The Art of Unpredictable & Unclassifiable Literature

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A word from the editors at Electric Literature & FSG Originals: This week marks the release of Book 2 — Autumn Princess, Dragon Child (FSG Originals) — in the The Tale of Shikanoko, the epic, mythical, mind-bending series from Lian Hearn (the pen name of English author Gillian Rubinstein). Hearn’s style, like her historical fantasy world-building, defies all easy description or easy understanding, so we asked four writers — each a practitioner of notably imaginative, genre-busting fiction — to sit down with Hearn’s four-volume epic of medieval Japan to try to figure out what’s at work in Hearn’s unusual storytelling. Sean McDonald, Hearn’s publisher at FSG Originals, also jumped in from time to time. And, in a final twist that was too good to forego, we asked the author herself — Lian Hearn — to read their conversation and tell us how she did it, and how these writers might have shown her something unexpected about her own writing.

Got all that? Is your head spinning?

Good, you’re almost ready for The Tales of Shikanoko.

But first, the participants:

Toby Barlow is the author of Sharp Teeth, a werewolf novel in verse set in contemporary Los Angeles, and Babayaga, a post-war Paris caper about witches, spies, and a detective turned into a flea.

Nicola Griffith is the author of six acclaimed novels, most recently Hild, a novel about St. Hilda of Whitby set in seventh-century England.

Kelly Luce is the author of Three Scenarios in which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, an avowedly imaginative collection of stories set in Japan, and a novel, Pull Me Under, forthcoming from FSG this fall; you can read an earlier conversation she had with Lian Hearn here.

Robin Sloan is the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a novel about a very curious man and his very curious San Francisco store that holds more books — including at least its fair share of multi-volume epics — and more secrets than seems plausible. None of the writers had read all four volumes of The Tales of Shikanoko at the time of this conversation.

Lian Hearn, of course, had read them all, more than a few times.

With that, we’re off…

Toby Barlow: I heard an anecdote once that, back in the 19th century, when Antoine Galland started publishing his volumes of translations of Arabian Nights, Parisian mobs would show up outside his apartment demanding he release the next stories. That’s how I feel about The Tale of Shikanoko. Somehow, the way it’s written, with the magic so organic and natural and the adventure so quick and sudden, it canters along and makes me feel almost childish in my joy. The book seems to work like a boxer’s jabs.

Also, it feels paradoxically totally cinematic and utterly unfilmable, which is my favorite kind of book, and it’s something I try to write myself, so that you hold the book not as a dry run for a yet-to-be-made motion picture, but the thing in itself. And you see it in your mind’s eye in a way that Hollywood would only botch if they tried. Though in this particular case, I would like to see them try.

Nicola Griffith: I was thinking about what Toby said about Shikanoko being cinematic. The books (well, book; I’ve only read the first one so far) remind me of something and I was trying to figure out what, and finally, this morning I grabbed the slippery little memory by the ankle before it could dive away again: Shikanoko reminds me of Monkey, a Japanese-made series from Chinese legend dubbed into English and shown by the BBC from 1979 (I think) to 1980 or 1981. Obviously my memories of it are hazy but I remember my amazement and delight in the sheer strangeness of the story about a monkey born from a stone egg who whizzed about on a magic-carpet-like cloud confronting demons and dragons and demi-gods… Anything could happen, and frequently did. I watched it because I honestly couldn’t predict what would happen.

That’s how I feel about Shikanoko: it’s not predictable. At all. It doesn’t follow Western storytelling sensibilities, certainly not literary ones. Kelley, my wife, has been writing screenplays for the last few years (watch out for OtherLife which we hope will premier later this year) so we’ve spent a lot of time over beer talking about film story vs prose story. Immersive fiction (the kind of thing I like) leaves a lot of emotional and metaphorical space for the reader to put themselves in the head, heart, and body of the protagonist. At the risk of getting loooong here, what I set out to do with Hild was for the reader to experience the seventh century, to see, smell, hear, taste and feel what Hild does; to gradually adopt her mindset and worldview; to think as she does, to learn her lessons, feel her joy — to be her, just for a little while. My goal was to run my software on the reader’s hardware: for them to recreate Hild inside themselves and know, not just think but know, what the early seventh-century was like. To do that I used very specific word choice and sentence structure to trigger not only the reader’s mirror neurons but something called embodied cognition.

There’s now a reasonable amount of experimental data (though I admit I don’t know how often it’s been replicated and confirmed) to indicate that certain written words can trigger the memory of scent and touch. For example, if you write the word ‘lavender’ a functional MRI will show the areas of the brain relating to smell lighting up. Similarly, if you use the word ‘leathery’ instead of ‘hard’ or ‘tough’ it stimulates your brain in the same way that actually touching leather does. So if you describe a character running a discarded leather glove drenched in lavender scent under her nose, the reader can actually feel the cool-warm of the leather against her skin, hear the faint creak of the leather, smell that lavender: we are there.

You can’t really do that with film. With film it’s all about what people say and do, not what they feel and think. Everything is built for you. In a novel you don’t have to describe everything; in a film you do. And there’s music and other audio effects to help.

I think Shikanoko would make a brilliant blueprint for collaboration in another medium, whether we’re talking film, animated TV series, graphic novels, or opera (it’s definitely operatic!). Hearn tells us what people say, she tells us what they think and why they think it, she describes the setting. It’s all there. And anything can happen — and frequently does. And those things are not small: death, demons, destruction, betrayal…

Kelly Luce: As to Toby’s “paradoxically totally cinematic and utterly unfilmable” — YES.

The world of the Shikanoko books is so richly imagined. The setting itself is novel to us, it is home to the unexpected, and yet it is populated with characters whose motivations and backstories strike an emotional chord. As readers, we then get to sympathize with these familiar feelings in an unfamiliar place. There’s a tension there between world and emotion, a safe and fruitful space. In that space, maybe, is where wonder and play and fun are created — the Fun Primordial Soup.

My background’s in cognitive science, so Nicola, what you said about those studies in which words trigger sensory experiences resonated with how I write in general. I think a lot about how words and sentences are translated by the reader’s brain into something not quite visual, like a film, but a thing that’s…super-sensory. John Gardner’s “vivid and continuous dream.” Because reading is a creative act — it’s active, not passive. The reader makes their own waking dream out of the author’s sentences. And as with a dream, it’s usually the feeling that sticks around, not the technical details (at least for me — I’m terrible at remembering plot and other specifics of books I read even just a couple weeks ago. What doesn’t leave, though, is how the book made me feel.) When the imagination is engaged in this way, it really does become fun.

Works that are aggressively imaginative are looked upon suspiciously: are they — gasp — genre? Are they for children?

It seems like maybe we as a culture are suspicious of play. It’s often overlooked — or devalued — when it comes to literary, or artistic, experiences in general. This for me is connected to imagination, another word that’s treated oddly. Works that are aggressively imaginative are looked upon suspiciously: are they — gasp — genre? Are they for children? (When people hear that my story collection has a story about a toaster that can predict the way a person’s going to die, for example, that is almost always their first question: oh, is it a children’s book? It’s fantasy, right?)

I agree; these books would make for an amazing opera!

Robin Sloan: One of the books I’ve been interleaving with my reading of the Shikanoko saga is Philip Pullman’s new translation of the Brothers Grimm. In one of his story notes, he cites a poet’s characterization of the ideal fairy tale narrator’s voice: “serene, anonymous.”

