Nathan Ballingrud's Blog

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2007-04-17T23:13:00.000-04:00

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It's Alive! It's Alive!

2006-08-19T00:32:00.000-04:00

Ellen posted the table of contents to Inferno over at the Night Shade boards, and if it's possible I'm even more excited about the book than I was before. I get to be in the same book as Joyce Carol Oates! How cool is that? Not to mention personal favorites of mine, such as Laird Barron, Conrad Williams, and Lucius Shepard. Tragically, the release date is apparently not until October of 2007, by which time civilization may have crumbled.

Mia started first grade yesterday, an event which is world-altering to me, but which elicits little more than a rolling of the eyes and compression of the lips from her. Its chief effect, as far as she's concerned, is that she gets to get a new backpack. Last year's Dora the Explorer has been mothballed, and now she's sporting a sleek and sophisticated Hello Kitty triple-zippered wonderment, done in tasteful black with pink outlines and of course the Kitty herself, smiling mysteriously and at a jaunty angle. She also gets pocket-folders for the first time ever; one is bedecked with kittens, the other with flowers. When I told her I thought they were very cute, she quickly corrected me: "No Dad." (I'm not Daddy anymore.) "The flowers are cute. The kittens are cool."

I must also add that I've noticed, happily, a ruthless streak in her. Last week we celebrated her sixth birthday (it actually occurred while visiting her mom in Alabama, but of course we have to have a second celebration here at home) at a sort of year-round indoor fairground called Fun Depot. She rode the bumper cars there; at first I was a little worried because three boys (about eight years old, maybe) were holding court there, riding for free over and over -- probably the ticket taker's family -- and Mia can get her feelings hurt fairly easily. But as soon as she figured out how the controls worked, she turned into Mad Max ! Her little brows furrowed over an evil grin, her hands punched those controls forward, and she repeatedly knocked the bejeesus out of those other kids ... oh man. It made the heart sing.

Let's see, let's see ... there was an interesting exchange of opinions and assumptions over on Lucius's message board concerning a trio of short horror films that I highly recommend -- namely, Douglas Buck's Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America. I want to write about the films and some of the things being said about them, but just not at the moment. I'll get back to that in the next couple of days. (That'll be motivation not to let this blog go moribund for another month or two.)

I recently finished reading Michael Bishop's Brittle Innings, which -- without giving anything away -- is a wonderfully poignant novel about fatherless sons, wartime living in the American South, race relations, minor league and Negro League baseball, and Frankenstein's Monster. It is truly, truly a beautiful novel, and it's a wonder to me that it fared so poorly, and is so little remembered today. It's one of the warmest, saddest, sweetest fantasies I've read in a long time, and I hope it's destined for a second life somewhere down the road.

I'm just now starting James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, which of course promises to be a fascinating read. The sampled correspondence between Tiptree and Ursula LeGuin in the current issue of F&SF is well worth reading, too, if you haven't already.

Back in a few days with thoughts on Douglas Buck and his wonderful collection of short films!

Catching Up Again ...

2006-07-03T22:28:00.000-04:00

Let's see, what's happened over the past month? Mia is visiting her mom for the summer in Alabama, where she's having a great time. She turned six just a few days ago. Six! In a month she'll be starting first grade! I could handle kindergarten; it was the start of school, yeah, but kindergarten inspired pride, and lots of Oh my God isn't that cute moments. (Like the first time she put on her backpack and marched down the sidewalk, like she knew the score.) But first grade? That's hard core, man! She's not a baby anymore; she's an actual kid!

I sold a short story called "The Monsters of Heaven" to Ellen Datlow for her upcoming horror anthology, Inferno. Thrilled about that, obviously. If she has any sort of reading up in New York after its release, I'm going to try to get up there for it. It's been way too long since I've been to NYC.

I've fallen in literary love: I've just begun reading Maureen F. McHugh for the first time, and I am just awestruck by her stories. I'm reading her collection from Small Beer Press, called Mothers & Other Monsters. These are the kinds of stories I've always wanted to write. This is what I dream of being able to someday do. I haven't finished the collection yet, but so far my favorite stories are "Laika Comes Back Safe," the best werewolf story ever; and "Oversite," which is so delicate and warm and heartbreaking that after I finished reading it I closed the book and closed my eyes, just feeling the story flow through me, the way great music does. I'm going to go out tomorrow and buy more copies of the book to give as gifts, and then I'm going to pick up China Mountain Zhang. Sorry to sound so fanboyish, but I haven't been this excited by a writer in a long time. I can't believe it's taken me this long to discover her.

I would like to go on in more detail about why I love those stories, but my computer is reacting so slowly that it takes me about two minutes to finish each of these sentences, and I'm about to throw the whole thing through the window. Since I'd probably regret that tomorrow morning, I'm just going to stop typing for the night.

Okay, There Is One Picture ...

2006-06-02T23:29:00.000-04:00

My mom snapped one before the recital began. You can't see Mia's pink tutu, and in fact I'm wondering exactly what was going on here to result in such an odd composition ... but here you go.

Catching Up ...

2006-06-01T08:45:00.000-04:00

So, Mia was wonderful at her recital. Of course I would say that, but it's true. At one point all the little girls had to pass bags of potato chips down the line until everyone had one; due to a minor mix-up, Mia ended up with two. I was afraid this would upset her, but she looked out at the audience and smiled and shrugged, eliciting an appreciative laugh from them. A minor thing, but it lit me up.

The Daddy-Daughter Dance also went well: I did not have any accidents, and when I did the leaping mid-air split my pants remained intact. I did land on that one kid, but she wasn't standing on her marking, so it was her fault, not mine. I am told she will walk again, so I don't know what everyone's getting all worked up about.

No pictures were allowed during the performance; they didn't want kids getting blinded by flashbulbs and pirouetting off the stage, which strikes me as sound reasoning.

My mother recently discovered an album of story rejections I started keeping back when I was about 20 or so ... I pasted each rejection letter on the left page and each first page of the story on the facing page. When she gave it to me I thought it would be amusing to reproduce those first pages here. Then I actually read them ....

You won't be seeing those pages.

They are bad enough that anybody who reads them will never trust me as a writer again. What amazes me is that they were written just a year or two before I got accepted into Clarion in 1992 (I know this because I recorded the copyright date on each page, complete with the carefully hand-drawn circled "c" (I note with some dismay that there is still not a copyright symbol on the keyboards)). Now, at Clarion, I remember being a barely competent beginner who got accepted, I think, because of a rudimentary ability to string coherent sentences together. I recently saw a list of titles of the stories I turned in there ... let me just say it was sobering. But, looking at these first pages ... wow. It was worse than I thought.

Anyway ... just finished a new, and I hope better, story called "The Lamentation." I'm about to finish "North American Lake Monsters," which I'd put on the backburner while I figured out some details in my head.

Nearly through reading Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania, which I had a difficult time getting into. I almost stopped reading it half a dozen times in the first 150 pages. I stuck with it partly because I've had good experiences with Park's fiction before, and partly because people like LeGuin and Crowley and Fowler gave it such high praise. I'm glad I did; once I finally settled into the book's conceit, I started really enjoying it. It's worth the effort.

Mia only has three days of kindergarten left; it's unbelievable to me. Yesterday there was an awards ceremony for the kindergarteners, and she won a good citizenship award, as well as a special award for her little saddle-stapled books, which she fills with stories and illustrations. She mis-heard "good citizenship" as "good singing," though, so she thinks she's been recognized for her wonderful singing voice. I haven't corrected her. She's about to go down to Alabama to visit her mom for the summer, and I want to hear all the singing I can:

"See you later, alligator,
Adios, cinnamon toast ... "

The Adventure of the Mummy's Eyeball

2006-05-09T23:07:00.000-04:00

Mia hated the dance rehearsal. I mean, my lord. She performed all her moves hunched over, arms dangling like a gorilla, and half the time she literally had her tongue hanging out and her eyes half-closed. It was kind of embarrassing. She blamed it on being tired, but as soon as we got out of there she perked right up. I don't know if I should let her off the hook on this one or if I should make her go through with it, so that she knows when she commits to something she's going to have to follow through.

