Missing the Bus

 

 

I have written almost 140 pages of my novel, “Dragons and Angels”. My hero, Pol Dairre, has discovered the terrible secret on the top floor of Tallgrave Prison. After having his shop confiscated, he has fled the city of Iovarre on the good ship

 . There, he has joined Captain Belias Varney and his crew in their search for the mysterious sea monster known as the Harrow. It’s a book of magic, romance and philosophy, and I feel lucky to be tuned to this particular cosmic channel in order to receive this very strange and wonderful broadcast.

We Americans are very keen on distracting ourselves from the important stuff –whatever that means to us. We watch TV and play World of Warcraft and generally do everything we can do to keep from doing the stuff which really fulfills us. Now, I’m nopt knocking World of Warcraft. If I could see, I’m sure I’d have an account and play a Tauren shaman or something. But my situation has brought me a particular grace which I’m not sure I’d give up, even if offered the return of my eyesight. The thing about being a writer is this: when it’s going well, there’s nothing better: not sex, not food, not the ten thousand attractions of the Web. When, at the end of the writing day, I’ve completed my one or two pages , I do a little dance at my desk. I am creating this wild aromatic world for others to live in for a while: to solve its mysteries, to hunt out its dragon, to conquer its grave malevolent king. Hang onto your lids, kids, because this book is going to be Godzilla in four hundred pages.

I live on just over $1200 a month. I mostly wear T shirts and I have to ration how many bowls of pho I can afford during the week. I can’t see and I have incipient diabetes, among other things. But I still count myself among the luckiest people in America, and certainly in the world. I had to pay a high price, to be sure, a nearly disastrous one. But can you say it’s too high a price when I’m actually content --will grow more content when I start receiving royalty checks-- and almost everyone elseI know is basically just struggling not to throw themselves in front of the number 10 bus?

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: writing a novel,World of Warcraft,poor Punk,living

A Season in Dell

 

 

It’s been three months since I ordered my Studio desktop system fromDell computers, and, friends, it continues to be an ongoing catastrophe. First, they sent me a computer which had a few different flavors of not working. Then there were the countless calls to Dell ordering the replacement, including some software which I had not ordered originally. Then there was the return of the defective computer, during which Dell repeatedly asked me to quote tag numbers to them when I explained to them that I’m blind and can’t scan labels like that. This is the thing with Dell: doing business with them requires that one keep track of a whole handful of numbers. There are customer numbers, order numbers, dispatch numbers, service numbers and on and on. And no two departments ask for the same numbers if you call them for different reasons.

 

After many troubles and dropped calls, I was finally assigned Varma, a service recovery agent who told me that he was going to handle all of my service requests from now on and that I could trust him. Sucker that I am, I believed Varma and agreed not to return the new computer and take my business to Frye’s.

 

Now I’m trying to get an invoice --a simple invoice!—which I need because a foundation for the blind is helping me to pay for the system. I sat on the phone for the better part of an hour while a customer service rep did a conference call with a rep in their billing department. The billing rep vowed to me that I would receive the invoices in my email within 24 hours. But 24 hours have come and gone, and the invoices are yet to make their appearance.

 

The thing is, there hasn’t been just one problem or even two. The whole Dell system seems to be rigged against the ordinary customermaking any headway. Calls consistently get dropped, and when they aren’t dropped they are often not returned either. I don’t know how Dell survives. I only know that the next time I buy a computer, I’ll be going to Frye’s. Constant Reader, I advise you to do the same.

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Dell Computers,customer service,failure,curry

Out of Egypt

 

 

I’ve been reading Anne Rice’s first person novel about Jesus, “Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt”. Though I don’t have any investment in Jesus from a religious standpoint and Rice aggressively does, she is a gifted writer and the narrative is compelling. The Jesus of the novel is a young boy who occasionally manifests remarkable, sometimes terrible powers and is troubled by the fact that his family seems to know more about his true origins than he does.

 

Jesus is a very likeable character here, humble and intelligent, and Rice’s descriptions of first century Judaea are riveting. Through the eyes of the young unknowing messiah, we see the great city of Alexandria with its temples and philosophers, and Nazareth with its dusty roads, strict Pharisees and Roman soldiers. I am especially pleased with the way Rice handles the latter two. Her Pharisees, while demanding are not cardboard villains, but a crucial element of Jewish culture, the final arbiters when some really knotty problem must be resolved. And the Roman soldiers, most of them, are not vicious animals but these poor bored bastards who are charged withkeeping the peace in a hot unyielding land many miles from home. Sometimes they do it with ruthless dispatch, but just as often they are seen struggling with dominion in a land whose people hate them passionately.

