inconsequentialia

State of the Blog Report

2012-02-14T10:58:00.001-08:00

When I started this blog a little over a year ago I committed myself to uphold three precepts:

1) Entries will in topic conform to my whim,
2) they will in production avoid excessive effort, and
3) they will require no more than five minutes to read.

Looking back on what I've done here so far, I believe I've done well with #1, but have increasingly lost sight of #2 and #3. This is par for the course for me. Just about every "low commitment" creative enterprise I've ever undertaken has followed a similar route—more effort creeps in as I try to improve the thing, and eventually it becomes a burden and I give it up. In recent months I've often thought about dashing off a quick entry here only to hesitate when I deemed the quality of the thing too low to publish. And I've been sitting on some ideas, not posting them because I don't think they're sufficiently developed.

Do you know this quote from Samuel Beckett: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

It is one of my favorite quotes ever (second only to Goethe's "Without haste—without rest."). And so I resolve! herewith! to realign myself with the original intent of this project. However, I also want to feel free to put more effort into something if it really seems worth it. What I'm hoping for is a more inclusive approach that includes short, undeveloped entries like this one but also incredible entries like Anna Karenina.

Therefore let it be known that on this day of 2012 I added the following, fourth, precept to my blog inconsequentialia:

4) unless I decide otherwise.

Liveblogging Star Trek

2012-02-07T12:56:00.000-08:00

I was obsessed with Star Trek as a kid in the late '70s when it was in its syndication loop. I could turn on the TV and know instantly which episode was playing. Now I'm returning to the show for the purposes of liveblogging an episode. I procured Season Two from my local library, and shall now commence!

Here we go—the DVD menu is taking me in . . .

Wow—the bridge of the Starship Enterprise! Yes!—just like old times! Kirk and Bones are talking about how much it sucks to be hosting a bunch of dignitaries. Sounds like it does suck. More are arriving even now on the shuttle. Cut to shuttle bay—bunch of security forces are there and the orchestra plays “danger music.” Who's going to emerge from the shuttle? The orchestra switches to “ennui music.” A vulcan gets out. When he greets Spock, there's tension. This guy is Spock’s dad. I totally remember this episode. Okay, fade to commercial ...

Fade in: The opening credits! Man, does this ever make me feel nostalgic! I remember Sunday summertime evenings, the sun streaming through the basement windows... “to seek out new life, new civilizations... to boldly go..." The music is so great!

... but... hold on a sec? Because this does not seem quite right?

This is not the same as before! Look—that planet flying by, there—that's not right! THAT IS A COMPUTER GENERATED PLANET NOT FROM 1967!?—

OMG, they redid this whole sequence with computers and re-recorded the music! I can't believe—this is not happening so much that Igm frekajging trieu!!! My childhood...! Lost! All lost!

[weeps, head in hands.]

Okay—back to the episode. “Captain’s log, blah blah..." The plot finally thickens—there’s a stowaway! Security! Captain’s log! The explication related through the captain’s log is too boring to transcribe. Basically, these ambassadors could start kicking the shit out of each other at any moment. There's a brief example of this provided in the form of "pigman vs. antennaman," slugging it out in the cantina.

More plot: there’s a spaceship out there. Spock peers into his bluelight gizmo. I —whao, hold on: where is that lady’s pants? She should be taken to the brig because there's no way that is okay. Yet, no one seems to notice ...? I wonder if it’s some kind of alien mind control making it so no one can tell she has no pants. Surely this will be important later, but for now, back to the ambassadors—pigman makes trouble with Spock’s dad. Then, one scene later, pigman's dead! “Security to captain Kirk—pigman’s dead.”

Fade out for for ad.

Fade in: Spock’s dad is the prime suspect in the pigman slaying. They confront him. “Where were you while you were killing pigman ..." This is the flabby middle of the show. We all know Spock Senior is innocent. Oh, but he collapses—some kind of geriatric Vulcanic health issue!

Meanwhile, on the bridge, where is her pants? Still, no one notices ... I’m starting to think that this is not an alien mind-control thing? That this ... is ... her actual uniform. Women’s uniform is "no pants" on Enterprise! Good god, how could Space Control Command do such a thing? To think that I watched this show as a kid and never even gave this a second thought.

But then—knife fight! It's Kirk vs. antennaman. I predict victory for Kirk, and am quickly proved correct. But he's injured, faints ...

This episode is really long. Has it only been thirty-five minutes? Spock’s in command now, but he's also got to give his dad a blood transfusion.

Spock: "Mom, I’m in charge of this ship now."
Mom: "But what about your Dad, Spock?"
Spock: "Ugh."

That was me saying "ugh," actually, not Spock. I’ve got to fast forward this a little... sorry ... bzzzzz ...

NOW THE SPACE WAR SCENE: Gah, everything is computer generated. I cannot tell you how depressing this is. Why would they do this? It's awful! As if the only thing keeping people from watching these is that there’s no computer animation? It’s totally disrespectful towards the work that got put into the original show. Like professionals didn’t sweat over their spaceships in 1967.

Okay, whew, it's finally over. Happy ending, and a good laugh about how when you get into Dr. McCoy’s sick bay, you don’t leave without permission! (har-de-har, oboe and clarinet.)

With the end credits, the intense feeling of nostalgia for sunny Sunday evenings of my childhood returns. Watching TV as a kid. That whole deal. The beautiful childhood times, my Trinitron TV set on the painted red table.

And... ruined by these damn computer bullshits! Not only is my childhood lost but I cannot even see how it is lost because they changed everything! The days—the days! My—salad—days!

[weeps, head in hands.]

Literary Counterparts! - Eco and Juster

2012-01-26T09:08:00.000-08:00

[[Let me say in these red double brackets that I really do try to make this a good blog! If someone ever says to you, "I sure wish I had just one more blog to read each week," I hope you'll recommend this one. Thank you!]]

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A few weeks ago I found two hardcovers in a local thrift store that I wanted to read. I bought them, read them, and had the following idea: Every month I shall buy two hardcovers from a local thrift store and compare them! You know how in The New Yorker when they review two books they always a find a connection that allows the author to make a pleasingly deft transition from one to the other? Such as "Gladwell's thesis on the relationship between the internecine strife of monarch butterflies and the cult of American celebrity may seem a far cry from Romanesque sewage systems, but ..." I want to do something like that. When I was in college one of my instructors held classes called "Literary Counterparts," in which two books were compared. Here's my inaugural effort.

The thrifted hardcovers for January are Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth!

FIRST SENTENCE

The books initially seem very different from one another.

Tollbooth: "There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always."

Rose: "On August 16, 1968, I was handed a book written by a certain Abbe Vallet, Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, tradui en francais d'apres l'edition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de l'Abbaye de la Source, Paris, 1842)."

And yet—I shall prove through my rhetorically deft The New Yorkerish circumlocutions that these two books are one and the same!

DESIGN

First of all, both have as their endpages maps of the narrative's geography. The map at the beginning is the map of where you'll go, and the map at the end is the map of where you've been. Same map:

STYLE

I skipped a few pages in both of these books when I encountered passages of profuse detail that didn't forward the plot. Both Juster and Eco take occasional refuge in the capacity of lists to house endless desultory inventions. In Tollbooth, I skipped where too many Demons of Ignorance are described, and I skipped a similar passage in Rose featuring too many Demons of Bible. One nice thing about Rose is Eco's admission (through his narrator):

"The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wonderful hypotypsis. But I must come to the subject of our discussion..."

Another observation I'll make about lists as storage facilities for authorial digression: they're easy to skip if you aren't interested.

METAPHOR

Tollbooth: Winding road
Rose: Winding labyrinth

Knowledge/wisdom is the MacGuffin of both books (if you don't know that term, take the time to follow my link to Wikipedia and before long you'll be using it all the time)—it is secreted away, and must be found. In Rose, it is hidden in a (SPOILER) secret room at the center of a labyrinth. In Tollbooth, it is imprisoned in a (SPOILER) floating castle. In both cases, the protagonist doesn't know he's looking for it at first and only learns what's up as things progress.

In both books, also, the adventure hinges on an attempt to preserve knowledge/wisdom in the face of barbarian threats from without (weird monsters in Tollbooth and the pope/emperor in Rose), and bureaucratic threats from within (weird monsters in Tollbooth and monks in Rose).

A FINAL INTERESTING SIMILARITY

The physical production of words is important in both books. In Rose, the monks labor all day copying books in the scriptorium, a very prosaic sort of occupation full of longsuffering frowns. In Tollbooth, Milo visits similar production facilities for things like sounds, letters, and numbers—identical in their way to what's going on in a medieval scriptorium. See how the two books are starting to get confused with one another to the point where you can't tell which is which?

I won't say how the books end, but let me just hint that they end identically. You could swap out the last twenty pages of each and not even know the difference.

Thank you for reading LITERARY COUNTERPARTS!

UPCOMING IN FEBRUARY

G.K. Chesterton's The Innocence of Father Brown
Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune

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One last thing—when I'm done with the two books for each month, I'll inscribe them as having been used for LITERARY COUNTERPARTS, and then I will re-donate them to a local thrift store.

"Neither rain, nor sleet ..."

2012-01-17T09:55:00.000-08:00

I shall now write an opinion-oriented blog post, one which props its claims upon an insubstantial foundation of anecdote and pathos! Witness:

Framing Paragraph
It snowed here in Seattle this week, and Anne and I and our friend Robb walked around on the hill where we live, and my thoughts resulted in AN OPINION.

