Best American Fantasy Discontinued

Anthologies: maybe not otherwise terribly popular here at Uncanny Valley, but let's all bid a fond adieu to one of the good ones: Best American Fantasy, under the editorship of Jeff and Ann Vandermeer (and recently turned over to Larry Nolen, who would have been series editor starting with this year's Volume 4). Particularly sad because of the impressive list of stories Nolen had lined up to pass along to guest editor Minister Faust: fiction from Blake Butler, Matt Bell, Adam McOmber, Ben Percy, Melanie Rae Thon, Traci O Connor, Stephen Marche, Ander Monson-- in other words, a spectacular list of recommended reading. You would be doing yourself a favor if you followed along, even with just a fraction of his list. Assuming you haven't already.

I Know Shoes

For a while I had an active Goodreads account. A lot of people in school with me had accounts there and I thought, why not?

For a while there too I was reading The Log of the S. S. The Mrs Unguentine. I had an edition from Dalkey, a little blue-and-white thing, the kind of book you could haul anywhere and read with ease even though the covers would pull themselves closed if you weren't careful. Once, just after I moved to Florida, I took this book to a sandwich shop near my office and sat outside eating soup and tuna and trying to read. The novel is very quick and unique and strange--it features a sort-of estranged couple floating around in a converted barge--and was going well until somebody told me I'd had my shoes reheeled.

"Nah," I said.

"I know shoes," this guy said. He was old enough that you would expect he was right, he did know shoes. But he didn't know these.

"These came like this," I said.

"Then you can get them reheeled." He was sitting in a little metal chair just like mine. This sandwich shop was in a strip mall just off a road spotted with crosses and flowers and wrapped teddy bears left for all the pedestrians and bicyclists and motorists killed by Orlando's terrible drivers. The sound of traffic was everywhere. This guy said, "I'm unemployed now but sometimes I work for that test company. The ACTs. We grade the essays. " He talked some more. He looked like he might be making up the details but in fact they all were accurate, at least to a degree I was able to judge.

Then he talked to me about drugs and liquor. He had a little bottle of something wrapped not in a paper bag but in a plastic bag. He pulled on it and offered me some. He didn't have any food. I didn't know if he was asking for money or if we were having a real conversation.

Anyway: both these experiences came back to me this morning. Goodreads sent me the newsletter they always send out and which I've been too ambivalent to cancel, even though I never visit the site. I opened it up and saw a little personalized part near the top and I saw that it has been 690 days since I started reading The Log of the S. S. The Mrs Unguentine.

When I swam out of my existential and nostalgic whirlpool (690 days!), I decided that I could pick up the book again and finish it (I made it only close to the end, for reasons I can't even remember anymore). I can do that for almost any book I've ever started, no matter how long ago I last closed the pages. With movies and TV series and even with video games it's different, I'd have to start again after a certain amount of time has passed, but books stay fresh or at least preserved somehow in my brain. I imagine this is true for all of us. My guess is it's because we're so actively involved in reading--we have to interpret even the rhythm of the language, and determine how many pages we read before quitting for the night, and we have to color and build the scenes set, etc. Sometimes when I'm writing something up I wonder how someone else will imagine a particular character, or a particular car, or whatever. Often I'm not even sure how I imagine these things myself.

Small Games as Literature: Dino Run

A lot of my short story ideas and even novel ideas are essentially about being a creature or a certain kind of person or a monster or a machine in a time and place. For instance, I have long wanted to write an epic novel, or script an epic graphic novel, about what I call The Ancestor Fish. The Ancestor Fish is the first one that crawled out onto land and stayed there. What would the story be about? Well I guess it would be about the life the fish had before, in the water -- how he ate bugs and whatever, and how they looked in the water, and how a fish might sort of half feel about seeing those bugs and eating them, and the barrier reefs, and whale carcasses, and so on. Then it would be about what it was like to crawl onto land. This wouldn't take very long but it would have a lot of air in it -- a lot of space for you to breathe, and feel The Ancestor Fish breathing, and know what a momentous occasion this is. Then it would be about life on the land. It would be about the plants that he saw and the other animals -- new kinds of bugs, worms, fruit, big trees, ivy, and so on. It would probably be sort of psychedelic.

