittal titters from the audience.
Next panel, the comic’s swapped signs for one that says YOU’RE FUNNY. The audience hisses and boos. (“It’s interesting to note,” says critic Marjorie Garber, “that the entities most usually described as ‘hissing,’ in the early modern period as also today, are devils, serpents, and audiences.”)
Third and final panel: the comic, dripping flop sweat, swaps signs one more time: THEY’RE FUNNY.
Cue the gales of laughter.
Every text is written in the first person.
Yes, all of them: even soi-disant experimental second-person narratives; especially those ostensibly in the third: every text is a first-person text. (Yes, and also those in the fourth. Hush, you.) —Every narrative must have a narrator, somewhere—did you check behind the curtain? If you’re still unclear, approach it as you would any other criminal enterprise: ask yourself, cui bono? Who chose the matter, wrangled the theme, pondered characters and angles of approach, began as they meant to go on? Such a constellation of considerations can’t help but cohere into a point of view, and that’s where, much as a sniper in a nest, you’ll find your narrator. (And if you shrug and say, with a quizzical cock to your brow, you mean the author? I’ll sagely shrug and answer back, perhaps.)
Once you’ve found the narrator, you’ve found your I in the sky: first mover, first shaker, first person.
“Did you notice?” said the Classicist. I don’t talk about the Classicist much, do I. And I have to be honest, here: while I remember having had the conversation, I don’t remember what we said, exactly, or where we were, not even a general sense of the circumstances, anymore. So let’s say we were having coffee in what I think was the only diner in town. “She pulled the whole thing off,” said the Classicist, with an emphatic gesture of her cigarette (menthol, which she would’ve bought next door, at what might’ve been called a bodega if we’d been in New York, but was called a bakery when the protests erupted years later), “the whole thing, without once telling you what was going on in anybody’s head.” —The SHE in that statement being Patricia McKillip, and the WHOLE THING being PULLED OFF the Riddle-Master books, and the statement itself not entirely correct, or right, or true: after all, when Morgon wakes up after the shipwreck, we’re told:
He tried to answer. His voice would not shape the words. He realized, as he struggled with it, that there were no words in him anywhere to shape the answers.
That’s from the first page of chapter three, and while it might be the first time we’re told something about someone’s state of mind that couldn’t be directly observed, or inferred from what’s been shown or told, it’s not the last. (And if you’d aver that the struggle described and the insight realized might well enough be inferred, perhaps by someone especially empathetic, I’d invite you past the next paragraph to read what follows: “A silence spun like a vortex in his head, drawing him deeper and deeper into darkness.”)
No, what the Classicist meant, if you’ll trust me to speak after all these years for her (and I’m not getting her voice right, not at all): in the writing of the Riddle-Master books, concerned as they are with identity, and selfhood, McKillip nonetheless eschews the free indirect: she never once presumes to speak for her characters, by making like their interiority’s seeping through the narrative. —You know. The bits Stephen King puts in italics. (Talking about King is probably how we got to this emphatic statement in the first place.) —Anyway. True or right or correct or not, it stuck with me.
Every narrative has a narrator. This may seem a ravelled tautology, but tug the thread of it and so much comes undone: a narrator, after all, is just another character, and subject to the same considerations. What might we consider, then, of a character who strives with every interaction for a coolly detached objectivity that’s betrayed by every too-deft turn of phrase? Who lays claim to an impossible omniscience, no matter how it might be limited, that’s belied by every Homeric nod? Who mimicks the vocal tics and stylings, the very accents of the people in their purview—whether or not they’re put in italics—merely to demonstrate how well it seems they think they know their stuff?
It’s only those texts that admit, upfront, the limitations and the unreliability of their narrators, that are honest in their dishonesty. —The third person, much like the third man, snatches power with an ugliness made innocuous, even charming, by centuries of reading protocols: deep grooves worn by habits of mind that make it all too lazily easy for an unscrupulous, an unethical, an unthinking author to wheedle their readers into a slapdash crime of empathy: crowding out all the possible might’ve beens that could’ve been in someone else’s head with whatever it is they decide to insist must have been.
The first few sketches of what would become (distractedly expansive gesture) all that were written on a clunky laptop lifted from an unlit room, filled with abandoned computers, just off the elevator lobby where I worked for a couple of weeks as a temporary receptionist. They were scraps of scenes, beginning after a beginning and never finding much of an end, but suggesting strongly where they’d come from, where they might go: our protagonist, Jo Maguire, already surly and underemployed, out for a night on the town with Becker, her gay best friend (making a stab or two at what would become his “epitome of mediocrity” speech); staggering back from the bathroom in time to see Ysabel, our protagonist, winding up the dancefloor with the slow-burn opening of Cassilda’s Song—only it was YSABEL, and BECKER, and JO, because these sketches all were written in screenplay form.
