The Modernist's Babel

.

The Modernist's Babel

God was the first to go, followed closely by Man.  We inherited a corpus of Western art that sprang from Medieval piety, overgrown with Renaissance sincerity, and was quickly overgrown with the Baroque and the Rococo.  All that baggage!  It got in the way of what we wanted to do.

We despised it, we discredited it, we destroyed it.

The pointless surface of a Vermeer, a Rembrandt, even a Dali  -- who could respect it?  Oh, some of our earlier members, our Picassos, our Klees, our Miros, suffered from an excess of technique.  But we were patient and they died and our work could continue its inexorable march toward simplification.  We got rid of that idiot fixation on beauty.  We got rid of the decoration and elaboration.  We reduced art to its quiddity.

Bruegel's Tower of Babel was re-imagined first as a collage, then as a line, and finally as a sheet of untouched white paper.

And on the seventh day we rested.

But then came Postmodernism, with its parody and pastiche and -- worst of all -- its rediscovery of representation.  One by one, all the elements we freed fine art from are returning.  Unmediated imagery.  Craft.  Prettiness.

Imagine our disgust.  Imagine our pain.  So must the ghost of Attila look now upon Europe and what has been done to his legacy:  All his work undone. 

 All that beautiful desolation no more.

4/30/08 12:45-12:55 p.m.

*

Afternotes

Yes, I know how unfair the above is -- I'm a big fan of the high modernists, though not of what their movement eventually devolved into.  But one of my notebook sketches of Babel was a collage, and this is the story it suggested. 

I didn't have the time to write anything polished (I'm running a little late today), so I just jotted down the above first draft, directly onto the post.  I may revisit and revise it, if I ever find the time.

And the latest poet on Poem du Jour is Shakespeare.  You can read it here.  Tomorrow, Lewis Carroll.  Not one of the the ones you expect.

*

Poem du Jour Redux Again

.

The Poem du Jour is up and running, and I've just posted the Tuesday poem. Those who are interested can check it out here.

*

Always Cut the Opening Page(s)

.

I went to Gregory Frost's reading at Philly Fantastic last Friday -- he was promoting Shadowbridge, which is why Thomas Thiemeyer's wonderful cover image is posted above -- and afterwards consulted with him about a story that had been giving me trouble. The story was "Libertarian Russia" (and, yes, I know that's a contradiction in terms -- it's a science fiction story), and the advice he gave me was, essentially, "Cut the first page."

Now, whenever I teach Clarion (West, South, or Classic Coke), I find the commonest error made by new writers is to start writing well before the story begins. Usually I can cut anywhere from one to eight pages right off the top. So it was a surprise to discover that, after more than a quarter-century as a published writer, I'd done it again.

Here's the opening I had to cut:

He left Moscow at dawn, rush hour traffic heavy around him and the sun a golden dazzle in the smog. American jazz saxophone played in his head, smooth and cool. Charlie Parker. He hunched low over his motorcycle and when a traffic cop gestured him to the shoulder with a languid wave of his white baton for a random ID check, Victor popped a wheelie and flipped him the finger. Then he opened up the throttle and slalomed away, back and forth across four lanes of madly honking traffic.

In the rearview mirror, he saw the cop glaring after him, taking a mental snapshot of his license plate. If he ever returned to Moscow, he’d be in a world of trouble. Every cop in the city – and Moscow had more flavors of cops than anywhere – would have his number and a good idea of what he looked like.

Fuck that. Victor was never coming back.

Three years was enough.

Outside the city, the roads got better as they passed through the gated communities where the rich huddled inside well-guarded architectural fantasies and then dwindled to neglect and disrepair before finally turning to dirt. That was when, laughing wildly, he tore off his helmet and flung it away, into the air, into the weeds, into the past . . .

He was home now. He was free.

He was in Libertarian Russia.