What would the sentences be like, though? This is where a lot of my ideas run into trouble. The sentences would suck. I mean they would be glorious at first, but after page twenty the descriptions of rocks and rotting logs and fish and bugs and so on would get pretty old. There wouldn't be conflict of the sort that makes books interesting to read -- things would try to eat him and nature would be against him, sure, but A) we're basically waiting for The Ancestor Fish to do it with another fish, thus confirming that he's our great grandfather, and B) you can't read about nature trying to kill a slow-moving fish for too long without getting terribly bored, I think.

Now there are days the challenges of stories like this make me think I should take on the dragon, as it were, and just go for it. There's nothing at risk but the time I might waste trying, after all. But often I realize what I'm really doing is designing video games, which are, much more than stories, about being a person or a creature or a monster in a time and a place. (Movies do this too, but for some ways of being more than others.) The Ancestor Fish could be, in the right hands, a really excellent platformer. The fish would have to be somewhat unrealistically mobile. Maybe there would be segments of levels where you swim really beautifully and then segments where you're totally out of the water, which are thrilling and important but also very dangerous. It would play like the first two Oddworld games, where your character is mostly trying to survive despite his very real limitations. You would spend a lot of time desperately outrunning things, and some time just walking through the jungle or swimming around, seeing the sights. Maybe you could try to bring other fish onto the land with you. Maybe you would have to save them from something. Given the right character designs -- I'd like to see the studio behind the 2D Rayman games give it a shot -- I think it would be a lot of fun.

Maybe sometime we'll talk more about my game ideas. But today we're talking about Dino Run. Dino Run is an excellent game about being a dinosaur in a time and a place. It's about as close as anything I've seen to The Ancestor Fish. And I've spent way too much time playing it.

When you start Dino Run your dino, a velociraptor, is facing left. This is weird. In video games this is the wrong way. If you play a lot of video games, and maybe even if you don't, you understand this instinctively, and so you hold down the right arrow. You figure out pretty quickly that you can jump with the up arrow. Down, less intuitively, allows you to duck and eat critters and magical power-up flowers, all of which help you run faster. Why are you running? There are two answers to this question.

One is that running to the right is just sort of what you do in a 2D video game. Another is that the music implies you should definitely be doing something, and, well, these are the buttons you've got. If you could find the "dino ray gun" button you'd probably press that too. Playing a video game for the first time, or coming back to it after a long break, is like being born. You're in this new, unfamiliar place with a new, unfamiliar body you only sort of recognize as yours. You start waving your arms around because you can. You start kicking your legs. You breathe, if you can breathe, because you can breathe. You scream because you can scream.

The best video games will generally give you a way of experiencing this moment pretty purely, because they understand intuitively its power. In Mario, you jump because you've got the A button. The fact that you'll die if you don't is sort of a secondary concern. You figure out pretty quickly that you can hold B to run because you've got to be able to do something with that button and the power flower is a long time coming.

And if you don't run in Dino Run? Well, pretty soon you start to hear this rumbling like a waterfall made of lightning and mud. The sky turns red. Things get dark. You see a wave of something -- of dust, of meteors, of black, annihilating -- rushing toward you. So that's what your dino was looking at when he started facing left. You understand that you were born into this dinosaur in a moment of hesitation -- a moment where he turned back and looked at the end of the world and asked himself if it could really be so bad. Your job is to get that dinosaur out of that moment. If you still don't move, this wave of stuff passes you. When the screen turns wholly black, you're dead, or rather, as the game would have it, "Doomed." At this point you understand that for the entire course of the game you will either be running or dying. So you start over. You start running.

The levels in this game are great in that they don't look very much like levels -- they look like places a dinosaur like yours might be. Your greatest enemies in this game are steep hills and big rocks. Not the big rocks that fall from the sky -- those aren't actually usually much of a problem, though they do certainly improve the atmosphere and up the stakes. No, I mean rocks that don't move. Your job in this game, as a person being a dinosaur running from doom, is to maintain momentum. Running up hills or big rocks kills you rmomentum -- when possible, you want to eat worms or small lizards or birds or magic flowers so you can climb more quickly, and you want to jump up the hills where you can. You spend a lot of time in this game hanging in mid-air. It may be that you get a boost if you duck as you hit the ground. I'm not sure.

