Category Archives: Sundry

I believe in the usefulness of letting a field lie fallow, and writing-wise that’s what I’ve been doing these past few weeks: taking a pause between one thing (a major effort, which feels like it’s nearing completion) and the next (tbd).

In the mean time, I’ve been enjoying the fruits of the online world. It’s stunning to think how recently none of this stuff existed (the www, I mean, and it’s ilk). During middle school and high school, I had a dialup modem — 56Kbps in my glory days — and messed around with BBSes, and later in college played with programs like Gopher and Mosaic, but in a qualitative sense that era of stuttering connectivity was fundamentally different than the access to communication and information tools we have today. I was reminded of this forcefully when my father sent me a box containing my correspondence from back then, letters that I received and a few that I wrote myself. In addition to their heartbreaking adolescent earnestness and extravagance, many of them are physically beautiful. We made collages and packets to send each other; we illustrated the margins of our pages, and hand-crafted envelopes by gluing postcards, sewing fabric, and with origami. Those letters were labors of love, little gifts that arrived unexpectedly in the post.

It’s hard to imagine a kind of communication more different from a facebook update or a tweet. Looking through those old notes and screeds I got nostalgic, of course. But then, in other ways, I’m grateful for the changes every day. Here are just a few of the things that have made me happy lately:

• Character Development a short story by David Mitchell from the Amnesty International anthology, Freedom
• The ongoing series of intimate and thoughtful letters about past Nobel Prize winners at Bookslut
• Wikipedia’s list of unusual deaths
• paperpools, the blog of Helen DeWitt, a writer I admire
• Poet Tony Hoagland’s essay on Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment
• This series of interviews with Iain Banks
• Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech
• …and, of course, The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive film Google made from the Arcade Fire song.

Between the paperback release of KOH, family visits, minor crises at work, holidays, and slowly inching toward a readable draft of my new novel, the last few weeks have gone by in a kind of frantic blur. Of course, one of the things that the internet is best for is providing bite-sized morsels of distraction that fit into the busy-ness of life so in my spare moments I’ve been reading the fascinating journal of two Belgians who decided to drive across the Congo.

From their travelogue:

It would soon become clear that very little information was available. We did not know of a single traveler that did this in the last 20 years. We knew of two who tried (both on motorbikes) in recent years. One crashed after a few days and got evacuated. The other got arrested and deported….

A major showstopper for our trip was a Permit to travel through Congo. Nobody really knows what kind of permit one needs, let alone where to apply for it. But everybody agrees that a permit is required….

Our Belgian Consulate really tried hard to get this stupid little piece of paper for us, but to no avail. They even managed to get us invited with the governor of Katanga, but he too could not give it to us. After many days of trying we asked the consulate to give us some sort of official looking letter with an official looking stamp. We would chance it without the permit!

From Josephine and Frederik’s journal

In addition to being a fascinating informal glimpse into one of the most troubled and often-overlooked places on the planet, one of the things that struck me about this narrative is how little it relies on the idea of “motive.”

In the literary world, people tend to get very excited about the idea of character motivation — the dark secret, or hidden yearning, or lifelong dream, or etc., that compels X to depart on whatever quest or journey lies ahead. In this journal, by contrast, we hear that Josephine and Frederik “decided to drive across the Congo” — and then we’re off. Yet despite this, it’s an amazingly good story.

And the fact is, it seems to me that most real stories don’t rely much on the notion of motive. For example, when I was in college I decided to buy an ancient, rusted-out, dangerously unreliable Cadillac hearse and proceeded to drive it all over New England, getting into various kinds of legal and interpersonal trouble along the way. Sure, if I dug deep enough I could probably scrape up some childhood moment that led to an adolescent yearning that led to my forking over $1,500 cash to a hunchback in a backwoods garage in Massachusetts, but that would be artificial. Instead, it was more or less a whim that led to my decision — and the real story isn’t the why of what made me do it, but the what of what happened afterward.

A few days ago, comrade here in Portland sent me a link to a story about this:

…the “secret” New York City Hall subway station. If you happen to be in lower Manhattan, it’s well worth a visit. As Jalopnik writes, City Hall station was

…intended to be a showpiece and crown jewel of the new subway system. Unlike the rest of the line, City Hall featured tall tile arches, brass fixtures, and skylights that ran along the entire curve of the station….

although it’s not open to the general public, there’s a way in-the-know New York subway riders can still see this famous and beautiful architectural glimpse at the city’s past. The 6 train used to make all passengers leave the train at the Brooklyn Bridge stop, but no longer.

If you have a little extra time, you can stay on the train and view the City Hall Station as the train makes its turnaround.

Of course, the “secret subway” that always fascinated me most (of the ones I came across while researching KOH) was the Beach Pneumatic Transit, an early experiment in subway travel constructed by Alfred Ely Beach in by 1869. It was, as the name suggests, a pneumatic underground human-transport system. The “trains” consisted of large capsules on tracks, propelled by a gigantic 50-ton fan, nicknamed “the Western Tornado.” A demonstration tunnel was built, and 400,000 curious people rode the Beach Pneumatic Transit during its first year of operation.

