Mightier Than The Sword (But Only If You Want It To Be)

This is the post on writing. Basically it's me bitching about writing and publishing and other writers and concepts and then I end it with some melancholy musings on the relationship between art and madness. If you're not a writer, you probably won't be offended, but if you're a hopeful young author you might be mad or disheartened. Or if you're like me you'll give me a high-five. Oh well. It's a chance to see inside my brain, and isn't that the point of a blog?

Virginia Woolf wonders "why does someone have to die?" (The Hours)

There's been so much to-do over writing in the past few months, both in my own head and in the so-called real world around me. You know, the Harvard sophomore novelist that apparently ripped off a couple other books by the same packaging company as hers. Yeah, "packaging". People "package" books. It's shorthand for ambitious advertising hounds of hell trying to get the front stacks of Barnes & Noble filled with your precious little baby hardcover. You stand a better chance at this if you are A) rich with well-connected parents; B) a writer of familiar, tried and true stories; C) a writer of very bland and nondescript characters who do not do anything out of the ordinary. Mind I am not talking Philip Roth "bland and nondescript", because I would never fuck with Philip Roth. The man's on a mission, and I'm not sure what it is, but he's trying to write the Great American Novel, I believe. Same with John Updike. I let them be. But they know what they're doing. Kaavya Viswanathan does not. Have you read the phrases she stole from Megan McCafferty?

Kaavya starts to hit the wall.

McCafferty: "Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart."
Viswanathan: "Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty."
(A/N: My two supreme heroines, Nike and Isabel, are both very intelligent - Nike in a life-experience way, Isabel in a bookish way - and they're both very pretty. That entire notion is shit.)

McCafferty: "He’s got dusty reddish dreads that a girl could never run her hands through. His eyes are always half-shut. His lips are usually curled in a semi-smile, like he’s in on a big joke that’s being played on you but you don’t know it yet."
Viswanathan: "He had too-long shaggy brown hair that fell into his eyes, which were always half shut. His mouth was always curled into a half smile, like he knew about some big joke that was about to be played on you."

Megan McCafferty: I'd be more mad if the plagiarized writing was good.

Oh boy. See Wikipedia for more. All I can do is laugh maniacally. Viswanathan says, "I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words". Yeah, right. She also claimed to have a photographic memory. I'm not going to turn this into a diatribe against overprivileged Harvard brats. I'm going to say that both McCafferty and Viswanathan, and especially that damn packaging company, Alloy (also behind Gossip Girl and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) are at fault. That's not creation. I'll discuss at the end what creation means to me, but that is what I mean when I ever refer to drivel.

Also from Alloy, I bet this has nothing to do with Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld at all.

Book-packaging companies, you see, "are hired by publishers to co-write, if not write, the concepts of novels given to them by their clients. In many cases, only the barest outline and character sketches are needed. The book-packaging company, with a staff of in-house writers, does the rest", according to Wikipedia. That should be an embarrassment to everyone in the publishing industry, including writers. It's like the oldest insult to artists - a thousand monkeys with typewriters, with infinite time, will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. I read a good article in Harper's once debunking this theory - the only sentence I remember is this: "Shakespeare=1. Monkeys=0". Let's hope it stays that way. Let's destroy book-packaging companies.

Just say no to book packaging.

Although it may not seem like it I write... a lot. It comes in spurts and waves, and I switch from project to project frequently, but I'm always writing. I've been doing it since I was old enough to carve out the letters on the pieces of paper, but I've been storytelling since before I could write, when I was "re-telling" what I felt to be the best, most awesome story at the time, The Prince and the Pauper (the Disney version of course, with Mickey Mouse as the lead role) and my mother was taking it down.

The Greatest Story Ever Told... Ever (The Prince and the Pauper)

But I have a very complicated relationship with writing, all kinds of writing, but especially fiction. I can't do short things. I try to do short things. My poetry is horrendous. One thing I've learned is that poetry looks real easy until you try to do it yourself. I have endless respect for poets. I do not know how they do it. My short stories, while they might be okay, tend to usher in sequels, and the sequels make more sequels, until the whole thing is reproducing like bunnies and suddenly I have a plan for five tomes instead of one miserable "short story".

Yeah, all poetry is basically runic to me.

True story, this is what happened to "The Grudge", which was supposed to be a Sin City-style escapade away from the increasingly epic and sort of overwhelming last book of my Musings series, The Peace Chronicles. "The Grudge" spawned three more stories I had yet to write. "East of Eden" was one of them. But then I decided that more needed to come to explain the gaps, to fill in this new post-apocalyptic city in a world with no water that I had made... and it became Rubeus Via. At one point I swore to just kill off everyone at the end of Rubeus Via, but I can't kill off my main couple. I am physically incapable of it. And yes, I hated Romeo and Juliet, and I think Othello is the most depressing of Shakespeare's works. I believe in the transcendence of love. I know a lot of people don't. But if you listen to the song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" by the Caesars you will understand what I mean. It's not love in the sense of romantic comedy love, or romance novel love - it's "come on, baby, don't fear the reaper" love. A love that survives and flourishes as the individuals involved get stronger. I specialize in couples that overcome incredible, incredible odds of death and separation and imprisonment. Anyway I couldn't give up on my main couple of Rubeus Via so I invented four more novels after it, of which they would be in one.