I thought of Lian Hearn when I read that, because in addition to the qualities you all have enumerated — the joyful canter, the waking dream — I think these books are delivered in a voice that is (a) a huge part of their pleasure, and also (b) totally beyond me. That serenity; that straightforwardness (even in its depiction of the very strange); that confidence!

No matter how weird the proceedings get in Shikanoko, the narration remains totally matter-of-fact — like a great dinner-table storyteller…

And Nicola, I think the voice plays into the unpredictability you identified; it’s what makes it work. No matter how weird the proceedings get in Shikanoko, the narration remains totally matter-of-fact, like a great dinner-table storyteller keeping a perfectly straight face while everyone around them melting down with suspense and/or laughter. Or like a standup comic! Somehow, the restraint enhances the pleasure, and furthermore, it makes wilder twists possible and plausible, in a way that a looser voice, insisting “You won’t believe what happened next,” precisely fails to do.

As a reader, I’m delighted by this voice, and as a writer I am covetous of it. So, allow me to pose a question to the wise demons gathered around this campfire in the Darkwood: to the degree you yourselves have employed this kind of voice… what does the down-and-dirty craft of it look like? Do you have to spend fifteen minutes in quiet repose before writing? Do you have to binge on fairy tales, books of myth? Does it all happen in the editing — the rigorous redaction of anything un-serene, non-anonymous? How does one narrate like Lian Hearn?

Toby Barlow: It would be interesting to discover how much Lian Hearn works out the details of the story in advance, not just the overall arc, which feels nicely premeditated with that sense of unfolding destiny we want and expect from epics, but also the nuances of the magic. Is there a lexicon there?

I tend to research in bursts, filling up the attic of my mind with potential — patterns of fabrics, anatomy of insects, various boat and carriage designs — and then let them fall into my writing as I go. Hearn feels much more comprehensive in her knowledge, I feel like she could knock out her own encyclopedic Silmarillion and fill out the entire history of the map. My guess is that this helps her write so sparingly, she can leave a lot out and still we sense some of the substance of what is missing, what the author is holding back. We know we’re in a world.

As for Robin’s question about voice or tone, I can only say that for me the story only begins when the tone arrives. I have too many narratives of what might bad or weird things might happen to a host of unlucky sorts, but until the rhythm or voice of the arrives, it’s like facing a forest without a path. I can’t force it, it comes of its own accord. That part is the inspiration. The rest is just screwing around with pieces on the game board.

Sean McDonald: This doesn’t exactly address Toby’s question, but Lian Hearn does say a bit about her process here. And elsewhere she’s said that she immerses herself very deeply in research and then tries to leave it behind while writing. This also addresses some of her world-building, especially towards the end.

Lian Hearn: Is there a specific thing I do? I suppose I do try to recreate the joy in reading I had as a child. I like to write early in the day, by hand, shutting out the world and my own inner critics. Like Nicola I start with a moment, visual, atmospheric, where a character exists in a world it’s up to me to discover. Somehow I know that character, and all the others that appear as I write.

I am often very surprised by what happens. I let almost everything in.

Maybe I’ll have some key scenes, and some images, that I know have to be fitted in though I don’t know where. Once a story is underway, it fuels itself, suggesting new ideas, new paths to follow. I love this first draft stage as I am in the “making up story” mindset that entertained and consoled me as a child and teenager. It is indeed the fun primordial soup. It is very rough, very free. I am often very surprised by what happens. I let almost everything in. I watch it unfold as if I am watching a movie and write it down. I realized, thanks to a very diligent proofreader this time round, that I instinctively use the where a would be more usual. It’s because I am seeing the scene: the boy who is right here, the palanquin that is by the steps. Later I’ll carefully work it all into a structure using timelines, charts, maps and so on, adding details and fleshing it all out.

A large part of it is my response to the history, art and culture of Japan. I did immerse myself in the warrior tales of medieval Japan, and folk and ghost tales, and found inspiration in Eastern forms of storytelling. I love Journey to the West, the origin of the Monkey stories. There is an almost visceral pleasure for me in recalling and recreating the way I felt in a Japanese landscape, a temple, a garden. And I think the Japanese aesthetic of ma — the space between things — influences my writing and gives it its sparseness and simplicity.

An article appeared earlier this year by Marie Mutsuki Mockett which refers to Hayao Kawai’s The Japanese Psyche. I read this book years ago, and have it on my shelf. I was reminded to reread it. Kawai says the Japanese fairy tale tells us that the world is beautiful, and that beauty is complete only if we accept the existence of death. Kawai also points out how naturally sex appears in Japanese myths.

Mockett also says in speaking of her her childhood experience of Japanese culture, both new and traditional: “Innocent people suffered as a result of living in a perilous if vibrant world.” The importance of the natural world and its beauty and danger is huge in Shikanoko.

Nicola Griffith: Robin asked about voice — how we write in the matter-of-fact narrator’s voice Lian Hearn uses. I don’t think I do. But I had to drive myself half-mad figuring out what voice I do use (sort of like trying to wrap my head around the notion of infinity as a pre-teen).

I’m with Toby on this: the voice comes with the story. Or maybe the story comes with the voice. But both voice and story begin, for me, with a moment: visual and atmospheric, a character in her place (most, though not all, of my fiction is from the perspective of a woman or girl) on the cusp of change.

First-person voice is easy to find, and it’s fast, but I find it limiting; it’s a challenge to write about anything the narrator isn’t involved in; it narrows our (me the writer, me the reader) window on the world. I sometimes feel a wee bit trapped when I write first person. It gives me enormous pleasure in other ways, though: it’s like acting, or singing: really going there, really swimming in a character.

The voice I’m working with now is variation on third person. I’m aiming for a variable focal length: zoom in on a tiny detail, pull out to panoramic view, and — very occasionally — drop into someone else’s head. But I always, always have my main character on the page. It’s versatile, but it can be hellish to control. (But, eh, that’s what rewriting is for.)

When I feel as though I’m flying, if I want to laugh like a maniac or have no idea where that phrase or that character came from, then I’m on the right path.

Which leads to me to the essential paradox of writing: It’s not about restraint, it’s about slipping the leash within carefully defined parameters. It’s running wild and free inside a walled estate. So I’ve learnt to build iron rules and then forget them, hurl myself about inside them, fly from side to side, plunge and soar, leap and dig. I can feel it happen at some point in writing a novel, that falling-off of restraint, and I worry until it does. When I feel as though I’m flying, if I want to laugh like a maniac or have no idea where that phrase or that character came from, then I’m on the right path.

To do that, of course, I have to know my stuff — whether it’s 21st-century bioremediation, or North American myth and legend, or 7th-century textile production. Like Hearn I prefer to do the research then forget it and dive into the people and place and see what happens. Having said that, I always know where I’m going, the end-point. Day to day, though, I don’t know what will happen or who will appear or what that will mean.

Finally, Kelly raised the spectre of genre. To me genre is just a handy tool, in the same way metaphor or setting or character or POV is. I’ll read anything as long as it’s good. Why wouldn’t I use anything, too? I find this insistence on genre old-fashioned and pointless. So, for example, my first novel Ammonite was described as “a radical re-examination of gender,” “a biological what-if story,” and “sex-romp on girlie planet.” Okay, I can see all that, maybe. But to me it’s a novel set in the far-future, just as Hild is a novel set 1400 years ago. Why does it have to be categorized any more than that?

