And I Thought I Had a Bad Year …

We are sitting here, with the end of 2016 in sight. I haven’t had the best of years, but who am I to complain? The planet has had a really miserable year.

This in itself should be something of a lesson: I am not alone.

And you, I hasten to add, can take comfort from it as well: You are not alone, either.

We have each other.

For better or worse.

If you’re reading this, I presume you are not dead. Not everyone who experienced 2016 can make that claim. Not only did many people of note expire sometime between January 1 and now; many people whose obituary would not make the major news media, but people near and dear, either to myself or to friends and family, haven’t made it to raise a glass as this year passes into the rearview landscape. Many of them died in dreadful, painful, unnecessary ways. We are poorer for their absence.

And many of our fellow humans who occupy this planet apparently have mistaken the rearview for the windshield. Reactionary forces are hard at work across the globe, on a mission to make one part of it or another “great,” and add “again” to that, because the rearview mirror is a rose-colored glass, alas.

Those who oppose the reactionaries are not without fault. Many of them followed the notion that whatever didn’t agree with their consensus was irrelevant. They believed this even with significant evidence to the contrary.

So here we are. What do we do now?

I’m not making a list. What I do suggest is that we don’t screw up as much as we did in 2016.

Did we screw up?

Take a look around.

And make no mistake, it is our screw-up. Collectively. We didn’t all screw up in the same way. Each in our own unique way, we screwed up to the point that it profits us not to look for any particular group (or even groups) upon whom to fix blame.

A bunch of suckers got conned.

A bunch of grifters worked the marks, and worked them good.

A bunch of folks who were smart enough not to get conned looked the other way or pretended that a significant number of their fellow humans would not fall for the con. Or worse: that the suckers didn’t really matter.

A bunch of folks raised on “good guys and bad guys” scenarios, figured out who the villains were and pointed their fingers at them because that’s what you’re supposed to do just before you say “Bang! You’re dead.” Except the villains didn’t always fall down.

There’s enough blame to go around.

When the suckers fall for the con, we all pay the bill. And it looks like we’ll be paying this bill off for some time. Thank goodness for installment plans and credit.

What I’ll be doing, I hope, is to redeem myself a little from my own screw ups. I want to do more of what I have been doing, with maybe a little more success. I work in that field of the arts that prides itself, rightfully or wrongfully, in looking at the world clearly and honestly, reporting back the good news, the bad news and what hasn’t been deemed news yet, if ever. We may take sides, but we do so ready to critique ignorance, hypocrisy, magical thinking and outright delusional beliefs wherever we find them, even among those on our own side.

I want to count myself among the artists with an eye on tomorrow as well as today, and one who is ready whenever the opportunity presents itself to say, “It doesn’t have to be this way! We can do better.”

I live in a nation that has never respected education. Not really. We’ve given it lip service. We confuse it with “training.” We confuse it with measurements.

We also pride ourselves in “independent thinking,” but for many of us, when we think, we’re doing so with anything but independence; and when we’re independent, we’re being so without thinking.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

I have not been a fan of the film Easy Rider. The story always seemed to me, even back in the day, when it was immensely popular, a mere excuse to go out and do some beautiful location cinematography. A product of the intensely wishful thinking of a segment of an oversized generation – an effort at creating a romantic mythology. We like doing that a lot. When reality gets pretty ugly we go looking for myths and pretend they’re realities.

But hey, a number of Roger Corman vets worked on it. It’s not so much the document of an era as a document of a state of mind. It’s not that I think it’s a bad film so much as it is a film that never really spoke to me. I was looking for another myth.

However, this year, this 2016, made me think of the film’s penultimate scene. Billy, the character played by Dennis Hopper, tells Wyatt, the character played by Peter Fonda (also known in the story as Captain America), that they had “made it.”

Wyatt stares away thoughtfully and shakes his head. “We blew it, Billy.” It’s a line I always heard as what Pauline Kael labeled “fashionably bleak.” It was hipster existentialism, a set-up for the romanticized nihilism of the ending – our heroes blown away by rednecks. A phony, forced, convenient, stacked deck of an ending.

I hear the line differently now. I hear it speaking to us in 2016, soon to be 2017. The two protagonists have been pursuing a dream of freedom by separating themselves from the rest of the world. They divorced themselves from society, even while engaging with it. They sought what another cultural antihero of the era (Gnossos, in Richard Fariña’s novel Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me) called “exemption.”