I was already writing a screenplay—it was why I’d stolen the laptop; some folks I knew were vaguely acquainted with a pot of techbro proceeds, and thought maybe a micro-budget horror film might prove an attractive tax shelter. It only made sense, when I was procrastinating the one, to sketch this incipient other in the same medium, and anyway, there’s room to play, in a screenplay, with voice, with performance, because the performance isn’t the point: it isn’t the final product, it’s instructions for assembling the final product. And who knew? Maybe I’d find some techbro money of my own (it was thicker on the ground, in those days), that might want to shelter itself in a micro-budget pilot for a syndicated television show. —My dreams were so much larger then, if simpler.
But the money went in another direction, and all I had to show for it was a screenplay no one would ever watch, and this, this thing that, if it was ever going to be anything, would have to become something else.
As I was considering how best to go about getting done what I wanted to do, I thought once more of the Classicist’s emphatic statement—maybe because these things had started as screenplays, concerned with the movement of bodies and objects in space, with words spoken out loud, not left to echo in somebody’s head—but I’d already played once or twice with the techniques suggested, in other, shorter pieces, elsewhere (much as writers today come up through fanfic, I’d done some time in the graduate seminars of alt.sex.stories.d). The strictures they impose—the pragmatics of blocking, the seamless exteriority, the relentless focus on precise, specific moments—that make it necessary to deal only by implication with what it is prose is supposed to excel at, by talking outside the glass: they can’t help but appeal to a scrupulous fool like me. So I decided to pull the whole thing off without ever once telling you what’s going on in anyone’s head.
But now I’m worried: having said this out loud, have I tipped my hand? Given the game away?
“I just don’t get it,” I said, and here we can suppose I gestured at the magazine on the table between us with a cigarette of my own (clove, filterless, bought at the drug store on the corner, where they kept the porn under a shelf behind the counter, so you had to ask for it).
“What’s not to get?” said the Classicist, and you have to understand, I would never have actually left such a thing lying out like that, but I have to have something to point to. Still: I did speak to her about this. This is another conversation that happened. Trust me.
“Well,” I said, and took a crackling drag. “If you had a sister. A twin. Would you do something like that?”
“Depends,” she said. Let’s say she sipped her coffee. “How much are they paying us?”
“But,” I said, “I mean, to, to take something, like that. I mean, whether you really feel it or not—actually, I think it might be worse if you faked it—but to take something like that and put it on display?”
“Honestly,” she sighed, “worse things happen at sea.”
Second seasons are where television programs typically hit their stride, confident in their logistics, but still gripped by their originating dreams. Second albums are sophomore slumps. Second movements are when things take a turn, get contemplative: usually scored andante or adagio, between fifty and seventy-five beats per minute, depending on your metronome. I’m not sure what can be said yet, about second series of epic urban fantasy webserial ’zines. There aren’t that many around from which to generalize.
This one is for the usual suspects, I suppose, but it’s also for the Classicist, who gave me if not the original idea, then a notion around which an idea might articulate itself. (You mustn’t blame her for any more than that.) But also, it’s for you. You’re the one reading this, after all.
In the Reign of Good Queen Dick
Portland, Oregon
2015 – 2019
1. THEY’RE FUNNY
2. I know you are
∴ But what am I
Three little words.
There was an episode, one of my favorite moments in Star Trek, when Captain Kirk looks over the cosmos and says, “Somewhere out there someone is saying the three most beautiful words in any language.” Of course you heart sinks and you think it’s going to be, “I love you” or whatever. He says, “Please help me.” What a philosophically fantastic idea, that vulnerability and need is a beautiful thing.
EDITH
And you don’t want to talk about it? Why? Did you do something wrong? Are you afraid of something? Whatever it is, let me help.KIRK
“Let me help.” A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over I love you.
—The City on the Edge of Forever
The difference between “please, help me” and “let me help” is fairly dramatic. In Fry’s mismemory, Kirk seems almost to ghoulishly relish this cry for salvation, this opportunity to exercise his own benevolent power over someone in peril. In the actual quote, Kirk cites a novel we’ve not yet read, and the phrase itself is not a ventriloquised cry of need but a personal offer to serve.
KIRK
Why do you say that?EDITH
Sometimes you seem, well, disoriented, Jim, like a man just in from the country.KIRK
Iowa?EDITH
Further away than that.KIRK
“When night begins to fall, all men become strangers…”EDITH
It’s true. Who said it, I don’t recognize it.KIRK
Wellman 9. An obscure poet. Someday people will call his work the most beautiful ever known in the galaxy.EDITH
That’s a lot of territory.
Even the bull puts in some effort.
This piece—pleasant, but slight, ending just as it feels like it’s run through the pre-flight check for a much longer trip—does, at least (as it two-steps from of all things Paper Moon to the 48 Laws of Power), manage to articulate an essential, implacable truth of the Age in Which We’ve Found Ourselves Deposited: how on earth is it possible to speak as we so often do of Donald J. Trump as a grifter, when he can’t even be bothered to begin to pretend to try?
