THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Space Opera

So, right, spaceships.

I like writing about spaceships. Not every science fiction story involving spaceships is space opera, of course--which, in my idiosyncratic definition, is often playful with language, frenetic, fecundly huge in galactic scope--but let's just say that my grips on the nuts and bolts of Actual Science are, um, tenuous. I don't really write science fiction to speculate on science, except when the science intersects with larger philosophical ideas. In this sense, space opera is the ultimate sandbox of non-realism. It exists in a vacuum. Not strangeness (though there is that!), then, as much as estrangement--from breathable oxygen, from homes, from the familiar. Put real people in the equivalent of a sardine can, unmoor from the real, and see what happens. What happens is the devastating feminist critique of James Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" What happens is the unhinged feline-human symbiosis of Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon." (It's hard not to fall in love with sentences like "The Partners rode their tiny craft, no larger than footballs, outside the spaceships.") 

Still, one might argue, one can write about identity, sexual politics, in many a setting. Why in space? With bad writing, this sandbox is a mighty uninteresting graveyard. With good writing, however, and an attention to character, the landscape--or rather, the lack of landscape--can add an adventurous texture to the narrative. (I wonder if this is the same dynamic that was going on in 19th and early 20th century maritime fiction--and doubtless someone smarter has already explored this link.)

So even though none of my space opera made it into the collection (the flow between stories, perhaps; or wanting to collect all of the space opera together at some point), it's still part of the fabric of what I write. Questions find different ways to be written, and characters--often with conflicting or contradictory questions--are going to stumble around trying to answer them. Any time. Any place.

Finally, I think that, in the course of pushing oneself, it can be very helpful to court embarrassment. (Does Battlestar Gallactica change this dynamic? I'm not sure. Maybe.) That is to say, if what you write about seems, on one level, spectacularly ridiculous to you, and yet still sparks your prose wildly onward, you might be onto something. And, really, there are few things more absurd than faster-than-light travel.

Our Byzantium

I’ve always loved--loved--the Ron Carlson story “What We Were Trying To Do. You may have heard it on NPR, too. It’s about the first people under siege who tried to pour oil on the invading forces: they don’t heat the oil, everyone gets slippery and messy but the invasion continues. The lesson: next time, we’ll use boiling oil…

Alan DeNiro’s “Our Byzantium” is not purely silly the way Carlson’s story is, but it has that perfect pitch deadpan. I was hooked from the first line: “In your absence, the Byzantines infiltrate our city.”

The story goes on with a double plot-line: one plot trying to figure out how it came to be that the Byzantines are invading at all (did they escape the fall of Constantinople [in 1453, DeNiro helpfully “reminds” us] and lie dormant in the hills of Eastern Pennsylvania for centuries?) and one plot about how “you” left Eastern Pennsylvania, driving all the way out west to Pittsburgh to visit “Todd.”

Alone, either plot might be fine. The Byzantium plot could be a good, funny story, akin to Carlson’s. The story about how the narrator tries to figure out why he is more attracted to the elusive and unavailable “you” than to the present, kind, and pretty Jerilynn (who has her own unavailable object of desire) might have been a sweet tale about our fickle hearts.

Together, they are magical, poignant, and, because of the constant threat of violence from marauding Byzantines, not too sentimental.

And then, there is this lovely moment near the end. “Yeats had it wrong,” DeNiro writes. “This is a country for old men.” I love a nice allusion and when a buried one emerges and enriches, well, then I’m doubly pleased.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees--
Those dying generations -- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.</blockquote>

Child Assassin

I have a really rather silly desire to see this story included in an introduction to literature anthology, one of those doorstop books of stories, poems, and plays designed for use in low-level college courses.  The desire comes not from my admiration for the story -- though I do admire it -- but from wanting to see what sorts of questions the editors would come up with.  I like stories that would be difficult to write such questions for, and this is one.  I can imagine what the questions might look like:

1. What does the title "Child Assassin" refer to?
2. Why is it significant that the protagonist does not have a name?
3. How are the other things -- "cars, books, toys, grandmothers, yachts, dogs, an eighteenth-century Persian writing desk, parakeets, anacondas, Winchester rifles, stuffed polar bears, ice-cream trucks, oboes, a ten-acre field of marijuana, and so on" -- are "babies" that the protagonist also kills.
4. Discuss the final paragraph.  Is it a metaphor?
5. Explain how these questions reveal nothing about the experience of reading this story.

Again and again we hear that the best fiction, the best poetry, the best music, the best this-that-or-another-thing is best because it cannot be summed up or reduced to anything other than what it is.  "If I could have said it differently, I would have," the creator claims.  Maybe I'm cynical (maybe?!), but often I wonder if this is really the case, or if the truth isn't something closer to: "Look, I've only got certain talents.  If I could dance, I would have put these impulses into a dance.  But I can't dance.  I'm a carpenter, so I built a house instead of dancing."

