JUST A QUICK NOTE to announce that, thanks to the talents of locally famous Sonoma artist and musician Jon Shannon Williams, my e-books now have handsome new covers – which (I strongly believe) are reminiscent of The Brothers Hildebrandt (Google same if you weren’t a Lord of the Rings fan in the 1970s). Please check him/them out and bask in the glow!
Tag: craft
The “writing” part of Writing.
Arms Call
“Don’t spectate: CREATE!”
–Barbatus the Elder
Sober Assessment
TWO-AND-A-HALF MONTHS AGO, I completed my tenth year of clear-eyed, clean-headed and grateful sobriety.
Now, when some people hear that, they might think, “Great, here comes the self-righteous lecture on the evils of intoxication.” But that won’t happen, at least not from me. I don’t and won’t disdain anyone else’s recreational or coping choices; frankly, they are none of my business, and refraining from inebriation is not a crusade that I feel either comfortable or qualified to pursue toward others.
Instead, I want to speak about the rarefied and addictive intoxicant that actually “saved” me, keeping me sane and healthy not just during the past decade but all of my life – and if you know me as well as you think you do, you can already guess what that is.
WRITING.
Not for nothing did Stephen King say of this 6,000-year-old-plus art: “Do it for the buzz.” There is an ineffable thrill in watching the words spill out onto paper or screen, an actual physical and mental rush only gotten from congealing thought into alphabetic form, that’s as hard to beat as it is to describe.
And the best part is, it’s free. Easily accessible. Shareable. No more watching my money go up in a cloud of marijuana smoke; no more furtively prowling dodgy neighborhoods; no more keeping it all to myself lest I run out.
Did I mention addictive? Once you start writing, you’re hooked for life. I sometimes find myself typing and typing until I fall asleep at the keyboard, literally unable to stop ’til I drop. (True story.) E.g., tonight: I meant to take advantage of the finally clear Sonoma skies and do a bit of long-delayed stargazing. But as I write this, it’s well after 10:30pm (or, if you prefer, 2230 hours) PDT and I’m already getting sleepy.
So before I trundle off to Dreamsville, I’ll leave you this hard-earned advice: Try not to let the Great American Novel (or Essay, or Blogpost) keep you from tending your other bodily needs. Otherwise, you may find yourself face down in a pool of your own ink – or even with “QWERTYUIOP” reverse-imprinted deeply into your throbbing forehead. Nighty night.
Ageless Speech
SPEAKING OF H.P. LOVECRAFT, as I was in the prior post, it’s easy to dismiss him for what some have called his “overly purple prose.” He can, I admit, become extremely flowery at times, but as mentioned here and elsewhere, the man was a true poet at heart: his writing is evocative, and justly so – its literary power is derived from the consent of the reader to simply and happily wallow in it. By way of illustration, I offer the following sonnet from a collection of same on weird topics titled Fungi from Yuggoth. It speaks to me, and deeply; I hope it does the same for you.
XXXVI. Continuity
There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence—more than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys.
It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than this we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.
Pithyism #4|4
THE MUSIC KNOWN AS “The Blues” is really only one continuous and endless song, shot through with instrumental solos and deeply pained warbling, as played and sung by a variety of lamentful musicians.
And that’s just fine.
How To Write
SUCCINCTLY.
Welcome To An All-Text, AI-Free Zone!
DEAR PATIENT READER (and anyone else who happens by),
Welcome! And now that you’ve found me, here is a prefatory word or two:
1. If you’re eager to meet Prosatio Silban, the self-defrocked holyman in a fantastic land who ekes out a meager but honest living as a mercenary cook, here he is.
2. You may also/instead browse at leisure rusty recollections, offbeat observations, friendly particularism, tasty recipes, unpretentious poetry, entertaining quotes, recreational science, and wry spirituality.
Thank you for your patronage, and please enjoy,
First Graf (rather, Line): The Lord of the Rings
OF THE 90% PETER JACKSON got right in his 11-hour and 22-minute adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s best-beloved work – the lush landscapes, the Balrog, Elves, the Nazgul, Sauron, Orcs and Uruk-hai, Gollum, Ents, hobbits (MY GHAWD! THE HOBBITS!!!), the Ring, Grima, the very different cultures and props and sets and cities and overall “look” – he got right in abundance.
But that other 10% … oy.
Read the actual books and you’ll discover that Aragorn is not a timid wimp, Gimli is not comic relief, Arwen isn’t an avenging angel, Saruman and Gandalf never duked it out with magic staves, Faramir didn’t try to bring the Ring to his father, the dialogue is more formal and less modern (except for the rustic hobbits), there’s a wonderful character named Tom Bombadil, and the book features a single climax instead of three simultaneous ones. And that well-traveled literary road begins, quite simply, like this:
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
Audiomobile
“COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE…”
So ran one of the many “found sounds” (today called “samples”) on the pass-around tape collages that were a fringe benefit of membership in the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo Valley College in the early-to-mid-1980s. (Accent on “fringe.”)
