InsideStorytime ENTANGLEMENT

“The Onion” reports -- “Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text.”

In other news, quantum entanglement is a property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which the quantum states of the constituting objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart -- even if the individual objects are spatially separated in a spacelike manner.

Ransom Stephens might claim the readers at tonight's (Thursday March 18th 2010, 6.30 - 8.30 pm) InsideStorytime ENTANGLEMENT at Cafe Royale are too large to be similarly entangled -- but what does he know? While any one of the readers is in a reading state, none of the others will be, even if their search for a parking space has transported them to the far end of the universe, so that classical mechanics would not permit information to be exchanged between them. This Einstein called “action at a distance.”

Jillian Weise is the author of The Amputee's Guide to Sex, a bold investigation of disability and sexuality.

Alvin Orloff, a veteran of the San Francisco reading series, author of Gutter Boys and I Married an Earthling, returns to InsideStorytime reading from a new work.

Anne Raeff is the author of Clara Mondschein's Melancholia, a Holocaust novel.

Jesus Angel Garcia is the author of badbadbad, a multimedia novel.

Writer and cartoonist Aimee Valentine will read from a work-in-progress.

Please note that John Somerville will not after all be participating, as he has to go to Australia to accept a Fellowship of Australian Writers Award. However, despite their physical separation, tonight's entangled authors will continue to act as a single quantum object. Mention you heard about the event from this blog and we will waive the $3 to $5 cover charge.

A Year of Blogging Dangerously

This is the one-year anniversary of my first ever blog post.

As Tamim Ansary wrote a few years back, "At last count (about a year ago) there were some 64 million blogs... I have to wonder: what do these 64 million people do for day jobs?"

Who knows how many blogs there are now? Mark Helprin in Digital Barbarism evokes how much more peaceful it must have been in Edwardian times, when correspondence routinely took weeks to arrive. There's much to be said for having less information to sift through.

But there are also advantages to the practice of formulating and broadcasting a few thoughts during the course of a chaotic week. Can the whole of a blog be more than the sum of its parts? Generally I'm overcome with gratitude that life affords me any time at all to write stories and novels -- blogging feels like a way of giving back. Which I agree makes no sense. But even so... this feels sometimes like a sort of cosmic debt repaid.

So happy Saint Patrick's Day, and what are you reading a blog by a limey for anyway? Go read Julian Gough on the state of Irish literature instead. Money quote -- "I must be a real bastard for translators, because increasingly I like to back-engineer scenes so that a crucial line of narrative, thrown up by the action, is also a line of poetry by Yeats, or a line of dialogue is also a line of Joyce, or Kafka, or is made out of Radiohead song titles."

Some Art-Languages

"Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real," J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in a letter. “But it is true." See Helge Kåre Fauskanger's site on Tolkien's art-languages.

Maybe I do believe him... In his lecture “A Secret Vice," Tolkien suggested, “I might fling out the view that for perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology concomitant... The converse indeed is true, your language construction will breed a mythology.”

In a footnote to “English and Welsh,” Tolkien says of The Lord of the Rings that “the names of persons and places in this story were mainly composed on patterns deliberately modeled on those of Welsh (closely similar but not identical). This element in the tale has given perhaps more pleasure to more readers than anything else in it.” That last sentence was probably not true even in 1955 -- and today, people who have read The Lord of the Rings doubtless outnumber those with any knowledge of Welsh, a language into which The Lord of the Rings has apparently still not been translated.

James Keilty was another writer for whom a big part of the attraction of creating a world lay in creating its language. Introducing a utopian science fiction anthology called The New Improved Sun, Thomas M. Disch singled out Keilty's utopia as one he would consider moving to.

"The People of Prashad" places Prashad somewhere between Russia, China, Afghanistan, and India. The people live in communal homes that somewhat remind me of Tamim Ansary's childhood. The sexuality and educational arrangements of the people of Prashad are what one might expect from a utopia hatched in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Keilty also provides architectural diagrams and a fairly Middle-Eastern-looking alphabet.

