Breakfast with Pandora

Healing Knowledge opening chapter posted

Chapter 1 of the Experiment has appeared on the Internet: the first 2500 words of a novel I'm drafting and then posting. It is called Healing Knowledge, and you can find it here, where you can also find a quick summary of what it's about.

Since it's a first draft, it will have some rough edges, the which all of you are invited to consider. Comments are always welcome on any topic related to the ms., in fact, and I will think about making changes based on readers' ideas. Much is up for grabs, including the title, which isn't quite right yet.

You'll also want to weigh in on how much backstory you'd like about the world of Healing Knowledge. It is subtitled "A novel before Greek mythology" because it is set in what is for me a fascinating time, the Aegean Early Bronze Age, circa 2400 BC, about a thousand years before Greek mythology as we know it got its ingredients in the same pot and began to heat.

It's been a great boon to my imagination to work in a time where comparatively little is known about the cultural particulars of a people, though there is plenty of evidence for extrapolating a complete and consistent world. It also helps that I wrote my dissertation on an aspect of the prehistory of Greek mythology.

I expect archeologists and other classics types will find much to disagree with in the choices I have made, but that's why I've chosen fiction. Hemming and hawing over the dating of pot sherds is not my thing. I'd rather look at the big picture, and story is a way to do that.

I was dialing through cable television yesterday and stopped on a C-SPAN taping of an appearance by author Michael Crichton (similar speeches archived here), where he was asked why he wrote about difficult scientific and political issues through the medium of fiction.

First he said, in a smug and deadpan way, that he felt someone other than Congress should get to tell some lies.

But then he said that fiction is a way of dealing with difficult issues where you can explore possibilities in a freer way than in political debate or scientific inquiry. I liked that idea.

My novel does not deal with anything as important as the Human Genome, but there are issues. I will not say anything about them now, because I want to concentrate on the story. I hope it's a good story that makes you want to come back and read more. That's my main goal.

I hope to post often, once a week if possible, and more often when I'm in a flow. Writing a first draft is hard, solitary work, but I have the impression that if I know there is one reader out there-- just one-- who is waiting for the next chapter, I will be able to deliver it. It's very tough for me to be the only one who is waiting for my next chapter to come out. I will always say to myself, "Well, if it's just you, then go do the dishes and the laundry. That's much more important."

See you over on the other side.

A pause for some Latin

Cucurbia sends a link to an extremely lovely t-shirt and an even lovelier commentary on the t-shirt.

I was just talking to someone about ancient letters and email.

Thanks, Cukes.

Online literature buzzes

A bit of news in the electronic fiction area:

(Photo: the spirit of the Parisii, the fishing tribe that settled Paris in 300 BC)

Grumpy Old Bookman, a champion of publishing on the Internet, has made available his novella, Lucius the Club, via a .pdf file. This is the story that he mentioned once last October about a person sitting in a rocking chair explaining a murder he had gotten away with. This post led to one of mine about the writing life; it is good for writers to communicate with writers. Less depression that way, I think. Note that if you do download Lucius, it is for adults. The writing is calm, tight, self-assured, veteran.

L. Lee Lowe, author of Mortal Ghost, an online serialized novel now with 27 chapters on the 'Net, has been interviewed in the new Philadelphia Inquirer column on online literature, written by Katie Haegele. It's quite a welcome development and forward-thinking of the Inquirer to start such a column. I will be checking on its progress.

Among Lee's choice quotes: "It would be disingenuous for me to say I don't want to be read, so I'd be perfectly amenable to paper and ink, though I'd be adamant about releasing my work online at the same time," Lowe wrote. "At the center of my work is a strong conviction in open culture, freely available to all."

Now that would be a request to make of a publishing firm: yes, you can publish my novel, but it has to be online as well. That would be a grand day.

My online first draft of a novel, now titled Healing Knowledge and officially in progress, will make its debut here round about February 1.

A slice of tiramisu for Cassandra Kubinski

A little tiramisu today to a talented actor/singer/songwriter named Cassandra Kubinski. She plays the psycho girlfriend of the title squirrel in Sean Overbeeke's short student film, Sam (note: R for language and adult situations!)-- a great role, as far as I'm concerned, hardly less distinguished than her appearances with Michael J. Fox on Spin City and Sean Connery in Finding Forrester.

But apparently, acting is not Cassandra's primary creative skill.