In our ways, we’ve all been on a similar journey, pursuing dreams, often without regard to the realities that surround them. We’re big on dreams in this culture. We brand them – “The American Dream” – not that we ever agree on what that dream is.

If we then become angry and dissatisfied with our fellow humans for taking their pursuit of dreams past realities, into illusions, and then straight to out-and-out delusions, we have only ourselves to blame.

In pursuit of making a dream into a reality, we sometimes find ourselves “reversing polarities,” as we say in the trade, turning reality into a dream.

Wyatt is right. We blew it. They didn’t blow it. We all put our knives in Caesar’s back.

We all, as the Three Stooges noted, in a somewhat different situation, put the yeast in.

That’s a reality we can face and move on. We blew it. We’ve blown it before. We will surely blow it again along the way. We’re capable of learning from our mistakes, at least in theory. In a reality that is already so filled with deceptions and illusions, we can at least make an effort not to deceive ourselves.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Seven-Volume Nightmare

Had a long-distance chat with the talented translator of "Orfy," and she told me about the multi-volume urban fantasy series she recently had to translate, and how seven-volume sagas are so cookie-cutter, and how translating a seven-novel series is sort of like having a job riding the amusement park roller coaster twelve times a day for six weeks. At some point the fun evaporates.

I told her I had a nightmare not long ago, where I was a character in a seven-novel series, and the author was waiting to kill me off in the seventh book. I felt like a car muffler that had been lodged loose from its moorings and dragged along below the undercarriage, scratching the pavement and generating sparks. I screamed in agony but I had five more books to go. The author kept checking on me. Apparently, he was at the wheel, driving the car, and every now and then he'd open his door, hang his head down under the car and check on me.

"How you doing down there?" he'd ask.

"AAAAAAAAAAA!"

"Okay. We still got a ways to go. Hang in there."

So his other characters had to ride from Gaukyton to Plootz City, on the other end of the continent of Spleh! They weren't taking the express route. They'd ride on and meet some splendid mage who blah-blah-blahed them until they got into a little fight with the Sploogean Army, and blah-blah-blah. And some secondary character gets killed and then there's this blah-blah-blah about "Why must we pursue this journey?" and "This is not our choice. But the fate of Sploo-jah is in our hands." And so they go on, blah-blah-blah-ing to the next mage -- or dragon, or den of ogres -- and the next Sploogeans and maybe some fair lady beckons them with blah-blah-blah and they all sit round a fire and talk about things no human would sit through straight-faced without commiting at least one act of homicide.

We are now half-way through Book Three of Splornthorn Saga.

I'm still down below, scraping the pavement, a third of me rubbed off my skeleton, the sparks setting the remaining part of me ablaze. My flames make the vehicle look like a stock car champ.

Characters who do change, but in slow motion, are killed. They get dumped out from the back. But I -- still waiting to die in Book Seven -- scrape and scream and burn.

Up above, Plootz City is still a whole blorn-thorn away. Characters don't change. They do more of the stuff they did in Book One, just further up the line. Nothing happens except what happened before, only different. Even I, still being dragged under the car, am in no different situation.

"How you doing down there?"

"AAAAAAAAAAA!"

So the heroes get to Plootz and reclaim the Sword of Bored, or whatever they came there to get . . .  and find that now they must return Gaukyton, and we're only at Book Five.

"AAAAAAAAAAA!"

I awake from the dream recognizing the great career mistakes I made as a writer. First I conceive of stories as having endings. I conceive of characters as needing to make changes. And I forestall the inevitable and do all my ass-dragging before I complete the final draft, not after. Why cut out all the boring crap and useless, meaningless moving around, when that's what you're going to have to fill Books Two through Seven with?

Had I waited, I'd have a seven-book saga on my web page, with buttons taking you directly to Amazon to purchase the next thrilling book in the series.

No wonder so many of my students tell me the first thing they want to do is write a seven-book series.

The Fate of Sploo-jah has never been more dire.

On Reading and Re-Reading

An inaugural footnote: Your patience is requested as I adjust myself to what for me will be a new mode of communication. Long have I envied the life of a blogger, but watched them all from afar. Now, I get to make all the same mistakes, and invent some new ones, I'm sure.

I'll go at this in an "I Write As I Please" format to some degree, but will probably focus on my immediate concerns these days: my writing, science fiction,  the teaching of writing, the teaching of writing science fiction, all the various related literatures, arts, cultures popular and obscure, and whatever little details intersect with these interests.