You can explore the levels searching for eggs (supposedly you rescue these -- I think it's clear you're eating them) if you can get far enough ahead of the apocalypse. This is always a very tense decision. When you "rescue" eggs, you earn DNA, which can be used to improve your dinosaur's speed, acceleration, jumping, and strength. This is your incentive to play the game again. It starts out fairly difficult. It gets easier (though not that much easier) as your dinosaur gets stronger and faster. Most of the time, though, you're focused on running. The music tells you that you're going to die. The other dinosaurs running with you or flying away (some faster, some slow enough that you know they'll die soon) tell you that you're going to die. Trees collapse under your feet. Slow dinosaurs get in your way. You find a brontosaurus sunken in tar, where it will die. You run along its back. If you aren't fast enough, you'll watch the brontosaurus die. You'll keep running.

In workshop a professor once argued that you can't have a story that's just about someone trying to survive -- someone trying to eat, to find water, to satisfy their basic needs and urges. I think that the best stories are often about this. But it's hard to tell that story in a book. Most of those that try are adventure stories for young boys. Their lesson is that you can, through sufficient ingenuity, survive anything. This is a lie but it's a good way to feel about the world sometimes and it can make for a pretty good story. More difficult is the story likely to end in doom -- the apocalypse that really does end the world, and the story about living within it. The Road pulled this off. (In fact I love The Road.) Generally video games are better for stories about running and eating to stay alive. This is, after all, the story of Pac-Man. Death is chasing you down a narrow corridor. You're eating pellets because it gets you points, because it brings you pleasure. Sometimes you eat a big pellet and you can chase death away for a while. This is analogous to the feeling of immortality that comes during a great meal, or when you're holding someone close, or when you've just accomplished a life goal. The end of that safe period is analogous to the ends of those moments, those meals. Death comes at you harder and faster than ever. Eventually you die.

Survival is about being a person in a safe place. Video games are often about being a creature, a person, or a monster, desperately searching for a safe place. Dino Run is about being a dinosaur. It's about running to keep up with safety. It's about the apocalypse over your shoulder. It's about the danger of looking back, and the opportunities.

Note: This video features not-very-good music that isn't from the game, which is a mistake, because the game's music is great. I just really like watching this guy doom surf.

Against Copyright

There has been some confusion in Tracy's life and mine as we construct course packets over the legality of these packets. The advice we've received from the school library in this matter has been self-contradictory and confused, and my own notions proven more or less false. It turns out there's a vast legal difference between, say, copying stories for students using money ultimately derived from their tuition and then giving them those stories for "free" (which we can't do anyway because graduate assistants have a crap copy allotment at NMSU -- as in, I assume, more or less all places) and having the library copy center do it for you and then letting them pay at cost. Even though, actually, it's ultimately the exact same amount of money changing hands.

I'm trying to figure out the polite way to say this is bullshit. Generally speaking the "mysterious" tendency of copyright law to extend itself every time Mickey Mouse comes up for passage into our collective intellectual property is about all the argument you need for the unnecessary arbitrariness and strength of copyright in the US, but the difficulties of educating poor students under this regime also surely deserves some mention.

The trouble is this: while universities will often give tenured faculty generous copy allotments, they won't do this for their part-time staff or even in many cases full-time non-tenured faculty, which are at this point the vast majority of instructors responsible for the vast majority of credit hours. In this situation, the students become responsible for financing everything they read for the class, whether in the form of paying for books or paying to print scans, webpages, and etc. (Of course sometimes you can just work from electronic copies, but in creative writing the discussion is pointless if you haven't got the text in front of you, and I try not to lead pointless discussions.)

If students need to pay for their copies, this is apparently illegal without going through an incredibly burdensome (and for many colleges no doubt unsustainable) process of attaining permissions in exchange for promises of trivial royalties. Some of us can go through that process -- Tracy's about to attempt it now, and if she succeeds then I'll follow. If we can't, then we're forced to work with anthologies, which, as I've just argued, likely lead to worse student outcomes, exclude certain voices, genres, and aesthetics, and make literature really effing boring (thus contributing to its so-called demise).