Anyway, today she told me some disturbing news about Reading Rainbow. Or -- maybe -- she has an active imagination. In any case, she told me that today her class watched a Reading Rainbow special on mummies.

"Mummies?" I said.

"Yeah, and then we dug a mummy hole in the playground and we actually found one!"

"My goodness. Was it gross?"

"No Daddy, it's just a mummy. But we found its eyeball, and that was pretty gross!"

"You found the mummy's eyeball?"

"Yeah, DJ found it!"

"Was he scared?"

"No, but I was. I said, DJ, put that eyeball down!"

"I hope he washed his hands."

"He didn't have to, because the eyeball was fragile."

"It was?"

Exasperated: "Yes Daddy, dead people are fragile! Duh!"

Here I started laughing. "They are, are they? How do you know this?"

"Reading Rainbow told me! Duh!"

I'm going to have to write a harsh letter to the folks at Reading Rainbow. Running specials about mummies and encouraging excavations is one thing, but teaching our children that dead people are fragile!? Come on. Those guys can take some serious punishment before they start to fall apart.

(I swear to God I don't let her watch my horror movies!)

In Which I Dance

2006-05-06T23:05:00.000-04:00

Or rather, in which I prepare to rehearse. Tomorrow is the first rehearsal of the Daddy-Daughter Dance, part of Mia's upcoming ballet recital in which -- you guessed it -- daddies dance with their daughters. Those of you who know me will certainly recognize the comic potential. I don't know what to expect, but I am fairly certain I will not actually have to perform ballet. As long as I am not expected to do much more than shuffle lazily about, I should be fine. There might be pictures. If so, they will be destroyed.

I recently finished reading Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead, and was disappointed. I'd go into the specifics, but it's easier for me to link to Matt Cheney's review over at The SF Site; I agree with most of what he says, although I think he's a bit more forgiving than I am.

I've since started reading Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles. I've heard Cornwell's name pretty frequently as an example of good historical adventure fiction, but somehow managed not to read him until now. I'm about halfway through the book and it's a blast. It's not up there with Patrick O'Brian's astonishing Aubrey-Maturin novels, but then again I've just started. We'll see.

I also picked up Hal Duncan's Vellum, which I can't wait to start. Up until I started reading Duncan's posts on the Night Shade Boards, I thought my friend Neal Stanifer was the smartest person I knew. I guess that's still technically true since I don't know Hal Duncan, but damn ... I'd love to hear them debate ethics. In a steel cage. Two men go in. One man comes out!

Also: John Crowley has a blog! Why was I not informed!?

A Brief Visit to New Orleans

2006-04-24T17:10:00.000-04:00

Last week, after dropping Mia off at her mom's for spring break, I drove on through to New Orleans. It was the first time I'd seen the place since leaving last June, which was of course before Katrina hit. I'd been warned that the place was still in rough shape; but still, I thought. It's been over eight months. How bad can it be?

Well, it's a mixed bag. The French Quarter is as good as new, for the most part. At least from all outward appearances. Because it was built on the natural levee, it suffered no flooding damage at all. Wind and fire damage was minimal, and walking down Decatur Street I couldn't tell that anything bad had ever happened to the city. The Central Business District looks all right from the outside; it's only when you notice how many businesses have failed to re-open that you sense that something is wrong.

The Lower Garden District, where I lived and worked, is also in pretty good shape. There is noticeable wind and rain damage here -- holes in people's roofs, defoliated trees, the great oaks looking sickly and bedraggled -- and many businesses are still struggling. My friend Ingrid told me that it's like living in Spain, with their afternoon siestas; businesses will close for a few hours in the middle of the day, sometimes without warning, if they are short-staffed. Many of them are.

But the real story is told in the outlying areas. These are the places that were once swampland and were drained in the early to mid-20th century to accommodate population growth. These are the areas that are below sea level and deal with serious flooding issues even after a garden variety thunderstorm. Here, almost nothing has been done. This was the first thing I saw driving in. I came in westbound on I-10 from Mississippi, passing through Slidell before I hit New Orleans. It was all I could do to keep my eyes on the road. Great ranks of trees which had lined the highway were uniformly snapped at mid-level, as though some wrathful hand had come down and chopped them all down with an angry motion. Outlying neighborhoods are devastated. It's as though whole acres had been lifted ten feet from the ground and dropped. A large sailboat was still beached yards away from a river. Oaks, their root systems as big as small busses, lay uprooted in people's front yards.

Driving through Lakeview, a suburb which hugs Lake Pontchartrain and borders the University of New Orleans, where I went to school, I was afforded a much closer view of the same conditions. Here the water line is marked by a thick rusty smear sometimes twelve feet off the ground. FEMA trailers are parked out in front of many of the homes, which seemed to me way past salvaging. Spray-painted glyphs on the sides of houses track the efforts of the SPCA as they searched for pets after the sadder business of human body removal had been completed. Small bushes and shrubs which had been completely submerged in the toxic waters are uniformly dead. They look like no dead plants I have ever seen before: they are not brown but a flat grey, like ashen constructions, like enormous leached brains lined up along the neutral ground and nestled in people's front lawns.

Here it was also clear how social class made a difference. The devastation is now almost categorically confined to low-income areas. Partly this is due to the fact that much of the wealthier New Orleanians lived on higher ground, and as the city expanded the less affluent had to move into the cheaper houses being built on converted swampland. But in the Lakeview area there are some upscale houses, and most of these had already been repaired and looked pretty damned good. Those who were waiting for insurance money to bail them out -- and the insurance companies are insisting that what happened to these houses was flood damage, not storm damage, thereby neutering thousands of claims -- are still waiting.

Claiborne Avenue, once a thriving center of black-owned small businesses, looks like a ghost town. There is nothing open there. Nothing. I used to dread driving through that area because the traffic was so thick; last week, as Ingrid guided me through the city, there were at best a dozen cars on the road.

I promised pictures, and I went there with digital camera in hand, but I have to admit I couldn't bring myself to take any. It felt too much like photographing the grievous wounds of a loved one. I understand there are tours through the devastated Ninth Ward, much to the anger of the people who still live there. I was reminded of a line from the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink: "You're just a tourist with a typewriter, Barton. I live here."

You've all seen the pictures anyway. If you want to see more all you have to do is use your search engine. You can check out the local news from The Times-Picayune by going here. Now that I'm once again distant from the ruin, I wish that I had taken some pictures. But at the time it felt too much like carrion-feeding.

After my last post Pam Noles reminded me that for all the neglect New Orleans still suffers, the rest of the Gulf Coast suffers even more. There is at least some measure of national press still devoted to my city; but nothing for the rest of the Gulf Coast, which suffers in the same way.

I want to go back again in the summer, and spend a little more time there. See a few more friends -- including Andy Fox, whom I was supposed to contact while I was there but didn't -- and just soak in the vibe of the place. Because it's still a beautiful city. And -- as I discovered on my arrival that night, feeling the place settle over me like a beaten leather jacket -- it's still my home.

After the Levees

2006-04-06T08:43:00.000-04:00

Over at TPMCafe, there's a subsite called After the Levees, detailing the political aspects of the reconstruction of New Orleans. It's excellent -- if frustrating -- reading, and it's one of the few places you'll be able to go to find up to date information about how the city is doing. New Orleans seems to have dropped from the national consciousness, which is a shame, since it's so far from being restored to anything resembling a healthy city.

I'll be spending a day there, probably on the 16th of this month. It'll be the first time I've been able to get back there since Katrina. I hope to see what friends I have that still live there, and get some pictures that I can post here.

A Tense Couple of Weeks

2006-03-20T22:11:00.000-05:00

If it seems I've dropped out of my own life the past couple of weeks, it's because the time for signing divorce and custody papers has arrived, and lately there has been some unexpected wrangling over custody issues. With luck and good judgement they will be settled very shortly, with Mia's best interests guiding us all. It has put literally everything else on the backburner, though.

On the upside, Mia's cousin stayed at our place last night for a sleepover, and they had a great time. I found myself just sitting back and watching the two five-year-olds, listening to their earnest exchanges ("I'm a teenager because I can throw the ball up in the air and catch it." "Well I'm an astronaut."), marveling at the beauty of it, and saddened, too, by all the hostile or indifferent forces crowding in around them, and around all small children.