It takes a special couple to get through abductions, evil governments, and aliens (The X-Files)

I'm sort of a binge-and-purge writer, see. When I'm "binging" I'm reading other books, nonfiction and fiction, researching, watching relevant movies (yes, this is helpful) and dwelling on, playing with concepts. Sometimes I don't write for a long while when I'm binging - I'll re-read my old stuff, maybe draw up a list of characters, make playlists... all in preparation for the "purging" phase, which is taking place right now in my life, where I'm pounding out five pages a night and it all flows, even in a scene that I wouldn't have had any inspiration to write in the "binging" phase. Kind of a gross analogy, and I'll admit I'm not the most fluid writer. Ah well.

This is what I do in the "binge" stage. Except with words.

My mother thinks I should have been a screenwriter... or at least she jokes it. I sort of agree. I see what I write as movie reels, and I know exactly who I want to play each and every character. I can imagine how it would look on screen. Some of the songs on my playlists are opening and closing credits songs. Hell the fact that I have a playlist at all is a nod to the idea of a soundtrack to a movie. That's the thing, sometimes I wonder if I'm more of a storyteller than a writer. If I was a writer would I think in terms of movies? Wouldn't I be revelling in the words I'm expelling rather than the images I'm trying to concoct in my own head, in the reader's head? I wonder. I wonder if I just write because I don't have a camera or actors at my disposal, and all I have is my fingers and a computer.

My ideal heroine and hero. Recognize them? (Natalie Portman, Joaquin Phoenix)

I think I only really started to see my books as movies when I started falling in love with visual entertainment, with tv shows and movies. I remember when I read The Lost World I was seeing it as a movie, not because there already was a movie based on the book, because it was nothing like it... because suddenly I had a cast of characters I knew and loved from a different world, a television show world, that I made play the parts of Sarah Harding, Ian Malcolm, Lou Dodgson, and the rest. And making it play as a movie in my head was hella riveting. That might even be why I don't read a lot of books anymore, because I can't turn them into movies and be interested in them. Sad, I know. But the book just has to be a lot more interesting than, say, the latest Oprah's Book Club blathering about tense but polite family relations across three generations... Jesus! I can't stay interested in that! Catch-22 and Macho Camacho's Beat are probably the two most riveting books I have ever read, and I credit the writers for their superb ability to bend the rules of literature and make for a read that is actually stimulating mentally.

Random acts of madness and war (Catch-22)

Believe me, I'm not so arrogant as to believe I am anywhere near Joseph Heller or Luis Rafael Sanchez. Oh no, nowhere near. But I do idolize them. I do idolize writers who have a sense of style. Cormac McCarthy is another one. I try to develop my own but I don't think I have one. My best bet is to go for the other kind of writing I like, the writing that means something, is trying to say something, makes you hate certain characters. The Sound and the Fury, for example. Not that Faulkner doesn't have his own style but that's not what I love him for. It's for creating characters like Caddy Compson, the original Prostitute With A Heart Of Gold, before Erin Brokovich made her just a tad too sympathetic, and the godawful Manifestation of the Devil on Earth, Jason Compson IV. And I admire Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih for his acute sense of place and the complexity of his characters. But these books, see, they're all bold. I try to be bold.

Faulkner signifies much more than nothing

Why, you ask, why try to be bold. It's only writing. Well, I ask this a lot of myself too: Why waste your time writing? It's not going to help anyone. And I am a very practical, pragmatic person who thinks that if you live your whole life without helping to better humanity or at least contribute to your national economy, you aren't living at all, and you're really an affront and a traitor to the planet you were born on. I'm not a big fan of artists, you can leave it at that, because as much as I might admire it, I don't believe it changes the world. I'm sure many disagree with me on this. I sound like a traditional nativist conservative, don't I? "Why teach art in public schools, give that money to football!" Well, not exactly. Art might do some good. But it's not enough. If you're a successful artist, then donate some of your proceeds to a charity or use your fame to rally support for a good cause. If you're a starving artist, then for God's sake get a job and contribute to the economy or - gasp - maybe get a job in the social sector, teaching schools, at a non-profit, in the civil service. Join the PeaceCorps. Better yet join the UN Blue Helmets. Do not sit in your penthouse venting about your rejection slips. Please.

Please do not be like these people (Rent)

I'm never going to write professionally. Even if my job at some point involves some writing, it's not going to be fiction. I'm not going to be an "author" and sit there and work on my next book, sipping on chamomile tea and watching the rain collect in my gutters. No [expletive] way will I waste my brain like that. But I'll probably always write on the side, in my spare time. That's the way I've always done it through high school and now college. I keep myself writing in a variety of ways even when life threatens to divert me from it. A) It's my lifeblood; B) It's a hobby, and keeps me relaxed and distracted; C) There's problems out there I want to address in my writing, and theories and politicians I need to debunk; D) There's writers out there who ruin it for everybody else.

Why I write (thanks www.msgr.ca)

But who may those be? I'm critical and cynical, so be warned. I probably should have been a critic too, along with a screenwriter. The last thing I should have been is a writer, ha ha. Anyway, you want to know the people who threaten to ruin it for me? People who write drivel. I hate drivel. There's a girl who's transferring out of my school, the campus pseudo-celebrity, because she's a got a book deal and she's a rising junior. I won't say her name because she might find me and gut my heart out, or maybe she'd just be happy someone's discussing her, any press=good press. But you'd probably be able to figure out who she is. She's pretty self-promoting. She writes "boarding school fiction". It's also been called "literary Young Adult" and "chick literary". Please insert your own angry expletive-laden phrase here.

