[My blog posts these days are largely drawn from my current writing project, the first draft of my memoir: Nested Scrolls.]
1960 was my brother Embry’s last summer at home before college. To be further from my parents’ scrutiny, he’d moved his dwelling into the basement of our house. He had shelves of hot-rod magazines, copies of Dig magazine, a set of bongo drums, and dozens of back issues of Evergreen Review. My friend Niles and I began spending time in Embry’s lair, even when he was there.
Niles thought the hot-rod magazines were absurd. “Look at this ramshackle jalopy,” he said, dismissively tapping the picture of a championship dragster. “What a piece of crap.”
“That car goes a hundred and sixty miles an hour,” Embry testily responded.
“Sure,” jeered Niles. “Off a cliff.”
When I realized that the Evergreen Review magazines had curse words in them, I began combing through them when I was home alone—looking for pornography. But that wasn’t exactly what I found. Instead I found a career.
One particular excerpt of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch utterly blew my mind, it was about junkies and hangings and weird sex, written in a hilariously in-your-face dead-pan tone, utterly contemptuous of any notion of bourgeois propriety. Burroughs was a banner to salute, an anthem to march to, a master to emulate.
Embry’s Evergreen Review stash was a treasure trove—I found poems by Allen Ginsberg, writings by Kerouac and, somehow the most heartening, story after story by beat unknowns. Men and women writing about their daily routines as if life itself were strange and ecstatic.
Niles and I found an anthology in the library called The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, and this was where we first saw Ginsberg’s Howl. We read that amazing poem out loud to each other, reveling in the bad language and bad attitude, staggered by the sense of liberation.
And from here it was a short hop to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This book spoke to me like none I’d read before. To be out in the world, free as a bird, drinking, smoking, meeting women and yakking all night about God—yes!
At the same time, Niles found a book on Zen Buddhism by Allan Watts and, in a slightly different vein, he discovered Edwin Abbott’s Flatland.
“It’s this weird flat world where the people are lines and triangles and other shapes. The main character is this guy called A Square.”
“How does it rain?”
“The rain is like a band of water that slides across the world. Never mind that. The neat part is that A Square travels up into our space. And then he comes back and tries to teach the Flatlanders about the mysterious third dimension, and the High Priest throws him in jail.”
I didn’t see how to fit all my new literary influences together until, when I was in the hospital after rupturing my spleen, my mother brought me a paperback copy of Untouched By Human Hands, a collection of science-fiction tales by Robert Sheckley.
Somewhere Vladimir Nabokov writes about the “initial push that sets the heavy ball rolling down the corridors of years,” and for me the push was Sheckley’s book. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Not only was Sheckley’s work masterful in terms of plot and form, and it had a jokey edge that—to my mind—set it above the more straightforward work of the other SF writers. There was something about his style that gave me a sense that I could do it myself. He wrote like I thought.
From then on, I knew in my heart of hearts that my greatest ambition was to become a beatnik science fiction writer.
When I was a boy, my friend Niles and I spent a lot of time on Saturdays exploring the new houses under construction in our neighborhood. The workmen took Saturdays off, so we had the houses to ourselves.
We’d search for the metal slugs that punched out of the electrical boxes, hoping to pass them off as nickels in Coke machines. We’d feed discarded lunches to Muffin until she threw up. We’d pee on the blueprints. We’d climb around the giant mounds of dirt from the basement excavations, and throw clods at each other.
Once we climbed a long ladder to the half-shingled roof of a new house. I went second at the top, I somehow managed to kick backwards against the ladder. It teetered and toppled to the ground. Niles and I were stranded and the sun was going down.
A neighborhood kid we called Danny Dogbutt chanced past.
“Push up the ladder, Dogbutt,” called Niles. “We’re stuck.”
Danny offered no response whatsoever. He stared at us as if he were deaf, the sun glinting off his thick glasses.
A little later my father appeared, walking down the road in his shirtsleeves. Dogbutt ha squealed to him. But Pop thought our predicament was amusing. He pushed up the ladder, gently admonished us not to climb on roofs again, and led me home.
We were glad it wasn’t Niles’s father whom Danny had fetched. He was a little stricter than my dad.
[My friend Jon Pearce.]
Once Niles’s father got quite worked up when he found Niles looking at picture of naked women in his attic. He burned the pictures in the furnace, even though it was summertime. I’d loved one of those pictures in particular, of a long-haired naked woman holding a violin.