I.
I worked for ten years as a faculty-member at an art college here in Seattle, and during that time the school almost always stayed open during storms.

I remember one time it snowed in the morning, melted in the afternoon, and in the night turned the entire hill—the entire city, in fact—into a giant sheet of ice, on top of which landed more snow. I had a morning class, and got up at about 5:30. I looked online and saw that the school was open. I couldn't believe it! "All right," I thought. "Let's do this." I got on my bike and rode to school along the empty streets. It was ridiculous—the craziest ice ride I've ever taken. I fell many times. Once, I tipped over on a steep street and my bike fell on top of me, and the two of us slid together for almost a block before stopping in a snow drift. (Actually, it was a fun ride.)

At school, four of my twenty-five students showed up—the four who lived in the apartment building across the street from campus. After class I wrote an angry letter to the school for encouraging students to travel during a snow event, especially considering that ours is a commuter campus, and driving that day would have been dangerous.

II.
Last year when Seattle had a snowstorm the city decided it was going to use only sand, and no salt, on the roads. Because here is the thing about using salt on Seattle roads: it turns into salty water and floods into the bay, changing the salinity there and killing ocean life.

But Seattleites freaked out! About how their cars slid! And the city was wrong about "salmon over people policies"! Kerfuffle!

III. OPINION
You know that slogan of the US Postal service, "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"? I think we should retire that and just take a break when it snows in Seattle. We have usually less than five days per year with snow here, and it is a very hilly city! Is it so bad to just go sledding, build snowpeople, and drink a beer on those days?

Not including essential services, of course. If there's a power outage at the hospital I think that should get fixed. And probably other things too, which will inevitably result in a big argument about what's "essential," and I suppose lots of different things are essential to different people. Kerfuffle! Also in these economic times (and generally) not everyone can afford to miss work, even for a day, so people who need the money, also, should probably... and... my whole opinion is stupid?

But! School should have totally been canceled that morning when my bike and I slid prone into a snowdrift. And "salmon over people policies" are important these days given how our "people over salmon policies" of the past century have nearly extincted a species that's indispensable to our ecosystem. Do you know how much public art in Seattle features salmon? You cannot walk a block here without seeing a sculpture of a salmon. Salmon sculptures are an ecosystem unto themselves in Seattle! Then we salt the roads, kill the fish, and commission more salmon sculptures.

Also: "Oaks may fall, when reeds withstand the storm." Maybe if we're willing to change our habits a bit instead of barreling through no-matter-what, we'll end up better off in the long run. Maybe even if everything is essential to someone and no one can afford to miss work—maybe we could still encourage a general attitude that is a little more accommodating? Here is my idea for a revised slogan that feels more realistically responsive to the dynamisms of seasonal change:

"Snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night will stay Seattlites from the swift completion of their appointed rounds—with the exception of essential services and in cases where missing work would cause undue hardship, but anyway why can't we at least try to create a culture that's capable of gracefully adapting to the unexpected without feeling like everything will fall to pieces unless we move heaven and earth to avoid even the smallest deviation in our schedules?"

Let me know what you think of that one, Seattle City Council! I think it could be good!

I Will Publish A Book This Fall!

2012-01-02T19:08:00.000-08:00

I would like to announce that I will publish a book this fall.

When I sold The Wikkeling to Running Press in 2010, there was a really long editorial process—over a year and a half (understandable if you've seen the beautiful edition they produced). My agent, the excellent Jenni Ferrari-Adler at Brick House, suggested that I keep myself busy in the meantime by working on something else, so I started a new book. It took a little over a year, and considerable revision, to complete.

I recall that it was a Wednesday when Jenni sent it out to a few publishers. Two days later, we had an offer. Over the next week, we got two more. We ultimately chose Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; I signed the contract; and now that book is in the midst of its own editorial process, which will culminate this fall in the publication of The Wrap-Up List.

High Concept: The Wrap-Up List is about a young woman, Gabriela, who gets a letter from Death telling her he's coming for her in a week. During that time, she has to wrap up her life and, if she can, figure out a way to trick him.

I mention this now because I'll be writing about it on and off this year as it comes closer to publication in the fall. It will be a "recurring theme" in my blog this year, but hopefully not a "monomania," because I have room for only one monomania: THE MAKING OF STAMPS! You may be tired of hearing me write about making stamps, but I do not care, because it is my "monomania!" Here is a stamp I made recently for my wife Anne, for possible use as a business card. It features a cormorant flying between the letter A and the musical note A. Because Anne does both writing and music. And because A is the first letter of both Anne and And!

One of My New Years' Resolutions

2011-12-26T13:18:00.000-08:00

I'm going to tell you one of my New Year's resolutions. I have eight resolutions at present, but I'm just going to tell you this one so at the end of 2012 you'll know if I accomplished it.

Because I'm a writer it might seem reasonable that I'd have a New Years' resolution like "I should write more." But I write a lot. I write for three solid hours, six days a week, whether I'm feeling good or terrible. I am utterly ruthless about forcing myself to do it. That's how books get written, after all.

But once those books are out there, what happens? This is what I'm poor at. When The Wikkeling came out this year, it got some good reviews (and has been nominated as one of Booklist's 2012 Best Books For Young Adults). But it was not a bestseller. I think I could have done more, except I am bad at promotion. And I don't mean this as a cloaked self-compliment, as in, "O! All true writers are destined to live apart from the thrall, alone in their lofty chapels of the mind!" I just mean that I am bad at promotion, and promotion is an important part of bookwriting. Not only am I bad at promotion, though—I am terrible at it. Let me pen for you a brief illustration of this, taken from my personal history.

When I was in my last year of grad school a fellow student approached me and said, "Are you new here this year?"

"No, I am in my second year," I replied.

"Someone told me that, but I didn't believe them," she said. "Dude—no one in this whole place knows who you are."

"I am kind of a hermit," I said.

"Well a lot of people here say that they are hermits," she mused, "but you really are! You are the real thing!"

And you know what? I NEVER TALKED TO THIS PERSON AGAIN!

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So, here is the resolution I made for this year. It is specific because I'm better at meeting specific goals.

It is hereby Resolved that I will get 1,000 people to like my Facebook page in 2012.

I know that looks ridiculous! But there it is. I will stand by it, and look ridiculous standing here. Further generalized, this goal would be: "I will make better use of social media this year." I understand that these new media outlets are important ways of telling people what I'm doing. It's not about bragging or being that annoying guy who won't shut up about himself. So I am going to do this! #Everyday! #Rain-or-shine! I signed up with Twitter and Goodreads, too, and I have an Amazon Author Page.

(PS as of today, 297 people like my Facebook Page.)

Ten Books I Read This Year

2011-12-13T15:47:00.000-08:00

Here are ten books I read this year, offered in an end-of-the-year sort of spirit. Most of these books were not published this year. This is just the year I read them. This is about me—about my perspective!

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Tove Jansson - Moominland Midwinter
What a beautiful book! There are images in here I will never forget. Here's what happens when poor Moomintroll tries to ski: "Nothing was up anymore, and nothing was down. Nothing existed but snow and misery and disaster everywhere." Also: in the 1970s there was a stop animation moomin show created for Polish TV. This is one of the greatest videos I have ever watched on YouTube.

George Orwell - The Essays of George Orwell
One thing I like about Orwell is that he's so scrupulous about identifying his own biases. He avoids excesses of both thought and language. Because of this, when he says something especially intense it really makes you think, such as "The greatest threat to Western civilisation is the decline in the belief of the immortality of the soul." (That's a paraphrase, but he does say something like that! Huh. I need to think about it.)

James Baldwin - Go Tell It On The Mountain
I could never write something like this. Baldwin displays such patience with a character who is so utterly revolting. . . I would probably have some other character stab him through the heart with a crucifix, but Baldwin sets up shop in this man's head and makes such a careful examination of what's in there, it's fascinating. It must have been hell to write.

Mark Bitman - How To Cook Everything
Last year I made a New Years' resolution to cook all of the soups in the soup section of this book. November of this year rolled around and I had not cooked a single soup. . . which means I am presently cooking a soup a day, almost! North African Lamb Soup was especially good. And I learned (not from this book, but from the Internet) that in the US "lamb" doesn't mean "baby sheep." It just means "sheep."

Me - The Wikkeling
Perhaps it's silly to put my own book on this list, but I did read it and by god I've been trying to accomplish this for thirty years!

M.T. Anderson - Feed
I found out about this book because people compared my book to it. Anderson mines some of the same themes as The Wikkeling with regard to advertising culture, but he tunnels much deeper and then the tunnel floods and everyone is killed but the canary. And yet you laugh, because it's very funny at times. There's a scene that takes place at a store called "Bun in a Barrow" where you get a giant hot cross bun served in a wheelbarrow.

Ralph Ellison - The Invisible Man
It's true, I had never read this. One of the many triumphs of Invisible Man is Ellison's ability to use images to develop themes. At times this technique is so strong that the book takes on a surreal quality. In this sense, it reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Maybe that's a dumb comparison, serving only to illustrate how little context I have to digest this. Oh well—so be it!

Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
It's true, I had never read this, either. You were probably thinking I would review 1Q84. I'm disappointed in myself. This is the most disappointing part of this whole post. Nonetheless, let me say about the similarity to the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Bertram Levy - American Fiddle Styles for the Anglo Concertina
How many books did you read this year about the Anglo concertina? Exactly. Nobody is writing books about this. But if you play Anglo concertina I would highly recommend Levy's new book, which has a focus on crossrow playing and some very interesting ideas about harmony.

