The Last Technology

I am, by practice, something of a maximalist. I like to stay in nice hotels with girls and order up food. Back in high school the third chapter of The Great Gatsby, where the preparation for one of Gatsby’s parties is described in the urgent present tense, was my favorite passage. It still is. I don’t have an ironic appreciation of that section, either. The sumptuousness isn’t perversely attractive to me; rather, I want to go to one of his parties and dance on the lawn with some starlet in the dim, incalculable hours. When asked recently who my favorite author was I said A.J. Liebling, and I was probably thinking of a passage like this:

I had watched Clay’s performance in Rome and had considered it attractive but not probative. Amateur boxing compares with professional boxing as college theatricals compare to stealing scenes from Margaret Rutherford. Clay had a skittering style, like a pebbled scaled over water. He was good to watch, but he only made glancing contact.

And yet, spiritually, I have minimalist leanings. In my novel We’re Getting On, which Flatmancrooked launched on Monday, my characters are dehydrating themselves materially and sometimes morally. I’m intrigued by a certain strain of conspicuous consumption, but, perhaps paradoxically, I’ve also always gravitated toward simplicity and revision. When I was a teenager I tried to move out of my room and into a tent on my parent’s acreage. Back then I saw leaving the house as a sort of purgation, figuring that I might reach some spiritual clarity in the woods. I’d just read Siddhartha (Gatsby must’ve been the following semester; I was, after all, an impressionable youth) and had conflated the Gotama Buddha’s asceticism with his enlightenment. And yet, as rash and unfledged as my philosophical leanings were, I’ve never shaken off the desire to wipe my own psychic and material slate clean.

When I set out to write We’re Getting On, the better part of a decade after threatening to cloister myself in the forest, I had the nebulous goal of telling a story where the characters were retreating from technology. We’re surrounded by machines, so to speak, and we rely upon them to see, eat, and communicate. I’m not interested in condemning the digital world permanently; that would be silly. I wrote this article on a computer, and I’ll Twitter and Facebook the hell out of it over the next week. And yet, I have to question the wisdom of being perpetually connected. The world we live in is dense with information, and as a test, perhaps above every other impulse, I’ve wanted to pare down my life, first through fiction, and ultimately through practice. Near the end of my book the protagonist (or antagonist) is lying on a rock in the desert. “Language is the last technology I have to rid myself of if I’m going to start over,” he says, then continues:

Although a new beginning seems beyond my grasp. I’ve gone too far in the other direction, and this isn’t a circle or a cycle, but a spectrum at the ends of which are two terminal extremes. How should I go about this? Were pronouns the right parts to start with? Maybe I should have begun by paring down my vocabulary more generally. I’ve left myself with I, as well as that and this and these. Let me hang onto those for a moment, and those as well… I’ll consider objects around me without assigning them qualities. The sky, I’ll think… I don’t need to inquire… I do not need to inquire anymore. Some repetition to ensure everything gets eliminated. I lie on the ground. The sun. A single cloud. No water. No one pursued me. I must end on the right word. The deer leaps. The goat’s hooves clatter sharply on the rocks and it slips, he, or she falls, down the shear face of the red cliff, or did it? I had to. That was the last outburst. I will not again.

Whether or not I’ve succeeded, by writing this I wanted to get to a place, conceptually, where nothing existed. Of course, Beckett tried to do this three times consecutively—first in Molloy, then in Malone Dies, and finally in The Unnameable—and we know how well that worked for him (“…it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”). Nonetheless, feeling surrounded by a superfluity of objects, ideas, and words, I’ve desired, like most writers, to understand why I’m adding to the world more objects, ideas and words. Is it simply the creative impulse, or is it ego?

It’s probably ego. I have a Google Alert set up for my name, not because I have some actual professional need to know when people are talking about me, but because I want to know. I enjoy being discussed. I feel vindicated when my work merits mention. But part of me doesn’t want to care if someone cares about what I’m doing. I’d like sometimes to be Salinger in Cornish. Yet in this noisy world the reclusive writer is going the way of the Abyssinian wolf. When Cormac McCarthy dies on his ranch in New Mexico, he’ll be among the last hermetic American writers; if I want to sell books in the 21st century, I’ll have to see a lot of people.

With that in mind, I’m taking my novel on the road starting in July. The first edition of We’re Getting On grows into a tree (there are spruce seeds in the cover), and in keeping with that environmental stance, I’ll be touring the book, between Los Angeles and Vancouver, by bicycle. There is, at the very least, some kind of thematic consistency linking the promotion of the book and its content. More importantly for me, though, is that I’ll get to experience first hand the sort of deprivation I put my characters through. During my ride I can’t use a phone or a computer. I can’t watch television or listen to the radio. And I’m not allowed to sleep inside. I’m not under any illusion that the ordeal will tamp down my ego or turn me into an ascetic permanently (if that is even desirable, which it probably isn’t). But as we race forward into a century that is rapidly blurring the lines between the digital and actual self, the private and the public, I expect to find a little respite from the storm—even if by this time next year I’m contributing again to the gale.