How will Hearn’s books be labeled, do you think? And why?

Toby Barlow: (I just want to add that I watched Purple Rain again last night and I realized that Prince was Shikanoko.)

Robin Sloan: (This statement is amazing and must make it into the final edited thing.)

Lian Hearn: I hadn’t realized Shikanoko is Prince!

But I agree with you all, voice is so important. Even though the narration is all third person, I try to vary it slightly according to the POV. I began Shikanoko with Aki’s story, chapter 15 in Book 1, and then I realized I had started too early and went back a few years to set the scene with Shikanoko and Kiyoyori. Medieval tales were spoken and sung, usually by blind biwa players, or in the case of the Tale of the Soga Brothers, by Buddhist nuns, and I suppose I was partly trying to emulate that very rhythmic narrative voice, with its underlying Buddhist sense of sorrow at the transience of life and the stubbornness of human nature, and also to suggest that the novel is a translation (from another language outside of time, yes!) — I sometimes use idioms translated literally to give this effect.

Robin Sloan: Nicola asked, “How will Hearn’s books be labeled, do you think?” and wondering about this makes me appreciate the bookstores with nonstandard and/or opinionated shelving schemes. “Underrated Writers.” “Talking Animals.” “Badasses.” In such a bookstore, I can imagine a shelf for “Books That Read As Though Translated from Another Language From Outside of Time.” That’s obviously where the Shikanoko saga belongs.

Given standard shelves, I do think Shikanoko will find fans among readers of fantasy, and I also think it might benefit from being placed on some YA shelves. I’m projecting: if these books had existed when I was 12 or 13, I would have been totally engrossed. I would have wanted to be Shikanoko, or Hina, or one of the tengu.

Maybe that’s a useful measure of fun: to what degree would I have liked this at twelve?

Okay, I am already plotting some surreptitious reshelving efforts. But I think we should keep Nicola’s question going. Where would you all put Shikanoko?

Toby Barlow: We all need our genres. It’s human. Genesis 2:19–20, Linnaeus, etc. We need our classifications. It tells us where we’re starting from and gives us a hint where we’re going. If the author wants to mess with that, well, okay, so long as they know how to fly that spaceship. But you have to start from somewhere.

My mother used to go into bookstores and move my novels from the “Horror” section to the “Romance” section. If I had a bookstore I would file Shikanoko under “Dreams You Wish You Had” or “Bittersweet Candies” or “Travel.”

Robin Sloan: The thing I love about genre is the freedom that comes from constraint. That sounded more Yoda-like than I intended. What I mean is: every genre is built on a bunch of implicit contracts between writer and reader. For example, in fantasy, one of those is: “I’m going to put a map in the front of this book, and you’re not going to ask me where in the hell these places are supposed to be.” It’s a fragile thing; I mean, the Westeros of Game of Thrones — is that another planet? An alternate history? A dream? It’s an impossible question and a totally deflating one. The key is: never ask. Genre is you, the reader, agreeing that you won’t.

The thing I love about genre is the freedom that comes from constraint.

I think you have to be conscious of those contracts when you start writing, or you risk getting bogged down trying to answer questions that should never be asked. Can you imagine Lian Hearn trying to “explain” the emperor’s magic lute in Shikanoko — where it came from, how it’s able to conceal itself and play of its own accord? Even keeping fully inside the fantasy frame — “it was crafted by the mountain goblins” etc., etc. — it would be a drag. Hearn knows better. She understands her readers have already agreed (or: are begging) to just go with it.

Viewed this way, the compact between writers and readers of traditional literary fiction seems pretty thin, doesn’t it? What is the contract? “I will read this book and see what I think of it”? Ouch. That’s not much fun at all.

Kelly Luce: PRINCE IS SHIKANOKO! I just started reading the third book and now when I picture him, I see a little mustache…

I’d file Shikanoko under “Devourable Epics” or “Books You’ll Stay Up All Night To Finish.” And definitely in Travel. Bookstores should be required to shelve books with a strong sense of place next to their respective Lonely Planet guides.

The genre label argument goes in circles. Labels are useful, as Toby points out, and as readers our easily-overwhelmed human brains need these heuristics to organize information and make decisions. But when you look at it from the writer’s standpoint, things get murky. I don’t know about you guys, but when I start a story, I don’t usually think about its taxonomic rank — maybe what kingdom it’s in, but not which phylum or class. I wait for the tone to arrive, usually for me in a voice I can hear in my head — either a narrator’s voice or a character speaking. And the creative process proceeds from there. We’re all products of everything we’ve ever read, and the more widely we’ve read among genres, the more likely it is that we’ll create something that falls in between labels. More writers are owning, are proud of, their genre-heavy reading past, and the result is this cool blending of literary and genre genes. Shikanoko is a perfect example of this. It’s exciting to find work that’s so engaging and yet so unclassifiable. It means literature is evolving instead of becoming stagnant. (Okay, I’ll stop with the biology metaphor…)

That psychic toaster story came from pulling three scraps of paper out of my “idea box” and making myself write something that included all three. I picked “Jehovah’s Witnesses,” “an appliance with a superpower,” and “a whole lot of beer.” I fit the pieces together in my head pretty quickly plot-wise, but it wasn’t until I realized that the narrator was a twelve-year-old Japanese boy who was sort of on the sidelines of the action that I knew how the story would feel its tone. Despite the weird premise, it’s a very standard “literary” story. It’s about death and fear and grief. It has a traditional structure. There are no monsters or villains or spies or sorcerers. All the magical/fantasy stories in my collection are like that. I think a few people were disappointed when they read the book — they were expecting hard fantasy. “You don’t tell us exactly what happens at the end,” is another thing I heard. Magic triggered in some readers the expectation of a clean, tied-bow fairy-tale ending.

Sean McDonald: This feels like the moment for our own clean, tied-bow fairy-tale ending. But in lieu of that, before we go, let’s blow up our neat conclusion with any questions you’d like to cast out to Lian Hearn. Toby has already wondered aloud about Hearn’s planning and process. Anyone else with questions?

Robin Sloan: There’s almost too much I want to know! Several of us have mentioned the sense of never knowing what’s going to happen next in these books — or even what could happen next. Did Lian Hearn know ahead of time? Or was her ride as wild as Shikanoko’s?

Nicola Griffith: I’m curious about which bookshelves she’d put Shikanoko on if she could choose….

Kelly Luce: Yes. And if she had her own bookstore, how she would organize the books.

Lian Hearn: I like to think I write in a genre of my own. It’s true that neither fantasy writers nor literary fiction writers have ever really accepted me as one of them. Maybe this is one of the consequences. Maybe the books are too easy to read, too much fun. But I don’t mind as it gives me the freedom to remain on the margin. Maybe I would use that as a category: books from the margin. I like very much the suggestions you made! I think booksellers should put books into several categories, so readers discover them in many different places.

I like to think I write in a genre of my own.