Mere strokes, interposed by a copyist.
There are rules to punctuation, of course, much as there are rules of grammar; the thing to keep in mind is that they’re descriptive, not prescriptive: technical documentation outlining specs, protocols, and use cases for an ancient system kludged together by oh so many divers hands, and as anyone can tell you, who’s ever had to document—and maintain said documentation for—anything at all: it’s forever going to be incomplete, inadequate, contradictory on the face of it, inexplicably controversial at unexpected points, and always always woefully out of date.
I mean, sure, yes: one uses a semicolon when joining two independent clauses that aren’t quite sentences of their own, given the broader context, when they can’t for whatever æsthetic be joined by a coordinating conjunction—but when I’m assembling sentences from key-clacks, I never not once do find myself thinking, ah, here’s two independent clauses, and no conjunction will do; let’s reach for a semicolon, shall we? —No: it’s the way the words fit one after the other, the heft of the passage in my mind’s hand, the lilt in my mind’s voice as it’s read back to my mind’s ear: this is what decides, for me, whether and when I reach for a semicolon, or an em-dash, or damn the torpedoes and splice the fuckers with a comma.
(A comma is where you take a breath, a semicolon is how the Welsh hedge the ends of declarations; a colon is more purposive: and thus turns neither up, nor down—the em-dash is a violent interruption, incorporated—and as for the ellipsis, well: it coyly trails…)
With the advent of the web, as writing and publishing carelessly merged, mixing the (supposed) iron science of grammar with the (presumed) mere craft of typesetting, use cases multiplied, and whole new arguments raged: whether to put two spaces after a full stop (if you’re displaying in a monospaced typeface? Sure!), or to italicize the punctuation at the end of an italicized phrase (opinions differ, as do fonts), or how best to set one’s em-dashes: there’s a school that would have spaces placed to either side whenever they’re deployed — like so; but to my eye that’s too much of an irruption in the color of the text on the page. Better by far to set them snug—like so; the flow, stuttered, is nonetheless maintained. Now: if you wished to use the en-dash instead (the width of the capital N in the font, or thereabouts, a touch more narrow than the width of the capital M: thus, em, and en, in dashes), you would deploy spaces to either side: the en-dash, being a touch more demure, would otherwise read as merely a hyphen. This technique, of an en-dash with spaces, is better than the em-dash in maintaining a consistency of color in blocs of text, but it’s not as versatile: the em-dash, if usually deployed without spaces, might here or there be employed with a space to the one side, or the other, at the end of a sentence, or the beginning: joining thereby sentences that aren’t quite separate paragraphs in much the manner a semicolon joins clauses that aren’t quite separate sentences. —But I digress.
This broader divagation we return to stems from a bit by Clive Thompson on “weird 19th-century punctuation marks you should try using,” which turn out not to be unusual new marks, but mere combinations: em-dash with comma, with colon, with semicolon. Thompson’s excited by the idea of playing with these ungainly chimeræ, and ordinarily I’d be as game as the next dingbat to put inconvenient extravagance to whatever use, but the commash, the colash, the semi-colash: or rather, perhaps:—or perhaps,—perhaps;—I just don’t feel it? Or rather, I do, I can, but the nuanced subtleties of the differences between each—and the constituent parts of each—it’s just too faint, too esoteric, to be worth their clumsy interpellations; I just, I’m afraid, don’t see—the point?
Thompson finds himself enchanted by the abrupt disappearance of these widespread, well-used hybrids, vanishing as they pretty much entirely did with the onset of modernism. He quotes the thirty-year-old (and rather better, because doubtless more amply compensated) Nicholson Baker essay that occasioned his bit:
What comet or glacier made them die out? This may be the great literary question of our time. I timidly tried to use a semi-colash in a philosophical essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 1983: the associate editor made a strange whirring sound in her throat, denoting inconceivability, and I immediately backed down. Why, why are they gone? Was it—and one always gropes for the McLuhanesque explanation first—the increasing use of the typewriter for final drafts, whose arrangement of comma, colon, and semi-colon keys made a quick reach up to the hyphen key immediately after another punctuation mark physically awkward? Or was it—for one always gropes for the pseudo-scientific explanation just after McLuhan—the triumphant success of quantum mechanics? A comma is indisputably more of a quantum than a commash. Did the point-play of the Dadaists and E. E. Cummings, and the unpunctled last chapter of Ulysses, force a scramble for a simpler hegemony against which revolt could be measured?