- James Kaelan is the author of the novel We’re Getting On, which he’ll be touring up the West Coast this summer on a bicycle.

The History of a Planet and Character Renewal

ONE: The Transformation

I used to work in a submarine sandwich shop in Longmont, Colorado. A woman came in to buy a sandwich. As a summer frock, she wore juniper and glacially displaced stones. There was an isolated shower near her hips where the dress clung to her body like moss. A thousand butterflies swarmed at her breasts. She turned to go, and a leaf fell from her boughs as autumn came on in her wake. I watched the leaf flutter to the floor, where it became someone else’s worn business card with an address written in pencil on the back. Her name was Simone.

Sometime later, I wrote her this invitation:

When I think of you, my neurons flap against my skull, releasing a meadow of tall grass and gentle wind. Buffalo are hiding in the grass. Drifting over my chlorophylled self, I settle in the meadow. A thousand butterflies find food in my body, and I know what it is to be you.

Perception Potluck

Alfred’s shed                  Please attend

Jack’s lawn                   Friends welcome

TWO: Three Tubs of Soup

Simone accepted the invitation and delivered to the event a half-breed concomitant named Kree, three tubs of soup and a loaf of homemade bread. The smell of baking was still on her when she hugged me.

I introduced them to Alfred and Thelma.

Simone passed the bread. I tore off a piece and put it in my mouth. The five of us sat against a wall.

On the wall opposite hung a painting of a paintbrush, painting a parrot. Thelma reached for the brush and wrapped her fingers around it. We gazed at one another before following her lead. Now, each of us held onto it, as if the paintbrush were a three-dimensional object and only two feet away.

As for Simone’s soup, it rotated one’s brain stem to the foreground. Thus, the unoffended perceptions of animals were regained. The effect earned her soup this nickname: Zimone’s Zoological Zoup.

It was a good beginning.

THREE: Desert of Me’s

Several potlucks later, the five of us found each other in the crowd at Thelma’s. Kree supplied the first course. He placed a piece of orange peel onto each of our tongues. Simone led Alfred to another room and pulled him to the floor beside her.

Here’s what happened:

I was thirteen and walking through a desert in Mexico. My father walked behind me, and I wasn’t allowed to look back. Because of this, I couldn’t be sure if he was really there. It was my rite of passage and would culminate when I found Peyote and ingested it. The plant would guide me to it, “bending the reeds of your body like a wind.”

After three days, I stopped eating. “Peyote likes a clean house,” my father said. “It cannot fill what is not empty.” Three more days on hot sands, and I no longer knew who I was. Such knowledge trailed me like tumbleweed.

I must have found Peyote and welcomed it in, because the earth cracked open. I was sucking a stalactite when she shook me loose again, depositing me back on the desert floor. It had been day when I’d arrived, but now it was night. It could have been thirty nights later, for all I knew.

Human figures took shape around me then—one squatting, one sitting, one standing on his head. One stalked a snake; another walked on fire. Each of them was me. A baby, a boy, an old man.

One had his arms raised to the moon. I traced his body with my eyes, his breathing with my lungs, his utterances with my tongue. I was him (easy to feel since he was me). I turned to face the moon. It bounced light to my eyes, which collected and reflected, while the source of it all grinned behind the world.

I glanced back at the figure I was impersonating, but he was gone. I looked in the other direction, and there, staring back at me, was the thirteen-year-old body I thought I still occupied.

Another me sprinted by between us. This time, I became him immediately. The planet rolled under my feet, as if I were keeping it in motion. A bead of sweat gathered and dropped from my brow. When it hit the sand, I was sitting cross-legged there, the body I’d just occupied running past and out of sight.

I’d been a man. Many had come before me. Many would follow. I held my hands to my face. They had sliced open much animal flesh and pierced the flesh of man. I watched my children grow. Remembering how I’d led my son on a rite of passage, as my father had led me, I was suddenly back in the body I’d started with, the thirteen-year-old who’d ingested Peyote. Only, my skin was looser.

I began switching bodies at will, bounding between perspectives. I changed so rapidly I saw through all eyes at once. Then, the figures swirled together like the gasses of a forming star. Everything exploded, and I was back in Thelma’s house.

Thelma had fallen to her face and was snorting. Alfred and Simone were still in the next room.

“Was that my father?” I asked Kree.

Commotion ensued. A man’s shirt was ripped open; his chest pounded. People asked what he ate.

“Egg salad,” someone said, “but I had it too, and so did Mark.”

Our guess had been confirmed: not every nervous system can stomach every perception. We made an early end to the night. Those who never returned would eventually flock to the predictable world the seventeen Four Dimension Generals were already beginning to encase themselves in.