If only I'd gone to private school, I too would be a female Holden Caulfield.

I don't know why chick lit exists as it does today. Nor do I understand the obsession with boarding schools. Are these writers just trying to relive their own disappointing high school experiences, so they can both revel in and shake their heads in condescendence at the rich upper crust brats of the East Coast and their private schools and their brand names? Because I see no purpose to boarding school fiction. I'm sure you've noticed the type of book... from that goddamn Devil Wears Prada to Prep, the kind of book that drops enough brand names (and not regular people brand names, mind you, brand names that scream "If you have to ask you can't afford me, peon") to hint of a contract with major advertisers. Their names make me want to scream. Bergdorf Blondes is one of them. How about the entire Gossip Girl series, or the wonder title, Best Friends For Never. In a Marge Simpson tone I roll my eyes and say, "Yeah, that's right, that's what I meant, Best Friends For Never." Their proponents claim these books deal with a specific strata of society. The "estate tax" strata, you know, the one that has to invent problems for itself because it learned from a young age that money grows in the family orchard. These are the big contributors to society here, man. Especially cuz the books don't exactly reveal anything especially insightful about these people. Nothing about the way the men (they're always about women) of the families ruin working-class families through their predatory capitalist ways, or how they're probably friends of Jack Abramoff and go golfing with the Cheneys. No, no real issues. The issues are things like - can rich beautiful divorcees have exciting sex lives? Or - will Ann-Margret find her true calling or will she be sucked into the glitzy entertainment business?

Oh, Meryl Streep. What depths you have fallen to (The Devil Wears Prada)

The teen stuff has similar weighty issues to deal with: Three privileged teens realize they don't really know themselves and so they do something outrageous, like take a road trip and maybe even make out! Or there's the other type: the beautiful mean girls of school are mean, slutty, and never get their comeuppance, ooh la la, don't you wish you were one of them, this is even better than an entire box of chocolates. This is as deep as it gets: how can I be more cool, help me, I'm a nerd and I want (like all nerds) to be cool. These aren't satirical, folks. These are serious. And they really try to be angsty and serious too, with real problems, like SATs and block scheduling and cliques. And they scream to be taken seriously. Can you hear them? It's loud and shrill.

It's like Sweet Valley High, but less Barbie and more Bratz (Gossip Girl).

And anyway, I read this certain pretentious young writer's blog to keep myself writing. She motivates me. Probably not the way she wants to. Sort of like the way I suppose the Antichrist motivates that priest in The Omen, you know. Speaking of religious fiction, I'm kind of the same with a lovely, popular, sprawling series called Left Behind. Oh, I have big problems with Left Behind. I turn over the LB DVDs and books when I see them in stores. Yeah, I'm childish, but what can you do against the apocalypse? It saddens me that a book where the supreme evil incarnate rises out of the poor beleagured United Nations is as popular as it is. A book that pounds home the traditional Christian and Christian-only ideals of good and evil at the same time as it sort of glorifies, a la Passion of the Christ, massive violence. I don't know where in history Christians got so sadomasochistic, but some of y'all on the right end of the spectrum really are. Blood 'n' guts 'n' glory, right? Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition (but first spray our own Lord with lots of bullets first. You know, so we can feel guilty and self-flagellate, like Paul Bettany's weirdo albino priest in The DaVinci Code).

Fire and Brimstone: You know these people just hate Earth and want to die (Left Behind)

Of course, most of this stems from my own frustration and angst, my issues with getting my writing out and at the same time keeping it safe. I used to have the old rejection slip crisis issue, like, I won't show it to anyone in case they don't like it, but then I learned to love it enough myself that I just didn't give a damn anymore if they liked it or not. I just don't care. I know what I write is good. The real problem, I've realized, is this: I don't have a genre. Most of the stuff I like doesn't have a genre. Take Macho Camacho's Beat - I defy you to tell me what genre that is. Is Catch-22 really military fiction? Really, really? Is A Season of Migration to the North a murder mystery? Really, really? How about Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende - do they write "political fiction" or is it more than that? Goddamn it, is David Copperfield Young Adult, is Pride and Prejudice chick lit? Argh. No. You know what they are? They're "literature". "Literary fiction", the bastion of all fiction, where Pulitzer Prizes and Nobel Prizes and "critically acclaimed"s and book clubs and posterity and english classes, someday, are common place. It's where I want to be.

The Bloomsbury Group: Ooh, aah, we're literati.

But I'm not there. Don't worry, I don't delude myself to the point that I think I write "literature". I think I need to love words more than I do to write literature - after all, how's a cynical critic and a screenwriter going to produce literature? So what's my other option? Genre fiction. That may sound like it has a lot of options, but it really doesn't, and none of them fit me.

When your name can be mistaken for the title, you're a hack.

