Too cynical to live, too dumb to die,
I'm still standing: Consider being afraid . . .
I've had it with these
motherfucking snakes
on this motherfucking plane!
--Samuel L Jackson, Snakes On a Plane
The sun shines high above
The sounds of laughter
The birds swoop down upon
The crosses of old grey churches
We say that we're in love
While secretly wishing for rain
Sipping coke and playing games
September's here again
September's here again . . .
--David Sylvian, "September"
Okay, it wasn't exactly serpents and the aircraft was metaphoric, but--yes--I, too, thoroughly (and motherfuckingly) had had it. For a while, at least. But now I'm back kicking ass and taking names. I guess everybody needs a hobby. Let's just say I was on a Business Trip and leave it at that. For the more melodramatically inclined among you, it turned out that only Moriarty plummeted into Reichenbach Falls--after which, I spent a long time in Tibet. Which pretty much brings us to this, The Return . . . Special thanks to what scholars of Elizabethan literature call "diverse hands"--they kept this place dusted and tidied while I was Elsewhere doing Other, Unfortunately Unavoidable Things.
It also should be noted that I lost a good friend along the way, demonstrating the extreme and unpredictable nature of this very peculiar trip. But if I have any advantage over Tony Dresden, it is the ability to say That was then and this is now. So onward . . .
At the top, let's be clear about this entry--given the amount of catching up that needs to be done, it is, by necessity, the Jagged Jump-Cut Edition of a post. So put aside any expectation of elegant thematic arcs--this is a reorganization meeting. Nothing more. Nothing less. I hope you brought a legal pad.
Business Item 1: For those of you just joining us--and for the rest who have probably forgotten by now--where's how we play: These posts are first-draft exercises--Gonzo entries if you will. In most instances, they're done in a single sitting. Once that hard return is hit for the paragraph in question, that's it--lockdown time. At the end of these oddly masochistic exercises in prose styling, we go Live and Direct: With the greatest insouciance, I send the sucker into the cyber-aether and it materializes here. No second draft, no soul-searching, no dithering over implication or impact. Just me betting myself that I can get it more right than not as a one-time-only improvisation. If I lose, then I fail publicly--and a hard-earned writerly reputation flutters away into digital rain.
The only proviso is this: Over time, I will fix typos and mindnumbingly egregious instances of crash-and-burn grammar. Not all, to be sure, but a sincere effort is made. When this is factored into the exercise, probably five percent of the first-draft material is further dicked with. Which means 95 percent of each entry is genuinely as billed: one-take-only writing. I was about to say it seems cold in here, but then I remembered--it's only my professional and personal ass hanging in the breeze . . .
Business Item 2: There's ongoing bewilderment swirling around the novel, so here's some mouth-of-horse clarification before we move on. I wrote 130,000 words on a kind of deadline I wouldn't wish on anyone. Contextualized this way, the results are satisfying to me. No one could have done better, given the circumstances. But life changes--publishers are intrigued and I also suddenly find myself with unexpected additional elbow room. My initial reaction was, with brutal honesty, to bind the art to its context and let it speak in that fashion. Meaning, I wanted to walk away from the book--call it the equivalent of a live jazz recording and forego any after-the-fact studio overdubbing. It was unruly, even by Gonzo standards, but I was sincerely willing to give it up to some smart editor--a fantasy projection of myself, probably--who would cleave-out something worthwhile. I wanted to do the Thomas Wolfe Thing and deliver boxes of manuscript pages to a latter-day equivalent of Maxwell Perkins. Except (1) I'm not Thomas Wolfe and (2) no one has replaced Perkins in the same way there has been no New Garbo.
Of course, the above explanation--while not untrue--is shot-through with self-protecting bullshit. The deeper truth is I simply didn't want to wade back into the book--it was a personally hard story to tell. (I had had it with all those motherfucking snakes in that motherfucking plot.) But, care of blog-centric pre-publication, I seem to have connected with readers as I had hoped to. This is where the Internet routes around artistic dithering. Thomas Wolfe had no idea if he was connecting until the Perkins-mediated version of his story was published. But I realize that my big, ungainly unedited manuscript is having the desired affect on readers upstream of publishing-house editing. And this reminds me I'm an artist these days, and not a corporate hack producing mercenary prose.
So, yes, I have decided to wade back in and finish the job as I first intended. In short, uncoupling the art from its original, rush-job context. But more importantly, I've admitted to myself that doing the Right EffingThing in terms of the book means digging deep enough to once again make myself wince as I revisit the source material. This revelation was also driven by my continuing work on the "happier" theatrical iteration of the work. After all, my experiment is the creation of a triptych--and all three "panels" require equal completion.