On her website I learned that Cassandra aims to make it big singing folk pop, a la (according to her promo copy) Billy Joel and Fiona Apple. She gives a generous sampling of mp3 files of her work, and dare I say it, as a dad of a 10-year old, Cassandra is Disney Channel ready. That's a compliment, by the way.

Take a listen to Hiding Underneath-- very naughty, but safe, somehow.

And here is the chorus from her Cradle the Moon, one of the winners of the 2005 Positive Pop Song Contest.

And I get so defeated, just tryin' to hold on
When I can't hold my head up, my spirit is down,
Then I come home to you, when I'm safe in your arms,
I can hold the sun, and cradle the moon.

I wonder if that would be disappointing to Cassandra to hear--Disney Channel ready. But there are worse things than being accessible worldwide.

Sean Overbeeke is a generously talented guy with a lot of moxie and commercial appeal, and Cassandra Kubinski strikes me as the same type. It must have been interesting to be at the University of Connecticut at Storrs when they were making Sam.

Knock 'em dead, Cassandra. Here's one fan pulling for you.

Paris looks to the horizon, Greece across the table

Twenty-odd years ago a French girlfriend of mine gave me a copy of Thérèse Raquin, a 19th-century novel by Emile Zola. Last weekend I got around to reading it (yes, I've been schlepping it in cardboard boxes for that many years).

Zola's novel is a hyper-psychological adultery-murder tale, and the story, along with the city of Paris itself, helped to clarify for me why I chose Greece as the milieu for my life's métier.

Zola loves to use the word "étouffant," "stifling," an excellent description of the atmosphere in which the title character lives. An orphan of a French soldier in Algeria and an African mother, Thérèse lives in a petit-bourgeois hell, tending a sewing store in one of the darkest and most inaccessible alleys of Paris. Her housemates are her aunt, Madame Raquin, and male cousin, Camille, whom Madame has nursed through various childhood illnesses. So low are Madame's expectations for Thérèse that she marries Thérèse off to Camille, who never, as far as the reader knows, attempts to consummate the marriage.

Thérèse turns out to be an extremely passionate woman once she finds the right man, who is not her husband. From there the action moves to the murder thing, and I leave you to the rest.

(This is maybe something not necessarily to be read in an airport when your plane is delayed three hours and an ice storm is cancelling flights all over the nation.)

France is famous for "downer" stories, but walking around Paris on a too-kind January afternoon, it all makes perfect sense.

Stand with me for a moment in the Place de la Concorde, the center of Paris, and we'll see romance, sentimentality, and idealism extending to every horizon. In the center of the Place de la Concorde, there is the gold-tipped Egyptian obelisk, a prize of the Napoleonic empire. To the southwest, the Tour Eiffel is visible, a monument to the French Revolution. To the west extends the Champs Elysées, the grand boulevard of Paris, with the Arc de Triomphe behind.

(Photo: tiny Arc de Triomphe on horizon, but it's there)

Turn right and there are the columns of La Madeleine, a ponderous and yet soaring imitation of a Roman temple, now dedicated to the humble yet romantic Mary Magdalene. To the east, the Tuileries Gardens, the front lawn of the incredible Louvre Museum. And to the south, the Hôtel des Invalides, a former military hospital that makes our Capitol building look like a mirage.

There's no way that a 360 degree vision like that can be fulfilled in everyday life. There is too much suffering, too much chaos, too much imperfection-- flaws, terrors, mistakes that go back thousands of  years. Parisians, and the French who visit Paris, breathe in the exhalation of the best and the worst of human nature every single day. That's got to be a disappointing juxtaposition.

Think of Thérèse and her superhuman passion, chained to the dullest and most stifling circumstances imaginable. Is there a way out? Is there a way to exalt her passion, redeem it? By the end of the book, Zola seems to be saying, not likely.

Still with me? Well, now let's move on to Greece.

Athens is built in abrupt hill lands, with a cliff dominating. You can't really see from one monument to the next, like you would in a floodplain. Sure, here is the Temple of Zeus, or what's left of it. There's Syntagma Square, lined with its cell phone vendors. Over there is the Olympic Stadium, tucked into a hillside. And on top of it all, the Parthenon, forever shrouded in scaffolding.

The glory and the inspiration that was Greece is here-- especially when you get above it all on one of the hills. But mostly Athens is a crowded city with winding streets. It is a place where people have been sitting down to the noon meal for thousands of years. There is no longer any anxiety in Athens over the Ideal and the Real. This is a city that's seen it all, and made peace with it. The streets of Athens are redolent of a kind of slow-cooked wisdom.