If I had my own bookstore… I should be rearranging my own bookshelves, all in a muddle after our move. I’m thinking about doing it by color as it’s the chief way I remember a book. And a lot of the books are in my bedroom so it would look pretty. But I would definitely have a section for “books that become best sellers that I personally don’t care for” and one for “books I love which inexplicably never became best sellers”. My husband said to me this week, “The books that you have been talking about all seem very idiosyncratic,” so maybe I would also have a category: “books that no one else except this author could have ever possibly written.”

I’ve just finished with second-pass pages for Lord of the Darkwood, making it about the 500th time I’ve read it. I’m at the stage where I no longer recognize if it is fun or not. So it was amazingly wonderful to read the responses, especially from a circle of such accomplished fellow writerly demons.

Many thanks from Electric Literature to all the participants.

Native American and Indigenous Lit Forge New Trails

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Eighty-three hundred miles away from the Billings, Montana-based indie Off the Pass Press and over across the Pacific Ocean to The Land Down Under and settled in the heart of downtown Sydney, Australia, lies a popular haven called Abbey’s Bookshop. On the nonfiction section shelf next to a book about NSA whistleblower Eric Snowden by award-winning journalist Luke Harding rest copies of a book called 8 Women: Pure Platinum People, by K.M. Harris, a Maori woman author from New Zealand.

Off the Pass Press was the publisher of Harris’s debut first person narrative and gonzo-styled work where she gave observations and a non-judgmental voice to — among other interesting people — various women working in Sydney’s sex industry.

I first approached Harris last year around the time me and a few other Montana Native American writers had just put out a book called Off the Path: An Anthology of 21st Century Montana American Indian Writers Vol. 1. Although that book has been highly praised — particularly for the unapologetically blunt, highly original, and dark storytelling — its uniqueness also lies in the fact that, as far as I know, there has never been an anthology of all-original, straight fiction works written solely by American Indians.

As far as I know, there has never been an anthology of all-original, straight fiction works written solely by American Indians.

Certainly, Native-based anthologies have been made, but those oft include a lot of poetry or samples of previously published works from the famous Native American Renaissance writers of the late ’60s–’80s. Since Off the Path Vol. I writers were in their twenties and thirties, our experiences not only differed generation-wise, but so did the nuances of us being various Northern Plains Montanan tribes (barring the late Blackfeet writer James Welch who is mentioned in the prologue as an inspiration).

For Volume II, I wanted indigenous writers included from across the U.S. and wherever else younger “21st century” indigenous writers might be. Certainly, I wanted to see if any up and coming Maori writers were willing to contribute, as I’d come across references to their culture via a Kiwi/New Zealand friend who worked at the Native American Studies Department at the University of Montana. And a few years earlier I’d interviewed a Stanford graduate from my own Northern Cheyenne tribe who had traveled back and forth from New Zealand, making her secondary homeland amongst the Maori people.

anthology

“They’re just like Natives here in that they’re very family-oriented,” she told me. “Tribalism is very much alive and well over there, and they have language programs to keep their culture thriving and alive.”

Through the powerful God-like tool that is the internet I came across the passionately driven Harris. She was very excitable and eager to communicate with Native Americans from “the States,” especially after reading Volume I and counting herself a major fan of our work — particularly of Northern Cheyenne and Dartmouth graduate Cinnamon Spear, a writer whose powerful work has the ability to cause just about anyone to wipe away tears.

Although it wasn’t a guarantee she’d be published in Off the Path II, An Anthology of American Indian and Indigenous Writers, I gave Harris and other possible contributors deadlines and said you know the sort of “beautifully bleak” work I prefer so give me your best, and that she did in a fascinating short story called “The Recruit.” It details, among other surprising subplots, the death of a young woman who joined the proud New Zealand Army that incorporates Maori fighting instincts and traditions. A young narrator speaks of her deceased sister:

Surrendering, my heart surrenders to the aching stabs inside my chest. The punctures cause my rain to pour, charging the static storm in my head and I am a mess in this weather of ‘whether.’ Whether I cry or pray, it’s not going to bring her back and whether I gamble with the Devil to resurrect her soul, it’s still not going to bring her back.

Beautifully bleak, indeed.

Off the Path Vol. I began with a Sherman Alexie’s preface quote, “I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed,” foreshadowing an array of oft tragic stories that transported readers into the lives of American Indian people amidst their modern day struggles and conflicts away from the tourist hot spots, pow wow celebrations, and historical caricatures that most often represent us to a mainstream western world that usually barely recognizes us through eyes of a whitewashed history that views our own narrative as inconvenient.

For example, after the Indian Wars effectively ended in the late 19th century, Native children who dared speak the languages first heard across this land were severely reprimanded and beaten in the boarding schools they were forced to attend far away from their homelands.

Storytelling reignited the fire that colonization tried to extinguish.

“Kill the Indian, save the man,” a phrase coined by Richard Henry Pratt of the infamous Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, became a de facto motto for all boarding schools as tribal children were taught to be ashamed of who they were and where they came from. “Let all that is Indian within you die!” said Rev. J.A. Lippincott at a Carlisle commencement address. Students were told they could never become “truly American … until the Indian within you is dead.”

But through it all and under the scarred ashes of their collective histories, a fierce, resistant, and proud spirit remained smoldering. Elders told stories that would carry on tribal traditions and history. In fact, storytelling is what kept Natives proud even as Western Civilization attempted to drill into them the notion that they were inferior. Storytelling reignited the fire that colonization tried to extinguish.

Then, as more Natives learned to write, we were able to relate on a personal level with other indigenous peoples who we otherwise might not have ever come across. From South to North America on over to the islands in the Pacific, from Hawaii to New Zealand and Australia, we can now relate to other indigenous people on a base level as stories and struggles are shared.

Among those Off the Path II writers who were eager to share stories with other indigenous people was Hawaiian Kristiana Kahakauwila. She was selected for the Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program for her realistic portrayals in her book of short stories about Hawaiian Natives away from the tourist hotspots, This is Paradise.

The young Australia-based writer Ellen van Neerven had won national awards for her debut book of short stories, Heat and Light, and had already been editing and promoting fellow Aboriginal works. When approached about Off the Path II she was eager to contribute to our international collection.

We know we are not alone, and we know we are similar not only because of the discrimination and hardships we’ve powered through, but also our ancestor’s pride that fought for their future descendants.

Still, despite collective tribulations and stereotypes we still face even today, we recognize and embrace our tribal differences. Our identities are not of a one-size-fits-all pan-indigenous nature, but ones of diverse cultures, languages, and geographical differences. Through those intricate lines we’re able to write about our experiences today from distinct points of view.

Our identities are not of a one-size-fits-all pan-indigenous nature, but ones of diverse cultures, languages, and geographical differences.

“It’s not just one story, where a mainstream audience will say, ‘This is what Indians are like,’ ” Sterling HolyWhiteMountain said about the Off the Path to Indian Country Today Media Network. An Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad, he’s a Blackfeet Indian and contributor to both volumes. “That’s its value. You get to see different people writing about Indian Country in their own way, and they’re doing it together. I can’t understate the importance of multiple voices. You need a broader spectrum view, because in American society, one Indian speaks for everyone. It happens over and over.”

The anthologies are about how we view the world as we know it and share it to other indigenous peoples through the lens of our own creative control; not what perhaps some so-called Big Five New York publisher or outside editor assumes the Native experience should read like because maybe they’ve previously read Louise Erdrich, other Alexie works, or an aforementioned Native American Renaissance-era book from decades ago and deduced that Native American literature representation had already been fulfilled.