Poignantly, the anthology supplies an address in North Beach where, at the time the book was published, you could have applied to Keilty to learn Prashadsim. Alas, while some of Keilty's plays in Prashadim were produced in San Francisco, I doubt you will find that language spoken here today. Some more info, from Samuel R. Delany's About Writing --

“James Keilty was a San Francisco city planner on the edge of a circle of fifties, sixties and seventies writers that included Robert Duncan and Richard Brautigan, many of whom were of an experimental bent. A frighteningly literate gay aesthete, he died of lung cancer in the early nineties. More obsessive than most, however, Keilty went so far as to invent his own language, complete with its own grammar and vocabulary, as well as an imaginary country and a culture to go with it. He wrote stories and folk plays in his invented language, Prashad. He began a lengthy novel in the language.”

Does it seem surprising or unsurprising, that so many new art-languages were invented in an age when so many old natural languages are dying out? Are the two facts connected?

For the movie “Avatar,” director James Cameron hired linguist Paul Frommer, an expert on Farsi grammar among other things, to create the Na'vi tongue. Was this the first time a movie director subcontracted the development of an art-language to a professor? Julian Sancton interviews Frommer for Vanity Fair here, and here is some more info about Na'vi from Frommer, and a link to Sebastian Wolff's Learn Navi site. The Internet, while being no help at all to real endangered languages, may help preserve new art-languages from disappearing like Keilty's...

Paul Auster's The Music of Chance

This novel was first recommended to me by a stranger at a party in the early 1990s. It's probably best to learn about this book in as random a way as possible, since it's kind of a paean to randomness.

It opens with incredible speed. A terrifying psychological transformation is compressed into the first few paragraphs -- Nashe’s wife leaves him, his daughter is adopted by his sister, he inherits about $200,000 from a father he doesn’t know, he becomes addicted to pointless coast-to-coast driving, and we’re still just a few pages in.

Even our readerly assumption that Nashe’s life was relatively settled before the story begins turns out to be misleading – apparently it's just as much an accident that he became a fireman in the first place. Is The Music of Chance the only novel ever written that doesn’t confuse correlation with causation, that confronts how much our lives are truly governed by happenstance?

I think of Stephen Jay Gould’s observation that if you ran the tape of evolutionary history a second time, you’d come out somewhere different. Auster here pulls off the trick of providing a completely immersive high-stakes reading experience where nothing seems fated. The Music of Chance delivers the intensity of myth without any of the determinism.

And yet, as usually occurs both in myth and in life, freedom quickly becomes captivity. Flower and Stone, the novel’s overlords of capital, are compared before we meet them to Laurel and Hardy, Mutt and Jeff, Ernie and Bert. They are petty, childish men, full of concealed animosity, who on the turn of a card become Nashe’s masters.

He is set to constructing a twentieth-century wall from the ruins of a fifteenth-century castle, using a child’s wagon to haul the stones – on reflection this feels like an elaborate metaphor for the bleak labor of the contemporary novelist, although this way of looking at it is only occuring to me now after multiple rereadings.

Building the wall is a meaningless task but Nashe finds meaning in it, or puts meaning into it. Like Camus in The Stranger, Auster seems to suggest we should take resposibility for our lives despite their contingency. Finishing this book always leaves me feeling more alive.

Promises and Prohibitions

This is from an essay called “The Politics of Gentleness” by theologian Stanley Hauerwas:

”... we live in a time when people believe they have no story except the story they chose when they thought they had no story. That's 'freedom' in a society shaped by liberal political theory. If you don't believe that's true of you, just ask yourself whether you believe someone should be held responsible for a decision they made when they didn't know what they were doing. Most of us don't; this ethos of freedom is deep in our souls. We believe we should be held responsible only for the things we freely chose when we know what we were doing.”

“The problem with this way of thinking is that it makes marriage unintelligible. How do we ever know what we are doing when we promise lifelong monogamous fidelity? Christians are required to marry before witnesses in church so we can hold them to the promises they made when they didn't know what they were doing. If marriage renders this understanding of freedom unintelligible, try having children. You never get the ones you wanted. Yet we still feel extraordinary pressure to raise our children in such a way that they will not have to suffer for our convictions. Otherwise, we think they would not be 'free.' But this just reveals that we do not know why we're having children. And this has everything to do with the deep assumptions about freedom that now shape our lives. We believe that we should produce people who have no story except the story they chose when they had no story. So our children grow up thinking that freedom is the choice between a Sony and a Panasonic.”