I'm not a religious man, but I find myself praying for the strength and the wisdom to be her father, to steer her safely into adulthood.

Kites of Doom

2006-03-10T23:36:00.000-05:00

This is truly unbelievable. I caught myself checking the date to make sure it wasn't April 1st already. Is the world really this bonkers?

It's a NY Times link, by the way, so they'll throw up a firewall in a week or so.

Some Probably Useless Thoughts on Horror

2006-02-28T10:35:00.000-05:00

So, I've thought bit more about "horror," why I like it so much, and why the name as a descriptor for fiction makes me nervous. What follows is in no way meant to be taken as my own gospel on the subject. As I have recently been reminded offline, I know better than to make broad generalizations about any genre, specifically one as fractious as this. Furthermore, discussions of this sort are as old as the hills, and nothing is more tedious than someone who claims to have The Answer to a question that has been asked, ad nauseum, for years. So what I offer here is entirely personal.

I believe that horror fiction, at its best, can be the highest order of genre fiction available to us. This is because it seems almost specifically designed to address our own moral and ethical structures. I mentioned this in my post on "S.S." though I didn't go into much detail. Now, horror's focus on moral structure serves to undermine the genre's effectiveness when it serves only to buttress long-standing social structures, which evolved as a tactic to encourage conformity and punish transgression from cultural norms. You know what I'm talking about: promiscuous or adulterous sex is punishable by death, children who don't mind their parents are visited with grotesque punishment, arrogant scientists are persecuted by their own unholy creations. Fiction of this sort works against the genre's strengths by encouraging groupthink, by reinforcing the status quo. It becomes a calcifying force.

I think horror is at its best when it functions as an adversarial literature. To get at what we fear (and what is the essence of horror, if not fear?), the horror writer must be willing to make the reader uncomfortable. Too many writers, I think, settle for the standard tropes -- these can range from vampires and zombies to abandoned mansions and cabins in the wood. While good stories can certainly come from these tropes, their very familiarity works against generating a true sense of horror; I'd argue that they actually breed a sense of comfort. Readers know what they're getting, and no matter how much bloodletting goes along with it, there's very little real horror involved at all.

Having said that, I enjoy the hell out of many, many stories that use these tropes. I might call them dark fantasy before I'd call them horror, but that's a personal thing that really has very little to do with the merits of the story, which is what's most important. The ghost stories of Glen Hirshberg are an excellent example of this. He's using very recognizable genre elements -- ghosts and, sometimes, Halloween -- but he uses them to explore the flaws and sorrows of his characters. I wouldn't call it horror, but who cares? It's wonderful psychological fiction, and often it's very spooky as well. Neil Gaiman's ghost stories -- I'm thinking particularly of "October in the Chair" and "Closing Time" -- are beautifully spooky and sad, and are two of the more memorable genre stories I've read in some time. They're about ghosts, but they're about much else besides. Again, they don't fit my own narrow definition of horror, but it doesn't matter. They're not hampered by their use of convention; on the contrary, those conventions are used to great effect, to make a larger statement about growing up, and abandonment, and about death.

I think the most of the failures associated with the genre come from the novels. And I think this is because the very existence of a horror market encourages some writers to think of themselves exclusively as horror writers, which has the immediate effect of shallowing their pool of ideas. A writer who only writes horror novels will be repeating himself in no time. In my opinion, the best horror stories have come to us from people who do not consider themselves specifically horror writers. I would much sooner trust someone who calls himself a fantasy writer, or even a dark fantasy writer, to produce a good horror story than I would someone who calls himself a horror writer.

I realize my own definition of the word is narrow to the point of being useless when discussing horror -- especially in marketing terms. I make the distinction between horror and dark fantasy, but it has no practical value. It's just a categorical quirk in my brain.

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant in North Carolina

2006-02-20T20:34:00.000-05:00

Early last week I received an invitation from my friend Dale Bailey, a professor at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, NC (and an excellent writer), to attend last Thursday night's public reading of "Monster" by Kelly Link, this semester's writer-in-residence. I'd met Kelly and her husband Gavin very briefly at the World Fantasy Convention in D.C. a couple of years ago, and I was eager to get a chance to make a more durable connection. More than that, though, I wanted to see Dale again; I'd last seen him at that very same convention, and although we'd emailed sporadically in the meantime, I looked forward to a chance to sit down and talk face to face again.

Dale and I were roommates at Clarion (1992, I think), and hit it off pretty well; although we see each other rarely, it always seems as though very little time has elapsed. We seem not to have to expend any effort reacquainting ourselves with one another, falling into the old comfortable patterns pretty easily. Now that I'm living in North Carolina again, I hope to maintain much more frequent contact with him.

Kelly and Gavin are wonderful people, as you might imagine. If you've read their writing (and if not: who are you? what are you doing here?), you know that it's intelligent, layered, and suffused with good humor. They are much the same way in person. For a writer who has been called "the future of American fiction," Kelly is refreshingly down to earth. Gavin is both affable and witty, though I got the impression his humor can be extremely cutting when he wants it to be. Despite being virtually buried by obligations (from what I could gather, one or both are immediately engaged in: teaching two classes at the college; working on the fantasy overview essay for the nineteenth volume of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror; editing a manuscript for a Small Beer Press collection of Alan DeNiro's short fiction; and keeping up with the regular chores inherent in running both the Small Beer Press and their 'zine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet), they spent the afternoon with Dale and me, and hosted the two of us -- along with a few of Dale's students -- for some beer and shoptalk in their apartment after Kelly's reading.

I took two things away from this meeting, both of which I'm going to have to mull over for a bit before I write much about them here. One came from a brief exchange with Kelly. I was orating tediously about my decision to abandon the genre in the mid-nineties, shortly after making my first professional sale ("She Found Heaven" to F&SF). I mentioned that the writing I had done for a while afterward had been mainstream. Kelly asked me if I'd felt that I had to consciously keep the fantasy out of the stories, and without hesitation I said, "Yes." It occurred to me almost immediately afterward that that wasn't true. I had conditioned myself to accept it as truth, which is why the answer came so readily; but it didn't feel right. My hang-ups with genre are long past; but I realized then that I'm kidding myself if I believe that the overtly fantastic is a natural part of my idea process. I have some thoughts on this, which bear directly on the pieces I'm working on now ... but give me another couple of days before I try to write them down.

The other thing came from an exchange with Gavin about horror fiction. Gavin makes no secret his general distaste for horror. When I questioned him about this, he challenged me to come up with examples of good horror writers who do not conform to genre norms (I don't think he doubted their existence; I think he just wanted me to give some solid basis to my viewpoint). I was stunned to find myself at a loss for ready names. I came up with Conrad Williams and Peter Straub then, but I found myself utterly incapable of mounting a credible challenge to his apathy. Now that I've had time to think about it, I could come up with a few more names for him -- Laird Barron is an obvious one, as well as Glen Hirshberg and Michael Marshall Smith -- but precious few. Damnably few, actually. And that recalled to me a long-standing, rather amorphous discomfort I've had with the idea of horror as a genre. One could come up with excellent reasons to exclude most of those names from a straight-up "horror" tag. I've blathered on vaguely about this in the past, to little practical effect, so that's another one to think about for a few days.

So: more to come.

Long GRRM Interview on the Radio

2006-02-10T11:02:00.000-05:00

George R.R. Martin is extensively interviewed by the host of CBC Radio Studio One Book Club, out of Vancouver, right here. There are four audio clips, which together add up to about an hour. In addition to reading two passages from A Feast For Crows, Martin discusses weak fantasy writing, the role of morality in his fiction, and the charge that there is too much gratuitous sex in the series (there is also gratuitous feasting, he says, and gratuitous heraldry). It's a fascinating listen.

There are minor spoilers, for those of you not up to date with the books, but nothing too big. If you've resisted reading them for this long, though, you're really doing yourself a disservice. These books have given me the most fun I've had as a reader in my adult life. It's easily some of the best fantasy writing being done in our lifetime.