I mean, y’know, yeah? Sure. Why not? —It’s not as if there’s a single cause for this particular effect, a grand narrative here to be untangled and assembled beyond, I mean, you know, like we said: modernism. Even their names—commash, colash, semi-colash—are obvious excrescences easily trimmed in any drive to simplify, streamline, regularize and (yes) modernize. So they no longer fit with the heft of our words as we put them together, did nothing we found we needed to tune their lilt. They fell out of fashion. Which is no reason of course not to use them yourself, if you find you want to.
—As for myself, I’m much more taken by the notion mentioned in passing, in Baker’s essay, of punctuation as an emendation not by the writer, or the editor, or the publisher, but the reader—confronted by a bloc of monochromatic, undifferentiated, unspaced text, as it was written of old, might well take it upon themselves to
decorate a work with dots and diples and paragraph marks as they read it and then proudly sign their name on the page: “I, Dulcitius, read this.” Punctuation, like marginal and interlinear commentary, seems at times to have been a ritual of reciprocation, a way of returning something to the text in grateful tribute after it had released its meaning in the reader’s mind.
Well, that, and also a lingering puzzlement with those who insist on using guillemets as quotation marks. The hell is up with that? Seriously. It’s like, kkkttcht, every line of dialogue’s being spoken over a walkie-talkie or something, kkkttcht. —Over.
Kinematograph.
Then, what do we mean when we say “this is so cinematic!” There is of course the implication of the visual rendered in prose, but there is also, anecdotally, sometimes a level at which cinematic fiction also implies something about pacing or narrative rhythm or narrative composition—things that for my convenience I’ll group and condense into the term narrative depth. To be clear, I do not mean depth in the modern sense of a value judgement. I mean it in the sense of the distance between what is occurring in the narrative foreground and what is occurring in the narrative background, giving a sense of relief or contrast. In cinema, this contrast seems diminished. That is, in cinema, things are happening and there is less ostensible commentary upon the events or the psychology of the narrative. This is due to the nature of film as a medium. In prose fiction, there is a greater potential for contrast between event or incident and commentary, and one might say that cinematic fiction is fiction that emulates this lessened narrative contrast: the flattened narrative relief of cinema.
That’s from Brandon Taylor’s Miserly Eye, which makes some interesting points in the matter of cinematic fiction, and in a manner that doesn’t make me twitchy. I’ll continue to maintain, myself, that the primary distinctions ultimately stem from their respective mediums—that cinema’s dependence on images fixes it on specificities that prose’s narrow channel of one word after another can only approach with great effort—but I’ll spend some time thinking with this notion of depth of field, and Bellardi’s notion of foreground and background tenses, maybe.
In the meanwhile, it’s an excuse to index a number of old posts hereabouts on the matter: a couple of extended quotes from John Fowles; a brief divagation on why it is I might tend to twitch when the subject comes up; a disquisition on, well, it has more to do with comics and serialization, but it’s still pertinent to the work of translating the techniques of one medium into another; some consideration of less-than-obvious implications of a cinematic mode; and what I might maybe call the keystone piece. —So there’s that.
Hydriotaphia.
All these people everywhere whittering over how Midjourney AI and ChatGPT and whatnot mean computers or machine learning or artificial intelligence or whatever we’re calling it this week is on the verge of surpassing us all the rest of us when it comes to drawing or writing or pontificating or illustrating or designing or coding or bullshitting or doing our homework, and to be frank also all those people cheerfully playfully wickedly teasing the networks or inputs or weighted averages, or however it is it works, it’s all starting to remind me of nothing so much as what happens at the end of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—and you know what that means. Go on revising, in the quiet of the days; work as if you do not intend to see it published.
A good reality will parry the blow.
I don’t recall how I first heard of Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai; I don’t have any longer that first copy (a Tina Brown Talk Miramax edition, I say, with an air of vaguely smugness); I think one of the many many times I lent it out it never made its way back, or I hope that’s the case, and it’s still vagabonding about, from hand to reading hand. (I’ve got a Chatto & Windus edition these days, which imprint was founded in 1855, then bought by Random House the year I graduated high school, then unceremoniously dumped under Vintage Books somewhere in the drafty halls of Penguin UK.) —I trust, at any rate, that the esteem in which I hold DeWitt is well known about these parts, and so you’ll understand I’ve just put in an order for Lee Konstantinou’s The Last Samurai Reread, about which I’ve only just found out.
In Memison, one must try the fish.
An exquisite little jewel of a review from M. John Harrison of a book that doesn’t exist so much in the particular, but very much in the aggregate; he comes at recent preoccupations hereabouts from other angles very much appreciated.
I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
Matter matter matter, let’s see—we’ve moved, across town, from Ladd’s Addition to Rose City; we’re homeowners now, and again, which means we can paint the rooms the colors we’d like, but also means we have to strip and sand and sweep and repair and replace and prime and tape and paint and paint again, over and over for each different color, and, well. Time passes. You look up and wonder what you’ve accomplished and then you look around, and yes, but also yes, well...