Ursula Le Guin - Gifts, Voices, and Powers
These are three books comprising Le Guin's latest trilogy for young people. Book one is very good, and books two and three are better still. Generally speaking I don't read more than the first book of a trilogy. Even if I like the first book, I just don't persevere. But I did this time. The last book, Powers, earned the Newbery Medal.

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In conclusion, the complete list of just about everything I take in is still scrupulously maintained by me at my userspace at the Seattle Public Library!

The Claw Wheel: An Essay About Art

2011-12-09T11:00:00.001-08:00

My parents recently moved into a smaller home, and I've ended up taking a few things they were getting rid of. One such was a picture I made when I was about seven years old. The story of the creation of this picture is the story of my first artistic crisis of confidence.

It is a “glue picture,” which was, I think, a common '70s-era gradeschool craft project. You pencil in a design and then trace your lines with a drizzle of glue. Once the glue is dry you rub over the picture with a black crayon and then iron it, melting the crayon and creating a dramatic image.

Our teacher told us to draw fish. I produced what I thought was a decent example. My fish had a body, fins, and a head and a tail. It looked kind of like this:

Admittedly I cannot now be sure which end was the head, but I was excited about my fish and spent several minutes meticulously covering it with scales. Then I looked at the kid next to me. I don’t remember this guy very well other than that I was a little afraid of him. He was older, a raw sort who might punch you. When I saw his picture, I was amazed. It looked kind of like this:

Basically, it was not a fish—it was a wheel of claws. It had no body parts other than claws. No head, no tail. No fins. It was utterly of claws. I think I had never until that moment encountered a more refined conception of total violence. The high degree to which I was shocked and fascinated by it is attested to by the fact that I remember it so clearly thirty years later.

When I looked again at my dum little fish I saw that it would be instantly annihilated by such a thing as the claw wheel. And that revealed something about me as a person—that I was a fool!

The glue was getting passed around, and students were using it to trace their pencil lines. I had only a moment to decide what to do. With a last furtive glance at the claw wheel, I made a quick adjustment and set it in stone.

There at the lower right is my clumsily appended branch of the claw wheel.

This picture hung on my parents’ wall for twenty-five years, and every time I saw it I remembered with shame that awful moment of doubt and my pathetic attempt to recover my dignity.

Last week when this picture returned into my possession, I explained its history to Anne, admitting how I'd altered my composition at the last minute because of the comparative awesomeness of the claw wheel. Anne studied the picture for a moment and then said, "Yes, but the claw looks good there."

I stared.

Could it be? Impossible! But yet . . . it had never occurred to me to consider the claw as a legitimate revision, knowing as I did the shameful inner turmoil that led me to place it there.

But maybe it does look good?

But how? And what is art? And why—and —and—

BEHOLD THE GLORY OF THE CLAW WHEEL

I Read at the KCLS "Mock Newbery"

2011-12-04T11:26:00.001-08:00

I learned recently that my book has been nominated for the King County Library System "Mock-Newbery," in which young people in King County vote on the book they'd select for the Newbery Medal if they were the Newbery Committee. Since I live in King County (here in the great state of Washington State), they contacted me to ask if I'd read for a group of forty 6th graders.

Anne and I showed up at the KCLS Service Center in Issaquah to hear a lively debate among the kids as to which book should be the winner. We were greeted at the door by a friendly librarian who said, "It's wonderful to meet you! You've been voted out already." Oh, well! I got to see the final voting sequence of the morning, between Okay For Now and A Monster Calls. It turned out to be a tie, which put everyone into a good mood. (Voting for the KCLS Mock-Newbery is still ongoing through their website. And I could still win, I think!)

I gave my talk/reading. I wasn't sure if the 6th graders were going to be interested, but they were a great audience. They had lots of questions, which I tried to answer, and I also got to hear some good ideas about how a possible sequel might go.

Afterwards, I got to thinking about an event that happened at my school when I was in about 4th grade. There was a local celebrity around here back then who was known to me as "The Storyteller" who had a Saturday morning show on our public television station. He wore a black turtle neck, and told stories, filmed in a tiny black box theater. I watched every Saturday morning. Then one day he came to my school, read a story at an all-school assembly, and talked about storytelling. After, we returned to our classrooms and did creative writing exercises. I never forgot it! I wonder if any of the kids who heard me at KCLS will remember me showing up to read and talk about writing stories. I hope some of them do. It's nice to think of being part of that generations-long chain. I do not own a black turtleneck, but perhaps I should . . . ?

I Made Stamps for My Wife's Band

2011-11-10T08:01:00.001-08:00

My wife Anne is in many great bands here in Seattle. One of them is called The Lonely Coast—it's a vocal duo that performs (among other things) lullabies from around the world. I decided to make a stamp for them and this is the story!

Step 1 - Procure Beer and Apple
This is a Black Apple grown in Washington, and a Harar Beer grown in Ethiopia. It is apple season here in Washington State. If you do not have the fortune to live in Washington State and eat the most incredible apples in the world, I'm sorry. I hope there is some great thing like apples wherever you live.

Step 2 - Trace Rubber Block
Once you've eaten the apple and drunk the beer, trace the rubber block. I know some people feel weird about tracing things because of emotional baggage from kindergarten when some kid made fun of you for tracing and you were so humiliated that you cried. But this isn't that kind of tracing—this is just drawing a boundary.

Step 3 - First Idea
Try out your first idea. Mine was a pair of clapping hands, from which I thought the words "The Lonely Coast" would emerge. I found some clapping hands online, and traced them off my computer screen. Do you trace when you do art? I trace sometimes. There's nothing wrong with it. Tracing is not "cheating," despite what some kid said once. That was a long time ago, anyway. I'm a grown man now.

Step 4 - Second Idea
It turned out that the clapping hands were too hard to trace. Actually, that was humiliating! I couldn't even trace them. I moved on to a ukulele, which I'm better at. But I've done a ukulele before, so I felt like I was repeating myself. This ukulele looks nice, though, doesn't it? I totally drew it freehand. I looked at a picture online, but I didn't trace it. Maybe. I can't remember.

Step 5 - Check The Chicken
You should always set a timer when you roast a chicken. In this case, the chicken was not quite done yet. It needs another twenty minutes.

Step 6 - Third Idea
I suddenly thought that my rubber block looked kind of like the shape of Washington State. And since this band has the word "Coast" in its name, I thought a stamp of the Washington coast would look cool. In this photo you can see me making that amid all the other ideas that didn't work out. Let me say, I've lived in Washington State almost my whole life. I didn't need to trace it, obviously. Only a total loser would have to trace their home state right off a computer screen, haha!

Step 7 - Transfer Design to Rubber Block
Using a spoon, rub the design onto the rubber block, which reverses it. An important thing to remember if your stamp includes words: backwards on the stamp = frontwards on the print.

Step 8 - Find the Rubber Gouge
I wonder where my rubber gouge is. It must be in here somewhere. (It turns out it was not in here, I discovered after going through all of this. It was elsewhere.)

Step 9 - Carve the Block

Carving a block is sort of like tracing because you go over the lines you transferred from your sketch. But it's not really tracing. IT IS RESPECTABLE

Step 10 - Print
I began with some precise prints, but I got an accidentally washed-out one that seemed better than the precise ones, so I moved in that direction. I chose green because Washington is The Evergreen State.

Here's one print that I particularly liked, for all the shades of green that ended up on it:

Thank you for reading this tale of stamps! Good luck making your own. I hope you do not have to trace anything, because I have found that tracing can bring up a lot of unexpected trauma from when Mark embarrassed me and made me cry.

I Marched for Gay Marriage in Wrocław, Poland

2011-11-02T15:34:00.000-07:00

[photos by Anne Mathews]

We'd been in Wrocław for about two days, on tour with our band, and I was enjoying the city. It was a beautiful place, presently benefiting from some EU money dedicated to sprucing up old buildings. Before showing up here, I'd thought it would seem very "foreign" to me, since the city's name contains an alphabet letter I had never seen before ("ł" sounds kind of like "w." Also, in Polish, "w" sounds kind of like "v," and "c" sounds like "ts," with the result that "Wrocław" sounds like "Vrotswahv").Wrocław is a globalized city with a Starbucks, McDonald's, and other chains in its city center as well as purveyors of good bread, venues for Indie rock bands, and some enthusiasm for the riding of motorcycles.

It was a sunny morning, and Anne and I stood in the main square drinking coffee and relaxing when some peculiar voices called out nearby. All male, judging by their timbre, the voices were aggressively shouting some kind of chant in Polish. Anne and I walked toward the commotion to see what was going on. As we approached, I saw a large group of young men wearing black and white short-sleeved T-shirts. They were marching through the square in an organized battalion, holding a banner in their midst that I couldn't make out clearly. "Soccer hooligans!" I said to Anne, in a sort of delighted way, because I had never before seen bona fide soccer hooligans amid their soccer hoolings. We pressed closer through the crowd of onlookers, and I tried to make out what sort of symbol was emblazoned on the banner held by about twenty participants. The sign was huge, but not fully in sight until a gust of wind blew it.

I drew up short as I realized what I was looking at. The banner featured an enormous, childishly rendered icon whose very clear message I shall summarize here as "NO BUTTFUCKING."

"These are skinheads," said Anne.