* Romance: Yeah, right. This is like the paperback books in grocery stores with maidens with long hair and flowing dresses on the cover along with their Fabios, who are sometimes vampires, pirates, or Vikings. Okay, I have couples in all my books. And they have children, meaning they you-know-what. Rod and Nike, Darius and Isabel, James and Lorelei, Acmon and Andromache. But I do NOT write bodice rippers that are ninety percent sex or sexual tension or virgin deflowering. The back cover does NOT read "when Jessica, Hollywood's current "it" star, crash-lands on a desert island, she is taken captive by a ruthless gang of brutish savages and claimed by their hunky leader, Broch. Will Jessica be able to withstand Broch's steamy advances, or will she succumb to the heat of primal mating season?" Now I can write sexual tension and I write damn good sex scenes. But that makes my brain hurt.

She needs to move her head.

* Thriller/Action: Uh... probably not. Now I have some respect for writers of this genre, since the books get turned into blockbuster action movies that may entertain me, and at least they're not drivel-filled. There's actually important, real people - presidents, prime ministers, popes, terrorists, secret service agents, FBI agents, etc. But it is somewhat predictable stuff with extremely stock and stereotyped characters. The evil Islamic fundamentalists trying to detonate a nuclear warhead. One Tom Clancy gem is about Communists trying to kill the Pope. I guess it's what neocons read before bed. I'm of the opposite persuasion... and I seriously doubt that I have enough knowledge of combat, the military, stealth operations, etc. I know what I read in Against All Enemies and what I've seen in The Fog of War and The X-Files. That's really it. Not enough technical know-how. And not enough burly, misunderstood patriots fighting for "one last chance" or "with nothing to lose".

Must... insert... most... masculine... words... possible

* Women's Lit: What is women's lit anyway? I guess it's supposed to be about juggling families with careers, or awful family secrets, or healing wounds and stuff like that, right? Sort of like emo, except grown-up and with Liz Claiborne instead of Hot Topic? The "by women, for women, about women", emotional honesty tract? Well, I have sort of a dearth of female characters - a huge majority of them are male and while I have a few really kick-ass women, there are only a few of them. I do write about gender relations but not necessarily from the perspective of literature "meant for" women. I don't really write to appeal to any gender. And in any regard, I think there's way too much war and not enough women's lib to make it women's lit.

Hold hands. We're all sisters.

* Chick Lit: No. Not eeeven. My heroine gets married to her one true love in the second book of eight, and while her husband is a fine specimen IMHO, this series does not revolve around shoes or heartbreak or demonic bosses. Ambitious women, maybe. Fashion and divorce and fashionable divorce? Nope. It's not beach-reading. Unless you're going to the beach on Amity Island (the island in Jaws). Also I failed to learn about how to write from the female perspective. Yeah, that's what I get for growing up on shonen anime and action movies as opposed to The Babysitters Club and Teen People. Thanks, mom and dad!

My first favorite movie. And you wonder why I'm not a girly-girl (Jurassic Park)

* Erotica: Ahahahaha. No.

Supposedly she actually has a good time (The Story of O)

* Fantasy: Ok, I have some instances of "magic" or otherwise spiritual power from non-tangible sources. But it doesn't really form the overriding plot or setting of the book - it's just an accessory to the atmosphere because I feel that stuff that is "out there", X-phile that I am, is a part of our world too. Basically I think it's not intricate or extravagant or important enough to actually be considered a fantasy. The world still believes there are no monsters hiding under the bed, there are no angels protecting Earth, and no demons taking possession of government officials. While some solutions come through fantastical methods, a huge majority are human-based. I'm saying a no until someone tells me otherwise.

Much as I love them, this is not really what I write (Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers)

* Science Fiction: Not enough scientific advances have been made to truly make it a scientifically different universe. Automatomeals and even more frightening spy planes than we already have. I'm not scientifically minded enough, even if I dabble in it here and there. I dabble poorly even when I do.

Incomprehension doesn't even begin to cover it (from an Isaac Asimov cover)

* Crime/Mystery: There's a lot of elements of the crime and mystery novel that are sort of pertinent to mine, as is the case with the fantasy genre. The organization with the most depth and character is without doubt the FBI, and my hero's best friend is an NYPD Lieutenant. There's some hideous criminals here, some of them caught and interrogated and imprisoned, others just petty and useful to a broader investigation. Even when the perspective becomes international there's always a murder some people are trying to cover up and other people are trying to uncover. The problem is the books don't actually revolve around any of these "cases" or one particular "crime". The cases are usually solved pretty quickly. It's the stuff around it that becomes far more important. There's also some basic rules of this genre that are quashed - my "chief investigator" is married without a foil, and there's not a whole heck of a lot of logic in my books. So I'm going to say a tentative no on this one as well.

Yeah, I'm just not smart enough for this stuff (Murder in Mesopotamia)

* War: Uh... the fact that I don't drop down to the level of the ground battles and always stay up "in the clouds" of the larger chess pieces, so to speak, no.

This is not what I write (Saving Private Ryan)

* Magical realism: This is one of the genres I think I hit relatively close to. I don't say this because of the so-called "rules" of magical realism but because of the books that are included in the magical realism category - Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I aspire to that kind of writing, that kind of subtle incorporation of that which you feel is unbelievable but yet flows oh-so-well within the book, without explanation. Surrealism is another way of putting it (and Dali is by far my favorite artist) - it's a more accurate description of the kind of "freaky stuff" that I put in the books than "fantasy" or "science fiction".