This leads to two perhaps unpredictable outcomes: less money for writers and redistribution of student money to a small group of already-privileged, possibly wealthy writers. Howso? Well, it's not as if I wasn't planning to make my students buy books -- I just have a limited budget (i.e., I recognize that I serve one of the poorest communities in the country, no kidding). The planned use of a course packet instead of anthologies freed me up to assign my students The Last Samurai and Whim Man Mammon. The former has, as I understand it, sold pretty well, but I know for a fact that the author could use the money from continued sales. The latter is a small press book that I'm assuming sold more in one month because of my class than it had in several months previous. Billy Collins and Tim O'Brien, meanwhile, will be fine -- they don't need my money. And of course they make far less on a sale of an anthology than Helen DeWitt will make on a sale of The Last Samurai. So, as I said: money gets redistributed from authors who need it more to authors who need it less by the dependence on anthologies, and at the same time writers are making less money.

In economic terms, the current copyright regime leads to very real losses of marginal utility. To put it in terms of mp3s, if you can't afford to buy the latest album by The National, but you would enjoy listening to that album, the economically ideal outcome would be for you to have the album anyway. (Well, really the ideal would be for you to be able to buy it for whatever price you could afford it at, but let's start simple.) The utility you would derive from the album is higher than zero, while the cost to The National of your owning the album is zero (it's free to them to distribute it online and through P2P networks). In short, your illegally downloading an album you wouldn't be able to buy is a positive-sum economic interaction. (I've seen Matt Yglesias make this argument in some form, I think, but I can't quite seem to find the post, so here's his blog.) And this is without considering the benefits to The National of your illegal download. You may, if you like the album a lot, pay for a copy later when you have the cash. You may end up going to one of their concerts or buying a t-shirt someday. You may help spread the good news about their album, which will in turn lead to more purchases than if you had not done so (and, of course, more illegal downloads).

The analogy to stories and poems is not hard to draw, and in fact the argument becomes much stronger. Right now the odds that any individual will pay money for a given story, poem, or other piece of writing (or even ANY piece of writing in a given day or week) are extremely close to zero: people don't spend money on literature. This isn't, however, because people don't like reading, as writers and publishers have generally convinced themselves. Rather the problem is generally the difficulty of finding a writer or a story you like, something that even longtime readers with plenty of time to spend on choosing and awareness of the market find daunting. Part of the solution is to make it easier for impressionable people -- students, for instance -- to be able to read your content for free or close to free, which will make them slightly more likely to go out and buy more of your writing, especially if it happens to be really good. Meanwhile, even if they don't go out and buy another story, they've still derived utility from the one they read for free, and, in the scenario where I've copied your story for them, you didn't lose a penny. Again, this is a positive-sum interaction with potential for every party to win.

In spite of the inflammatory title above, I'm not arguing that copyright needs to die. I think that our current system of excessively strong copyright with lax enforcement works okay, and that a system of somewhat looser copyright with lax but more consistent enforcement would be better. Rather, I would argue that it's in both the enlightened self-interest and even the narrow self-interest of publishers to explicitly allow far more nonprofit uses of their content, especially where educational purposes are concerned. It would be possible to imagine extreme abuses for looser rules -- a person might construct a not-for-profit anthology of all their favorite famous stories and sell it to anyone on the planet, or post all their favorite famous stories online, given the right legal framework -- but these would be rare, especially in the case of literature, and would in most cases still probably be positive interactions for all parties, on net.

Thinking carefully about what this implies for Uncanny Valley.

Tuesday Night Dance Party: Triumph Edition

The theme of tonight's dance party is Triumph. We begin with seven minutes of Tracy and I laughing at each other and recounting the incredible story of our trivia night victory, then there are some really sweet songs.

I feel some "tension" when Tracy tells me to stop interrupting her but rest assured she is making a joke.

The Difficulty of Not Writing a Novel

I've been having a rough time dealing with the fact that I'm not, at present, working on a novel. This probably says something about the way my brain works -- and not something good. It's not even that I need to be actively working on a novel; there have been long periods during my time at NMSU where I haven't been actively working on my book at all, including a first year where I wasn't even sure what book I would be writing. The thing I'm really missing is, I think, the passive effort.

One of my instructors + mentors at Butler University was Dan Barden, who taught my freshman comp course. He made us immediately buy notebooks, in which we were required to write for fifteen minutes and later half an hour every day. The idea was that if your brain knew it was going to have to deliver on a regular basis, it would spend its off time working on ideas for when the time came. I'd been writing more or less daily for years (my first novella was completed at age fourteen, I think) but I hadn't really considered the mechanics of it. Afterward I became increasingly conscious of the way in which I was, when I wrote fiction, dependent on the material produced automatically and subconsciously in advance. At this point I tend to come up with a story idea, decide that in a day or a week or so I'll try to write it, and then eventually I realize I know how to do it. Then my job is to sit down and let it happen, more or less. Sometimes I have to start a story over several times over the course of years before my brain manages to figure it out, but I don't generally consciously mull, too much -- I pretty much just let it happen.