Hoegbotton & Sons Clearance Sale

2006-02-06T20:08:00.000-05:00

Jeff VanderMeer, newly anointed judge of the forthcoming World Fantasy Awards, must clear shelf space of dross in order to accommodate all the important new books -- chest-thumping and jaw-wagging -- which will be competing for his favor. We may scrounge for scraps! Head on over to Hoegbotton & Sons, and take advantage!

In all seriousness, there are some great books available, and the prices are impossible to beat. There are a number of unusual or rare editions of Jeff's own work, as well. This is your chance to grab some very rare copies of Stepan Chapman's The Troika, Michael Cisco's original Buzzcity Press printing of The Divinity Student, and Leviathan 2, along with much else.

I see somebody already beat me to the Manly Wade Wellman. Damn you, whoever you are. Damn you to hell!

Race and Star Trek

2006-02-05T02:34:00.000-05:00

For those of you out there who don't read all the comments to blog posts, check back to my previous post on race in the genre and give them a look. Pam Noles, Nalo Hopkinson, and Melantrys engage in a pretty interesting debate on how Star Trek's approach to race and -- with a tip of the cap to Hal Duncan -- otherness has evolved over the years.

Friday's Fun Link #2

2006-02-03T00:32:00.000-05:00

I doubt there's enough good stuff out there for me to do this every Friday, but some things are too good not to call your attention to. It's because I care so much about you.

Link!

This one was emailed to me by Michael Griffith.

Two Recommendations: FREEDOMLAND and FORBIDDEN GAMES

2006-01-31T10:51:00.000-05:00

So, in what is, I assure you, pure coincidence (considering our recent discussions), I've just finished reading Richard Price's novel Freedomland -- a book about, among other things, racial tensions centered around a housing project which abuts a more affluent, white community. This conflict is touched off when a white woman claims her car, with her four-year-old child still in the back seat, was stolen by a black man. The book chronicles the detective work on the case, the extreme pressures exerted both on and by the black community, and the tightrope a black detective must walk as he balances the need to save a child with the righteous outrage of a people who know an abducted black child would not have elicited the same massive police response.

Of note, considering my earlier post: Richard Price is a white author, who dives into the challenge of writing from a black perspective without the slightest hesitation, and with resounding success. (This is nothing new for him, as a quick perusal of his other books will indicate: among them, Clockers and The Samaritan.)

It's an incredible book; the felicitous characterization of Brenda Martin, the mother of the lost child, which is sustained over 500 pages, is nothing short of a marvel. Not to mention, Price has the sharpest ear for dialogue I've encountered from any writer.

Apparently there's a movie coming out. I don't know much about it, but I highly recommend you read the book first.

Another recommendation for you: a French film, circa 1952, by Rene Clement called Forbidden Games. It's about a little girl whose parents are killed during an airstrike while fleeing Paris. She is taken in by a rural family, and befriends their youngest son. The two of them become obsessed with the trappings of death and mourning, and take to stealing crucifixes and constructing their own little cemetery in a nearby barn. Heartbreaking; the girl is nothing short of remarkable. The last scene literally had me crying.

Friday's Fun Link

2006-01-27T01:02:00.000-05:00

I've tried three times to set this up, but nothing I write can do it justice. Just trust me and follow the link. If this doesn't convince you the world is worth saving, I'm going to have to re-evaluate our relationship.

Don't Move That Rock! You'll Kill the Fairies!

2006-01-26T08:39:00.000-05:00

This is the best news story I've read in a long time. It was called to my attention by my friend, John McNichol: according to the Times Online, a development project in St. Fillans, Perthshire, has been scuttled due to the presence of fairies. Just as they were set to move a large rock, developers were stopped by a villager who called out, "Don't move that rock. You'll kill the fairies."

Complaints began to pour into the developers' offices, and the matter was taken to the city council, in which the chairman said, "I do believe in fairies but I can't be sure they live under that rock."

Apparently the council decided to err on the side of caution. The development company was forced to find a new site.

Read it here!

Pam Noles, Ursula LeGuin, and Science Fiction's Dirty Secret

2006-01-25T23:31:00.000-05:00

Pam Noles has an essay on Infinite Matrix that you should read -- now -- if you haven't already. It's called "Shame", and it's about, in part, the failure of the science fiction/fantasy genre to adequately represent -- in most cases even to acknowledge -- any race other than the white one. (She expands upon it a little bit on Nalo Hopkinson's blog here). The essay pivots on the hatchet job the SciFi Channel did on Ursula K. LeGuin's astonishing Earthsea books. In those books, almost none of the characters were white; instead they ranged from a reddish-brown to onyx. Pam writes that coming across those books as a girl marked the first time that she really felt included in the genre she already loved. The SciFi Channel, of course, cast nearly every role with a white actor, with the lonely exception of Danny Glover (fulfilling the role of the Wise, Non-Threatening Black Man, the one usually played by Morgan Freeman). LeGuin herself has written about the offensiveness of this decision on Slate.com, in an essay entitled "A Whitewashed Earthsea."

It seems Pam's essay has sparked a bit of controversy. Rather than post links here, I'll refer you to her own post about it here. Behind one of the links that she lists you'll find someone lamenting the difficulty of writing a black character because he lacks identification. On a superficial level, I can sympathize with this fear. It's easy to worry about getting it wrong, and of being offensive or looking foolish, or both. I remember back in Clarion, one of the students wrote a story which featured a black character. Harlan Ellison, offering critiques via speakerphone (another story for another day), asked the writer if she was black. "No," she said, "but I grew up in a black neighborhood." Ellison shot back, "Yeah, I had a black guy carry my bags for me once. Nothing like identification."

At the time, I silently cheered Ellison for squashing what I took to be this woman's pretentious claim to understand the black experience sufficiently to write about it. Now, I think it was an unfair criticism, because it leads to this fear that we, as white writers -- or, in my case, a white male writer -- cannot write from the viewpoint of a member of another ethnicity or gender. I'll fine tune that point: the more alienated that culture, paradoxically, the lesser the crime. One could write comfortably about a sixteenth century Chinese soldier and not fear criticism; but write from the perspective of a black person, or of a woman, and the fear of judgement balloons like a tumor.

Serious writers have an obligation to empathize. If you can't do that -- if you can't make an effort to feel the experience of another person, no matter how cosmetically and culturally different, then who exactly are you writing about? Are you writing the same set of characters over and over again, only with different names and in different settings? Am I?

Recoiling for fear of fucking it up is unhealthy for the writer, unhealthy for the genre, and unfair to people who find themselves either under-represented or all-but excluded from the genre. It is also downright criminal for a category of fiction which styles itself as forward-thinking, and culturally literate. It's easy to make up another world and fill it with all manner of aliens or critters; less easy, I think, to write well and convincingly of the failures in our own culture. And don't tell me it's all done with metaphor. When I hear that the aliens are symbolic of black Americans, or Native Americans, or gay Americans, or even impoverished Americans, I feel a twinge of disgust. Step up and write about people.

Maybe this gets down to a longstanding problem I've had with genre; I think I've always been, and may always be, a closet realist.

Why do I have to read Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel Delany, or Walter Mosley to read about black people in the genre? Why do I have to read Douglas Clegg or Clive Barker to read about gays?

Pam's essay has me examing my own work all over again. If you're a writer, it should have you examing yours. If you're a reader, look at what you're being offered. They say that the appeal of SF/F is the constant newness it offers, the renewable sense of being off-kilter. How about really getting something new for a change?

In Which I Discover That My Child Is a Disney Character

2006-01-14T00:27:00.000-05:00

Mia had her cute-engine cranked up pretty high tonight. She was singing a phrase from some song I've never heard, but I could tell she heard it on the radio because she faithfully reproduced a British accent when she got to the word "heart."

"It's my favorite song in the world," she said. "When I hear it my ears have a party!"

Also, she's been learning about Martin Luther King in kindergarten. While I was tucking her in tonight, after storytime, she said she gave "twenty prayers" for "Martin Leather King." When I said that was sweet, she told me about the birthday cake she planned to make for him, which would come with a giant frosting heart. I smiled and said that sounded really yummy.

Then she got her sad face and said, "I wish he didn't die."

"Me too," I said, rubbing the hair from her forehead.