“We’re not all Sherman Alexie, he has a very specific voice and he has a very specific experience,” Crow Indian writer Luella N. Brien said in a Bighorn County News interview, a small town Montana-based newspaper. Luella and her older sibling Eric Leland Bigman Brien contributed to Off the Path Vol. I.

She continued, “The Natives in Montana, we have a very different experience from him and yes, we all deal with alcoholism and drug abuse on the reservation, but there’s a cultural difference along with a contemporary view that differs from where he’s from and where we’re from, as well as just being a younger generation.”

As far as colonizers are concerned, “Indigenous people are always in the way,” HolyWhiteMountain noted in a Montana Public Radio segment titled, “Beyond Sherman Alexie.” He said, “The desires of nations are for resources and land and there just happens to be a group of people here that are in the way of that desire. That’s one of the defining experiences of being indigenous.”

Whether the non-indigenous audience relates to or ‘gets’ where our work is coming from or not, we won’t really worry.

So whether the non-indigenous audience relates to or “gets” where our work is coming from or not, we won’t really worry. After all, our public school systems are already inundated with mandatory reading written by and about whites with the occasional token minority yet books like Alexie’s award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian young adult novel are deemed offensive and continually marked to be banned from high school curriculums.

In the Off the Path anthologies and like most literary works, there are no guaranteed happily-ever-afters, but there are certainly stories that allowed some of us to creatively breathe out personal demons that may have long plagued our souls as we aimed to intrepidly speak from our hearts as we spilled blood and tears as ink on the book’s pages, just as Spear did when she described fleeing an abusive situation as a child with her mother in a Vol. II story called “Jimtown Ruined My Life”:

Stars witnessed our dark escape. The sound of freedom was gravel beneath our feet along a rural Montana highway. I told her, “Mom, breathe. Don’t cry. We’re alright now, Mom.” She’d squeeze my hand, “I know.” She tried to regain composure walking sloppy drunk. Her cries shot through the night sky before she’d inhale quickly and swallow them again.

She hated to leave her other children behind. I did too but I couldn’t stay for them. Mom didn’t have a job, money, a car or house of her own. He isolated her from her family and friends decades ago. I had to make sure that if she felt she had nothing in this entire world, she at least had me by her side. I walked tall. I walked steady. I carried my teddy bear in one hand. In the other, I carried my heart.

Lakota writer and Off the Path II contributor Dana Lone Hill described in a Partnership With Native Americans interview how she wrote her debut novel about the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Pointing With Lips: A Week In the Life of a Rez Chick, with golf pencils and “napkins and anything I could just to keep going” during a dark time of her life while awaiting sentencing in jail.

Lone Hill recalled thinking, “‘I’m not going down like this…I have so much I am capable of because I am a Lakota woman and came up around strong Lakota women.’ I knew that as soon as I hit freedom, I was going to get my voice out there, and I have.”

For indigenous peoples, love of family and plenty of shared communal humor still arises as life’s primary motivator despite grim statistics that formulate outsider perceptions. “Most media is about sadness,” Lone Hill said. “We as Indians get through the struggle with laughter. I want people to see that’s who we are, not the romanticized people of Hollywood or the pitiful stories the media portrays us as, but real people.”

Whereas humor, heartache, and colonized-based complexities are acknowledged between indigenous cultures through writing, we also might be able to bridge gaps between the non-indigenous world as shared humanity is conveyed.

“Decolonization and love seem like unlikely partners or unique inner demons,” Navajo and Off the Path II contributor Bojan Louis noted in an essay about his own childhood trauma titled “Beauty & Memory & Abuse & Love.” “But that, too, is erroneous.”

Although societal issues may be naturally highlighted throughout the course of a narrative, artistic literature isn’t founded on catering to current political sensitivities, but generally something far more personally transcending.

Tucson-based Off the Path II Blackfeet writer Bill Wetzel navigates a yearning tale of love and companionship that “sauntered” away from him and left countless unanswered questions in “The Maze”; Paiute and Shoshone writer Kenneth Dyer-Redner contributed “Small Tremors,” a story based on witnessing his grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s as she tragically sought out her deceased husband of many years.

My own Vol. I story, “He Doesn’t Know He’s Dead Yet,” is about the narrator’s brother, who was killed on a cold Montana Indian reservation prairie. That story was based on my own brother’s murder, and I described the anguished cries of the bereaved mother while my own mother’s real-life cries still echoed in my head.

It might technically be fiction, but many readers definitely know it’s real — especially if they’ve been there too. That’s exactly how they felt when their close friend or relative died as the whole world moved on and seemingly didn’t care or understand.

The story understood, however, and that’s why we write them.

My Year in Re-Reading After 40: Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings

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BEFORE RE-READING:

Got in a minor Twitter brouhaha the other day about GMO and Roundup™ and the evils of Monsanto, etc. etc. etc.

GMO tweet

For me, the discussion is intensely personal because I spent whole chunks of my childhood summers with a hoe, amongst endless rows of soybeans, bandana draping my neck, and bottle of water perched in the dirt on one end of the field, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with weeds. This was in the day before the magic of RoundUp (TM), when farmers routinely mixed up a witch’s brew of pesticide chemicals using their own home-brew recipes, and it still wasn’t enough to keep the weeds from conquering whole fields. Hence, me, as a kid, with a hoe. (To say nothing of the legions of migrants, always Hispanic and invariably polite, who washed over the country each summer for $9-an-acre work.)

But of course this isn’t about big evil agribusiness multinationals or bragging about eating organic food (people on the Internet do this, if you can believe such a thing) or ignorant journalists who wouldn’t know a windrower from a one-pass. It’s about literature.

See, when you grow up like this:

1979-harvesting

Harvesting beans with my dad, 1979. Safety regulations? What safety regulations?

on a place like this:

1980-thefarm

The farm off Lake Alice Rd, Scotts Bluff County, Nebraska, 1980

you spend your days longing to be on an epic journey somewhere like this:

Thing

No, not NYC [Image credit: Mladjo00]

When you’re a farm kid with a big imagination and it’s a million miles to the city, you do things like make a sword out of a shovel to fell stalks of corn that serve as stand-ins for marauding orcs. (“Jesus, son,” my dad said when he saw the carnage, “we grow that corn to sell, you know.”). You pretend the hills beyond the bean field are magic mountains where goblins stalk and treasure is hid. That pretty girl from two towns over with a bob in her hair who you see at church every Sunday? She’s a princess who’s one burning castle away from setting out on an epic journey with you. (At the end of which I suspected we might kiss, though I wasn’t sure why. Nine year-old fantasies are chaste fantasies.)

Which brings me to this month’s book in my Year in Re-Reading: Pawn of Prophecy, by David Eddings, Book One of the Belgariad.

The main thing I remember about this book: Aunt Pol. She has a white streak in hair, as evidenced on the cover, and she’s a sorceress.

Christa Faust

Caption: This isn’t Aunt Pol, but I’m pretty sure Christa Faust stole Aunt Pol’s hairstyle.

Aunt Pol is the only character I can recall by name. There’s also an uncle who’s also a sorcerer, a princess, and a boy. The boy, needless to say, has a magical destiny. He’s a prince, or something, and that’s why he has a pair of sorcerers guarding over his youth. Until it’s time to leave the farm and head out on a grand adventure.