The single station (the track was circular) was luxurious, adorned with frescoes and easy chairs; a statuary and a goldfish pond provided distraction for patrons awaiting their turn to ride. Unfortunately, the system fell into disrepair and was forgotten for years; the abandoned ruins of the tunnel were largely destroyed in 1912.

A concise timeline of the Beach system is here. Joseph Brennan’s site is the most comprehensive online resource for the Beach Pneumatic Transit.

Not too long ago I was in a bar with a friend, talking about if and how video games can function as art. Like most grandiose barroom conversations, we glossed over a few small details: for example, the whole question of What Is Art? And while maybe someday I’ll take a tilt at that windmill, right now I just don’t have the energy; my daughter has been sick, and it’s the end of a long week.

In sober retrospect though, that discussion has got me wondering about a more immediate and answerable issue: why video games don’t work as art for me. In particular, I’m thinking about the flavor of video game (I use the term broadly) that seems to aspire most specifically to the status of art, both through its relatively abstract structure and its appeal to the conventions of narrative: the text adventure, aka “interactive fiction.”

For those not familiar with the genre, this overview is from the website of Adam Cadre, among the most respected contemporary IF authors:

To most people who’ve heard of it, the entry for “interactive fiction” in their mental dictionaries goes something like this: “Interactive fiction, noun. A fancy name for text adventures, a type of computer game popular in the early 1980s despite having no graphics. Usually involved wandering around in caves solving complicated puzzles, and became completely obsolete around the time Reagan left office, as graphics became less crappy.”

The problem with this definition is that the medium of interactive fiction is no more a relic of the 1980s than the novel is a relic of the 17th century. If you’ve never encountered it before, it works like this: you start up the program and it prints out the first paragraph or two (or, um, nine) of a story. Then suddenly there’s an angle bracket and a blinking cursor: it’s your turn to type. For in interactive fiction (IF for short), you don’t just read the story — you get to shape it. Usually you’ll be typing instructions for one of the characters to follow — and unlike in a “choose your own adventure” story, you’re not just picking from a menu, but can type anything you can think of.

It seems to me that, in other words, “interactive fiction” aspires to an organic storytelling experience, which (at least partially) effaces the distinction between listener and teller. In practice though, the effect is often the exact opposite of a natural conversational flow — what I privately think of as synonym hell, trying to find the exact combination of words that the game expects:

Even aside from this essentially technical limitation though, I think there’s a deeper issue which gets in the way of my enjoyment of IF. Way back when, I went through a (very brief) phase of reading “choose your own adventure” books. (In particular, I remember one memorably titled You Are a Shark!) The problem with these books was not, as Adam Cadre suggests, the limited and/or stupid choices available to me as a reader at each juncture of the plot. Instead, it was the fact of having to make those choices at all.

For me, maybe the greatest pleasure and promise of reading is the opportunity to spend a few hours or days hanging out in someone else’s head: the chance to look at the world as it might seem to someone else, with different priorities, impulses, and insights. Reading great books is an opportunity to try on different modes of being. But in order for that magic to work, the characters in a story need to come alive. On an intuitive level, we need to be able to project our own selfhood into theirs.

So the issue with “interactive fiction” — like “choose your own adventure” — is that it deprives the characters in a story of their own personhood. How can I believe that a character is “real” if they can’t even make their own decisions — but instead rely on me to choose door X vs. door Y, stay and fight or run away? The net result is to hollow out the characters, making them nothing more than puppets. So rather than creating a bridge between myself and anther kind of living, “interactive fiction” winds up feeling to me like a kind of sad masquerade in which I remain myself, but less so — since the richness of real life is narrowed down to a constrained and essentially foreign set of choices imposed by the author, with no basis in my own selfhood or that of anyone else.

Over at The Millions, novelist Bill Morris has an interesting article on the declining quality of rejection letters in the publishing business, and how important the exceptions to this rule can be for aspiring writers.

Long ago, I wrote a number of heartfelt and extremely convoluted short stories. Crouched in the damp basement of the little rented house where I lived, I would send out little packets of query/story/SASE to the addresses listed in Writer’s Market like the message-bearing bottles of a shipwrecked castaway, hoping against hope that a few of my missives would find their way into the hands of a kindred spirit.

After dozens of curt rejections, I was at the brink of despair (not for the first or last time) when I received an unusually thick response envelope from a small literary journal. Inside, I discovered a typewritten (!) letter from the journal’s editor, David Castleman, who — he wrote — was himself a poet, lived alone in a shanty with his two cats, and labored in a lumberyard north of San Francisco to support himself. Mr. Castleman went on to offer his encouragement, and a brief friendly correspondence between us followed.

Although I lost touch with Mr. Castleman years ago, I still think back fondly on his letter. The sense of camaraderie in shared aspirations and struggle that his words provided helped me to continue the slow, arduous process of becoming a writer.