A Retired Medical Officer from the Dutch East Indies ends up in Cambridge, 02140.

“I, who see a tragedy in every cow…”
D.H. Lawrence, Christs in the Tirol

“Maybe it all started when I found myself living without a broad in an apartment outside of Porter Square with a 65 year old MD and drinking Batavian Arrack for breakfast. Chocolate and orange peel were always in my bushwacked nostrils. Wives despised me, older daughters avoided me, and who knew what my younger wee daughter thought? I had had a heart-attack, surgery on a broken ankle; pious, self-regarding, smug, puritanical social-workers, who didn’t really know what the Salavation Army was exactly like, and who didn’t know who George Bernard Shaw was anyway, began to talk to me about walkers, crutches, shelters, and finally, canes, which are at least good defensive weapons. Other decent, thoughtful people, supporters of Cest moi to the last, came dangerously close to suggesting I get a real job. Charles Bukowski came back from beyond the grave with ants crawling upon his drunkard’s arms and said he could see me for counselling for a six-pack of Busch tall-boys an hour. I was offered a sales route as a shill for Seroquel which was a lot more money than teaching creative writing at Lesely University. I considered going for broke and specializing in 10-minute play competitions, but then realized there were a number of seasoned stallions ahead of me. I considered sperm donation, and tried waxing 30 something beaver dams, but none of these things really worked out. There were scrooge plays, translations from the German, or the Dutch, and then one day I realized I had shrunken down to a bed-post sized chipmunk , and being chased by a rabid house-cat, disapeared into the crotch of a tree.”

It is with remorse that we have received your recent concerned correspondence regarding definitions of the above as well as speculation and debate. I have addressed the issue with our entire dramaturgical staff world wide. We admit to a Coleridgian waywardness and promise to get back on the ground. I have pushed for articles, letters, definitions etc. We invite your contributions. This ongoing work will appear on our Dramaturgy: Definitions page.

Sincerely,
Christian Dietrich Grabbe
Der Zuschauer

“…Coleridge wanted to write as an opinion-former, to create a philosophical intelligensia in a new way. His work was to be deliberately elitist: exclusive and intellectually demanding. He made no apology for this. He was not producing a set of Labourers’ pocket knifes for cutting bread and cheese, but a Case of Lancets for dissecting the anatomy of a national condition. His target was what he came to call the Heresy of expediency, of short-term aims, superficial thinking; it was also the intellectual partianship of…journalism itself.”

From Richard Holmes’ Coleridge, Darker Reflections: 1804-1834

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“Oh, qui, me dis-je, bientot tout sera termine…auf!…assez nous avons vu…soixante-cinq ans et meche que peut bien vous foutre la plus pire archibombe H?…Z?…Y?…souffles!…vetilles! seulement horible ce sentiment d’avoir tant perdu tout son temps et quelles myriatonnes d”efforts pour cette hideuse satanee horde d’ alcooleux efiates laquais…misere, Madame!…”Vendez vos rancoeurs, taisez-vous”!…bigre, j’accepte!…je veux, mais a qui?…les acheteurs me boudent, il parait… ils n’aiment et n’achetnet que les auteurs presque comme eux, avec juste en plus, lesere a la couleur…chef-loufiat, chef torche-chose, leche-machin, fuitets, beni-tiers, poteaux, bidets, couperets, enveloppes…que le lecteur se retrouve, se sente un semblable, un frere, bien comprehensif, pret a tout…”

From Celine’s Nord, we apologize for the lack of accents, etc. eds. Klinger, Grabbe, Degot.

As correspondent for the Northeast Corrider, I am writing to alert playgoers of The Slutcracker: A Sexy, Freaky, Holiday Zeitgeist Spectacular, to be presented at the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square. December 10-13, 8PM, December 17-20, 8PM, and Sunday matinees on December 13th and 20th, 2PM. Come one come all.