There were a lot of them, two hundred or more, and they continued through the square, past Starbucks and McDonald's. An onlooker informed us why this was happening: there was soon to be a march in support of marriage equality for gays and lesbians in the square, and these guys were here to beat up the marchers. I felt an awful coldness in my gut. Some of these shaven-headed kids were scrawny fifteen year olds, scarcely more athletic than saltwater taffy, but some of the older ones were solid beef, and they all shared a cold quickness of eye that suggested they were looking forward to proving something. I would like to emphasize, just to be clear, the pronounced homogeneity of this group. If you are picturing someone among these skinheads who was not an 18-20 year old white male wearing a black or white short-sleeved T-shirt, you are not envisioning them correctly. The exception that proved the rule here were three women, in black short-sleeved T-shirts, who were standing next to their 18-20 year old black or white T-shirt wearing boyfriends.

Police in riot gear flanked the group as it advanced, and the marriage equality rally soon came into view ahead. In contrast to the skinheads, the equality participants were a colorful bunch—everyone involved was holding party balloons. As we grew closer, I saw represented among the marriage rally: toddlers as young as two or three, six year olds, gawky teens, parents, grandparents, crossdressers, punk rockers, and college kids.

Anne and I stepped into this group and went up to the guy handing out the balloons. I got a blue one, Anne green. It seemed odd at first that we didn't discuss this course of action with one another. That one of us didn't say to the other, for instance, "I would like at this juncture to verify your awareness that in joining this group we are markedly increasing the chances that today's activities for us will include getting kicked in the teeth?" But the situation was clear enough that I guess such words were not necessary.

Surrounded by the society I'd picked, I looked out at the skinheads, who were now pressed against the line of police, waiting for the march to begin. And I felt afraid.

I've participated in quite a few pride marches in my hometown of Seattle. Usually some of the people in attendance are motivated by a philosophical persuasion antithetical to my own. They wave homemade signs, and sometimes they shout stuff. But in my era of such marches (which stretches back only to the late 1990s) these people are handily outnumbered. I've never felt fear at such an event. Sometimes I even feel a kind of pity for such people, who have so willfully denigrated themselves with such weak, hateful ideas. But this army of young forearms, though hateful, was not weak. I was the one who was weak, in comparison.

The march began. The marriage rally had a small drum corps, which began playing as we commenced. Remarkably, the first song they performed was an arrangement of a tune by a marching band Anne used to play with back home in Seattle. I could hardly believe it, but there it was.

The police surrounded us protectively, and the skinheads could not get through, though they boiled around the perimeter, shouting. We left the main square. An elderly couple walking next to us, who spoke English, told us that this was the third-ever march in Wrocław in support of equality for gays and lesbians. "How did the first two go?" Anne asked. I didn't hear the response, as the equality marchers began chanting at that moment, to combat the chants of the skinheads. The words were Polish, of course, so I'm not sure what they were saying, but to me it sounded like, "Ho-mo-phobia! Dulce de leche!" And I kind of like that, as a chant. Dulce de leche, you homophobes—dulce de leche.

The march entered a narrow area between two buildings, and some commotion erupted. A new group of skinheads had leaped out ahead, and pushed in. Then there was something in the air, confusion, people lunging, and I was struck lightly. I looked down at myself and found that Anne and I were both covered in egg. An odd, salty, not-eggy smell arose from the egg (a smell which I have since preferred not to think too deeply about, dear reader). More skinheads appeared from across the street, who'd been hidden behind a hedge—they apparently knew the route of the march, and had gathered in these ambushes.

In the end, the egging was as bad as it got—once the police realized that these smaller groups were lying in wait, they changed their own tactics and kept the participants separated until they naturally began to disperse and go home after the march finished. As Anne and I made ready to cross through the line of police that surrounded us, I realized I still had my balloon. I stopped. I couldn't leave while carrying it—it would be like drawing a target on myself. I gave it away to a fellow marcher, feeling a little ashamed as I did.

•

A few years ago, when I was teaching college, I often facilitated discussions in class about how oppressions can be subtle in the ways they exert influence. That's primarily what I've seen in my life—semi-sneaky nastiness that, though often very effective at forwarding an oppressive agenda, can be difficult to name. But this experience transcended such subtlety. The people involved on both sides eyed one another across a clear gulf, and no efforts were made to disguise that. Side A featured colorful balloons, men and women, babies, kids, teens, and elderly people out for a parade in support of diversity. Side B featured guys looking to kick the shit out of Side A. The odds in open combat here do not favor the balloon-holding six year old, but that's obviously the group to join. It's not a subtle choice. Instead, it's a scary one.

During the march, I saw a middle-aged man with a long, graying ponytail, who was wearing a knee-length denim dress and red pumps. Though I've now returned to Seattle, I expect he is probably still in Wrocław. I have no idea what he's doing at this moment, but I think I do know one thing about him. I think that whatever he's doing, some part of him is afraid.

Since, I've thought frequently about that event, and wondered where things are headed in Poland and other places in the world like it. If I have any short-term wish, maybe it's just this: that the ranks of weakling balloon holders will increase to such overwhelming degree that the hatreds of bigotry are driven back, into their difficult subtleties.

I Went To Albuquerque

2011-09-13T08:34:00.000-07:00

If you do not want to hear about my trip to Albuquerque, stop reading before I tell you that I decided to walk from the airport to downtown. Have you ever walked away from an airport? Airport designers do not put much thought into how this will be done. In this case I found myself on the wrong side of an eight lane thoroughfare with a dividing greenspace. I spotted a group of lunchbreaking security guards at that moment and I asked them, "How do I get across here?"

"Well, you could walk half a mile that way," said one, pointing in the direction from which I'd just come. "Or you could just jaywalk across right here," said a second. "There's never much traffic." He was right that there wasn't much traffic, and all that stood between me and the road itself was a thin metal railing about three feet high.

Always excited to participate in minor transgressions that give me an outsized feeling of my capacity for lawlessness, I experienced a sudden vim of enthusiasm for this idea. "I'll try it!" I announced to the guards. I knelt to duck quickly under the railing, but instead of going under, I apparently decided to just run straight into it? With the result that I bounced off and fell down. Now, looking back on it all, I think that would have been a good moment for me to announce to those guys that I was an author in town to read from my new book.

*

I read from The Wikkeling at an independent bookstore called Bookworks, which was a great shop in what I will call the north part of Albuquerque (all things being relative). In the audience was a little girl of about six years old, half-a-lifetime away from the age I'm actually writing for. She sat in front and listened very attentively to my entire presentation. Afterwards, when I asked if there were any questions, she raised her hand.

"Yes?" I said.
"I would like to know where you got that book," she said. "It sounds pretty good."

*

Thanks very much to Bookworks for having me, to Running Press for sending me, and to that metal railing for preventing people such as myself from foolishly jaywalking into situations that would obviously be too much for them.

I Went To Salt Lake City

2011-08-29T09:35:00.000-07:00

(José Reynaldo da Fonseca, via Wikimedia Commons)

Do you want to hear about my trip to Salt Lake City? If not, stop reading before I tell you that my cab driver from the airport was a 62 year old Slovakian man named Fikret who was to return to Slovakia in a week to spend his retirement in a house by a lake on the Austrian border. Because of this, he was PUMPED ABOUT LIFE! and he told me two stories.

Story 1: Some years ago on a trip with his wife to Slovakia a hired car appeared to take them from the airport to Fikret's son's house. Fikret's wife said, "What is this!" and Fikret said, "Yes, this is how it is." But his wife said, "No!" But Fikret said, "What are you saying? I know!" His wife said, "But I must ask him about the cost!" Fikret: "No need! I know how it is!" Fikret's Wife: "But I must know!" and to the driver: "What is the cost?" Driver: "No cost. It's paid for." Fikret: "You see how it is!" Fikret explained to me that this is exactly how it was.

Story 2: Some years ago on a trip with his wife to Slovakia a young woman had not known him, or understood him, though she thought she could, and said he could sign one set of documents or the other. Fikret said, "You could not understand me if you lived 107 years!" And then it turns out he was great friends with this young woman's boss, who gave him a hug and took him back to the office, and said, "I know you, here, here are the documents. Just sign." Fikret signed, and the young woman was greatly humbled at her lack of understanding.

At the end of our ride, Fikret offered that I should come stay with he and his wife at their house by the lake on the Austrian border if I ever am in Slovakia.

Now that we're taxi-ing through this blog post, I'll tell you two stories:

Story 1: Once while on a visit to Salt Lake City to give a reading from The Wikkeling, I visited the Salt Lake City Public Library. Did you know that at about the same time we were building this in Seattle:

they were building this in Salt Lake City:

By Bobjgalindo, via Wikimedia Commons

Seattle hired Rem Koolhaas and Salt Lake City hired Moshe Safdie. Twin architectural rock stars building simultaneous libraries! It seems like there should be a movie where these two buildings do battle with one another, then become friends and team up. I spoke with several excellent librarians there and sat in on an energetic and well attended kids' storytime. I was also impressed by the excellent merchandising of their collection, with a great "browsing" area that was kind of like a bookstore with free books. You should also know: they keep honey bees on the roof! In September they harvest the honey and give it away for free to Salt Lake City residents. You bring your own mason jar and just fill it up. [Update on 9.1.2011: SLCPL wrote to say they aren't currently giving the honey out, as they're investigating some health regulations about the practice.]

Story 2: Once while on a visit to Salt Lake City I gave a reading from The Wikkeling at The King's English Bookshop. If you live in SLC you probably know about The King's English Bookshop. But you should visit The King's English Bookshop if you haven't. It has the Five Bookstore Essentials: Old Building With Creaky Floors, Great Books, Community Involvement, Knowledgeable Staff, and Je Ne Sais Quoi. Many thanks to them for hosting a reading by some guy no one has ever heard of (me).