Now I have some French blood through my paternal grandmother, and I am intensely romantic, sentimental, and idealistic. But I find finally that I can't help but cut the human race some slack. Instead of sliding into cynicism the way many idealists can, I want to get off that philosophical toboggan and just have a plate of mezes with some friends.

Which is not to say the Greeks are all happy-go-lucky peasants who sleep the afternoon away with a bottle of wine cradled in their arms, or the French are all tortured intellectuals who cheat on their spouses. I see tendencies, and I love the Greek tendency to take everything-- including themselves and their past achievements-- with a grain of salt.

At the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France's museum par excellence for modern art, they were having a free exhibition on the children's comic-strip artist Hergé, the man who gave us the character Tintin. France is mad about Hergé, even though he was a Belgian by birth (and the French don't think much of the Belgians). As I walked among the memorabilia, the correspondence, the reproductions, the sketches, I was looking just as much at the affectionate half-smiles of the Parisians as I was at the exhibit itself.

After he became famous, Hergé answered a now-infamous questionnaire, an identical one to the French writer Marcel Proust, in which one of the questions was "Which human errors [fautes] do you most easily overlook?" Hergé's wonderful, punning answer:

    les fautes haurtograffes

which may only be approximately translated "speling ererrs."

That's the kind of humility and ability to laugh at oneself that I admire most in people, whoever they are and wherever their birthplace.

Photo: Centre Georges Pompidou blasts off with Tintin's rocket ship from Explorers on the Moon.

The French Way of Thinninity

This post is posted in thanksgiving for the acceptance of my humor piece, The neurotic's recipe for perfect (okay it's crap) teriyaki chicken, in the food writing journal Alimentum. Sound the trumpets.

Somewhere on Saturday of my trip to Paris, I realized how the Parisians stay so thin, despite their inordinate intake of white flour, butter, and eggs. A list follows, but really, the only item that matters is the last.

Exercise: Not only is the city walkable, but you want to walk. Everywhere you turn, something new and exciting catches your eye. The architecture, the landmarks, the skyline, the shops, the wom-- um, the people. Everything and everyone merits a second look. Pretty soon you've burned off your morning pain au chocolat and then some. Who could be a couch potato when you have Audrey Tatou lookalikes treating the sidewalk like their own personal runway?

Portion sizes: It seemed on Saturday at noon everyone was walking around with a sandwich or a crepe in their fist. That's it. No double cheeseburger, no large fries, no twenty ounce Coke. In fact, the young family of three speaking a Slavic language who sat down next to me in the Tuileries gardens were sharing their McDonalds Value Meal among the three of them.

Hip teenagers into the latest American stuff were jauntily tipping 12-ounce cans of Coke. That was excess, French style.

At dinner, you might have two or three courses. I had asparagus-and-pecorino ravioli, steak, and French fries one night, two courses, and skipped dessert. Sound like a lot of meat and carbs? It might have been 4 ounces of steak, 6 fair-sized ravioli, and a reasonable mound of fries, some of which I left on the plate. And I was satisfied.

Red wine: Besides having all those anti- and uncle-oxidants, red wine gives you a feeling of fullness and encourages you to savor your food. You eat slower and therefore eat less, because you give your tummy a chance to signal to your brain that it's had enough.

Dark chocolate: Wow. The best kind is so good you sit there dazzled and just take it in for a while. Eating a thousand calories of this stuff would be incredible sensory overload. One truffle turns out to be enough, two if you're really greedy.

Taste in general: When everything tastes good, you pay attention to it, eat slower, and eat less. There's something gross about a Krispy Kreme raised glazed doughnut that makes you want to eat a half-dozen even though the first one stopped tasting good about halfway through. My theory: when something tastes sort of good but sort of gross, you eat more for the sake of the texture in your mouth or the fullness in your stomach.

And most importantly,

French Coffee.

At noon Saturday I drank one small cup of cafe noir with a packet of sugar, calorically insignificant but enough to keep me up till 2 AM and stave off my appetite almost completely, so that when dinner came with its small portions I thought I was eating a feast. I liked everything and still left half my dessert.

My theory: Drinking a cup of French coffee is like popping a half dozen barbiturate-laced diet pills.

(See chocolate above, which has caffeine, too.)

So there you have it. I think there may be a book about this, but now you don't need to buy it. I have lived the French Way of Thinninity, and It Is Good.

Voila, c'est tout

Back from Paris, with photos and chocolate. Will post more when coherent.