Respectfully,
Stanley Richardson for
Der Zuschauer

(Disclaimer: I was in a particularly silly mood when I wrote this post, but thought that I would publish it anyway. After all, it is not like I have a reputation to protect )

Brilliant sunsets and rainy days,

Comfortable recliners and lazy ways,

Bourbon biscuits and long hikes,

Amongst the many things that I likes.

Gregory Peck and Gene Kelly,

Endless hours in front of the telly,

Christopher Plummer and Clint Eastwood,

Charm and wit and all that is so good.

The sound of waves and the flutter of leaves,

The flight path of birds and the pattern it weaves,

The company of books and music that rocks,

Endless conversations, debates and talks.

Knowledge of history, gossip and more,

Prince of Persia and other games galore,

Travel and road trips and cameras and bikes,

Amongst the many things that I so totally likes.

Patience dear reader, for thou shalt be blessed,

That you would have gotten so far, I never would have guessed,

Heaven’s door opened, the cosmos shall be kind,

To one who survives this assault on the mind

Dear Readers, I was water-skiing along Somerville Avenue where the current swings along the hill in Union Square when our speed-boat, and then I and the editors, Klinger, Grabbe, and Degout, all collided with several barges bearing Volga Boatmen singing Gorky songs. I was in the hospital for 49 days. Others are still recovering. We all decided to read Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, inside, and I can refute earlier reports of our demise either in Monogolia or tsunami-swept Guam Island. We are all, in our own way, trying to keep our knickers on, be they boxers, thongs, or bronze shields. I myself have left the sparrow-graced, squirrel-jumping haunts of Somerville’s Walnut Hill for a cozy and incendiary flat off Porter Square in Cambridge. We should all be back in full voice shortly. Our best wishes. A reading recomendation: The Soviet Writers’ Conference 1934. Zhandov, Radek, and Bukharin are all a laugh-riot, and Gorky is a bit on song as well. Keep the growling tractor between your thighs. We live in History.

Stanley Richardson

I’ve been reading Calvin and Hobbes lately, mostly because it’s fantastic, and I’m struck by how well Calvin is characterized.

I find children somewhat difficult to write, particularly as I have none of my own (yet), and tend to struggle with a bleary sense of nostalgia for the better aspects of childhood while eliding the worse. I’m fully aware of the (sometimes surprising) perspicacity that children can display, of their great struggle with what’s ‘no fair’, of the generosity of which their capable. I often need to remind myself of the scheming cunning of childhood, the egocentrism, the power games between peers, and the astounding stupidity that can be exhibited by someone who simply doesn’t have an adult understanding of consequence.

Calvin embodies all of these things. He’s by turns perceptive and stump-dumb, worldly and locked within the confines of his imagination, deeply concerned with Hobbes’s happiness and stunningly self-obsessed. Certainly, it’s all played up for comedic effect, and some of the insights that come out of Calvin are much too sophisticated for a six-year-old, but they feel true to life.

Calvin’s not an adult-in-child’s clothing; he’s not a pensive Linus or a world-weary Charlie Brown, he’s not one of the too-jaded Foxtrot kids, he’s not always-wise-beyond-his-years Huey (he’s a pretty good match for Riley, though). He’s a child, through-and-through: whiny, brilliant, exasperating, hilarious. We feel for his parents, even as we’d like nothing better than to get on that toboggan with him.

In other, adorabler news, my gorgeous little niece is apparently now walking unaided! Alas, she can’t say ‘Marcin’ yet, and I’m getting the feeling that Daena isn’t taking me entirely seriously when I ask her to make with the teaching. All very unfair, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Apparently, in their wilder days (i.e. circa 300ish BC), the Gaulish tribes – much unlike their French descendants – had a rather draconian approach to questions of punctuality. When a summons to war was declared, the last man to make it to the meeting was sacrificed to the gods for good luck in the coming battle!

Oh, those kidders.

In this post, I alluded to a contest into which I’d entered my novel.

It turns out, dear reader, that I’ve been shortlisted. A top ten was chosen, from all of the submissions, and I’m on it!