Along with those, I also plan to post some "Dispatches from Sauria" -- unless I decide to create a new blog solely devoted to the saurs and to saurian activity, most likely including the harangues of one Agnes A. Stegosaur It's always good to have someone like Agnes around. If ever I find myself short of an opinion, Agnes is only too ready to provide one. For this I feel truly blessed.

Recently, at Wiscon, I appeared on a panel, "Rereading: What Stands the Test of Time and Why?" It's a topic that seems dear to many bloggers and commentators, especially (if not exclusively) to those in the field of science fiction and fantasy.

I wrote this (somewhat edited) on the topic in the thread of one of my Facebook postings, before attending the panel:

"I don't know what "test of time" means . . . All I know is that mucho folks are digging out old tomes and filling blogs with their opinions as to why this one here is no longer relevant (relevant to what?) or that one there has been unfairly neglected (by whom?").

"I don't believe many of these commentators have an objective criterion to make their determinations -- none of them are holding judgeships in the Great Court of Literature and, when I last checked, no authors have been brought before that body to face charges of 'literary irrelevancy' anyway.

"Some of the immediate motivations for this interest in tests and time vary between spite, indignation and a need to trim down a personal library that's grown way too big to manage anymore. Maybe another motivation: a feeling that folks within our little community are checking out which books will embarrass 'the genre' if ever we achieve another modicum of literary respectability, and said books need to be stricken from the shelves, which is an even sillier (and pettier) reason than spite and indignation.

"What continues to be read by readers continues to be read because for one reason or another (even for no reason at all) these works still speak to them. In my class, "The Cold Equations" still generates intense and lively discussions, and I can't tell you how many pieces in NYRSF, essays and letters of comment alike, have tried to bury that story [And, after attending another panel at Wiscon, I can confirm that academics still cringe at the mention of "The Cold Equations" I can't tell you how thrilling and fascinating it was to watch one particular academic's face twinge into 'cringe mode' as I uttered that title. It was like reciting a magical incantation.].

"I am no fan of 'The Nine Billion Names of God,' and yet when a colleague assailed me (good-naturedly, I confess) about its continued relevancy, it being a "punchline story," as he put it, I defended it by pairing it against a more recent story [the most rewarding "Infinites" by Vandana Singh], and tried to demonstrate how the older story addresses concerns which haven't entirely disappeared in the sixty-odd years since it was first written. My opinion of the story has little to do with the conversation created between stories and readers when you put the two together.

"There's no quicker way to gather negative critical responses than by having your work chosen by the Library of America. There seem to be more people who know what LoA shouldn't publish than agree on what what it should. If I have to read one more blog entry by Joe Sourball going back to read to some personally significant work that first lured him into reading SF, and finding that it creaks and totters, I will barbecue Mr. Sourball's cat personally. I'm participating in the panel because I also find this 'test of time' business puzzling and hope to come out of it better informed about what it's all supposed to mean."

Well, that panel has been and gone, and as always happens after a panel, I couldn't really figure out what I had to say until a few weeks after. The panel itself, through no fault of its own, equipped with a capable, intelligent cast and an equally smart audience, made no further headway on the topic. At cons, panels like this often break down to the audience asking for titles to put on their "to read" (or "not to read") lists.

The one thing that's struck me, though, since attending that panel: You know that whole experience of going back to some favorite book, reading it again (or trying to read it again) and finding it somehow diminished, or lacking (for 'lack' of a better word), or otherwise not living up to one's memories of the book? Never happened to me.

Never. Not once.

Why? Am I so lacking in critical faculties? Were my tastes always so highly refined that I gravitated only toward the greatest of masterpieces? Or am I such a bottom-feeder that anything written above the level of a semi-literate ransom thrills me?

I don't think so, bottom-feeder though I may be. I think it has more to do with the way I read books. It may not be that I'm lacking in critical faculties, but that what faculties I utilize are applied to different ends.

Stating this, though, makes me pause, because it's three in the morning and I'm about to enter a labyrinth of "explanation." Let me see if I can find a quick way to explain what I mean:

The book (or story, or novelette, or poem) is itself. It's also the creative act of its author. It's also the creative act of its reader(s). The reading of the book is the summary of the time, place, author, reader -- all sorts of things along with the book itself. Each reading creates its own individual context, and each of these contexts is fascinating to me (no, not too strong a word) -- even if it's of no interest to anyone else.

I don't read books to "test" them. I read books to read them, and will take my pleasures where I find them.