"I would tell him, thanks for changing all those laws."

It's the kind of thing that if I saw on a movie screen I'd choke on the schmaltz. If I read it in a book I'd hurl it away and cry out, "Why do you assault me with your saccharine fantasies!?"

But it's my kid, and I'm just a sappy old dad. It's beautiful.

Why I Wrote "S.S."

2006-01-10T09:24:00.000-05:00

One thing you come to take for granted living in New Orleans is how readily it forgives eccentricity. I never thought of myself as other than a fairly normal person. Sure, I have this predeliction for writing dark stories, and I like watching dark movies, and sometimes my humor runs to the morbid, but . . . hey, that's normal, right?

For many of us in the genre, of course, it is. By New Orleans standards, it was certainly too tame a character trait to qualify as weird, or even interesting.

But standards are different in Asheville. When people I work with found out that I write and have published a few stories, a few were eager to read some. So I circulated a copy of "You Go Where It Takes You," and the reaction has been largely one of dismay. One person has asked me why I have custody of my daughter if I hate her that much. Another has stopped talking to me altogether.

At first I was stunned by this reaction, although now I see I shouldn't have been taken by surprise. Of course you always know that there are going to be people who can't separate the author from the characters, but it's strange to actually encounter it for the first time. It certainly convinces me that I'll never give any of them a copy of "S.S."

"S.S." was published in March of 2005 by The 3rd Alternative. That probably mean that the few of you who come over here have not read it. It's about Nick, a fifteen year old boy, living at home with a mother rapidly descending into insanity, who is seduced by the white nationalist movement. Since the story is told from Nick's point of view, it is also a sympathetic portrayal. Obviously, any confusion between character and author could lead to some trouble.

Many years ago, my brother spent some time in a white supremacist group. He has long since abandoned it, as well as the belief system that accompanied it (by the way, I asked him if I could write about this, and he's given me his blessing). At the time, though, it was scary for me and our mother; very likely for him, too. He wore the persona like a coat, and it seemed to change him completely. I remember him bringing friends over to the house: big guys, shaved heads, radiating hostility. I was never afraid of my brother -- he was, after all, my four years my junior, and a lifetime of exploiting that fact had deluded me into thinking that I would always be able to squash him into submission if I had to -- but I was afraid of his friends. They looked like they could hurt people if they wanted to. And they looked like they wanted to.

This was right around the time, too, when Geraldo Rivera had the neo-Nazis on his show, and one of them broke his nose with a chair. They were getting a lot of press -- at least it seemed so to me. And the public reaction was, of course, one of moral outrage. And that's the proper reaction to any belief system that inspires violence to a people based on ethnicity, religion, what have you. But that outrage is also a warping factor in and of itself, and all to often what happens is that the members of these groups are painted as two-dimensional monsters. There's no substance to them; no gray. (We're seeing this now with "evil," "death-worshiping" Islamic radicals.)

I probably would have leaped eagerly into that reductivist mindset if my brother hadn't been a part of that scene. And I saw the complexities: I heard the racism, saw the burgeoning urge to violence, watched the contempt grow like a cancer. But I saw that same kid (and many of them are just kids) come home at night and play with his G.I. Joe action figures in his bedroom. You know, voices, sound effects, everything. And that created such a dissonance; it was hard to get my mind around it. But it convinced me that he was still just a kid, and that there was hope for him. And that anyone who said he was evil was not making an effort to understand the roots of the problem. Calling it evil wasn't going to solve anything.

It's a liberal's disease, I know: try to understand the villain. Find his inner child. Discover why he is who he is. But I really believe in that. And because of my brother, I know there is a lot of validity to that approach.

So, years later, thinking back on all of that, I decided to write a story about a kid who gets caught up in the movement. It's not my brother's story. Our mother is not crazy, and our father did and continues to maintain an active presence in our lives. But there are cosmetic similarities: a growing sense of alienation and worthlessness; a feeling of abandonment; and a desperate need to fit somewhere.

A lot of people call horror fiction a moral fiction. You know, drugs and sex will get you decapitated. For a long time I scoffed at that notion, and when I wrote "You Go Where It Takes You" I thought I was rebelling against it. But I understand now, especially in light of "S.S.", that I am very much preoccupied with morality, and that those stories at least can fairly be called moral fictions. What I do rebel against, however, is the notion that horror fiction should be an instructive moral fiction. I think all good fiction should ask questions. Beware fiction that offers solutions; beware fiction that offers catharsis. You're being drugged.

I wrote "S.S." to get readers to see the world through Nick's eyes. It was an uncomfortable story to write, and I hope it's an uncomfortable story to read. There are no apologies offered for the epithets he uses, or the actions he takes, because he does not feel they're wrong. I don't celebrate Nick; I don't really like him, even. But I get the kid. I understand him.

If this story ever gets a wider circulation, and people confuse me with the protagonist, the way they sometimes do with Toni, I understand it might cause me some trouble. Especially if people find out about my brother's history and decide to leap to some handy conclusions. But I like fiction that digs into ugly places; I like fiction that places the world in an unusual and disturbing perspective. I think that if horror fiction is truly an exploration into morality, then this is one of its duties. Maybe its most important duty.

That's why I wrote "S.S."

But I'm still too chicken to bring it into work.

Andy Fox in New Orleans

2006-01-05T21:47:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned sometime previously, my friend Andy Fox, author of Fat White Vampire Blues and Bride of the Fat White Vampire, is still living in New Orleans with his family, doing his part in helping it get back on its feet. He doesn't have his own blog to chronicle the city's struggle, unfortunately, but he does have a thread or two dedicated to the topic over at the Night Shade Discussion Boards. It's one of the best places to go on the web for a more personal approach to New Orleans than what you'll find in the papers.

I read Andy's books when I was living in New Orleans, and enjoyed them at the time; but recently I've gone back and reread long passages from them, and they resonate with me a lot more. He captures the place and its people so well that I can practically smell the place. Believe it or not, that's actually a good thing.

Here's another New Orleans-related site, dedicated to doing some good: Rebuild 504. It's a small effort, judging from the money they've raised so far, but a lot of small steps will take you a long way.

Merry Ex-Mas

2005-12-29T01:54:00.000-05:00

So: I've been depressed. Or I guess I am depressed.

I feel very uncomfortable writing that; I feel like I'll be perceived as grasping for attention, or whining, or something equally churlish and contemptible. And I should point out that I've seen real depression -- the crushed spirit kind, the gun in the mouth kind -- and this is not of that variety. I've never experienced that myself, and I don't mean to trivialize it.

I'm not one of these people who gets down every Christmas, either. In fact I quite like Christmas: the lights, the smell of the tree, the cold weather, the anticipation. Hell, I even like a few Christmas carols. Ever since Mia was born, I get to experience all its joys vicariously, and in some ways that's even better. Making your own little kid giddy with delight is by far the best thing you'll ever experience. It lights you up. It makes you shine.

But this one was kind of a bummer. It's because of the divorce. It isn't final yet, but we've been separated since March, and it feels final enough. Erin came to visit again, so she wouldn't miss Mia opening her presents Christmas morning. We sat around the tree and watched Mia do her thing, and she seemed happy enough. But there was a mild -- tension isn't quite the right word -- flatness, maybe, to the proceedings. A weird sense of going through the motions, a lack of spontaneity. We were wearing our happy masks, though our eyes were filled with dead channel static. At the time, I chalked it up to the stress of Erin's visit, and of having to visit my mother with Erin in tow and somehow avoiding all the obvious discomforts that might entail. And those things certainly factored into the equation.

But I've had some time to think more about it the last few days. (Mia is in Alabama for the week, visiting Erin and her grandparents, leaving me free to commiserate with my own terrors and self-doubts.) And it's become clear to me that I really miss being married. I miss the comfort marriage brings, the certainty of having at least one person in your corner, of shared parental responsibilities. I miss another body in the bed. I miss someone waiting for me at home. I miss having someone else to be amazed by Mia with me.

And, while recognizing all of that, I also understand that this particular marriage cannot work. Its bedrock was starting to crack quite a while before I was ever aware of it. I won't go into the reasons for it here -- it would be self-serving, I think, and deeply unfair to Erin -- but I will say that divorce was not then what I wanted. A year ago today I still thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with her.