That is exactly how it was!

Mirror Duet

2011-08-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

Anne recently ran across a mention of Mozart's so-called "Mirror duet." It sounded interesting, so I looked it up. It's called "Der Spiegel," or "The Tabletop Duet." The sheet music is placed on a tabletop and the two performers stand on opposite sides, one beginning at the beginning (right side up), the other beginning at the end (upside down).

To put it more complicatedly, the retrograde inversion can be played simultaneously with the prime version due to the palindromic nature of the harmonic language. I looked for some commentary about the piece and found that its authorship by Mozart is unlikely (it's listed by Köchel in an appendix of commonly misattributed works). Whoever wrote it, though, it's great.

Here's a video shot from an angle that reveals how the score is used in performance.

My New Bike

2011-07-29T14:28:00.000-07:00

You may already know that some months ago I bought a folding bike. But you may not know that this week I bought another folding bike! The following photo, which I shall henceforth refer to as "figure 1" shows these two bikes folded up next to one another.

The one on the right is my original folding bike, a Dahon Speed. The one on the left is my new folding bike. It is a Brompton. It was made in England by English craftspeople. See how the Dahon, folded up, looks like a mistaken mess? But the Brompton folds into a nice neat owl pellet! That is the magic of English engineering.

Some of you may have noticed that in Figure 1, the Brompton appears as though it may be pink in color. This issue is more fully considered in the following picture, referred to henceforth as "figure 2":

The line between "toy" and "not toy"

2011-07-25T16:59:00.000-07:00

This last weekend, Anne and I traveled to the fair city of Anacortes, WA to attend "Shipwreck Day," which is a citywide garage sale now in its 31st year. I thought to buy myself a pair of shoes, but I ended up buying an accordion?! I have a small accordion that I play in The Toy Boats, but had been kind of on the lookout for one with a few more buttons on the button side. My present one isn't fully chromatic. It has no B, no F#, no G#, and no C#. At shipwreck day I saw an accordion, and it looked a lot like my present one. On closer inspection, it was exactly like my present one, only it had a B, F#, G#, and C#, as well as a few extra keys on the keyboard side.

Of course, for this to work, it still has to look like a toy because The Toy Boats plays toys. Below is a picture of my old "clearly-a-toy" accordion, alongside my newer, "possibly-not-a-toy?" accordion. I worry that I have crossed the line. The blurry cat head in the foreground is Otis, preparing to deliver her opinion in the matter.

Book Versus Movie II: Stuart Little

2011-07-01T14:48:00.000-07:00

When I read books, especially kids' books, one thing I hope for is an encounter with a narrative turn that's different from my expectation. In a world as saturated with storytelling as ours, if something is nonstandard there's probably a reason for it, otherwise it would be replicated everywhere. Stuart Little contained two such moments, and these were my two favorite parts of the book. In both cases I thought, "There's no way it will be like this in the movie."

The first thing is simply this: Stuart Little is the mouse-son of human parents. To be clear: he is the biological mouse son of a human mother. He is not her nephew. He was not fetched from an orphanage or delivered by a stork. He sprang forth in natural mammalian glory! The book treats this so well, I can only quote the doctor's reaction as penned by White:

"The doctor liked Stuart very much and said that it was very unusual for an American family to have a mouse."

The second thing is the ending of the book. Stuart gets a magic car that can turn invisible, and he goes hunting for his friend, a bird named Margalo, who has flown away. He thinks maybe he's going to have to look for her for a long time. He starts driving, and sees a man repairing some telephone lines. He says "hi" to the man. They have a short conversation. Stuart keeps on driving. The end!

It was so well crafted. So much has happened to Stuart at this point, and he metaphorically carries it all with him as he disappears around a bend in the road. I loved it.

3. The Movie

Armed with my curiosity over these two elements, I set about watching the 100-million-dollar movie Stuart Little, starring a computer-generated Stuart voiced by Michael J. Fox, who moves through the paces of M. Night Shymalan's screenplay.

Opening scene: The parents go to the adoption agency, and they adopt Stuart. As it played, I shouted, "This scene gets an F-minus! Stuart is not adopted! Rather, he is flung forth with all gusto from the healthy American loins of his human mother!"

Before I could complete my invective, however, the movie hulked moronically on. The scenes following that Bowdlerized genesis proved so saccharine, so treacly, they were perhaps about as bad as treacle made with saccharine would be. I started feeling kind of gross, and then I realized that the movie was so awful that it was giving me a brain embolism! I went off . . . to another world . . .

When I returned, it was as if I had somehow advanced my DVD player to the very end of the movie, which was a great mercy for which I have given thanks continually since. Here we have Stuart engaged in an epic battle with an evil cat. There are two cats—a good cat and a bad cat. The good cat is white and the bad cat is black! Stuart The White Mouse and his friend The White Cat battle The Evil Black Cat and eject him in a computer generated pratfall from a lofty tree into a degenerate puddle, defeating him. White Stuart and the White Cat return home to such a triumphant violence of orchestrabonanza that my embolism came back. I slipped away . . . .

(In that other world, Stuart climbed into his magic motorcar and drove on to find his friend.)

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Book vs. Movie!

2011-06-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

Last week my book The Wikkeling came out, and I wanted to mention that here, on this blog, as I decide that one of the emerging functions of this thing is to record such. I gave a reading at Elliott Bay Booksellers here in Seattle. There was a Q&A after, during which I told one person that I felt the answer I provided had not lived up the excellence of her question, but otherwise I think it went okay? Now The Wikkeling is out in the world, and I am wondering, having given it this sendoff, what it will go on to do, if anything.

Of more immediate importance (though perhaps less important in the long view): yesterday I read Voyage of the Dawn Treader in the morning and then watched the new Disney version in the evening.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was my favorite Narnia book when I was a kid. I have since grown tepid about Lewis for most of the same reasons people usually grow tepid about him. Reading the book yesterday, though, I was struck by those moments that struck me as a kid--particularly the last fifty or so pages, devoted to the Dawn Treader's arrival at the very end of the world. The sea gets glassy and the sailors can see the very bottom. The ocean becomes fresh water. They cruise over an endless field of white lilies . . . it's really great. Magical and still.

The movie had a budget of $140-million, and a considerable portion of that was used on special effects (Wikipedia tells me). So it's interesting to note that the movie is utterly devoid of magic! This is an example, I think, of both cosmic irony and comic irony. Of course I was especially interested in how the filmmakers would treat the ending, since it was my favorite part.

Throughout, there was considerable plot revision, sometimes to good effect, but only sometimes. In a nutshell: the wandering, subtextually-didactic meander of the book is turned into a threat-filled, Sturm und Drang swashbuckle against a Satanic green fog. So slavish is the movie's adherence to the apocalyptic nightmare quest that it struck me as more "Christian" (in the neofundamentalist sense) than the book. Lewis himself seems moderate by comparison. But the restart contrived here doesn't really seem the point. All of this meddling appears aimed not at producing the refined-sugar of an unambiguous moral, or even at producing a more high-stakes pulsepounder. It seems aimed, rather, at contriving center-stage opportunities for special effects.

CGI generally looks like CGI to me, often to such degree that I have difficulty processing scenes that contain a lot of it. Reepicheep the mouse looks like he's been beamed in from some other movie. ReepiMuppet would have kicked ass over DigiReep. I just cannot trust DigiReep. Uncanny Valley, bla bla bla. But worse than my confounding sense of the alien is the wholesale reorientation of a narrative to forward the best interests of the special effects department (I know I'm singing in a mass chorus here, sorry . . . ). Case in point: the beautiful, silent, still climax of Lewis' book has been turned into a chomping epic battle with a disgusting sea serpant. The serpent is like nothing described in the book (it is not even like the sea serpent in the book). It is an enormous, slimy, glistening booger decocted from a pot of pure fleshgross. Repulsive fleshgrossness. A big oily extrusion of fleshgross. Worth noting is that the first CGI I ever saw in a movie was the 1989 film The Abyss--it was a length of glistening watery phallus.

That's still basically where we're at, I guess. I'm sure there are many administrative and creative currents at work in producing a $140-million movie. I can't imagine, really. But I can confidently say that the magic I loved in this book as a kid, that calm, mysterious magic at the end of the world, has been very precisely removed from the movie, replaced by a ropy clot of deliquescing sickup.

The Final Episode

2011-06-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

The final episode of The Wikkeling will be broadcast Friday, June 10, 8-9pm at www.hollowearthradio.org. The guest musician for this episode is Oakland-based percussionist Nick Tamburro, joined by a few of his students from the San Francisco Rock Project! Here's a short sneak preview.

I'll be reading at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle:

Friday, June 17 at 7pm.

Facebook event page.

Episode Three!

2011-06-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

The "Always Darkest Before the Dawn" episode of The Wikkeling will be broadcast Friday, June 3, 8-9pm at www.hollowearthradio.org. The guest musician for this episode is Seattle-based sound designer Robb Kunz. Here's a short sneak preview.

I'll be reading at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle:

Friday, June 17 at 7pm.

Facebook event page.

The Tagger Came Back!

2011-05-31T12:35:00.000-07:00

I was riding my bike the other day on a forgotten stretch of bike path, and ran across an unusually nice-looking tag. I stopped to look at it, and noticed that there were two versions--one old and faded, the other new. The tagger came back! It's interesting to see how the tag changed. I'll let you know if a third version ever appears.