It's a lot like those computer programs that use your otherwise wasted computer cycles to fold virtual proteins or chart the stars or whatever. Writing fiction puts my subconscious to work! But what happens to all those brain cycles when I'm not using them on a novel anymore?

At this point I'm beginning to suspect "my brain eats itself alive." I get grumpy. I use the freed-up capacity to scratch furiously at stupid little itches, like, "What will my damn job be next year?" or "How can I better establish myself as a writer and editor and, more importantly, a sympathetic and likeable person?" My dreams become more vivid and I remember them more often -- awful, socially awkward nightmares where people tell me I suck and they hate me. I become more aware of the people around me, sure, but also much less companionable to them.

I catch myself thinking, "Well, if I'm not going to write something, why don't I get drunk?" I think, "That's probably what an alcoholic thinks." (Don't worry! I'm fine.)

I channel that impulse into eating favorite foods, drinking soda, playing video games. I feel stupid. I listen to video game podcasts.

In a couple weeks we'll be workshopping my novel and other books at NMSU, and I'll be teaching again, and taking a contemporary poetry class. I will presumably have short story ideas again. I may even write some poetry for the first time in an eternity (I kind of miss it!). I will find something to do with this brain of mine.

But, for now, my brain will just gnaw on its own meat.

"Buds" by Stephen Kempster Whelpdale Thomas

At The Incongruous Quarterly:

Ted and some of his good friends (his real friends) were hanging out saying “My life is so good, my life is perfect” and all that, like “My life is perfect” and Slavona was like “My life is perfect,” and here comes William who’s like “My life is perfect” and everyone was like for real tell us about it and he’s like I look good smell good etc but here comes Mohammed who’s like “Let’s think about some bad thoughts” and the others were like not today that’s not what we’re into just now and so Mohammed just kinda hesitates a moment and just then Sophie rode by on her bike looking like she was talking to herself, her mouth was moving like that, and everyone all watched for a second and Mohammed was like I think we should talk about bad, depressing stuff. The others were like “Kind of can’t believe you’re still here, we’re not interested in your mode.”

Go read it.

Against anthologies

Tracy and I spend the entirety of today (as well as much of Thursday) preparing for our CW classes, which will be starting (along with MFA school) late next week. It has been unbelievably complicated accomplishing the simple task of scanning, cropping, printing, and arranging short stories and poetry for our students. The scanner at the library takes pictures from above, so my thumbs are visible in many of the scans, holding the books open, and, in one case, my entire left hand is a claw on the left page. You can see my wedding ring. It's black and white -- very classy. My hands are pretty girlish, though also hairy. When my students get their copies of the pages, I will tell them that each time they see my fingers on the margins, it is a reminder of how much I love them and care for their education: I assembled those readings one damn page at a time, against all odds, in spite of the resistance of some of the most obstinate computers and programs in all time, rescanning some books three times to get the files safely from Point A to Point B.

Sadly my students will have to pay for their copies of these stories (I'll leave them with the copy office in the library, which will then print + bind for everyone who asks), but this seems far superior to the usual strategy of forcing them to buy up anthologies. More work, yes, but ultimately less money and less waste for what I think will be better outcomes. Here's why:

1. The dependence of creative writing instructors on anthologies has a stultifying effect on writing and writers.

I won't claim to know what the aesthetic of any individual anthology is, because I don't read them enough to know. And of course there are exceptions -- Best American Fantasy and Horror is fairly encyclopedic and I remember spending whole weeks discovering new writers through it when I was in high school -- but generally my sense is that you go to Anthology X for this type of story and Anthology Y for that type. If you get a yearly anthology you're mostly exposing your students to what was trendy and easy to publish in a given year -- I remember getting the impression from one particular year of Pushcart that epiphany stories were basically all anyone wrote anymore -- and if you do one of the readers focusing on a broader range of time things arguably get worse, as you end up with a very checklisty collection of writing. Here's the Billy Collins poem. Here's the William Carlos Williams poem. Etc. In short it ends up very bland, and usually even in its blandness and broadness captures only a few segments of one general aesthetic; I don't want to give my students the idea that the only work that matters comes in the form of realist stories about middle-class and upper-middle-class white people having affairs and poems about, you know, whatever Billy Collins writes about. (I can never remember.)