As for words words words: as to written, and here you must imagine me sucking my teeth. I’ve got the fortieth novelette queued up and ready to go starting Monday, but that’s the only one I’ve written this year, and last year I managed to write most of five, and the discrepancy gnaws. I’d point to the work alluded to in the paragraph above, and the work associated with the day job (turns out, preparing for and supporting a federal criminal trial? Time-consuming), but work we will always have with us, and the work still needs to get done, and the forty-first isn’t at the moment coming any faster, and as for anything written around here, well...
But as to have read, have been reading, to be read: currently bouncing between two big books, each expansively large in their own particular idioms: on the one hand, I’ve decided instead of dipping in almost at random to sample this run of stanzas, or that, to work my way through the F--rie Queene from first line to last, drawing what dry amusement I might from the coincidence in age between myself when I finally started it (53) and Virginia Woolf, when she finally started it (53)—
The first essential is, of course, not to read The F--ry Queen. Put it off as long as possible. Grind out politics; absorb science; wallow in fiction; walk about London; observe the crowds; calculate the loss of life and limb; rub shoulders with the poor in markets; buy and sell; fix the mind firmly on the financial columns of the newspapers, weather; on the crops; on the fashions. At the mere mention of chivalry shiver and snigger; detest allegory; and then, when the whole being is red and brittle as sandstone in the sun, make a dash for The F--ry Queen and give yourself up to it.
—only to find myself at the end of the first 12 cantos looking up, blinking, as our avatar of Holinesse, that Redcrosse knight his own dam’ self, so happy in his ever-after with Una, his one true only, the only one true only, suddenly just ups and leaves her in the space of eight lines of iambic pentameter and a single alexandrine—and, I mean, I know why St. George leaves the personification of true religion to return to F--ry Lond, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how Spenser knew, or at least what Spenser knew, and wanted me as a reader to know, and it’s another of those weird bucks and hitches from out of time that keep kicking me loose from the poem and yet drawing me back all at once.
The other is Pynchon’s Against the Day, which if I were feeling glib I’d describe as Roszak’s Flicker meets Vollmann’s Bright and Risen Angels with a dash of let’s say Matewan; it’s like the reading and research I did back in the day for that never-to-be-realized mashup of Blavatsky and Lovecraft, Space: 1889 and the Difference Engine, all was homework for enjoying this—but such flippancy isn’t meet for any of the works in question. It’s baggy and shaggy and too much by half, I’m completely lost every time I slip back into it, but comfortably lost, reliably at sea, and the stew of language Pynchon and Spenser make when taken in alteration is heady indeed.
Heady, but thick, and slow-going, and see above re: work, and so these other books are piling up in the queue: John Ford’s last book, and Avram Davidson’s last Virgil Magus book, Mary Gentle’s Ash, the Moonday Letters and the Monkey’s Mask, the Underground Railroad and a half-dozen Queen’s Thieves, and that’s just the fiction, good Lord, there’s the White Mosque which isn’t even on my shelves yet, and Reading and Not Reading the F--rie Queene, which is, but, I mean, well...
As for what I have read, recently, well, I mean, there was Under the Pendulum Sun, which was fine insofar as it went, some lovely and divertingly weird imagery, but overall the book’s preoccupations weren’t my own, or rather weren’t what I would’ve expected them to be, given what we’re given, which resulted in some unfortunate undercooking here and gauchely overdoing it there and left me mostly with I’m afraid a shrug; and then there was Jawbone, which was spectacularly taut and exactly pretty much what I wanted it to be until it somehow utterly failed to end; and then there was, well.
Oh, it’s a big thick wodge of an epic, diligently working the post-Martin space, which is terribly au courant for epics, and it’s got a killer title, and that’s about all I can say for it—it has nothing like Ojeda’s power, or Ng’s charm, it sags tiresomely when it doesn’t race through suddenly ancillary quests for plot coupons (I’m afraid my disdain is such I’ll reach for overused critical terminology): an Anthropologie®-curated fantasy with a girlboss gloss that insists I see a dragon without doing the work to show me anything like a goddamn dragon. —But Shannon did make two moves, at least, that stuck with me, in how they kicked me loose, but without anything beyond my own cussedness to draw me back:
The first (which, as I’m piecing this together, I realize happens second in the book, but it’s the first I remember, so) is when great revels are thrown to celebrate the introduction of Sabran, our unmarried cod-Elizabeth I, to her proposed suitor Livelyn, our cod-Anjou:
The Feast of Early Autumn was an extravagant affair. Black wine flowed, thick and heavy and sweet, and Lievelyn was presented with a huge rum-soaked fruit cake—his childhood favorite—which had been re-created according to a famous Mentish recipe.