“What happened?” Thelma asked, back from the desert.

“Stay away from the egg salad.”

- Excerpted from The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir [Green Integer, 2010]

- Daniel Grandbois is the author of the Believer Book Award Reader Survey Selection and Indie Next Notable Book Unlucky Lucky Days. His work appears in many journals and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Boulevard, Mississippi Review, and Fiction. Also a musician, he plays in three of the pioneering bands of “The Denver Sound:” Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Tarantella, and Munly.

Remembering Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah died on March 1, 2010, but I was fortunate enough to have become his friend long before then and, later, to have him teach in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University, which I direct.  Fortunately for those of us who loved and admired Barry as a writer, a friend, or both, videotapes of a Q & A session and two readings that he gave while he taught here still exist.  The readings took place in 2003 and 2004 at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, which is based in Katherine Anne Porter’s childhood home, ten miles from campus.  I thought that many of you might like to hear what he to say, so feel free to click on any of the following links and listen. – Tom Grimes


Barry’s first reading, during which he encourages a young novelist:

Barrry’s Q & A, in which he talks about the role of place in fiction a hardly gives anyone a chance to ask a question:

Barry’s second reading, fall 2004, during which he muses on Texas hippies, pills, writing about your own backyard and the “imposing and handsome” Katherine Anne Porter; he then  reads “Uncle High Lonesome” from High Lonesome. – Bearden Coleman


- Tom Grimes directs the MFA Program at Texas State University.

- Bearden Coleman is a graduate of the MFA Program at Texas State University where he studied with and, during that time, became a close friend of Barry Hannah.

Kapitoil

Journal date recorded: October 3, 1999

The Atlantic elongates below us like an infinite violet carpet.

However, the American teenager dividing me from the window does not observe it. He is plugged into earphones and recreates with a video game simulation of an airplane flight. It is strange that someone would focus on a minimal flat monitor of artificial flying when you are truly flying and have a big-picture view of the world. Possibly it is because he has traveled in an airplane multiple times and this is my initial experience.

His name is Brian, and acne covers his face like islands on a map or discrete red points on a graph. After we relaunch from London, he asks if I have any games on my computer.

“No,” I say. “I use it merely for programming.”

He unplugs one earphone. “What do you program?”

I am still in the brainstorming phase for the programming window currently open, so I have coded only a few lines. “I work for Schrub Equities at their office in Doha, Qatar.”

“Really, for Schrub?” He unplugs his other earphone. “You make financial programs for them?”

“I sometimes create programs.”

He looks at my screen. I reach for the airplane’s consumer magazine in the chair’s netting and intentionally contact my laptop so that it rotates away from the angle of Brian’s eyes. “What do they use them for?”

“I typically do not show them to my superiors,” I say.

“Why, they don’t work?”

“It is complex to describe.” I minimize the programming window. “Sometimes programs require—”

He shifts through different channels on his personal television. “Then what are you coming to New York for, if you’re not a real programmer?” he asks.

“I am here until December 31st to help them prepare for the Y2K bug so their systems do not malfunction.” It sounds less impressive than when I practiced stating it at home.

“So that’s why you’re in business class,” he says, and I think he is complimenting me until he replugs both earphones and adds, “Only the serious businessmen fly in first.” I restrict myself from telling him that it is in fact critical work and they are transporting me because I am the cream of the cream Y2K specialist in Doha, and instead I look outside, where the ocean mirrors the plummeting sun like toggling quartz in concrete or an array of diamonds, and reminds me of why our mother gave Zahira her name, because she parallels a diamond in various ways.

When I retrieve my new voice recorder/electronic dictionary from my pocket later to certify it is functioning, Brian inspects it and asks how it works. I explain that if it detects human voices nearby it records for up to 12 hours, and if it detects silence it powers off. He asks if I am also a reporter. “I am recording a journal while I am in the U.S., and this will help me to study the American voices I hear and to transmit their conversations without error.”

Brian laughs loudly enough for the people behind us to hear. “You keep a diary?” he says. I wish his parents were on the airplane, but he seems like the class of teenager who does not adjust his behavior even in front of his parents. “The only person I know who does that is my sister.”

Several of the American financial magazines I read advise recording a journal for self-actualization, and I am additionally doing it to enhance my English, but he will not appreciate that or my two other motivations: (1) I hypothesize that writing your thoughts is a way of deciphering precisely what you truly feel, and it is especially valuable if you have a problem, similar to how writing a computer program helps you decipher the solution to a real-world problem, and (2) recording my experiences is also integral to remembering precise ideas and moments from my time in the U.S. I have a robust memory for some details, but it is complex to continue acquiring data and archive them all, and even I now am forgetting some older memories, as if my brain is a hard drive and time is a magnet.