Salvador Dali's The Discovery of America By Christopher Columbus

* Political fiction: Probably the most accurate classification, but I'm not aware that this is actually a popular, booming genre. I mean, it's no chick lit, it doesn't exactly have publishing houses and book packaging companies clamoring for the latest release, right. But it's probably the closest I'm going to get. All the books in the Musings series involve politics, some of them much more so than others, and how it intersects with society and people's daily lives. Of course most of this is a criticism of current policies. That's par for the course. But can I really market a book calling it political fiction? Plus most of the examples of "classic political fiction" are heavy, dense, theory-laden stuff... Thus Spake Zarathustra, Candide, The Pilgrim's Progress, or more recently, 1984 and The Manchurian Candidate. I've noticed that the most recent example of political fiction given by Wikipedia is 1996's Primary Colors by journalist Joe Klein, about the Clinton campaign. Some argue and I agree with them that The Constant Gardener is political fiction, but it's usually classified as thriller. And here I fear that I'm too emotional and "feminine" for straight-up political fiction. So in short, a yes, but I don't know what the hell it means.

If I got Denzel Washington and not-working-for-vogue Meryl Streep to star in a book-made-into-movie of mine,
I'd die happy (The Manchurian Candidate).

P.S. Bones to pick: "vicious" is spelled V-I-C-I-O-U-S. Please don't mispell this word. It's a very good word and it does not deserve to be spelled V-I-S-C-U-O-U-S, which is something else entirely, or V-I-S-C-I-O-U-S, which isn't even a word. Thank you. Second bone: Please do not come up with chapter titles like this one: "Out, Out, Damned Spotlight" or "For Those About to Rock the Boat, We Salute You". Macbeth and Caesar are rolling in their graves. No one has the right to use the phrase "Partying Is Such Sweet Sorrow". EVER EVER EVER.

Bow to the Bard. Bow to him!

There is a very likely chance that I will someday go insane. I've got those precarious-intellectual genes, you see, and they're made even worse by my creative writing tendencies, and my preference of having nine novels to write at once, with something like a thousand characters running through my head. Well, not a thousand. Maybe just a hundred. I'll devote a post to that someday... all the characters I've created for my current works, without looking them up. Let's just see. The voices in my head accumulate and intensify with time, gaining their own personalities outside of their stereotypical little boxes they were born in. I don't doubt that many artists go mad because they are artists. Or they are artists because they are mad, I'm not sure which (am I sounding like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass enough? I love those books, and they're an excellent discussion and presentation of madness). When you have so many alternate worlds going through your head even when you're trying to do something totally unrelated... it's easy to lose focus, lose touch. I bet painters and other visual artists have it even worse. I admire with sadness and wonder the bizarre beauty of paintings by schizophrenics (see Louis Wain). I feel like I empathize.

David Marsh's Mercury

Most people will tell me that I am far too sane and level-headed to ever be schizophrenic. It's true that instead of disorganization I tend to hyper-organize, probably to the levels of mild OCD, making lists and descriptions of characters, outlining chapters, cataloguing pictures, post-it-noting relevant parcels of information in some book on the Ku Klux Klan. I am an organization-of-information diva. But sometimes I do feel like I'm in delusions and hallucinations. You know how I crashed my car into a mailbox in the middle of my suburb? I was listening to "Vertigo" by U2 and pasting live-action, imagined scenes from one of my books onto it. Guess I got so lost in doing this, as I do whenever I drive and listen to music, that I managed to crash my car into a brick mailbox on my way to my piano lesson. Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I feel like I have the negative symptom of schizophrenia, a blunting of emotion and feeling - at least in my non-writing life, my "numb" life. I can only live in my books. Is that strange? Is it mad? Maybe if I don't become schizophrenic an offspring of mine will. These things run in families.

August Walla's The Absolute Truth!

Here's an interesting analysis of schizophrenia and art. Joseph Campbell has said, "...the imagery of schizophrenic fantasy perfectly matches that of the mythological hero journey, which I had outlined and elucidated, back in 1949, in The Hero With A Thousand Faces." (I am sort of obsessed with the hero's journey, by the way) Continuing on in the article, "It's the same 'place' that the shaman 'goes to'. It's an experience that is so similar yet polarized. To paraphrase the words of Joseph Campbell, it's the same archetypal waters, whereby the schizophrenic is drowning, while the shaman is swimming. The shaman is centered and in control, the schizophrenic is frightened and out of control. And I believe the heights of spiritual understanding the schizophrenic experiences while 'riding the waves' are genuine."

Louis Wain's The Perfect Cat

That's the same journey I think a lot of writers and creators take. I know I do - somewhere between drowning and swimming. In and out of control of a world you think you made, but yet you feel has been there all along, before you made it in a word document, before you were even born. So did you really create it? You gave it life but it gave you life too. You give and take life from your manuscripts, so why shouldn't the manuscripts give and take life from you? That's the link between art and madness. Creation is like playing ouija. You opened the door to a realm you had no business, no right going into. You might stir its pot but if you stir it it's gonna stir you right on back. The alternative is to leave it alone, not to open the door at all, as many people who don't create art do. It's just that I don't think artists have much of a choice. We're like Pandoras. We just can't help opening the box and seeing what's inside the collective unconscious of humanity. Was Jesus man or God? Both? Maybe a writer is both.

Louis Wain's Wallpaper Cat

Into the West (Vacation Part 2)

And this is where the post gets bad. I'm afraid I'm just not that interested in my vacation anymore, but since I started it, I'll finish it - very, very quickly. It will be commemorated in my mind enough for me to remember it, I hope. Don't get me wrong, I believe in working hard - but not when it comes to posting stuff that does not matter and I'm not particularly interested in. So where did we leave off? Saturday night.