But with a story like "Child Assassin", I cannot come up with any way to describe it that encompasses all the story is.  I don't know how to reduce it to something other than its own particular expression.  And many of its particular expressions are quite wonderful, for instance: "The tremors of their voices were on the furthest edge of comprehension, resembling the speech of minor earthquakes or lichen cellular growth."  I love that sentence.  The first part is familiar from many other stories and books, but the second part goes off in a direction few other writers would even notice, never mind head toward.

The structure of the story is interesting, too.  It begins by offering a character -- a guy who kills babies -- and details the ins and outs of his job and life.  Then it offers a complication -- a long-lost daughter of his own.  The complication develops complications.  This is where many writers might end, creating a trick ending, a reversal, a peripeteia.  But no.  The complication doesn't lead to just desserts or the return of order to the universe, nor purgation of any sort.  No, it leads to a weirder ending, a world of junk and refuse and trash.  The logic is the logic of dreams and nightmares, the logic of vision and hallucination.  It opens the story out to be something more than what it seemed to be, though what that something is each reader must decide on their own.  It also sends us back to think about the things the first parts of the story echo -- the old noir movies, the spy stories, the tales of clever criminals, lost children, tricks and traps.  We are brought into a story that is strange, yes, but that seems to have the contours of something familar: we have been brought up to admire the professionalism of assassins, been trained to see them as something other than murderers and reprobates, psychopaths.  We know they might not do the most savory things, but what they do they do with style and elan, with special knowledge and cool codes.  Even if they kill babies of all sorts.  Even if...

Which is just a roundabout and not very precise way of saying the last pages are up to a lot, and the last paragraph, which states so little and implies so much, comes awfully close to perfection.

Three Questions

Here are my answers to the questions from the comments of my last post...

Hey Alan,

What are your opinions on writers being pigeonholed into specific categories? By chance, have you seen the Best American Fantasy collection? If so, what do you think of it?

Dan

I think the pigeonholing can sometimes happen, to an extent, as part of an end product with a finished book. But for me, good writing always transcends demographics. During the writing process itself, I try not to worry about category--sometimes there are specific tropes that I like a story or novel to snake around and get inside of, but those are permeable. There's this quote from the poet C.D. Wright that I've always loved: "We are indispensable to one another. We keep the language machine going. Often in different directions at once. And the behavior of language is such that parallel concerns and sympathies are available to serious practitioners on many levels, at any point in space and time--the formal, the inventive, the revelatory, the message plane itself." I think this is the best way to ensure that writing doesn't become a kind of lifestyle accoutrement.

I haven't read the Best American Fantasy yet, but am really psyched to pick it up, probably at Wiscon. The wide range of venues that the stories were taken from is simply astounding.

*

Hey Alan -- Since you're going to talk about poetry anyway, I'd like to hear about whether your poetry and your fiction intersect and how. Do you work on them at the same time? How is writing each a different process (or is it)? And that sort of bizness. --Gwenda

I almost never work on fiction and poetry at the same time, though over the years the two have been drawn together much more closely, so that (in my mind) there's less of a barrier between the two. For a long time it was my poetry (since that was what I received my MFA in, and what most of my "training"/reading was in) influencing my fiction, but in the last couple of years I've found myself in a place where my fiction has been influencing my poetry more. I'm not sure exactly how, necessarily. In the long poem that I've been working on called The Stations, I have these interspersed prose-poemy/New Sentence-like prose sections...those are definitely coming from the kind of syntactical leaps that are bread and butter in science fiction and other forms of fabulism. So I've been finding ways to let them influence each other and for the most part they play nice. For this new story I'm working on, I have been writing ghazals that are interspersed throughout the story, that provide kind of a (okay, cryptic) metacommentary on the narrative at large. I'm not entirely sure whether I'm going to keep them or not in the final draft but the ghazals have been definitely useful in figuring out what's important and what's not important in the story.

Alan, you've written for Rain Taxi and maybe other book reviews. How is the book review situation in the Twin Cities and are people worried that about it? (a la the Atlanta paper etc. losing pages and editors.) --Gavin

I don't know if I'm the best person to answer this; I don't really read either Sunday paper in town. I do like the book coverage in City Pages. I feel really lucky to be able to write for Rain Taxi, and to live in the same town where it's based; they do a fantastic job bringing writers of all stripes to the Twin Cities to read and interact with readers. I do agree with what a lot of people say: that the cuts in book coverage have more to do with newspapers in general than books in general.

If I Leap

I thought it would be easy, writing about "If I Leap".  It's not.  I don't know what to say.  (I feel stuck to the ground.) 