Much though I might like to play this off, with a wee bit of dignity and perhaps that :coffee: emoticon so well-loved the world’s internet forums over, I’m actually really damn excited.

I’m currently in the research phase of my next writing project, and so I find myself reading about Gaul.

It’s not the easiest of subjects; the Gauls left no written record of their exploits, and as such survive mostly in the collective memory of other cultures (the Greeks and Romans, primarily, and to some extent in the Irish by dint of generalizable similarities between Celtic/Gaulish peoples). And so I find myself reading a Frenchman quoting Caesar quoting Poseidonius, in a historical variant of ‘Six degrees of Kevin Bacon’.

Now, I should note that historicism is not my number one concern; I’m not that sort of writer. I’m primarily interested in the semblance of historical accuracy, and particularly in those bits that make for a strong story. In short, I’m more concerned about feeling right than being right, and I’m not unwilling to play fast and loose with the details if they don’t fit the story I mean to tell.

In my defense, I never claimed to be a historian.

That said, I take that feel seriously. I want to be accurate, not for the sake of it(else I’d simply write a textbook), but because history is interesting. The ancients had their own themes and behaviours and metaphors, which feel alien enough to our modern sensibilities to stand out, but similar enough in their commentary on the human condition that we can nevertheless recognize pieces of ourselves in the distant past. The details of Gilgamesh may be foreign, but who among us hasn’t laughed about a woman taming her lover? Who among us doesn’t fear death?

One of the greatest difficulties in establishing this feel of historicity is that the details of interest to historians unfortunately are not always those of interest to writers. This is to some extent changing with the advent of what I like to call ‘DIY history’ – you know, the blokes who dress up like Roman centurions and erect a Roman camp using Roman techniques, to get a better sense of how things were really done – but nevertheless a not insignificant portion of historical research concerns itself with dates and names and who conquered whom. It’s not by any means a dastardly agenda; merely a reflection of the fact that the history that tends to survive is that of the upper classes. Even if Joe Babylonian could write, he’d have been too busy with the plow to commit to clay the details of his day.

In the end, some of the questions I most want to pose – what did they wear? what did they eat? how were their families structured? how were their cities laid out? what did they do for fun? – are the most difficult to have answered.

It’s an interesting conundrum. I find myself making great use of history aimed at children – who, having little interest in dates and names, are natural targets for questions of the quotidian. I find myself reading myth, and trying to cross-reference the attitudes referenced therein to what we know of historical realities. Mostly, I find myself extrapolating a lot.

Yes, and making stuff up.

I wonder if, several hundred years from now, historians bereft of context may unearth a copy of Generic Fantasy Trilogy, and assume based on the limited information available to them that such a work of fiction represents a genuine mythology.

I also wonder how many times we’ve done exactly that, and if, say, the erotic adventures of Zeus are merely the Asterix comics of three thousand years ago.

Novels are elusive buggers.

You may think that you’ve got one gagged and hog-tied securely in the trunk of your car. You may be certain that all you need do is happily putter on down the highway, from Point Outline to Point Publication. Chances are, you’ll be wrong. That trunk has a loose latch, and the bonds aren’t as tight as you think. When your mind’s ‘prisoner’ skitters off none the worse for wear while you stretch your legs at a truck stop, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I can’t honestly say I was well enough prepared with Pale Queen’s Courtyard. I thought that I was, at one point. I knew how it began. I knew how it would end. I even knew most of the steps in between.

Two chapters in, a character I’d intended to be a two-scene wonder stood up and waved his arms, shouting “Hey, look at me! I’m important.” Six chapters in, I realized that one of my protagonists was far too self-aware, far too forgiving, to play a role I intended for him down the road. Ten chapters in, I realized that role needed to be obviated entirely, because I had at least two or three chapters in mind that were too long and too repetitive; worse yet, they would have forced me to tip a particular hand earlier than made dramatic sense. Twelve chapters in, I had no idea where the hell I was and no memory of how I’d gotten there.