In every electron, a story

On the phone with a friend long distance, sudden static, and an unfamiliar voice.

"Are you there?" I asked the friend.
"Yes, I'm still here."
"Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?"

Skssssssskkkksssss...

Then, as clear as a bell:

"No, I haven't had a chance to check my email yet," came a rich, affectionate voice of a woman perhaps in her thirties. "But I was thinking we could use the free trip for that."
Now a reserved, fortyish-sounding masculine voice: "I could do that."

And we were cut off.

My friend called again, and we continued our own conversation, until about ten minutes in, more static.

Again, the woman, this time sounding much more agitated, her voice raised and irritable.

"I was in a meeting for two hours, listening intently. And I said, what can we do about this? Do we do 20 percent or 10 percent? I was looking at the figures for the last fiscal year. And so I went home and was reading this document, and it was ten pages long..."
The man, breaking in: "Ten pages?"
"Yeah, ten pages. And so I..."

And that was it for that round.

Finally, one last time, the man came in with a fragment of a sentence:

"... it was painted by the previous owner..."

My friend and I immediately began to speculate about the couple's relationship. Was it an affair? Were they scheming an illicit rendezvous? Was it a long-distance relationship? She would never have been telling him about her day if they lived together. Or maybe, my friend suggested, the couple was married and the woman was on a business trip.

In the sands of Egypt there are all these little tiny shreds of papyri that have been dug up, most of them written in ancient Greek, but some in Latin, some in Coptic, and other languages. Some are literature, such as the script of a play by the Greek comedian Menander. Some are letters: "Give my love to Harmodion. I pray your health returns..." Some are laundry lists.

It seems that in 2000 years perhaps the electronic conversations we have had, the waves of sound converted into electrons and back into sound, will be traceable again, like papyri in the sand. All archeologists will need to do is set up some kind of receiver, and they'll be able to hear these conversations, eavesdrop on the ancient world, write papers on the historical linguistic range of three-letter acronyms such as "TMI."

And they will understand, as O. Henry did, that in a city of four million people (or however many there are), there are many more than four million stories, and that the glory of humanity is that all of these stories, somehow, some way, are compelling, just by being human.

So here is my story: I am off to Paris for a weekend, courtesy of a tour company whose name I shall not divulge. I will attempt to take a few pictures and blog, but who knows what will happen in this whirlwind of about 96 hours? In any case, having returned and gotten over jet lag, I shall post whatever part of my story happens to be worthy.

For the new year, a new direction

Here in 2007, it is time to test the waters of mainstream publishing. Real agent query #1 for my nonfiction manuscript The Power of Greek Heroes goes out tomorrow.

Here's the hook:

THE POWER OF GREEK HEROES offers today's teachers, parents, and myth enthusiasts a multi-purpose method of teaching and appreciating ancient tales. I argue that outstanding characters such as Achilles, Odysseus, and Pandora benefited their audiences most not by encouraging young people to "be like them," but by boosting the desirability of ordinary family and community life. In today's isolated and celebrity-mad world, this is a timely message.

Since Power is a partial manuscript so far, I will continue to work on it in case an agent is interested in seeing more than an introductory chapter. But I anticipate a fairly long and rejection-filled process lasting into the spring.

So I have decided to work on another project-- mostly for enjoyment-- inspired by L. Lee Lowe's Mortal Ghost, and by the overall strength of the online writing community. I am going to try my hand at writing the first draft of a novel and posting it, chapter by chapter, online.

The working title of the novel is HEALING KNOWLEDGE, and here is the hook:

A thousand years before Greek Mythology, an apprentice shaman met an apprentice trader on the shores of a sea that would in time be called Aegean. Though they spoke neither the same language nor understood life in the same way, as time went by they became united in loss-- and in the fourteenth spring of their lives, when they set out on a short sea journey to a nearby island in order to become men, they embarked instead on a quest for the knowledge that restores all hurt and heals all wounds.

Just about everything in this manuscript is up for grabs (including the title!), except that I do have my preferences and prejudices. Commenters are welcome to suggest directions for the story to go, or improvements in the draft itself, or engage in conversation about the details of the story or the ideas and questions it may raise.

I envision the audience to be teenagers and anyone who has ever been a teenager. It is not a YA novel per se, but a novel about future adults' intents and adults' intense pasts.

You should see Chapter 1 of HEALING KNOWLEDGE up at my eponymous second Typepad blog by February 1. Thereafter I'd like to write a chapter a week, but we'll see, won't we?

