Bell's Yells

A Nibble

2012-01-08T10:07:00.003-05:00

The title of this post is intentionally restrained, maybe too restrained, because I don't want to get all excited and then all disappointed if things don't pan out. But....

An agent requested to see my novel!

This is big news for me. Big, big news. Huge, in fact.

And it all happened thanks to a revised query letter.

That's right. I'd been sending out a query for Survival Colony Nine that seemed pretty good to me, but it wasn't getting any bites. So I went back, did a little research, and revamped the query, making it catchier, snazzier, snappier, whatever-ier. And within a day, I got a reply from the agent asking to see the whole manuscript.

So first of all, thanks to all those online resources that tell you how to write a dynamic query. They obviously helped.

And second of all, thanks to those (mostly my wife and children) who have held faith in me during this process. My daughter said to me just yesterday, "I have a good feeling about this."

And third of all, keep your fingers crossed for me!

Novels and Stories

2011-12-22T18:58:00.003-05:00

One thing I've discovered about writing novels: it definitely slows down one's ability to write short stories.

Duh!

But seriously, since I've committed much of the past two years to novel-writing, my short story production has drastically slowed. I've got a bunch of half-finished stories in the hopper, some of which I'll try to complete, others of which are probably best left where they are. But I haven't been able to muster the time to work on them.

It's not just a time thing, either. The novel I'm currently revising is Young Adult fantasy fiction--requiring a very different voice and narrative approach than the experimental, literary short fiction I've been producing lately. So changing gears from the one to the other presents certain problems; it takes a period of decompression of whatever to move from one style and genre to another, radically different kind.

Case in point: I just completed a very short short story (1,700 words or so) titled "Girl Drives into Oncoming Traffic." I'm pleased with it, and I've started to send it out. It was short enough that I could write it in a week and thus not take too much time away from revising the novel. But its language and narrative were SO very different from what I'd been working on, it had a powerful effect on the novel when I returned to it--in the middle of a lovely, straightforward prose passage, I found myself spouting postmodern nihilism. I cleared it up, needless to say, but it was eerie seeing the hold a particular voice gains over you.

Eerie, but also encouraging. Sustaining a narrative voice is one of the hardest things about writing, especially writing longer works. You have to let the voice take control to a certain extent if you're going to keep it strong and consistent. So it was good to see how deeply the voice I'd created had taken on a life of its own.

But now, it's back to the novel. And to another long dry spell for all the other voices clamoring to get out.

What the Dog Saw

2011-12-12T09:21:00.004-05:00

I just received word that my latest science fiction story, "What the Dog Saw," has been accepted by Bellow Literary Journal. It should be out early next year.

Warning: this is the story I mentioned a good long time ago (last year, I think, when I was first writing it) that possesses a very experimental voice. It can be off-putting--though interestingly, two or three journals that rejected it said they liked the voice but didn't like other aspects of the story! I personally think it's a pretty cool little piece, but consider yourself warned.

It's also interesting to note that the editor of Bellow spent some time working with me on this story to make it better. I say this is interesting because, in my personal experience, I've found editors of speculative fiction journals more willing than editors of straight-up literary journals to work with their writers. Several of my spec fic stories, including "Cats in the Backyard," "A Very Small Child Called Eugene," and "A Chimaera Story with Four Morals," were published only after some editorial changes, all of which made the stories better, in my opinion. Now, this might be a false comparison; it might be that my literary fiction just isn't good enough to get published in the journals that offer editorial assistance, so such stories of mine aren't even making it to that point. But it might also be that the editors of journals that specialize in genre fiction have a particularly keen sense of what their readers want, and thus they are particularly invested in crafting stories to meet those expectations.

Whatever, the story's coming out soon! I'd love to hear some reader reactions to it once you see it in print.

Finished!

2011-11-17T18:01:00.003-05:00

This is to announce that I've officially finished a draft of my young adult fantasy novel, a month ahead of schedule! Beating my own deadline is not uncommon for me; I get a spurt of energy and creativity at the end, once I've finally figured out what the heck I'm trying to say, and the last couple chapters fly by. (It also helps that the final chapter is presently very short.) But the draft is complete: 304 manuscript pages, roughly 66,000 words, and a plot that wraps up most of the loose ends but still leaves room for the sequel. I did mention this is part of a trilogy, didn't I?

That makes two novels completed in the past two years. Not bad for a guy who hadn't written a word of fiction since college!

So I think I'll take a week off and then get down to the work of revision. A writer's job is never done....

The Frog Prince Is Coming . . . Slowly

2011-11-11T10:44:00.002-05:00

I found out today that my creative nonfiction essay "The Last Days of the Frog Prince" is scheduled for publication in the journal Snowy Egret . . . a year from now!

That wouldn't seem all that unusual if not for the fact that it wsa accepted for publication . . . a year ago!

Can we say "glacial"?

But, no biggie. The essay concerns a childhood experience of mine, so it's hardly essential to rush it to print; what happened when I was ten isn't likely to change anytime soon. I'm just excited to know that the thing is actually coming out.

I'll keep you posted on its progress . . . a year from now!

Gone Hollywood

2011-11-02T09:54:00.005-04:00

As you know, I've been busily working on my latest novel, which is now nearing completion (18 of 21 chapters drafted). But this is a strange business, and you never know what's going to drop into your lap.

To wit: I received a phone call yesterday from a Hollywood producer who's interested in optioning my forthcoming book Native Acts for a screenplay.

Before we all get too excited, let's be clear about certain facts.

First, the aforementioned book is a collection of scholarly essays for which I, along with a colleague, served as editor. I've always thought of it as my final work of scholarship, a project conceived before I made the decision to switch to fiction-writing and thus a project I felt obligated to see to its completion even after I made the switch.

Second, despite its cool and racy title, it's not comparable to, say, Smoke Signals or The Last of the Mohicans. It's a bunch of historians and literary critics writing essays on Native American performance in the colonial era.

Third, I'm not even sure I have the rights to sell the book to a film production company. I'm a bit fuzzy on this, but I assume the publisher would be the one to do that.

So this is probably a dead end at best, a scam at worst. It's probably a guy who saw the title, knew it had something to do with Indians, said to himself, "Hey, Indians are hot these days!", and jumped on the phone. It's probably not going to amount to anything.

But as I said, this is a strange business.

$2.01 USD

2011-10-22T22:09:00.004-04:00

The title of this post is exactly how much I've made so far in royalties from my story "Snooping," which was recently published in an e-book anthology from Nevermet Press. That's the amount that went to me after the editor/publisher took his percentage and all the other authors divvied up the rest.

So obviously, unless you're Stephen King or J. K. Rowling, you do this thing for love, not money. In fact, they probably do it for love too. The money just kind of happened.

But you plug on. I just got word that my story "What the Dog Saw" has been (kind of) accepted for publication. The editor wants some revisions, and unlike previous instances in which I've been asked to revise a work before publication, this guy sounds as if he's not ready to publish the story unless I meet his expectations. So we'll see what happens there.

I've been publishing fiction now for about three years, and I've got a good twenty stories and just about as many dollars to my credit. To some, this might make the act of seeking publication for one's work seem pointless.

But me, I'm not complaining. I'm living large. And I've got $2.01 USD to prove it.

Survival Colony Nine, Doing Just Fine

2011-10-08T21:11:00.003-04:00

Just an update on my young adult fantasy novel-in-progress: it's coming along quite nicely. I've hit a very fertile stretch of the writing, and I'm now pleased to report that if I stick with my 2-page-a-day average, I'll be done with a complete draft by the end of November (not December as originally projected). And, the best part of all, my 12-year-old daughter, who's serving as my test audience, really likes it!

I know, that doesn't sound like much; what's she going to say to her dad? "This really sucks, old man"? "Don't quit your day job"? It's no doubt hard for her to disentangle her affection for me from her estimation of the book.

But what the hey. I think it's pretty good, she thinks it's pretty good, and I've logged just over 200 pages, or roughly two-thirds of the projected total. So there's no stopping me now!

Look for it in bookstores. . . . Well, whenever!

"Snooping" Available!

2011-09-26T18:28:00.003-04:00

My new/old story "Snooping" is now available, along with twelve other fantasy/sci-fi stories, in the anthology Stories in the Ether from Nevermet Press. You can check it out and download it in a variety of e-forms here.

Enjoy, and spread the word!

"Aphasia" Available to Order!

2011-09-22T14:01:00.004-04:00

Just thought you'd like to know that my story "Aphasia" is available to order in the collection Beyond the Grave, published by Pill Hill Press. The link is here. Trust me, the cover art alone makes it worth the price! And then when you add in my story (as well as all the others). . . . Well, you just can't put a dollar value on quality like that!

Your Name Here, Here

2011-09-09T19:10:00.002-04:00

I found out a couple days ago that my fantasy/horror story "Aphasia" will be appearing soon in the anthology Beyond the Grave. I'll let you know when it's available.

And speaking of horror stories, I discovered at around the same time that my sci-fi/horror story "Your Name Here," which was originally published in Rotten Leaves Magazine, is no longer archived on the site. Not wishing to deprive future generations of the chance to read this story, I've included it here.

Enjoy!

Your Name Here

by J. David Bell

You arrive early. The tests, they’ve told you, may take all day. The waiting area is jammed. You people watch. Old bodies, frail bodies, a smattering of cue-ball tweens with huge, haunted eyes. A geezer slurping oxygen in spasmodic gulps, a palsied granny wobbling in a wheelchair. Relatives and personal care attendants lean solicitously, untangling IV lines, patting parchment hands. Barely enough of these cadavers left to save, but here they are, ardent for eternity. A skeleton starts to cough, his knotted hand flying to his mouth, his eyes gaping. Others look away in politeness, embarrassment, dread. The hacking rips your chest. You fight a rising disgust at being hemmed by such ugliness. You pray it’s true what they say, that everyone’s different on the other side.

Bored and anxious, you leaf through the echure. You’ve read it a hundred times. The slogan: “After Life, Live it Up!” The pitch: “Achieve Immortality! Become a Name!” The pristine bodies cavorting in select pleasure locales: Aruba, Montana, the Outer Banks. Their forms glide with the assurance of youth as they body surf, sun, track big game. The crystalline coral gardens, the battlements of red rock bathe in an unearthly glow. Shimmering, that’s the word for it. Everything shimmers. The choral voices on the edge of hearing tantalize. If you stare too long you feel your body drop into the surround, weightless, floating. The illusion of being there is dangerously convincing.

You tap the screen, scrolling pages. More images surface, hover, dissipate into mist. For those with aspirations to culture, the deluxe package promises nirvana as living canvas, dabs and whorls of pigment, a swirling mindscape worthy of Monet. For the young or chronically immature, the clichés of pop cult beguile: a Star Wars space station, a medieval fortress à la Tolkien. For the more traditionally pious, bright light and ethereal music, a hint of vestments, maybe robes or wings. Limits exist, though, to the architects’ imagination, limits placed by design. Except for the very wealthy, those who can upload their most private fantasy to the graphical interface, one must be content with the company’s simulacra, and these incline toward the generic. An afterlife too closely patterned on a particular belief system may prove unacceptable to another. An offense may be taken. You’ve been told this commercial tact is the origin of “Names,” a term non-denominational to the point of insipidity. (You’ve also heard it’s an anagram of the pagan “Manes,” shades or spirits of the dead.) The noun has yielded some arresting street lingo, including “Taking Names” (the recording process), “Name Recognition” (the meeting of acquaintances in the beyond), “Name Dropping” (the erasure of corrupt files). For obvious reasons the company chooses not to publicize that last possibility, though the fine print does spell it out. Legal boilerplate, but still, it gives you pause.

Now that you are here, though, you wonder at all the precautions. After all, no one has ever come back to complain, to demand a refund. The whole enterprise could be a sham and none would be the wiser. Becoming a Name, you decide, entails a certain leap of faith. Will the path you’ve chosen meet your expectations? Will it fulfill your dreams? And if not, what then? Names are gnomifiles, mental echoes of your lifelong self uploaded to the Your Name Here virtual host, with its advertised lifespan of effective infinity. These phantoms cannot, so far as you know, communicate with the living. They cannot request a reset, retain an attorney. The marketing geniuses who have cornered the hereafter are beholden to no one, need fear no government regulators or incensed clients. To become a Name means to trust enough in human ingenuity--and honesty--to seek eternity in a construct of man’s devising. They may have discovered how to immortalize the mind, but they have yet to figure out how to stopper the soul.

No wonder, then, the truly pious will have nothing to do with the place. They have set up a permanent picket at all Your Name Here offices. You walked through their ranks this morning, your eyes on the revolving door; you waved away their glossies of crackling flame behind the words of John 3:16, the promise of God’s undying love. You withstood their prayers, their appeals. You noted that none wore the insignia, the fiery cross of the Defenders of the Gate. Of course. Their operations were secret, their attacks unannounced: “as a thief in the night,” they wrote, searing the words in charcoal and ash. Now armed guards patrolled the clinics, and in L.A., site of their bloodiest attack, craft circled overhead. The Defenders were listed as a terrorist organization after that bombing, which left five techs and twenty clients dead, not to mention the untold numbers of Names awaiting their owners’ deaths before upload to the virtual host. In triumphal feeds, the Defenders cited John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” And Revelations 3:3: “If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.” More than one church was rumored to back them. All denied the charges. In ways the architects never intended, becoming a Name had become a matter of taking your life into your hands.

You wonder what became of those raw Name files, severed from their donors, preserved in the virtual equivalent of cryogenic freeze, then abruptly, in a silent puff of explosives, curling into smoke and flame. Did they wake from their sleep of death long enough to witness their end? Did their owners suffer a pang at the passing of their cyberselves? And what of those whose physical deaths had already passed, whose bodies lay in the grave but whose recorded consciousnesses had yet to be transferred to permanent storage? Was there nothing but darkness for these hopeful, deluded souls? The Defenders had sworn they would not cease till they had razed the ersatz heaven of the Names, rent its towers to the foundations, choked this veneration of false altars and idols. Immortality for the asking, for the buying. The consumer culture finally proving, if more proof were needed, that it worshiped no God but Mammon. So many whose faith rested on machines, whose lights were so darkened they could not wait upon the Lord. You would not have thought--you sniff, recalling your Dante—-that Death could have undone so many.

Yet here you are. Soon you will be called into the room behind the reception area, seated in the blue vinyl chair where insurance information will be collected, BP and pulse checked, medical history ticked off. Your height, weight, and vision, for reasons obscure to you, will be recorded. Moved to an examining room and stripped to your shorts, you will be tested for physical and—-so they say—-mental fitness to endure the transfer process. You will be screened by a tech with a compboard, who will administer a psych eval to determine your readiness to place faith and fate in the lab workers who will harvest the thirabytes of mental data that constitute you. You will testify that you have no religious, moral, or other scruples to the Naming process, that you agree to hold harmless and indemnify Your Name Here, its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, and employees from and against any third-party claim arising from or in any way related to your use of the Service, including any liability or expense arising from all claims, losses, damages (actual and consequential), suits, judgments, litigation costs and attorneys' fees, of every kind and nature, brought by your heirs, if any, in perpetuity. Only once during the interrogation will the tech administering the diagnostic hesitate, frown, the compboard illuminating his face flicker. You will initial after each paragraph listing potential bugs in the system: partial transfer, which may result in your consciousness surviving for perpetuity in a damaged state akin to that of infancy or mental retardation; data corruption, said to produce symptoms of permanent virtual dementia and/or psychosis; subject splicing, wherein your Name, rather than communing with others, becomes fused with at least one fellow traveler; GI arrest, wherein the link between Name-consciousness and surround fails intermittently or permanently, producing, it is believed, either total sensory deprivation or an effect resembling an endlessly skipping laser disc or strobe light. When the techs are done with you, clothes returned, results posted, you will schedule the daily recording sessions that will occupy you for the next several weeks, as the immeasurable reams of thought the techs name you will be extracted. (The process, you’ve been warned, is exhausting; even if it were less extensive, it could not be completed at a single sitting.) You will then make your way back out through the lobby, where new faces of doom and decay will have assembled, their eyes resting on you in confusion and wonder, maybe in anger, some in suspicion, even in pity, you the sole apparent possessor of an as yet unbrittle body. You will wade through their stares like fog.

On the sidewalk, past the sawhorse perimeter drawn for the protestors, you will refuse their literature once more, watch them cross themselves, fold hands over rosaries, close eyes and bow heads in dumb protest or petition. You will think that, for all their slideshows and icons, these emissaries lack the vital courage of their faith. Though only a child when September 11 struck the nation, you nonetheless felt an awe like sickness in the pit of your stomach at the thought of its dealers’ fiery martyrdom, the conviction it required to yield their bodies to the flame. You wonder who will be the saved: those who stood by in passive prayer, or those who flung themselves into the roaring breach. You ache to receive an answer.

You remind yourself to be patient. You will be dead in less than a month, and then all things will be revealed.

***

When you received your death sentence, a mere half year ago, you craved assurance that your demise might serve some cause, some purpose. You saw, as only one on the brink of mortality can, the mere waste of your days: never to be married, never to raise children, never to answer life’s calling. You would not have bothered to lengthen this excuse for existence if you had not been brought to believe that, as a Name, you might claim some place in a grander scheme. You grew convinced that Time had been your enemy all along--Time, and the world’s indifference. As a Name, those hindrances would no longer apply. Eternity beckoned, a limitless escarpment gilded by special status. Compared to that, casting aside the body that had slogged through its middling allotment of years seemed a small price to pay. You would die, but your Name would live forever.

“Getting your affairs in order” was a joke. You didn’t even own a dog. No farewell letters to polish, no final trips to take, no last flings to consummate. The only challenge to face was the breakdown of your body, a process they’d cautioned you would be grim: as the virus spread through you, shutting down organs, thinning bones, you’d experience pain on a scale that would make the faint of heart tremble. And your mind would remain intact through the failure of your physical being, your mind would witness your body’s utter dissolution. It had to be that way: you could not be transfigured otherwise. The loss of corporeality did not particularly faze you, though naturally you fretted to learn what form the pain and debility would take. You were assured you’d last long enough for a full recording, even if, as proved to be the case, your final sessions would be conducted at home, where you would lie pinioned to your bed, your legs too weak to carry you and your arms too frail to lift toward the window’s light.

The extraction, it turns out, is every bit as grueling as foretold: your body shudders as if your guts are being sucked from their moorings. Yet as the days pass and you watch your frame dwindle, your chest collapse, your ribs slice through your flesh, you feel a calm descend upon you. Soon it will be the end. The fire in your veins has become, if not tolerable, at least not unfamiliar. It burns away your outline, leaving only your spirit. The more your body weakens, the more your will braces; lingering doubts drop off like the last wisps of hair you’ve found littering your sickbed. You realize you are becoming what you will remain for the rest of Time: ethereal, incorporeal, pure faith and implacable conviction. Without a body to bear you down, you soar. The words of the hymn return to you: “on eagle’s wings.” Had you possessed such faith before, you would not have waited so long to take this journey. But the journey was requisite to forge the faith, you know that now. You are a pilgrim on the road to glory. Only by this path may you enter.

The techs bustle by your bedside. They strip the last shards of your sharpened consciousness, watch your breathing grow so shallow only you know it is there. “Is he gone?” they ask, probing for a pulse. Their gloved hands leap from your skin before they find it. “He’s on fire!” they curse, and you smile inwardly, no longer able to form your face to your mind’s resolution. You know the end is near. You wish you could speak to them, pronounce your final sentence. You watch the room darken, the techs and their machines freezing and melting away, and you know you are there at last.

***

You wake to perfect darkness. This is not unexpected; the literature predicts a delay in the Name’s correspondence to the GI. Or it could be the interface is malfunctioning or, what did they call it, sleeping during the system’s routine self-maintenance. Whatever the case, you will need to be patient, more patient than you’d ever imagined it possible to be. Time is no longer a factor. No, Time has no meaning here. Eternity stretches before you.

In the absence of external stimuli, you test your consciousness to register if all appears intact. You remember who you are, how you got here, why you are here. Good. You suppose you should experience delight that you have cheated death, that such a place truly exists, that you have not been deceived. Instead, you experience only eagerness to begin. You quiver for another Name to pierce the darkness, to make contact.

Patches of light, filmy and fluid as sun through a leaf’s green membrane, begin to penetrate the dark. The surround flickers like heat lightning. A landscape forms out of nothing, the one you selected at random from the menu: endless green fields, groves of fruit trees, a sparkling river. Lanky bird shapes, perhaps sandhill cranes, bank against a strawberry and lemon sky. Now that you see it, you suppose you might have been drawn to it by some impulse toward tranquility. Or at least, its bland beauty was preferable to the alternatives. You’d been appalled, but not surprised, to find that one of the options was a mammoth mall. (Its slogan, in squirming neon: “You are what you shop. Forever.”) The experience of the interface, like everything else here, is personalized: what you see as a sheltered valley some other might know as a seascape. Even your sense of self will not match another’s: they will see you, and you them, as each wishes. If all works as advertised you will be able to commune with other Names, but not to experience the afterworld through their eyes.

The tickle of an uncompleted swallow weighs in your throat. Only you have no throat, your throat is in your mind, a function of mentality’s tenacious belief that it must be tethered to some physical form. You had a choice to refashion your body as you willed, to become the hero or idol you’d not been in life. Most Names shaved years. Some, you learned, went so far as to swap genders. But you announced that you would have no body at all (the tech had raised an eyebrow); you would become pure mind. You’d been convinced at the time, and even more so as your disease ravaged you, that one could be a slave to one’s body as surely as to other false gods. The fact that your motives were different, you’d been assured, would give you an advantage no other could foresee or resist. Unhampered by a material body, you could achieve the mission for which you’d come.

You rove, wraithlike. Your mind, you discover, possesses an expansiveness and flexibility it could not have matched on earth: it gallops in great dizzying vaults, wolfing territory, refusing boundaries. Soon it is racing ahead at light speed, conscious of what lies beyond long before you reach it. Your pace, impossibly, quickens: trees shoot past so quickly they seem to sprout from bare earth, a mountain range is at once remote and eclipsed the moment you record its existence. The world warps, space no longer laid out in a radius around you but curling through you as if through the eye of a needle. The experience is exhilarating, the power to conjure rather than inhabit a world. Yet this ability more than anything cements your conviction that this place is counterfeited, its designers no true believers. Here you are a God. In the heaven to which you aspire you would be but another thankful soul.

With a shiver of excitement you realize your first contact has drawn near. You have no idea whether it is male or female, young or old, black or white: however it may choose to experience itself, all you see is an open, throbbing form, something like a flower, something like a wound, something like a heart. This, too, is as it should be. Your purpose coils within you as the Name recognizes your presence, expands its consciousness to embrace yours. Sensing no threat, it opens wider to commune. You detect the fragrance, the balm, of its greeting; the walls of its cavity melt away. To its eyes, you might be another bargain-hunter at the Perpetual Mall. In moments it will speak, in the customary manner.

I am Ada, it says, its nebulous form pulsing like lips. Its voice is as the rushing of blood. I welcome thee. Tell me, beloved friend, thy Name.

I am Death, you respond, the Destroyer of Worlds.

Then you strike. Your mind lashes out and plunges into its aperture, a sensation at once wildly exciting and cramped to the point of panic, and what they told you would happen begins: the Name called Ada screams, shudders, convulses around you, its mollusk-form radiating frenzied signals of memory and collapse. You experience, in a brief burst of illumination, its life: the cancer that hollowed its mortal form, the lust for fleshly pleasures that brought it to this place. (The Name called Ada, you learn, was a woman. Her stink suffocates you.) You witness her sins as if they were your own, and for a moment you long to withdraw, to break contact, to flee. But it is only a moment, and you hold firm until the Name called Ada flames, her consciousness consumed, you have been told and so believe, by her own sins. You are only the agent, the activator. Entering this false paradise, you do nothing but reveal the truth.

When the Name called Ada withers into a film, feebly palpitating, you leave it to hunt for others.

With each it is the same; with each it is different. The Name called Bel shrivels at once, its sins so palpable you can taste them like a gum on your tongue. The Name called Gem sickens, its form turning leprous and black before you shake free. Many repeat Ada’s fiery end, though the intensity and tint of the flame, the concentration of mind you must expend to draw forth their confession, varies. You do not linger to speculate, but move on. The most satisfying are those you drive mad, those you leave shrieking monosyllables or tearing at their leached forms. These, you trust, retain enough awareness to suffer the torment of self-knowledge. As you spread through the system, encountering Names, waiting for their welcome, stabbing through their defenses, you learn to prevail over the flood of feelings that at first made you waver; though your loathing does not slacken, as you find that none can withstand you your will to carry out your appointed task grows ever stronger. In no time the Elysian fields are littered with their carcasses.

Your only regret is that you cannot communicate with those on the outside. You have opened the door, but you may never know if they have managed to complete what you made possible. The timing of their attacks was to have coincided with your death, but not having spoken to them for months beforehand--by design--you cannot be sure if they remained as resolute as you, if they struck as boldly as planned, or, if they did, if their success was as total as all swore. You suppose you may find out. If the attacks succeeded, the place of Names should remain vulnerable to you for as long as your deathless consciousness walks this land. If they failed, if those responsible for this heathen heaven remain alive or the pathway to the VH remains intact, then someone may be able to undo the damage you have caused: to restore or delete corrupted Name files, to reboot the system, to root your consciousness out of the circuits. Yet even if they did, would you know it? Or would you be snuffed out so completely you’d have no knowledge you had failed? Could you, in fact, exist at this point as anything other than what you have chosen to become: a virus, a rot in the system? It was this same virus, implanted by the Defenders, that killed your body, leaving only your infected mind. Deprived of that, what could you possibly be?

These questions wrack you, but you tamp them down as you move on. You remind yourself of what you have vowed to do, of the sacrifice you alone were willing to make, the place you were willing to go, and all with full consciousness that you would receive neither recognition nor reward in this afterlife. Your mind has been lopped not only from your body but from your immortal soul; neither can know the fate of the other. Suppose all goes as planned. Suppose you obliterate all that haunt this place. Still your mind will never leave. It will remain for all Time in the hell it has created.

The wailing of ruined Names surrounds you like a sulfurous cloud. The plains smoke with the fire pits of your passing. You sense an infinitude of untouched Names crowding the boundless horizon, terror-stricken by now but unequipped to repel what you carry. You decide to let them wait for your coming, to add doubt and despair to their punishment. You know at last that this is what you are meant to do. You know you will make it to heaven, even if you must spend an eternity in hell.

The End

Survival Colony Nine

2011-08-29T09:08:00.003-04:00

The title of this blog post is the title of the first novel in my planned young adult fantasy trilogy. I finally came up with a title, and though the work was progressing without it, I find that the work's progressing much better with it. In fact, the narrative has finally hit its stride.

For a while there, I was a bit worried. I've written young adult material in the past, but that was in the way past, and I wasn't all that confident in the voice I'd crafted for the first couple chapters. Nor did I believe I'd struck the right balance of narrative, exposition, and dialogue--the right balance for a young adult audience, that is. And finally, I wasn't convinced the plot was sufficiently complex to sustain a novel, much less three. But I kept on writing, hoping it'd come together eventually.

And I believe it has. I'm now in the midst of chapter seven, and the ideas are tumbling out almost faster than I can put them on the page--the characters and plot becoming richer and more complex, the fantasy world becoming more fully realized, the arc of the entire book taking firmer shape in my mind. All of this is good stuff.

Whether it'll be good enough to be published is another matter. But I'm putting that thought on hold for the moment. My plan is to have a complete draft done by the end of the calendar year (which, according to my quickie calculation, I can achieve if I write an average of two pages a day from now until December 31). After that, I'll start revising and looking for agents and/or publishers. And of course, I'll let you know how it all turns out.

A Very Small Child Called Eugene

2011-08-25T08:50:00.002-04:00

As promised, I'm back, with news of a recently published short story. It's titled "A Very Small Child Called Eugene," and I suppose you'd call it speculative fiction/alternative history/magical realism/something like that. My contributor's copies came yesterday, so you can order copies of your own if you're so inclined. And the online version will be out in October, according to the publisher, A cappella Zoo, which you can find at this link.

Warning: the story contains explicit language and hard-to-stomach concepts (hard to stomach in the moral sense, not the physiological sense). It's why a couple publishers turned it down; they liked it, but told me they were afraid their readers might not understand what the story's trying to do and might be deeply offended by it. I hope that's not the case with you; I hope you see what the story's really about. But that's always a risk when dealing with sensitive subjects, subjects we as a culture haven't really resolved no matter what we may like to tell ourselves.

The Write Choice

2011-08-09T23:33:00.004-04:00

After considerable thought, I've decided to change the content of my blog and, instead of offering a smattering of this, that, and the other thing, focus solely on the thing I care about most: writing.

What this means for my legions of fans is two principal things:

1. You'll no longer be able to find my pithy, scathing, misanthropic rants on this blog. If that's what you're looking for, you'll have to seek elsewhere.

2. The frequency with which I post will now be determined by the frequency with which I have something to say or report about the course of my writing career. Up to this point, I've tried to post roughly once a week; but I can't be counted on to do that anymore. If I've got news about writing--a new story written or published, a comment about the craft--I'll post it. If not, I may be silent for long periods.

It's not without misgivings that I take this new direction; I've enjoyed the freedom to post about anything and everything. But for the time being, at least, I felt that a more focused approach might be good for me and my voluminous readership. So we'll give it a try and see how it goes.

Write on!

Techno-Humanism

2011-08-01T13:05:00.004-04:00

I recently read an essay (which I won't dignify by linking to it here) by a guy who works at Google. This guy delivered a commencement address describing his odyssey from being a "technologist" to being a "humanist" (apparently, he went back to school to earn a Philosophy Ph.D. after earning a bundle in the technology industry). He waxes eloquent about the wonders of humanistic inquiry, how it has enriched him as a thinker and a person. And then he tells us how wonderfully the humanities can serve society: apparently, with his fancy new Philosophy degree, he got the brilliant idea to create a new kind of internet search engine.

Wow.

As someone who believes in the humanities, I'm frankly tired of those who try to argue that humanistic inquiry is "as good as" technological, scientific, material, or economic pursuits. What these arguments typically boil down to is what I've described above: a claim for the ways in which the humanities can get you a good job, help you solve a technological puzzle, or add to the material prosperity of humankind.

What you'll never hear these supposed "supporters" of the humanities say is that the humanities are good in ways that simply are not reducible to dollars earned or techno-gadgets built and improved--that the humanities are, indeed, in some ways antithetical to the values embodied by techno-society.

If anything, these techno-humanists are more dangerous than those who simply vilify, ridicule, or demean the humanities. The latter at least are being honest: they believe that all there is to life is money, material possessions, and technological advance, and they have no time to waste on anything that doesn't contribute to those ends. Techno-humanists, by contrast, act as if they favor the humanities--but really, they merely wish to transform the humanities into another servant of the almighty technological god.