Sunday:

Bear Lodge, I tell you.

* Devil's Tower. I can't remember if it's Devil's Tower or Devils' Tower, but the most important part is, it's the tiny remainder of some gigantic volcano that has long since vanished, and it is now slowly eroding, the columns that make up its sides falling to form the field of rocks surrounding it. Of course, it has nothing to do with devils or the Devil. Indians always called it some variation of "Bear" and "Lodge", because they believe it sprouted out of the ground to protect these girls that went to it in the hopes of escaping a gigantic bear, prayed to it, and got rushed by the growing rock to the sky, where they became the Pleiades. The columns thus are the claws of the bear dragging down the huge boulder.

* Spearfish Canyon. A pretty road that winds through a very, very twisty canyon. There are waterfalls supposedly, but we could only see one from the road.

They're named after a bridal veil. How original.

* Deadwood. This is a casino town. It used to be a Gold Rush town (as in the Black Hills Gold Rush, yet another incident of white people shoving off the Indians when it's profitable for them... see your local American History text book for more information), but now the gold is only found in the bright and flashy slot machines frequented by old folks in hordes. All that remains of the mines used to explode out the gold is a delapidated building on the edge of town that runs over a dirty little creek, abandoned, the glass shot out, last opened in the 1970s. It reminds me of the kind of destroyed New England post-industrial village that Stephen King writes about. We stayed in a very nice hotel, the Celebrity Hotel, that prided itself on its "ye oldtime casino" decor - dramatic, stylish in an absurd, gold-plated, hair piled up on top, Indian kitsch way. You know. Except the Celebrity Hotel had acquired random crap from blockbuster movies, like Harry Potter's wand, a mummy from The Mummy, an outfit of a park worker in Jurassic Park, etc. We had dinner in a pretend Chinatown restaurant with a dragon theme (except their big display was a lion costume... oh well), since of course the Chinese get to be exploited in the mines, those lucky ducks, before they get shipped back to China posthumously.

Monday:

Wild Bill Hickock's Last "Stand".

* Deadwood. We got strong coffee from this local little coffee shop (no Starbucks anywhere on our trip, I'm proud to say) then went to the cemetery. This is why historians come to Deadwood - Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane are buried here. She claimed they were lovers, but most people doubt this - regardless, the people of Deadwood honored her request to be buried next to him. The cemetery came with a guide featuring the stories of the famous dead people - and there are a lot of famous corpses in the Deadwood cemetery. It's a good expression of Deadwood's heyday, back in the 1800s, reading those stories. Preacher Smith, killed by Indians. Hundreds of children died of a now curable epidemic. "Wild Bill" himself in a gunfight. There are reenactments of his killer's capture on summer evenings at one of the hotels on Main Street.

* Hill City. We visited their Museum of Natural History. They own Stan, the most complete male T-Rex skeleton. Their Black Hills scientists also discovered Sue, but apparently the farmer whose land they found her on decided to auction her off on eBay, and the highest bidder was not the South Dakota Museum of Natural History - it was Chicago's. Thus Chicago has Sue, who's even more complete than Stan. Needless to say this little museum in the middle of the Black Hills in a quiet town has an enormous grudge against the big-name museums like Chicago's. Yes, we were guilted into paying the optional donation.

Me and Stan - we're bffs.

* Cosmos "Mystery Area". Discovered by (probably drunk) college boys in the 1950s, this place in backwoods Black Hills claims to have three vortexes where gravity is "all messed up". Balls and water roll up hill, people defy gravity, leaning the wrong ways and shit. It might all be an illusion based on slanted houses on slanted hills, but it's worth the creepy feeling you get while traipsing around that screwed up house where you lean forward and don't fall. My mom thinks it's the minerals in the hills, an excess of iron. I think it's ley lines. New Age people think ley lines are lines of cosmic or Earth-based energy, and when they converge, they form a vortex, where the energy mixture skews gravity. We also saw a guy whose shirt said "The Storm is Coming". I'm convinced he's part of a racist organization. See StormFront. It wouldn't surprise me if this part of the country was rife with their supporters.

My way or the highway.

* Custer State Park. Huge wildlife preserve. We stayed in a rustic cabin-like house surrounded by the forest, in the dead silence of nature. Before that, however, we went on the Wildlife Pass road (by car), and after moaning about how there were no wildlife, ran into a buffalo herd. Let me tell you that buffalo do not respect the idea of "roads". They stand anywhere they want, for hours on end. And if they get mad, they charge, so it's really not in your best interest to go "buffalo-tipping". A calf will go onto the road to follow a bull. Then its mother will follow. And so on. There were about three herds, and these are pretty large herds, so by the end I had had my fill of buffaloes. I also had pheasant for dinner for the first time. It was lovely.

Tuesday:
* A lot of driving. I would like to pause here to make the following point: South Dakota's roads are horribly, horribly mislabeled. It's impossible to find turn-offs, the names of roads change, the maps are inaccurate. Etcetera, etcetera. It was clearer once we got out of the Black Hills and back onto steady highways. But we had to try a couple times to get into the Badlands National Park because the roads were so goddamn bad.