When we were discussing who wanted to write about which story or stories, I said without hesitation, "If I Leap!", though the reasons weren't entirely clear to me at the time -- it's not really my favorite story in the book (but then, which is? depends on my mood), nor do I think it's the most impressive or innovative or, well, anything.  I'm just fond of it.  It's like that interesting relative you always enjoy seeing at family get-togethers -- not the one making the most money or the one with the most beautiful hair or the one who'll get a Nobel next year, but the one you can sit down and talk with and laugh with, the one you might call in the middle of a really bad night and say, "Hey, I need to talk," and they wouldn't threaten to commit you, and they wouldn't hang up.  The one who understands you, and you understand.

(So that's an extended metaphor for something, but I'm not entirely sure what.  Call it a leap.)

The narrative elements of "If I Leap" are simple enough: a boy, a girl, tall buildings.  An Eastern Orthodox priest who makes toothpick crucifixes.  The sky.  These elements coalesce (or co-exist) into a story that's familiar enough in its general movement -- the boy and girl are attracted to each other, fall in love, face obstacles, have to separate, sacrifice -- and off-kilter in its details: the boy jumps off one building after another with apparent ease, bleeds blue blood, predicts catastrophes, and says he's the sky; the girl believes him and becomes like him; the Eastern Orthodox priest gives away his toothpick crucifixes, though there are fewer and fewer passersby.

I'm fond of the familiar parts of "If I Leap", being the sucker that I am for such stories, which makes me fonder still of the details, the flourishes that off the kilter.  Perhaps that's all there is to it.  But there might be more, too.

Because look at the sentences, and how they juxtapose.  This is the sort of thing amateur writers are told not to do, because there's no rules about how it can work, and the only sure thing is you need a spark of genius to pull it off:

One day, while watching him fall, she realizes that her life has been incredibly unhappy.  The velocity of his descent doesn't change, yet she can see him in mindless, excruciating detail, like a slow close up.  She stands up from the picnic table, body awash with sadness.  Looking more closely, she sees that Chicken Little closes his eyes when he falls, a slight smile, his tawny hair whipping. 

The good-bye girl realizes he's in ecstasy.  She drills him about this later, not about why he doesn't die when he hits the pavement (and at the same time she doesn't want to know, she doesn't want to know).  He gives a bright easy laugh.  His body is lean and taut, and the yellow jumpsuit is almost baggy draped over his narrow bones.

"You flatter me," he says. "Nothing makes me happier than falling, nothing."

See what's happening there?  Some of the sentences don't line up.  They don't flow together.  They don't lead logically one into the other.  Why does watching him fall make her realize her life has been incredibly unhappy?  The next sentence is a collection of new details.  The next sentence adds movement and brings us back to the sadness.  The paragraph is a montage.  (How does she look closer?  How does she see his eyes?)

The next paragraph moves us forward on the assumption that we've put the pieces together ourselves.  (And no, we don't know why she's the good-bye girl.  She was in the beginning of the story, and she is so here.  It's just the way it is.  Nomenclature is another story.)  The second sentence of the second paragraph moves us forward in time, suggesting a god-like, or at least well-informed, narrator and a story that has completed some, if not all, of its parts.  The parenthetical statement, lovely in its rhythm, tells us something more about the girl, and opens once again the question the story leaves for us to deal with on our own: why, why, why?  (Motivation is so over-rated.  Motivation is so psychologically reductive even as it attempts to be psychologically astute.  Motivation is an illusion created by storytellers too enamored of the word because.  Why do you do the things you do?  Do we really have to care?)

The dialogue in the third paragraph is a bit of a puzzle.  We have to make the montage leaps to get it all.  We have to figure out the questions asked for ourselves.  Form and content are not separable, but are made of the same things -- words -- and here the words make the reader do what the words tell us the characters do: leap.  That it isn't very difficult is half the wonder here.

Go on now.  Give it a try.  This is a light and lovely story.  Enjoy it.  Don't let gravity get you down.

Greetings

Hi folks, Alan here. First off I just want to say/reiterate that I'm thrilled to be part of the "LBC experience." Thanks for the opportunity to blog here, and for putting together a really fascinating, diverse list of books for every season (literally and figuratively). I'm also really excited to pick up Mark's and Marshall's books--my book is in fine, fine company this spring.

Ultimately, without getting too corny, I want the rest of this week to be more about you, the reader, than me, the writer. Yeah, you! Sit up straight! (Just kidding.) For me, the LBC, and lit-blogging in general--for which LBC is a common square--is a celebration of books and their readers, in all of their manifestations. So I guess I want to ask--what do you all want to talk about? What floats your boat? By the way, this doesn't mean that it has to be a whitewashed experience. Say, if there were certain stories in the book you didn't like, and see criticisms as part of an ongoing process, by all means, throw them out there. No one is expected to like everything; the world would be a pretty drab place if that were so. Books, with any luck, elicit passions, and those aren't so neatly contained or codified.   

