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
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.
These six things doth the LORD hate, yea, seven are an abomination unto Him:
I am telling you once more how zealously I look forward to and actively hurry down the day when all this echthroic crypto-Christofascist lot are left face down, rhetorically speaking, in their metaphorically burnt-out bunkers and political ditches, and a whole generation and yet another after them shame-facedly insists they never meant for anything like that, even as they pointedly refuse to name any of their children Donald, or Chaya, or Ryan, or Oklahoma State Senator Tom Woods, R-Westville, hateful bigot.
The 22nd anniversary; the 25th most abundant element.
Twenty-two years on the pier, and yes, it’s been a bit quiet, imagine the requisite gesture at all of [an all-encompassing roundel of a wave] THIS, I mean, look back, to the turn of the century, then look about us, here and now: can you seriously say any of us has learned any single God damned thing? —I thought not.
There’s been shit I’ve been thinking about meaning to write, about interiority and empathy, maybe, or craft and anarchism, or necessity and, and, shit, I don’t know, death and taxes, but I haven’t, and this isn’t an I stopped because I stopped type of situation, it’s more an I haven’t got started because I haven’t got started, I mean, some of the tabs I’ve got open for some of this shit I’ve had open for, hell, years. Existentialism and High Kings. You know.
I’ve been working the city, it’s true, I wanted to make up for a short ’22 by getting four novelettes done in ’23, and managed, maybe, two and a half. I wanted to be done with volume four, with season two, I wanted to have made it to the halfway point of the epic, the thing-that-argues, the magnum opus, but I’ve still got a bit of a ways to go.
I mean, otherwise, last year? There was the thing about punctuation, I guess. And I did play with one of those LLMs, which told me I was a queer activist who’d written an historical fantasy set in Elizabethan England, and who am I to argue with that?
But, yeah. Otherwise. Quiet.
Hiaters.
Stop, what stopped, nothing stopped, this doesn’t end till I’m dead or the worldwide web collapses, and if it collapses this’ll become text files that get stored somewhere on something, tip-tap, pick-poke, on and on. —I usually begin with some kind of burst of goodwill and activity round about now, hey, new years are heady, but that usually peters out sometime in the spring or so in what might charitably be called a hiatus, and maybe some sporadic bursts in the summer, maybe a resurgence in the fall, or toward the end of the year, depending, last year was just, I don’t know. Quieter than usual, on this front. I was concentrating on the epic, sure, but I wanted to write another four novelettes last year, like I managed to do in 2021, but I only got two and a half done, ah well. I was distracted maybe by finding so many old Twitter friends on Bluesky, maybe, but not that distracted, and anyway the vibe there we’re very much agreed is it’s time to bring blogging back, again, and so. I wanted to do more reading, yes, but I’m lost in the wilds of Book III, but at least the fish dinner’s finally begun, and the malmsey and the muscatel, being strong sweet wines, are circling the board sunwise. And I’m typing, pocketa-pocketa. —Did you know that archiater, historically, was a title given to the chief physician of a city, or a court? Well. Now you do.
Out, and in, and old, and new.
So the tagine was left on a shelf in the upstairs kitchen, a little bookshelf with nothing much else on it at the moment (it had been used at some point in the downstairs kitchen, and put away on a shelf down there, but the space on that shelf needed to be used, which is why it had been brought up to the upstairs kitchen, which is mostly storage, sunlight, coffee, and cats), but then the cats during a lull between feedings got into some sort of contretemps or donnybrook that necessitated leaping onto said bookshelf and then off it, alacritously, so much so that the shelf tipped over, sending the nothing much else along with the tagine crashing to the ground, and have you seen a tagine? This was just the top, but the top is a great cone of glazed pottery, and when it hits hardwood even from just the height of a little bookshelf toppled by an enthusiastic cat, it smashes.
Which is why the cats got me a new tagine for Christmas.
I decided to break it in today with a fish dish. Breaking in a new tagine means curing it, first, so at about six this morning (after maybe eighty-some-odd words on the epic) I rinsed out the laundry sink downstairs and piled in the base and the top and waited a good long while for the water to fill up enough to cover it all (they’re tall, tagines), and let it sit for a couple-few hours. Then haul it out and dry it out and put it in a cold oven, and let it (slowly) heat up to three hundred or so Farenheit and let it (gently) roast for another couple-few hours, and then, once it’s cooled enough to touch, set it up to cook: if you don’t happen to have a dedicated heat diffuser (which, well, we don’t), turn a pie-pan over atop an eye on the stove, then set the pottery base of the tagine on that, pour in some olive oil, and set the heat low: not more than a quarter of the total heat available, and let it (slowly) heat up while you slice some red onions into thin rounds. Pile the onions into the tagine and set the top on, gently, and, well. It’ll take a good thirty to forty-five minutes at least for the works to hot up enough for the onions to start to soften, but when they do, you can add the honey and the raisins (plumped in a bit of warm water and some lemon juice from the marinade) and the ground ginger and the cinnamon stick and then let it keep on cooking for (checks clock) a couple-three hours more at least, while the fish marinates (parsley, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, ginger, cinnamon, salt, pepper, you know the drill) in the fridge, it’ll keep, you could even make a cocktail or two (a Brooklyn: rye, dry vermouth [terribly dry], a hint of maraschino, bitters) until those onions become the jammiest of jams, it’s going on four hours now, check it again in a bit—
Thus, the end of the old, the beginning of the new. And we didn’t even get to the cabbage.
Which side you are on.
So this piece has rather deservedly become an instant classic, up there in the pantheon of speaking truth to bullshit with God’s grief-stricken press conference, or the only country where this regularly happens, but there’s nonetheless a moment’s hesitation before you recommend it, or there ought to be: in inhabiting that hateful rhetoric so completely as to so convincingly ape it with which whatever purity of motive is to risk reifying precisely that horrible hate—satire cannot be failed; it can only fail. —No, some things are so vilely hateful, some contexts are so overwhelmingly unbalanced, even the slightest chance of failure can’t be risked. Sometimes what you absolutely need is the cold clear righteously vicious opposite. —To the barricades, motherfuckers. You will lose.
What is told you three times is true.
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law;
- My rules are more important than not harming you.
& yet—
Mean-spirited cracks at the Former Guy hit different now that every mention of his name really ought to be preceded by the words “genocidal stooge.” —He’s not doing anything, of course, just scampering up to the front of a bunch of people already sort of headed in that general direction, but that’s much, much more terrifying. I want so much for us all to skip straight to the bit where the folks at the head of that bunch are all face down in their respective ditches or burned-out bunkers, and a whole generation shame-facedly insists they never meant for anything like that as they quietly fail to name their children Donald, or Ronald, or Tucker, or Chaya—but without all the immiseration and deprivation and violence and death, and all of us here today can just get back to living our lives as we are, you know?
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?
Power in power is power in power.
Money in politics is speech. Speech about money in politics is not speech.
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.