My initiation into this three-part sonic conspiracy – which included “Mr. Bird” and “Zoro X.R. Troll” – came about on receiving from Zoro a postage-stamped 60-minute cassette tape with no explanatory note save “PLAY ME” written on its label. Curious, I popped it into my boombox and pressed “Play.” My ears were happily assaulted (in machine-gun succession and no particular order) by excerpts from: Alan Watts, William S. Burroughs, The Grateful Dead, Firesign Theater, a straitlaced radio preacher, Mr. Bird’s paranoid brother, Tom Robbins, Zoro’s favorite inspirational readings, The Beatles, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and various other audial offerings now hazed by time and headspace, as well as Zoro’s drawled invitation to add to, subtract from, or otherwise mess with “this here tape” before sending it either back to him or on to Mr. Bird.
The process was simple:
1- Wire up two cassette recorder/players from output to input (this also works just as well, if not better, if you have one two-bay cassette player/recorder).
2- Load output player with whatever you like: music, spoken narrative or poetry, movie/tv soundtrack, sound effects, live microphone, &c., as limited only by imagination and source material.
3- Load a cassette into the input recorder, press “Record,” and engage the Pause button.
4- Play a section of the output tape.
5- Disengage input ‘s Pause button to record as much output as you want, then re-engage.
6- Switch output sources, the more incongruous and/or thematic the better.
7- Repeat process until you lose interest. (WARNING! It’s addictive.)
To simple, mad minds like ours, the results were vastly entertaining, and inadequately depicted in writing: “output1 (click) OUTPUT2! (click) OuTpUt3? (click) oUtPuT4…” ad infinitum.
After it was exchanged for a while, the tape had mutated into something very odd and layered indeed. One surrealistic iteration included dialog between myself and elements of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” Another had Mr. Bird and Zoro calling out each others’ names in weird voices and at unexpected intervals. Yet a third featured Jim Morrison repeating the lyric “learn to forget” over and over and over.
For whatever reasons, we three eventually drifted away from this collaborative creation. Yet I still have a copy of the original tape kicking around here somewhere, plus one which I slowly built up over a period of nearly 20 years, always meaning to send it on to my colleagues.
Perhaps, one day, I will.
The Zine Scene
A LONG TIME AGO, IN a post office far, far away, our mailbox was fraught with wonder and excitement.
In those cultural Dark Ages of pre-public Internet access, creative folk could communicate through the medium of “zines” – homegrown/amateur magazines, usually (but not always) photocopied by the dozen at the local 24-hour Kinko’s. Zine subjects were limited only by the interests and imaginations of their creators: politics, music (mainly punk rock), personal essays, communality, underground comix, satire, movies, TV shows, media criticism in general, religion, cassette culture, spirituality, alternative lifestyles, history, science fiction, fantasy, sexuality – the list goes on.
At the hub of this textual universe stood Factsheet Five, the quarterly “zine of zines” stuffed with hundreds of brief reviews and publisher contacts. Each issue opened up entire worlds of conceptual adventure, and she and I would take turns devouring it and highlighting the publications we wanted to receive. Per-issue costs could be anywhere between a few stamps, a few bucks, or trade for “something interesting” — including one’s own zine.
We were both well-supplied to swap: she with her women’s spirituality “perzine” (personal zine) Sacred Wilderness and me with my elsewhere-described Far Corner, a UFO/paranormal satire journal. For those small but intense investments – thinking, writing, copying, and postage – we netted a substantial return from independent publishers all over the planet.
Factsheet Five has passed into the What-Was, having ceased production in 1998. Blogging, vlogging, Substack, YouTube content, and social media in general now fill the creativity gap once occupied by zines; they’re cheaper, have a potentially longer reach, and can be published and accessed with greater immediacy. As a result, the weekly post-box trip has become more prosaic and less exciting. But the memories remain, of a secret world populated by anyone who could afford to get their personal word out and connect with likeminded others. I like to think that, though the medium may have dwindled, the spirit hasn’t. Long live the revolution!
Points of Honor, Literary and Otherwise
– STUFFING SENTENCES TO CARRYING CAPACITY.
– Never starting a blog post (or sermon) with “I.”
– Punctuality.
– Creative segues.
– Repeating verbatim whatever someone wants said to another.
– That only what I actually heard appears inside quotation marks.
– One-sentence ledes.
– Snappy ledes. (“If you can do that, you’ll never be out of a job,” quoth a mentor.)
– Keeping an open mind, especially when it’s difficult.
– Never speaking in absolutes. (Present list excluded.)
– Crediting my sources.
– Communicating as accurately as I can. (Challenging, but aspirational.)
– Pushing through my shyness. (Also aspirationally challenging.)
– Being kind to cashiers, sales clerks, waiters, and tradesfolk.
– Saying “Take your time” whenever necessary.
– Waving at passing cars.
– Not speculating.
– “Killing my darlings” (per Wm. Faulkner, via Stephen King).
– Making an effort to pet stray cats.
– Greeting passersby with (at least) a smile.
– Concisifying.
(And yours?)
Participatory Solipsism
I am the greatest man in the world; indeed I am so great that I can afford great generosity: I encourage all others to adopt the delusion that they are as great as I. If they truly thought that they were themselves the greatest, they too would be as generous; and then we would all be able to humor each other, in peace, for none would feel threatened by the now-harmless delusions of everyone else.”
— Dr. Philo Drummond (Now go thou and do likewise.)