Episode Two!

2011-05-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

Episode Two of The Wikkeling will be broadcast Friday, May 27, 8-9pm at www.hollowearthradio.org. The guest musician is Seattle-based composer and pianist Tiflin. Here's a short sneak preview.

The Wikkeling on Hollow Earth Radio!

Fridays at 8pm, May 20 and 27, June 3 and 10.

I'll be reading at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle:

Friday, June 17 at 7pm.

Facebook event page.

Episode One!

2011-05-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

Episode One of The Wikkeling will be broadcast Friday, May 20, 8-9pm at www.hollowearthradio.org (that's tomorrow night from my position in the timestream this morning). The guest musician for this episode is Seattle-based instrument builder and percussionist Paul Kikuchi. Here's a sneak preview, if you're interested in sneak previews!

The Wikkeling on Hollow Earth Radio!

Fridays at 8pm, May 20 and 27, June 3 and 10.

Facebook event page

I'll be reading at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle:

Friday, June 17 at 7pm.

Facebook event page.

I Have The Book

2011-05-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

I got home on the afternoon of Friday the 13th after working with Robb for some hours putting together the music tracks for the broadcasts of The Wikkeling, to find a package on the doorstep. Inside the package was my book.

Friday the 13th, 2011!

It actually comes with that bow on it. How great is that! I think it's great, and unlike the average YA book I see at the store, which is even very considerably better than great (a statement that may cost me my membership in the Guild of Stoic Bloggers).

This book has been determinedly creeping along now for nearly five years. Back in August 2006 the title I typed at the top of my very first brainstorm session was "PKD04—teennovel." PKD stands for Philip K. Dick. A friend of mine told me that when Dick decided to start writing novels, he knew he needed to practice first, so he wrote twelve test books (none ever published). I decided to do the same, and titled my attempts PKD01, PKD02, PKD03 . . . The Wikkeling was "04," and I ended up sticking with it instead of moving on to "05," which was to be an experimental novel based on the plot of the song "Frosty the Snowman" ( I'll let you know if I ever get to that one).

I've been trying to write stories for thirty years! It was really nice to get this in the mail.

The Wikkeling on Hollow Earth Radio!

Fridays at 8pm, May 20 and 27, June 3 and 10.

Facebook event page

I'll be reading at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle:

Friday, June 17 at 7pm.

Here's the Facebook event for that, too.

Those Stamps

2011-05-09T17:21:00.000-07:00

In case you were wondering if I ever got those stamps made into buttons:

2 for $5, exclusively wherever The Toy Boats are playing!

Broadcasting The Wikkeling: Step Five

2011-05-06T08:50:00.000-07:00

Step Five: Tell People

As I've mentioned before, marketing isn't my strong suit. If you had a deck of cards with five suits instead of four, and the symbol of the fifth suit was "moldy cake," and the value of the cards in that suit were all zero, and if you held any single moldy cake card in your hand it rendered the rest of the hand worthless, that's a reasonable analogy for my marketing skills. And I don't mean this in an I-am-above-such-trivial-concerns sort of way. I am the king of the moldy cake suit (that king is pictured stabbing himself in the head with a slice of moldy cake).

It is therefore my incredible good fortune to have had such great help on the marketing end with the book and the upcoming broadcasts. The book has benefited from solid, consistent attention from my publisher Running Press. They've sent it all over the place, gotten blurbs, reviews, sent me to San Diego to attend the American Library Association conference, et cetera. School Library Journal published a review last week: "Arntson has created a detailed and fascinating dystopian world that seems eerily similar to our own, and Terrazzini’s illustrations strike just the right note. This delightfully creepy tale will appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline."

The broadcasts have benefited from Anne making a wonderfully nice PR sheet, and getting email addresses of over fifty members of the local media to send it to (let me know if you know anyone you think should have it):

I also asked designer-extraordinaire Neda Dokic if she would employ her mad skills toward creating a poster . . .

I hope you do not find yourself ever holding any cards from the moldy cake suit. And please let anyone know who might be interested:

The Wikkeling on Hollow Earth Radio!

Friday, May 20 at 8pm,
Friday, May 27 at 8pm,
Friday, June 3 at 8pm, and
Friday, June 10 at 8pm.

Facebook it if you are on Facebook.

I Dreamed About Unicorns and Dragons

2011-05-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamed that, of my four baby green dragons, only one was willing to help me work in my garden. Normally I don't dream about dragons, and this dream would have come as somewhat of a surprise except that I was prepared for it by what I dreamed the night before. That dream was of a shopfront sign, like a flashing neon sign. I drew it for Anne when I told her about it:

The line of unicorns comes out of the clouds on the right side, circles below, and re-enters the clouds on the left side. Meanwhile, the clouds are raining melted butter down on the backs of the unicorns.

The Wikkeling Broadcast: Step Four

2011-04-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

Step Four: Guest Musicians

As the broadcast idea continued to develop, Anne suggested finding guest musicians to do music. I brainstormed the best people I could think of, asked them, and they all said yes! (That kind of luck can't hold out forever, but I'm enjoying it while it lasts.)

Episode One: Paul Kikuchi

Paul is an instrument maker, percussionist, and performer. He's the proprietor of Prefecture Records, whose recent Open Graves LP features haunting improvisations performed in a pitch dark, two million-gallon underground cistern on the Kitsap Peninsula. Recently, he and some friends performed at Seattle's Union Station:

Episode Two: Tiffany Lin (AKA Tiflin)

I've seen Tiffany perform Debussy, as well as prepared piano works by John Cage. I've seen her play "the piano monster" a massive wheeled contraption that grinds on piano strings. I've seen her play instruments engineered from salvaged parts of Craigslisted pianos. I've seen her accompany a 1920s-era science film about the gestation of a salamander, performing on a thriftstore Casio keyboard.

Episode Three: Robb Kunz

Robb Kunz is known to hide homemade speakers up in trees, speakers which rotate around on hubs salvaged from bicycle wheels and receive broadcasts from hacked ipods of sounds he's collected from all over the world. Robb once created an installation in downtown Seattle called We Are Here to Disrupt, Disrupt, Disrupt, DISRUPT. It involved a giant ring of speakers emitting sounds of anarchist marching band performances in Europe. Robb is the Jim Rockford of sound design.

Episode Four: Nick Tamburro
Nick is the drummer for one of my favorite rock bands, The Dead Science. He's toured and played with more acts than I could name. He was the first drummer I ever saw who used a bag of corn chips as a serious part of a drum kit. He presently teaches drumming in San Francisco at the super-incredible San Francisco Rock Project.

(Nick is the one in the bonnet.)

What the Albums Looked Like

2011-04-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

I've written about it before, but I've been buying some old LPs from various regional Goodwill stores. Here's pictures of a few interesting things I've run across.

1) Excellent placement of the owner's name and address sticker.

2) A lot of the records I buy have the owner's contact info affixed. This pair of 45s came from the (apparently) separate collections of two people who shared both an address and a surname.

3) This album was owned by an individual I've dubbed "The Underliner."

The Underliner interacted with every part of this cover. Even the marketing copy was considered:

4) This album is labeled with a Braille label-maker, both on the slipcover and on the LP itself.

This last one was particularly interesting, as I had never heard a recording of a carillon before. I shall immediately remove the following MP3 if requested to do so by the copyright holder, but I thought you might also be interested. The carillon is the heaviest instrument in the world--some of them weigh over 100 tons.

The Wikkeling Broadcast: Step Three

2011-04-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

Step Three: Theme Song!

The Wikkeling begins with a poem that I'd always imagined as a song, so I asked Anne if she'd compose a musical version that could be used as the theme song to the four broadcasts. She took an excerpt of the poem and turned it instantaneously into an incredible composition, which is one of her superpowers from when she was a kid on a distant planet (She was sent to Earth when that planet exploded).

Anne is also half of a duo called The Lonely Coast, which sings repertoire from world folk traditions. (Visit their website.) The theme completed, The Lonely Coast sang it into one of Robb Kunz's microphones (I didn't ask which one, a lapse of diligence for which I heartily apologize, dear readers!). Anne has requested that I assert on her behalf that any bad singing on the song is her, and not Valerie, which compels my equally assertive counter-assertion that there is demonstrably no bad singing to be found here!

The Wikkeling on Hollow Earth Radio!

Friday, May 20 at 8pm,
Friday, May 27 at 8pm,
Friday, June 3 at 8pm, and
Friday, June 10 at 8pm.

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The Wikkeling Broadcast: Step Two

2011-04-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

Step Two: Record My Voice

To record myself reading the condensed version of The Wikkeling, I turned to the inimitable Robb Kunz for help. Over the course of two days we recorded the whole thing up in Anne's and my attic. Did you know that a plane passes over my neighborhood about once every two minutes, on the way to either Boeing Field or SeaTac Airport? It's true. Also, there are hospitals (sirens), and train tracks (whistles). Also, some little kid across the street hitting a rock with a stick. ("I think he's stopped," I said. "No way," said Robb. "Once you discover noise, there's no going back.")

Here's a footnoted photo of these attic recording sessions!

That is a squid coming out of a vase. I made it in high school, and it's the only piece of my pottery that I now possess. My masterpiece!
This is some kind of tube amp Robb has, so that my voice on the recording will have that warm, lush, full sound of yesteryear.
Our house is old, and the electrical system is all two-prong. So we've got tons of these three-prong-to-two-prong adapters sticking out of the walls. The house was built in 1907. I looked up our address in the Seattle Times Archive and found an ad for it for rent in 1909. The whole "modern" house rented for $70 or so.
Robb needed some duct tape, and I supplied this. After using it for a few moments, he said, "This duct tape is terrible. It's--hey, it's made in Italy!"