As I start to think more seriously about my next book (the Projects sub-page has been updated, should you be curious!), I wonder how best to approach the preparation phase. I don’t know the answer, you see. If I’m lax with my outlining, chances are I’ll set myself up for the same loss of direction that delayed PQC. If I’m too strict, it may all be for naught anyway. Characters can be rebellious little buggers; when it comes time, they don’t always want to do what they’re told. Much can change as a result of a late realization that an important plot point hinges on someone acting out of character, or that a necessary event is logically inconsistent, or that an entire swath of text is just boring and doesn’t belong in the final work.

Nevertheless, I tried one rather hazy not-quite-method of outlining, and so I’ll try another. I suspect I’ll be more rigid with my next novel, and I think I’ll try a running outline – when my writing inevitably strays from my planning, I’ll explicitly revise the plan rather than shrug and continue on in the hope that I can tie everything together in the end. It may take longer, and it may cause new difficulties that I can’t predict now, but there’s no harm in trying.

Later, anyway. I’ll probably start writing again in November – nanowrimo is a great motivator – which leaves me two months to fix my trunk and learn to tie a good, solid knot.

In two weeks, I’ll know whether or not I made the Tor UK short-list. Until then, I’m compulsively refreshing my e-mail.

In … well, I’m not sure how long, my company will have fallen apart entirely, and with it (chances are) my day job.

That leaves me with a bottle of whiskey and the Serenity Prayer – yadda yadda, etc., grace to accept the things I can’t change, or something of that sort. (I think it’s the Serenity Prayer, anyway. I’m mostly indifferent to the specifics of spirituality, but at any rate I can find no fault in that message).

Shrugging at things beyond my control has generally come easily to me, but the uncertainty has been wearisome.  My company declared Ch. 11 bankruptcy protection at some point in January, and ever since then the pink slip of Damocles has been fluttering about, waiting to land. We’re now in month seven of the Year of the Pulled Plug, and while I’ve enough money saved to go a good, long while without work, I’m still struggling somewhat under the now-constant feeling that I need to be careful and prudent and frugal and boring and oh god when will it end?

I’m probably well set to be a survivor of that frowniest of newscaster words, the (whisper) economy. Still, I’d just like to know when the hammer will fall.

I disappeared, recently, from the happy world of the ’social’ and ‘rested’, in preparation for a novel submission contest run by Tor Books in the UK.

It was something of a stroke of serendipity; a poster I much enjoy over at rpg.net (a forum I much enjoy!)  happened across a mention of this contest in a UK sci fi mag, and decided to share his discovery with the world at large. At the time – perhaps midway through July – I had somewhere between 80k and 90k words of my own novel, many of them raw, ugly, scattered and not altogether useful.

But I didn’t want to let this opportunity pass me by, and so I revved my mental engine and got to work.  The first step: finishing a novel whose momentum I’d largely lost. Two weeks and 30k words later, I fell upon my poor manuscript with scalpel and chainsaw, working feverishly to get everything in place for the August 20th final deadline (today, as it happens!).

And, with the help of my lovely Daena, I hit that deadline. Pale Queen’s Courtyard is done, at long last, and I’m happy with the result. My initial submission – three chapters and a synopsis – was made two weeks ago, and now I wait. If I have the good fortune of shortlist candidacy, I’ll know by September 10th. If I don’t, I expect I’ll start querying agents shortly.

So wish me luck, indifferent world at large.

Dear Reader,
This is a photograph of a recent editorial meeting of our dramaturgical staff. The discussion seems to be about the term realism.