And at that I closed up the book, and looked about the bus (I was reading this almost entirely on the bus, in to work, and back home again), and then opened it up to the front to scour the maps—here, follow along—there’s the Queendom of Inys, or cod-England, and the Draconic Kingdom of Yscalin, or cod-Iberia, and the Free State of Mentendon, which I keep thinking of as cod-France, but is really more of a cod-Low Kingdoms (which makes doomed Lievelyn more of a cod–Holstein-Gottorp, I suppose); there’s cod-Lybia and a cod-Levant, and then over here on our other map we have wee cod-Nippon and but also the Empire of the Twelve Lakes, which is a cod-Middle Kingdom and not a cod-Minnesota—but what we don’t have is a cod-India, a cod-Cyprus, a cod-Madagascar, a cod-Madeira, a cod-Caribe, a cod-Hawai’i, not a cod-plantation to be seen—so when I read that a Prince’s favorite dessert is
a huge rum-soaked fruit cake
and you have countries and cultures and glimpses of history recognizably English and Spanish and Dutch and Japanese, and you tell me offhandedly you have rum, rum which if it is to be rum and not some phantastick honey liquor or something, but rum made from sugar, sugar from sugarcane (I mean, you can make rum from beet-sugar, but I’d hope you’d tell me it was beet-rum so I could take at least some visceral delight)—and sugarcane as such requires prodigious quantities of backbreaking labor to grow and harvest and process on a scale industrial enough to have enough left over to think to boil it into liquor, liquor enough that it might occur to a royal pâtissier, or banketbakker, to soak a fruitcake in a bottle’s worth to see what might come of it, you tell me that this is a thing in your world, but I look on your maps and I can’t anywhere find a trace of the God-damned Triangle—
—I’m gonna get flung right the fuck out.
The second move that stuck (which, again, now I’m looking at it, came first) is at once almost anticlimactically smaller and yet so very much more large: it’s a move made over and over throughout the book, but this was (for me, at least, at the time, for reasons) the most startlingly salient example, the one after which I could no longer ignore the bedevilment—it comes as Niclays Roos, disgraced alchemist and con artist, exiled before the novel begins from Mentendon to the lone Western trading post in Seiiki, our cod-Nippon, he’s being palanquined across the island to a mandatory meeting with the Warlord, and gets inexplicably dropped on his own in the middle of downtown Ginura, the Seiikinese capital, where he knows no one, nowhere, not hint of how to get to the Warlord, not a thing, until he coincidentally bumps into an old friend and colleague: Dr. Eizaru Moyaka, who, with his daughter, Purumé, had come some time before to Orisima, the aforementioned trading post, to study anatomy and medicine with this exiled Western doctor. Eizaru offers his modest house to Roos as a place to stay until the Warlord is ready, and Roos gratefully accepts; after all, he knows no one else here, nothing, no-how.
Eizaru lived in a modest house near the silk market, which backed onto one of the many canals that latticed Ginura. He had been widowed for a decade, but his daughter had stayed with him so that they could pursue their passion for medicine together. Rainflowers frothed over the exterior wall, and the garden was redolent of mugwort and purple-leaved mint and other herbs.
It was Purumé who opened the door to them. A bobtail cat snaked around her ankles.
“Niclays!” Purumé smiled before bowing. She favored the same eyeglasses as her father, but the sun had tanned her skin to a deeper brown than his, and her hair, held back with a strip of cloth, was still black at the roots. “Please, come in. What an unexpected pleasure.”
Niclays bowed in return. “Please forgive me for disturbing you, Purumé. This is unexpected for me, too.”
“We were your honored guests in Orisima. You are always welcome.” She took one look at his travel-soiled clothes and chuckled. “But you will need something else to wear.”
“I quite agree.”
When they were inside, Eizaru sent his two servants—
Wait—which the what, now?
We have a couple of academics living in a modest house—in the capital, on a canal, sure, nice little walled herb-garden, she’s answering the door herself, taking in an old friend on a whim, sure, but there’s a cat twining about her feet, and then, all of a sudden—servants?
This sudden, wrenching shift, the violent clash of assumptions, between what I’d expect of the class of a couple of modestly housed academics, worldly enough to travel to a distant, despised outpost for a chance to study with an exotically disreputable doyen, yet grounded enough to open their own door to visitors, and what the book was willing to prepare me to accept of their class, with the sudden irruption of these two servants, never named, never described, just there, to, to, I don’t know, to have done things, fetch water, keep the day’s heat at bay, lay out the food, deliver messages, to signal the class to which the doctors belong despite any other assumptions, to otherwise be ignored.
They’re of a piece, these similar ignorances: slipping a rum-soaked cake into a scene for the one set of connotations the word “rum” might bring, without taking into consideration all the others that freight the word; dropping a servant—two!—into a set-piece for no other reason and no other effect than that it is assumed servants of some sort must be there—a heedlessness severely detrimental to the building of a world.