Niles and I had found the pictures at a quarry that was a couple of miles from our house. This was a fascinating place, with sheer limestone walls over a hundred feet tall. It wasn’t much in use, so we could poke around there as much as we liked, particularly on weekends. There was a good path to the quarry along a stream that ran through the Keiths’ pasture.
When we were at the quarry, Niles loved to sit on the bulldozers and cranes and pretend he was driving them. He’d slam around the gearshift levers and make motor noises with his mouth.
The dirty magazines on the site had been left there by the workers, it may have been that they were tearing out pages for toilet paper. Niles and I salvaged a few dozen good photos. I was scared to bring any of the pictures home, as my Mom knew every square inch of our house at all times. But Niles, whose mother was equally observant, had taken the reckless chance of keeping the precious documents in his attic.
One day, coming back from the quarry, Niles and I made our way up one of the cliffs and found a new way home. We passed through an amazing, spooky zone that we never managed to revisit again—as it was so difficult to get there.
In this curious region, the limestone had been irregularly eroded so that we were walking as if in a labyrinth, the smoothly worn walls reaching up to our chests or even over our heads, the passageways branching and merging.
“This is so cool,” I told Niles. “It’s like science fiction.”
Growing up in the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, my absolute favorite reading materials were the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books. Once a week I’d accompany my mother to the A & P Supermarket, and she’d give me a nickel for a comic.
[My friend Gunnar with his beehive.]
I loved the irreverence of the ducks and the energetic, abbreviated way in which their tales hopped from one frame to the next. I learned a lot from those comic books. When grown-ups would ask me how it was that I knew the meaning of some fancy word I might use, I enjoyed telling them I’d learned it from Donald Duck comics.
[Hiking at Castle Rock Park]
By now some of my school friends had televisions. One boy lived within walking distance, and I went to his house to see the Howdy Doody show. It was the first time I’d ever seen a television.
I liked the show a lot, I could hardly believe how great television was—the creamy black and white shades, the hiss of static, the announcer’s rounded tones, the jerky scan across the children in the audience, the hilarious commercials for Ipana toothpaste.
[Inside the Capitol buildng in Madison, Wisconsin.]
There were some great ads for Jell-O as well. In the Jell-O ad, a warm housewife voice would sing-song “busy day, busy day,” as her cartoon icon hurried around. And then would come the Jell-O. And I remmber an ad—for what?—with the tag line, “Chinese baby say…[Product name]!” I loved that the baby. I’d never seen a Chinese person.
I didn’t actually like the puppet Howdy Doody himself—he disgusted me. And I hated his conniving partner Clarabelle the clown. But near the end of the show, they’d air a cartoon, and the cartoons were paradise.
My brother and I worked on our parents, and eventually they agreed to get a television. We went to a department store in downtown Louisville, and Pop negotiated with the salesman for nearly an hour. Embry and I watched a cowboy show on the dozens of display TVs, the horsemen eternally riding down a sandy road beneath dry, spindly trees.
We went home with a Dumont set, a small tube in a cubical yellowish cabinet that might have been particle-board. You could get two channels in Louisville, 3 and 11. And at 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoons I’d get to watch Cartoon Circus.
I worshipped that show. To make it even better, when I watched Cartoon Circus, Mom would give me my one soft-drink of the week, orange soda in a pale green anodized aluminum cup.
Everything about the cartoons was wonderful. The exultant blare of chase music, the high slangy voices, the xylophone sound of sneaking footsteps, the moany-groany graveyards with twisting ghosts, the sarcastic ducks, the battles and stratagems of the cats and the mice.
[My friend Emilio.]
One Saturday afternoon my father for some reason wanted to take me for a drive in the car.
“No, no! I have to watch Cartoon Circus.”
“Oh, don’t worry, we can hear it on the car radio.”
I wasn’t quite sure if watching cartoons on the radio would work—and then, of course, it turned out that there wasn’t any cartoon radio show at all. But I didn’t nag my father on it. He seemed a little sad and distracted. Perhaps he and Mom were having a fight.
I finally sold one of my paintings online last week, “Stun City,” to a nice guy, Michael K., in Germany. If you too want to own an original by me (or a print), check the newly marked down prices. My basement is getting full…
I just finished going over the copy-edits on my novel Hylozoic, which will appear in hardback from Tor Books in, I believe, June, 2008. It’s a sequel to my novel Postsingular, although it’s independent enough to be read on its own.