Badlands from afar

* The Badlands. It's a jagged territory. There's very little grass or vegetation of any sort - it's just these tan spikes sticking out of the ground. It looks kind of like the moon, except much, much more craggy. The wind is also unbelievably strong. Apparently Yue and her family thought they were in some massive, constant tornado when they came here, and that is sort of what it feels like. It was hard to trust myself walking up the rickety staircase to our second-floor room of the shoddy but passable Badlands Inn. It howls. Tumbleweeds fly across the roads. Birds try not to crash into buildings. The food is horrid, too, and there's no cable television anywhere. People do not live here. At least here they respected the Indians' view - it was the Indians' idea to name the place Bad.

Badlands up-close.

Wednesday:
* The Badlands. I should mention the huge amount of dead prairie dogs in this area now. Some of the rodents are just damn suicidal, seemingly daring each other to run across the highway where they get smashed. Dead prairie dogs litter the highway. It's sad. There's also a buffalo jump around here. Good place to kill anything, I say. The wind was so strong I had to hold on to the precious new dreamcatcher earrings I bought to keep them from flying off my ears. And some of these places might kill tourists when they get blown off rocky ridges.

* More driving through northern Nebraska. We drove through an Indian reservation. I thought it might be, you know, different from the rest of the landscape, but really it was more of the same - green(ish) farmlands, cows, hills. Except here they're owned by Indians. We stopped at O’Neill and here I had access to the internet for the first time since Chadron, NE – I sat in the lobby and listened to the loud desk attendant and Limp Bizkit-like guest who wanted to know where to find a bar and replied to my emails.

Thursday:

Rhino mother and child.

* Ashfall State Park. We had to try twice to get in here too, because the first time we got there it was still closed, so we randomly drove back up the scenic country drive, then back down, and just waited for the gates to open. Ashfall is probably the most famous fossil site in Nebraska, more so than Agate National Monument, although I kind of liked Agate better for whatever reason – more mystique, more out there I guess. But the animals at Ashfall are sizeable – a rhino herd (bull and harem and calves), random slender horses, and birds crushed under their hooves. There’s widespread assumption that predators were also roaming around, dying after the large herbivores were thoroughly scavenged, but none of their fossils have been found. These animals died because of the eruption of a huge volcano in Idaho, ten times more frightening than Mt. St. Helen’s. It’s near Yellowstone, but it’s not the Yellowstone volcano. And anyway it came and asphyxiated all the animals – gave them lung disease and killed them over the course of a week, a lung disease that caused abnormal bone growth and probably massive discomfort. The fossils are unearthed and lying out for visitors to see in a barn.

Wildflowers.

* Home.

Into the West (Vacation Part 1)

The obligatory vacation post. Because I feel like I had to do it, to memorialize it and get it the hell out of my head! Not that the vacation was some kind of life-changing experience. But it was memorable in the way all vacations are, because they're out of the norm, they're somewhere new, and this time, I actually got my mother to listen to nearly my entire music collection as well as my justifications as to how my playlists relate to my books. And we managed to stay off the interstate (or the internet, as mom kept accidentally calling it) and drive the scenic country roads. That's probably about as "backroads" or "off the beaten path" as mother and I will get.

Thursday: Set off. Dropped off Brownie and the red daisy with Uncle Norm, packed up the car (it was quite a marvel, how we were going on a trip that was supposed to be totally relaxing and unplanned, spur-of-the-moment... and we still end up totally packing the car, taking everything but the kitchen sink) and drove to Grand Island. I fell asleep because I let mom listen to some damn NPR show... probably the market show, the one that became an apologist extravaganza for Ken Lay after the trial. Pretty uneventful because we only left at five in the afternoon and didn't drive more than three hours, tops. I got mom to go to a Comfort Inn instead of the Holiday Inn Express because the Comfort Inn had wireless highspeed internet, not just highspeed internet - I forgot to bring my ethernet cable. Ate dinner at Applebee's, surrounded by locals... but of course the locals weren't so different from Lincoln locals, since Grand Island is still a hub of Nebraska.

Friday: The Westward drive through Nebraska, from Grand Island to Alliance. There are absolutely no cities on this drive, scenic as it may be, just tiny villages that are more like pioneer settlements than anything else - houses falling down on their own walls, pick-up trucks with grass creeping up all around, inbred-looking people, little white churches with gigantic crosses. Some have signs pointing toward a "Business District" - kind of laughable when you think about a town of 96 people having a "business district". We first stopped at a section of the Nebraska National Forest, which is the largest handplanted forest in the nation, and shelled out the first of our many contributions to the underfunded Park Service. The forest is reminescent of the lower Rocky Mountains - temperate, American, vaguely cool, full of buzzing insects, standard camping area.

A forest in Nebraska

Apparently people use the place as a racetrack for their ATVs, which my mother of course began to vehemently detest, as she is wont to do. Then we had lunch at the worst place we ever ate at - Stubbs Cafe, one of those warehouse-sized cafes for both the villagers and the truckers/travelers. Its vicinity was so treeless and barren, the building itself so bare except for the little bell that rang with the door. I had a fish sandwich, Mom had a cheeseburger. While my fish sandwich was perfectly ordinary, Mom's cheeseburger was hilarious - it was obviously a hoagie bun ripped in half (not cut, mind you - ripped, as in with bare hands), a thin, small, dry slab of hamburger snuggled between... and that was all. No vegetables whatsoever. Perhaps Stubbs figured ketchup was a vegetable. Despite the large dining room there were only two other groups of patrons - one a standard three-generation family of blonde airhead women, the other one lonely village man in overalls who talked to himself. Wonderfully, however, Stubbs does offer gift certificates. I still think that would have been the best oleh-oleh for Uncle Norm. We drove the rest of the afternoon, passing Alliance and settling in Chadron. By then the scenery had become radically different than that of southern Nebraska - buttes interrupted the landscape, which had become elevated and sloping, rolling even... hilly, vaguely Western, green. Like it could become Brokeback Mountain scenery given a few more hikes in latitude.