So the next time you hear someone sing the praises of the humanities while telling you how he used his Philosophy degree to dig us deeper into the pit of techno-slavery, ask him this: might he not try using his Philosophy degree to try to start digging us out?

Gotta Lotta Harry Potta

2011-07-24T22:30:00.005-04:00

I've now seen the final installment of the Harry Potter series (twice, in fact, thanks to my daughter's obsession with it). What can one say? To praise the movies (or the books) is redundant, to critique them seems like sour grapes, especially when one is an aspiring fantasy novelist oneself. But for what it's worth, here's my assessment of "The Deathly Hallows, Part 2":

I liked it.

It was very dark--literally and figuratively; I had trouble seeing what was going on some of the time. The score was terrific, the acting was effortless, and there were a number of stirring scenes, notably the arming of Hogwarts. I also found myself moved by two scenes in particular: Snape's memories viewed by Harry in Dumbledore's Pensieve, and Harry's meeting with the shades of his loved ones in the Forbidden Forest. Though Voldemort's death was something of an anti-climax (less so, actually, than in the book, where he just kind of falls over dead), the film had a fittingly final feel. The promos read: "It All Ends," and though that may be a bit grandiose and hyperbolic, I didn't feel as if they'd left anything out or failed to tie up any important threads.

The only negative thing I'll say about the movie, or about the series as a whole--and this has nothing to do with J. K. Rowling or the film-makers--is that I just don't get all the reviewers and critics who write about the saga's profound religious and mythological resonances. I had the same objection to those who waxed eloquent (and incoherent) about the Star Wars films as modern-day myths. Yes, Harry visits King's Cross Station when he dies--and then he comes back to life, so you can definitely see the Christian imagery there. But the books (and the film adaptations thereof) don't strike me as carrying the gravity and significance necessary to proclaim them "mythological" or "religious." They're pretty simple fairy tales or action-adventure yarns: good confronts and defeats evil, all while riding on dragons and fighting ogres. If that's all there is to mythology or religion, so be it. I suspect, though, that there's lots more: like the complexity of faith, the puzzle of suffering, the relationship of humanity to the earth, the mystery of creation. Harry Potter (not to mention Star Wars) doesn't seem to have anything to do with those subjects, and so for me, it fails the test of myth.

But it fails that test only if we expect it to pass. If, by contrast, we expect it to be exactly what it is--a well-crafted story with appealing characters, a visionary dreamworld, and a compelling narrative--then it passes with flying colors.

Fairy Tale Future

2011-07-17T21:27:00.005-04:00

As mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently working on a young adult fantasy novel. It's set in a post-apocalyptic Earth (or maybe not Earth), and that's all I'm going to say about its plot for now. I've got a chapter and a half drafted (but no title!). We'll see if something comes to me.

Anyway, working on this book has got me thinking about futuristic narratives and their relationship (or lack thereof) to reality.

Take Blade Runner, for instance. It's celebrated as one of the great science fiction films of all time--and I don't dispute that. Its visuals remain stunning (especially on a widescreen TV and Blu-Ray, both of which I recently purchased), its conception of a future Earth is arresting, and (once Ridley Scott got the control he needed to strip out the voice-over narration and other distracting elements from its theatrical release) its plot is deeply moving and disturbing.

But measured against the real, it's way off base.

Think about it. The film, which came out in 1982, is set in 2019, or eight years from now. Earth is for all intents and purposes uninhabitable. Non-human animals are extinct. And superhuman android slaves labor in off-world colonies. Huh?

Unless we have some major changes in the next eight years, Blade Runner's vision of 2019 is pretty much laughable.

Or let's consider the Terminator movies (which also look really cool on Blu-Ray). The narrative is set in 2029, after a super-smart computer called SkyNet has initiated global thermonuclear war to annihilate the human species. Cyborg assassins called Terminators travel back in time (that's right) to eliminate the humans who will, in the future, fight back against and ultimately triumph over the machines.

Double huh?

Time travel is impossible (Einstein proved that). The smartest computer we've got can barely beat a human being on "Jeopardy." And though nuclear war does remain a looming threat, what will happen in its aftermath, if it happens, is that humans will have to struggle against themselves, not a bunch of machines, for survival.

I'm not being dense here. Obviously, futuristic narratives aren't meant to offer "real" pictures of the future; they're meant to facilitate reflection on the present. And we do indeed have reason to be fearful about our present technologies, our present violent tendencies, our present destructive ways. The only point I'm making is that stories about the future, even those that gesture the most strenuously toward believability, are bound to be just that--stories. Fictions, in fact. Or, to use a somewhat more loaded term, fairy tales.

This is why, perhaps, I prefer futuristic narratives that make no pretense of accuracy. Narratives such as those of 12 Monkeys or Star Wars. The former an obvious social allegory, the latter based largely on The Wizard of Oz (which was itself, by the way, a futuristic narrative when it came out in 1939, as well as a social allegory).

So when you're reading my book (assuming it comes out some time in the future), don't be surprised if I get everything wrong. As the androids and cyborgs will gladly tell you, that's the nature of the game.

The Passing of Boss Krenkel

2011-07-09T21:16:00.003-04:00

Hi all, and sorry for my extended absence; I was on vacation.

As mentioned in a previous post, I've started to send out my novel, "The Passing of Boss Krenkel," to agents; so far no bites (I got my first rejection yesterday!), but I remain hopeful. To signify my optimism and to commemorate the book's possible future publication, I offer here its prologue. If you like it, you can do me a favor by telling all your agent friends that this is the one they can't afford to miss!

Prologue: Tidings

We had not dreamed the old man could die. It had been so long since he arrived with his merriment and good works, his jingle bells and whips, his coming lay far beyond the memory of the oldest Aleph. His advent was a thing of legend, the-time-the-world-changed; it made us forget the time-before. And though one among us kept the old stories in trust and longing for the time-after, even he did not believe in his heart that it would truly come.

If the stories of old are true, we were once a great people: Alephs, Dwellers of the Winter Light. We hunted the vast reindeer herds across the snowy tundra of Zhahiiljok, we built our deerskin dwellings in the pine forests of the interior, far from the icy shores of the Pravtha Sea. We braved the neverending winters in camps of seventy or a hundred, huddled together in deepest dark while the winds shrieked outside, shielding our eyes against the blinding snowpack by day. We launched our seacraft on frigid waters bucking with icebergs and prowled by sea monsters, whose pitch-black heads reared through solid sheets of ice and tossed our boats like tinsel. At first of day we rose, beseeched the spirits of mist and weather for good hunting, and set off across the whitened land in cloaks of sealskin and reindeer hide. Every hill and valley we traversed had its name: Kronsvuur, Niiljaraad, Gimmelsthuul. We chased our quarry--snowshoe rabbit, reindeer, great white bear--through field and forest, drove them from the icy cliffs of Taarnjak with shouts and torches, took their lives with arrows and slingshots and fire-sharpened spears. Our eyes burned in the shuddering cold, our lips and nostrils frosted over. When the hunt was done we saved the best of the kill, surrounded its carcass with sweet-smelling winter grass, and prayed to its spirit for blessing and understanding. Then we dragged the rest back to camp on pine sledges, our rabbit’s fur boots sinking with the weight, our eyes ever alert for the packs of sleek white wolves that slipped from the forest to contest our kill. The women met us at camp with shouts of joy or, on days of want and bad luck, with cries of lamentation. They then went to work dressing the kill, knitting the skins for shelter and clothing, cleaning the bones for vessels, tent poles, the frames of kayaks.

Stories were told at night, over a sizzling fire of pine boughs and reindeer fat, of the founding of the world, how Wolverine stretched his great form over the ice fields of Fjaarnjok and beheld living things wriggling in the bare, wetted ground. We recounted his stunts with the other Animal People: how he tricked Reindeer by tying antlers on his head, but made the knots loosely so the antlers would fall off just as Reindeer grew enamored of them, and laughed as Reindeer loped through the forest vainly seeking his lost glory. And how he offered Seal the choice to sprout legs or a grinning face, and how Seal foolishly chose the latter, and was left to thrash in the snow until Wolverine took pity on him and gave him fins and a warm coat so he could slip through the icy waters with ease. And how at the last Wolverine, convulsed with laughter at Seal’s frowns and grimaces and fruitless attempts to pull himself up from his belly, took the smallest, most defenseless of Seal’s children and made him stand upright, and turned his fins to legs and his flippers to hands, and removed his warm coat, and gave the naked, shivering thing thumbs and keen eyes and a quiver full of arrows, so that he might hunt the other Animal People and feed his belly and clothe his nakedness. And how he named him Aleph, first of the People People, in whom Wolverine implanted his own cunning and good humor and edge of desire. But what Wolverine had not foreseen was that such a creature would grow dissatisfied with trotting along behind its creator, fetching him small animals and scratching his belly when he itched, and that with his creator’s cleverness Aleph would fashion more of his own kind, men and women of every shape and size. And Aleph would teach these new ones to tell the different creatures’ tracks in the snow, and to descry their droppings steaming in the sun, and he would show his kindred how to drive the different creatures toward other Alephs waiting in ambush, and how to shoot them with arrows and bludgeon them with clubs of pine, and to butcher them for their meat and bone and hides. And soon to Wolverine’s dismay the Animal People would be hunted nearly to an end, and no reasoning with Aleph and his kindred could convince them to restore the rough balance Wolverine had meant for the world. And so it was that Wolverine determined to bring Aging and Death to the world of the Alephs, and make the crystal waters swarm with sea monsters, and plant the packs of hunting wolves in the forests to challenge the Alephs’ dominion and to drag off their own unwary children. We laughed to think of Wolverine’s great folly, and we grew solemn at his terrible recompense. In seasons of famine, when we pulled up our camps and trekked across the barren snows of Tiiljok in search of our vanished prey, we recalled his displeasure and pleaded with him to forgive us our impudence and ingratitude and guile.

And at winter’s peak, when times were good, when we had been rewarded for our faithfulness with an abundant kill, the scattered villages of the Alephs came together at our central camp of Aarnzhiil (“this quiet place”) to celebrate the renewal of the year. Thousands of Alephs from camps as far away as Kuulikshiim on the ragged Mountains of Basuun and Strelspaath on the fjords and floes of the Pravtha Sea came streaming in, crossing the snowplains on shoes strung with sealgut, their tents rolled on their backs, their pine sledges laden with household belongings. One heard them singing from afar, camp songs and kill songs and frolic songs, their high clear voices carried like the call of snow gulls across the frozen expanses. When they sighted the pine crests and smoke spirals of Aarnzhiil they let out the peculiar Aleph whistle, a ringing sii-sii-ju-siiii as joyous as only travelers longing for home can know. Then they unloaded their sledges and pitched their tents in a frenzy of activity made all the more raucous by the shouts of children as they hurled snowballs and wrestled with their long-remembered, long-missed kin. When all was ready and the women had begun to roast the first of the reindeer on sweet aromatic fires, the headmen of the various camps came together in the central clearing and clasped each other’s forearms in token of friendship and spoke the words that had been given to us by Wolverine in the world’s beginning: “Hantha bethardje, miirlaak” (“And so it is you, my friend”). And all assembled gave a shout and stirred the snowy air with their laughter.

For three days and nights the camp throbbed with music from the bonepipe and handdrum. Fires glowed red throughout the camp, fed with reindeer fat and the household treasures that, on a whim and a dare, each head of family sacrificed to Wolverine to celebrate our people’s reunion and our world’s remaking. The women tended the fires and watched the men dance, then the men took their turn at the fires while the women donned sweeping robes of bear and snowgrouse and went spiraling through the camp like a child’s bone top. Those of both sexes just coming of age found their first mates and retreated to tents prepared and consecrated for this purpose, where amid tens of other couples they bedded down in plush, fragrant robes and burned the icy nights away with their newfound passion, then joined the dancing horde in their intoxicated state, still-tumescent boys leaking driblets of seed on the snow and no longer shy girls gyrating with flecks of blood smeared on their pale flushed thighs. Many children were conceived in those moments--the witch women with nimble fingers and totems carved from walrus tusk could tell, placing their hands on the girls’ flat bellies, who among the revelers had been blessed by Wolverine with child--and the family of the Alephs grew ever larger, ever stronger, till the dim light of that final morning when the fires were doused and the tents furled and the sledges loaded for the long journey back.

All that has changed. None could have foretold how much his coming would change.

Now we Elves wear coats of bright red cloth, pointed boots of rubber and metal. Now we load sleds of iron painted in gleaming shades of red and green, hung with bells and ribbons of holly. Now the reindeer are gone, bred for flight in his laboratory, hunted to extinction in our fields. Now the words we use to name our homeland are words we had not heard until his arrival: "featureless,” “wilderness,” “waste.” Now we make children the way we make toys, and for the same purpose: unconsciously, and to meet his quotas. Now the stories we hear, in the gray dark of the Work Shop, speak not of the elder gods but of him: of his humble beginnings in the northernmost reaches of his own land, of his great Vision, kneeling in the northern woods with the snow-draped pines all around, in which he beheld, with the absolute certainty of foreknowledge, the Castle, the Work Shop, the yearly ride. Now when we sing it is of him as well: carols echoing across the cathedral, canticles keeping time to the clanking of machines in the Work Shop. When we pray it is for his goodness and beneficence, his fatherly care, his ever-watchful eye. He sees us when we are sleeping; he knows when we’re awake. Under his gaze we are never idle: we stoke machines, string lights, wax runners, count blessings, stock inventory. We are merry as only slaves who do not believe they are such can be. We speak of the time-after as he has instructed us to: not as an actual time but as a deliverance from all time. We speak of the time-before not as an actual time either but as a dream well dead.

And I, Aezhiil Engaart, an Aleph, am different in this one regard: I alone of my generation have kept the old stories, the old words and ways. I have learned them at great pains, and saved them at great cost. I can tell them now, as I was told them by the man who came before me. When I tell them the stories seem to come alive, the past to rise before me and I its witness. I see as in a dream what was, the chain of inexorable circumstance that brought it to pass, and I can almost believe that, like a dream, it will vanish at first light of dawn.

But not so. When I wake in truth the chain remains binding, and I can no more predict the future than I can correct the past. Of our Master’s final days I can speak with some confidence. I was there. Of the time-before I have only the broken words of a broken people. Of the time-after I have no faith and no prayer.

Snooping, Redux

2011-06-30T17:18:00.003-04:00

The new and (I think) improved version of my old story "Snooping" is available on the website of Nevermet Press! The story's been trimmed and tightened, and I think it reads much better now. There were supposed to be illustrations to go along with it, but alas, they seem not to have materialized. Maybe they will when the print edition comes out later this year.

Enjoy!

Toxic Tommy

2011-06-27T22:01:00.005-04:00

Of all the crazy things, I've been asked to create an anti-fracking coloring book to parody, lampoon, and otherwise undermine the pro-fracking coloring book recently released by a natural gas company. The title character's name, Toxic Tommy, is not of my design, but the character and his shenanigans are. I offer the first page of the coloring book here; I hope the whole thing will be out soon.

How did a self-respecting English professor like me end up doodling sinister cartoon dinosaurs?

A Writer's Life

2011-06-20T22:31:00.005-04:00

A couple major summertime writing projects are underway, to wit:

1. I've started to query agents about my novel, so it'll be interesting to see whether it piques anyone's interest. To be truthful, I'm very conflicted about whether to seek an agent at all or simply send the manuscript out to publishers; I can see pros and cons to doing it either way. But for the moment I'm going to see what luck I have with agents; I figure any feedback I receive from them will give me some idea of how marketable the book may be.

2. I'm beginning to write a Young Adult fantasy/sci-fi novel (a trilogy, actually, but I think I'll write one novel at a time!). Way back when, I had a certain affinity for the Young Adult voice; not only did I like to read it, but I had some success writing it. Hard to say whether I've still got it. But I've recruited my twelve-year-old daughter to be my first reader; if she likes it, chances are it's pretty good. This is, obviously, a long-term project, but with one novel in the bag, I figured now is a good time to start something new.

I used to think of myself as a teacher who writes; I guess I felt the need to define myself according to the occupation by which I made a steady income. But I think that's wrong; most writers don't make a living from writing alone, but they think of themselves as writers nonetheless. So now, I think of myself as a writer who teaches. It might not seem like much, but it's made a world of difference for me.

School of Frack

2011-06-13T21:35:00.003-04:00

My latest cartoon addresses the paradox I mentioned in a previous post: while Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett finds it impossible to tax fracking companies lest they flee the state, he finds it all too easy to cut funding for education and social services on the grounds that there's not enough money in the state coffers. Where, precisely, does he think state money is going to come from if not from taxes?

Then again, as my cartoon suggests, maybe this isn't a paradox. Businessmen such as Corbett aren't fond of public education, which they feel costs too much money at too little direct return to them. If they can manage to gut the education system, they'll get their wish: an under-educated workforce desperate to take any job business throws its way.

In other fracking matters, I've been asked to draw the cover art for an anti-fracking album that's being released. I'm thinking of drawing the "Stairway to Heaven" hermit with a gush of fracking water coming out of his lantern.

Killing for Cross and Crescent

2011-06-07T11:40:00.004-04:00

Somehow or other (the vagaries of hypertext, I guess), I recently stumbled across a conservative blog, the purpose of which appeared to be to deny the reality of global warming and to slander Islam. Since I've said enough about the former topic, I thought I'd comment here on the latter.

Now, on one point I agreed with the blogger: anyone who says that Islam is a religion of peace is being, at best, disingenuous. From what I've read of the Koran, it's roughly equal parts touchy-feely, love-thy-neighbor stuff and scimitar-rattling, slay-the-infidels stuff. Pretty much like the Christian Bible, in fact. And to say it's a peaceful religion in some generic sense is to overlook the fact that religion exists not merely in the abstract but in the lived practice--in what followers of a particular religion say and do. Thus, if individuals commit acts of violence in the name of Islam, it's nonsense to say that Islam itself is peaceful.

Where I disagreed with the blogger was in his suggestion that Islam is inherently more violent than Christianity. Jesus says a lot about love, but that didn't stop the Crusades, the Holocaust, the American slavery system, the Ku Klux Klan, assorted far-right hate groups, Jim Jones, the members of Heaven's Gate, and multifarious religiously-inspired mass murderers from committing unspeakable acts of violence against others and themselves.

Islam, being a somewhat younger religion than Christianity, may be a bit behind in acting out its most intense slay-the-infidels phase, but the reality is, all crusading, proselytizing religions generate a certain number of followers who are prone to violence. The Aztecs, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims: all of them have had their world-conquering, infidel-slaying wings.

This is probably why Buddhists and Jews have a somewhat more clean track record: not aiming to conquer or convert anyone, they have less motivation to kill anyone.

So: let's call it what it is. Let's not go around saying that Islam is peaceful and that those who commit acts of violence in its name therefore aren't "really" Muslims, but let's not afford Christianity or any religion the same excuse. Let's critique religious violence as religious violence, violence justified by (though neither synonymous with nor necessary to) the religion practiced by the person who commits the violence. Let's accept it as something we ourselves have created, not some dark, monstrous aberration over which we have no control. Only in this way, I believe, can we understand and seek to eradicate it.

Connecting the Dots

2011-05-31T11:22:00.003-04:00

Global warming warrior Bill McKibben has a good piece out on his 350.org website about the relationships among all the bizarre weather events we've had in recent months (tornadoes, floods, droughts, blizzards, etc.). I think it's vitally important for us to realize, as McKibben's essay makes clear, that global warming is not only REAL, it's HERE--right now. I hear too many people saying, "oh, IF global warming happens, then we'll do something about it." These people have failed to do what McKibben does: to draw connections among the surface manifestations (that is, the weather) and trace them to their underlying cause (that is, a warmer climate). It's hard to think systemically; I always tell my students that when they prefer to look at isolated cases out of context. But it's what we need to do, right now, if we are ever to get a handle on this global-systemic problem.

From the Archives

2011-05-27T22:04:00.003-04:00

I was cleaning out file drawers today and came across this cartoon. It dates back to the 80s, when I originally coined the name "Bell's Yells" for a cartoon series I drew for my college newspaper. I thought I'd resurrect it for a new generation.

Who knows, maybe I should have stuck with the cartooning. Look where that Far Side guy went with it.

Feast or Famine

2011-05-25T21:51:00.003-04:00

In the world of publishing (at least, in MY world of publishing), it always seems to be feast or famine. I'll go months without getting a nibble on any of the stories or essays I've sent around, then all of a sudden I'll get two or three acceptances in rapid succession.

At the moment, I'm relishing a "feast" phase: I just found out today that my sci-fi short story "Snooping," which was previously published in a now-defunct and unavailable e-magazine, was accepted in the anthology Stories in the Ether, to be published by Nevermet Press. It'll appear (so they say) in print, online, AND audio formats, the last of which is new for me. I just hope they have James Earl Jones or Ian McKellen reading my stuff!

I should also point out, for those who have read this story before, that the editors have asked for some fairly substantial changes, so it'll be a fundamentally new (and, I hope, fundamentally better) story this time around. I will, of course, let you know when it appears.

I wonder whether tomorrow will bring more feast . . . or the beginning of a new famine?

Fantasy Fiction Feast

2011-05-25T08:17:00.004-04:00

For those of you who have been famished for a taste of some fantasy fiction (I know I have been), I offer two delightful tidbits: my just-published story, "A Chimaera Story with Four Morals," which appears in Jersey Devil Press; and the promise of more to come, as my story "A Very Small Child Called Eugene" was just accepted for publication by A cappella Zoo. (It should be out in September.) The latter story is a bit of a personal triumph: it's an odd tale, as you'll see when it arrives, and after a dozen or so rejection slips, it was hovering on the verge of retirement. But I had faith in it (a couple of those rejection slips were very encouraging, as rejection slips go), and I'm glad I stuck it out.

So dig in, and enjoy!

Apocalypse Not

2011-05-23T21:30:00.003-04:00

So I found out yesterday that my wife and I scheduled our son's eighth birthday party for the day the world was supposed to end.

I'm always the last to know.

Fortunately for my son, who otherwise would have been deprived of various sword-fighting ninja contests and items of Lego merchandise, the prediction of world-endingness was, shall we say, premature. The world did not end--unless, that is, we're living in some weird Twilight Zone episode and we don't realize we're all dead.

I'm really not bothered by people who predict the end of the world. Everyone has to have a hobby.

The only thing that bothers me, I guess, is the evident pleasure the end-of-the-worlders take in everybody else getting royally screwed. That doesn't seem very sporting.

So, for what it's worth, and because (the world not having ended) we're left with time to kill, I offer herewith the following riddle:

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Answers next week. Unless, of course, the world ends.

Weird World

2011-05-22T12:46:00.003-04:00

The world of environmentalism is a weird one, full of surprises, unexpected juxtapositions and reversals, random facts and realizations. Here are three recent examples:

1. I was driving home a few days ago in blinding rain when it occurred to me that what I was seeing (or, actually, not seeing) was the climate I'm going to be living with for the rest of my life. We all know how rainy it's been in the northeast and the south, how strange the weather patterns have been; we remark about it all the time. But it doesn't strike most of us that the reason the weather's so weird is that the climate has changed; we keep waiting for global warming to happen, not realizing it already has. Weather is the veil of climate: it hides the bigger picture we can't see. But at the same time, weather is the sign of climate: it reveals what we can't see. If the weather is weird--and it is--a weird climate lies just behind.

2. I recently learned of a company, Terracycle, that will turn those pesky juice pouches into kid-friendly products (pencil cases, etc.). If you sign up online, your school gets a few pennies per pouch donated. On the face of it, this sounds like a good thing. But then you have to ask yourself: why are juice pouches manufactured in such a way that they're not recyclable by usual means? And is not the promise to recycle the things into yet another consumer product a way of convincing people to buy non-recyclable items, guilt-free? My advice to anyone who worries about juice pouches being thrown into landfills: don't buy the damn things in the first place.

3. A few weeks ago, I attended an event concerning the Marcellus Shale. One of the speakers delivered a passionate address against drilling; she waxed eloquent about the "poisons we're pumping into our chilren's bodies," and she presented herself as a staunch foe of corporate greed, indifference, and propaganda. After the event, I went to congratulate her on her speech. I found her outside, smoking a cigarette.

Going Local

2011-05-15T08:44:00.005-04:00

Yesterday was an environmentally friendly day for me. In the morning, my kids and I helped the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association plant trees; in the afternoon, I switched electricity generators to Viridian Energy, which will supply 100% of my electricity through wind power; and in the evening, I attended a lecture on sustainable agriculture by Anna Lappe, whose new book connects our eating choices to the climate crisis. And, having read recently that the majority of car trips we make are fewer than two miles, I decided to walk the mile and a half to the lecture and back. So there was lots of good stuff, environment-wise.

There was also one depressing moment, when I read the following passage in Michael Shuman's book Going Local:

"Governments will be increasingly inclined to put a tax on oil, as well as on other fossil fuels, to account for the environmental effects of burning them. There is a virtual consensus among scientists today . . . that human progress is warming the planet. . . . By the time the multi-trillion-dollar costs of global warming are clear enough to affect the market price of fossil fuels, it will be too late to prevent it. But political pressures will surely mount on governments to place taxes on these fuels, per unit of pollution (a carbon tax) or per unit of energy (a BTU tax), that will raise their prices and reduce releases of carbon into the atmosphere."

Shuman, writing in 1998, is certain that governments will come to their senses, tax carbon, and thereby level the playing field for the development of renewables. But here we are in 2011, and guess what? We haven't taxed carbon (partly because the scientific consensus Shuman applauds has been attacked relentlessly by climate change deniers); we're investing heavily (in both dollars and infrastructure) in the latest fossil fuel to come down the pike, natural gas; the market in renewables is stagnant; the price of oil is way up, but mostly because of unrest in the Middle East, not because of the environmental costs of burning it; global emissions continue to grow day by day; and the planet's climate is becoming increasingly unpredictable, chaotic, and punishing. At the national and international level, we've utterly failed as a species to take the necessary steps to protect our planet and ourselves.

Which is why, for the foreseeable future, I'm "going local," as the title of Shuman's book recommends. I'll plant trees in my own neighborhood, power my own house with wind energy, walk instead of drive, support local groups like the Nine Mile Run association, and otherwise focus on what I can do in my own community. I'll act locally, and think--or at least dream--of a time the global community will come around.

Thor-oughly Disgusted

2011-05-11T22:14:00.000-04:00

For the record, I am royally sick and tired of movies about gods who don't get along with their daddies.

There was Clash of the Titans. And Percy Jackson. And (in a somewhat different register) Tron: Legacy.

And now there's Thor. I saw it today, and while it has some cool special effects (as well as some really chaotically filmed special effects, almost as if the filmmakers didn't want the audience to be able to see whether the effects were any good or not), in the end it boils down to that unbelievably tedious tale of a spoiled little boy who argues with his daddy, but who learns in the end that father knows best.

Director Kenneth Branagh, dabbling in the decidedly lowbrow, must think there are Shakespearean echoes to this silliness. It's Hamlet in Asgard!

Well, actually, no, it's more like Ferris Bueller's Day Off with frost giants.

I mean, come on. Can't anyone think of a more original thing to do with gods and monsters? Does every story have to be so boringly Freudian? Couldn't we have a story where dad and son actually got along, so we could explore something more interesting about them?

Fathers and sons do have conflicts, sure. I have plenty with my own dad. But I hardly believe these petty squabbles are of Olympian or Asgardian proportions. I'm not so delusional as to believe the heavens quake every time my dad and I piss each other off.

On the horizon, I see there's a movie coming out called Immortals, a Greek mythological mishmash with Theseus (but no minotaur that I can tell) fighting on the gods' behalf against a corrupt mortal king.

Let's just hope it doesn't turn out that Theseus bears a grudge against Papa Zeus. I'm not sure I can take any more.

Ruffling Feathers

2011-05-06T21:18:00.004-04:00

A letter to the editor I recently published has angered some people (which is not surprising, of course; that's what letters to the editor are supposed to do). This time around, however, the people I've angered happen to be my friends.

It goes like this: in my letter, I question the wisdom, and the impartiality, of the environmental group Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future (Penn Future for short) in its stand on the natural gas issue. Penn Future has been promoting natural gas as a clean alternative to coal, and I find this problematic, for obvious reasons. Hence the letter.

But I've got friends in Penn Future. I've attended their conferences, supported them financially, met with individuals in the organization socially. So this seems, I guess, like a betrayal.

And maybe it is. But that may be the best reason it had to be said.

At root, my problem with Penn Future's stand on natural gas is that the organization is too much of an insider to see the issue objectively. Penn Future prides itself on being pragmatic and politically savvy, which means it focuses on lobbying politicians and working with state and local governments, as well as industry, to achieve its objectives. That's fine, and it may produce some positive results. But it also places severe strictures on what the organization can say and do.

You won't get radical critique, visionary thinking, or even impolite discourse from Penn Future. What you'll get is tame, middle of the road, compromise measures. The organization's slogan says it all: "Every environmental victory grows the economy." That's about as centrist a position as you can take.

But the environmental crisis, in my view, will not be solved by centrists; it'll be solved by radicals. Centrism gets us nowhere on important social/political issues. It got us nowhere on slavery, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement. Every environmental victory may grow the economy--but it needs to be said that growing the economy is the root of the problem, and we can't solve the environmental crisis by continuing to promote the behavior that produced it. We can't overcome our addiction to fossil fuels by consuming them. Neither can we "bridge" the gap to a non-fossil fuel future by investing astronomical sums of money and building exorbitant new infrastructure as we are doing with natural gas.

Penn Future can't see this, or at least, they can't say it. If they did, they'd lose their ability to influence the political process. But from my perspective, it's not worth influencing the process if, in so doing, one becomes merely another failed part of it.

Penn Future has its approach to natural gas, and I have mine. I can't stop them from pursuing their approach; no more can they stop me from pursuing mine. If they want to criticize my position, they're free to do so, just as I'm free to criticize theirs. And if a few friends get their feelings hurt--I'm sorry, but this issue is too important to let that stand in the way.

So for the record: I'm sorry I upset people. But I'd be even sorrier if I let my fear of ruffling feathers interfere with the work I believe needs to be done.

Jumping Ship

2011-05-02T22:18:00.003-04:00

Here's my latest anti-fracking cartoon. This one pertains to the practice of "forced pooling," whereby landowners who have not sold their rights to the drilling companies can nonetheless have their lands drilled into from adjacent sites. (Remember, fracking wells move horizontally as well as vertically.) This practice obviously rigs the system in favor of the drillers; a real-life prisoner's dilemma, it pits landowner against landowner, with each individual thinking, "if I don't sell my land but any of my neighbors does, I'll be faced with the negative impacts of the drilling while my neighbors make off with the profits."