Today I posted a version of my Notes for Hylozoic, which is a 3 Meg PDF file with lots of hyperlinks, some links are internal links into the notes document itself, some links go into my blog or into the Web at large. There’s a number of illustrations. The notes are 196,000 words long, compared to the 91,000 word length of the actual novel. Maybe I’m starting to think too much…
What is hylozoism?
“Hylozoism (from the Greek hyle, matter, and zoe, life) is the doctrine that all matter is intrinsically alive. Under hylozoism, every object is claimed to have some degree or sense of life.”
— David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West.
This being election season, I want to drop in a quote from Hylozoic about systems of government.
With the world gone hylozoic, the whole idea of governments based upon human power elites was seeming increasingly dumb.
The dinosaur era of oligarchic rule had reached an end. The few rulers who didn’t have the sense to abdicate were forcibly evicted, or worse.
Via a rapid series of teep referendums, nation after nation adopted new constitutions. No more Presidents, no more Senates, no more Parliaments. From now on, countries would rule themselves via realtime public consensus.
Something subtler than the blunt instrument of majority rule came into sway. Laws became dynamically tuned compromises, continually adapting to social change. The post-digital body politic was as homeostatic and self-healing as the body of a living animal. It was odd to think that for so many millennia, people had lived in societies that were like crude, awkward machines.
On a totally different theme, let me mention that my pal Paul DiFilippo has published a short novel, Cosmocopia , illustrated by a jigsaw puzzle created by comix god Jim Woodring! Here’s purchase info, and a video of Paul reading from the work at Fantagraphics Bookstore in Seattle last week:
This week I’ve been working on a new painting called, “Owl Creek,” the name taken from the Ambrose Bierce story, “An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a tale about a guy who thinks, for a time, that he’s survived being hung until auugh, he realizes different.
I spent yesterday and today in my studio (my back yard, on most days,) finishing the picture. I had to do some work to make the different areas match in terms of how tight they are, loosening up here, tightening there. I was wondering whether to put in any critters, or maybe even a hangman’s rope, but I think it’s done now. (Note that I keep changing what’s posted here, if you want to see all four versions, check my comment.)
By the way, the significance of the “Occurence at Owl Creek” reference is that, in thinking about the multiverse of late, I was specualting that in a different branch of the universe, I died this summer, and that I’m in this odd temporary stub of time, and the real branch is the one where I died. I’m just in the stub long enough to write my memoir, Nested Scrolls.
So this painting is in fact more sinister than it appears.
[My studio.]
Today what I’m “really” supposed to be doing is to go over the copy-edits for Hylozoic, and I will get to that right now. And for the rest of today’s post, how about a memoir excerpt…
There was a strange collection of boys in my seventh-grade driving group. An older boy named Owen was practically a psycho, always wanting to pinch and slug the rest of us. Another, saddled by his simpleton parents with the nickname Skeeter, was a radio buff, and one day he entered Faith’s car in a state of high elation. This was October of 1957, and he’d been listening to the radio beeps of Sputnik, the tiny new satellite that the Russians had put into orbit.
“It’s so…spooky and wonderful,” said Skeeter. “To hear that little thing calling down to us from up above the sky.” My mind drifted off with Skeeter’s, contemplating the miracle of a human-made object floating in space.
“Ow!” exclaimed Skeeter.
Owen had swung his plastic trigonometry triangle like an axe, bouncing its corner off the boy’s short-haired scalp.
My friend Niles loved science fiction every bit as much as me. We read all the SF books in the Louisville Public Library, and we even bought some SF paperbacks at the Woolworth Five and Ten Cent Store. We were excited about Sputnik, and we felt it was our duty to help the US to catch up with the USSR.
So we started building half-assed rockets. We didn’t even waste our breath trying to talk our parents into buying us stuff like powdered magnesium, potassium perchlorate, or steel rocket tubes. Instead we used recipes we’d invented or that we’d heard at school.
For one of our rockets we harvested the little red heads from about ten packs of matches, and stuffed them into a pointed plastic tube that had once held a flower. The fuel flared up wonderfully, spewing a fierce beam of flame. But instead of taking off, the plastic tube simply melted.