A lot of work went into that opening. It began with my last morning in Moscow and the drive to the airport with the sun in my eyes and jazz on the radio, incorporated observations I'd made there, and had a few hidden science fictiony bits that wouldn't become obvious until later in the story. I was very fond of that page.

Nevertheless, it had to go. That's the first lesson you learn as a writer: You have to be ruthless with your own prose.

I include it here because the thirty-fourth or -seventh lesson you learn it: Never waste anything.


Day Three of Poem du Jour Held Captive . . .

There's no news yet. I'll let you know when there is.


And for those of you who listen to podcasts . . .


Paul Cole of WRFR radio is podcasting "A Small Room in Koboldtown" in two parts. The first half has been uploaded and can be found here.

*

Poem du Jour Redux

.

TZ writes of my other, newly launched blog Poem Du Jour:

"This blog is under review due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations and is open to authors only"



That sounds ominous. Will the patient live?

I just got that message myself when I went to make my Saturday posting. It was generated by robots because they'd automatically determined that my blog "has characteristics of a spam blog."

I think that means the poetry.

A lot of spam does of course contain poetry in an attempt to fool spam filters, and I'm guessing that quoting "The Windhover" in full automatically identifies you as spam nowadays. So Gresham's Law apparently applies to language as well as currency!

The automated system assures me that a human being will look at the blog within four business days, at which point I see no reason why anybody could object to what I posted.

*

Poem du Jour

.

Okay, I am now completely and officially mad. I have created a second blog -- and it's about poetry!

Here's the story:

Several years ago, my son Sean complained that, despite having graduated from Central High (which periodically swaps the distinction of being the best public high school on the East Coast with Boston Latin), he had no familiarity with poetry whatsoever. So I began to email him a poem a day, along with a few helpful comments about things that might not be obvious to the untutored. The intent was to demonstrate that there's nothing mysterious of intimidating about poetry -- it's just words.

Really, really good words.

After a while, some of Sean's friends asked if they could receive the emails as well, creating a de facto listserv of five to eight recipients. Most of those emails have been long lost, but my friend Benjamin Davis recently uncovered a cache of them, to which I was able to add a few of my own. Marianne and Sean both thought I should turn them into a blog. To be perfectly frank, I thought they were nuts. But, as I frequently tell Marianne, "I am the most obedient of husbands."

I don't know why she snorts so derisively when I say that.

Anyway, I'll be posting one letter every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. These posts are not in any sense systematic. But if you're interested, I've started the blog with the first five surviving letters at poemdujour.blogspot.com.

And in perfectly unrelated news . . .

I made it onto the Locus Awards Finalists list twice . . . Once for Short Story ("A Small Room in Koboldtown"), where I'm up against Peter S. Beagle, Stephen Baxter, Elizabeth Bear, and Ken MacLeod, and once for Collection (THE DOG SAID BOW-WOW) where I'm up against Jack Vance, Cory Doctorow, Howard Waldrop, and Connie Willis.

I mention the competition so that, should I lose, you'll understand why. That's a pretty damned distinguished lot! It feels great to belong among them.

You can check it out here.

*

The Secret Rules (number one in an occasional series)

.

Reading over the comments about my recent appearance at Robin's Book Store, I realized that there's a lot of lore that all us Old Hands know, but which has never been written down.  I like to think of them as the Secret Rules.  So, from time to time, as the thought occurs to me, I'm going to put them into print.  Here's the first, and a useful one it is too:

If the people on a panel outnumber the audience, they are allowed to adjourn the panel, audience and all, to a table in the bar, where the panel will be held as an informal discussion.

There is no hard-and-fast rule on who pays for the drinks.

*

The Funniest Thing Since Waiting for Godot

.

Today's post has nothing to do with fantasy, science fiction, or even me.  But my son turned me on to Garfield Minus Garfield, and I had to share.

The site's intro says it all:  "Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrnia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?"

And who would have guessed that Garfield could be made funny?

*