For what it's worth, Corbett has come out against forced pooling. But then, he's also come out in favor of college campuses leasing their lands to gas companies as a way of compensating for the budget cuts to education he himself proposed.

Machine Man

2011-04-28T09:24:00.002-04:00

Thanks to the Blockbuster queue (my seven-year-old son calls it the Blockbuster “cube”), I saw a fantasy film last night that brings together many of the issues I’ve been blogging about of late: technology, spirituality, fatherhood. It was, of all things, Iron Man 2, and like its predecessor, it wasn’t half bad (even if, in the end, it was a bit muddled). Still, I’ll take it over The Dark Knight any day.

Iron Man 2 opens with gazillionaire Tony Stark hosting a revived “Stark Expo,” which his deceased father originated a quarter-century earlier. A showcase for his dad’s (and his own) technological utopianism, their belief that technology can make the world not only a better place but a perfect place, the Expo seems to be vindicated by the exploits of Stark’s alter-ego, Iron Man, who in a very short span of time has used his high-tech iron suit to bring about an unprecedented era of world peace. But the film undercuts Stark’s confidence by showing what’s going on behind the scenes: Iran and North Korea are trying (though at the moment failing) to build their own Iron Man weapons, Stark’s competitor for military contracts is creating Iron Man drones, and a rogue Russian physicist, memorably played by Mickey Rourke, has succeeded in reproducing the reactor technology his father co-designed with Stark’s father, enabling him to wear and wield a high-voltage reactor weapon. Meanwhile, the reactor technology built into Stark’s own Iron Man suit, a technology that not only gives him super powers but keeps him alive, is also slowly killing him as its radioactive elements leech into his bloodstream. All is not well, it appears, in the world that technology has built.

But then, with the introduction of a home-movie lecture from Stark’s father, the film shifts, suggesting that technology is indeed not only a panacea but may well be divine. Looking directly at the camera (and at his son, who’s watching the home movie), the absent father, who in life was too busy with his experiments to pay attention to his young son, reveals to his grown heir the sub-atomic secrets he himself was unable to unlock due to technological limitations. Armed with his father’s knowledge and the technological advances of our own day, Tony manages with ridiculous ease to produce a particle accelerator that creates a new element, one capable of keeping his heart beating without destructive side effects. In other words, the Starks, father and son, become gods, creating new matter and new life. Faith in technology--and in fatherhood--seems safe once more.

And yet, in another turn, the Stark demons come home to roost when Iron Man must face an army of the drones his own technology has enabled his competitors and enemies to create. He triumphs, of course, with the help of his trusty African-American sidekick (a racial stereotype the film could well have done without), but only after the drones, as well as the good guys’ efforts to defeat them, have caused untold chaos. So we’re left with a very ambiguous message, wherein advanced technology both saves and destroys, brings both peace and war, serves both God and Satan (not to mention Mammon).

What I like about the Iron Man movies is this ambiguity, or ambivalence, or even (to be less charitable) this confused, have-one’s-cake-and-eat-it-too mentality. Unlike the Batman movies, which trot out simplistic propositions about life and refuse to challenge or undermine them, the Iron Man films question their own conventional wisdom, their own sacred truths, even their own vested interests. (Let’s not forget, after all, that the cinema itself is a highly advanced technology, and any film that traffics in technological utopianism and/or dystopianism implicitly fingers its own medium. The Iron Man movies make this connection explicit, as everything in Tony Stark’s world--his phone, his coffee table, the interior of his suit, even the air around him--is transformed into the equivalent of a handheld, wireless touch-screen.) So where the Batman films are screaming at the top of their lungs “Life is complicated!”, but doing nothing to visualize or, for that matter, complicate such complexity, the Iron Man films are showing us something of that complexity in the texture of the films themselves. In that respect, these films are heirs to a long and honorable fantasy-film tradition, going back to Metropolis and The Wizard of Oz and forward to Alien, Blade Runner, RoboCop, and others, in which technology becomes both medium and means for reflecting on matters of church and state, machine and man, faith and fantasy--including our culture’s faith in the fantasy of film itself.

This doesn’t make these films masterpieces. But it does make them worth watching--just as the issues they address are worth watching out for.

Hollywood Fatherhood; or, Bad Dads

2011-04-26T14:21:00.003-04:00

For some time I’ve been fascinated, and increasingly frustrated, by Hollywood’s love affair with fathers. From the start, the film industry has been heavily invested in the assertion of patriarchal authority, generally by portraying fathers as the ultimate source of benevolence, wisdom, and social cohesion. Since the eighties, though, the theme has shifted somewhat: fathers are frequently portrayed as two-bit bums, scoundrels, even monsters who ultimately, through some life-transforming experience usually involving time spent with annoying young children, become icons of fatherliness. It’s as if all the contemporary concerns about “deadbeat dads,” the degradation of the male role in minority communities, and other indications of patriarchal fault lines in the culture are being enacted and then wished away through the magic of the movies.

I was thinking about this when I watched the latest movie on our Blockbuster queue, “The Game Plan.” It’s about a self-centered quarterback who discovers he has an insufferably cute eight-year-old daughter by a previous marriage; inevitably, this egomaniac (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) becomes a model parent, the kind of guy who’d give up a $25 million endorsement to spend an afternoon with his little girl. It’s the same plot, all else being equal, of half the films on my bookshelf: “A Night at the Museum,” “Shrek 4,” “Jurassic Park” (parts 1 and 2), “War of the Worlds,” “Big Daddy,” “Tron: Legacy,” “Despicable Me,” even, for God’s sake, “The Simpsons Movie.” Granted, that last one plays some riffs on the theme, but unless my DVD collection is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation, this appears to be a trend.

I’m a dad. I’m a pretty good dad, if I do say so myself. I spend tons of time with my kids, read to them, play with them, support them, encourage them, hug them, tell them I love them; I don’t ignore them, abuse them, demean them, deny them. But I’m also human, and I do have to balance my own needs with theirs; I can’t always put aside everything for them or find complete and total fulfillment in them. This makes me, according to Hollywood, a Bad Dad. So I’ve got to be whipped into shape, subjected to an endless barrage of reminders that Dads are the rock (“The Rock”) upon which civilization rests and without which it would crumble. I’ve got to be treated to the Hollywood obsession with simultaneously glorifying and demonizing Dads, fingering them as failures unless they live up to an unrealistic ideal every moment of their lives.

Maybe I’m just watching the wrong movies. But then, there is no film of which I’m aware called “Mother Knows Best.”

The Greediest Generation

2011-04-20T08:09:00.003-04:00

Journalist Tom Brokaw famously dubbed the generation that came of age during the Depression and World War II "The Greatest Generation." This was a group of people with the wisdom to face these two global evils, the courage to confront them, and the selflessness to accept the sacrifices meeting them entailed.

By those standards, I guess you'd have to call the present generation of so-called grown-ups in this country "The Greediest Generation."

I was reminded of this when I read that all but one of the Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to deny the reality of global warming, regardless of cause. Yep, they actually voted--nary a climatologist in the bunch--to deny that global warming exists.

The hubris of such a vote is nearly unfathomable. It's as if they'd voted to deny that the earth revolves around the sun.

Beyond this, such a vote is strikingly stupid.

To put it in perspective, let's imagine these clowns had been in the House during our grandparents' time. They decide to take a vote on the reality of the Depression. Sure, lots of folks are out of work, the banks are bankrupt, the breadlines are growing, the breadbasket is blowing away in a cloud of dust, but is the Depression really real?

Nope, we don't think so.

And what about those politically-motivated rumors of war over in distant Europe? They say some guy named Hitler invaded Poland; that he's currently bombing England and France; that his tanks are in North Africa; that he's moving on Stalingrad? Let's take a vote on it.

No, there's no war.

We can deny all we want. We can even legitimize our denial through the political process.

But we can't change the nature of reality. It'll always be there, silent and irresistible, to show us when we're wrong.

Aphasia

2011-04-18T14:09:00.004-04:00

I had another short story accepted for publication yesterday, in a print anthology titled Beyond the Grave, to be published by Static Movement. The title of my story, "Aphasia," might not seem to have a lot to do with beyond-the-grave stuff, but trust me: read it and it'll all make sense! I'll let you know when it's published so you can do just that.

This'll be my third anthologized work, which I've found is a nifty way to get genre fiction in print: there are many small publishers producing many, many themed anthologies, and they're always looking for more. They don't pay as well as some of the genre magazines, but who cares? I'm in this for the love, not the money.

Good thing, too; I think my royalties from last year were a whopping $14.86. Needless to say, I don't plan to quit my day job anytime soon.

A Novel Idea

2011-04-16T22:33:00.003-04:00

Well, I did it. I really did. It's done, and I did it.

What did I do?

I wrote a novel!

Yep, just finished it yesterday. Four hundred and twenty-five manuscript pages, about 93,000 words, twenty chapters plus a prologue and epilogue, title page and epigraphs and table of contents and everything. It's not done done--that is, I still need to revise it--but it's completed.

I know, I know, people write novels every day. So what's the big deal?

Well, people may do it every day, but I haven't done it since college.

Seriously.

That's almost twenty-five years ago. I've started a couple since then (including one in the summer of 2009), but they've all fizzled. Call it work, call it family, call it lack of inspiration (or talent), call it whatever you want to call it, but for the past quarter-century I haven't been able to muster the time, energy, and perseverance to complete anything longer than a short story.

Until now.

So for me, at least, this is an auspicious occasion. Whether this thing ever finds a publisher, as of course I hope it does, is secondary to the fact that I've proved to myself I can still do it.

So congrats to me, pats on the back, parties and parades, all that stuff.

Now back to work.

The Dreck Knight

2011-04-11T08:39:00.004-04:00

The word on the street is that the next Batman movie is going to be filmed right here in my hometown of Pittsburgh.

My advice to the producers: don't bother.

After what seems years of hearing that The Dark Knight is a must-see movie, one of the classics of the fantasy/action genre, a gritty, atmospheric mood piece anchored by Heath Ledger's Oscar-winning performance as the Joker, I finally saw the thing on DVD.

My reaction: yawn.

I'll freely admit I've never been a fan of "the Batman" (as those who are serious about this drivel refer to him). I never read the comics; I watched the TV series but was too young and, I guess, too straight to catch the camp; I found the Tim Burton films (with Pittsburgh's own Michael Keaton) pleasantly silly but nothing more; and I find the Frank Miller Dark Knight hooey utterly pretentious and preposterous. So maybe I'm not the best person to ask about this particular film.

But come on! The whole Batman mythos is built around the idea that a guy who wears a costume and engages in vigilante justice is somehow making a profound statement about LIFE. In reality, though, the philosophy of the dark knight boils down to sophomoric propositions anyone over the age of ten could tell you. Like: GOOD PEOPLE SOMETIMES DO BAD THINGS! Wow. Deep. Or: LIFE IS UNPREDICTABLE AND RANDOM. Really? I didn't know that. Or my favorite: THERE IS GOOD AND EVIL IN ALL OF US!!!!! Now that one I'll have to think about for a while.

Putting one guy in a bat suit and another in clown make-up to "represent" these obvious, simplistic truths does not make them any more interesting. It merely illustrates how banal these truths truly are.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love lots of trashy fantasy films: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, Dragonheart, Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans. I just don't get all serious about them and think they hold the answers to life.

I also happen to think there are many fantasy films that are eminently worth discussion as works of art: Alien, Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys, and so on. Such films are both stylistically daring and thematically rich.

The Batman films, alas, are neither.

But maybe I'm being unkind. After all, in The Dark Knight, there's a character, Harvey Dent (aka Two-Face), who gets badly burned so that one half of his face is skeletal while the other is strikingly handsome. This represents the fact that THERE IS GOOD AND EVIL IN ALL OF US!!!!

Yep, there's one that'll keep me up nights.

The Puppet Master

2011-04-04T23:12:00.002-04:00

This whole business with the "independent" drilling inspectors has gotten me so worked up . . . I couldn't resist.

Wake Up and Smell the Poison

2011-03-31T09:24:00.002-04:00

This morning, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that inspectors policing the drilling operations in the Marcellus Shale will no longer be able to do anything--issue permits, enforce regulations, cite violations--without approval of top Department of Environment officials. According to DEP spokespeople, this will bring "consistency" to the regulatory process. Yet oddly enough, such consistency is being sought only in regard to the Marcellus Shale; the same policy does not apply to any of the other regulatory protocols the DEP oversees.

Come on, people! This is a shameless ploy to strip independent inspectors of their power to regulate the shale drilling, and to place all decisions in the hands of political appointees whose jobs are dependent on an administration utterly sympathetic to the drilling industry. It's one step short of having the drillers issue their own permits and cite their own violations. My guess is, they wouldn't find themselves having committed any.

Tom Corbett's office denies having had anything to do with the policy change. And if you believe that one....

When are ordinary Pennyslvanians going to wake up and smell the poison?

A Chimaera Story

2011-03-30T14:17:00.004-04:00

Well, after yesterday's gloom-and-doom message, maybe you're not ready for this announcement, but here goes: I had a new story accepted for publication. It's called "A Chimaera Story with Four Morals," and it was picked up by Jersey Devil Press. Should be out in June, at which time I'll provide a link.

Funny story about this story: when I originally wrote it, I had in mind some bizarre, tongue-in-cheek, self-referential parody of the "sci-fi apocalypse" narrative. So I wrote it that way--or at least thought I'd written it that way--and sent it off. Turns out there's a very straightforward, mournful tale about loss and the relationship between fathers and sons lurking within the madcap prose, and the editor at JDP was sharp enough to pick it up. So I was advised to trim out the parts that worked against the inner story and let it emerge. I was reluctant to do so at first--it's easy to fall in love with one's own high concepts--but once I did it, I realized the editor was right, and it's much better in its current form.

It just goes to show, you never really know what you're doing when you sit down to write. Sometimes, maybe all the time, you're better than you think.

The Evil That Men Do

2011-03-29T08:31:00.006-04:00

The murder of a teenage girl in my hometown has set me on a course of rather gloomy reflections. The person accused of the crime, a teenage boy, is alleged to have convinced her to play hooky from school, then, at her home, perhaps while attempting to rape her, he is accused of shooting her in the chin, a wound that would not in itself have been fatal. He is then, however, alleged to have covered her with a blanket, which he proceeded to set on fire, whether to cover the crime or merely for the thrill of seeing another living creature burn I don't know. She died of smoke inhalation. While she died, the boy is alleged to have looted her house, taking (among other things) that other favorite of a species bent on rapine and destruction: a video game.

Reading between the lines, my wife, a mental health professional, speculates that this girl, who was described as "simple" and "trusting" and who could neither read nor write, was mentally retarded.

So there you have it: a boy who snuffs out the life of a profoundly innocent creature merely because, I suppose, it fulfilled some need of his own. And in that respect, he's pretty much like the rest of us.

Assuming he doesn't get the death penalty--and though he's being tried as an adult, I hope he doesn't, because what's the point of adding more death to the original death?--he'll spend sixty or so years in prison. There, he'll perhaps learn to feel bad about what he's done. But what can he ever feel, what can he ever do, to justify, atone, or compensate for this act?

Nothing.

Which brings me to the human species of which he is, sadly, all too representative. We've caused untold chaos on this planet, much of it directed against ourselves, much of it directed against other species and the planet itself. What have we ever done, what can we ever do, to justify, atone, or compensate for our acts?

Nothing.

Those seeking to find extrinsic value in human life--that is, value that goes beyond our value to ourselves--can point at a number of accomplishments as evidence that, despite all the bad we've caused, we're still capable of producing good. But I'm not buying any of it.

Art and music? Sure, they're nice to look at and listen to, but all they do in the end is fulfill our own needs. They have no extrinsic value whatsoever.

Technology? Most of it has been bent toward the destruction of human and non-human life and the gutting of the planet. Some of the rest has been dedicated to making us feel good about how smart we are: landing on the moon, for example. And the rest has either helped prolong or enrich human life or attempted to fix some of the planetary messes we ourselves have caused. So again, none of it has value beyond what it produces for us or, in the latter case, what it would not have needed to produce had we never come along in the first place.

Human rights? Well, if there hadn't been human wrongs, there'd have been no need to develop human rights. All the human rights movements throughout history have done little more than move us marginally closer to respecting each other in ways that the simplest caterpillar instinctively respects its fellow caterpillars. And even if we go all the way--that is, even if we arrive at a point where all human life is treated with dignity and care--we'll have done no more than fulfill another intrinsic need, a need to value ourselves.

The human species, in short, is exactly like every other species in this fundamental respect: we seek to fulfill our needs and preserve our lives. There are only two differences between us and everything else. On the one hand, we've needlessly deprived trillions of other organisms--human and non-human--of the same desires; and, on the other, we appear to be the only species capable of recognizing, conceptualizing, and articulating these desires. In consequence, we seem to think that fulfilling them is inherently more significant than the fulfillment of those desires in and by other species.

We even have recourse to God to provide extrinsic justification of our biological needs. All I can say to that argument is, if it's true that the most depraved, destructive species the planet has ever known is God's personal favorite, then God has some serious issues.

Maybe we make the argument for God because otherwise, we couldn't live with ourselves.

In the end, these reflections are not despairing (much less suicidal). I want to live just like everyone else. I enjoy life. I enjoy music, art, certain forms of technology, Nature, my family, my writing, and lots of other things besides. I've done some good to other human beings and non-human beings in my life (and also some bad). I just don't think the things I've done justify my existence.

That teenage girl wanted to live, too. Maybe that's all she wanted. And no matter what the person who did this to her may do in the future, the one thing he most assuredly cannot do is give that back to her.

My Maine Man

2011-03-28T19:31:00.003-04:00

Inspired by my own analogy of a week ago, I came up with this cartoon to satirize Tom Corbett's position on a natural gas severance tax. For the record, his administration is now talking about some kind of monetary compensation for communities hard hit by the environmental effects of fracking, but he's still insisting that a severance tax is "off the table."

There He Goes Again

2011-03-23T08:39:00.005-04:00

If he has his way, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett--he who refuses to impose a severance tax on multi-billion-dollar natural gas companies--is about to impose a huge severance tax on ordinary Pennsylvanians.

A severance tax is a tax on the use of public resources. In the case of natural gas extraction, for each unit of gas taken (or severed) from Pennsylvania's lands, the gas company pays a marginal tax.

Corbett (and the Republican-controlled State Senate) won't impose such a tax. They claim it would drive industry away. Forget the fact that every other state in the Union that possesses shale gas formations, including tax-averse Texas, imposes such a tax. Forget, too, that the gas companies are limited in where they can drill; there's no shale gas underneath Rhode Island, so drilling there would be like fishing for lobster in Arkansas. Facts be damned, Corbett, his campaign coffers swelled by industry dollars, has stood firm against a severance tax.

At the same time, Corbett's proposed budget would slash funding for public education at every level, from K-12 through college. The results of these proposed cuts would be catastrophic (I just read that the Duquesne public school district might close entirely), but that's Corbett and the Republican party: cut taxes, slash budgets and public services, and boost industry, and we'll live in a utopia.

But the thing is, such a program does not cut taxes. It raises them. In the case of Pennsylvania's public colleges and universities, Corbett's budget proposes a roughly 50% cut in state funding. The result, inevitably, is that public education in Pennsylvania will become more costly; the schools will have no choice but to raise tuition (or, what is in essence the same thing, to drastically cut services, which students will then have to pay for themselves). Thus the budget cuts effectively impose a severance tax: for each unit of education taken (or severed) from the public system, students and their families will have to pay an increased amount. To finance this additional tax burden, especially in these days of cuts to federal and state grant money, they'll have to take on the additional tax burden of bank loans. Or, what is equally likely, they'll have to forego college altogether.

You'll tell me this isn't about taxes. But it is. Pay now or pay later, services in a society cost money; you can either pay for those services through direct taxes of one sort or another, shared (in theory) equitably by the society that benefits from the services, or you can pay for them through higher costs. From the perspective of the taxpayer/consumer, what's the difference?

Corbett, in short, is not opposed to raising taxes. Rather, like all Republicans, he simply wishes to shift the burden of taxation from those most able to afford it--the corporate and the wealthy--to those least able to afford it: the middle classes and the poor. Thus the social benefits of public services, whether they be gas or education, will be disproportionately enjoyed by the rich, while the social costs (not only in terms of dollars but, as with gas extraction, in terms of environmental impacts) will be disproportionately borne by the poor.

But there's a bright side to all this. I'm sure all those kids who can't afford school can find really good jobs working on natural gas rigs.

Worth Reading

2011-03-21T09:40:00.003-04:00

Having critiqued a short story not my own in a recent post, I thought I'd introduce a story I thought was terrific. It's titled "Tomorrow People"; I can't remember the author's name, unfortunately, but who really cares? I'm interested in stories, not authors. And you can look it up yourself if you're so inclined.

"Tomorrow People" is set in 2040-ish, but it's not science fiction. Oh, there were a few offhand references to technologies that don't currently exist, but that's just for flavor. The real story concerns the narrator, a pre-teen boy whose college-aged sister was killed when a terrorist nuclear bomb destroyed the city of San Francisco. His parents and older brother don't talk about her, and they've kept no images of her; when he sees an old picture of his parents on his dad's laptop and asks one too many questions about it, thinking his sister might have been the photographer and he might be able to catch a glimpse of her in the sunglasses his mom is wearing, his dad scrubs the picture from his hard drive. So this is definitely a post-9/11 story, a tale of memory and loss, or of lost memory.

The story takes a turn when a neighbor, a former soldier in the ongoing war against those who destroyed San Francisco, brings home a Muslim boy who has lost his own family in the war. The narrator, who committed an unthinking act of anti-Muslim prejudice the year before--spraypainting epithets on the toilet stall of a mosque his school visited--wants nothing to do with the new arrival, and neither does the Middle Eastern child want to make friends with Americans. But the child's adoptive father keeps trying to get the two together, the narrator's mother wants her son to atone for his act of the year before, and the two are forced into an awkward, tension-filled meeting.

If this sounds a bit like the story I disliked, "Summer, Boys"--two pre-teen boys making friends over the summertime--well, it sort of is. But it's a far superior story in every way: unpredictable, far less mannered in its writing style, and about something that strikes me as far more significant, or at least bigger, than that of two boys coming of age. I won't spoil the story by telling anything more about it; I'll just say it's inspired me to try a story of my own that I've had in mind for a while but not, shall we say, in heart. If anything ever comes of that, I'll let you know. Either way, it's always nice to know that there's fiction out there that's not just well-written but well worth reading.

It Bears Repeating

2011-03-13T10:57:00.003-04:00

Much as I hate to repeat myself, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to, shall we say, augment my post of a couple weeks ago concerning our "smarter" planet. Once again, the impetus for this post was a commercial, which might seem a bit trivial; but then, what are commercials if not barometers of cultural desire? Commercials show us what we want, or at least what we think we want, and the fact that so many of them show us thinking we want technological solutions to planetary problems suggests something significant about where we are today.

Enough preamble. The commercial of which I speak was, I think, for GE, and its slogan, after showing lots of people (doctors, salespeople, nuclear plant workers) dancing in some ungodly, earth-spanning conga line, was this: "Technology that makes the world work." My response was: here we go again.

Let's look at this in two possible ways. By "makes the world work," the commercial might be suggesting that technology gives people jobs. (That's the standard corporate and government line, even when they're pushing supposedly "green" technologies: they'll put people to work.) But "makes the world work" could also mean "makes the world function." That is, in the absence of technology, the world would break down, fall to pieces, and ultimately, I guess, cease to exist.

Both of these suggestions are nonsensical. Yes, in a technological society, technology does provide for employment--but it also provides for unemployment. Just ask anyone who's lost a job to a machine whether technology "made them work." My grocery store has trimmed the number of cashiers drastically by installing automated scanners; every time I try to reach someone on the telephone to complain about the breakdown of some piece of technology I purchased, I have to punch fifty-seven keys into the automated system then wait an hour to talk to the one living human being still employed by the company. Unemployment in the U.S. still stands at a whopping 10% (and remember, that figure doesn't include those no longer looking for work, those who are underemployed, or those who are employed in below-subsistence-level occupations). And the U.S. is a lot better off than much of the rest of the world. So much for technology as a panacea for joblessness.

Technology, it would be fairer to say, makes the work that is necessary to sustain itself. In its absence, the work taken up by technology would be taken up elsewhere.

But even more nonsensical is the suggestion that technology makes the world function. The world was functioning just fine before we came along, thank you. Rather, once again, it's a purely circular process: technology creates the conditions under which further technology can be called into action. So technology pollutes rivers and cleans them, sickens people and heals them, trashes the planet and tries to patch it up. If you can name one technology that has solved a problem technology created, I will grant that I'm being hyperbolic. But you can't. You can only name cases (such as the case of CFCs and ozone) in which the removal of an existing technology was necessary to begin to resolve the problem it had introduced.

I am not, in the end, a technophobe, a Luddite, a primitivist. Technologies have achieved some very nice things (such as enabling me to disseminate these words). But let's not kid ourselves about their capacities. Let's not forget that every time I fire up the blog, I expend energy (most of it produced by coal) that dirties the planet and sickens its inhabitants. Nor let us forget that when you read these computer-mediated words, you distance yourself, if only ever so slightly, from primary contact with the physical world.

If we must have technology, then so be it. But let's be prepared to deal with the consequences, and not imagine we can so transform the world through technology that it will, at long last, work.

Nuke Wells

2011-03-05T12:11:00.003-05:00

Amid reports from the New York Times that fracking wastewater contains dangerously high levels of radiation--and that regulators are doing little to ensure its proper (notice I didn't say "safe") disposal--I drew this cartoon. What are we willing to suffer, what are we willing to risk, to feed our fossil fuel addiction?

A Smarter Planet

2011-03-02T08:31:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago, an IBM-designed computer program, Watson, defeated several human contestants on Jeopardy. This was hailed by many as a triumph. In its commercials, IBM featured the program's chief engineer, pronouncing the company's new mantra: "Let's build a smarter planet."

I've been mulling over why this disturbs me so much. For what it's worth, here's what I've come up with.

Humans, being human, have tended to measure intelligence in absolute terms, with ourselves as the sole and final standard. Thus anything that possesses an intelligence functionally akin to ours--say, chimpanzees and dolphins--is "smart," while the farther you get from that standard--from birds to lizards to jellyfish--the farther you get from intelligence. God, being the smartest of all, is simply an uber-human, with an extension of our own capabilities: he knows everything, sees far into the future, etc. Being smart, according to this way of thinking, is an abstraction; it has nothing to do with the organism that houses it, much less with the conditions and contexts within which that organism exists. You're either smart like us, or you're dumb.

But this is, in my view, a radically reductive--and dangerous--understanding of intelligence. Intelligence, as I'll define it, has little to do with human-ness. Rather, it has to do with adaptation.

Birds and reptiles, for example, aren't particularly "smart" by human standards; in fact, we tend to think of their brains as the most "primitive" aspect of our own. Partly, that's an evolutionary description, but it's also an evaluation: the least evolved part of the brain, the part that has the earliest evolutionary emergence, is also the least "smart." (Hence the expression "bird-brain.") And indeed, were you to place a bird or reptile in a situation requiring human intelligence, they'd fail miserably. Put them in front of a closed door, for example, and (even were they possessed of opposable thumbs) the most they'd do is stare listlessly at it.

But the evolutionary progenitors of birds and reptiles, we are told, were very "smart." Dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years, and in modern theorizing and modern storytelling such as Jurassic Park, their intelligence compares favorably with our own. Put a Velociraptor in front of a closed door, and it figures out how to use its claws and snout to open it.

My guess, however, is that if you actually put a Velociraptor in front of a closed door, it would have no more idea what to do with it than a modern-day parakeet. That's because, having spent millions of years adapting to a particular environment, a doorless environment, its intelligence would not extend to an environment to which it was not adapted. Over time, given the opportunity, this misfit might eventually figure out what to do with doors. But initially, a creature "smart" enough to survive infinitely longer than we've managed to thus far would appear quite "dumb" when thrown into a world some other creature's intelligence had built.

The same applies for birds and reptiles. They're not particularly smart by our standards, but they are supremely well adapted to their environments. In the absence of major disruption, in the absence of the equivalent of our poor Velociraptor being thrown into an alien world, they thrive without much "smarts" that we would recognize. But as soon as the environments in which their intelligences evolved are disrupted--mostly by humans--they die in droves. Just like their "smart" dinosaur forebears, who died without a wimper when the climate changed and the meteor struck, modern-day organisms are only as "smart" as the environments to which they are adapted allow them to be.

We humans tend to forget this. We believe we're so smart we can adapt to anything--even the drastically new environments we've created for ourselves. If our smarts get us into a jam, if they produce environmental disasters we weren't godlike enough to predict, no problem--we'll just build an even smarter planet that addresses these issues.

It should be evident by now that it doesn't work this way. In fact, it works exactly in the reverse. The more we engineer our planet in an effort to address the perceived and actual shortcomings we've either abided or produced, the farther we drive our world from the intelligence that was adapted to it. The "smarter" we make our planet, the less readily our own smarts can deal with the results.

We don't need a smarter planet. We need a planet to which we're adapted, a planet on which our bodies and brains can survive: a planet in which the global climate remains within the range we evolved to tolerate, a planet in which we don't dredge up radioactive waste every time we force fracking fluid into the shale, a planet in which mercury and other toxins don't concentrate in the fatty tissues of fetuses, a planet in which the other species with which we co-evolved and co-adapted aren't driven to mass extinction by our activities. A "dumber" planet, perhaps--a planet with fewer Watsons and Ipods--but a planet that can sustain the creatures whose intelligence it shaped for these millions of years.

We've already built a smarter planet--a planet smarter than us, in fact. And it turns out that was pretty dumb.

One (Dull) Story

2011-02-27T09:16:00.004-05:00

I've been preoccupied lately with writing my first novel (I'm about halfway done with a draft), so I haven't had much chance to write and submit short stories. I did complete one, titled "Aphasia," and I'll be sending that out soon to see what happens. But in the meantime, rather than offering more of my own short fiction, I thought I'd comment on someone else's.

Over the past year, I've subscribed to the literary journal One Story, whose innovative idea is to send out precisely one story to subscribers roughly every three weeks. Of the fifteen or so stories I've received from them this year, I've really liked about five and at least appreciated another five; the rest I haven't thought much of. The most recent one, titled "Summer, Boys" by Ethan Rutherford, falls into the "appreciated" category: it's beautifully written, but in my view, utterly predictable and ultimately unsatisfying.

"Summer, Boys" is a coming-of-age story about two unnamed fifth-grade boys who develop an intense friendship centered on the common interests of many prepubescent males: professional football, skateboarding, dirt bikes. The two are inseparable until an older cousin of one of the boys mocks their interests as childish and introduces them to his own interest, namely video porn. The story ends with the two friends uncomfortably but compulsively trying out on each other one of the acts they witnessed in the video. So in the end, the story becomes what just about anybody could have predicted it would become from the first word (which is "Friends"): a story of the loss of innocence, conveyed through the medium of homosexual experimentation.