It is an awesome thing to realize how quickly, and how savagely, your entire life can change.

I guess I'm just lonely, and feeling sorry for myself. It doesn't help that I'm turning 35 on Saturday. Assuming I get my allotted 72 years, I'm almost exactly at the midpoint. And I feel like I've lost everything I had: my wife, my friends, my city. And I feel like it's unfair.

Believe me, though, I know how full of shit I am. I have Mia, for God's sake, and she brings me so much joy. She galvanizes me. I have an ability to write which I have neglected for so long, but which I find is miraculously still there, ready to be honed at last. And my friends are not really gone; they're just scattered, and they're suffering from displacement, too.

In the course of writing this I've managed to slap myself out of my self-pity. Sorry you had to read it, but really, what else is a blog but the blogger's long, loving, sentimental gaze into the mirror? Welcome to my narcissism. You really should have expetced this.

In an essay on style, Norman Mailer wrote, "The idea could even be advanced that style comes to young authors about the time they recognize that life is ... ready to injure them. Something out there is not necessarily fooling." I may not be young anymore, but I've just been knocked to the floor. There's blood in my mouth and in my nose, and I think that's my tooth over there by that guy's foot. Apparently life is not, after all, fucking around. I can feel sorry for myself or I can get up.

It's two o'clock in the morning. I want to go to bed, but I have work to do.

House Republicans Enact "Martial Law" to Force Budget Vote

2005-12-20T09:45:00.000-05:00

When will enough be enough? How much abuse are we willing to take? The House Republicans enacted "martial law" over the weekend in order to get their bloodthirsty new budget passed; what this does is essentially circumvent requirements that a minimum of 24 hours pass between the introduction of a bill and the final vote on that bill, giving representatives time to actually read what they're voting on. The Republicans were thus able to force a vote on a budget hundreds of pages long without giving anyone (namely Democrats) time to read it. It's worth noting that the bill passed even though every single Democrat in the House voted against it.

I found this story over at TPMCafe, a site which is well worth your time.

Big Brother Bush

2005-12-19T01:08:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting post on the current question of whether or not Bush's authorization of the NSA to spy on American citizens without a warrant was, in fact, legal:

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Purposely misquoting FISA to defend the Bush Administration

Be sure to read the comments (ignoring, of course, the occassional hysterical partisan), which is where the real debate begins.

Lurching From My Sick Bed . . .

2005-12-18T22:18:00.000-05:00

I've spent the last week crawling through my daily routines with dwindling strength, fading will. Mia brought home the flu virus from school (show-and-tell, Daddy! WHAMMO). We've been filling our little apartment with the cloistered funk of our illness. There are signs we're coming out of it, thankfully, one of which is that the thought of sitting down at the computer no longer induces hemmhoraging.

We managed to get up the Christmas tree today, finally, and I did some shopping for her: I got her some activity books and a CD-ROM which will help me introduce her to nouns and verbs, as well as fractions. She has recently expressed interest in chemistry and paleantology, so I got her a science experiment kit as well, which will let her perform some of the basic tricks.

(Understand, by the way, that when I say "expressed interest," I realize I'm talking about a five year old. I believe the conversation went something like this: "Daddy, what's science?" "Well, science is the study how things work: people, stars, the whole world." I then gave brief descriptions of astronomy, oceanography, and biology. "What about when you do this?" (makes pouring motions) "That's chemistry." "Well, when I grow up I want to do chemsitry!" Rather than laugh this off, I've decided to actively encourage this line of thought: we'll play with science kits, look at some basic science books, and with a little luck she'll see how cool it really is.)

And she's already writing books, the precocious little so-and-so. Beat me to the punch. She gets six or seven sheets of paper, folds them into roughly bookshape, and makes stories out of them: a title page complete with byline, followed by sentences and illustrations. The first one is called The Crayons and is, as you might imagine, about the high times and misadventures of crayon people. You should see the faces on these guys. Another is called Eeeek! (actually spelled "Ekkkk!"), which she assures me she will one day make into a movie; it's about a boy who convinces his mother that there's a monster in the house. When she finally starts to believe him, he reveals that in fact he was only pretending to be the monster all along, and laughs cruelly at her.

Before the flu punched me in the gut and squat-humped me, I'd been reading John Crowley's Little, Big. Since then, my attention span has been reduced to that of a right wing radio talk show host, so I've been reading Conan stories instead. And I'm not ashamed to tell you that I still think they are awesome. "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." Fucking right! (That's from "The Tower of the Elephant," by the way, and it occurs shortly before Conan splits the skull of some condescending nobleman.)

This down week has also made it more difficult to hold to my plan of finishing my short story, "North American Lake Monsters," before January. Since Mia will spend the week following Christmas visiting her mother in Alabama, it's still an attainable goal, but I'll have to not fuck around. A habit I'm still trying to break.

I realize there's very little of interest in this post; mostly it represents my effort at shaking off the lethargy and working again. IN order to leave you with something worthwhile, however, I'll leave you with a link to one of my favorite sites on the web: trust me, it's Damn Interesting.

Lucius Shepard on "You Go Where It Takes You"

2005-12-08T23:29:00.000-05:00

Well, Lucius Shepard wrote his piece on my story, "You Go Where It Takes You," for the Ellen Datlow/SciFiction Project.

It's really a very kind piece (better written than the story it describes, but then that's Lucius for you), and the fact that it's written by this writer, in particular, means more to me than I can tell you.

You can find it here.

Thanks, Lucius.

Now I have to live up to that somehow. . . .

An Appreciation of Glen Hirshberg's "Struwwelpeter"

2005-12-07T21:12:00.000-05:00

What follows is the appreciation of Hirshberg's story I wrote for The Ellen Datlow/SciFiction Project, which I first mentioned in my second post. If you haven't gone over there yet, do so; you're missing out.

Also, if you haven't already, pick a story which hasn't been claimed yet and volunteer to write an appreciation. There are many great stories remaining. (For example, someone has got to pick up Dale Bailey's "In Green's Dominion.")

Here's what I wrote:

The original "Struwwelpeter" is a poem by the nineteenth century German writer Heinrich Hoffmann. It is one of a series of cautionary verses meant to frighten children into proper behavior; other titles in the collection include "The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches," in which a young girl plays with matches and is burned to death, and "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb," a particularly frightening poem about the "tall tailor" who comes to slice off the thumbs of little children who cannot keep them out of their mouths. "Struwwelpeter" is actually one of the mildest poems in the collection. It's about a boy with terrible hygiene: he refuses to wash his face or comb his hair, and his nails grow to grotesque lengths. He is an awful little boy, we are told, and everybody hates him. Little basis, it would seem, for a ghost story.

And so we come to Glen Hirshberg's "Struwwelpeter." It's about an awful boy, too, but it's easy to get distracted from that by the wonderful creepiness of the setting. There are many elements of the traditional ghost story to be found here: a windy Halloween night; a haunted house; a disagreeable old man who surrounds himself with strange symbols and objects, who speaks darkly of raising the dead. The story is laden with images all ghost story aficionados are familiar with: mysterious, half-glimpsed lights; a stray article of clothing lying, abandoned, in an empty room where a person ought to be; the doomful tolling of a bell. We become so caught up in the spooky trappings of the tale that we run the risk of forgetting the title, and the title's heritage. Hirshberg is intimately familiar with the tropes of the ghost story, and uses them here to brilliant effect. Like Shirley Jackson, he only drops suggestions, letting the reader's imagination do the heavy lifting. And while we are occupied with the immediate threat of the haunted house, the real story is uncoiling underneath, infinitely more dangerous.

Because this story, like all of Hirshberg's stories, is about human pain. How it manifests, and how it steers us.

Here's the opening paragraph:

"This was before we knew about Peter, or at least before we understood what we knew, and my mother says it's impossible to know a thing like that, anyway. She's wrong, though, and she doesn't need me to tell her she is, either, as she sits there clutching her knees and crying in the television light."