The Wikkeling on Hollow Earth Radio!

Friday, May 20 at 8pm,
Friday, May 27 at 8pm,
Friday, June 3 at 8pm, and
Friday, June 10 at 8pm.

Facebook it if you are on Facebook.

The Wikkeling Broadcast: Step One

2011-04-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

Anne and I were talking about ways I could advertise my book, which will be published in June. "Marketing" happens to be the name of the capitol city of the most powerful nation of the largest continent of the world of my incompetence, and any help I can get is greatly appreciated (plz post your ideas below). Anne suggested that perhaps I could serialize the story and broadcast it.

There's an Internet radio station here in Seattle called Hollow Earth Radio. The Toy Boats (in which I play concertina) performed recently for a fundraiser of theirs. I wrote to them to propose reading the book on their digital airwaves in four hour-long episodes. They were very enthusiastic, and the idea was officially off the ground. Then I discovered that creating an audio version of a 234-page-long novel is quite an undertaking. Hence the "Step One" aspect of this blog post, to be followed by further steps.

Step One: Create An Abridged Version.
I went through and figured out elements to delete, timed myself reading every chapter, rewrote linking segments, etc. (etc.) Here's a sample page of what the book looked like when I was finished. I cut over sixty pages of text, so there's still a good reason to buy it when it comes out (plus there are innumerable amazing illustrations)!

The Wikkeling on Hollow Earth Radio!

Friday, May 20 at 8pm,
Friday, May 27 at 8pm,
Friday, June 3 at 8pm, and
Friday, June 10 at 8pm.

Facebook it if you are on Facebook.

The Wikkeling is Preorderable (subtitle: The Destruction of My Blog)

2011-04-08T13:25:00.000-07:00

My book is getting closer to publication. It's coming out in June, and many details are starting to firm up, so I'll be writing about it more frequently. "Guy Writing About His Book" could destroy my blog, but I am that guy now:

(photo by Anne Mathews)

Months back, my publisher Running Press sent out advance copies to see if anyone would blurb it. Because The Wikkeling is my first book, a few words from more established writers could really help. I didn't know if anyone would offer . . . but it turns out that when the book comes out, there will be three great quotes on the back.

James Dashner, author of The Maze Runner trilogy: “A truly original piece of work. Swinging from funny to creepy to intriguing, it kept me enthralled throughout. I loved it.”

Sylvia Branzei, author of the Grossology series: “Fresh and edgy. Even when I wasn’t reading the book, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The Wikkeling is a middle-grade novel with the maturity to appeal to adult science fiction readers as well.”

Jacqueline West, author of The Shadows: “Skillfully written, clever, frightening, and hopeful, it is a tale that feels like a reassuring secret handshake to anyone who believes in the power of books."

I am now giving you the soft sell. "Guy Selling His Book" will surely destroy this blog, but I must do it. I am that guy.

Preorder The Wikkeling at Amazon (link) or Elliott Bay Books (link), or at your favorite retailer. I'll be reading at Elliott Bay in June if you'd like a signed copy (more on this later).

Art Garfunkel: The World That Never Was

2011-03-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

I always thought that the cover of the Simon and Garfunkel album Bridge Over Troubled Water was a humorous comment on how much taller Garfunkel is than Simon.

He is indeed much taller, but everybody knows that. It occurred to me one day that perhaps this cover had more to reveal about the pair. For instance, it is widely known that Simon for many years wore a sizable moustache. I've always wondered, as you may have as well--what if it had been Garfunkel? Looking again at the cover of Bridge Over Troubled Water, the true purpose of the image is revealed. The cover is more than a statement of the obvious--it is a peek into a World That Never Was.

On the Subject of Obsolescence

2011-03-20T00:18:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I bought some old LPs of Italian music at Value Village. The back of one of them contains the following statement:

I was sort of taken aback by the boldness of this! It got me to thinking about the concept of obsolescence. I looked up "obsolete" at Mirriam-Webster.com and found that its first known use was in 1579 (during the English Rennaissance). Maybe Shakespeare had cause to think about it. If this essay were more than just a passing fancy on my part, I would do a text analysis of the Complete Works over at Project Gutenberg to see if The Bard ever used the term "obsolete." (Actually, that ended up seeming interesting, so I did it. The word "obsolete" does not appear in the Collected Works. By contrast, the word "porpentine" occurs eight times.)

When I googled "obsolescence," I found several sites devoted to old computer systems. I searched out the first computer I ever owned, a Commodore Vic-20, and found that there's a community still interested in this machine. They have a pretty active forums site. Here's a screen shot of a game that someone resurrected recently from an old tape drive. The illusion of three-dimensionality is quite impressive if you take into account the hardware limitations.

(Just kidding about that.)

Reading about the continued interest in old Commodores makes me think that the true proof against obsolescence isn't in the technology itself, but in the capacity of the human mind to be interested in just about anything. Though I have no interest in old computers, I like old records and will probably continue buying them as long as they persist in the world and can be acquired for less than a dollar. Here's an MP3 I extracted from one of the above-mentioned LPs (which I shall remove forthwith at the request of the copyright holder, if such person exists!).

Red Westerns

2011-03-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

I had not heard of "Red Westerns" until I stumbled across one at the Seattle library. The term arises from the same premise as "Spaghetti Western," but instead of being filmed in Italy, Red Westerns were filmed in East Germany, Bulgaria, former-Yugoslavia, &c--many by a production company called DEFA studios. Anne and I saw The Sons of Great Bear. I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it was interesting. Whereas the American Western film tradition's take on "Cowboys and Indians" is pretty familiar, Red Westerns have a different approach, running sometimes contrary to expectation, sometimes parallel, and other times just going bonkers. Case in point with The Sons of Great Bear: the music! I will call it "Teutonic Morricone." It was so bizarre that at times I thought I was watching a Brecht play (i.e. substantial verfremsundeffekt)!

I Made This Poster

2011-02-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

I was asked to make a poster for an upcoming show at Arabica Lounge featuring Orkes Manohara, Chick Influenza, and The Toy Boats. You should come! It will be great.

Step One: I wanted to use cut paper, and began with a lightning bolt image which, over the course of a few drafts, turned into a seaweed clump. I drew it on white paper, put the white sheet atop a black sheet, and cut through both. See that fish swimming at the top? Doesn't look like much, but I had to trace it!

Step Two: I wrote out the show info using a brush and ink. Such brush skills as I have were earned through the discipline of years spent in a relentless siege against the nearly impregnable bulwark of my lack of talent. Because of this, I'm kind of proud of my abilities, though I know I'll never win a ribbon.

Step Three: I wanted a strip of variegation in the seaweed, and used some orange construction paper I had on hand. My cat Otis likes tearing paper, so she stopped by to give me a pointer or two.

Step Four: I moved the project onto the computer--scanned the cut paper, brushwork, and torn paper into a commercially available digital image manipulation program (you know which). I don't like working on the computer, the fun goes right out, but there are some things that are way easier, such as arranging layers. At this point I thought I was finished. I made an 8xll version, a 11x17 version, and a Web version. And then I noticed something . . . missing . . .

Step Five: Gah, I forgot to put the time. I got out the brushes and ink, wrote "5p," let it dry, scanned it in, and redid the 8x11, the 11x17, and the Web version. I make a mistake like that every time I ever do anything. Here's the final poster!

Hope to see you at the show! "5p," as it says.

SPL LPs! The Vinyl Collection of the Seattle Public Library

2011-02-22T09:37:00.000-08:00

I went to pick up a CD I had on hold last week at the library to discover it was not a CD, but a record. This got me to thinking: how many records does SPL have? A search for "LP" at SPL.org revealed approximately 700. This is my report on those 700 disks.

Generally speaking, the collection includes classical music (50%), 20th century classical (20%), world folk traditions (20%) and other stuff (10%). The library has neither Zep IV nor Quadrophenia on LP, but there is one Yoko Ono album and one Joan Baez album. It appears that the library stopped buying vinyl in 1989. There are 19 albums dated that year, but none after. I wonder if there's a way to find out what record was the very last one ever acquired by SPL? Maybe it was Next To You by Tammy Wynette (currently housed at the Central branch, as is the majority of the vinyl collection).

I made two lists of some of the most interesting-looking records I found. Here they are:

"Vinyl LPs" contains such highlights as Music of the Moravian Trombone Choir, Wendy Carlos' Digital Moonscapes, and Yoko Ono's It's Alright.
"More Vinyl LPs" includes Bavarian Yodeling Songs and Polkas, George Crumb's Macrokosmos Vol. 1, and Songs of the Humpback Whale.

If you live in Seattle, I hope you find some interesting records to check out. I just got The New Pennywhistle Album, and have a hold on Solidarity! Postulat 22: Songs from the new Polish Labour Movement.

A Formalist Exercise

2011-02-16T09:16:00.000-08:00

Here are two pictures. The first is of an old, iron dutch oven containing a beef roast, which my wife and I ate. The second is of an old, marble-base Kenwood record player, containing The Diminished Men's Shadow Instrumentals, which my wife and I listened to. To quote Robert Frost, "What but design of darkness to appall?--/If design govern in a thing so small." Yep, makes you think.