(Speaking of which--Business Item 2-B--an additional, structurally demanded song has been written for the theater piece. You can find it here In addition to the needed contribution to the play's story arc, I'm pleased with its song aesthetics. The challenge here was to advance the plot and prove that emotional blackmail could be highly danceable. Thinking about it, that's precisely how emotional blackmail works: You dance, for a time, anyway, trying desperately hard not to think of the implications--or, in this case, the words. For those following the progress of the musical version of the story, "Losing Ground" becomes the new lead-in to the closing number of the first act, slotting between "I Love You Now" and "No Rules In Love.")
Thus, the novel is currently being retrofitted with most of the stuff I didn't have time to tackle earlier. While some new material is also being added, the sequences and scenes I'm now wrestling with are primarily those that have existed in my master outline since it was completed months ago. In the initial rush to get the book done, I eliminated story levels, rather than compact incidents. Therefore, my efforts now focus on the insertion of these expeditiously mothballed plot threads.
For instance, some of the emails between Tony and Beatrice appear in the working draft of the novel, and the rest of the correspondence is alluded to. However, it was always my intent to incorporate a fully realized epistolary thread in the book--think embedded Dracula. Beyond deepening the Tony/Beatrice relationship for the reader, the letters are ways to underscore (or undermine) some of Tony's impressions--and in a book told almost exclusively from his point of view, this is essential. Letters from Beatrice provide differently subjective takes on the same events. They can be seen as psychological snapshots that, while open to interpretation, at least provide a non-Tony point-of-departure for the reader. This is also critical, given the book's controversial climax.
Another enhancement is more detailed sex scenes. While the impressive number of times that Tony and Beatrice couple are found in the master outline, a surprising sense of propriety is evident in the working draft. Perhaps I simply wasn't feeling well enough to fully capture the eroticism. But on rereading the draft at a distance, it's clear to me these literally seductive fantasies need further articulation--not to sell more books, but because they symbolically suggest how the numerous fictions outside of the bedroom were similarly enticing. I had suggested this in the working draft but, pun be damned, it needs to be made more explicit. I want to amp-up the nettle-in-the-kiss feeling of Sylvian's "September;" the surface shimmer of the couple 'saying' they're in love, which disguises secret wishes and games-playing . . .
Business Item 3: Over the next few days, I shall be tidying-up this place yet again. True to my word, CultureHack is my private playground, where I am not opposed to visitors (so far, at least). It is not a Citizen Journalism site and I cavalierly could care less if content is removed, rendering useless the links of others. These online pages comprise a notebook that I allow visitors to read over my virtual shoulder.
As Tony discovered in Vancouver, we all need Temporary Autonomous Zones. The bohemias of the last decades of the 1800s and the first years of the past century were TAZs prior to the articulated theory. So see CultureHack as a personal bohemia--a place for experimentation that, if you behave yourselves, is yours to treat as an intellectual ant farm. Previously, I've used this place to explore my thoughts about blogging and online communications, to talk about marketing and my approach to writing, and--most recently--to draw out (and in some cases invent) the sense-memories I needed to deepen Tony. I can only imagine that for the foreseeable future, I'll be thinking aloud about the second draft of the book--so base your decision to visit accordingly. Though, unavoidably, I also plan to bang on Republicans like gongs--it's so obviously The Right Thing To Do.
In the next week, I'll be replacing the novel excerpts with newer versions and once again making the design consistent. Additionally, I'll finally get around to refreshing the sidebar material (I've already posted new, more currently realistic author photos in the sidebar and on the bio page). Which brings us to . . .
Business Item 4: The soundtrack of the past few months. Because this has become a staple email query, allow me to anticipate--here's some of the music that's made regrouping and rewriting tolerable: Pet Shop Boys, Fundamental (Two-Disc Edition); Scritti Politti, White Bread Black Beer; John Cale, Black Acetate; Miles Davis, The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions; Anjani, Blue Alert; Yo-Yo Ma, Bach Cello Suites; Etta James, Blues To the Bone; Anthony and the Johnsons, Anthony and the Johnsons and I Am a Bird Now; Brian Eno/David Byrne, My Life In the Bush of Ghosts (Remastered and Amplified Edition); Thomas Dolby, Forty; Peter Murphy, Unshattered; Donald Fagen, Morph the Cat; Greg Osby, Channel 3; The Fitzwilliam Quartet, The Complete Shostakovitch Quartets; Ute Lemper, Blood & Feathers; Robert Downey, Jr, The Futurist; John Coltrane, The Impulse Story; and--ahem--Atlas/Sheridan, The Formal Absences of Precious Things.
There was a lot more music, but this is the stuff I kept returning to--a lot--at least according to my iPod. (Of the new releases in the above list, Anjani's Blue Alert is my personal choice for album of the year--it's a staggering thing: beautiful, minimal, perfect.)
Later. (Well, hopefully so--you never can tell about those motherfucking snakes; just ask Sam . . .)