It is a wonderfully complete paragraph. We are presented with a mystery, and the engine of the plot: this Peter, and the thing about him which everyone should have known, but didn't. To me, though, the strength of this paragraph -- and its principal beauty -- comes from that last image: "as she sits there clutching her knees and crying in the television light." It's one of the most powerful, most economically precise depictions of loneliness and despair that I've read in a long time. It just about breaks your heart. And it sets the mood for this story perfectly.

This is a story about isolation, alienation, the hope of fathers and the trust between friends. Like Hoffmann's "Struwwelpeter," it is a story of the despised boy. The supernatural trappings are window dressing for the real horror at its heart. Horror writers should read it, along with other stories by Hirshberg (particularly "The Two Sams"), and learn from him. This is the scary stuff.

I can't end this, though, without calling further attention to the language. There's so much joy to be found on the sentence level alone. Take, for example:

"We wandered toward the locks, into the park. The avenue between the pine trees was empty except for a scatter of solitary bums on benches, wrapping themselves in shredded jackets and newspapers as the night nailed itself down and the dark billowed around us in the gusts of wind like the sides of a tent. In the roiling trees, black birds perched on the branches, silent as gargoyles."

If that doesn't do it for you, I just don't know what you're doing here.

Al Jazeera Would Like Not to Be Bombed, Please

2005-12-05T16:03:00.000-05:00

The Mirror's recent story about Bush's desire to bomb the Qatar offices of the Arabian news agency Al Jazeera has provoked remarkably little attention in the American press. Besides being an astonishing act of aggression against a country which has allied itself with the United States in its Middle Eastern gambit, it stands as just one more example of the Bush Administration's well-documented hostility to the idea of a free press. (In case you've forgotten, refresh yourself on the stories of the Office of Strategic Influence, Jeff Gannon, the purchasing of favorable coverage of education policies, and the current question about planted stories in Iraqi newspapers.)

There is, of course, some question over whether or not this was a serious suggestion. But the hardline response from the British government raises some doubts regarding an unnamed official's contention that Bush was just making a "joke": David Keogh, a civil servant in the Cabinet Office, and Leo O'Connor, a former employee of Labour MP Tony Clarke, stand accused of dispensing top secret information under the Official Secrets Act. It is worth noting that under this act, journalists who further disseminate illegally obtained information are subject to prosecution as well. If it was just a poor attempt at humor, why not allow The Mirror, or any other British newspaper that gets a hold of it, to publish it?

A few alarmed staffers of Al Jazeera have made their own blog in response to this, called Don't Bomb Us. Whatever your feelings about the war in Iraq, it's worth a visit. In the United States, the press has been undermined and manipulated to such an extent that a skeptical approach is the only rational one available to us. In Great Britain, the government can prosecute journalists for telling the truth, even if it's in the public interest. Responsible people have an obligation to look beyond the official sources of information -- to look, in fact, in the very places we're told not to look.

Check out the blog, and while you're at it check out Al Jazeera's official site. I'm not saying you'll find the unvarnished truth there, or that those sites are any more reliable than our own. I just don't know. What I do know is that their perspective is different -- although not as different as you might think -- and that you might be surprised by what you find. Come to your own conclusions, of course.

Come to your own informed conclusions.

Warning: Cute Kid Post

2005-11-30T23:21:00.000-05:00

Mia wanted to get a snack from the pantry. A box of raisins, maybe, or a granola bar.

"No more food," I said. "Dinner will be ready in twelve minutes." Hamburger Helper simmered in the big cooker thing. I don't know what the hell it's called. It cooks.

She threw her hands up over her head, flung her body back onto the couch, and said, in a weak and sorrowful voice, "Oooooooh, that's making my brain break!"

"It's making your brain break?"

"It's making my brain hatch like an egg!"

I couldn't keep the smile off my face, which did not endear me to my daughter just then. "What's coming out of it?" I asked.

Pitifully: "All my ideas."

Beautiful Prose

2005-11-30T00:15:00.000-05:00

Almost as much as a good story, I love beautiful prose. An artfully crafted sentence can send a shiver of joy through me; it can induce feelings which I probably ought not to discuss in polite society.

But here, I reckon it's okay.

If you haven't read Annie Proulx, for God's sake, get started. Here are two samples from her stunning short story "The Mud Below," collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories:

"He knew he had little talent for friendship or affection, stood armored against love, though when it did come down on him later it came like an axe and he was slaughtered by it."

And:

"Emanating from him was a kind of carved-wood quietude common to those who have been a long time without sex, out of the traffic of the world."

Maybe they don't do it for you, but those sentences strike me as finely cut diamonds. The strong imagery, the startling and yet completely appropriate juxtaposition of love and slaughter, of lovelessness and interior focus, and the crisp and elegant precision of each sentence are a marvel to me.

As an added bonus, the book has a lovely painting by William Matthew on the cover.

If you love good prose, you need to read this woman's work.

The Tinker Toy Bomb

2005-11-27T23:35:00.000-05:00

Mia, my five year old daughter, has developed a sudden and disturbing interest in bombs. Specifically, atomic bombs. She has announced her intent to build one. This arose from a session browsing her children's dictionary. We flipped through pages and discussed windmills, hydroelectrics, guinea pigs, and plumbing. She turned back a handful of pages and there it was: this beautiful, appalling flower in the middle of the page. A mushroom cloud.

"What's that, Daddy?"

She then proceeded to answer her own question. (Damn all those hours spent teaching her to read! Why didn't anyone stop me!?)

"Atomic . . . bomb. What's an atomic bomb, Daddy?"

Mia is extremely bright. I do not believe in telling her pretty lies; but then again I do not think it's right to dump too much reality on a child, either. What with the divorce, she's had quite her fill of reality, I think. So I gave her a quick answer and I tried to pass over the subject.

"Bombs are things people use in wars, to hurt people. Bombs are bad."

"Why are they bad?"

"Well, because they hurt people. Mostly innocent people."

I consider it a mercy that she did not ask me to define innocence (she must have been off her game that night; usually she's quite adept at zeroing in on the most uncomfortable topics). Instead she seemed to accept my crude definition and allowed me to turn back a few more pages and discuss the flaws and virtues of apricots.

Later that night, though, some conflict arose when I tried to give her a little good advice (I can't remember now what it was; probably I told her not to eat the cat). She stormed off to her room, her little face crunched in rage, and screamed over her shoulder: "I'm going to go start a war!" I sat there quietly, disgesting this information and wondering how seriously I ought to take it (did I mention she's bright?). A few short minutes later, she emerged smiling from her room, holding aloft a weirdly menacing Tinker Toy contraption. It bristled with colorful spokes; it had spinning parts. "Look Daddy, I made a bomb! When this little piece falls off, people die!"

She then flung the thing through the air and the proper bit came off. So did much else. She flopped down onto the ground, peered down her shirt, and said, "I see the darkness on me."

I picked up a book today called Nuclear Terrorism, by Graham Allison. Allison is, as far as I can tell, a reputable man. According to his backcopy bio, he is the founding dean of Harvard's "modern" John F. Kennedy School of Government, and served as special advisor to the secretary of defense under Reagan and as assistant secretary of defense under Clinton. One of the primary contentions put forth in the book is that a nuclear attack in this country is all but a certainty.

It's been my pet fear for years. I tend not to talk about it with my friends because I'm afraid they'll think I'm turning into some survivalist nut who wants to build a bunker. But the thing is, part of me does want to build a bunker. A bunker with walls nine feet thick, a hundred feet under the surface of the earth. Part of me wants to get out the map and pick a location as far away from significant metropolitan centers as I can and move there with my daughter. And then build a bunker. Of course, these options are unavailable to me. I rent, so I can't start digging large holes in the backyard (assuming I had the money, which, you know, hah!) Mia's world has already been turned upside down and shaken vigorously when her mother and I separated and initiated divorce proceedings. Even though such a move would satisfy the pessimist in me, who counts on the worst possible outcome, I know that it would be cruel to my daughter. What she needs now, more than anything else, is stability. She needs her father not to succumb to his fears, irrational or otherwise.

So I stay put. And I worry. And I know I'm doing the right thing as far as her psychological wellbeing is concerned. The part of me which grew up during the last twenty years of the Cold War -- the one that heard about nuclear bombs all his life and saw it amount to nothing -- dismisses these fears as hysterical, or at least exaggerated.