 

Finally --well, not exactly finally, as I haven’t finished the book --the Devil makes the first of what I assume will be several appearances. He is a beautiful but miserable being who seeks to draw Jesus into his circle of despair and emptiness. Jesus does not hate him in some gross operatic way, but recognizes that this is a treacherous spirit who must be refused at every turn. It’s deft writing, and like the rest of the book, enormously entertaining. You ask me kids, I say: check it out.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Anne Rice,Egypt,Christ the Lord,religious novels

We Be Jammin’

 

 

It’s a couple of weeks late, but I’m making my New Year’s resolution now. I know my blog maintenance is more than a little erratic and I hereby vow to change that situation. From here on out --well, at least for the next couple of months—I intend to write a blog post every day. It’s good for warming up my chops, and maybe someone will be intrigued enough to stick around Cinema Nocturne and tell me what they think about what they read.

 

I know that we have a number of regular readers here, though all of them are on the shy side. I switched to Blogspot precisely because it provides a more robust platform for discussion, in my opinion, than did the old Workpad site.

Also, I find that my thoughts lately have more to do with writing than they do anything else, so you may be in for a taste of the writerly consciousness. I don’t know what to say about this, since this will clearly interest some while boring others to tears. I can only ssay that my approach to writing is an essentially mystical one, and I think the things I have to say about it are anything but dry.

 

Finally, I am eager that some people should read “Dragons and Angels”, or part of it, at least, and I wonder if anyone would be interested in following a blog which consists of chapters posted from the first draft, in which I am still engaged. Just drop me a brief note if you would and I’ll be thinking about it seriously.

 

Thank you for flying Air Nocturne.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: novels,writing a novel,blogging,Cyrano de Bergerac

riting and the Loa

 

 

If you haven’t cribbed the knowledge from William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”, the loa are the spirits manifested by the adherents of Voudoun. When they take possession of a worshipper, they are said to ride him or her like a horse.  David Byrne refers to this phenomenon in his song “Papa Legba”, which as you might have supposed, is the name of the chief loa and the opener of communication with the spirit world.  When the voudounsis is mounted by a loa, she takes on the physical attributes associated with that spirit.  Worshippers of Baron Ghede, for example often speak in a nasal tone and have a marked fondness for rum and cigars.  while the love goddess Erzulie may demand the worshipper’s total devotion.

Not to drag the comparison out too much farther,  possession by the loa seems to me to be very much like writing a novel.  In fact, without thinking about the similarities at all, I’ve evolved a kind of mystical language around the process of writing.  It seems to me, having written one book and being about a third of the way through my second, that working in such a long form isn’t principally an act of will.  It seems to me, rather, that it is guided by a spirit I refer to as the Genius.  Each novel has its own demands, its own moods and colors, and its own gifts, and they seem to come from the spirit of the work itself.  Different Genii feel different, but they all seem to require of the writer that their gifts be accepted and cherished.  This means that when the Genius tells you that your protagonist must go on a sea voyage and encounter a mysterious sea monster, you bloody well had better listen or find that , after many such refusals, that the source of inspiration has abandoned you altogether.  I call this “pissing in the Well”:  profaning the mysterious sources of your creativity.

 

Now, having said all that, it’s important to make it clear that the writer is not the slave of the Genkius.  The Genius is a source, a wellspring, an advisor.  You must use your own craft and cunning to work and shape the material given you by that source.  sometimes, you find that the idea offered belongs to some other work altogether, something to be honored but set aside for a past or future  project. The important thing is that the writing flows through you like a live current, rather than being forced out of you by some constricted notion of artistic will.

 

I feel that I have a balanced, wholesome relationship with my Genius.  Some artists, though, seem to have a toxic tormented relationship with theirs.  I suspect that some Genii are so demanding and their gifts so great that their hosts turn to drink or drugs to drown them out.  Or maybe the truth they bring is too painful, maybe they seem too unstinting in their role as couriers from the world of ideas. As far as I can tell, the Genius is a reality and if you’re an artist you ignore it at the peril of your sanity.

 

I don’t mean to be so dramatic about it, butI’ve come to these conclusions because I’ve done a lot of a certain kind of suffering when I’m not working on my current book or short story.  For instance, I’ve been stuck at a certain point in “Dragons and Angels” because my protagonist Pol Dairre has to make a sea voyage of some kind and I know very little about sailing vessels.  With the rest of the book so far, I’ve known enough about London in the 17th century and the character of Henry VIII, on whom the wicked king in my novel is loosely modeled, to write certain scenes to my satisfaction.  But except for “Moby Dick”, my reading in such things as the difference between a topsail and a spanker are woefully limited.  And yet, there has not been an hour since I began my break from writing a couple of months ago that I haven’t worried at the problem like a dog with a bone.  The Genius is a benign force, but it is powerful and it is persistent and it can make you more than a little bit crazy.

 

And yet, I accept the yoke cheerfully. How many of my countrymen, I wonder, are driven by nothing more interesting than a demanding spouse, a wretched job or a need to pay last month’s extorionate phone bill? I write with the aim of creating a world which others may inhabit; a world of angels and dragons, of fiercely noble toymakers and malign and gentle-spoken kings. I am blessed, and I am not even remotely tempted to drown the blessing with whiskey and despair. Writing is prayer, it is communion, it is joy. How many great artists have died not knowing that? Not me, Bubba.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: loa,Voudoun,Papa Legba,the art of writing