This past week was hectic. We had to take our cat Poe to the vet to have three of her teeth extracted. She is recuperating nicely, but caring for her as she recovers has thrown off the daily and weekly routine. Therefore I didn’t manage to accomplish as much as I had hoped.
Reading
I am still reading through the collected interviews of Jorge Luis Borges. He is currently at the top of my list of “If you could spend a day talking to one author, living or dead.” The interviews are all excellent, but there is a notable difference the interviews where the interviewer is almost as smart as Borges, and the ones where the interviewer is nowhere near as smart as Borges. Actually, “smart” isn’t the right phrasing. “Well read” and “erudite” work better.
Writing
I am still planning what I will tackle in November, since NaNoWriMo, having both become enshittified and having shit the bed, is off the table. Probably a re-write of my novel-in-progress Cacophonous.
“Metal music festival loses headliner, multiple bands after announcing Kyle Rittenhouse as guest” (PennLive) – Four of the bands, the headliner Evergreen Terrace, along with Southpaw, Let Me Bleed and American Hollow, dropped out of the Shell Shock festival when they found out Rittenhouse was a guest. I suppose inviting an incel whose mom drove him across state lines to hunt people for sport is a bad move for a festival whose stated purpose is to support people with PTSD.
Happy Fall, y’all! We finally have some seasonally-appropriate weather. And some seasonally-appropriate animals, like this young opossum which stopped by for a visit a few days ago.
The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for October 2024 is: Ghost stories fit right in during this month. What’s your favorite classic ghostly tale? Tell us about it and why it sends chills up your spine.
Maybe it is because I have recently been reading a collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges, but the first story which came to mind when I read this month’s question was Ambrose Bierce‘s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” While not a ghost story in the traditional sense, nor supernatural in character, it is the story which most disturbed me when I first read it as a teenager. I had read many more immediately frightening stories – Jaws, the Stephen King collections, and scores of others from books and magazines of the 1980s. Those stories bothered me for days or weeks (lookin’ at YOU, The Shining!) after reading them, and caused many a sleepless night. But they eventually faded into the background radiation of the larger horrors of my childhood. Eighth grade, for instance.
But it was Bierce’s story which threw me off-kilter in the long term. In fewer than 4,000 words, Occurrence cast into doubt the entirety of my lived experience. I had no way of knowing if I was not experiencing something of the kind at any given moment. Maybe I had been hit by a car and the past week was all a hallucination as I slowly slipped off this mortal coil. Or maybe I had been crushed in the barnyard as I tried to coax recalcitrant cows into the milking parlor. I couldn’t be certain if that which felt real was actually real, or if it was some combination of dream, memory, and imagination.
[At the time, I was unaware of Samuel Johnson’s “appeal to the stone” and likely would have broken my foot trying to prove that this was, in fact the really real world, even though the pain of a broken foot is experienced by the same mechanism that tells us we are in reality in the first place, and thus this would have been a pointless experiment. Reality may not be subjective but it is often contextual.]
Like all the other scary stories of my childhood, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” slowly dissolved into the larger morass of my teenage years, leaving me with a continual sense of existential angst long before I had heard either of those words.
Then I read the story in college. And again after college. And as the 1990s became the 2000s and The Real suddenly found itself in competition with The Virtual, “An Occurrence” made its way back to the surface. People began asking interesting and uncomfortable questions about the nature of reality, consciousness, perception, and the mind. If we had a sufficiently lifelike Virtual Reality environment, could we fool someone into believing that it was the real world? And if something is indistinguishable from the real world, does it matter that it is not, in fact, real? Are we all just brains in jars hooked up to something like The Matrix? Is the entire universe really just a simulation running on a vast computer network? Barring obvious and unambiguous breaks in causality, such things are impossible to prove or disprove.
A few years ago I began reading essays by the late Mark Fisher, particularly those concerned with hauntology – the ghosts of lost futures which haunt the present. The protagonist of “An Occurrence,” Farquhar, is experiencing the ghost of his lost future in the time between when he is dropped and when the noose snaps his neck. Objectively the rest of his life lasts about a second. Subjectively it lasts several days. Which is the real future? In a sense, both and neither. For an infinite moment he is neither alive nor dead. Schrödinger’s protagonist. Solipsism and nihilism fistfight in heaven.
And that’s not even getting into the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Somewhere out there is a version of reality where Farquhar slipped the noose off of his neck and dove into the river, alongside another version where he never traveled to Owl Creek Bridge in the first place.
So to sum up, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” did a serious number on my head, and continues to do so to this day. Reality may not be real. The most useful thing we can do is choose to believe and behave as if it is.
After all, what are ghosts, but restless spirits mourning their lost futures?
In contrast with last month, September was an excellent month for short fiction. I have dozens of issues of various magazines and journals lying around my house unread, as well as probably close to 100 anthologies and short story collections awaiting my attention. Any progress is better than no progress.
[The latest, and possibly the last, harvest from our small garden this year.]
Suddenly here we are in the last week of September and the first week of Autumn. We finally have something approaching seasonal weather, though the weather we are having now would have been considered unusually hot only a decade ago. So it goes.
Reading
I have set all of my other reading aside so that I may focus on reading the collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges. I picked this book up back in June 2016 and it has been gathering dust for the past eight years.
Writing
Thought it isn’t necessarily creative writing, I did stay up late a few nights ago and write a long blog post for the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop. The post will go live on Wednesday, October 2. The question for the month was about our favorite classic ghost stories. I chose “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce. For why this was the story which most affected Young Me, check back in a couple of days.