I Made Stamps For My Band

2011-02-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

I'm in a quartet called The Toy Boats--we play Italian cinema soundtrack music, folk tunes from a variety of world traditions, and original compositions on small and toy instruments, such as toy drum, toy piano, ukulele, and concertina. Yet we have no buttons or other merchandise! Today I decided to take a step in that direction by making some rubber stamps of the abovementioned instruments. This blog post shall tell the tale.

Step One: Get images (thank you, Wikimedia Commons). I sized them on-screen and traced them right off the computer.

Step Two: Transfer these images to rubber blocks by rubbing each one on with a spoonback. Then cut the rubber blocks with an Xacto knife or a rubber gouge.

Step 3: Roll out some ink and ink up a block.

Step 4: Put on the Yes album Yesterdays, which is a "best of" compilation they released in the mid '70s, and which includes a song titled "Astral Traveler." It takes some courage to name a song "Astral Traveler," and it also takes some courage to make stamps.

Step 5: Print!

You may be wondering about the lighting in these photos. It is sunshine--the first sun we've had in Seattle in over a week. The moment I took this last photo (below), the sun disappeared!

Thank you for reading, and good luck with your own stamps if you make them!

The Detectives

2011-02-01T09:02:00.000-08:00

Anne and I have been on an after-midnight filmic British murder mystery jag to answer the question of where one ought to turn after exhausting interest in Holmes and Poirot. Here are the results of three recent forays.

The Midsomer Murders
A friend alerted us to this long-running series with the following tepid recommendation: "It's a show." In the end what I like most about Midsomer Murders is the theme song, which employs a theremin. But the plots often fail to satisfy; some elements strain even my generally elastic credulity, and the police inspector's wife just never gets any development despite her perfectly consistent presence in every episode.

Johnathan Creek
Also scores high for theme song, which is a nice workup of Saint Saens' "Dans Macabre," known to me as a child as the "H, A, double-L, O, double-U double-E, N, spells Halloween!" song--a song so horrifying that in first grade one of my classmates fled the room in tears after hearing it. Johnathan Creek specializes in "locked room" mysteries along the lines of 'a bow tie, a puddle of water . . . .' Again, though, the mechanics are often a stretch. Additionally, the first three seasons contain some absolutely terrible writing around Creek's sidekick, with whom he is contrived to engage in romantic shenanigans so horrifying that I fled the room in tears. Season 4 is a little better.

Cadfael
Sadly, not a very good theme song here, but this is the best series Anne and I have run across. A 12th century Welsh monk solves 12th century murders. The production design is great, and there are plenty of bizarre details about life, especially monastic life, during that age. And let me say, if you like tonsures: this show earns a tonsure rating of 10/10! Some monks are proud of their tonsures, and have huge ones. Others are ashamed of them, and have teentsy-weentsy ones.

I Met Librarians

2011-01-24T10:30:00.000-08:00

Before everything that happened in the last couple weeks (see previous post) my publisher Running Press sent me to the mid-Winter American Library Association convention in San Diego to sign advance copies of The Wikkeling. Anne and I both flew down to glorious pale sunshine on palm trees. (Emblematic of San Diego: at the airport there are outdoor baggage check stations.)

The convention transpired in a massive hall filled with countless booths of publishers and producers of library-specific furnishings (such as kid-sized giraffe-themed foam chairs, high-security steel bookdrops, and carbon-neutral high-traffic carpeting). The signing was my first one ever, the books were free, and that morning I'd found one of those four-color ballpoint pens in my bag (Did you know those are made in France?). I asked everyone what color they wanted for the signature. I did a couple of 3-D effects, also, in red and blue.

I think the signing went well. There was a line of interested people, and I think I signed about sixty copies. It's strange to think that someone I don't otherwise know might be reading the book right now. I wonder if they'll like it. I wonder what they'll think of the part where---et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. . . .

Ken

2011-01-18T10:06:00.000-08:00

My father-in-law Ken died last Monday, very unexpectedly, from an aortal hemorrhage. He is survived by his wife, four daughters, two granddaughters, siblings, his mother, and many friends. We've been talking all week about who he was, and remembering him. There's no end of such recollection, but if I was to memorialize just one thing it would be Ken's quick, fluent enthusiasm, which led his life in so many directions.

He held a doctorate in psychology, and once published a book about empathy and healthcare. I didn't know him as a psychologist, though, but as a database administrator who worked for several eminent Seattle concerns, both civic and private, and who taught at local community colleges (I never knew him to have just one job). When I first met him some fourteen years ago, his driveway was full of many classic/not-so-classic cars he was restoring. During that time, he also enjoyed making stained glass windows. He studied archery, and took private archery lessons with a former Olympics medalist. He had a lifelong interest in music, and played guitar, keyboards, and drums. He enjoyed sea kayaking. His interests were so legion, I won't try to enumerate them. At his memorial service last week, my wife asked some friends to sing a song for him----a song for someone who wasn't ready to go.

Ken also loved helping people out, whether it was cramming them onto his family cell phone plan, building computers for them, or just driving to the store for a few onions for dinner. When I lost my job last year, he told me he'd give Anne and I any support he could. We've been remembering many things like that about him this past week, in a world hugely empty of him. I think it's impossible to know how fully people inhabit life until they leave it. All of Ken's pursuits and possessions, so effortlessly animated by his liveliness, are as dull as clay in his absence. They are embarrassingly incapable. As are these words.

Desultory in 2011!

2011-01-02T12:19:00.000-08:00

Writing from the rind of 2011 on a freezing, cloudless, canary-yellow day in Seattle. Anne and I have some resolutions this year. One of mine is to make every soup from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. The New Year also finds me in need of a functioning record player, unable for the moment to play my newly purchased copy of the 1963 album Tribute to Uncle Ray by (then eleven years old) Little Stevie Wonder. (Excerpt from back cover: "Though it has been said, and is admittedly true, that no one can sing these tunes like Ray Charles, it must be concluded that here Stevie does one whale of a job.")

Next week my publisher, Running Press, is sending me to the mid-Winter American Librarians Association convention in San Diego to talk about and sign advance copies of The Wikkeling. I've spent a lot of time in the last ten years talking about things as a college instructor, but I haven't spent much time talking about myself (an enduring state of affairs authored by a gestalt of genetic introversion, laconic Scandanavian heritage, NoDak self-abnegation, Lutheran stolidness, and a childhood spent wandering the suburban heath). So, I'm looking forward to the opportunity for personal growth! After, Anne and I will visit friends/relatives in the Bay Area, which I'm looking forward to. The last time I was in Berkeley I ate a kind of tomato called "dry farmed." The best tomato I have eaten in thirty-seven years on Earth.

10 Things

2010-12-28T11:23:00.000-08:00

I don't want to say these ten things are "top ten" or even "of 2010," because sometimes I'm not sure exactly when I run across things. But this is one of those kinds of lists.

Emergency Unemployment Compensation. I lost my job of the past decade this year, and am looking for work. Thank you, unemployment insurance. Without you, things would be very different for me right now.
Beef/pork roasts. My wife and I this year discovered the great merits of cooking salted and peppered beef or pork at low temperatures for long intervals in a lidded cast iron pot.
The Secret Museum of Mankind. I've known about this series of CDs for a long time, but in the last few months I've been going through attentively. Some of the most amazing music I have ever heard is to be found on these incredible disks.
The Mighty Boosh, season 3. I don't know why I feel a little embarrassed to include it, but I shall persevere and say this was one of the great pieces of comic culture I encountered this year.
The Small Faces. I spent my whole life thinking that Rod Stewart was their singer. But he wasn't!
Folding Bicycles. Fold it up and put it in a corner.
Holy Mountain. This film by Alejandro Jodorowsky is indescribable. I think there's been nothing else like it in the history of the world.
SPL Website. The Seattle Public Library has a new online catalog. You get your own user space. Here is a list I made of 1970s-era progressive rock albums!
Gifts, Voices, and Powers. I read this recent series by Ursula Le Guin this year, and enjoyed it.
The Lonely Coast. This is a new project of my wife's, a duo that performs music from world folk traditions. They'll blow up in '11, so go see them now.

Thanks for reading my list!
-Steven

Trying to Blog / The Wikkeling

2010-12-26T10:54:00.000-08:00

Trying To Blog
I have an idea to create some short entries this year, hewing to three central tenets: 1) entries will in topic conform to my whim, 2) they will in production avoid excessive effort, and 3) they will require no more than five minutes to read. Let this first sample exemplify these tenets.

The Wikkeling
I’m going to publish a young adult novel in May. It’s called The Wikkeling, and I'll probably write about it with some frequency in the coming months. The setting is a dystopic city where people are obsessed with efficiency and safety. Three children, Henrietta, Gary, and Rose, fall into an unexpected adventure as they uncover some lost facts about their world and find themselves drawn into a web of deep intrigue, featuring a mysterious cat, a secret attic, a scary creature, a dusty bestiary, and no small amount of other et cetera thrown in for good measure (and because I am a cluttered thinker). Running Press, 250 pages (give or take), and illustrated with beautiful watercolors by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini.

I’ve written about ten different summaries of the book at this point, for different purposes during the publication process, and it isn’t getting any easier. Here’s a haiku version:

Dystopic Future.
Secret attic, injured cat.
Who’s the Wikkeling?

Once, years ago, I won a haiku competition. The rules stated that all entries had to be about superheroes. Mine was:

This hero’s called God.
On the seventh day He rests.
Other days, He kills.

Actually, I tied for first place. I and my fellow poet won fifty cents each.