But here’s me being awfully stern about an epic so—I’d say “slight,” I’d say “inconsequential,” but there’s stern again, and uncharitable. I mean, I did finish the dam’ thing, didn’t I? —And there, up above, did you catch it? When Virginia Woolf was telling us what we ought to do, and ought not do, before we set out to read the F--rie Queene? That we should “walk about London; observe the crowds; calculate the loss of life and limb; rub shoulders with the poor in markets—”
And who does it turn out to be are we, then, being addressed? And who, is it assumed, are not?
That mighty wall between us, standing high.
Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Elizabeth Nelson presents a Jonbar hinge I never would’ve thought of: what if Merle Haggard had released “Irma Jackson” when he wrote it?
INT. HEADSPACE. DAY.
You know what’s really irksome about the Royal Tenenbaums?
It’s such an overtly, ostentatiously bookish film, from the inspiration for the grown-up whiz kids past their prime (everyone else will tell you it’s that Glass brood, but I’ll tell you it’s much more the ilk of Claudia and Jamie Kincaid and Turtle Wexler) to the obvious surface gloss of those exquisitely designed dust jackets, from the genially gravelly Narrator to the way it’s broken into chapters, with those primly typeset insertions—
—and there, that’s it, that’s what’s annoying: the text of the book we’re ostensibly reading as the movie unspools. If you read it (and it’s large enough to easily read, we’re given enough time), well. Ostensibility crumbles. —Oh, the first one, the Prologue’s okay: it’s just the Narrator’s opening lines, set down on the page and perfectly prosaic, excellently novelistic: “Royal Tenenbaum bought the house on Archer Avenue in the winter of his thirty-fifth year.” But the rest?
Chapter One as we can see starts off with “Royal’s suite at the Lindbergh Palace Hotel. There are shelves full of law books and hundreds of spy novels in stacks on the floor.” Chapter Four? “The side entrance of the hotel. Royal goes in through the revolving doors.” Chapter Seven? “The next morning. Richie comes downstairs. He carries the stuffed and mounted boar’s head.” The Epilogue? “A gentle rain falls in the cemetery, and the sky is getting dark.” —This isn’t the sort of prose to be found in books with those dust jackets, in novels written by Ellen Raskin or E.L. Konigsberg—these are passages from the screenplay of the movie that we’re watching, bald instructions to the production team, this is what needs to be seen to make the story happen, copied as-is and pasted just so, to lorem ipsum up a handful of grace notes in the movie’s art direction. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, sticking out among all the other details so much more carefully considered. It irks.
I get a little twitchy, whenever the subject of cinematic writing comes up. —Cinematic writing, filmic writing, the screen-like æsthetic: here, let me grab a passage from Simon McNeil’s Notes on Squeecore, since that’s where I’m going to tell you it most recently came up:
Wendig is, perhaps, the clearest example of a novelist who writes in a filmic style. Now I think it’s important to draw out how I talked previously a bit about how this was a characteristic of Hopepunk—the mediation of a literary canon via its filmic representation being something I called out within the Hopepunk manifestos—but this isn’t so much a matter of Wendig mediating literature via its depiction on screens as it is Wendig drawing the screen structure back into the book. The crafting of an image becomes the chief concern of the novel in Wendig’s hands. Action is in the moment and the dialog is kinetic precisely because Wendig is trying to show his audience a moving picture rather than tell them a story. In a way the lionization of show, don’t tell, almost inevitably leads to the logic of a filmic literature. After all, internality often involves telling the audience how somebody feels. As “Show, Don’t Tell” becomes a hard rule, it’s not hard to see how an audience of would-be authors with an insufficient grounding in literature but a lot of exposure to television will inevitably interpret that to turn the page into a kind of screen.
Breezy, surfactant, imagistic, often in the immediately present tense and almost always the disaffectedly third person (first person in screen-like tips from teevee to vidya: first-person shooters, don’t you know): at its most amateurishly egregious, the iron law of SHOW DON’T TELL eats itself, as the prose insists on telling you the show that needs to happen in your head: bald instructions to the production team, as it were; passages cut and pasted from a screenplay. (Rather than show you a dinosaur, I tell you to see a dinosaur, to tie this to other ongoing threads.) —It can be intended as complimentary, to say of someone’s prose that it is cinematic, but there’s always a bit of English on the ball: oh, look, the writer’s trying so hard, the poor dear, to make prose do what it manifestly can’t—and anyway, everybody knows the book is always better than the movie. (Think of what it means, after all, what’s intended, when a television show is said to be novelistic.)
And, well, I mean, here’s me, then, and the epic: specifically imagistic, immediately present, disaffectedly third, cinematic, yes, okay, sure, filmic, all right, I’ll even cop to a screen-æsthetic, but only if I get to play with all the various meanings packed into “screen,” but but but I know what it is I’m doing, it’s not amateurish, honest, I’m sufficiently grounded and aware of if not all then at least a great many literary traditions—
See? Twitchy. And that’s never a good look on anyone.