Not only will I capture a broader sense of what's happening and what's happened in writing for my students by avoiding these books, but by not making the claims that anthologies make on their own behalf, I can distort their image of what writing is and can be perhaps a bit less. My reading list will not say it is exhaustive, will not say it is a collection of The Best, will not in fact claim any authority beyond my good taste and general open-mindedness. If a student doesn't find what she's looking for in my chosen works, I hope to make it clear there's still plenty more out there: that this is only the beginning. I think that anthologies tend to create a sense that there is One Thing in writing to which we should all aspire, and I think that this is how they perpetuate themselves, and I think that this is (part of) why people quit writing, or write boring garbage they would never actually themselves read.

2. The illusion that everyone reading the same fifteen people gives us a "shared vocabulary" needs to die sooner rather than later.

This is perhaps another way of saying what I'm really getting at above. There seems to be an assumption in creative writing pedagogy that everyone should read certain stories and authors as they progress toward the MFA, and then within the MFA. This is necessary because A) you can't be a good writer unless you've read, say, Hemingway, and B) it lets us all speak the same language.

If I had only read Hemingway and the other approved authors in school and on my own time, I wouldn't speak the same language as these other writers because I would have quit writing. The main effect of this system isn't that people can communicate more so much as that they needn't communicate: remove everyone who isn't on your wavelength from the room and it will begin to seem very much as if you're actually talking to each other.

My experience of the official primary texts of creative writing has been so different from the experiences of other writers that I don't believe they can actually unite people in a conversation: referring to Moby Dick in discussion doesn't communicate your experience or sense of Moby Dick, it invokes mine. Instructors especially dependent on the "shared vocabulary" concept will also tend to believe that there is one correct experience of or reaction to a book or story or poem, which can make it damn hard to have a conversation in light of the reality that this is, you know, bull. To really talk about writing is harder than gesturing at The Things They Carried or "Pet Milk," in part because writing well is more difficult than simply emulating these texts. The more we're allowed to bring our own experiences, aesthetics and favorite texts into the classroom, the more we will be forced to actually engage each other rather than echoing our own thoughts off each other's lazily bobbling heads.

3. But maybe what I'm really trying to say is simply that my favorite stories aren't in these anthologies.


Which leaves me at an impasse. Do I crowd-source my teaching and attempt to explain to my students a spark I don't actually see? Do I explain to them the brilliance of "Hills Like White Elephants," which I can understand but can't really feel or believe? Or do I assign them Shirley Jackson's "The Daemon Lover," which I actually love, and for which I can actually express and teach love?

Haven't they spent their whole lives being taught that literature is something you only pretend to care about? That it's something you fake your way through? That you can never really enjoy it, and shouldn't expect to? Do I have to give them that same lesson?

It's not about me, it's about the students. Which means I have to be a little selfish. I have to focus on sharing things that I genuinely and personally believe are great.


4. It lets them spend their time and money more wisely.

The only anthology I'm having my students buy this semester is a collection of plays. Why am I doing that? Because I'm not well enough read in plays to choose my own -- I would put something by Durang in, something by Beckett, something by Sondheim, or whatever, and that would basically be it. Maybe give them a flashback to high school with some Tennessee Williams. With the anthology I've chosen (which seems well-edited, I hope) I've narrowed the field of possibilities considerably, and so it becomes easy to choose, with some baseline level of confidence that the students will benefit. But it may not have the best plays in it, and it certainly won't have the ones I can teach most passionately, and odds are my students will benefit from some far more than others. If I knew more about plays, if I had been reading them longer, I could have selected those few works that would benefit my students most, provided them with copies, and then directed them to spend their money on a collection of work by one exemplary artist. This is what I've done in fiction and poetry (with Helen DeWitt and Abraham Smith respectively) and this means that my students will both have a small collection of carefully selected prose and poetry bought at a low price, and two incredible longform works.