Not so hard to figure out why this book might appeal to a lonesome farmboy.

Hell, I’ve racked my brain, but for the life of me I cannot recall what epic adventure they are setting out for. Rescue a princess? Defeat the dark forces massing in the East? Retrieve a magical scroll? Storm a dark tower? Does it matter?

Not to me, not then, not at nine years old. Swords would get swung, bad guys would get slewn, adventures far, far from the farm would be had. As I recall, the book ends up with the boy-hero fighting a freakin’ god who stands taller than the Empire State Building and also for some reason has a sword, and winning. And getting to be king, or at least knighted. This after travel through dark and dreary forests and facing down a whole host of other, lesser enemies (basically the plot to every video me me from the ‘80s). Maybe those video games stole their plots from Pawn of Prophecy? After all, the book came out in 1982, when Pac-Man was still the height of arcade fun and you turned to Dungeons & Dragons if you wanted questing fun (though I wouldn’t have read it till 1985, or thereabouts).

To be honest, a lot of what I think I remember from Pawn of Prophecy is likely to be derived from any of the other dozens upon dozens of books I devoured as a kid, before some English teacher forced me to read Wuthering Heights and I began to discover that books could be vastly more than mere stories. I recall it was one of those books that I read with such enthusiasm that the very sentences and words almost got in the way of the story. It’s magical, that kind of reading, the kind you don’t get to have as an adult with critical faculties. Reading was a lot more fun back when it required no edification beyond entertainment.

That said, I’m more than a little afraid that the books will be painfully poorly-written, and that it might descend into a long slog to reach the end. I sure hope not. I mean, I don’t expect to be inspired to go attacking local corn stalks with a shovel again, but I hope I won’t be driven to take sanity breaks, either.

AFTER RE-READING:

Pawncover

You know when you watch one of those old-timey movies, black and white and ponderous, where some girl takes about a hundred and fifty years to look at herself in the mirror or the gumshoe walks up the dark alley for roughly seventeen nights? That’s what Pawn of Prophecy felt like at times. Those were a long 258 pages, friends. Though it was gripping in places, the book itself is one long set-up for the four books that follow, a time-honored cliffhanger tradition that reaches all the way back to the earliest pulps and cowboy dime novels from the 1800s. No epic swordfights with actual gods or ginormous battles where whole races of bad guys are exterminated: those come later, evidently. Pawn of Prophecy features a lot of walking and riding and boat-riding and even more talking around round tables, square table, inn tables, stable tables, in castles, inns, fields, forests, and on boats.

And after all that, I still didn’t get to find out exactly what the heroes, a young boy named Garion and his merry band of companions (yes, including Aunt Pol) are after. Only that they’re chasing a bad guy, who’s trying to get to even badder guys, for reasons which are unclear. Oh, there are broad hints: it’s clear Garion will be kicking some evil ass down the road, but if you want to know for sure, welp, read the next (four) book(s.)

No doubt my impatience says a lot more about my acquiescence to the Culture Of Now than it does about Pawn of Prophecy. It’s just the 40-year old in me, ever conscious of the minutes trickling away, irretrievable. Meanwhile, the farm boy in me? He was freakin’ thrilled.

Why? Because:

“At the top of the hill he stopped and glanced back. Faldor’s farm was only a pale, dim blur in the valley behind. Regretfully, he turned his back on it. The valley ahead was very dark, and even the road was lost in the gloom before them.”

Are you shitting me? ARE YOU SHITTING ME? This, this right here, this is exactly what I dreamed about, fighting corn stalks with my shovel. A secret destiny! An adventure with a sorcerer and a sorceress and a warrior and a thief into lands of legend! Enemies on every side, danger lurking about every corner, trusty sword at my side! Ditching the farm for a noble yet mysterious quest!

Practically the oldest story going, in other words. And thus guaranteed to thrill the heart-cockles of lonesome farmboys and would-be farmboys everywhere.

As a boy I loved — L-O-V-E-D — tales of fantasy and magic and high adventure like this book. As an adult? Superheroes annoy me, magic bores me, adventure tales send me a-snoozin’. I haven’t at all understood the resurgence of comic book movies and yeah, I watch Game of Thrones like everyone else, but my least favorite parts are when some sorceress births a demon shadow assassin in shitty CGI. Why? Re-reading A Pawn of Prophecy, I figured it out.

You see, all those years of longing to get somewhere, anywhere but the farm (and not just on some boring highway, but on the back of a noble steed, or maybe a dragon, or at least in a covered wagon with a wizard and a dwarf) left their mark on me. The older I got, the more magic kept on not happening. And as it dawned on me that I was gonna have to do the hard lifting when it came to this living thing and no magical destiny was going to sweep me up in its grand scope, I came to resent any suggestion otherwise. Wizardry? Epic quests? Great destinies? These are the daydreams of childhood, I wisely thought, turning sixteen.

fountainhead

Around which time I moved on to this phase. God, please don’t tell anyone.

Here, meanwhile, is what A Pawn of Prophecy has to say about a magical destiny:

“There’s a world beyond what we can see and touch, and that world lives by its own laws. What may be impossible in this very ordinary world is very possible there, and sometimes the boundaries between the two worlds disappear, and then who can say what is possible and impossible.”

The premise and the promise of a thousand fantasy books, and not a single one of them true. It’s a resentment I imbibed, then somewhere along the line decided it’d be too uncool to admit that I harbored such a resentment, and then forgot about it, and now when I see a tweet for some dumb superhero movie (see???), I’m dismissive.

Now, I don’t know that I’m going to run out and catch up on all the fantastical movies and books I’ve missed in the last couple decades or so (life is still short, and this time of year, it’s baseball practice that’s long) but next time Daenerys rides a dragon, I do resolve to give that nine-year old farmboy a chance to thrill along for the ride.

David Eddings, therapist.

HERE LIETH MONEY QUOTES:

The Medieval Bootstrap: “Don’t make things more difficult for your Aunt just because the world isn’t exactly to your liking. That’s not only childish, it’s ill-mannered and you’re a better boy than that.”

The Club of Moral-Lesson: “I now had more gold than I’d ever had at one time before, but it somehow seemed that it wasn’t enough. For some reason I felt that I needed more.”

“It’s the nature of Angarak gold,” Mister Wolf said. “It calls to its own. The more one has, the more it comes to possess him. That’s why Murgos are so lavish with it. Asharak wasn’t buying your services Jarvik; he was buying your soul.”

The Staff of The Training Montage: “Didn’t anyone tell you it’s customary to jump out of the way after the boar has been speared?”

“I didn’t really think about it,” Garion admitted, “but wouldn’t that seem — well — cowardly?”

“Were you concerned about what a pig might think of you?”

“Well,” Garion faltered, “not really, I guess.”

“You’re developing an amazing lack of good sense for one so young,” Wolf observed. “It normally takes years and years to reach the point you seem to have arrived at overnight.”

NEXT RE-READ:

Back to quotidian reality.

POSTSCRIPT:

So not three days after I turned in this essay, I watched that latest Game of Thrones episode where Danerys did in fact ride a dragon again. Unfortunately, though, I completely forgot my vow to give fantasy another chance, because this was my first reaction:

khaleesi

While it’s true that she does do a lot of speechifying, this does not exactly jive with my aim of regaining that long-lost sense of wonder. I suppose that means I better engage in more therapy.