I didn’t set down specific rules I’d follow, or at least not break, when I set out to figure out what I was going to do and be doing. It’s more that the rules assembled themselves, from what I wanted to pull off: an epically longform, episodic serial, and the best and most prevalent examples thereof at the time were superhero comics and hour-long dramedic television serials. So I leaned into that. —I’ve written before, about the differences between words, and moving pictures:
The primary difference between prose and cinema (beyond the obvious) is I think in time, and how each handles it; cinema (like theatre before it) no matter how achingly it might strive for universal generalities, must necessarily show you specific people doing specific things in specific places at very specific times. Prose, on its wily other hand, can say: “Monday morning staff meetings were always a chore for Willy” or “For the next week whenever she went to the coffee shop she saw the woman on the corner” or “And then everybody died.” —The narrow bandwidth of prose can’t begin to approach the wealth of incidental detail that makes up cinematic specificity without enormous slogging effort; most of the tricks and tips one needs to learn to tell stories and have them told with mere words, in fact, those reading protocols we’ve all had put in place, have everything to do with tricking us into thinking that specificity’s been achieved without us noticing (just as a great many of cinema’s tricks are all about forcing us to empathize with the saps up on the screen, bridging the vast gulf between their specificities and ours).
Setting out to ape the effects of one with the tools of another, though, is less about what I’m going to do (write with immediacy and specificity, as if, yes, I’m telling you what you’d see and hear if the story were playing out on a screen, yes yes) than what I won’t: generalize, pull back, sweep up and away from that immediate moment, that specific place. —And there’s one more thing prose does, that the epic does eschew:
Every narrative has a narrator. This may seem a ravelled tautology, but tug the thread of it and so much comes undone: a narrator, after all, is just another character, and subject to the same considerations. What might we consider, then, of a character who strives with every interaction for a coolly detached objectivity that’s betrayed by every too-deft turn of phrase? Who lays claim to an impossible omniscience, no matter how it might be limited, that’s belied by every Homeric nod? Who mimicks the vocal tics and stylings, the very accents of the people in their purview—whether or not they’re put in italics—merely to demonstrate how well it seems they think they know their stuff?
It’s only those texts that admit, upfront, the limitations and the unreliability of their narrators, that are honest in their dishonesty. —The third person, much like the third man, snatches power with an ugliness made innocuous, even charming, by centuries of reading protocols: deep grooves worn by habits of mind that make it all too lazily easy for an unscrupulous, an unethical, an unthinking author to wheedle their readers into a slapdash crime of empathy: crowding out all the possible might’ve beens that could’ve been in someone else’s head with whatever it is they decide to insist must have been.
I’d never presume to tell you what someone else is thinking, good Lord, no. That would be rude. Instead, I’m going to show you what it is they do, and say, and let you draw your own conclusions, and trust you to adjust them as we go.
Framing it this way, as what I’m not going to do, makes me mindful of the tools I’ve set aside, and turns those vasty fields untrampled into negative space—a very potent consideration in any composition: instead of showing you a dinosaur, or telling you to quick, think of a dinosaur, the hope is that these dotted moments, and the space implied between them, might at this moment or the next shiveringly resolve in your head into the suggestion, of a dragon-like, dinosaur-sylph—and all the more impactful, as it’s one you’ve made yourself.
A long way round, perhaps, but fitting, I think, for an idiom that seeks to immerse you in a slightly disjointed reality, to make you believe that at any moment a short sharp shock of the numinous might intrude. —At any rate: I’m having fun. The occasional twitch aside.
Actually, you know, the one for the epilogue’s okay, too? “A gentle rain falls in the cemetery, and the sky is getting dark.” That’s a fine-enough turn of phrase for a novel, or even a screenplay. Except of course for the fact that it’s not getting dark in the scene that then unfolds: the sky’s a fixed and dreary mid-afternoon. —The perils of adaptation, one supposes.
Civitas Aurelianorum.
So I’ve finally slowly been picking away at Treme, in part because I’m feeling a bit of a jones for some of the world below the Mason-Dixon, but mostly because I want that taste of systemically languid flânerie about a quintessentially urban warp and woof without, you know, all the fucking poe-leece the fucking Wire brings to the table (though there are still cops, of course there are cops, Jesus, the cops), and anyway: this point I’m making is entirely evanescent, but nonetheless: it is of some interest that the Baltimore of the Wire is, to the extent that it’s not only an inside joke, but a goddamn plot point, an insular world sufficient almost entirely unto itself, but—the New Orleans of Treme is almost from the very beginning dependent upon not nearly entirely but still to a surprising extent within the fiction coterminal with New York City. —But in the meanwhile, the car is making this very loud noise, and I’m supposed to be able to walk away from the day-job for a week-long vacation that involves a lot of driving just next week. But at least this verde margarita’s cold and spicy? At least.