Christian Grabbe

Nude Volley Ball has suffered severe blows from all the rainstorms and thunder-clapping clouds of late, as have most nude beach activities, not to mention the US Open. Many established groups, such as the writer’s colony in Provincetown, Norman Mailer’s group, and the reconstituted Partisan group do their volley balling indoors in Truro, Wellfleet, etc., where all the talk is about Obama’s influence on the recent events in Tehran, or possible retaliation to a North Korean missile strike on Pearl Harbor. Super models continue to get knocked up, bait shops are open, and Critical Inquiry is still on sale at the bookstore in Vineyard Haven; thus you have to drive back to Oaks Bluff to get alcohol with your moralism, or is it the other way round? Savvy salty dogs have their TLS or NYRB delivered via post or internet. Your correspondent appreciates writing on the internet via this Journal for really big bucks, but I do not listen to Little Dorrit on an I-Pod or I-Phone, or try to read it online with any of the various new reading technologies now available. If you can’t get sand in it in the summertime why go to Marseille or Chatham in the first place. Of course the situation hasn’t changed that much. Reading a New Yorker after an Ivy League BA is held the height of casual awareness. There is much perfect storm discussion of the French airliner “disapeared” over the Atlantic. The usual blather about the Red Sox and the Yankees, spottings of Ayn Rand paperbacks continue, as well as the odd Decline of the West or Civilization and its Discontents. There always seem to be more French readers than German readers on Cape Cod and the Islands. Almost everyone now drinks Aussie Swill-Shiraz, which is the current dago red. John Ashbery seems set to live forever and one can’t help but think somewhat fewer Europeans will weep if he dies, than as they did for Lord Byron. My editors continue to remind me they are due articles on Icelandic economic reform and the Mongolian theatrical avant-garde. Max Klinger is in heavy debate with scientists over the presence of hotel resorts and spas in the Marinas Trench. C.D. Grabbe and Ekaterina Degout are no longer speaking to another.
Dear Reader, I write to you from the broad, sandy beaches which surround the hill-populations of Somerville, City of Trees and Dogshit. I travel to my local Brazilian Beer Store on an outboard-powered skiff. I have promised Herr Klinger more on this topic later, and some translations from the German poems of George Heym. My Best to you.
Stanley Richardson, Correspondent for Der Zuschauer
Northeast Corridor All Rights reserved Guam Battalions

Dear Readers, We have had more than our fair share of Flegeljahre in the air hangers here on Guam Island. I am relieved, firstly, to let you know that both Max Klinger, here, and Stanley Richardson, back in New England, have returned to their domestic quarters after their seperate hospitalizations. We hope to publish articles from both of them shortly. The real reason for Klinger’s 2nd heart attack was the following as related by himself.

“I felt a unsettled heart throb as I was reading Samuel Beckett’s Watt. There is a stinging rebuke to hope and faith in the novel which is hard to ignore.”

And yet it is uselss not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. The gluttonous castaway, the drunkard in the desert, the lecher in prison, they are the happy ones.

“Now this is heartbreaking but hardly life-threatening. Pessimism I can bear but fastidious repetition to what point can drive one to madness and death. Following hard upon the above is the lethal passage begining:”

And the poor old lousy old earth, my earth and my father’s and mother’s and my mother’s mother and my father’s father…
“After a further 13 lines of more father/mother variations we get finally to:”

Father’s father’s fathers and mother’s mother’s mothers…

“The finale of the first aria is: An excrement”

“At this point I felt I had had a stroke; my face grew dark crimson, then purple, my nostrils flared wide. I was barely able to comprehend the fineness of the following sentence:”

The crocuses and and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep’s placentas…

“It was at then that I suffered a massive heart attack.”

“Stanley Richardson, thousands and thousands of miles away in the Commonwealth managed to keep his mind sound enough to read further…”

And the long summer days and the newmown hay and the wood pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and corncrake in the evening and the wasp in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the apples falling and ithe children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others…

“…assuming more about uneaten sheep plaacentas would follow and ggetting instead…”

…howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy…

“He too, Richardson, lost consciousness and suffered arrested cognition. That is all I have to say at the moment.”

I can tell you, Dear Reader, that Klinger will never touch Watt again and I would doubt whether he will venture upon any Beckett at all. Richardson says he will give Watt a third try. And thus the calumny against Grabbe and Degot has been withdrawn and we all continue to live in history.