The captain says we should complete our customs forms “ASAP,” and I research the term in the book I contain a copy of in my other pocket, which I also gave to Zahira: The International Businessperson’s Guide to English, which self-defines on the reverse cover as “An indispensable compendium of English financial jargon and idioms for the global businessperson, from actionable to zombie bonds.” There is also a void in the rear for the owner to record more jargon terms, as I do frequently, even though my knowledge base of English financial jargon is already broad for a foreigner because of my nighttime classes in programming and mathematics and economics.

The chief flight attendant commands us to power off electronics. We angle down to New York City, and the skyscrapers of Manhattan aggregate like tall flowers in a garden and the grids of orange lights look like LEDs on a circuit board.

The previous landing from Doha to London slightly panicked me, so to reroute my brain I reinitiate conversation with Brian, although my ideal partner for logic problems is Zahira.

“I have an interesting math problem,” I say. “Is an airplane a greater gas-guzzler per passenger than a car? Here are some data that I received from the captain when I transferred, converted to American measurements: (1) We will consume approximately 17,000 gallons of gas on this flight; (2) it is 3,471 miles from London to New York; and (3) there are 415 total passengers and employees.”

Brian yawns, but I continue, as sometimes people become stimulated by a subject once they learn more.

I write the equation on a napkin for him:

(415 passengers)(3,471 miles)

—————————————            = 84.7 passenger-miles/gallon

17,000 gallons

“Therefore, if a car has four passengers, what must its gas mileage be to equal an airplane’s per-person efficiency of ap­proximately 84.7 passenger-miles per gallon?”

“I don’t know,” Brian says. “I suck at math.”

It is frustrating when people do not have faith in their skills, because this is a simple problem he could solve if he tried. I explain that a car must consume 21.2 miles per gallon to be as efficient with four passengers, and that a new hybrid car from Honda is more efficient with just two passengers.

“But there is no car that is as efficient if you are solitary,” I say.

Excerpted from Kapitoil (Harper Perennial, 2010).

- Teddy Wayne is the recipient of a 2010 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. His fiction, satire, and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, and Esquire, McSweeney’s, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.

Kapitoil‘s Book launch party will be held at McNally Jackson on Apr. 19th, 7pm.


Scrababble


Mattel recently announced plans to change the rules to Scrabble games sold in Britain. Changes would allow for celebrity names and proper nouns, and the focus appears to be on making the game more fun for younger players. The response to this news can be spelled s-t-r-o-n-g, especially in the US, where response has been based partly on misinformation and hearsay. In the spirit of clarifying what the rule changes are, below is a summary of the changes with the greatest impact on gameplay.



1. All spaces are now triple word score bonus squares. The bonuses are also cumulative (i.e. the first letter earns a triple word, the second a cubed score, the third a tricube or “Brady Bunch Frame”, and so on).
2. Correctly spelling a word is now worth double word points.
3. Double letter spaces are banned. Fuck ‘em. No one liked them. They are worse than getting no points.
4. Correctly spelled made-up words are worth triple points.
5. Challenging another player’s word will no longer entail a dictionary. Instead, challenges will be decided by majority rule. In the case of a tie the player and challenger shall engage in physical combat a la Spock and Kirk in the Amok Time episode of Star Trek.
6. All players shall have two challenges per half, just like the NFL.
7. Unlike the NFL, one challenge shall be spiritual in nature.
8. Spelling the name of a weapon and then subsequently pulling said weapon on the next player earns double points. Use of the weapon is optional.
9. The decisions of the judges are final.
10. Proper names, places, foreign words, grunted sounds, abstract premises, vague ideas, poorly constructed arguments, disproved theories and imaginary letters are now acceptable.
11. When playing an equation involving long division, it is necessary to show your work.
12. Playing the word “classic” is forbidden. We’re on to you, elitist.
13. To make the game even more exciting, the board and tiles are all now highly flammable.
14. To determine who goes first, all players must pick a tile at random. The one closest to “A” is first to go and must light the included candle before playing her first word.
15. The player who picks the tile furthest from “A” may be beaten severely at the other players discretion.
16. Certain “difficult to use” letters have been removed: Y is now a lower case h; Z has been turned sideways, making it an N; Q has been renamed “O with an attitude;” K and X have been turned into asterisks.
17. Correctly spelling a real word that no one else knows will earn minus-50 points. This game is supposed to be fun, Wordy McWordstein, and you’re getting all wordy on us? What you trying to hide, Wordboy?
18. Any player with more than three duplicate vowels waiting to be played may now earn double bonus points for screaming the vowels as one long sound into the ear of the next player (e.g. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!).
19. The first player to play the word “of” wins, regardless of score, remaining tiles, or grade point average.

- Sean Ferrell is the author of Numb, coming from HarperPerennial in August, 2010 www.byseanferrell.com