Brokeback Country

The sky was also no longer a simple bright blue - it was a curdled blue, and of a darker shade than normal, much more dramatic and textured, sort of the way one thinks Celtic skies should be. Chadron's a pleasant enough little town, big enough to have gas pumps and a nearby college. We stayed at a Best Western and had a fairly crappy and generic dinner at the nextdoor Country Village. As well as a stop in the whirlpool of the hotel.

Saturday: We drove out to the Agate National Monument, taking a slight detour. The Agate National Monument is a nice addition to Nebraska's scientific resume. A long time ago a farmer discovered a rhino fossil jutting out of some little buttes in his property. Then he found these large formations in other rocks on the property that became named "Devil's Corkscrews" - they looked like gigantic corkscrews. I mean, gigantic. Taller than men. The guy from UNL he invited thought they were the roots of prehistoric plants. Wrong, of course. The guy from Pittsburgh University got it right - they were the burrows of cat-sized prehistoric prairie dogs. Anyway, after what must have been a funding fight, Agate became a national monument with a visitor's center and trails leading out to the buttes, which are home to the bonebeds that had been covered by loads of volcanic ash - though the animals here did not die of ash.

Always wanted to be a paleontologist...

They died of malnutrition brought about by a drought - as they ate up all the remaining vegetation, it became too long of a trek between the shrinking waterhole and the grasses. So they stayed at the waterhole and died there - the little herbivores first, the big herbivores next, and then the scavenging carnivores. Meat-eaters always, always die last. This is, of course, post-dinosaurs by a long stretch. Nebraska at this point is no longer an inland sea, but a savanna, filled with sheep-like oreodonts, saber-tooth cats, bear-dogs, monstrous hogs, long-necked camels, large rhinos, vultures, svelte little horses.

It's a marsh, during rains

The trails all said beware of rattlesnakes, and we laughed at first, but then I almost stepped on one up near the visitors' center, as I was walking back to the car. It was a prairie rattlesnake and was not pissed, just went slinking on its way, hugging the curve between the grass and the pebble-path. We had lunch near the border with Wyoming, at a tiny little cafe that was the other half of a kitschy souvenir shop. The food was slightly better than Stubbs, but it was a better experience overall because there were authentic cowboys there - with cowboy hats, stirrups and all. This is cattle country, after all. Although on the road to Agate I really could imagine dinosaurs coming over the rolling hills at any moment. Again, we drove the rest of the afternoon, crossing into Wyoming and finally stopping in Sundance, Wyo., a vaguely tourist-y city just because it's the closest settlement to Devils' Tower. We stayed at a Best Western again, this one manned by one lanky twenty-something in glasses who when we asked where the Buffalo Jump was said something like, "I have no idea". I swear this lad was the manager. We found the Buffalo Jump on our own, but the sinkhole itself was closed, a lid locked on - the site was quite undeveloped due to insufficient funding.

"proceed at your own risk," the signs said

A buffalo jump is a place where Indians used to drive buffaloes over a cliff to kill them. The creatures would die from either the fall or the crush of other buffaloes falling on them. This was apparently the first way of killing buffaloes, before spears or guns. They're all over the Northwestern plains. I was a little disappointed that the sinkhole with all the buffalo bones was closed... but what can you do. The National Park Service isn't perfect and certainly isn't rich, and it wasn't even prime vacation season. We went for rib-eye steaks at a Sundance restaurant, but soon after we ordered all the lights went out. It killed the country music, which was nice, but the lights did not come back on for the rest of dinner. We paid with cash because the credit card machine was broken. We ate by candlelight. People had to change their orders because the deep-frier was electric. And certainly no ice cream. It was the whole region, we were told. So we drove back to the hotel by cloudy twilight - it was threatening to rain, and it did start by the time we drove up to the Best Western, where all the lights were out. But there was little nerdy hotel-manager-guy at the backdoor, with a spelunking light strapped to his forehead, waiting to guide us down the pitch-black hallway to our room. "Dude, it's like in The Shining," I said. The hotel manager chuckled. My mom didn't think it was amusing. We asked for candles or a flashlight, but when they didn't come, decided to go down to the lobby to fetch them ourselves. I cannot tell you how fucking dark the hallway was, but I led the way. I mused that I could do this sort of thing, the dark-into-the-unknown sort of thing, as long as I didn't think there were ghosts. As long as I hadn't heard any stories beforehand. They gave us a flashlight and a candle and we went back to the room. I had been wanting to start Night Shift, but that was before the lights went out. Mom did Sudoku by flashlight - I listened to my playlist of Chathura, which takes place during the downfall of science and the rise of a vengeful nature. Night had settled then. We went to sleep. Of course, the lights came back on about an hour and a half later.