And that's precisely my problem with the story. Not the homosexual experimentation, which I'm confident lots of boys engage in as they're making the passage from childhood to teenhood. What bothered me was the predictability. As a rule, I think we can agree that any story whose plot can be expressed in the form of a tabloid headline isn't a very original story: "Two Young Boys Lose Their Innocence and Engage in Homosexual Experimentation!" What's so interesting about that?

Rutherford, it must be said, can write his pants off (no pun intended). Just look at this sentence (and yes, it's all a single sentence):

"Plays are called, random numbers, slow huts, sharp hikes, and the trees lining the street, the great oaks and elms that have been watching over this particular block for who knows how long, have seen how many plays called, have seen how many errant, throwing-starred punts go up on the roof, who hold, in their branches, a generation's worth of Aerobies too high to knock out--these trees, who have enjoyed, for centuries it seems, those magical on-the-lawn-hours when balls are drawn heavenward, who have stood in rapt attention for those endless minutes before the car-door slamming parents return from the outside world to ask their kids what the hell, just what the hell is going on, these trees, they whistle their applause."

That's good stuff. But to my thinking, it's form without much substance; it sounds great, it evokes a feeling, but it's all in the interest of setting up the scene toward which you knew the story was driving all along. The trees, see, are timeless, but cruel Time will snatch these boys and drag them toward teenhood and an Unspeakable Act! But that Act being neither unspeakable nor particularly interesting, the trees are mostly wasting their time, or ours, by leading up to it.

Some might say it's precisely the job of stories to render the commonplace in uncommon language; others will quibble that the classic definition of the short story presumes that every word will indeed point toward a single predetermined effect. But personally, I'm not much for stories that go to great stylistic lengths to tell me something I already know, or something I could already see coming from word one. I much prefer stories that teach me something I don't know, stories that shock or surprise me, if only (to paraphrase Emerson) with the alienated familiarity of my own being.

If you want to read a couple recent coming-of-age stories that do just that, check out Benjamin Percy's "Refresh, Refresh" and James Lee Burke's "Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine." Both of them are brilliant, impossible to summarize, surprising, melancholy, hilarious, sad. No timeless trees or unspeakable acts in either, but I promise you won't miss them.

Sixty Students

2011-02-22T08:36:00.004-05:00

Facing financial meltdown, the Detroit public school system has been ordered to close half its schools, raising class sizes to as high as sixty students per high school class. Just another present to the people from our enlightened leaders in Washington.

It's not fair, of course, to blame this crisis entirely on the present Republican Congress. Detroit's public schools, like most big-city public schools, have been in freefall for decades.

But then, it's not inappropriate to suggest that the slash-and-burn mentality the current Republican Congress has brought to our nation's capital is the same that has failed our public schools over the past half-century.

To speak bluntly, our nation's leaders don't give a shit about poor black kids in Detroit's public schools. They never have. And witness the results.

I looked up the statistics on one of Detroit's public high schools, Barsamian Preparatory Center. (It was first on the alphabetical list.) Almost 100% of its students are black. Almost 80% receive free lunches. Its attendance rates are around 55%. Over 60% of its students lack proficiency (as defined under No Child Left Behind) in all subjects, including reading, math, and writing. That's actually a lot better than the district as a whole, where the below-proficient population is over 80%. And anywhere between 50 and 60% of the students in this "preparatory" high school drop out before completing their degrees.

Apparently, what they're being prepared for is the reality of being poor and black in America: no one gives a shit about you.

I have a prediction for the 60 students in each class at schools like Barsamian Prep. 30 will drop out and end up either dead on the streets, hooked on drugs, living off welfare, or working at minimum wage. Of the remaining 30, 10 will rely on public assistance, 10 will find low-wage employment, 5 will go to community college and obtain work as lab techs or clerical laborers, 4 will go to state schools and possibly manage to claw their way into the middle class, and 1 will go to Harvard, where, feeling hopelessly alienated and out of place, he'll commit suicide.

And our elected leaders in Washington will be chauffeured home to their mansions and townhouses, and wash their hands for dinner, and congratulate themselves on a job well done.

Burn, Baby, Burn

2011-02-20T09:52:00.003-05:00

Sorry for the blaze of environmentally-themed posts in recent days--I promise I'll have something entirely new soon--but I was so incensed by the House vote yesterday, I just had to fire off this cartoon. And yes, as you can see, all the incendiary language is intentional.

A Tolerable Planet

2011-02-19T21:29:00.005-05:00

Recently, I reported on attempts to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gases. Today, I am sad to report House Republicans have had their way: in their spending bill, the House not only slashed EPA funding but tucked in an amendment to prohibit EPA regulation of heat-trapping gases. The reason, of course, is that they claim such regulations would hurt the economy.

The last time I talked about this issue, I tried to see it from the side of your average American, someone who's afraid of losing her or his job (or who has already lost it) and who honestly believes regulating CO2 and methane will hurt their chances of a decent life. That person, I suggested, was someone with whom one can sympathize.

But the Republican leadership and representatives aren't supposed to be your average Americans. Politicians are supposed to be forward-thinking, insightful people who understand the implications of their actions. They're supposed to think about the damn future, not just about the next election cycle.

Sadly, American politics are in ideological freefall, with neither party able to govern effectively. All they can do is piss off the electorate enough that the vote swings toward the other party two or four years later.

We are living in a climate-altered world. That's fact, not ideology. If the world's climate gets much worse, we may not be living at all. I can appreciate the difficulty of the average citizen in accepting that reality. But I can't accept elected officials' ideological purblindness to the actual world in which they and their constituents live.

Thoreau wrote in his journal: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" That was in the 1850s. He was thinking of the future. If he were here today, he'd surely be shocked and saddened to see so many of the nation's supposed leaders living in the past.

Passing Gas

2011-02-18T22:26:00.004-05:00

Here's my latest pictorial comment on newly inaugurated Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and the natural gas industry he supports. If you're a Pennsylvanian (or New Yorker, or West Virginian, or Ohioan, or Texan, or just plain American) concerned about this issue, watch Josh Fox's film Gasland, check out the Marcellus Protest website or the blog "Fracked Again," and get involved!

The Third Option

2011-02-15T12:05:00.003-05:00

I got a call a couple days ago from some lobbyist group trying to convince me that the EPA shouldn't be allowed to regulate greenhouse gases. Their reasoning? You guessed it: doing so would "hurt the economy." My response: "perhaps, but it would help the planet." Clearly, we had little to talk about, so we hung up.

It boggles the mind, this weighing of profit over planet. Taking the long view of things, it's impossible to conclude that those who favor the former over the latter are certifiably insane.

And yet, the thing is, they're not insane. They're behaving, in fact, in perfectly sane, indeed eminently rational ways. According to rational choice theory, most of us, when given an either-or choice, will choose the one that is most rational for our immediate circumstances. If the choice is between having a job today and having a planet 100 years from now, it's rational to choose the former over the latter. And so most people do.

This reminds me of discussions we've had in one of my classes this semester. Why, we've wondered, did northeastern woodlands Native peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over-hunt and over-trap fur-bearing animals? Couldn't they see that they were depleting the very resources on which they relied? Weren't they--according to the popular stereotype--environmentally conscious enough to want to preserve for the seventh or seven hundredth generation the land's bounty?

Perhaps they were. But they were also enmeshed in a colonial economy wherein just about the only valuable commodity they could sell or trade was furs. Their populations were decimated, their forests were falling, their lands were diminishing, their languages and cultures were threatened--and they still had to feed their families. Given the choice to do so over the choice to preserve hypothetical future beaver and deer, they rationally chose the former.

The same holds true in contemporary Native Nations. Some of my students were troubled, given the prevailing stereotypes, to hear of the presence of extractive, and highly destructive, industries on Indian reservations. How could Indian peoples damage the lands of their ancestors? Well, Indian peoples live, by and large, on the submarginal lands to which they've been relocated; poverty in their communities is endemic; opportunities for education or advancement are practically non-existent; and when the coal company comes knocking, the rational choice is to open the door and let them in.

All of this simply goes to show that to make a truly rational choice, one that empowers communities while at the same time embracing planetary health, we need a third option. And that third option can only come from systemic change; individual communities generally don't have it at their disposal or within their means.

Which is exactly why we need the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. That, in conjunction with programs that help individuals pay the bills and that promote renewable energy and green jobs, would be a step toward that third option.

My Best Work

2011-02-09T20:49:00.003-05:00

I've noticed something odd about the editorial guidelines offered by many literary journals. In their tips to contributors, they often say something like, "send us only your best work." Which means . . . what?

Maybe it's some kind of code. Maybe if I'd attended an MFA program I'd know what they were talking about. Maybe it means, "make sure to proofread, you moron!" Or, "send only those stories that your thesis advisor compared favorably to the works of Chekhov and Hemingway." Or, "if you've written a hundred stories, throw them all at the steps and send only the one that lands on top."

Because really, how many writers seriously consider sending their worst work to a literary journal? Yes, I suppose there are a lot of desperate writers out there (maybe I'm one of them), and I suppose there are people who jot down a story, run a quick spell-check (or not), and then flood the markets with the thing. Given how many journals accept electronic submissions these days, this is relatively easy (and cheap) to do. So I guess, in this light, the journals are just trying to protect themselves.

But my guess is also that it doesn't work. Because those few writers who adopt the above approach are not going to be dissuaded by such editorial advice, and the rest of us are not going to be helped by it.

I'm confident that most writers, the vast majority of writers in fact, are sending their best work--the best work of which they're capable. That doesn't mean it's going to be great; but the fact that it isn't great doesn't mean it isn't their best. The majority of writers, even those whose stories are not very good, are not trying to annoy and infuriate editors by sending inferior stories; they're sending their best, and it's precisely the job of editors to determine which stories among the innumerable "my bests" are actually the best.

I've written lots of stories. Most of them I consider to be pretty good. A few I know are awful. And many I consider to be my best. But I'll be darned if I know how to make my best better. The only way I know to get better as a writer is to keep reading and writing, and so that's what I do--but should I sit on these stories forever, hoping that in years to come they'll meet someone else's hypothetical standard of "best"? Or should I send the work I consider to be my best at present, knowing that as I continue to write, my best will get better? The stories I send out for possible publication are the best I can do right now, and so it's not particularly helpful to tell me they're the ones I should be sending. That would be like me saying to my students, "Send me your best paper." What other paper would they send me?

I think it's time for some honesty here. Don't tell us on the editorial page, "send only your best work." Tell us, "send only the best story ever written, the single story most likely to be immortalized by the bards of the future." If I saw that advice, I'd know not to submit my stories there.

Instead, I'd submit to some market that's willing to consider my best.

Father Knows Beast

2011-02-08T10:58:00.003-05:00

So I understand the Steelers lost in the Super Bowl. Sizeable Benjamin did not, as the blogger whom I mentioned in a previous post hoped, get his legs broken, but perhaps it would have been better for his team if he had; I hear he played very poorly. The city of Pittsburgh was briefly traumatized (I could tell from the absence of hoots and cheers outside my window Sunday night), but now everything appears to have returned to normalcy. Life goes on.

In my case, life was never interrupted; I spent the Super Bowl grading papers and watching Iron Man. Interesting film, though it's disturbing how its apparent critique of militarism turns into a critique of supplying arms to the bad guys (and thus, in the end, into a promotion of militarism on the part of the good guys). It was also intriguing for its use of a theme I've noticed in a number of fantasy films, where the father either is a monster or consorts with monsters. You see it in Iron Man when Tony Stark's surrogate father, Obidiah Stain, turns out to be the supplier of arms to the bad guys (and, later, dons the Iron Monger suit for a face-off with his estranged "son," Iron Man). You see it in The Spiderwick Chronicles, where the father, having deserted his family for some other woman, later returns to apologize--but it turns out he's actually the arch-villain, the shape-shifting ogre Mulgarath, in disguise. You see it in the Jurassic Park movies, where a bunch of childless, irresponsible men sic monstrous dinosaurs on innocent children. You even see it in Terminator 2, where the fatherless John Connor is both pursued and saved by Terminators posing as guardians. I'm sure I could multiply examples, but I think you get the point.

There's a very lengthy critical literature on the representation of the "monstrous-feminine," psychoanalytic critic Barbara Creed's term for the feminization of movie monsters. Supposedly, this has to do with men's universal fear of female genitalia, the vagina dentata, and all that. (Creed has a field day with the mouth-inside-a-mouth of the Alien monsters.) I'm sure there's something to this, but I prefer to read gendered monsters sociologically, to ask what cultural anxieties and desires underlie the representation of monsters as voracious moms or dastardly dads. For those interested in learning more, there's always my book Framing Monsters. Alternatively, you can pop any of the Star Wars movies into the DVD player and learn all you need to know for yourself.

Of course, we could also talk about the football quarterback as failed father-figure, but perhaps we'll save that for another time.

The Big Four-Six

2011-02-05T21:47:00.004-05:00

Today's my 46th birthday, and though I haven't learned much in 46 years, I thought I'd pass along, for what it's worth and in no particular order, some of what I have learned:

1. Human beings are amazing creatures. So are trees. And microbes. And dolphins. And three-toed sloths. And just about everything else.

2. Everything in life is too complicated to be understood or solved. It can only be addressed.

3. Art is infinitely better than war, but it makes far less money for the powerful.

4. Nature is good. And civilization is good. And Nature is good for civilization. But civilization is not good for Nature.

5. Ethical decisions follow the same rules outlined in #2 above.

6. If God exists, s/he appears to be content largely to let us figure things out on our own.

7. Faithlessness and unfaithfulness are not the same. Being faithless means denying what you don't believe in. Being unfaithful means denying what you do.

8. The best things in life (love, happiness, purpose, freedom, etc.) are not free. You have to work far harder to achieve them than you do to buy stuff.

9. There is no such thing as good luck. There's only a.) hard work or b.) random chance. Take your pick.

10. In art, we approach the divine. In divinity, we approach art.

11. Life is far too short. But if it were any longer, we'd probably waste most of it.

So there you have it. By next year, maybe I'll have learned something new.

Waiting for Super Fan

2011-01-29T21:26:00.003-05:00

With all of Pittsburgh in transports about the Steelers' return to the Super Bowl, you'd think I'd be dancing in the streets along with the rest of the Stiller Nation. But that wouldn't be me, would it?

So for what it's worth, here are the top three things that are wrong with professional sports:

1. It glorifies meaningless activity. There's a guy on the Steelers (whose nickname, I believe, is Sizeable Benjamin) who can throw an oblong object into other people's hands. He's apparently very good at this. But so freaking what? There are countless more meaningful enterprises in which human beings might engage: cure cancer, solve the energy crisis, pick up litter, care for children, read or write a book, carry on a conversation with another human being, etc., etc. Yet professional sports encourages, indeed requires, otherwise sane individuals to invest far more energy and passion in the exploits of oblong object-throwing individuals than in anything else. I'm not sure if professional sports are responsible for the bastardization of real achievement, but they sure haven't helped the cause.

2. It distorts economic and civic priorities. Years ago, I used to be a sports fan--until, within the span of several years, both the Pittsburgh Pirates (they of 18 straight losing seasons) and the Pittsburgh Steelers (they of six Super Bowl rings) extorted taxpayer money from my hometown in order to build fancy new stadiums. Their arguments were identical: if you don't help us build these things, we'll move away, which will cost the city jobs, revenue, and civic pride. To my mind, this would be equivalent to the city of Pittsburgh paying to build a Wal-Mart. With inadequate public services, underfunded libraries, no place for homeless people to sleep, collapsing roadways, filthy air and water, and pathetic public schools, we're spending taxpayer money to build stadiums for billionaires. And I sure feel proud.

3. It brings out the worst in people. Oh, I know they'll tell you that sports build character and discipline and all that, and maybe they do. But professional sports breed little but arrogant, I-don't-have-to-follow-the-rules-because-I-can-throw-an-oblong-object types of behavior a la Michael Vick. And so far as its legions of fans are concerned, the only things professional sports breed are anger, loathing, hysteria, incivility, substance and child abuse, and broken marriages. To wit: after the Steelers' last Super Bowl win, fans set fire to cars. Recently, a blogger who shall remain nameless expressed his hope that the Green Bay Packers break Sizeable Benjamin's legs on the first series of the upcoming Super Bowl. This morning, my seven-year-old son, as sweet a little fellow as you're likely to meet, was publicly berated by a shopkeeper because he happens to prefer Green Bay. Perhaps because they invest meaningless activity with apparent meaning, or perhaps because they distort our sense of justice, proportion, and fair play, professional sports turn otherwise decent people into lunatics and monsters.

So there you have it. I'm sure these words of mine will have little effect if the Steelers win (in which case thousands will trash the city) or if they lose (in which case thousands will strike their children or throw themselves off the nearest bridge). But you can't blame me for trying.

Racist Like Me

2011-01-22T10:26:00.002-05:00

I just received word that my memoir "Racist Like Me," accepted roughly a year ago by the print journal Smash Cake Magazine, will be appearing in the journal's inaugural (March 2011) issue. It's been a long time coming, but I think it'll be worth the wait!

If you're interested in preordering the issue, here's the link. Word has it that this will be a double issue, with lots and lots of cool stuff, and at $8 it's a steal.

And for those who can't wait to read the essay, here's a preview:

Racist Like Me

by J. David Bell

Years ago, when my wife and I had just settled into our first house and our now pre-teen daughter was little more than a month old, I got held up by a black guy. I’d walked over to our former apartment to check the mail, which didn’t seem to be arriving at our new home. It was nighttime, and snowing, probably a stupid time to take a stroll. The guy was ahead of me, and when he doubled back alarms should have gone off but didn’t. He was far away, I couldn’t see him distinctly, my mind was on other things, fatherhood and home ownership and missing messages and the start of the spring semester, a week off. It wasn’t until the gun was in my face that I realized anything peculiar was going on.

The mugger didn’t get anything from me--I wasn’t even wearing a watch--but he did make me lie face down in the snow while he frisked me. “I swear to you,” I kept saying to him. At one point I foolishly reached for my pocket to prove I had nothing; I’m lucky, I guess, he didn’t shoot me then. When he left I stayed down a good five minutes, the tips of my fingers wet in the snow, my body not registering the chill. Walking back unnaturally fast, feeling as if my feet weren’t touching the ground, I managed to stay calm, only my breathing a bit off tempo. But when my wife met me at the door with our bundled daughter and asked what had taken so long, my voice choked and I started to cry.

The cop who came wanted a description. I couldn’t give him one. “You were looking at the gun, right?” he said. That was true--it seemed to blot out everything, even the hand holding it--but that wasn’t the real reason. I’d seen the man’s face. But once he pulled the gun it disappeared, never to return. In a perverse parody of racial profiling, I robbed the robber of a face when, having fulfilled the stereotype of AAA (Armed African-American), he no longer needed one.

As a professor whose work centers on the representation of race in American literature and culture, I wish I could say this incident is what corrupted me, turned me from an angel into the sort of bigot my teaching and scholarship have sought to expose. It would be truer, however, to see my teaching and scholarship as acts of expiation, or even exorcism, for the racism I’ve long recognized to be my own. I’ve feared black men most of my life, an unreasoning, visceral fear manifested by the clench in my chest when one (except, oddly, this one) nears me at night. But there are other symptoms, less obvious, masked as bravado or disdain: safely ensconced in my own vehicle, I scoff when one pulls up beside me, the bass thump of some rap anthem rattling his SUV. Or when another peels around me, I think not “reckless driver” but “black guy,” “ghetto,” or even “gang-banger.” When a dark, dour face flashes on the eleven o’clock news, as it always does, associated with some drive-by or rape or other crime against humanity, all my reading and knowledge of economic inequality and judicial bias and selective reporting go out the window and I see what they want me to see: a black beast loose in my neighborhood. When a black teenager from the school where my wife works showed up on the news one night, accused of butchering a baby in a hail of indiscriminate bullets, I didn’t mourn, as she did, the waste of two young lives. I thought, “there goes another one.” I was almost glad, in the sick way racists are, to see my prejudices confirmed.

The story we tell about racism in this country has two threads, one individual and the other social. The individual says that racism comes from education: you learn it, you can unlearn it too. The social says that, thanks to the integration of our schools two generations ago, the nation as a whole is gradually outgrowing racism, or never learning it to begin with. But my own experience suggests that neither of these stories is accurate--or at least, that the latter offers no real answer to the former. A child of enlightened parents and integrated schools, I received no proper training in racism. On the contrary, I received lesson upon lesson dedicated to withering it in the bud. Yet a lifetime of such schooling has proved inadequate to touch attitudes far more basic, beliefs bred in some abyss I can’t quite identify. At most, my formal education has enabled me to intellectualize my racism, to name it for what it is, to recognize its voice when it croons to me like a demon lover. To own it--in part by distancing myself from it--but not to root it out or will it away.

Faith in Fantasy

2011-01-16T19:48:00.004-05:00

I saw the most recent Narnia film today with my daughter. (She's a big fan.) On the whole, I'd have to rate it a failure, certainly inferior to the first and best, and even a hair below the second. Though it had plenty of promising material--a high seas adventure in search of enchanted swords and missing lords, a boy who turns into a dragon, a pool that transforms all it touches to gold--for me, all of these elements fell flat. And the reason is simple: the film had no faith in its own fantasy.

That's the problem with allegory, and the Narnia films, though they've been softened somewhat from the overtly allegorical books, are nonetheless allegories. (At one point in the film Aslan tells Lucy, "I am known by a different name in your world, and you must come to know me there." Yawn.) Allegory, by its very nature, empties fantasy of its mystery and appeal and turns it into a mere facade or excuse for something else, something supposedly deeper and presumably more important. Allegory won't let fantasy simply be; it insists that fantasy has to mean, and what it means cancels out the very vessel that holds the meaning. So instead of a thrilling adventure, you get a dull lesson in temptation and sin. Instead of true imagination, you get a sermon. Instead of a talking lion, you get talking points about the Son of God.

I say all this, remember, having nothing against the Son of God. As Martin Luther King Jr. Day approaches, I think we would all do well to remember what the Son of God said, and try to live our lives, as King did, a bit more in his example.

But King was no allegory. Neither was Christ. They were living models of the spiritual life, and when they told us to follow them, they didn't need a talking lion to make their case.

So let's have both faith and fantasy, and keep the two separate. Let's allow life to be mysterious and unknowable for its own sake (that's fantasy) as well as mysterious and unknowable for some higher purpose (that's faith). Let's not demean faith by calling it a fantasy. But let's not demean fantasy either by insisting it has to be the handmaiden of faith.

100th Post!

2011-01-15T18:26:00.005-05:00

In my kids' elementary-school classrooms, they've always celebrated the 100th day of school with a big party and a big project--something, naturally, that contains 100 items of some kind. (My son is thinking of doing something with Legos this year.) It's a nice ritual, one that commemorates persistence, accomplishment, or just plain survival.

Well, according to Blogger, this is my 100th post since I started this thing a year and a half ago. And while I don't have any great big project planned for my 100th post, I thought I'd use the opportunity to present a story of mine that went the way of all flesh when the magazine in which it was originally published shut down for good.

The story's called "String," and though looking at it now after a further year of writing, I can see some flaws in it, at the time it represented a big advance for me in terms of story structure, discourse, and point of view. So I still feel a great deal of fondness for it, and I'm happy to take this opportunity to present it to you.

Here's to the first 100 posts, and to the next!

String

They stand on the shoulder by their crumpled Toyota Prius, waiting for the cops and the Triple-A tow truck to show. Jasper eyes the accordioned fender, his upper lip clenched in his lower. Lila braces for the one-liner she knows is coming. Why can he never take anything seriously? It drives her mad.

Jasper peruses the wreckage, not because his inspection tells him anything of use, but because he needs time to formulate his quip. Then he thinks of a good one, one sure to get her steamed. “Well, this will certainly reduce our carbon footprint,” he says.

Lila expels a breath. “This never would have happened with a normal car,” she says. “I felt something, a hitch, a hesitation. It’s that goddamn hybrid motor. It must have stalled just as I braked.”

“You were driving like a bat out of hell,” he tells her. “This would have happened in an SUV. The only difference is the damage would have been much greater.”

“And the carbon footprint would have been much higher,” she sneers. “You and your crusades. I need a cigarette.”

She retreats from the roadside. Jasper watches her brace her purse against her thigh and stab her hand vigorously but randomly into the bag. He knows her purpose is less to find the cigarettes than to impress on him his guilt in bringing her to this extremity. Finally she extracts the flattened pack and looks at him disgustedly. “I’m out,” she says, crumpling the offending object and hurling it to the ground. It rolls away in a passing truck’s slipstream, a miniature cellophane tumbleweed.

“So I’d noticed,” he says. She knew she was out before she started fishing. She hasn’t had a cigarette in three days, the empty pack meant to be a motivator. She also knows he knows she’s quit, and has merely been egging her on.

“Do you care?” she says. “Do you care that we almost got squashed, we’re standing by the side of the fucking highway, and I’m out of cigarettes?”

Jasper squints at the shrunken car. The airbags stuff the front seat like some overgrown fungus. Then another good one comes to him. “If the choice is between killing yourself and killing me along with you, I’ll buy you the cigarettes.”

Lila glares. She wonders why she has put up with this for so long. In a heartbeat’s time, she can tick off a royal tally of irritants. His arrogance, his air of superiority. His constant dry, sandpapery sniffling. His inability to bring her to orgasm. His spreading forehead and sloping back. His insouciance regarding her quarterly smoking-cessation schemes, his told-you-so smugness when she relapses. His this, his that. Her girlfriends had warned her he would never change, and in this they were right. What they hadn’t foreseen, what she hadn’t foreseen herself, was how he would.

“You’re a real asshole, you know that?” she says.

#

Cissy rests against the metal barrier, her face lowered to ward off the dust and debris of trucks rumbling by. The couple who rear-ended her, having spent the briefest of moments checking her condition and exchanging necessaries, have returned to their car and are, by all appearances, quarreling. Though they keep their voices low, the argument emanates from the lines of the woman’s body: the arch of a heel, the thrust of her chest. Cissy supposes she should be angrier than she is--they’ve mashed her bumper, barely apologized--but she finds herself studying them, pitying them. At least, she thinks, she has no one dear to blame, no one dear to blame her.

When the impact first shook her Hyundai, grinding her against the seat before pitching her forward, she felt a moment’s vindication, even exhilaration: the copper-colored car had been bearing down on her hard, she’d felt the adrenaline rush tailgaters always produced as they squeezed you into the smallest of spaces, leaving you no exercise of will except the sacrificial protest of slowing to a crawl. After the hit, though, she felt herself deflating, righteousness ceding to gray, empty routine. Move the car from the travel lane, limp along the shoulder. Take a deep breath, reach for the glove compartment, free the insurance card. Take another deep breath, compose one’s face to exude neither overt aggression nor unfelt forgiveness. Check the side view mirror, exit, circle the passenger door. Meet the culprits, express concern for their wellbeing despite their reckless blunder, enter pertinent information in one’s mobile device. Shake hands, comment on the pristine fall day, return to separate vehicles, wait. Remarkable how readily the moves flow from her, considering she’s never done this before.

Only once she returns to her car does she have time to wonder at the byzantine chance that has brought her here, to feel the panic flame in her chest--how close, how very close to the end of me!--to offer thanks for her salvation, to clutch at reasons, to register irrelevancies--the doughy clouds, the circling hawk--to enter the minds, the lives, of those who struck her, to sound their souls, to imagine how they too will be changed by this circumstance, even though it was of their own causing. The woman with the black dress and smoker’s contralto, so much younger and more vital than the wispy beanpole beside her--his daughter? No, too much accumulated anger tautens her back, her shoulders; they are lovers at least, husband and wife more likely. Nor, Cissy decides, is the woman so young as she seems. Though she carries it well, Cissy can picture gray beneath her black crown of hair, can trace the outline of cords ready to flare from her fleshy throat. Still, the man is quite a bit older, his hair as fine as iron filings, his hands mottled and veined. In a sure-footed leap of sympathy, Cissy perceives their life, knows they are childless, estranged, knows they were arguing just before the impact, knows the woman--Lila--was plunging forward in hopes of killing them both, or him alone, or her alone, or at least of making him believe such was her intent, and that her current posture of coiled and strained defiance is a result of his not having been at all impressed by her fatal bravado, in fact of his having mocked her, called her bluff, when what he should have done was acknowledge it for what it was, its desperate foolishness. Cissy feels certain, too, that this man is incapable of internalizing others’ feelings, is always inspecting them from a comfortable remove--a psychiatrist, a politician--no, she has it, a college professor. Lila, then, will be one of his former students, dazzled as a freshman by his command of hermeneutics and the grade roster, seduced in his book-lined office or under a leafy campus grotto, or maybe at a café following a reading of his poetry, and yes, again, Cissy knows with dead-eyed certainty, the woman too is a poet, a lesser one, lured by the promise of prosody by osmosis, but always failed, always second best, always denied. Next to this betrayal of her life’s ambition, a rear-end collision must seem scandalously insignificant, if not a gift from a life unlived.
Cissy considers going to her, offering her sisterly sympathy, certifying it through the ironclad accuracy of her intuition. But just then the police arrive, the spell is broken, the routine resumes.

#

“You were lucky, you know,” Amos tells her. An insurance agent, he knows all about lucky. “It could have been a lot worse.”

“I know,” Cissy says. “If I hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, if they hadn’t hit the brakes, if we’d been traveling any faster. . . .”

“I’m not trying to scare you,” he says.

“I’m not scared,” she answers.

Amos drives with both hands on the wheel, his foot hovering over the brake. He slows to let a woman back her minivan out of a driveway, grimly returns her wave. Though he has shared little with his twin sister in the past twenty-five years, her near miss with mortality has spooked him, and now, floating in his tin can through the streets of the city, he feels vulnerable.

“You could sue,” he says. “Recover damages.”

“Amos, I’m fine. The paramedics checked me, and I’m fine.”

“The car--”

“The insurance will cover the car.”

Now he is in more familiar territory. “Trust me, Cissy. You’d be amazed at the loopholes these guys find. They’ll dredge up some parking ticket from six years ago. . . .”

“I’ve never gotten a parking ticket.”

“Fine.” He lifts his hands from the wheel in a brief, petulant shrug. “But you wait and see.”

Cissy can’t decide whether to feel touched by his awkward concern or annoyed by his fractiousness. She glances sidelong at him, notices that his face looks sweaty, and that the knot of his tie is loosened the smallest degree, a gesture she has come to decode as his attempt to lend a “family” feel to their brief contacts. She has actually watched him undo it in her presence, hooking an index finger and pulling, his Adam’s apple tugging against the downward pressure. She decides, on the strength of his willingness to drop everything and come pick her up, to be charitable. “Will this affect my rates, do you think?”