James Franco Won’t Rest Until Another Stephen King Adaptation Gets Made

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by Nick Politan

The moon will wax and wane, the sun will (also) rise, taxes will come due, and Stephen King will have another of his works adapted for the screen. These are the inevitable forces of our world. The author’s 2015 short story “Drunken Fireworks” is now set to be taken to the big screen after having been picked up by Rabbitt Bandini Productions and Rubicon Entertainment, according to reports from Deadline. You may have heard of Rabbitt Bandini before. Their notable productions include topless-Matthew McConaughey in Fool’s Gold, cult-favorite Spring Breakers, the ambitious Faulkner sojourn As I Lay Dying, and 2013’s Palo Alto. If you’re sensing a trend… the common link, of course, is stage-soap opera-actor-student-teacher-McDonalds cashier-writer-poet-producer James Franco. (Rabbit Bandini is his production company.)

Franco, famous for an inexhaustible number of reasons, is set to star in the new King project. (He recently worked on the generally well-received 11.22.63 adaptation for Hulu.) “Drunken Fireworks,” in typical King fashion, is a dark and quirky tale. A fireworks competition splinters life in a small town in rural Maine. Local Alden McCausland (to be played by Franco) finds himself embroiled in a strange and increasingly hostile rivalry with a retired mob boss who’s recently moved into the area. As Wendeline O. Wright puts it, “bottle rockets make bad neighbors.”

No word yet on who will direct. Maybe Franco will try his hand?

Carnivalesque Mayhem of Exceptions — Two Poems from Mark Halliday

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LIKE IN SOMALIA

You’d better explain again about the mortality thing. As regards me, I mean. It’s not quite coming across, I’m afraid. You’re saying that I’m not the great exception, that there can’t be an exception, that the generalization holds in all cases. I realize you’re trying to be logical. It’s just that I’ve derived so much satisfaction from noticing exceptions to so-called rules. Life in my observation has been this carnivalesque mayhem of exceptions — some of them awkward or dismaying, but many of them exciting or delicious. So that’s where I’m coming from, orientation-wise. But I’m not denying the validity of what you assert as being, you know, the truth from your perspective, accurate on your terms. I’m sure it does apply in some areas. It’s just that nothing is quite convincing me of the relevance in terms of myself. Not to be conceited or anything, you know, but there is a loophole in every net, and I’ve always known myself to be the odd fish in the river, the frog that jumps the other way, the monkey in the tree over here rather than over there where all the chatter is coming from. No offense! If you want to explain your idea again, feel free. I’ll listen again. It’s just that I sort of see your lips moving but the words turn out to be strangely muffled. Like a bad connection. You said something about how the heart stops beating, and the lungs stop breathing. I don’t question it as a concrete fact in many, many situations, like in Somalia, or Haiti, or much closer to home. I saw my father — I was there — I saw that he went from asking for some cookies to just breathing very slowly, very softly on the tired old bed, and then when I looked again — when I looked again there was the stony quality — I saw that, I have seen that — a man turned into that strange thing, that stone — but still it seems an extreme leap to go from that, to infer from that — I mean there would seem to be a kind of arrogance, no offense, a kind of overreaching of so-called logic when you try to stretch the point and push me into that big dreary and frankly rather banal category! Okay? But still, seriously, I’m not just shutting you out, I’m a learner type of person, so if you have something to tell me, hey, give it to me straight.

BEING NOT HUGH

When I visited Hugh in San Francisco in 1974 the air of the city was blue-gray. We schemed to get through a day spending not more than seven dollars each. I was twenty-five, yet in memory more like twenty; Hugh was two years older than me, two huge years. Hugh accepted the modesty of fate. I walked with a bounce of unfocused energy. Hugh walked with irony. He hoped to develop a romance with Stephanie though he didn’t conceal the thought that it would be an experience only within beige limits as Stephanie was plainly not a source of endless joy, she was humorous but not wild, she was skeptical and faintly disappointed, but maybe vast joy was a myth anyway, maybe it was a tinsel illusion sold by movies, and the life to accept was the tolerant shuffle and hustle of the mildly humid tilting streets in the blue-gray air and the narrow comical angular apartments and the meals of cheese bread with olives and peppers. Stephanie liked to hear Hugh’s opinions about movies which he formulated with a kind of burlesqued difficulty, he conveyed how all descriptions turn out to be maddeningly imprecise, he liked evocations of the absurd strangeness of being alive at all, he liked the implication that meaningful success — in a career, or in art — is impossible, or so near to impossible that the possibility was tiresomely funny. Traffic went phush phush phush along the sloping streets and conversations slowed toward silence until someone had an idea about dinner. Hugh accepted the obvious extreme smallness of The Individual, the individual who drank California merlot trying not to doze over Robert Musil. My mind hummed trying to decide how I was different. One day Hugh bought the new album by Stevie Wonder, “Fulfillingness’ First Finale” and he accepted it as a big indication that life was good or at least desirable, and I was alarmed because I had never focused on Stevie Wonder and didn’t know how to locate him in relation to, say, the Rolling Stones. I was impressed and I wandered humming in the blue-gray air intensely considering how I was not Hugh, how I wanted to believe in vast joy and transcendent confirmationand how I would need to write a book and experience passion with Rosie back home or if not Rosie then another woman and soon.

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: My Mom’s Old Lamp

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★★★★☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing my mom’s old lamp.

Even though my mother died many decades ago, I still think of the lamp that sits in my living room window as hers, because she wrote her name on it. I worry if someone else named Eunice Wilson were to get her hands on the lamp, I might not have much legal ground to stand on.

I considered painting over my mother’s name but it felt like I would in some way be erasing a little bit of her. That’s how I felt when she was buried in the ground. Like I was erasing her. A lot of her.

The man at the funeral home suggested taxidermy as an option for people having trouble letting go. He said it wasn’t legal, but he needed some fast cash before he left town. I considered it briefly, but it likely would have caused a lot of confusion, especially among my mom’s older friends with poor eyesight. Another option would have been to have her taxidermied and then placed inside a taxidermied bear with a removable head. Kind of like she died wearing a bear costume. I’m glad I chose not to do this. I’m scared of bears.

The lamp hasn’t worked in years. The switch is broken, wiring frayed, one of the legs came off, and there’s a crack from the time I fell onto a rock while hiking with the lamp. At this point it’s less a lamp and more of a paperweight with a lampshade. But I still can’t let the lamp go. It’s funny how we can become attached to objects.

My mother never cared much for this lamp but it’s literally the only thing she owned that I still have. For a while I had the couch she died on, but because she was murdered the police took it as evidence.

I saw an identical lamp in a thrift store and considered purchasing it so my mom’s lamp wouldn’t feel so lonely, on the off chance the lamp contains my mother’s ghost. But then I worried the thrift store lamp might have a ghost in it as well, and I don’t know if ghosts can get scared by other ghosts the way humans get scared by ghosts. It was a tough call because the other lamp was only $2.99, which is a good deal as far as lamps go these days.

A lamp very similar to my mom’s old lamp.

I have some photos of the lamp in a photo album if you would like to see them. Some are better than others. Please call me at (617) 379–2576 to arrange a time to come over. Unfortunately I can’t show you the lamp in person for fear that it could be damaged.