Ultimately the use of anthologies seems like a way of wasting one's expertise and students' money. You don't want to take the time to curate, so you don't. They buy things you know they'll never even consider reading, and which, if pressed, you couldn't explain why they should read -- after all, chances are you haven't read it either. Nobody in any creative writing class ever read everything in the Pushcart anthology. My students will read everything they pay for in this class, and I suspect they'll have a more rigorous, more enriching experience as a result. They will also own a copy of Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, which is something I wouldn't have felt comfortable making them buy in addition to a story collection, a poetry collection, and a collection of plays. I would trade a hundred sales of Best American Short Stories for one sale of The Last Samurai.

  

Harry Smith

The first nine minutes of Harry Smith's magnum opus, Film No. 12, or, alternately, "Heaven and Earth Magic"



Smith's synopsis:

The first part depicts the heroine's toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel and Montreal. The second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward VII dedicated the Great Sewer of London.

The Naropa Poetics Audio Archive (hours worth of William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Kenneth Koch, and John Cage) has a 1988 recording of Smith talking about the film during a screening at Naropa, the closest you'll come to DVD commentary:

On the original, six-hour cut of the movie: "People in the art-world tend to like it... because they like to be bored. They're, like, masochists."

On the animal noises on the soundtrack: "They're not ecologically correct."

On the images used: "A lot of the people in it are real."

In short, it is incredible, as interviews with Harry Smith tend to be:

More on Wolfmen, and Also Some on Atmosphere

Yesterday while eating my Wolfman Rancheros I watched the 2010 update of The Wolfman. This thing was hyped around here (in Orlando, I mean, in connection with Universal’s Halloween events last year, on billboards and on fast food soda cups) and so I was vaguely interested in it for a while.

Was the movie entertaining? Well, I took breaks to write a blog entry and to feed the cat and to stuff laundry into the machine, but overall felt my two Sunday morning hours had been decently spent.

Was it good? Well . . .

Actually, the elliptical well there is unnecessary. The actors are names but with the exception of the female lead they come across as wooden character frameworks rather than as humans (my fiancé called them something like “skeleton people”). The storyline, while curvy, is predictable. The effects are occasionally cartoonish, and at one point after the Wolfman batted a Wolfman hunter’s head off his neck I was surprised to feel disinterested by the gore.

But I still enjoyed the film because of the atmosphere. I’m easily won over by a muted landscape and gothic foreboding, and in The Wolfman the atmosphere is created with such care that it may be to blame for some of the flim’s other faults. Just as the wide shots of asylum interiors and London streets offer beautiful views with our actors reduced to small figures, the broad takes on superstition and small-city fear overwhelm the growth of the characters.

(This problem, of course, isn't one specific to the horror genre. We can probably all think of times we've read straight lit pieces and thought, come on, enough of the description of the falling snow, or the noises of the rushing traffic, or the mundanities of cubicle life, just get to the characters.)

It made me think of another piece of art, executed more skillfully yet also supersoaked in atmosphere: Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula. My first year in undergrad I was cast as a narrator in the drama department’s fall play, and as a consequence spent hours every weeknight up in a sound both with a muted mic, too engaged with the action of the play (projected up to me on a little black-and-white monitor) to open homework but too bored to just sit there. Somehow I found in the campus library a copy of The Annotated Dracula and I hauled the enormous volume up to the booth with me every night as we approached the premier. The edition was gargantuan, library black, loose and frayed, and inside, along with Stoker’s story, filled with illustrations and historical background and editorial elaboration on plot points major and incidental. There were so many asides that they sometimes became ridiculous, but the project as a whole hung together well and carried a foggy gravitas that made me consider stealing the damn thing. Thankfully it would have been too big even to fit under my shirt.

So maybe that was the spark point for me. Since reading it I’ve issued free passes to stories that are short on narrative elegance but that somehow capture the spooky desperation and wonder of our nostalgic take on the past unknown: Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, certain X-Files episodes, cheesy network TV Halloween reruns, volumes of horror writing. I feel guilty loving a set of art that is so regularly flawed, but maybe we all let our standards go for certain atmospheric trick, in the hope that this time everything will come together better than expected.

Wolfman Rancheros and Story #24: Mechanic

If you woke up today like me, lazy and hungry, you might enjoy this recipe:

throw down some heated corn tortillas
throw down some tater tots
throw down some heated black beans, tomatoes, and red peppers
throw down 1-2 wolfman eggs (or regular eggs)
splash hot sauce everywhere

While you're tearing that meal apart, you might enjoy reading this story. What is it called? It is called "Mechanic." I wrote it last night after eating a sea of fish tacos. I also wrote one about sharks, and about eating dolphins, and about a cat with a drinking problem. Those fish tacos were really swimming around my head.