“Shouldn’t,” he grunts, then softens. “It wasn’t your fault, Cissy. You filled out the police report, you were abiding by the speed limit, right? Your brake lights were working? You didn’t stop suddenly, swerve, anything like that?”

“I was driving the way I always do,” she begins, but then, remembering the woman’s suffering face bearing down on her in the rearview mirror, she feels a fresh spurt of doubt. Doubt not only about her own reaction--did she hit the brakes, slow dangerously in a fit of pique?--but about the entire sequence of events. At what point, exactly, did she perceive the woman’s grief? Did she read it in her eyes, inverted by the mirror? Or only reconstruct it after the collision, along the roadside, as a spectator to the ill-matched pair’s bickering? And why does this matter? Shouldn’t it be enough that she is alive and well, the only residual a slight, prickly stiffness across her neck and shoulder blades? Shouldn’t it be sufficient that she has dodged death?

Amos, noticing her silence, makes an effort, does what does not come naturally to him, forces a smile. “You must have been pretty scared.”

“I was--” What was she? Cissy turns to him, and Amos realizes she has begun to cry. He considers what to do, finally decides to find a place to pull over. His tires rustle across dry leaves. The decision turns out to be the right one, as moments later she starts to bawl, and he is forced to shut off the ignition and reach across the seat for her shoulder. She leans her head against his hand, her eyes shut tight, her mouth grimacing in what appears to be real pain. He tries stroking her shoulder, but that’s difficult with her head there on his hand, and anyway he begins to think it might not be enough under the circumstances. He pivots to maneuver his left arm over the steering wheel and around her back, pulls her to him. She shakes with sobs.

Amos assumes this is a delayed reaction to the trauma, and he is right in part. Cissy herself can hardly tell what is causing this, everything has become so tangled. The accident, the woman’s wounded eyes, her husband’s brutal indifference, the sororal communion that had never happened, would now never happen, would seem intrusive and ghoulish if she tried, the round of police reports and medic evaluations and calls to work and the repair shop, her twin brother’s judgment, then his gentleness, the perfect, prismatic blue of the fall sky. For the first time in a long time she thanks the random chance of sharing a city with her nearest relation, not the city where they were born and their parents died, the city where, as a beginning speaker, he christened her with the nickname that soon crowded her birth name into obsolescence, but the city to which he moved as an adult and she, unmotivated by his presence, followed. If fate operates, she thinks, could it have been for this occasion the strings were pulled that brought her here? But she knows she will never be able to trace those strings, and she knows, too, that in a day’s or a week’s time they will be released, Amos will return to his work and family, she to her schedule, and the pattern of Thanksgivings, Christmases, birthday parties will resume. She feels her brother’s stiff shirt, wet by her own tears, beneath her cheek, smells its powdery fragrance, and knows this was not enough. But she lets herself drift in his embrace for a while longer, remembering.

Amos feels Cissy’s breath level from gasps to deep sighs, then soften to rhythmic inhalations and exhalations. For a moment, thinking of his own daughter, he imagines her asleep against his chest. He finds his left hand absently stroking her hair; a lullaby plays in his mind, almost rises to his lips. Then, at once, Cissy withdraws, sits erect, her eyes wide in a way that reminds him again of his daughter. Her short blonde hair sticks up like a chicken’s crest; he realizes she wears mascara, because it has smeared. Uncomfortable at the transition from four-year-old Franny to full-grown Cissy, conscious of looking at his twin sister as a woman, and a woman in distress at that, he turns away. His hands flutter in the door pouch for a tissue, but he finds none. Cissy laughs as if she knows what he is seeking, runs her sleeve across her nose, and rests back against the seat, her eyelids slanting closed. Amos starts the car and drives the remaining blocks to her apartment.

He pulls up before the building, a former elementary school now bedecked with rows of brass mail slots and wooden planters. Cissy turns to him. “Thank you, Amos,” she says, laying her fingertips on his arm in a dignified manner, almost with a hint of noblesse oblige, but he takes no offense. For once, he knows what she means.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asks, leaning across the seat as she exits.

“Do you need anything?”

Cissy shakes her head. As it happens, Amos can think of quite a few things she needs. Like a real job, not this low-paying, dead-end daycare shift she’s held for years. And a husband, or at least a boyfriend, someone to call in crises like this, not that he grudges her the favor. With a rude shock the thought occurs to him that his sister might be a lesbian, and he knows that, whether true or not, the suspicion will haunt him until she marries or he dies, whichever comes first. The latter more likely, he guesses. He feels a rush of affection and sorrow for his twin, for the meager life it seems to him she lives. What ever happened to the Cissy who used to orchestrate puppet shows, tunnel snow forts, fashion uproarious nighttime narratives with herself as star and crusader? For that matter, what happened to the Amos who used to join in?

“I’m fine, Amos,” she tells him. “Give my love to Becky and Franny.”

#

From the apartment window, Ricardo watches the foreign car sidle up to the curb and disgorge Miss Cissy. His surprise at her arrival is overwhelmed by his delight. His mother has been edging around the apartment all morning, reminding him of her responsibilities, his responsibilities, and the apparently subtle relationship between them. Now, with Miss Cissy home, he can stop trying to puzzle out the precise contours of that relationship and simply play.

“Mama!” he calls. “Miss Cissy here!”

His mother emerges from the kitchen hallway, her hands knotted in a dishtowel. She is smaller than Miss Cissy, and even prettier, her eyes somewhere between turquoise and brown, her eyelids golden, her hair a glossy braid that reaches almost to the small of her back. Ricardo has no memory of her in any less than perfect condition, groomed and polished like a studio shot, though she could if she so chose evoke for him weary nights when she’d stumble into his bedroom with tousled hair and lined face. He’d never believe her, though, any more than he’d believe there were times then she doubted she loved him. She has vowed never to let him learn what scars and sacrifices bind their life together, and she has kept her vow.

“Miss Cissy?” she says, gliding to the window and raising it to glance out. “What she doing home?”

Brianna surveys the sidewalk, but there is no sign of either Cissy or her car. Still she does not doubt her son’s report; he is, generally, a truthful child, and in any event he will be too excited by the prospect of a midday playmate to concoct a lie that will disappoint mostly him. A favorite teacher at the daycare center Ricardo attended until the start of school this fall, Cissy has sat before, though only for emergencies; Brianna does not date, does not leave him lightly. Though she wonders at Cissy’s unexpected return, she blesses her luck this day.

Ricardo’s face is alight with expectation. “Can Miss Cissy come play?”

“We’ll see,” she tells him. But she is already planning her deliverance, hoping this is not simply a lunch break or a momentary stop on some errand.

Her answer suffices for her son, who scoots to his room and begins making his own plans.

Brianna slips out the apartment door just as Cissy opens hers. The two women--not exactly friends, Cissy a good decade older, but across-the-hall neighbors since Brianna and Ricardo’s arrival five years before, and sharers, if far from equally, of his young life for all that time--greet each other with a nod and a smile, Cissy’s a bit less generous than usual due to her stiffening neck and self-consciousness of her appearance, Brianna’s perhaps a trifle peremptory, since she hopes to skip the preliminaries and get right to business. Tidy in a brown velour sweat suit with tan piping, the younger woman faces her neighbor, whose oversized white sweatshirt shows a ring of hand-holding stick figure children, in red. “You’re home early,” Brianna says.

Cissy considers contriving some tale, but knows she lacks the energy for it. “I got into a little accident on the way to work.”

“My God!” Brianna’s fingers fly to her cheek. Her nails show golden against her brown skin; even in alarm she is regal and glamorous, like an Egyptian princess. “You all right?”

“I’m fine,” Cissy smiles. “Just a little stiff.” Though the truth is, she is more than a little stiff; every time she shrugs her shoulders, trying to loosen them, they tighten and sear. “Hey, Ricardo. What happened to school?”

Brianna looks behind her to where her son has emerged. His face douses at the mention of school. Since starting kindergarten two months ago he has missed five days, each time with an identical and unidentifiable ailment: lethargy, fever too slight to be detected, dry throat. Whenever Brianna presses he shows signs of panic, his nostrils wide, his heart racing against her chest. The teacher assures her he has not been bullied, is welcomed by the other children, seems confident in forming capitals and numerals. “Many new learners experience separation difficulties,” the teacher said, and Brianna knew what she was thinking: single black mother, child at home, first time on his own. That the corollaries were untrue seemed not to impress the teacher, for whom, Brianna knew from other such contacts, her race and marital status trumped all else. The teacher suggested she seek counseling; thus far she has managed only to drop several broad hints at work. She courts hope the spell will lift on its own, and then it will be as if it never has been.

“Ricardo’s not feeling well,” Brianna explains, circling her arm around her son. She feels his resistance, feels it melt as her hand folds him in. “We’re having a home day today.”

Cissy has not worked around young children this long without knowing what’s up. She knows, too, meeting Brianna’s proud eyes, that a home day is exactly what Ricardo’s mother cannot afford right now. A receptionist at the hospital’s radiology clinic, she may have a more lenient employer and forgiving schedule than many in her shoes, but something in her delicate embrace of her child tells Cissy she is fast running out of sick time. Cissy projects the day that would have been, dreams herself surrounded by preschoolers, and determines that if she must be stranded in her apartment all afternoon, she might as well be stranded with Ricardo. Maybe he will even give her an excuse to walk to the park.

“I’d love to watch him,” she says. “If it would help.”

Brianna does not respond immediately. She is thinking of too many things at once: the grace and worry of motherhood, the blessing of numbers, the future of her child. The half-day she will not have to subtract from the ledger of her best efforts. The riddle that she must send her son to a classroom he for some reason fears when he could learn so much more of loving kindness from this chance woman across the hall. She is about to speak when Cissy saves her from making a fool of herself. “We’ll pretty much be stuck here, of course. But I think I can keep him entertained.”

“He loves race cars,” Brianna blurts, before ushering Cissy in and vanishing to her room to change.

#

Ricardo watches Cissy’s every move. Though she is nothing like his mother, her voice not as fluid, her smell not as fresh, she harbors a magical energy that easily balances Mama’s steady presence. She is the same bright spirit he knew from playschool, the one with the instant, laser-beam focus and just-for-you grin. She does not race his cars along the track; she zooms them, readying them for takeoff, inscribing spools and somersaults in the air with their shiny metallic bodies. She crouches low to urge them along the carpet, cups her hands over her mouth to make the breathy noise of the crowd’s cheering, waves an invisible checkered flag to greet the champion. When he tires of cars she suggests reading, and when he returns from his room with arms full she makes an amazed face, her eyes popping and her mouth so wide he can peer down her throat. She cantilevers the pile on the end table, pats the couch beside her, and takes it from the top, departing from his mother’s serious murmur, inventing voices he’s never heard, crazy voices and giddy voices and booming voices and squeaky voices. As if in accompaniment, a racket of high-pitched bird song erupts from the direction of the front window. Ricardo leans into her body, turning pages on request, trusting her to make sense of the mad squiggle of black lines. He feels her arm around his back, her fingers flexing in his hair, and recalls a comfort he had not remembered he’d forgotten.

“Miss Cissy?” he asks, mid-book.

“Hm?”

“Can we have lunch?”

“Sure.” She sets the book aside, shoos him from her lap, takes a couple tries to stand. Her body has been clenching ever more tightly throughout the day, and her spirited bout on the living room rug didn’t help. “Oh, I’m stiff!” she says, then laughs, and he laughs along. Being stiff, it turns out, can be a game too.

She rummages in the kitchen for plates, cups, forks, napkins, a pot, macaroni and cheese. “This okay?” He nods serenely. While the water boils he regales her with tales from Star Wars, having been impressed to learn that the first movie came fourth, the fourth first, and so on. Like most boys his age, he seems in equal parts thrilled and stricken by Anakin’s descent into the Dark Side. “He used to be a good little boy,” he reports solemnly. “Then he became the second most evilest person on earth.” Cissy senses he could talk about this all day and still be set tingling by its pitiless intricacy. She wonders, not with much hope, whether she can engage him in a discussion that will get to the root of his school anxiety, but she decides not to meddle. He seems simply happy in the unplanned day’s embrace, and why cloud it? Besides, she is growing sleepier by the minute.

He helps her clear, climbs a stool to get his own snack. She exclaims at what a big boy he is getting to be. “Too big for a nap?” she experiments. He laughs as if she’s made another joke; apparently, the thought of becoming too big for a nap has not fully settled on him. “We do quiet time,” he says, mouth full. “At kiddie garden.” Then his face shuts down as though he is conscious of having broken some wordless pact, fearful he has spoiled the day.

“We’re not going to do quiet time,” Cissy assures him. “We’re going to take an honest-to-goodness nap.”

They pad down the hall to his bedroom, take a moment to show and be shown new toys, then stretch out on his bed, with its puffy blue Transformers comforter. Cissy reaches across him to hoist the bed rail, lets her arm come to rest across his slip of a body. He settles into her. She hopes he will sleep; she will not feel comfortable drifting off unless he does.

“Miss Cissy?” he whispers into her hand. His breath is warm and, now that she thinks of it, a smidge ragged.

“Hm?”

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Boo.”

“Boo who?”

“Don’t cry, little baby. They nothing to be scared of.”

She smiles drowsily and draws him closer. For a moment she imagines herself as his mother. She marvels at the strangeness of cuddling this little boy, this boy about whose life she really knows so little--his father, his mother’s history, the strands of his school avoidance--when she has not done the same with her own niece, her twin’s daughter, since Franny was a newborn. Amos and Becky have their own babysitters, teenage girls in the neighborhood, and they have never asked. Or is it that they know better than to ask? Has she ever suggested to them that she has no desire to sit her niece? The crisscrosses in her mind are becoming too complex, they close like an aperture on a pinhole of light, and this is her last thought before falling fast asleep.

Ricardo wakes first and shakes Cissy gently but urgently. There is something he needs to show her. She glances at his clown clock in confusion, realizes it is still afternoon, they have slept only a couple hours. She gasps as she gets her elbows under her; her position, arm looped over his body, which had seemed so cozy when she nodded off, turns out to have been a mistake. “Give me a second, okay?” she asks Ricardo, who is out of bed, trying to pull her after him. She can’t exit by the side because of the bed rail, so she inches toward the foot, using mostly her butt and heels. She stands, letting gravity do what her arms won’t. Her shoulders feel as if they have been pierced by a two-by-four, pinned into place so she must rotate her entire upper body as a single unit, like a lumbering marionette. She mentally reviews her medicine cabinet, knows she has nothing for pain. A discreet search of Brianna’s bathroom turns up a bottle of Motrin. She downs a couple tablets while Ricardo dances outside.

“What is it, Mister Fidgets?” He laughs and takes her hand, pulling her down the hallway to the living room. She decides not to resist, since that makes the pain stab even harder. He opens the door to the adjacent room, saying, “I want you to meet Leonard!”

The darkened room erupts into light and a crazy squawking, the same song, she now realizes, she has been hearing off and on throughout the day. The air enfolds her, stuffy and sweet. The source of all this sensory commotion, Cissy makes out, is a single small birdcage resting on the black-topped desk that dominates the room. Flitting from perch to wire barricade and back again in an endless, pointless staccato is a finch-sized bird with a rosy sheen to its body, bright black eyes, and a heavy orange beak, with which it clutches and pecks the wires of its enclosure, madly clacking. The cage shares space with an open laptop, its power cord trailing but its screen damped; the walls and floor cluster with bookcases, half-empty boxes of books, piled plastic clothing containers, loose baby clothes and shoes. “This is Leonard!” Ricardo announces, and the bird, stimulated to an even higher pitch of frenzy by its owner’s voice and movement, begins to circle the cage like a bright bit of rag caught in a spin cycle. “It’s time for his dinner!” Ricardo sings, and Cissy appreciates why he has saved this revelation until now, when he can demonstrate his duties to his pet. She nods in silent approval; she doubts whether, at his age, she would have made it through playtime, lunch, and a nap with such a surprise in store.

“Where do you keep his food?” Cissy asks, just as she spots the twist-tied bag of seed slumped beside the birdcage. Ricardo rushes over, and before Cissy has a chance to register the danger he springs open the gate. “Don’t--" she begins, but Leonard, seizing the chance, has already squirted through the gap and, skimming the ceiling, made for the open sunroom door.

“It’s okay,” Cissy begins again, before remembering: the living room window is open, she saw it when she entered, left it that way, had no reason to disturb anything of Brianna’s that didn’t absolutely need to be disturbed. Now, with heedless certainty, Leonard darts for the opening, Cissy praying for a screen. But the screen is raised, and in a liquid blur Leonard pours through. Cissy lunges for the window, her neck and shoulders screaming in protest, her expectation fully to witness him sailing off into the startling afternoon sky.

He pauses on the window ledge, cocking his head this way and that, perhaps baffled by his instantly enlarged world. Cissy inches toward him, the futility of the rescue bunching in her thoughts: she will need to raise the window yet farther, lean out, and, last and most unlikely, scoop the creature from its own buoyant element to her leaden hand. For a single, heart-starving moment she visualizes cornering this sliver of less than air. But before her pained body can gather itself to match her purpose, Leonard leaps into space, skips gaily, and is gone.

Cissy turns a horrified face to Ricardo, who smiles.

“Don’t worry,” he soothes. “He always come back.”

#

At five-thirty Brianna returns to find her son and neighbor playing a hand of Uno on the living room floor. Cissy rises at her entrance, her movements clumsy and formal. She wastes no time. “We lost Leonard,” she says. Her greatest fear is that unassuming Brianna, her look turned strangely ferocious in her brown business suit, will punish Ricardo for his irresponsibility. Then, too low for him to hear, “I’ll buy you a new one.”

“Oh,” Brianna says. She notes such guilt in Cissy’s eyes, over such a small thing, it momentarily makes her want to laugh. “That’s all right,” she says. “They die all the time,” she adds, mouthing the words.

Pursued by Brianna’s thanks, Cissy helps Ricardo clean up. At the door, she leans to give him a goodbye hug, and Brianna hears her wince as her son’s small arms grip her neck. Boldly, the boy’s mother reaches out and presses through the heavy cotton cloth the soft flesh of her neighbor’s back. Cissy whimpers but does not shrink from her touch.

“I’ve got some Icy Hot,” Brianna says. “It might help.”

She leads Cissy to the bathroom, closes the door, helps her balance on the edge of the tub, eases her sweatshirt over arms she can no longer raise above shoulder level. The woman’s pale shoulders crowd with bruises the size and color of sweet cherries. “Girl,” Brianna breathes. “I thought you said you were okay.”

Cissy, miserable with the pain and Leonard’s flight, considers outlining the crazy theory that has been sharpening in her mind as the day grew long and the knives in her back bored deeper. She considers saying: I met a woman in agony today, a woman so angry and hurt she was willing to take the life of a perfect stranger, and I had a chance, a brief moment, to reach out to her, to feel for her, but I refused it. I didn’t even know at the time I’d done so, I just didn’t see it for what it was until after. And so I feel as if I’m being punished for that, for not trying, or not knowing, or thinking I needed to know before I tried. And I feel, too, as if my punishment is to have taken on her pain, for it to have gone into me. It’s part of me now, it’ll only get worse. Even after the bruises heal, if they ever do, it’ll still be with me. It’ll never go away. What she says is: “I’ve caused only pain today.”

Brianna shakes her head. “Not so,” she whispers, as with gentle fingers she probes her sitter’s spreading wound.

#

Brianna slips from her bedroom where Cissy rests, closing the door noiselessly behind her. The poor thing had protested--I live right across the hall!--but Briana insisted, and in the end Cissy was too drained to struggle. The Icy Hot, Brianna determined, was not enough, so she ran a hot tub, helped Cissy undress, lowered her into the fragrant lavender suds. After she soaked for a dreamy time Brianna bade her rise, wrapped her in a towel, and steered her to the bedroom, where she found a sweat suit that just fit. Passive as a child, Cissy sat on the bed while Brianna toweled moisture from her hair. Then Brianna lifted her neighbor’s legs, settled her body, and drew the covers to her chin. Cissy was gone before she turned out the light.

Through the whole procedure Ricardo sketches, his drawings of superheroes and monsters spiraling across the living room rug. Though he is far from comprehending how a babysitting has turned into a sleepover--with the sitter retiring before him, no less--he has figured out this much, and in so doing has taken his first great step toward the grown-up world: it has nothing to do with him. “Miss Cissy sick?” he asks.

“She just tired,” Brianna responds. “She be fine in the morning.”

Ricardo nods and returns to his artwork. Brianna notices two things: first, no picture of the missing bird blemishes his portfolio, and second, the drawings all bear his overgrown scrawl, RICARDO, a sure sign that these images are presents, for her, for Cissy. Her heart swoops: how long before he works out that Leonard is irreplaceable, and after that, all the rest? How long, Lord? She feels the time has come to tell him certain things, things she has kept from him thus far, things that perhaps he has a right or a need to share. She quivers at the thought, but it will not release her. He will know pain, she thinks. I will know it too. She takes a breath and squats beside him, breaking his concentration, peering into his serious eyes.

“Baby,” she says carefully. They will get there, but not by the straightest road. “Why you so scared to go to school?”

#

Leonard soars above the city streets. His brain is small, not much more substantial than a fine almond shaving, and his legacy of domestication has dulled its survival protocols. He may learn to distinguish food, but he will have difficulty competing for it. He carries no memory of predators, no hint of talons roosting in the network of skyscrapers above him. No instinct tells him where to turn when the air grows cold. He will not survive the winter.

But tonight he is free. No artificial barrier circles him, no arbitrary limit binds him. If only he knew how, he might cinch the cord that won this night’s liberty; at least, he can follow its course. He can wing above the penthouse balcony where the dark-haired woman sits, savoring an after dinner cigarette without the slightest trace of repentance or ill ease. Or he can dive low past the window where the handsome couple tuck their four-year-old daughter in for the night, her face radiant and her purple bedspread dancing with daffodils. He can cruise atop the highway where the merest remains of the accident, paint flecks and skid marks, fade to invisibility, their history troubling none of the streaming blind headlights that loop over them. He can even, if he chooses, return to the building that now holds no meaning for him, the memory of the cage and its pale horrors no longer resonant in his mind, and peek in the side window at the sleeping woman, her body milky in the moonlight, her shoulders lifting and falling in a peaceful synchrony like wings. He can circle to the front and spy on the mother and child settled cross-legged on the maroon cushions of the couch, hands laced as if in a suspended game of patty-cake, the mother speaking, her son listening. He can wink at them, chatter a mindless valedictory to the closed portal, and launch himself once more into the night.

Tron, Reloaded

2011-01-11T09:00:00.002-05:00

I saw the remake of Tron a couple days ago with my son. He gave it a 9 out of 10 (but then, he never gives anything less than an 8 if it's got spaceships and laser beams). I gave it about a 2. It was just plain awful.

The story made even less sense than the original: guy is somehow translated into his computer, where he has to fight programs in human form with spinning-laser-disk-frisbee-things and lightspeed motorcycles. One of the programs, a clone of the creator, wants to take over the world (he was designed to create perfection, and he's pissed when his creator suggests that perfection is unattainable). Another program, a really hot chick, turns out to be an angel of some sort. And yet another program, named Zeus (huh?), camps it up in possibly the most bizarre scene in the film, wherein he dances in white tailcoat and cane while the creator's son, who's also been zapped into the computer, gets his ass kicked.

We saw it in 2-D, thank God, because I don't think I could have taken all the blinking lights and neon laser thingies if I'd seen it in 3-D or, worse, Imax. But even in 2-D, it was barely watchable.

It was also, for what it's worth, yet another of the recent fantasy films that tries to insert a religious element into the mix. But its religion was so muddled and confused, it made me long for the simple allegory of Narnia and its ilk. The creator of the programs is kinda like Jehovah, see, except he's into a whole Zen Buddhist thing (except when he's kicking people's--er, programs'--asses), and the program that opposes him is kinda like Satan, I guess, and the cute girl is an angel, maybe, and the whole place is a utopian society, possibly, unless it's not, in which case it's something else. All they needed was a wise Native American elder to pronounce statements like, "The earth is our mother," and then they'd pretty much have covered everything.

I'd love to see a fantasy film that deals with religion in an intelligent way: not by bashing it (like Legion or your typical vampire film), reifying it into allegory (like Narnia et al.), or throwing every damn thing into the hopper and hoping it'll make sense somehow (like Tron). If you've got any suggestions, please, send them my way.

In the meantime, I think I'll go do a Zen Buddhist thing and kick somebody's ass.

Fracking Cartooning

2011-01-05T08:34:00.002-05:00

Combining artistry with activism, I've been asked to draw a series of anti-fracking cartoons for the website marcellusprotest.org. Here's the first of them; check out the website as well!

Jack Van Pimpe

2011-01-03T08:24:00.004-05:00

There's something about the holiday season that makes me particularly intolerant of religious fraud. With all the good will and good works going on, I hate to see scoundrels and shysters hijacking the season for their own self-serving purposes.

So it was with considerable disgust that I watched a clip from the inimitable Jack Van Impe's TV broadcast last night.

For those who don't know him, Van Impe (and his wife, the impossibly named Rexella) host a TV ministry that masquerades as a news show but in reality uses the daily headlines as a pretext for predicting the Second Coming of Christ. Every week it's the same thing: whether it's crashing stock markets or raging wildfires, everything is interpreted as evidence of Christ's imminent return.

So what's so bad about that, you ask? Let's put it in context. I'm an English professor; one of my principal responsibilities is to help my students improve their writing. If I were to promise that their writing would improve, then sit back and do absolutely nothing to help them, then--when their writing did not improve--promise yet more fervently that it would, I'd be out of work. My wife is a social worker; if she promised that her clients would get better, then did nothing to achieve that end, then promised despite all the evidence to the contrary that they'd get better, she too would be out of work. That's the way it is in the real world: whether you're a doctor, a lawyer, a garbage collector, or a plumber, you promise your clients that you'll use your expertise to achieve certain ends, and you're judged a success or a failure based on how well you help them achieve those ends.

And then there's Jack Van Impe. His livelihood consists of making promises he's in no way qualified, prepared, or even inclined to fulfill--and then, when his promises amount to nothing, he makes more promises of the exact same kind. Unlike most ministers, whose job is to minister--to comfort the afflicted, to officiate at religious services, to make the world a somewhat better place--he sits there raking in the bucks by making promises that are in their very nature dedicated not to improving the world but to wishing the world away. And the more those promises go sour, the more he promises they'll come true.

The Bible has a lot to say about false prophets. In the Old Testament, we read: "When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him." And in the New, there's this piece of wisdom: "In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up. Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping."

If and when Christ does return, I hope that's one promise he'll keep.

The Politics of Climate Denial

2010-12-30T21:10:00.004-05:00

Following on the heels of my "Warming in a Winter Wonderland" post of a couple weeks back, my fellow blogger at "Fracked Again" has posted a great video from the Rachel Maddow show connecting winter snowstorms to climate denial to the new Republican House leadership to the oil-funded organization Americans for Prosperity to . . . well, you get the picture. Thanks to the aforementioned blogger for this video, and watch it if you don't mind weeping profusely over the future of our planet and our species.

Putting the "Christ" Back in . . . The Movies

2010-12-27T13:03:00.004-05:00

It's the end of the year, which means it's time for the big blockbuster serial kiddie fantasies that have become Hollywood's mainstay since the dawn of the Star Wars era. I saw the first part of the seventh part of Harry Potter with my son and daughter, and I'll probably go see the latest Narnia installment with them as well; I might even check out the Tron remake (sequel?) for kicks.

But I'll tell you, I'm starting to get a bit annoyed by the way in which the studios, influenced by the likes of Walden Media, are inserting subliminal Christian messages into all these kids' films.

With Harry Potter--not a bad film, by the way, though it could have used a couple fewer scenes of Harry and gang looking scruffy and confused out in the British countryside--there's the whole Savior/Satan thing, with Harry being "The Chosen One" and Voldemort being, well, a snake. With the Narnia films, there's the C. S. Lewis Christian allegory (which was the main reason J. R. R. Tolkien, as stauch a Christian as his friend Lewis but a far better fantasist, hated the books). A while back, there was Bridge to Terabithia, with its really unsettling discussion of whether one of the main characters was going to hell or not because she didn't attend church regular; earlier this year there was the final Toy Story installment, with its title characters very nearly being consumed in a junkyard incinerator that was as vivid an image of hell as can be. So we're getting a good number of veiled Christian stories in our children's films, and I for one find this troubling.

Mind you, I'm not knocking Christianity. Nor am I arguing that there shouldn't be films with Christian themes. Christianity is a powerful and pervasive cultural force, and movies need to deal with it. What I object to is the use of children's fantasy films as a "wedge" to introduce Christianity into secular culture, much as Intelligent Design has been used as a wedge to insert creationism into the science curriculum and the Institute for Historical Review has used historical revisionism to insert Holocaust denial into the scholarly community. I don't have a problem with The Passion of the Christ (though personally, I couldn't watch it till the end; its depiction of torture was just too gruesome). I do have a problem with The Passion of Harry Potter.

If Christians want to disseminate their message, they are free to do so. I even encourage them to do so--if their message is to love one's neighbor, to do good, to forgive others their trespasses, to judge people by the content of their character not the color of their skin. But Christianity doesn't, or shouldn't, need to proselytize on the sly, through seduction or misrepresentation; if it's really as good as it claims to be, it should present itself openly, with no disguises, and let its audience judge for themselves. That was Christ's method, after all: he told it as he saw it, with no concessions and no prettying-up of the sacrifices entailed, and he let people choose for themselves.

A sermon should be a sermon. It shouldn't be a toy, wrapped like a Christmas present to tempt the young and unwary.

Scarecrow

2010-12-21T21:25:00.004-05:00

As promised, I'm posting a story of mine, "Scarecrow," that just can't seem to find a publisher. As you'll soon see, it's a retelling of the Oz story from the point of view of the Scarecrow, and I personally think it's pretty good--not appreciably worse than the wildly popular Wicked, a retelling of the Oz story from the Wicked Witch of the West's point of view. (Cross my heart, I came up with the idea for "Scarecrow" decades ago, before Wicked was a gleam in Gregory Maguire's eye.) The difference, perhaps, is that Wicked goes back to the Baum book, while "Scarecrow" refers most overtly (with a few exceptions) to the film version--thus tainting it with the dreaded label of "fan fiction," i.e. literature based on a popular narrative or series not devised by the author (think Tolkien, Star Trek, etc.). In my defense, I think the retelling goes far beyond the source material; it's not so much fan fiction as a fan-tastic retelling of the original. If anyone out there knows of a journal that might be interested in this sort of thing, please let me know!