But the quiet part of me, the stare-at-the-fucking-ceiling-all-night part of me, sees that hideous flower blooming in D.C., or Atlanta, and considers the radioactive fallout whipped into town by the weather. That part of me imagines tumors popping up like mushrooms in a rainstorm: in me, in my little girl.

Normally I try to keep the father and and doomsayer separate. But then Mia finds a picture in her dictionary and makes a little bomb from rainbow-colored sticks. Her little face is flushed with excitement and pride. And those two sides of me, the warring senses of responsibility, meet, and stare each other down.

And so I help Mia pick up the pieces of her toy, and I wonder: What the fuck am I supposed to do?

And Let Us Give Thanks For, Um . . .

2005-11-24T21:56:00.001-05:00

Okay, so much for not being political. This comes from Stephen Legget, via And We Shall March, the blog of my friend Pam Noles. Permission has been given to disseminate. According to Pam, Mr. Legget has said, "I would like for it to spread like a virus." Well, here you go.

"Lord, on this day consecrated for the purpose of heightening our awareness and gratitude for the blessings in our lives, we thank you, first, for giving the indigenous inhabitants of this continent so little resistance to the pathogens carried by our forefathers when they arrived here, full of hope, from their European homelands, thus making it easy for the natives to share their lands with our people.

Lord, we thank you, also, for sending us in these troubled times a president with the vision and courage to lead us into war, whatever the cost to the common people, in defense of important economic interests of our country.

We thank you for sending us leaders able and willing to make the hard choices these troubled times present, and sacrifice our civil liberties in exchange for the appearance of increased security for our children.

And we thank you for bringing us into this era of new hope, in which, for the first time in nearly a century, we can look forward to the possibility of raising children free of the burden and stigma of a scientific education. Lord, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for these and all our blessings, and we pray that you send us the strength and the wisdom to be worthy of them.
Amen.
Stephen Legget"

Personally, I'd change the word "present" in paragraph three to "demand," but I didn't write it.

Go and do likewise, gents. Go and do likewise.

I Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans

2005-11-21T23:35:00.000-05:00

I recently received a call from Neal, who was one of my best friends in New Orleans. He relocated to southern California after Katrina hit, and only got back to New Orleans last week to retrieve his salvageable possessions. He told me that the city was starting to look like its old self again, at least in the lower Garden District, which is where we used to live. He said in some areas it appeared as though nothing had ever happened.

It was good news, of course, and it triggered a powerful new rush of nostalgia in me.

I moved out of New Orleans with my daughter one month before Katrina hit. My wife and I were in the middle of divorce proceedings, and once it was decided that our daughter would live with me, I decided to move us to Asheville where I had family I could rely on to help, when things got tough. I had spent the previous thirteen years in New Orleans, and -- in every real sense -- that city became my true home. There is no other place in this country where I feel as immediate a sense of belonging. Like Neil Young said, "all my changes were there." (I think he was talking about Toronto, but never mind.)

When the storm hit, and the extent of the damage became clear, I felt an overwhelming urge to be there. If my daughter hadn't been with me, and I wasn't aware of that far larger responsibility, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have been down there at once. I know that probably sounds ludicrous, considering the great suffering going on there, but New Orleans had come to mean so much to me that I felt I should be present for what was arguably its darkest hour. I felt I should help it, in whatever way was possible, to recover. I admit I also felt the writer's compulsion to witness: I knew I was missing a singular opportunity to gather incredible material. But I don't want to reduce the feeling I had to a purely mercenary impulse. I loved New Orleans, and I felt as though I had betrayed the city, somehow, by dodging this particular bullet.

And of course I still love New Orleans. Which is why, when Neal called me a couple of days ago, it was a relief to hear that it was actually healing; but it was also heartbreaking, in a way. I can only liken it to being in love with someone who, while you are gone, is beset by some awful circumstance; something happens which pares away the peripheral layers of being and what is left, what you find upon your return, is a leaner, tougher, sadder version of the person you left behind. You still love this person, and it is possible that you are yet loved in return; but you missed something crucial, something defining. And, in a fundamental sense, you are strangers to each other from that moment on.

So the work of rebuilding goes on. My friend Andy Fox is there, and his aggressive good will and civic activism are exactly what the city needs if it is to assume a character that can somehow overcome this miserable moment in its history. And I look forward to the day -- soon, I hope -- that I get a chance to revisit the place, to stop by the Avenue Pub, where I worked for eight years, and have a beer with whatever old friends remain.

But I know it will be bittersweet. I still love New Orleans, but I don't think I know her anymore.

The Ellen Datlow/SciFiction Project

2005-11-19T23:29:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has travelled to this godforsaken little cranny of the cyber-abyss is probably already familiar with the impending demise of SciFiction, where Ellen Datlow -- easily one of the best editors the genre has ever had -- has published hundreds of wonderful stories by newer writers (that's right, Spanky, I allude to myself, but also to people like Glen Hirshberg, Kelly Link, M. Rickert, and Dale Bailey) as well as established authors (Lucius Shepard, James P. Blaylock, Rick Bowes, and Michael Bishop). She has also kept the younger generation of fans current by reprinting classic stories by the likes of Harlan Ellison, Alfred Bester, Manly Wade Wellman, and others. In short, SciFiction was arguably the premier showcase of the best short fiction the genre has to offer.To eulogize its passing and to recognize the value of its contributions, a website called The Ellen Datlow/SciFiction Project been created. Each story in the archives has been linked, and will be accompanied with an appreciation of that story written by a fan and/or another writer. It's a classy send-off a for a top-notch venue.

I've signed on to write an appreciation of Glen Hirshberg's story "Struwwelpeter." My own story is getting some attention from Lucius Shepard, which to me is like Ted Williams telling me I've got a nice swing.

Go to the site and check it out. And visit SciFiction before it's too late.

I Can't Go On, I'll Go On

2005-11-18T00:36:00.000-05:00

It seems appropriate to start a blog about writing (by an all-but-unknown writer, no less) with a confession: I hate writing. I hate the process. I hate sitting down and trying to focus on the work at hand. I go to mighty lengths to distract myself from it; I am in fact much better at not writing than I am at writing, which is why at 34 I only have a small handful of stories in print, and run the very real risk of being one of those sad souls who could have made it, should have made it, but just didn't have the gumption to get the job done.

The bitch of it is there's nothing else I'd rather do. When I've finished a story, or even a paragraph I'm proud of, I literally feel like I've snorted a line of cocaine. My body is electrified, the endorphins are crackling, I punch strangers in the face because dammit, I can. Luckily I'm pretty good at it (writing, that is; not so much with the punching (at the end of this little post I'll list some of the places you can find my stories, so you can come to your own conclusions on whether or not I'm full of shit)). And I certainly don't want to end up on that scrap heap of might-have-beens. So -- for the first time in my life -- I'm making a commitment to writing every day. That's part of the reason that I started this blog; even if no one ever reads this thing (and, really, let's be frank: if you're here, who the fuck are you? What is the matter with you?), I'll feel as though there is a presence over my shoulder, which I should not disappoint.

In this blog I will likely write about my daughter, though I've not decided yet how much I should. I'll write about bartending in New Orleans, which I did for nearly ten years, and bartending in Asheville, which I've done for four months so far, and which is far less interesting. I'll try to avoid politics, though no promises there. Let's just say I'm on the left and leave it at that (for now). I'll write about writers I admire, and why I admire them. I'll probably write a little about horror fiction, and why I'm drawn to the genre despite being uncomfortable with its existence as a genre. God knows what else. I've never done this before.

Here's a list of my stories so far and where they might be found, starting with the most recent.

"S.S." The 3rd Alternative #41
"You Go Where It Takes You" SciFiction (reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Vol. 17)
"The Malady of Ghostly Cities" The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts
"The Casual Conversation of Angels" The Silver Web (#11) (apparently to be reprinted in their forthcoming Best Of anthology)
"She Found Heaven" The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, (reprinted at Fantastic Metropolis, and included in Breaking Windows: A Fantastic Metropolis Sampler)