Robbie liked to talk too much when he was drunk or excited. He'd get all pulled thin on cigarettes and say anything so that you could never tell if he was being true or talking out of the hollow part of his head.

"Did you know," he said, "that you can increase your gas mileage with a simple potato?"

"Can you now," I said.

"What you do is you unclip that hose from the engine to the radiator. The starches filter and distribute the cooling fluids."

"You're full of gravy," I said.

"I'll show you," he said.

"Yes you will," I said. Lately I'd got this feeling that I ought to show Robbie I was wise to him and here was my chance. We went inside for a potato and then I lead him out to the workshop where he had his pick of junkers to surgery around in. We got the hood of this Aerostar open and a mess of machinery sprawled before us. "Have a go, buddy," I said.

Then I went inside and turned on the TV. Some people were running around in suits after other people with suits. I got to thinking about teaching Robbie a lesson and I looked up the number for the newspaper. Those people spent most of their days writing about dead trees and pumpkins found floating in the public pool anyway, and I told them about this automotive and dietary breakthrough going to occur in my very back yard.

"Hum," I said, when the newsman showed up. It was the editor himself, which was no surprise considering how many people the paper employed. "Right this way." I lead him through my house and into the backyard and the hood was still flung up on the van but Robbie was long gone. Even his car was gone. The only sign of him was a few cigarette stubs lying in the grass.

"This is it?" the newsman said. He got up to the van and lifted his camera and started shifting around like he was taking pictures even though the camera didn't make a sound.

"Hum," I said, but it seemed now the only thing to do was to try the trick. The potato was in the grass by one of the tires and I got it up into the guts of the engine and with some effort got the hose Robbie had talked about jammed up into the skin. "Now watch this," I said, and I opened the van's door and got up inside.

Running my first game of Sleep is Death

As Tracy wrote, we played our first game of Sleep is Death last night. I think it went really well, and I definitely plan to tell more stories with it. (I also hope to find someone who will tell me a story with it, but this is admittedly pretty demanding.) You can read the whole thing here. There were some hiccups where I misused the software slightly or misjudged how long something would take me to do (it's really interesting but also fairly stressful to create art on-the-fly for a game) and these resulted in a few continuity errors, some more embarrassing than others. These are a part of the experience, though -- SiD is a performance on the part of the controller and the player, and the mistakes become a part of the performance. Some of the mistakes are even sort of interesting if you take them as part of the narrative -- others merely serve as reminders that there are people behind all of the images on the screen. (Before we go any further, if you need a refresher on what SiD is, start here.)

Broadly speaking, the experience was surprisingly emotionally engaging. I had been working for the past week on creating the assets I would need to tell the story, putting in half an hour here and an hour there building characters, rooms, objects, and other art. The longer I worked on it the harder it was to believe it would ever come together in a story. And there's a real risk with this game that it won't -- if you go on building your story's world forever, if you don't finally play a game with someone and make it all live and breathe for a moment, I imagine you can get lost in the details. The limitations (the time limit, the turn-taking structure, the needs and agency of your player) are what will make the story happen. They give you structure and sense. The goal should probably be to do world-building as quickly as you possibly can while doing a decent job (with an eye toward creating assets that you can use in many, many stories) so that you can get into the meat of player interaction.

Of course a big part of the story's success was Tracy's performance as a player. Her gifts for character and dialog as a writer not only created Mr. Sagara, they made him an engaging person. I felt real sadness when he began disconnecting the phones, and my decision to make him cut his hand while disconnecting the phone in the closet built on that feeling. There's a sense of isolation in the game -- a weird loneliness that comes from knowing this whole little world is being built and sustained by just two people, for a very limited time -- that can be, if modulated by the story correctly, quite devastating. I saw glimpses of that. There is also, of course, a real warmth in the fact that you're interacting so intimately with another person. It's hard sometimes when writing to remember how important it is to be generous to your reader. That never becomes a problem in SiD, because your "reader" is right there, with a very real voice in the story's creation; the kindness fostered between controller and player is a very good feeling.

I suspect you could learn a lot about writing, reading, and art in general by playing SiD.

Below the fold, I'll make some more specific observations about how SiD works, and how those who play it can build a better experience.