Niles and I usually had a small stash of firecrackers that we’d brought home from family vacations through the South, or that we’d bought from friends. We emptied out the powder from a whole pack of firecrackers, unrolling the layers of newspaper dense with wonderfully alien Chinese characters. We funneled the powder into a hollow rocket-shape we’d molded from Reynolds wrap, and lit it off with one of the firecracker fuses. The tin rocket raced around the ground in a widening spiral, spraying Nile’s leg with sparks.
This was too big a waste of firecrackers, so we switched to a more efficient technique. It turned out we were able to get a rocket-like effect from a single firecracker by making a mortar from two tin cans. One can was a little smaller than the other, so that they nested together. We’d drop the lit firecracker into the larger can, set in the smaller can, and—whoosh, the little can would fly thirty feet into the air.
Moving beyond mere rocketry, we soaked a shovelful of sand and gravel in gasoline, lit it, and tossed it high into the air, loving the movie-disaster look of the flaming pebbles.
Alarmed by our pyromaniac investigations, my mother bought me a safe rocket, a red plastic Alpha-One, which was powered by something very much like baking soda and vinegar—although the instructions called these the fuel and the oxidizer.
The Alpha-One was quite well designed, and we enjoyed many successful flights, with apogees in the hundred foot range. The thing was in fact still working twenty years later, when I unearthed it from a box of boyhood mementos and started launching flights with my own children.
As of today, my story about infinity, “Jack and the Aktuals” is online at Tor.com. If you read it there, do me a favor and post a positive comment on the Tor site! (I’m worried I’m going to meet with uneasy incomprehension.)
I had the idea for this story while I was doing a painting called “Giant’s Head,” up in Castle Rock Park last November, and I posted about it then.
If you like, you can listen to a podcast of me reading it on the www.Tor.com site, too. You can find the podcast on the Tor site, or click on the icon below to access the podcast via my Feedburner podcast station.
As I mentioned in the last post, I’m working on my memoir, Nested Scrolls, which, although not SF itself, is partly about becoming an SF writer.
Memoirs are so big anymore. I was reading the NY Times Sunday Book Review yesterday, and I saw two or three of memoirs reviewed. One memoir by some cosseted literary mandarin, aged 62 like me, focusing on how worried he is about death. Aren’t we all…
My own memoir is going pretty well, now that I vaguely know what I’m doing. The rest of this post is a quoted bit about my earliest efforts towards science fiction thinking.
My parents tended to send me to bed before I was really tired. So I’d play mental games while I was waiting to fall asleep. I developed a little repertoire of fun things to think about, fantastic powers like shrinking, breathing underwater, or flying through the air. Looking back, I can see that, all along, I was meant to be a science-fiction writer.
One particular evening’s imaginings stick in my mind. I imagined being an inch tall and walking around my room. The space beneath my bed was like a dim, dusty hall. The mouse that sometimes invaded our house was there, the size of a horse. He could talk, and he was friendly. I rode the mouse into the kitchen and got us two slices of apple pie with chunks of cheddar cheese. It was more than we could possibly eat, but we tried.
I made myself still smaller, the size of one of the dust specks I’d noticed floating in sunlit air. I drifted across the kitchen and through the grill of the window screen. Outside a gentle breeze set me down upon a blooming flower at the top of our magnolia tree. I took a swim in a dewdrop resting on the flower’s petals. Music chimed from the palace-like structure at the flower’s center. Perhaps a princess lived there.
My mind turned back to the sensation of drifting up through the air—and I switched to imagining I could fly at will. I often had flying dreams—in the dreams I’d launch myself by hopping backwards, and instead of crashing to the ground, I’d angle upwards and float on my back as if I were in a swimming pool. And now, just like in the dreams, I launched myself into the air from the back yard of our house. I shot up through the clouds and followed the light to downtown Louisville where the big buildings were. I circled all around them, and I flew under the Ohio River bridge. And now I shot straight upwards, higher and higher to where the air was cold and thin. Looking down, I saw the cities of Kentucky and Indiana as splashes of light.
But now—as so often happened in my flight fantasies—I suddenly lost the ability to fly. So long as I believed it was possible, I stayed aloft, but the minute I doubted myself, I began a long tumble. The air beat at my face and fluttered my pajamas.
And now came the best part of the falling fantasy. There was a hole in the ground below. I was falling into an endless empty void, a canyon or mineshaft that went down forever. Lave dripped from the distant rocky walls, small goblins peeped at me. But I didn’t need to worry about hitting bottom. I would fall forever and a day, on and on, world without end.