Reading the interviews with Borges has helped me sort out a few problems in one of my longer (and older) works-in-progress. I am taking notes and rearranging a few things, noting where I can remove characters who are now extraneous and adding one or two who will be central to the revised work. Though I will not be officially participating in NaNoWriMo this year I do plan to spend much of November (and October, and December) writing, and perhaps complete a first draft by the end of the year. This will only be possible because I will be able to use more than half of the previous version essentially unchanged, or only lightly edited. And if I can’t complete a draft by December 31, I would like to have it done by the end of the Year of the Dragon.
This past week was my last week of work for the fiscal year, which ends at the end of the months. I am taking next week off in order to burn some unused vacation days and also to just…not work. I have taken some days off here and there over the preceding twelve months, but those days were filled with chores, errands, travel, and the ten thousand other things which tend to fill in the days, hours, minutes, and seconds of a day when we allow them to. Or rather, when we don’t take sufficient care to guard our down time.
Reading
For the past two weeks I have been working my way through my back issues of DreamForge magazine, to which I have had a subscription since 2019. Unfortunately I was so inundated with reading material at the time that I never got around to browsing more than a handful of stories out of any of the issues. So I am making up for lost time.
I also, on a whim, pulled down Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, and am slowly working my way through an assortment of interviews with Borges, which start in 1965 and run through 1985, the year before Borges died. I think this will lead to me pulling my down my Borges collections and reading them through the rest of the year.
Subject: Precursors, Super Powers
Setting: Labyrinth
Genre: Technothriller
Listening
Miami Vice premiered 40 years ago this past week. I can’t overstate the impact it had on my rural outsider psyche, sitting in front of the television on Friday nights all through high school.
Interesting Links
“The Subprime AI Crisis” (Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At) – It’s time to start shorting OpenAI stock.
[ Looking south down the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids. The river is exceptionally low. ]
It was another busy week here in West Michigan, as I worked through the final week of one work project and began ramping up on another. I have some vacation time coming up soon so I want to get as much off my plate as possible so my vacation can be an actual vacation, and not just a deferred workload.
The Harris/Trump debate took place this past Tuesday, and Harris absolutely mopped the floor with Trump. Trump has always been a laughing-stock and a buffoon, but he is also aggressive and a bully. To see him taken down in a venue where he can’t intimidate those around him, or fall back on the adulation of his bootlicks and coprophages, was one of the more enjoyable experiences of this election cycle. His aforementioned supporters, who are all apparently suffering from terminal boot-polish poisoning, are of course saying he won, and using racist and misogynistic attacks against Harris to back up their arguments. So things are progressing as usual.
Reading
I’ve been working my way through back issues of magazines and journals which I have accumulated over the last decade. This week I finally opened Dreamforge #2, which I received back in 2019 after helping to fund their Kickstarter.
Writing
This past week I didn’t put a lot on paper. I am taking notes for some writing projects I want to tackle during my upcoming time off, but I do not hold any illusions that my plans will go as expected.
[ The weekly harvest from our garden. Zucchini, string beans, a few varieties of tomato, and a hot pepper. ]
Well, this was another busy week. My partner had a food booth at the Eastown Street Fair on Saturday so I spent a good amount of time assisting her with preparation, setup, selling, and the tear down. All this in addition to working a 45-hour week. So not a lot happened otherwise.
Reading
I finished Fleur Jaeggy’s short story collection I Am the Brother of XX, which upon review of my LibraryThing account I saw that I had read before, but as I do not remember a single thing about this book I am going to say that I have not, in fact, read it before, and that the rating in LibraryThing was a mistake.
Writing
Per usual, my writing was confined to this blog post and a few pages in my journal. I did put in an appearance at the River City Writer’s Group, where I presented a poem along with the first draft version, and general consensus was that the first draft was the superior draft, so back to the drawing board, I guess.
[ Lake Michigan, seen from the shore at Rosy Mound Natural Area in Ottawa County, Michigan. ]
The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for September 2024 is: What’s a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?
Honestly, other than standard grammar, and oddball things like “‘I’ before ‘E’ except after C”, I don’t remember any rules which might have been sent my way that really stuck. For instance, “The first word in every line of poetry must be capitalized” was disproved the first time I read a poem written after about 1900.
The writing attitude which messed me up the most, and which still causes me some angst here in my mid-fifties, is that writing is meant to be published. The quiet parts here being “for other people to read” and “and monetized.” With such debased motivation and viewpoint, the characters in a story are no longer living, they are performing.
Here we can easily be pulled into the infinitely-regressive fractal layers of reality, simulation, imagination, dream, metaphor, nothing, Nothing, memory, wu-wei, etc., until Baudrillard and Laoze are fist-fighting in heaven.
(And don’t get me started on AI [sic].)
Writing is meant to be written. Everything else is secondary.
In August I returned to short prose for the first time since May. It is a strange consequence of having little free time or attention that I have space in my head for fractions of large stories, but not complete smaller stories. Will need to investigate and submit my notes to the Academy.
[ A colorful…something…on the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids. ]
After suffering through another heat wave and humidity spike so severe it caused the corn to sweat (which just made everything worse), we are in a brief stretch of cooler weather, and with renewed vigor fueled by a couple of nights where I managed to get more than four hours of sleep, I am taking care of All The Things!
Reading
I finished Thomas McGuane’s short story collection Gallantin Canyon, and it was most excellent! McGuane has a fine sense for creating characters and motivations, and his writing style is quite enjoyable. I would put him on my shelf between Elmore Leonard and Jim Harrison.
And I just finished the beautiful and heartbreaking Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Highly recommended to EVERYONE!
“They Don’t Make Readers Like They Used To” (Charles Stross, Antipope) – The world has changed over the past fifty years, and so has the way readers approach and appreciate fiction.