In the meantime, I will continue to blog here at BwP, and anyone is welcome at all times to ask questions about classical and comparative mythology by emailing me at teenage underscore heroes at sign yahoo dot com, all run together.

Words for the new, and for memory

Terry Pratchett, who writes the "Discworld" series of novels, gave me a message while I flew in a plane last night.

(Left: "Mouseion": House of the Muses, House of Memory, Museum)

The novel Thief of Time, which I have not yet finished, hides a deeply-felt philosophy behind humor and irony, part of which is contained in this passage, explaining why a man named Wen had gotten the epithet "Eternally Surprised":

Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, re-created anew. Therefore, he understood, in truth, there is no Past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

I know that, when I turn the last page of this book, I will see this passage in a more completely round way. Here are my thoughts as of page 20, and at the beginning of 2007.

My first reaction was pessimistic. I wondered, if it's true that there is no Past, do those who have a talent for memory have any business being in the world? Is there a place, indeed, for storytellers, for historians, and for antiquarians of all types? Is there a place for writers of time-travel novels?

Time has become, in this post-Einstein era, almost a tangible thing, like rope. Scientists have detected a beginning of time, the Big Bang. So that means that Time, capital T, can exist in our minds like a line, as taut as we want to make it. If we have the means, so the reasoning goes, we can skip along this line, or we can manipulate the length and by loosening the tautness, join one point on the line with another.

The Past can represent, to some storytellers, an eternal movie playing on a screen into which we can jump if we have the technology or the gift. Audrey Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife, a novel I admire, makes random time travel into a genetic abnormality, as if Time is programmed into our DNA. I don't think the author adequately considered the eternal problem of what happens if you go back in time and change events. But that's a question for another post.

The point is, Western culture does mostly kinda sorta believe that the Past exists, if only in fond fancy. Few of us are eternally surprised by the Now. Many of us hold on to the Past, especially onto hurts, the pain of which radiates into the present.

But despite my past hurts and past-dwelling nature, I liked this Pratchett-enunciated reason for being eternally surprised, because it feels true. When you look out an airplane window, the scene is constantly changing. If you see a grid of fields below and highways crisscrossing them, in the next instant you see it from a new perspective. In only a few seconds you have to crane your neck to see it, from the edge of the window. Then it is gone. Every second on a plane traveling 600 miles an hour, the view from the window is different.

(Right: view of Greece from a bus window)

How, then, to reconcile my talent for the memory of the past, if there is no Past?

I suspect Pratchett will have something to say about this. Storyteller that he is, he also has a memory of the past, and appreciates it.

I also suspect that Pratchett, as a Brit, feels the weight of the Past very strongly. In Europe the Past is everywhere. Tradition is everywhere. Class conciousness, the difference not between rich and poor but between noble and common (a time-tested difference), has impinged mightily on British storytelling.  People try to get away from it, but it's almost as if Time is in one's DNA. Time, the Past, Tradition, in some ways is a kind of god.

But this overvaluing of the Past knows no boundaries. Just think of all the conflicts in the world that are based on memories of past hurts, on our inability to let go. Time, the Past, Tradition-- The Memory That Cannot Be Forgotten For It Must Be Avenged-- is a jealous god.

Those who obsess over and bow down before the Past are therefore practicing idolatry-- unhealthily giving attention and energy to something which cannot save or even help.

So it is a healthy thing to be surprised at the Now, and to use the memory of the past as a way of appreciating the Now.

That is, being present to the Present might mean to remember the past without being manipulated by it.

It might mean not to be so caught up in memory that we can't see the new universe that is being re-created every instant. Not to be so caught up that we can't respond anew with a fresh, loving, joyful stance towards a new world.

This Christmas my uncle made a DVD out of a VHS tape that he shot in 1984 at one of my brother's birthdays. I have no memory of the party because I was at university and didn't attend. Everyone was younger then, and their skin was smoother. I spent a moment remembering where I must have been and what I must have been doing, and what I valued then and devalued, and regretted not having been there.

Then I went upstairs and sat at the bedside of my daughter, who had been up late the night before. She had the window seat on the plane when I read Pratchett's passage; she asked me why farmed fields are sometimes not square or rectangular, but circular. Her profile against the pillow was perfectly human. Her breathing was even, short, and almost silent.

I smiled at her, at the moment of the Now.

May you also, in this New Now, smile and be surprised.

(Below: Nauplion, Greece)