But in the meantime, here's the story. A long time ago on a yellow brick road far, far away....

Scarecrow

by J. David Bell

Logically it makes no sense. A man of straw who lives? In all my vast researches, I have yet to come across another living scarecrow. I have some of my best scientists on it right now. Working from a specimen of my own precious and royal straw, they’ve labored for years to isolate the genetic quirk, the mutant protein, the culprit bacterium that lends life to these limbs of mine. So far, they’ve come up with very little. One of them thought he was on to something when he discovered a peculiar glucose derivative, but it turned out that’s just what happens when straw rots. So I issued another sample and they’re back at work. I’ll keep you posted.

Well, but here I am. Who knows how, or why? Who knows how or why any living thing lives? The beasts of the forest, the fish of the seas, the crows of the fields, who knows? And yet you must admit I am unique. A man of straw who lives: well, perhaps one might hold one’s applause. But a man of straw who not only lives but thinks, figures, deduces, induces, cogitates, extrapolates, interpolates, elucidates, postulates, pontificates, and performs Euclidian geometry (without so much as a single lesson)--there’s a thing to marvel at. The sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse: not bad. I could even tell you why this is so, if you had time for a lengthy theoretical disquisition. But do you know, for all my knowing it to be so and knowing why it is so and knowing why it must be so, I still haven’t the faintest idea why anyone should possibly care.

I don’t remember my birth, if you can call it that. The first thing I recall is the caw of a crow right in my ear: that must be what woke me, if anything did. I don’t sleep, but those who do tell me this is what it’s like to awaken from a sound sleep at the bray of an alarm. Reflex action being independent of the central nervous system (the which, to be honest, I’m not sure I possess), I swatted the crow off my shoulder. Then CNS action (or its analogue) kicked into gear, and I experienced, in no particular order, cognition, perception, volition, and one last--one last. (I have, by the way, been working on a particularly needling problem for some time, i.e. the relation between thought, sensory perception, and feeling. Can a rational being exist without emotion? Can a creature see an object without thinking about it? Without feeling something about it? Questions like that. I’ll get back to you.) I saw endless stalks of yellow corn and endless expanses of blue sky: two opposing stripes, heaven and earth. I felt nothing--that is, I had no experience of the sensations of heat, cold, pressure or pain--but I noticed my feet were suspended above the ground, and when I tried to jump down I found myself flailing in midair. Inexperienced as I was, I thought the natural condition of animate creatures was to dangle in the void. Later, when I saw men walking the yellow road that lay beyond the yellow corn, I began to feel cheated, or misfit, or ashamed.

I’ve studied countless theories of childhood amnesia (all of them utterly forgettable), but the one I’d like to refute goes something like this (Adopt pompous tone): “Individuals fail to remember their early years because they lack a systematic verbal means by which the experiences of the past may be linked to the experiences of the present.” I had no language when I awoke. When I first tested my voice the only sounds I could make were the cawing of crows. No, it’s not language that makes life a continuum. Language is an arbitrary system imposed on something far more basic to human (or, in my case, pseudo-human) experience. I speak of course of emotion. I remember my first moments because I felt then what I feel now. Crows hopping across the earth filled me with loathing; Munchkins ambling along the yellow road filled me with longing; the sight of my limbs blowing in a strong wind filled me with sorrow; clouds drifting across the blue filled me with an aching joy. When I learned the words, much later, from a sympathetic Munchkin boy, I graduated from lip-diddling idiocy to such verbal pyrotechnics as you witness before you now. But the feelings remained the same, unaltered, unadulterated, unaugmented by the words. The feelings remained the same.

You know the story, how the girl found me, Dorothy, and how I went with her to Emerald City. I remember watching her approach and not knowing what to make of her; the only people I had seen were Munchkins, and those male, their portly blue bodies blanketed with gray beards. This one was different. It (I had no concept of “she”) was small, but not round and stumpy like the others. Its hair was brown, its cheeks smooth. It wore red shoes that clacked and sparkled against the yellow road. I knew when I saw those shoes, more so than the small white hands or long chestnut hair or bright blue eyes, that this was something special, something not of my world. An ache shot through me as I saw her (enough of “it” and “this,” already) pause at the crossroads and place a hand to her lips, her brow contorting in a manner I had never seen in the poker-faced Munchkins. I coughed politely.

Her head snapped up. “Who’s there?” she said to the sky and the wind.

I cleared my throat.

Her eyes narrowed. I had the distinct impression that our acquaintance might not best be served by my continuing to deliver myself solely through bodily sounds. “It’s just me,” I said. My voice, unpracticed, scratched like dead husks. “I,” I corrected myself.

“But. . . .” Her face twisted. “But you’re a scarecrow.”

I couldn’t deny it. The Munchkin boy had told me as much. I hung my head.

Then she clapped her hands so loudly I nearly had a straw attack. “A talking scarecrow!” she said. “Can you tell me the way to Emerald City?”

“I. . . .” It surprised me, of course, to discover that talking scarecrows were miraculous. As of yet, I didn’t know of the ubiquity of scarecrows; I assumed (ass that I was) that I was the only one, and if anyone had told me there were others I would have assumed they could talk as well. But now I knew better. I could talk. I could really talk. I could out-talk every last scarecrow in Oz with one hand tied behind my sack.

So I talked. My vocal reeds loosened and my voice took on what I imagined to be a pleasing, sonorous quality (though recordings have since told me I sound somewhat like a beetle struggling to get off its back). “If you follow this road, you might get there. Of course, if you follow the other, you might get there also. In the end, if two roads diverge in a yellow cornfield, is one really different from the other?”

“It is,” she said. “I have to get to Emerald City so the Wizard can send me back to Kansas. If I take the wrong road, how will I ever get there?”

I mulled that over. “The shortest distance between two points,” I concluded, “is a straight line. Thus you would be well advised to follow a linear, and not an elliptical, nor for that matter an asymptotic, path.”

She laughed and clapped her hands. “You’re so funny!” she said. “Do you know the way? Which path is straight and which one is--the other one?”

“Of course,” I lied. I liked the sounds she made, so unlike the cawing of crows, the hawking of Munchkins, the wailing of the wind. “In fact, I can guide you there. I need,” I extemporized, “to see the Wizard myself. You see, I don’t have a”--and here I was stumped. Eloquence failed me, and had I a tongue, it would have been tied.

The problem, you see, was that I didn’t know what I needed: not knowing what one was meant to have, I had no idea what I lacked. “A brain,” I said at last. I don’t know why I said that. I suppose my impressive brainwork was on my mind, and thus it was the only thing I could think of worth anyone’s while to have. Instantly I regretted saying it, but the girl seemed doubly impressed.

“You’re very smart for someone who doesn’t have a brain,” she said. “When you get a brain I bet you’ll be the smartest person in all of Oz.”

I lowered my eyes. You will probably say, as you read these introductory remarks of mine, that she was just the slightest iota excessive in her praise. But I was wise enough--or confused enough--to impress a child. “If you’ll only help me down from here,” I said, not entirely confident of where “here” was.

“Of course.” She slipped through the fence and neared. She smelled like flowers, and her hair was shiny and clean, unlike the tangled mops of the Munchkins. “Are you heavy?” she said. “Can I lift you off this pole?”

“I don’t know.” I thought deeply. “Suspended as I am, I don’t feel much in the way of gravitational pull, but I can’t tell whether this is due to a lack of mass or to the apparatus that appears to fixate me thusly.”

“I think I can lift you off,” she said, “if you’re like the scarecrows back in Kansas.”

She reached up with those little white hands of hers, and I saw them touch my sides. I say saw them, and not felt them, because I did not feel them. I am a man of straw, and straw has no feeling. I was lifted into the air and set on the ground. Unable to feel the soil beneath my soles, I wobbled and collapsed.

“Are you all right?” She looked at me in childish concern. I really was all right, I felt nothing, so I decided to amuse her.

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” I pulled straw from my belly and tossed it into the air. “It’s just straw. Nothing can hurt me.”

She squatted next to me and poked my stomach, giggling. “You are made of straw,” she said. “You’re light as a feather. But,” her face grew frightened, “what about fire?”

“Oh,” I said, though I didn’t know what fire was. “Right. But I’m not afraid. I’m smarter than fire.”

She laughed delightedly. “Of course you’re smarter than fire, silly. Fire doesn’t have a brain. But of course,” she put a finger to her lip, “you haven’t any brains either. Oh, how can you be so smart and funny if you haven’t any brains?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it seems to me that many brained creatures aren’t very smart at all, so there’s no reason why something brainless can’t be very smart indeed.” Complete nonsense, by the way, the worst kind of false syllogism, but she responded with a solemn “Oh.”

The girl helped me from the ground and prodded me into a bipedal configuration. Once, she pulled my hand off and was horrified, but laughed when she realized it didn’t hurt me. Soon I got the hang of it, though my legs remained weak and the wind (whose approach I could only hear) easily sent me sprawling. She introduced herself as Dorothy, and I--figuring, not without logic, that the species to which she belonged was Dorothy--introduced myself as Scarecrow. “You’re so cute!” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders. “Just like a little man.” She turned me around and asked me to show her how I could take straw out without it hurting, then she stuffed the straw back in, and laughed and clapped her hands. “Just look at you!” she said. “Such skinny legs and such a fat tummy, and such big ears, and your eyes! one smaller than the other. Let me show you.”

She took a small piece of silvered glass out of the straw contraption she carried and held it up to me. I was amazed--horrified, I might say--by the visage that appeared there. I had always imagined I looked like the Munchkins, and to a certain extent this was so: they had formed me in their own image. I knew I was a shrimp the minute I stood on my legs: she yet a child, and I a good head shorter. And I knew my legs were gangly and my stomach round, but these were no great source of chagrin, as all Munchkins had spindle-shanks and pot-bellies. But my face! The man who painted it had either a warped sense of humor or an advanced case of rheumatoid arthritis. It was lopsided, one eye not only smaller but lower than the other, the nose canted to one side, the mouth a ragged line painted to look as though it had been stitched closed. When I spoke the stitches stretched to their utmost but the line remained closed, unlike Dorothy’s pink mouth which opened to show white teeth. How I produce sound at all remains a mystery to me. My ears were shapeless blobs of cloth; no attempt had been made to fashion them like real ears. My head, it appeared, was made of a sack--an old sack, one that had been repaired too many times to be used for anything but a scarecrow’s head. Countless stitches and patches crisscrossed my face, blue threads and red threads and black threads and white threads, a bit of polka-dotted cloth that might once have been a handkerchief, another of pale blue that was once a man’s overalls, yet another a weathered, leathery square that belonged to a glove, not a man’s face. I felt something building inside me, welling up from my chest, forcing its way to a place behind my eyes, then stopping, unable to find release. For you see, I can’t cry either.

I handed Dorothy her mirror, vowing never to peer in it again. I knew now what I would ask of the Wizard. Not brains. What did I want with them? I would ask for something else: a new face, a new body. If he could hand out brains, surely he could do so simple a thing?

“Shall we go, Scarecrow?” Dorothy sang, holding out her arm. She was only a child trying to be brave in the big world, and she had just found a wise friend to help her through the rough spots. I accepted those terms for the nonce: I gave her my arm, she laughed at how skinny and floppy it was, and we started down the yellow road.

“I’m not scared anymore, Scarecrow,” she said gaily. “Why, I believe you’re already the smartest person in all of Oz, except”--and she looked fearfully at me--“the Wizard himself. . . .”

***

You know the story, how amid the enchanted apple grove we found the Tin Woodsman. You know how my impromptu stratagem tricked the trees into parting with their bounty, you know how we stumbled upon him, you know how Dorothy marveled at a man made of tin (children do enjoy such gewgaws), you know his woes. But did you know he almost didn’t join our merry band? If you don’t, I might as well tell you. I’m under no time constraints; no, I’ve plenty of time.

“You see,” the Tin Woodsman said as he sat on a stump, massaging his rusted joints, “I haven’t any heart. The tinsmith forgot to give me a heart.”

“Oh, you poor thing!” Dorothy said. She knelt by the Woodsman, took the oilcan, and rubbed oil into the backs of his knees. “Why don’t you come with us? I’m sure the Wizard can give you a heart.”

“Do you really think so?” The Woodsman’s blue eyes--such startling eyes, for a man of tin!--lit with joy. “I would give anything for a heart.”

“Of course he can,” Dorothy said, turning to me. “Can’t he, Scarecrow?”

I rubbed what passes for a chin. “Well, let me think. A heart, you say? That might be a problem, even for a Wizard.”

Dorothy had already turned to the Woodsman, smiling, anticipating confirmation from her learned friend. Now her face fell. “But he must! If he can give you a brain, why can’t he give the poor Woodsman a heart?”

“Well, you see,” I said, pacing wobbily, “the difference between brainous and heartous matter is a not inconsiderable one. While brainous tissue appears to constitute a simple conglomerate of several uncomplex phenylalanine neurotransmitters and ribosomal nucleic phosphates, heartous tissues generally comprise the more complex cardiolipid antibodies and vexatious polysaccharides. . . .” I gazed at the Tin Man, his shiny features hidden by his drooping head, his perfect metallic hands resting limply on his knees. Then I saw Dorothy. She cried like a child: thin shoulders shaking, biting down to stop the sobs. “Of course,” I said softly, “my researches are of necessity incomplete, and I could well be mistaken.”

The Tin Man raised his head, eyes sparkling. Dorothy had stopped weeping, but continued to twist hair around a finger. “I’m sure,” I said, “the Wizard can find a way to give the Tin Man a heart.”

Dorothy sprang up and hugged me so hard she squeezed my guts out. She took off my hat and placed phantom lips against my bald head, then dropped to the ground and began picking up the fallen straw. She was bubbly, giddy, shoving straw in any which way, burdening me with a slapdash stomach I had to straighten later. The Tin Man shook me by the hand--precise language, that: he took my hand and shook my body thereby--thanking me in his poetic idiom, pumping so hard my mitt came off. “Oh, don’t worry,” Dorothy said, “it doesn’t hurt him, nothing can hurt him, look!” and she twisted my hand back on the way I had taught her, and they laughed. She jumped up and kissed his silver cheek, and then we linked arms and started down the road, the Tin Man and Dorothy singing, his resonant (though a trifle tinny) bass and her sweet child’s soprano blending perfectly, me swinging along between the two.

***

You know how we came across the Cowardly Lion in the deep dark forest. You know how Dorothy took pity on him--she was such a gentle, loving creature!--and how he came along in search of courage. You know how she grew to love him as a pet--not a favorite pet, for that space was taken by Toto, but a cherished pet nonetheless. When we slept at night, the Woodsman would stand watch, his axe in his untiring hand; the Lion would lie down next to Dorothy, his mane a combined pillow and blanket; and I. . . . Well, at first I tried to tend the fire, but Dorothy wouldn’t hear of it, and besides my limbs were too weak to carry the logs and kindling. Then I thought I might spell the Tin Man, but since he never tired and I couldn’t lift his axe, there didn’t seem any reason to do so. I offered Dorothy my services as bed--I even suggested she could remove my straw and restuff me in the morning--but that was too much bother and she preferred the Lion’s soft mane anyway. So at night, for the long hours the Woodsman watched and the creatures of flesh and blood slept, I pondered the questions of existence, and my vast intellect flourished. The whole world was my classroom. Insects chirping inspired in me a deeper understanding of the wave motion by which sound travels, refraction off plane surfaces (echoes to the layman), and even, with a few simple algorithms, an accurate computation of the speed of sound. The first dim rays of sunlight seeping over the horizon led me to consider the visible and invisible spectrum, the speed of light, the heavenly bodies, quantum mechanics, the laws of conservation of matter and energy, and the theory of relativity. (I got as far as E=mc, but mistakenly arrived at the cube rather than the square, a miscalculation I’m still trying to live down.) The babbling of a brook taught me the cycle of rain, evaporation, condensation, and rain again; the hooting of animals in the night taught me of ecosystems, the survival of the fittest, and the interdependence of all living things. I broached the great questions: what is life? What is good? What is God? In the morning, when Dorothy, Toto and the Lion awakened and the Woodsman shouldered his axe, I tried to impart to them something of what I had learned during the night, but they never understood. And if I tried to point out, say, in the yellow globe of the sun, something about the heliocentric system, Dorothy would smile and say, “The earth doesn’t move, silly; if it did, why don’t we fall off?” And when I tried to explain gravity, she would laugh, pinch my cheek, and run ahead, picking flowers to fashion garlands for the Lion, the Tin Man, and myself.

When at last we exited the forest of the Lion we came across a field of poppies (Poppius narcoticus, to employ the nomenclature) that lay between us and a shining green shape only the Tin Man, keenest-eyed of all, could discern. Dorothy was sure it must be Emerald City itself. She raced into the sea of pink, waving, plucking flowers to slip behind her ear and place in her basket. The vegetation was too thick for me to ford, so the Woodsman hoisted me onto the Lion’s back and we pranced across the verdant meadow. But soon the mighty creature’s bounds became less powerful; his sides heaved, his head sagged. The Woodsman was checking his powerful strides, trying to let Dorothy stay in front, but she seemed to be running against a wall of water. She stumbled and finally fell. I grabbed the Lion’s mane to brake him, but this proved to be the straw (beg pardon) that broke the camel’s back. He fell too--not, fortunately, on me, for I doubt even the Woodsman could have budged him. Little Toto was nowhere in sight. The Tin Man and I, marvelous gizmos that we were, remained unaffected by the mysterious bane that had claimed our companions.

The Woodsman scooped me up and bore me to Dorothy, whom we found sleeping peacefully, a tiny smile on her lips. He, sentimental fellow, began to cry. I assured him, however, after instructing him in the search for vital signs (which I--curse me!--was unable to detect), that she lived. His blue eyes turned to me, misted with tears. But this was utterly beyond my knowledge; my nighttime education had been sadly incomplete, and no reference volume on poisonous plants was handy. I tried--how I tried! I spoke to her, and rubbed her arms and legs, and even tried to think her awake, but it was useless. She slept soundly, smiling. Reasoning that a brain as sublime as mine could surely accomplish so simple a task, I tried to lift her from the vile weed through the power of telekinesis, but it turns out such a feat is beyond me. (I think I did make a pencil move once.) The Woodsman broke down crying at last--poor simple creature!--and refused to be the slightest bit useful. I banged on his tin shell but to no avail. Finally, after precious seconds--precious for all I knew--had ticked away, the oaf roused himself to lift Dorothy from the flowers. But when he did so, she broke into such a fit of kicking and clawing I was afraid she would damage herself against his hide, so I hammered away on his back until the mindless kettle saw sense and put her down again.

You know what happened, how the good witch sent snow, killing the flowers and their seductive poison. I didn’t find out it was she for some time; all I thought was how odd to encounter precipitation in the middle of a sunny day, and I resolved to look into these summer blizzard phenomena. Dorothy awakened, stretching her arms, yawning prettily, then sitting up as if she had just realized she was late for school. She shivered, so the Woodsman lifted her onto the bleary Lion’s back, despite my objection that the beast would surely fall and crush her. The Woodsman was moving slowly, painfully, his shoehorn jaw set and his blue eyes intense. Dorothy was too young, too cold, too miserable to notice, but I knew what was happening. Snow is, after all, merely water brought to the freezing point, i.e. 0 degrees Celsius (or 32 degrees Fahrenheit), and upon contact with his metal skin it was bound to melt and then freeze again as his surface temperature plummeted. When the Lion let Dorothy off beyond the flowers and came back to give me a lift, he found the Tin Man standing in a thin casing of ice, one arm raised as if waving to Dorothy a last good-bye.

“What’s happened to him?” the Lion said.

“He’s frozen,” I said, with an impressive roll of flaccid head on toothpick neck, “and I don’t know if it’s any good to unfreeze him. His metallic epidermis is certain to be brittle after having plunged to this extreme of temperature, and warming him suddenly might spell calamity.”

“We’d better tell Dorothy,” the Lion said, and leaped off yelling, “Dorothy! Dorothy! The Tin Man’s epidimus might warm to extreme clamminess!”

Well, you can imagine what happened next. Dorothy rode out on the Lion’s back and begged me to save the poor Woodsman. To be honest, I had a preposterously simple solution in mind, involving getting the automaton into some sun and oiling him into shape. But I made it seem a major dilemma, one requiring all the considerable mental energies only one such as I could summon. I even made it sound a desperate, last-ditch measure that might well result in the dread “clamminess” the Lion so feared. Dorothy began to cry.

“I can’t decide,” she wailed. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!”

The Lion’s huge doltish brown eyes dripped tears.

I placed a hand on Dorothy’s shoulder. “Never fear,” I said in my most comforting tones--something between a whistle and a rusty hinge, I imagine. “Clamminess shall never claim the Woodsman, so long as I am here.”

She tried to smile, but cried all the harder.

So I barked orders, and the Lion carted him out into the sun, and the water puddled at his feet. Dorothy took the oil can in trembling hands and, biting her lip, fumblingly followed my directions. In my defense, I was very gentle with her, though she spilled most of the oil on the ground. Gradually the Woodsman creaked, and blinked, and stretched, and in a very short time was as good as new. The excitable Lion patted me on the back (sending me sprawling), while the Tin Man, who had heard me describe the dire clamminess that might descend upon him, offered me his service in terms so profuse I almost felt I had actually done something. Dorothy pressed against me, tears in her eyes, whispering childish words of adoration. Then she leapt to hug the Tin Man, fresh oil staining her cheeks and gingham dress.

***

This Wizard fellow didn’t impress me. Oh, I was a bit cowed at first--and wouldn’t you be, if you were a little straw mannequin facing a gigantic green head that appeared, by its immense cranial capacity, to harbor brains to burn? But I soon got over it. As soon as he told us to kill the witch, I knew he was a fraud. But what could I do? Have you ever seen a child awaken from a nightmare? If you have (I haven’t, but my sources are excellent), then you can imagine what a girl might feel when commanded not only to confront the witch of her dreams but to defeat her as well. At first, all Dorothy could say was it was too horrible, she would stay in Oz forever and ever but she could never do it. But then the Tin Man and Lion said she should not stay in Oz forever if she didn’t want to, and they offered her their hands, their strength, their lives. I shall never forget, though I live a million millennia, how Dorothy looked up from the green stone, gazed at her two strong friends and then shyly, proudly and hopefully directed those eyes at me. And when I said, “I will never desert you, Dorothy,” and she jumped up and kissed me, and when she leaned down, her lips (no doubt) touching my ear, and whispered, “I love you,” I knew I would do anything to see her home.

You know how we tangled with the witch. You know it was my brilliant “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” gambit that breached the evil thing’s castle; you might know it was I who screamed at the paralyzed Woodsman to chop the rope that held the chandelier over the Winkies’ heads; you no doubt have heard that even though I did not--could not--cast the bucket at the witch, it was I who engineered her end. You hadn’t heard? Well, then, allow me. I taunted the witch, telling her nothing could hurt me. My plan was to burn, and act as if I were in agony (though truth be told, though fire consumes my straw I still can’t feel it), and thus either to create a diversion or a smoke screen, or even to fling my body on the wicked creature in my seeming death throes. Of course, the way the whole thing terminated was accidental, what with the water and the melting (an interesting question, the relation of consequences to actions, but one betokening so many permutations I acknowledge even I will probably never crack it). Dorothy never knew what I had done, and I resolved never to tell her. It would not do for her to know that a man--or even half-a-man--could risk such a thing for her.

You know, of course, that the Wizard turned out to be a charlatan, a humbug, a quack. You know, nonetheless, that he managed to conjure serviceable parts for the Woodsman and Lion--no great feat, says I. You may not know that when it came my turn and I stood on tiptoes to whisper in the Wizard’s ear, Dorothy chimed in, “Oh, do help the Scarecrow! He hasn’t any brains!” I whirled to face her, but then I saw the look on her face. That look! So eager, so proud, so certain that in saying the words it was she who was bestowing upon me the boon she thought I so sorely craved. And when I turned back to the Wizard and he said, “Is this so, Scarecrow?” I told him it was so. And he handed me my diploma, and I uttered the Pythagorean theorem (which I had figured out on my own some time ago), and Dorothy clapped and hugged me and cried. She leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Now, dear Scarecrow, you truly are the smartest person in all of Oz!” For a time that was enough, her happiness in thinking me happy, but it has long since become less than enough, far less.

She has been gone for years now. The good witch sent her away when the Wizard--old fool!--bungled his aeronautic exit. She kissed me good-bye and I, knowing this to be the last time I would see her, tried to will my straw to feel, but it was futile. Then she tapped her red shoes and repeated, “There’s no place like home,” and I couldn’t help thinking the witch could have come up with something a bit more original than that. But perhaps it was enough for a child. I rule Emerald City, and with it I rule all Oz. The Tin Man and Lion are my Ministers, my Cabinet, my Court, whatever you care to call them; I seldom care to call them, and then only on official Oz business. My reign has been very successful, as far as these things go: I’ve instituted new irrigation procedures, improved intercity road travel (really, a single yellow road, poorly paved, linking the entire land was something of an absurdity; it has fallen into disrepair now my new roads are laid); I’ve revolutionized the postal service, erected schools, founded wildlife preserves, cultivated (with my immunology team) vaccines for childhood diseases, and on and on. My subjects, for the most part, adore me. I’ve written several volumes of poetry, all standard reading at the university level. My philosophical treatises are even more extensive, and are universally regarded as the major works of the Golden Age of Oz. If little Dorothy could see me now, she would see it is true, I truly am the smartest thing in all of Oz.

She has been gone for years. If the timestream in Kansas is the same as that in Oz (an intriguing question, that of parallel worlds, but you’ll forgive me if I’m not in the mood to go into it just now); if, I repeat, their timestream is the same as ours, she’s not little Dorothy anymore. Probably she is married, with a loving husband and children. I can’t give her that. My thoughts are my children, my brainchildren if you will, but I can’t give them to her. I never could. My thoughts, like my brains and body, are straw. I’ve come to realize this, and it’s better she has gone away, better she was never forced to witness the limits of my powers. For my love, too, you see, is straw.

I sit in my throne room, wearing the revolutionary lightweight crown one of my technicians designed for my feeble though royal head. At a single word my retainers break into sighs of wonderment, my subjects bow to kiss my feet, the world outside changes under hands not my own. I am the king, the Wizard, the smartest man in all of Oz. But for all my pitiful profundity I am still a man of straw--straw, do you hear?--and thus I am less than a man. My brains are straw, and my flesh is straw, and my limbs are straw, and my body is straw--but my heart, my heart is not straw. My heart is as human as yours, and it hates the dwarfish pedant that surrounds it.

So I sit in my throne room, scheming great schemes, breeding good works, gestating philosophical disquisitions. There is no fire here now; fire was outlawed in Emerald City the day I came to power. This hasn’t presented a problem; new and cleaner forms of energy are being cooked up in my noggin even as I speak. There will never again be fire in Emerald City, not so long as I live--and though the question is an open one, I suspect I will live a long, long time. There will never be fire here. But if there is, if for one moment someone coaxes the tiniest spark from flint, or wood, or one of my new-and-improved sulfur-headed matches--well, then, I believe we will discover, once and for all, how well straw burns.

"Frogsong" (Officially!)

2010-12-15T23:18:00.004-05:00

My sci-fi story "Frogsong" is now officially available in the anthology Farspace 2. It's an interstellar environmentalist love story of sorts, with a dash of Heart of Darkness thrown in for kicks. Ya gotta love it!

So check it out, buy lots of copies for Christmas, and let me know what you think!

Warming in a Winter Wonderland

2010-12-14T12:22:00.003-05:00

It never fails. The first spell of bad winter comes along (we’ve currently got four inches of snow and temps in the teens here in Pittsburgh), and questions start to arise about the validity of global warming. Last year, when two feet got dumped on us in a single night, the naysayers, conservative talk-show hosts, and industry lobbyists had a field day. How, they asked--and expected only one answer--can the planet be warming when it’s so gosh-darned cold outside?

Never mind that there’s nothing in the science of global warming that says anything about cold days vanishing from the globe. Never mind that increased precipitation is one of the expected results of warmer air, which holds more moisture than its colder cousin. The real problem is that most people get all confused--and the skeptics thrive on seeding such confusion--about the difference between weather and climate. The former, since we live with it on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day basis, might seem like the thing to focus our attention on. But it’s not.

Weather--the atmospheric conditions in any given place at any given time--is, as we all know, wildly variable. The proverbial butterfly’s wings can change it, and meteorologists struggle to predict it as little as twenty-four hours in advance. It would be foolhardy to attempt a weather forecast of more than a few days--to predict, say, the weather in Pittsburgh a year from now. Chances are you’d be off by as much as 30 or 40 degrees in either direction--to say nothing of clouds, precipitation, wind, and all the rest.

Climate is different. As the composite of weather averaged over space and time, climate is remarkably stable, and can be forecast with considerable confidence years, even centuries, in advance. In the case of global climate, human beings have enjoyed roughly the same one for thousands of years. The last time the planet’s climate looked significantly different, Cro-Magnons were hunting mastodons and a mile of ice flattened Manhattan. The time before that, when the planet was appreciably warmer, tyrannosaurs roamed North America and crocodiles cruised the poles. The stability and predictability of our present climate is what enabled human civilization to become what it is today.

And that’s the ultimate irony: for the past two centuries, human civilization has tampered with the very climate that, for the past two millennia, made human civilization possible. The planet is warming--and more rapidly than ever before. (Indeed, even with its unseasonably cold December, 2009 is tied for second hottest year on record, and at the end of the day the past winter, on average, was warmer than the one that preceded it.) We’ve made great, and undeniable, advances as a species: advances in technology, in medicine, in science, in human rights, in art. Since the dawn of the Hydrocarbon Era, we’ve made those advances with ever accelerating ease. But in so doing, we’ve degraded the planetary climate (not to mention the planetary soils, waters, and affiliated organisms) perhaps beyond recall.

We have a couple choices here. We can acknowledge the reality of climate change, and respond appropriately. Or we can deny that dire reality and continue to dig ourselves deeper into a hole.

If we choose the first option, our choosing can’t be like the weather, which changes every day. It has to be like the climate, which steadies us and survives deep into the future.

"The Burning of Sarah Post" Hits the Stands (for Real)

2010-12-09T21:12:00.003-05:00

I received my copy of "The Burning of Sarah Post" in the mail today; apparently, the printer was running a bit behind schedule, but it's available for purchase now. If I do say so myself, it looks great! There's one part of the story (you'll know which part I mean when you see it) that I had some concerns about, typographically, but the printer did a great job with it. I'm looking forward to reading all the other great stuff in the collection too!

The publisher, Sam's Dot Publishing, also alerted me to their online newsletter, which contains information about their publications, plus some excerpts therefrom. If you're into fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, it's worth checking out!