For sure, I'm going to blog about two subjects in the upcoming days: (1) space opera, and (2) poetry. Or...something along those lines as starting points. I wanted to think of ways in which the collection intersect with other modes that I write within (or against), and how different writing traditions, at times, combust with each other, even if it's not readily apparent on the page.

Thanks again, be well, and keep reading.

My Two Cents

I would thank Pinky for introducing me to Alan Deniro's work, but I'm lucky. I came across this book last year and devoured the stories. I reread it for this round of the Read This! and found it just as delightful. I have two favorites in the collection and I'd be hard-pressed to say which I prefer over the other. They're so different, yet it's obvious the same person wrote both (one of the reasons I like Deniro's work).

The first story is called The Caliber. In short, it's about a high school senior Shelby whose uncle is put on the FBI's second tier most wanted list because of his cult. Her uncle Jalen has been mailing her a postcard a month, so the FBI station an agent with her. The story pertains to the complicated relationship between Shelby and her unnamed FBI agent. He becomes her protector and friend. He even helps her with her homework. I loved these lines: "And inside the body-Shelby, there would be mind-Shelby and heart-Shelby,  not exactly friends...The agent's eyes were steady, somehow unjudging and unapocalyptic. Unagented."

The second story Quiver has a similar setting, but the plot seems so different and has touches of humor. Iris witnesses a stick-up at the Quik-Mart one Sunday by a guy using a antique crossbow. "And yet he had well-groomed fingernails. Dainty, soft fingertips had he. She didn't think this observation was of any forensic value; it was no crime to have nice hands while committing a crime." Iris seems hardened and enured to disappointment. Her husband left her after Jesus told him to get an English degree after all. She tries to track down the thief herself and ends up winging him with a rock. I'm not going to tell about the rest, because that will spoil the pleasure of reading this fine story. I'll just say that it involves time travel and a fire.

The common point to both stories are main characters Iris and Shelby. Even though they're twenty years or so apart, they both have this '"I've seen it all, especially how stupid people can be" attitude. I really enjoyed reading them over again, picking up the subtle nuances each time.

The Centaur, From Skinny Dipping

The back cover of Alan DeNiro's "Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead" promises a story in which "a man loses his leg in a war, and a field doctor sews on a fairy tale leg in its place."  Opening this book, I immediately began hunting for this story, maybe because I just had to see how the author would make it work.  The story turns out to be called "The Centaur", and it opens with a realistic scene of battle trauma in which the lead character does indeed receive a fairy tale in place of a lost leg, and then slips into a dream where he is reunited happily with his wife in fields where "sheep at bright golden barley, and men in hobbyhorse costumes played jaunty songs on flutes."

He then wakes up, discovers that his phantom leg has fallen asleep, and also discovers that the battle is moving on and that the army's medical personnel is leaving him behind.  All of this barely breaks the placid surface of deadpan weirdness that characterizes Alan DeNiro's prose, which another member of the Litblog Co-op recently compared to that of hippie surrealist Richard Brautigan in a conversation about this book.  As with Brautigan, you can scour the unhinged imagery for meaning, if you like.   Or you can just let it all wash over you, and let the strangeness sink in. 

Me & Mr. De

I won't pretend to be objective about Alan DeNiro -- I've been writing about his work from the early days of my blog The Mumpsimus.  I wrote about his marvelous story "Tetrarchs" (not included in Skinny Dipping) and praised "A Keeper" to the skies when it first appeared.  I interviewed him.  I invited him to be part of a symposium on "speculative poetry" that I edited.  Eventually, I even got to meet him.  And now we're in a movie together.

Naturally, I think Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead is an extraordinary book -- a book of skilled weirdness, visionary pleasures, unpretentious intelligence, and other abstract terms.

But right now what I want to do is share some of my favorite quotes from Mr. DeNiro's lesser-known works...

Neither a borrower nor a blender be.
--Appliances: A Novel in Prose

A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the wind's will is a boy's will,
And boys break wind, then wind the
Will till windy boys fall down the hill.
--Tongue-Twisters for the Doomed

In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except misquotation and lack of humor.  And that the stuff in the back of the refrigerator is probably scary.  Which won't stop Cousin Joey from eating it.  And getting sick.  Again.
--Old Proverbs Revised and Made Only Slightly Less Irrelevant to Today's Post-Industrial Society

My appendix is a lonely hunter.
--Home Surgery: A Metaphorical Handbook

A writer should never write about the extraordinary.  That is for the journalist.
--Alan DeNiro's Book of Least Favorite Quotes from James Joyce

Interviewy Goodness Pt. 1

Gavin at Small Beer Press has made a short video featuring Mr. DeNiro that you should check out -- not least for the grinning countenance of one Matthew Cheney.