Think how many fairy-stories feature decisions made by people who don't know what they're doing. In “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien notes that the point of the story of the princess and frog lies “in the necessity of keeping promises (even those with intolerable consequences) that, together with observing prohibitions, runs through all of Fairyland. This is one of the notes of the horns of Elfland, and not a dim note.”

In the old stories, promises must be kept even if they were made uncomprehendingly, even if their consequences are intolerable. This makes me think of a claim from Writing the Breakout Novel by literary agent Donald Maass, regarding what kind of stories sell -- “there are two character qualities that leave a deeper, more lasting and powerful impression of a character than any other: Forgiveness and self-sacrifice.”

Magical Contamination and Playing it Straight

I just read Stephen Kessler's The Mental Traveler, a pellucid fictionalization of a mental breakdown during the late 1960s -- the time of the moon landing and Charlie Manson, when as Kessler writes, “the air itself carried invisible streams of hallucinogenic potential.”

Since that era's still the stereotypic moment in twentieth-century Californian cultural history, it's curious how little our culture's general interpretation of it has changed over the last forty-odd years. For example, Joan Didion's essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” was written while the summer of love was still in progress, yet as an account of those events has yet to be surpassed in cynicism.

How do the late 1960s appear now, retrospectively, to those who were there and have since matured? Since the hero of The Mental Traveler is alienated, Jewish, fairly well-off, and working at UC Berkeley, his involvement in the counterculture seems over-determined. Yet he feels alienated from the counterculture too. His friends are very conscious of the moment's historic potential, but unclear how to seize it. The hero's paranoid schizophrenia feels like a recapitulation, on the level of the individual, of what his subculture and generation are undergoing.

“This is the way the world was spinning, intricate swirls of interconnection, no individual detail without its web of associations, a natural continuity yet dangerous too in its revolutionary resonance, multiple waves of implication spreading with every beat, with every note, with every word and image, and we were in and of it, riding this wild world's allusive waves, up to our wits in history, in fiction. Everything burned with meaning, glowed, radiated risk and urgency, a kind of magical contamination.”

I remember feeling the same way when I was twenty, but in late 1980s England there wasn't much encouragement for this attitude. Perhaps I got off lightly.

Kessler – now a distinguished poet, translator, and essayist – reports on how it was to feel intensely alive and intensely lost.

“Ever since Altamont I'd felt my life was being guided by superior powers, that gods of the revolution were secretly directing my trip through this mythic dimension suffused with meaning most people were forced to ignore because they couldn't use the information, they'd be overwhelmed, but I had been selected and was acting out for the collective welfare some model scenario of new consciousness.”

The songs titles on a Mose Allison album are a series of instructions from the cosmos. After reading Robert Bly's poem “Anarchists Fainting,” the mental traveler hits on the tactic of being crazy on the inside, rather than on the outside.

He learns to play it straight, while continuing his trip in the realm of creativity. This part, he almost makes sound easy...

Tell me About Your Childhood

In a café in Marin last weekend, I met up with a friend who'd just read a draft of a novel of mine. A couple of readers have asked me to make the main female character in said novel “more likeable,” and since “main female character needs to be more likeable” is very much the sort of phrase that crops up in rejection letters, that's an issue I've been trying to address.

Hence a lot of our café conversation focused on our understanding of this particular character... we agreed that, as a rule of thumb, the better an author understands a character, the more sympathetic that character will be...

Our conversation must have set some subterranean train of thought in motion, since as I drove back to San Francisco, I suddenly realized something important – even obvious-seeming -- about this character's background. Indeed, anyone who reads future drafts of the novel will probably assume it was integral to my original concept of the character – as, on some subconscious level, it may well have been. It just wasn't yet on the page where it needed to be.

Little connection-explosions of this kind – cf. Robert Burton's description -- can be among the most gratifying moments in a novel's development, yet they're also exhausting and humbling.

Something that worries me, on an epistemological level: stories are built out of connections that just feel right, in a parts-fitting-together kind of way... which is disturbingly unscientific. The detective in Michael Chabon's The Final Solution considers that “as doctors, no doubt, psychiatrists left something to be desired, but they often made fine detectives,” and I suspect the rationale for this is that fictional detectives think the same way writers and psychiatrists and shamans think, and not the same way scientists think...