Making a Killing

2010-12-08T10:45:00.004-05:00

Let's imagine you could kill people and make a profit from it. Not only were there no negative consequences to killing people, there was an economic incentive. Would you do it?

Maybe, maybe not. You're a moral person; you read your Bible; you know that killing is wrong. For most of us, the moral disincentive to kill would outweigh the economic incentive to kill. Even in the absence of materially negative consequences--jail time, our own potential execution--the negative effect on our consiences would be sufficient to prevent most of us from killing.

But let's imagine that economically profitable, consequence-free killing had been the social norm for 200 years or more. Might the situation be different then? Might not many of us be socially conditioned to accept killing-for-profit as a positive good, or at least an inalienable right? Might not many of us ignore the Bible (or whatever religious or ethical text we currently subscribe to) in light of the powerful cultural message that killing for profit is a-okay? Indeed, might not the Bible itself have been rewritten--or never written at all--to sanction such killing?

To help answer these questions, let's consider a real-life analogy.

For the past 200 years or more, it's been socially sanctioned, wildlly profitable, relatively cheap, and (at least as most of us imagine it) absolutely risk-free to burn fossil fuels. And guess what? The vast majority of us burn fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow.

Maybe this is a bad analogy. Maybe gutting the earth, poisoning the soils and waters, devastating habitats and their inhabitants (both human and non-human), and pumping pollutants into the atmosphere isn't comparable to kiling other human beings.

But if you look at all the costs of fossil fuel extraction and consumption, they're pretty significant. The only problem is, these costs don't strike us as costs, because they're "externalized"--they're not built into the market price of the thing. Health care costs, loss of species and habitat costs, community degradation costs, planetery climate collapse costs aren't reflected in the price we pay at the pump, so we get to engage in incredibly risky, damaging behavior without (apparently) suffering any negative consequences for it. Quite the contrary, we benefit from it economically (some of us, such as BP executives, more than most, but all of us to a considerable degree). And as a result, most of us engage in this behavior--a lot--without a second thought.

All of which suggests not only that we're incredibly malleable beings, capable of being socially engineered for better or for worse, but that if we're really serious about getting a handle on our current bad behavior, we need to acknowledge it as such. Even if doing so might prevent us from making a killing.

On Being Rejected

2010-12-06T11:42:00.002-05:00

Aside from the one essay I've had accepted recently--the aforementioned "Last Days of the Frog Prince"--I'm currently in the midst of a string of rejections. My sci-fi story "A Very Small Child Called Eugene" can't seem to find a home, my essay "The Toad Garden" (yes, I like amphibians) just received its first rejection slip, and my short story "Scarecrow," a retelling of the Oz story from the Scarecrow's point of view, has pretty much exhausted the possibilities. (I might publish it here, just to give it a shot at being read by someone other than my wife!) Using the tools on Duotrope's Digest, I can chart my progress; the figure 17% popped up, meaning, I guess, that out of every 100 submissions, I'm garnering 17 acceptances. This is, once again according to Duotrope, a healthy number.

Which just shows how tough it is to get published. If that were my batting average, I'd be sent to the minors; if it were my score on course evaluations, I'd be in the Dean's office. But for the majority of us trying to publish our writing, rejection is by far the norm.

So how does it feel, being rejected? Really, not that bad. It might be different if I had aspirations to immortality; it would certainly be different if I had no compensating acceptances. But the fact is, there's an awful lot of good writing out there (as well as a good lot of awful writing), and if you're going to play the game, you have to live with the odds.

We all wish the rejections could be more personal, something to help us the next time around, something more than a preprinted quarter-page sheet saying, "We regret that your submission does not meet our needs at this time." (You could drive yourself crazy interpreting that: "Hey, maybe I'll send it again at another time when their needs have changed!") But I've received only one truly obnoxious rejection in the two years I've been sending stuff out, and I'll chalk that one up to the publisher having a bad day. So long as everyone is striving for the same outcome--the discovery and publication of truly deserving work--I can deal with the form responses.

Being rejected isn't so bad. Not trying for fear of being rejected is a whole lot worse.

What Would Aldo Do?

2010-11-30T15:32:00.007-05:00

Last summer, I participated in a month-long institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities on conservationist Aldo Leopold. Leopold's not as well known as other environmentalist icons such as Thoreau and Rachel Carson, but arguably he's more important than either in developing a philosophical underpinning to the modern environmental movement. If he were around today, I think he'd have a thing or two to say.

In his essay "The Land Ethic," published in his book A Sand County Almanac (1949) the year after his untimely death, Leopold wrote:

"The 'key-log which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Now, as I hasten to point out to students when we read Leopold, a land-ethic does not erase human claims or automatically subordinate them to the claims of non-human members of the biotic community; it does not mean that we should ignore the legitimate economic needs of human beings. Having lived through the Great Depression, Leopold knew better than to argue that human beings didn't need jobs, natural resources, and land on which to enjoy both. But having lived through the Great Depression, he also saw how reckless land-use had contributed to the breakdown of the human economy (think soil erosion and Dust Bowl), while as an ecologist, he saw how the same tendency to ignore all but short-term economic considerations had devastated the "economy" of Nature (think depleted wolf populations, deer overpopulation, downed forests, polluted waterways, and all the rest of it). He saw, in other words, that a reasonable accommodation had to be struck between human economic activity and the larger needs of the biotic community, including the needs of its human members.

Judged by that standard, the Marcellus Shale craze fails utterly. The integrity, stability, and beauty of the land are being ignored altogether in the rush to produce the profits and fossil fuels that drive the human economy; from what I've read, not a single thought is being given by industry or government to the ethical issues involved. Whether considered in solely human terms--as a grotesque infringement on human rights--or in ecological terms--as an equally brutal assault on the land and its non-human inhabitants--the Marcellus boom tragically illustrates how far we as a society are from the ideal Leopold articulated more than sixty years ago.

We need to organize, agitate, legislate, and do everything possible to combat this great wrong. But we need Leopold's voice as well to remind us that it is wrong, and that only we can set it right.

The Last Days of the Frog Prince

2010-11-29T20:40:00.007-05:00

Well, maybe I should complain more often about the lack of action in my writing career. No sooner did I post yesterday's piece than I received word that an essay of mine, "The Last Days of the Frog Prince," had been accepted for publication by the journal Snowy Egret, billed as the "Oldest Independent U.S. Journal of Nature Writing." The essay, a memoir concerning the frog-hunting days of my youth, hasn't yet been slated for a publication date, but I'll be sure to let you know when I hear more.

I've had some success publishing environmentally-themed essays online; if you want to read a few of them, check out these five links. One of these essays, "Positioning," was nominated for (but did not win) a Pushcart Prize. But "Frog Prince" is my first print publication in the field of environmental literature (as opposed to environmental literary criticism, of which I've published my share). So it's pretty special to me.

Ironically, I'd targeted an online journal for the piece, but their spam filter must have axed my submission, because I never heard from them. In retrospect, I'm very happy computer technology was working against me this particular time. I submitted to Snowy Egret the old-fashioned way: in an envelope, in the mail. And I printed it on the back of paper I'd already used once, so I feel fairly environmentally friendly about it too.

I'm currently working on another environmental memoir, this one titled "Watershed." We'll see how (and where) it goes!

For Fiction Fans

2010-11-28T21:44:00.003-05:00

I know I've been focusing a lot lately on the Marcellus Shale, and I don't aim to stop; it's a timely issue and one I'm passionate about. But I also know that some readers of this blog are more interested in my fiction than in my stance on fossil fuels--and though I could make some very convoluted comment about how our faith in fossil fuels is itself founded in fiction (oops, I think I just did make it), I'll simply say that at the moment there's no new fiction of mine to share with you. I've got about four pieces out for review (one of them a story that was accepted by an online journal that folded before it got around to publishing my piece), but no good news on any of them at the moment.

So, by way of keeping you updated, let me at least describe the stories I'm currently working on:

1. A sci-fi story, "A Very Small Child Called Eugene," about a future United States that has been taken over by racist hate groups. Perhaps not so very far from the truth, some might say.

2. Another sci-fi story, "What the Dog Saw," about a mysterious stranger who appears in a small Western town. As the title suggests, the story is told from the point of view of, yes, a dog.

3. A realistic piece, "More Passion," about a college student and her professor, written from the student's point of view and using her own clumsy voice and diction. Lest the title and scenario lead anyone to worry, I can assure you that the story is not what you think.

As these summaries suggest, my recent work has tended to be rather odd, perhaps unclassifiable, playing around with point of view and voice, which might be why I haven't gotten any bites on it yet. But I'm pretty pleased with the direction my writing has taken; in "What the Dog Saw," for example, I think I've been able to tell a story through a narrator that, being a non-human animal, can witness events but not comprehend their significance. That's harder to do than you might think, and I'm not sure I could have pulled it off when I resumed writing fiction a year or two ago.

So I guess the gist of this message is: hold the phone. I'll let you know if there are any developments on the fiction front, and in the meantime, I'll keep on plugging away at the fossil fuels.

Afterthoughts on the People's Summit

2010-11-21T11:30:00.006-05:00

Great as the People's Summit was, there were a couple things that troubled me while I was there, and I feel as if it might be important to the movement to note my misgivings.

The East-West divide. Numerous westerners, folks from Texas and Wyoming who have been living with the effects of the fossil fuel industry (and fracking in particular) for years, professed themselves thankful that this issue has finally hit the east. They weren't wishing their ill luck on us--they were just pointing out that until fracking became a reality for us, we easterners were all too happy to consume the natural gas produced in their states. Like the fossil fuel industry itself, in other words, we were willing to externalize the costs of fracking, to palm them off on someone else. As a homeowner whose water and air are heated by natural gas, I hope I'll never make that mistake again. But I fear that, in many cases, an issue needs to affect one personally before one wakes up to its dangers, or even its existence.
The black-white divide. Though there were numerous representatives of tribal peoples at the summit, there was no one I would have identified as African-American. (This is not to say, of course, that visual identification is foolproof.) One of the oldest splits in the environmental movement, one dating back to its origins in the nineteenth century, is the predominance of (relatively affluent) whites and their tendency to ignore the issues of most importance to (relatively poor) non-whites. Given the anti-fracking movement's emphasis on environmental justice--on securing clean air and water, meaningful work, and civil liberties for all people--I hope the movement will be responsive and receptive to the needs of people of color. But given who is most directly affected by fracking at present--rural and suburban people, large landowners, etc.--I fear the movement may take a while before it begins to recognize the concerns and claims of urban, lower-class, and minority peoples.

If this movement is to succeed, it can't be exclusive or exclusionary. Here's hoping the next People's Summit works to address the issues that divide us.

The People's Summit, Day Two

2010-11-20T20:28:00.003-05:00

The People's Summit ended today with another excellent round of presenters and a slew of frightening, but galvanizing, facts. Mayor Calvin Tillman of DISH, Texas (featured in Josh Fox's film Gasland) spoke, introducing us to a new nonprofit he's created to help low-income families and communities get their air and water tested. The lunchtime keynote speaker, EPA whistleblower Wes Wilson (also of Gasland fame), fired the crowd up with his homey aphorisms and grassroots passion. (His best line was a Winston Churchill quote: "You can always count on the American people to do the right thing--after they've exhausted all the other options.") And at the conference's close, Fox himself Skyped in from Australia, where he's doing location shooting for a Gasland sequel. I missed a morning session on new online tools to help people in the anti-fracking fight track the industry and connect with each other, but overall, I feel as if I'm bursting with new information and energy.

For me, the most enlightening presentation was given by Bob Howarth, a professor at Cornell who challenges the industry's claims that natural gas is cleaner than coal and oil. In particular, he demonstrated that when you take into account routine leaks of methane from the pipelines and storage tanks, as well as the carbon-intensive activities necessary to transport the fracking water and refine the gas, natural gas ends up being a greater contributor to global warming than either coal or oil. As a longtime follower and advocate of the fight against global warming, this was important news for me to hear--and it suggests that the two movements need to start communicating to a far greater extent than they've done thus far. The only sour note to all this was the speaker who followed Howarth, a former industry vice president now working for the UN who addressed a roomful of activists as if we were kindergartners while he explained to us why gas is much better for the planet than coal and oil. He even had the gall to ask Howarth--a Cornell professor, mind you--if his research had been peer-reviewed! If nothing else, his presence reminded us of what we're fighting against, and of the depths to which they'll sink to try to invalidate our movement.

I returned home to a nice surprise: an email from a fellow blogger, John, who'd noticed my blog and featured it in his own. For those who are following this issue, John's blog is essential reading, focused as it is specifically on fracking. You should definitely check it out!

The fight continues. And thanks to the summit, I think it's safe to say the movement is stronger, more unified, and more prepared to take on the challenge than ever before.

The People's Summit

2010-11-19T18:55:00.003-05:00

Today, I attended the first half of the EarthWorks National People's Oil and Gas Summit, held in Pittsburgh (whose City Council, earlier this week, unanimously passed an ordinance banning gas drilling within the city limits). Attendees came from as far as Wyoming and New Brunswick to discuss hydrofracturing ("fracking") in the various shale formations that underlie the North American continent; some of those who spoke are featured in Josh Fox's film Gasland (which, we learned today, has been short-listed for an Academy Award nomination). One of those speakers, Wyoming rancher John Fenton, summed up the attitude of those assembled when he said: "Drilling might be the industry's pot of gold, but to me it's a pot of poison." Stories were rife of people sickened and forced from their homes (or unable to sell them), of communities divided and disenfranchised, of itinerant workers bringing crime and drugs to town, of callous industries threatening and equally callous governments ignoring the communities they claim to serve. One speaker discussed how the profits from drilling are privatized while the costs (economic, environmental, and social) are "externalized" and foisted on the public; another described industry-funded studies based on flawed data, outmoded models, and insupportable comparisons; yet another documented the links between fracking chemicals (those we know of; many remain shrouded in secrecy) and health risks ranging from neurological impairments to cancers. A number of shocking facts emerged, including the following:

In two communities in Wyoming and Texas where fracking is taking place, between 70 and 80% of residents are experiencing respiratory problems.
While drilling is often touted as a job-maker for local communities, fully 70% of the industry's workers in Pennsylvania come from out of state.
The natural gas methane--which is not only deadly to humans but a potent greenhouse gas--has been recorded at asphyxiation levels in some homes near fracking sites.
High rates of sexual predation--including predation on children--are reported among fracking workers.
Though Pennsylvania's State Senate insists that a severance tax will drive industry away, Wyoming, with the highest taxes among western states, also has the highest energy production in the U.S. (indeed, it ranks close to the top compared to other energy-producing nations).

On the positive side, some legal battles have been won against the drilling companies, ordinances such as Pittsburgh's are being contemplated by other municipalities, and as evidenced by today's summit, the movement against fracking is growing larger every day.

The chief message I took from today's meeting was the need to learn as much as possible about this issue, and to act on that knowledge in every way imaginable.

I'll be going back tomorrow to continue that process.

From the Vault

2010-11-15T20:49:00.003-05:00

As mentioned in previous posts, I'm going to be using the blog to "publish" some old stories from online journals that have gone under. I think I've pretty much decided to focus on print publication exclusively; my latest negative experience concerns a story that was accepted by an online journal that vanished before it had a chance to publish my piece. I might change my mind in the future, of course, but that's where I am right now.

So for the moment, here's my story "Snooping," which appeared in the inaugural (and only) issue of the online journal The Squirrel Cage. It's my first sci-fi publication, and though I personally think it's a bit less polished than my later stuff, it's got obvious sentimental value, if nothing else.

Snooping

Minnie is Snooping on the couple in 2A.

Ruth and Jericho are their names. They are at the kitchen table. Ruth curls on a chrome and red vinyl chair, her knees to her bent head, her brown hair spilling over her bare legs. Jericho stands in a grease-stained t-shirt, his torso tipped slightly forward and upward as if a new self is straining to burst free from the shell of his old body. The table hosts a solitary plate from which a bean-and-rice dish has been violently spilled, trailing a muddy cone across the white plastic tabletop. Its companion lies on the floor, its contents smearing the linoleum near the legs of Ruth’s chair. Ruth’s back jerks arhythmically, her sniffles clotted as if from some obstruction of her nasal passages. When Jericho cocks his arm she raises her head, showing puffy eyes and a red tangle where blood has matted her hair against her cheek.

“All right, Minnie,” Dr. Achison’s voice says. “That’s enough for a start.”

The kitchen fills with the whine of a desktop powering down and Minnie watches as Ruth, Jericho, the table, the room shudder and shrink like a balloon flying through space, only there is no space, the scene is the space, and its collapse yields a sickening sense of compression until Minnie opens her eyes to the familiar sight of the darkened office, her therapist’s shadowed face.

“So,” he says, reaching over to unclip the device from her ear. “What did you see?”

#

The first thing Snooping taught you was that you were far more populous than you could ever have guessed. The brochure even said so. Personae proliferated, depending on how deeply you went in, until you found yourself the axis of a veritable republic of surrogates, each bearing a name, a behavior, and a history. None of these factors, though, was fixed; as Dr. Achison explained, the personae could shift, change, surprise. The next time in, it might be Jericho whimpering at the kitchen table, Ruth taunting his crumpled back. Or it might be that Ruth had departed, leaving Jericho to pitch dishes in pent solitude. Or it might be that Minnie would find them cuddling by the ornamental fireplace, the chance vocabulary of Scrabble tiles lying forgotten on the flagstone hearth. This would not, however, mean the two had separated, reconciled, switched personalities or places; all was simply random fluctuation, neural firing. It was vital, Dr. Achison stressed, to keep in mind the three fundamental principles of Snooping:

1. The personae were not real. They were manifestations of the brain’s electrochemical activity, anthropomorphized, it appeared (the process was not well understood), in the mind’s effort to foster identification with its own biochemical basis. The Snooping technology did no more than provide heightened access to, and in principle control over, these personifications of one’s neurological apparatus. Hence its trade name, Sub-Neural Omniscience OPtimization.

2. You could not interact with your personae in the normal sense of the word; you were not, by definition, a participant in the scenes generated during Snooping sessions, for “you” were at once source and expression of the personae on whom you Snooped. You could watch, but not join, the action.

3. Your role was to guide the action, to cultivate a healthier, which was to say a more productive, relationship to your personae. In so doing, you would not (as in classical psychotherapy) simply be altering your attitudes or beliefs but actually changing the physiological operations of your brain. But such guidance, again, could not take the form of direct interference. Snooping subjects who failed to honor this built-in limitation found themselves frustrated, angry, finally worse off than when they began. What you were watching, you had to recall, was yourself, and you could not leap in to save yourself. You could only gain sufficient ownership of these simulacra of yourself to make such dramatic gestures unnecessary.

Since its introduction a half decade ago, the brochure explained, Snooping had supplanted talk therapy as the most cost effective form of therapeutic intervention. Skeptical at first, patients, doctors, hospital administrators, and insurance carriers had all come around. Clinical trials to assess the procedure’s effectiveness on major depressive disorders were currently underway.

#

Minnie had begun seeing Dr. Achison after her husband died, when her dreams turned so turbulent she couldn’t sleep. In the first nine months following Greg’s death she had experienced all the anticipated signs of heartache: finding a sock balled at the bottom of the hamper and sobbing uncontrollably, finding herself dialing his office from work, finding she’d misremembered a detail of his courtship, his body, and pleading at the altar of her grief for forgiveness and consolation. The pieces of him he’d left behind, the pieces that had fallen irrevocably away, made a jagged mosaic she knew it was her lot to carry for life.

But the dreams introduced a totally unexpected form of torture. Most of them were of his death, grisly fantasies so unlike his sad surrender to cancer she (who could never bear to watch that kind of movie) couldn’t imagine where they came from. Greg gunned down by hidden assassins, light beams piercing the perfect round holes in a blinding Braille. Greg torn to bloody shreds by packs of wolves. Greg drowned in the tub, his eyes encrusted with corals and crabs. And worst of all, in some of the dreams she was the victim, he the attacker. This didn’t make sense; her husband had never laid an unwelcome hand on her in eight years of dating and marriage. But in her dreams he stalked like a murderous golem, brandishing hatchets, beating down doors she put between them. At her first, tentative sessions with Dr. Achison they pursued the usual routes: guilt over her inability to predict or prevent Greg’s death turned to anger at him for abandoning her, then the anger twisted back onto herself for betraying her guilt. But the dreams didn’t cease, and when her therapist suggested they try something a bit more radical, she gratefully agreed.

The afternoon of their first Snooping session Minnie remembered pausing at the apartment door, feeling she’d forgotten something, frozen with unease. The wedding photograph she’d never had the heart to take down gleamed on the wall: Greg in his tuxedo looking shyly at the champagne flute in his hand, she half turned to face him as if waiting for his signal to drink, the lacy hat she’d worn in lieu of a veil piled on the table where the cake sat, tiered and ruffled. Long life, the toast had been offered. She had been so dazzled then by her husband’s beauty she could remember no more. Four years later, when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just shy of his thirtieth birthday, the cruel fact of his undamaged good looks struck her like a fist. She felt it to be a spiteful joke that he could appear so sound when the oncologist gave him less than a year. Like the crystal flute of the photo, his fragile beauty would not last.

After one final, fruitless search of her purse, she closed the door and left that memory behind, waiting.

The Snooping setup was disarmingly simple: a slim box about the size of a laptop, with a wireless transmitter in the shape of a Bluetooth that hooked to your ear. The transmitter directed a signal to your hippocampus, initiating a process of cerebral stimulation and memory retrieval. The operator, Dr. Achison explained as he showed her the keyboard, could modify, intensify, redirect, or abort the signal on the subject’s cues, but could not (with current technology) access the Snooper’s personae. The Snooper, meanwhile, required practice not only to recognize, sort, and differentiate the scenes presented to her but to distinguish the interior landscape sufficiently from the exterior to provide the operator with feedback. Ideally, in time the subject would become so expert that she could remain in constant communication with the operator throughout the procedure.

“But let’s start slow,” he said at that first session, gently clipping the device to her ear. It pinched slightly, warm from his touch. “When I press this button you’ll feel a pulse, a tingling behind your ear. I’ve tried it, it feels something like a cell phone on ‘vibrate,’ it’s not unpleasant at all. The tingling will penetrate, that is you’ll feel it deeply inside your head, but there should still be no pain. Most people prefer to close their eyes, at least at first, it cuts out distractions.” He smiled encouragingly. “Are you ready?”

“And you’re sure this will help?”

“All I can tell you is that it has helped others. On the premise that the devil you know is preferable to the devil you don’t.” He cocked his head, whether in irony or not she couldn’t tell. “Are you ready?”

Minnie closed her eyes, nodded, and felt her jaw hum, then she vaulted inside with Jericho and Ruth.

#

At first she is like a swimmer reentering the water after losing a limb: the cool fluid embrace feels familiar, but its very familiarity mocks her unbalanced body. Her strokes lash out lopsided, mutinous; she thumps the water where once she shrugged it off. Her coach assures her she will recover her cadence, but she trusts the poolside more than his words. She launches herself for its slick surface and clings, heaving.

In these first few weeks of uncertainty many personae appear, their bodies and faces coalescing out of nothing, shimmering and wobbling like soap bubbles. Anthony, the homeless man with walrus mustache and filthy olive parka who snoozes at the bus stop. Ray, the young black woman who dances in a black leotard beneath the track lights of her apartment, her back a snapping ribbon. Delilah, the stringy redhead who negotiates the hopscotch grid under the autumn spill of leaves. But these are isolates; they never commune, never last. They flicker and fade. They tantalize--how to fit them together?--but they do not take.

The one person who never arrives, whose arrival she awaits, is her husband. But she knows (the brochure tells her so) he will not be there. No one real will.

Unlike the others, Ruth and Jericho arrive regularly, and always as one. Within a month the apartment they share becomes as familiar to Minnie as her own, its nooks and spaces mapped in her mind: cream-colored living room carpet, off-white walls bare of photos or artwork, improbable jutting fireplace, front window seat, peeling kitchen floor, bedroom and bath down the narrow, unlit hallway. By this time Minnie has mastered the jarring duality of inside/outside adequately to report as she views. There they are again, they’re arguing, Jericho raises his voice, Ruth hugs a shawl around her shoulders as if his words cast a chill. Or: Jericho seems subdued today, he sits at the alcove window staring into the sun while Ruth putters in the bedroom, folding sheets. Or they’ve gone out, the apartment is empty, Ruth’s vanilla scent lingers. Minnie asks Dr. Achison whether the couple’s persistence may be significant, and he concurs, guardedly, that it may be: though primacy and frequency offer no proof of relevance, the obvious analogy--a young couple experiencing marital difficulties--suggests they are worth pursuing. He only cautions Minnie not to become so fixated on them that she ignores or suppresses other potentially fruitful leads.

“If I were to suppress them,” she asks, “how would I know?”

He has no answer to that, beyond the suggestion that she consult her dreams.

This response is characteristic; though occasionally he prompts, queries, he offers no analysis of what she has witnessed, and Minnie needs to remind herself, conditioned to the give-and-take of psychotherapy, that here the analysis is not his to make. At the end of each week’s session they discuss but do not speculate. The lone time he provided what might count as diagnosis or exegesis followed her first session, and then only because the violence she had witnessed made her quail to continue. She should not be surprised, he had suggested then, that Jericho should appear as aggressor this first time, given the dreams with which she’d lately been wrestling. She could not so easily escape the violence that had settled on her life, he said.

“Will I ever?”

“That’s the hope,” he responded.

And indeed, after that first time Jericho displays no violence, merely anger and a bristling disquiet, and Minnie is somewhat mollified.

Her first real crisis occurs three months in, when unexpectedly she is thrust into Ruth and Jericho’s bedroom. Or not altogether unexpectedly: she had wondered, worried, if this might be coming, but when it had not, she had relaxed, reasoning that such scenes would surely be blocked by some internal censor. Now from her position of hovering omniscience, within the scene yet surveying it all at once, she spies on the couple in bed, Ruth reaching up to fondle Jericho’s face, he accepting her caress, eyes closed, cheek slanting to her fingers. Minnie is relieved to see the tenderness of their lovemaking, on this occasion at least, but still she feels defiled, and the knowledge that it is herself she is watching does not help. She had not imagined her brain had sex. She knows that, with some effort, she can terminate the session, instruct her mind to disengage with its own material basis, but at the same time she admits, with corrosive guilt, that she does not want the scene to end. She has been without a partner for over a year, Greg’s final months having been so fragile he bruised at her very touch. If nothing else, this scene recalls to her when his body--and through his hers--was whole.

“Minnie?” Dr. Achison’s voice enters the room, making her flinch. “Is everything all right?”

“I--” This is even worse, now she is in bed with her dead husband, two strangers, her brain, and her shrink. “I’d rather not say.”

She hears the rapid ticking of his keyboard. “Would you like me to stop?”

Despite her confusion and shame, Minnie almost laughs. But the truth is, she does not want him to stop, does not want Ruth and Jericho to stop, does not want Greg to stop, does not want herself to stop. And yet, even now, she can see the distraction taking its toll, the rhythm of Ruth and Jericho’s movements becoming fractured, the room darkening. Soon they will deflate, sag like wilted violets, and she will be powerless to prevent them. How horrible, she thinks, that she cannot close her eyes to avoid seeing.

“Yes, please,” she says, as Jericho jerks covers that stretch and bubble like gum over his own and his wife’s bodies. “I’d like to stop now.”

#

At the following session Dr. Achison tells her that crises differ from catastrophes. He offers this spontaneously, in no particular rejoinder to anything; if he guesses what she saw the previous week, he does not disclose his deduction. A crisis, he explains, typically marks a transition, the arrival at a crossroads. But choice is difficult; there is always the temptation to turn back. Hence the conflict, hence the crisis.

“You remember the line from The Wizard of Oz?” he says. “When they enter the lion’s den? ‘I think it’ll get darker before it gets lighter.’ Which is another way of saying it’ll only get lighter if it gets darker.”

Minnie has her doubts, but remembering Greg, her crystal wine glass, she decides to enter the forest.

And as it turns out, her reward awaits her there. Ruth and Jericho have returned to a less compromising spot--their old standby the kitchen--and have commenced the first civil conversation Minnie has seen shared between them. Most encouraging is how truly trivial their talk flows; no accusations or innuendoes, just common chitchat such as two young lovers might trade. Maybe, Minnie thinks, the crisis was theirs as well as hers; maybe the x-rated scene was a reconciliation, the result of some breakthrough in their relationship. Or--she still finds it difficult to remember that their relationship is hers, or a function of hers anyway--some breakthrough in her own recovery.

“I’ll resist the obvious forest-for-the-trees witticism,” Dr. Achison says as he removes the earpiece. “But how was it?”

“Lighter,” she answers.

She spends that weekend boxing up her life with Greg. The wedding picture comes down, the album following it into storage. His clothes are long since gone, except for a special hand knitted sweater and a tie or two she’d given him over the years. These she slips into storage bags and deposits with the rest. She empties the shelves of college textbooks, maps from journeys they’ve taken, novels they’ve exchanged. She buried him with his wedding ring; many times since she’s wished she kept it, but now she tells herself she’s glad it’s gone back to the ground from which it was mined. She hardly knows why she is so keen to purge the space just now; she wonders whether it is time to move altogether. She wonders, too, whether this is what it means to heal. She breathes deeply, looks around the emptied apartment, and tries not to remember where everything used to be.

#

As the weeks pass and the memories of forgetting dim, she finds herself looking forward to her sessions. Ruth and Jericho have supplanted all other personae (the last to go was dancing Ray, who tapped madly at her curtain call as if determined to impress before being applauded offstage). But Minnie welcomes the uncontested space the two now own, the space, she realizes, they’ve needed all along; freed of the others’ disruptive presence, their relationship is quite obviously improving, even thriving. Perhaps it was that initial, unimpeded conversation that sealed the change. Or perhaps it was the ring Jericho presented Ruth shortly after: an opal set in silver, he slid it onto her left hand, and Minnie was surprised, but not displeased, not to have considered their being unmarried. This explains the ugly start, she reasons: a young couple just starting out, of course there’ll be hiccups along the way. A bloody nose, she recognizes, is no hiccup, but it has not recurred, Jericho’s hands are gentle as blossoms as he cups Ruth’s shoulder or guides a strand of hair behind her ear, and perhaps its initial appearance was her--Minnie’s--fault.

The apartment becomes a second home. Minnie fails to witness a formal proposal or wedding preparations, but she presides over every sign of their courtship deepening. Jericho surprising Ruth with roses, she returning the favor with back rubs. Extended exchanges at the dinner table, now filled with sly laughter and private allusions. Evenings before the TV, Ruth’s hand trailing from the couch to be cradled by Jericho’s, he feeding her popcorn, she taking the kernels lightly on her tongue and teeth so each bite seems a promise. And yes, more nights in bed, Minnie no longer torn between fleeing and drinking in the scene but simply relishing their uncorrupted delight in each other’s body. She has not reported these encounters to Dr. Achison--in fact, she has not reported the disappearance of Anthony, Ray, and the others--but she has come to an understanding that satisfies her: watching Ruth and Jericho together is no more inappropriate than watching her former husband’s body sleek with droplets from the shower or tense with the rapture of their own lovemaking. Ruth and Jericho are hers, are her, and there can be nothing disreputable about sharing in their joy.

Minnie’s nightmares have ceased. When she does dream it is of Ruth and Jericho.

#

Six months into the process, Dr. Achison suggests a change.

"Thus far you’ve been a more or less passive observer,” he says. “That’s not a criticism, you’ve done wonderfully considering. But I think it’s time to step it up a notch.”

“But I thought we were making progress,” she says. At their last session Ruth and Jericho took a walk in the park, the first time she’d witnessed them outside their apartment, and she had thrilled to see them holding hands, kicking leaves, contemplating others’ children.

“We may be,” he says. “But I’m afraid. . . .”

Minnie’s heart sinks; she imagines what’s coming.

“. . . you’ve become content to watch, to let things develop as they may. And that’s problematic, even dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” This is the first time he’s raised the prospect of dangers.

“Risky,” he amends, smiling. “Therapeutically speaking. It suggests a withdrawal from the process, a desire to cede control.” He smiles again, apologetically; Minnie knows he does not want this to sound as reproving as it does. “There’s a term for this, Minnie. Not that a term makes a thing real, but. . . . Omniscience avoidance. Everything appears to be going well, yes? Ruth and Jericho’s relationship appears to be strengthening, healing?”

She nods.

“But ask yourself this: if they were taking a turn for the worse, would you feel the same way? Would you be so willing to allow things to develop ‘naturally’? Or would you want to step in and take control?”

The response is too obvious, which is perhaps why she feels the need to argue. “But if they’re healing, doesn’t that mean I’m healing? If they’re me, if my mind--brain--is finding a healthier place, maybe I am taking control without even knowing it.” She suspects this is a lie; she feels only pleasure at their strolls and sex, too purely gratifying for the hard work of therapy. But maybe it’s true.

“It’s possible,” he muses. “Only you would know. But let me pose it this way: can you know when you have no basis for comparison? Never having tried any alternative, can you be sure the path you’re following is the right one?”

Minnie’s resistance wavers, drops. Therapy, she had believed before Snooping, was an inexact science: relative, a tautology. Whatever worked was good; whatever was good worked. But apparently with neurochemistry came absolutes. Still she tries: “I don’t think I have enough control.”

Wrong objection; he pounces on it. “That’s precisely the problem. You can’t gain control until you think you can.”

Fearing another storybook analogy, she concedes. “What do I need to do?”

“Nothing drastic,” he assures. “Just when you’re in, try to think of yourself differently, less audience than director. Don’t simply watch; ask yourself what you’re watching, why you’re watching it, whether it’s what you want to see.” He waves away her riposte. “I know you’ve already done this to an extent, it’s impossible not to. I’m simply asking you to try harder, to do more.”

“What will happen to Ruth and Jericho?”

For a moment his eyes scrutinize her face. He begins to say something, stops. “Let’s just wait and see.”

#

In her mind’s eye Minnie sees trees, trains, traps. She knows the therapeutic relationship is built on trust. On the edges of the vacuum that forms her vision she senses personae crowding, swirling like vapor, clamoring for entrance. For the first time she imagines one of them as her doctor, shadowy and stern. Why, she wonders, is it so hard to know one’s others, one’s self? Why can we never escape this mind? Then the room fills with light as if in answer and Minnie watches intently the scene that takes shape on the brightening sphere.

Ruth sits at the kitchen table, the scent of cinnamon hovering in the air. What was once a merely functional, uninviting space has been leavened: an oversized brass ladle hangs from a peg on the wall, its beaten surface reflecting golden cuts and crescents, a ceramic vase stands on the table, overflowing with baby’s breath, the buds’ pink shade only one hue of the rotating pinwheel Jericho replenishes daily. Ruth seems agitated but not upset; she glances frequently at the hand-painted clock above the counter, rises to peer out the kitchen’s single window. Watching her, Minnie feels a throb inside her stomach, a deep wobble greater than tension or anticipation. When the apartment door opens and Jericho enters, bearing blue flowers wrapped in plastic, Ruth runs to him, and Minnie knows what she has longed for has come to pass.

#

“Ruth is pregnant,” she announces without prelude at their next session. She has kept the secret a week, savoring it, but she cannot contain it any longer. Her voice is triumphant, her chin raised, her eyes squarely on his. It is almost a challenge.

Dr. Achison blinks. Then he asks, “How far along?”

“It’s still early,” Minnie says. “She just took the test. But they’ve been trying for a while.” Her voice sounds actually defiant; now that the truth lies before them, she refuses to apologize for having watched and withheld so long.

He says nothing for a time; he is enough of a Freudian to be intrigued, even intimidated, by anything having to do with sex. Then he says, “And how do you feel about this?”

“It’s what I’ve wanted,” she says. “What I’ve willed. You told me I needed to take control. This is proof I have.”

“Proof,” he repeats. “Minnie, how long has it been since you’ve Snooped on anyone other than Ruth or Jericho?”

“Months,” she says without hesitation. “Just after I first saw them in bed together.” She adds, needlessly and recklessly, “And I’ve been dreaming of them too. Real dreams. Good dreams.”

“You’ve banished the others?”

She shrugs. “I didn’t realize it at the time, at first it made me uncomfortable to watch them, but now I know they’ve been trying all along. To have a baby.”

“They’ve been trying.”

“They, I, we. I’ve been trying to have Ruth’s baby.” She laughs. “And now I have.” She realizes this makes no sense, she cannot be mother and father, watcher and watched, the one who wills and the one who receives all at once. But at the same time she feels absolutely sure of herself, sure of the miracle of surrogacy that has enfolded her life. This, she thinks, is what it means to heal: to become one, whole, a cosmos integral and secure.

“Minnie,” Dr. Achison’s voice interrupts. “How long has it been since you’ve had your period?”

She ignores him. She watches a fly bat itself against his window, stupidly stubborn to gain the light outside.

“Minnie,” he tries again. “Whatever is going on, Ruth can’t be having a baby. Or you can’t be having theirs. There is no Ruth, there is no Jericho. These people aren’t real.”

“They’re real enough,” she says. “More real than this office, than”--she points--“that machine. Their love is real. How do I know you’re real?” How, for that matter, did she know she was real?

“You know,” he says. “Reality isn’t always such a nice place.”

She rises. She considers a final gesture--dashing off a check, slamming the Optimizer shut--but decides simply to march past him and grab the doorknob.

“What about Greg?” he says as she opens the door.

She pauses for a moment, hand gripping the doorknob. “What about him?” Then she exits the office.

Another patient sits in the waiting room, an older woman thumbing a magazine. She looks up, surprised, thinking she has lost track of time. Her watery eyes search Minnie’s face. Then, catching the young woman’s expression, she smiles conspiratorially. “I used to cry at night,” she confides. “Now all I hear is singing.”

#

The machine, Minnie knows, has opened a pathway. For that she offers thanks. But it is no longer needed. She can travel the pathway whenever she chooses, wherever it goes.

Ruth reclining in a hospital gown, cool gunk smeared on her belly, Jericho standing proudly at her side. The ball rolls across her flesh, the screen brightens with a gray, swirling form.

The couple at the mall, pricing prams, strolling arm-in-arm past the goldfish stream, spooning each other sundaes at the snack court.

Ruth decorating, blue and white, fingering the mobile and watching it dance.

Ruth lying in bed, aglow in a shaft of sunlight. Her skin pale, her arm flung above her head, her hair splayed as if sinking. The door parts and Jericho peeks in, his tie loosened, his daily floral offering fanned under an arm. At first he smiles tenderly, begins to retreat. Then his look changes and he leaps to the bed, lilies scattering on the floor. He touches Ruth’s shoulder, speaks her name, lowers his ear to her chest. His eyes travel her body to where the blood shadows the sheets.

#

The doctor admits it was a close call, but Jericho’s vigilance has saved her. Within a day she has recovered her color, within weeks, having clung to Jericho every night, her spirits. She is more determined than ever to have her baby. And within the year she is rewarded. Her faith has healed her.

#

At least, that’s what the Snooper hopes happened.

But there remain other possibilities, random firings, she can neither predict nor avert. Ruth barren for life, bitter in a childless marriage. Jericho resuming his assaults, caged, furious. Or arriving too late to save his beloved, blankly watching the earth take her rose white body.

#

Ruth is Snooping on the woman in 1A. Minerva is her name. Chubby, with a headful of black ringlets and dark eyes, she squats among cardboard boxes in an apartment empty of furnishings. She calls out, but her only reply is silence.

Ruth rests a hand on her stomach, feeling the baby beat inside her, and waits for Jericho’s return.

"The Burning of Sarah Post" Hits the Stands!

2010-11-10T09:25:00.003-05:00

The anthology Cover of Darkness, in which my short story "The Burning of Sarah Post" appears, has just hit the stands! "Sarah Post" is a story of witchcraft and evil (not necessarily the same thing!), perfect for Halloween (or the month after). Pick up a copy or two--you won't regret it (though you might have trouble sleeping!).

Baboons and Monkeys

2010-11-09T13:41:00.002-05:00

As a lover of all non-human primates (gorillas especially), I'm never pleased to see them used colloquially to stand for human misbehavior or stupidity--as in "stop monkeying around," or, "you've got the table manners of a chimpanzee," or "you big dumb ape!" It seems to me bad enough that we've managed to drive the majority of our closest genetic cousins to the brink of extinction without suggesting that they, who never did anything nearly as bad to us, must somehow be held responsible for our sins.

But I've been reading a lot of Thoreau and Emerson lately (all in the context of a class I'm teaching), and I have to admit, both of them get a lot of mileage out of simian analogies. Here's Thoreau, in Walden (1854):

Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.

And here's Emerson, in his 1851 address on the Fugitive Slave Law:

I thought it was this fair mystery, whose foundations are hidden in eternity, that made the basis of human society, and of law; and that to pretend any thing else, as, that the acquisition of property was the end of living, was to confound all distinctions, to make the world a greasy hotel, and, instead of noble motives and inspirations, and a heaven of companions and angels around and before us, to leave us in a grimacing menagerie of monkeys and idiots.

I resort to sentiments such as these when I hear people blather on about extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and leasing national parks to oil companies, and drilling in the Marcellus Shale, and building more strip malls, and leaving uninsured children to the mercy of the streets, and dropping more bombs on Afghanistan, and buying more handheld technogadgets, and refusing to tax carbon because China refuses to do it, and lifting regulations on Wall Street, and buying bottled water, and polluting the water that's left, and lots of other things besides. I find comfort in the thought that some people, past and present, knew the true purpose of life, and refused to allow anyone to tell them otherwise.

And I find even greater comfort in the thought that baboons and monkeys have known this all along, and never needed to be convinced.

Or Well

2010-11-06T10:56:00.003-04:00

Pennsylvania voters, God love ‘em, have just elected (by a sizable margin) a Republican governor and (in a squeaker) a Republican senator who share, among other loony opinions, the belief that taxes are evil and should not be imposed under any circumstances. Seems like folks in the Keystone State were sick an’ tired of them damn tax-and-spend liberals in Warshington and Harrisburg with their bailouts, stimyoolous plans, and what-not draggin’ our country and our economy down.

Never mind that without the bailouts of the automobile, banking, and lending industries, millions of jobs (not only in those industries but in all sectors affected by them) would have been lost. Never mind that without the stimulus, we’d be in a full-blown depression comparable to the Great one. Never mind that the deficit under Obama is actually lower than it was after eight years of Bushonomics.

Never mind any of that. The citizens hath spoken, and their word is law.

Now, from an environmental perspective, the most depressing part of this whole business is the governor-elect’s vow to resist imposing a severance tax on the gas companies that have descended on my state like a swarm of locusts. Every other state in the union that allows deep-well drilling (the “fracking” process you’ve heard me talk about before) makes the drillers pay such a tax, which the states use to support various programs including, most importantly, environmental clean-up from the drilling. Pennsylvania’s State House, controlled by Democrats, passed a severance tax last year, but its State Senate, controlled by Republicans, can’t seem to move this legislation out of committee. With the new governor at the helm, all hope for a severance tax is lost: even if, by some miracle, the Senate could be convinced to pass this legislation, the governor would surely veto it.

Those opposed to the severance tax say it will scare away the gas companies. If this were true, I’d say that's the best reason of all that we should impose a severance tax. But it’s not true: the gas companies will come wherever the gas is, and the gas is in Pennsylvania. They’ll pay the tax if that’s what it takes to mine our state’s natural resources, just as they pay it in every other gas-rich state across the land.

As you know, I'd prefer a permanent moratorium on gas drilling. That would be the ideal. But in the absence of that unlikely outcome, a severance tax is a minimal palliative against the environmental devastation drilling causes, as well as a minimal mechanism to level the playing field for alternative energy development. It’s a recognition that when drillers drill on public lands--as they’ve already begun to do in Pennsylvania’s state forests--they owe the people who own the lands, namely the citizens of the state of Pennsylvania, something in return. It’s a tax, sure, but it’s a tax that returns money to the citizens, not one that takes money away from them.

But in the Orwellian logic of our newly anointed governor and senator, any tax is a bad tax. The only exception they’ll make, the only tax they’re all too willing to impose, is the exorbitant tax on the health, the environment, and the communities of the very people who put them in office.

Frick, Frack

2010-11-03T21:55:00.002-04:00

In the city of Frick, the people are taking a stand against Frack.

Today I attended a rally in downtown Pittsburgh to protest industry plans to drill tens of thousands of natural gas wells (through a process known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”) into the Marcellus Shale formation that lies beneath our fields, forests, and cities. A broad coalition of environmental and citizens’ groups has formed to push for a state moratorium on drilling until further research into its environmental impacts has been conducted, to call on lawmakers to impose a severance tax on the drilling companies to help mitigate environmental impacts, and--most radically--to declare the city of Pittsburgh off-limits to drillers, permanently. The latter ordinance is working its way through Pittsburgh City Council. If passed, it would be the first such ordinance nationwide.

The rally was attended by none other than Josh Fox, rogue visionary behind the film Gasland. Fox whipped the crowd into a frenzy by citing the copious evidence (all of it denied by industry) of negative environmental and health consequences of drilling. He also showed his characteristic flair for the theatrical, calling up the Republican governor-elect of Pennsylvania on his cell phone and, while the crowd hooted approval, leaving a message with the man’s secretary. But the grandstanding had a serious purpose: as Fox represented it, the fight against fracking is the environmental battle of the day. Win this one, he told us, and we secure a greener, brighter future. Lose it, and we concede a future of runaway environmental and human degradation.

Now, all environmentalist prophets say these sorts of things. For Aldo Leopold, the issue was land. For Rachel Carson, it was pesticides. For Al Gore, it was global warming. Environmentalism thrives on these sorts of dire prognostications of utter collapse if that one issue, whatever it may be, is not addressed.

But this time around, I tend to agree with Fox. The natural gas industry stands in the way of healthy environments and communities not only in Pennsylvania, but nationwide (if not worldwide). This latest boondoggle by the fossil fuel industry represents an effort to keep our future locked into the same sorry path we’ve been walking since the time of the industrial revolution, a deal with the devil where we forfeit environmental and communal wellbeing for the luxury lifestyle offered by rapacious robber barons. The rush to drill is based on two deeply flawed propositions that, if exposed and rejected, may well set us on the road to recovery as a people and as a world:

1. Natural gas is a clean energy source. This is, quite simply, bullshit. While natural gas is marginally cleaner-burning than coal or oil, the process by which it’s extracted is brimming with environmental hazards: contaminated water, damaged soil, toxic air. Of the three, the threat to water is perhaps the most ominous: the amount of water required to drill one well is astronomical, and there’s precious little regulation concerning where that water comes from and where it goes after it’s been drenched in hazardous chemicals. As several speakers at today’s rally pointed out, if drilling is as safe as the industry claims, then why did they enlist Dick Cheney and his cronies in Congress to ensure that legislation would be passed exempting the fracking process from key provisions of the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Superfund law? To tout natural gas as a “clean” alternative to oil is akin to praising crack as a safer-burning form of cocaine.

2. Natural gas represents a “transition fuel” to a clean energy economy. Again, total bullshit. If you look at the history of the fossil fuel industry, you’ll find plenty of transitions--but only from one fossil fuel to a yet more cheap, abundant, energy-intensive, and environmentally destructive fossil fuel. From charcoal to coal to petroleum, the industry has tried them all, and they’re seeking newer and unhealthier sources of energy (tar sands and the like) even as we speak. There’s simply no incentive for the industry to do anything else, and anyone who thinks it will diversify out of the goodness of its heart or concern for its customers has been drinking its toxic Kool-Aid for way too long. (We all saw how well BP fulfilled its vow to move “beyond petroleum,” right?) Unless the rest of us make it inconvenient, unprofitable, and in fact illegal for these vampires to conduct their filthy business, the industry will continue to suck fossil fuels from the planet until it’s literally sucked dry. If we are to embrace a clean energy future, it has to start now, with heavy investment in renewables and disincentives for business as usual. This will hurt in the short term, but it will not hurt nearly as much in the long term as a continued dependence on fossil fuels.

So if you’re following this issue, keep your eyes on Pittsburgh. If my hometown can secure victory in this battle--if we can claim our land, our communities, and our health as inalienable rights no one can steal--then the collapse of the fossil fuel industry is within grasp, and a sustainable world within reach.

Drill in Pittsburgh? As they chanted at today's rally: "No fracking way!"

Well, Well, Well....

2010-11-01T08:57:00.005-04:00

And here's a shock: it now appears that Halliburton, the company that brought us the Iraq War as well as the gutting of environmental regulations to promote the Marcellus Shale feeding frenzy, knew weeks beforehand that the cement mixture it planned to use to seal the bottom of the Deepwater Horizon well was unstable. Halliburton has steadfastly denied that it did anything wrong or that it had any prior knowledge of faulty methods or materials.

Halliburton lied.

And when Halliburton lied, 11 human workers--and countless non-human workers--died.

If the Iraq War is any indication, Halliburton's punishment for its criminal malfeasance and suppression of the truth will be . . . well, nothing.

When you go to the polls tomorrow, all fed up with the damn Democrats and itching to make a change, to get the country back on track, to axe Obamacare, to do away with the new regulations on Wall Street, to lock in tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans, or whatever the hell else you plan to vote for, remember this: a vote for the Republicans is a vote for Halliburton, a vote for everything Halliburton stands for: rampant corporate greed and disregard for human (and non-human) life. It's not about limiting government, cutting taxes, restoring individual liberties, or any of that tea-party crap; it's about limiting government, cutting taxes, and restoring individual liberties for the people and corporations who are ruining this country and this world.

But hey, if you can live with that, vote for Halliburton. Maybe they'll be so thankful they'll clean up their act.

Trick or Treat

2010-10-31T21:13:00.004-04:00

Halloween, in case I haven't told you already, is my favorite holiday. There are lots of reasons for this, most of them obvious: the imaginative aspects, the fun of dress-up, the candy, the ghost stories. Then there's my own special reason: Halloween is the only holiday that's almost entirely politician-proof. When's the last time you heard some blowhard spouting off about how Halloween expresses the values that made this country great? "Our long-suffering pagan ancestors, in the days of yore...." It just ain't gonna happen.

I had a great Halloween this year, though it was tinged by a sad note: my old animation teacher, Tippi, died several weeks before. Tippi (or Priscilla, as I discovered from the obituary she was named) was one of the great influences of my young life, when, at the age of nine, I joined her class at the local arts center to learn the craft of stop-motion, cell, and other forms of animation. With regular-8 camera in hand, I produced lots of wobbly, jerky claymation shorts in hopes that one day I'd become the next great stop-motion animator, following my heroes Willis H. O'Brien (who animated my favorite movie of all time, the 1933 King Kong) and Ray Harryhausen (whose swan song, Clash of the Titans, was remade earlier this year). Of course, it didn't work out that way; stop-motion went the way of the dinosaurs when computer-generated effects hit their stride, and in any event, I'd moved on to other venues by that time. But I still think of Tippi as one of the most important people in my life, one of the first people who took entirely seriously my love of fantasy and my desire to live a life not altogether according to convention. Several years before she died, I had the pleasure of presenting her with a copy of my book on fantasy film, in which she receives acknowledgment. I acknowledge her again here as an extraordinary woman and an undying part of who I am today.

And speaking of early childhood influences, who should I run into while taking my kids out trick-or-treating (my son in homemade General Grievous costume, my daughter in homemade Ms. Pac-Man monster suit) but one of my childhood friends, Herman, with whom (among many other things) I used to construct Halloween haunted houses in my parents' basement? We'd lost touch for many years, then reconnected several years ago, lost touch again, and now (having traded emails) I expect we'll keep the friendship going once more. It was at Herman's house that I first saw some of the fantasy films I remember best today; on his birthday, his family would set up a rented projector in the livingroom and a bunch of us boys would watch such movies as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (another Harryhausen classic) and The Blob (which made just about all of us sick). I've carried on the haunted-house tradition with my own kids; at our annual Halloween party, my son, the younger of the two, squats inside a cardboard box and pulls all the fishing lines that make ghosts and werwolves and devils dance while my daughter reads a script full of spooky names and (age-appropriate) scary scenarios. So just like Tippi, Herman was one of the first people who helped nurture my love of the fantastic, and bumping into him on Halloween was both a perfect coincidence and quite a treat.

Another coincidence, this one more of a trick: I was unable to attend Tippi's memorial service because it conflicted with my Halloween party. But I guess you could say, in the truest sense, that she was there in spirit.

Frogsong

2010-10-25T11:21:00.003-04:00

My latest sci-fi story, "Frogsong," is due out in the anthology Farspace 2 (available any day now through this link). Here's a teaser:

Frogsong

By J. David Bell

The delivery truck rumbled along the muddy road above the swamp. In the cab, eyes fighting fatigue and the gathering dark, Todd Stuckey guided the rig up a steep grade. He could feel his rear tires slaloming in the slop until with a rattle and cough of gears they caught hold. He kept the window cracked just an inch, taking in rich whiffs of diesel to clear his head of the swamp stench, rank and stifling as a latrine. The lush green of overhanging trees faded to a blur in the twilight as luminescent bugs started to dance over the marsh like sparklers. And behind it all, as ever, the song: a drone, a peal, a whine. An endless, senseless cacophony of throats crying carols across the swamp.

In low gear, Stuckey inched down a grade that levelled at the swamp’s edge. One more bend and the compound rose in his headlights: a paved loading dock, prefab trailers, the broad squat gable of the mess hall. On the flagpole, the Stars and Stripes drooped in the sultry air. Beside the dock a halo of sulphur light revealed a solitary figure slumped in his booth, head lowered on crossed arms. Stuckey wheeled around the drive, backed her in, and hopped from the cab. His boots met the pavement with a familiar liquid smack. He circled his truck, unlatched the gate, and sent it rattling to roost. Then he approached the clerk.

The man had shown no awareness of the truck’s arrival; he remained prone, head buried in his arms, cap hiding his face and hair. Close up, Stuckey could see his shoulders rising and falling, hear his snores. They seemed to keep time with the rhythmic pulse of the swamp.

“Delivery,” Stuckey said. His voice came out loud and ringing against the background buzz. “Where do you want it?”

The clerk muttered, raised his head, and squinted. Stuckey saw then he was only a kid, maybe twenty-two, red-haired and freckled, red-eyed and raw cheeked. New guy. He removed his cap, ran a hand through unruly hair, and yawned.

“What you hauling, Joe?” They called the delivery guys “Joes”--as in “Regular Joe.” Stuckey’d have preferred to be called a Regular, but it was the Joe part that had stuck.

He shrugged. “Laminate, drywall, the usual. It’s in the manifest,” he said, shoving his clipboard at the kid’s face. “We got an unloading crew?”

The kid scratched his head as if he’d never heard such a question. “Ease up, Joe,” he said. “Just take it easy.”

“Look,” Stuckey began, but the kid had roused himself from his stool and gotten his legs out the door. “I’ll make the call,” he said, and yawned again. Then he sat there stupidly, hands in his lap, staring at his open palms.

Stuckey left the clipboard and returned to his truck. Last run of the day, he reminded himself. A tepid shower, a frozen dinner, a lukewarm beer, a rerun or sportscast in the rec room. Anything to dream the place away, drown out the sound and smell for a moment. Then bed. Then the same thing the next day.

The Stupor Bowl

2010-10-21T16:25:00.003-04:00

I was listening to a local DJ rant and rave about a guy named James Harrison. Apparently, James Harrison is a professional football player, and apparently he was fined $75,000 for hitting another football player really hard and hurting him.

Now, of course, the object of football is to hit other players really hard and hurt them, so it’s not clear to me why anyone should be surprised when this happens (or why any player should be fined for doing it).

But anyway, this DJ was talking about a Facebook site wherein fans of James Harrison are encouraged to submit one dollar to help pay his fine. Evidently, 10,000 people have already contributed.

The DJ couldn’t fathom this. He kept calling these people stupid. In fact, he used the word "stupid" approximately ten times (which in my household would have cost him ten dollars). How, he foamed, could anyone think to pay a millionaire’s fine? How stupid could you get?

To an extent, I agreed with him. It is stupid for average football fans, folks who make roughly one one-thousandth of what this James Harrison character makes every time he steps on a football field, to pay his fine.

But what this DJ overlooked is, these people already have paid Mr. James Harrison’s fine. They paid it when they paid his outrageous salary, and they paid that when they paid the outrageous ticket prices charged to watch the football games in which he hits other people really hard, the outrageous product prices charged for official licensed team merchandise with his name and likeness on it, and the outrageous broadcast prices charged for pay-per-view and the other forms of media in which his antics are featured.

If it’s stupid to pay one dollar to cover some thug’s fine--and it is--how much more stupid is it to pay that same thug fifty million dollars?

Professional sports, in short, are paradigmatic of capitalist/consumer culture, which convinces relatively poor people to consume overpriced, disposable products (in this case, the games themselves and the merchandise associated with them) in order to enrich a tiny, select group of individuals lucky or unscrupulous enough to have acquired the necessary endowments for such highway robbery (in this case, big bodies, even bigger wallets, and shriveled, nearly nonexistent souls).

And it’s not as if non-fans like me are exempt from this stupidity. When the city in which I live built brand-new football and baseball stadiums to prevent these capitalist vultures from carrying out their threats to leave town, it paid the costs with taxpayer money. Supposedly, this was necessary in order to boost civic pride (something that never paid any hardworking taxpayer one single dime) and to keep jobs in the city (mostly, I might note, the low-paying, menial, benefit-less positions--janitorial, vending, food services--that sports franchises support).

And the amazing thing is, most people in my city--in all cities--are only too happy to pay.

So yes, we’re all part of the stupidity: the fans who send their hard-earned dollars to cover the fines of bloated criminals like James Harrison, the DJs (including the one who broke this story) who host daily shows to whip everyone up into a frenzy about the team’s latest escapades, the city officials who throw taxpayer money at gluttonous bazillionaires, the taxpayers who don’t storm city hall with torches and pitchforks and throw the bums out.

But you can’t say stuff like this to anyone. They’d think you were stupid.

Trash Stinks

2010-10-17T23:16:00.004-04:00

While I'm on the subject of commercials, how about this one for unrivaled stupidity:

A husband and wife are sitting on their couch at home. Their noses wrinkle. Seems like something stinks. Next thing you know, the camera zooms back to reveal that they're sitting in the middle of a landfill. Apparently, this is meant to represent the fact that their house is malodorous.

So what do they do? Buy a Glade air freshener, of course! Couple sits back down on couch, camera zooms back once more, and presto! they're now sitting in the midst of a forest glen. The miracle of modern air freshening technology has converted a dump to a national park.

Now, of course, once the air freshener runs out--which it will in a month or two--where's it going to go? Into a landfill, naturally (where, I can assure you, it will no longer smell quite so wholesome and piney). But that's okay--the couple can always buy another, and another, and another, and keep on disposing of them in their friendly (someone else's) neighborhood landfill. Their house need never stink again! So what if some other guy's house--or the entire planet--stinks to high heaven? So what if, sooner or later, there will no longer be a forest glen with which to compare the smell of their home?

No one expects commercials to have a social conscience. Or a brain. It would be nice if the people watching them did, though.

Droids R Us

2010-10-10T20:33:00.003-04:00

The most terrifying commercial I've seen in a long time is an advertisement for the newest "Droid" techno-gizmo. I freely confess that I don't know what "Droid" is, though from what I've seen, I gather it's the latest and raciest in a seemingly endless line of palm-held gadgets designed to lure us away from life into a pseudo-realm of puerile, onanistic fantasy.

Anyway, in the commercial, a young guy, early twenty-ish, sits at a conference table in his office building, surrounded by his co-workers, his boss standing at the head. Our hero whips out his "Droid" and begins fooling with it. As his fingers fly ever faster over the crotch-sized keyboard, a startling, CG-assisted transformation takes place: his hands and forearms turn to shining, chrome-plated cables, and before you know it, man has become part-machine. As he completes his task and rests back in his chair, the voice-over intones: "Turning you into an instrument of efficiency."

What are we to make of this? To begin with, the masturbatory appeal of the pitch is unmistakable, with a presumably pleasurable physical transformation obtained via the agency of one's own hand. At the same time, the voice-over converts erotic pleasure into yet another business protocol: hearkening back to the efficiency system of Frederick Winslow Taylor, this commercial defines the ideal worker as the man who buries his individuality (and sexuality) in the routinized performance of corporate labor. To put it simply: you jerk off, the Company makes a killing. Work, in this commercial, is literally transformed into a fetish; sexual arousal and fulfillment arise not from human contact but from contact with, indeed inseparability from, the machine.

All of this is horrifying enough. But when you add to it the fact that the "Droid" into which our satiated worker turns strongly resembles the soulless killing machines of the Terminator movies, we've left the realm of horror and entered that of absolute, totalitarian nightmare. This commercial implies--and from what I've seen on the street and in the classroom, it's not far off--that people want to be turned into Terminators, want to surrender their humanity in the interest of corporate profit, want to lose their identity, their heart, their spirit. The Terminators are precisely what I've described above: mass-produced slave labor employed by the ultimate faceless corporate entity, the military computer Skynet; their sole reason for existence, their sole source of pleasure (if they can be said to desire or experience pleasure at all) lies in carrying out Skynet's merciless, murderous dictates. The Terminators are out to kill the human race--and they do so with perfect efficiency.

It makes me want to ask: this is what we long to become? This is our evolution as a species? This is the end of human life?

On second thought, I guess it might be.