BEST FEATURE: Because the lamp doesn’t work, it means I can’t electrocute myself on it again.
WORST FEATURE: The lamps is in the shape of a dolphin, which I don’t care much for, because I’m scared of dolphins.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Elliott Gould.

Cultura de café

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Mexico City, Mexico
Cultura de café, by Juan Villoro
translated from the Spanish by Philip K. Zimmerman

Built over a lake that was drained, overwhelmed by the exhaust of cars and the pollution in a valley encircled by mountains that don’t let the wind in, Mexico City is a bastion of dust mites. The atmosphere isn’t as aggressive as our winter is benevolent (although you suffer inside the houses, built according to the superstitious idea that heat is unnecessary), but spring asthenia thrives in the dirty air. The arrival of the rains, more torrential all the time, provides relief from allergies but not from flooding.

In this context cafés are not, as in other parts of the world, places where you can escape the snow for a while, but rather spots where you can combat the rush and, in some cases, breathe differently. Some modern coffeehouses have a system known as “washed air”; the more traditional ones don’t have it and don’t need it: they make up for the vapors of the Italian machine with a fan that simultaneously refreshes the air. The best atmosphere in Mexico City is in a café.

In his exceptional conversations with Bioy Casares, Borges lamented that there should be a literature of wine, of opium and of absinthe but not one of café con leche. Despite its galvanizing effects, the mixture lacks the glamour to justify an alternate vision of the universe.

In my adolescence people spoke of “café intellectuals,” not with the respect due to a sect that transmits ideas within the cramped space of a table but with the contempt reserved for those who turn their backs on reality and take refuge in vain speculation.

Nonetheless, the elusory cafés of Mexico City represented singular refuges for reinventing the real with words.

In my adolescence North American-style diners were beginning to develop, but there was only one Vips and only one Denny’s. Although Sanborns had several locations already, the franchise coffee shop wasn’t omnipresent yet. Those of us who were starting to read would search out secluded cafés to hold gatherings that resembled conspiracies, not for what we said but for the scarcity of participants and the fanaticism we assumed.

From my rambling childhood, I passed to the sedentary life of cafés. There have never been many of them in Mexico City. If you don’t count the spots started by Cubans and Spaniards in the centro, among us the café has never occupied the preeminent place it has in other metropolises. What’s more, the North American-style chains have bit by bit replaced the little cafés where the owner would smoke behind the counter with a dog on a comfortable cushion at his side, the unique, unrepeatable places, the grottos of the initiates.

The capital’s best-known café is the Casa de los Azulejos, or House of Tiles, built by a revanchist Spaniard looking to get back at the authoritarian father who had told him, “You won’t even be able to build a house of tiles” (meaning a toy house). The stately building has a mural by José Clemente Orozco in its staircase. Upstairs there’s a bar with a little window in the shape of a flower which gives onto one of the best views of the centro histórico, dominated by domes and bell towers.

The Zapatistas ate breakfast at Sanborns after taking the capital in 1914 and left behind the indelible image of a people receiving for the first time the providential gift of pan dulce.

The writer Carlos Monsiváis liked to ask: “What percentage of you belongs to Slim?”

This building of indubitable lineage was the first in a chain that now belongs to Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world. The writer Carlos Monsiváis liked to ask: “What percentage of you belongs to Slim?” As investors own stakes in a boxer, so the owner of Sanborns controls a part of the life of every Mexican. The Casa de los Azulejos is merely the nucleus of an empire of ubiquitous businesses which spans the entire country. In 1990 President Carlos Salinas de Gortari initiated the privatization of Teléfonos de México. Slim was handed the company as an absolute monopoly for five years and a relative one for ten. Without this impetus foreign to free competition and derived from the trade of governmental favors, he wouldn’t have become the magnate he is today. The coffee at Sanborns is terrible, but it tastes even worse when you know the trajectory of the owner.

Casa de Azulejos, Mexico City, Alejandro Linares Garcia

The invasion of plastic-chair coffee shops lent the few real cafés an air of quasi-secrecy. Meeting spots for a sect to which one belongs on merits that can’t always be defined.

A café is a place for talking. The mythology of radio announcers, who populated my childhood with magic words, was substituted in my enthusiasm by that of writers, particularly poets. Going on twenty, I’d make pilgrimages down Bucareli towards Café La Habana, where according to Roberto Bolaño the “iron poets” could be found.

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro: I met him in 1973 under his original name, José Alfredo Zendejas, in a short story workshop. He wrote only poems but liked to debate narrative. His critical sense was ferocious, yet he tempered his fire with jokes that he himself celebrated with thunderous guffaws. He had read more than we had, knew the avant-gardes, banged the drum, along with Roberto Bolaño and other rebels, for infrarrealismo and was planning an epic trip to Europe.

By the 1990s that poet of the fiery eyes and riotous hair was handicapped, walking with a cane because he’d been hit by a car. A forty-something with strange hair and bad teeth. People treated him with annoyed suspicion. When he’d come to see me at La Jornada, the newspaper where I worked, the receptionist, who was used to dealing with all kinds of eccentrics, would call me on the phone to ask whether I really wanted to let Mario in.

I preferred to see him at Café La Habana, where he’d order a beer at ten in the morning in order to evoke the 1970s, the period Bolaño was to make famous in The Savage Detectives, where Mario appears under the name Ulises Lima.

The rhythm of a café lends itself to the writing and correcting of verses that roll onward as the cigar smoke once did. You can’t write a novel in a café.

The urgent demands of journalism and the need for isolation drove me away from cafés, where I had begun to feel superfluous. I wasn’t a poet and was wasting time. So said my puritanical conscience, trained at the Colegio Alemán.

Cafe La Habana, Mexico City, Francis McKee

Sometimes I take shelter from the rain in those places and kill time there between one appointment and the next, but they’re no longer targets in my life. I admire the people who get together there, although I do it with the incongruous feeling of one who’s been missing out on something for thirty years. Every city has parallel societies: the gamblers, beggars, drug dealers and addicts tend to associate clandestinely in order to fraternize at the margins of the norm. For me cafés have become something similar, almost prohibited. Is there any reason for this renunciation? It’s possible that it all has to do with the way we administer the future. For years I’d meet with poets to talk about the future. I didn’t plan to write any poems, but like the protagonists of On the Road or The Savage Detectives, I aspired to live poetically. The café was the place of violent conjecture, the place where we could conceive of rare, perhaps unattainable hopes.

With the years the past grows stronger, until suddenly it presents itself with the blunt extension of a city; it’s a labyrinth begging to be crossed. This book is a lot like a returning. Only in writing it have I understood that distancing myself from cafés had to do with distancing myself from the future. Little by little the horizon ceased to be imaginable and transformed itself into a certainty that lies behind me.

But sometimes the dash of milk in my café cortado reaches me like a telegram from another time, and I recall the teachings of poets who scanned verses by tapping their cups with their coffee spoons.

The history of a city is the history of its cafés, where life mixes with culture.

The history of a city is the history of its cafés, where life mixes with culture. Ramón Gómez de la Serna set up his observation post at the Pombo in Madrid, Claudio Magris his at the San Marco in Trieste; Karl Kraus at the Central in Vienna; Jean-Paul Sartre at the Deux Magots in Paris; Fernando Pessoa at the Martinho da Arcada in Lisbon; Juan Rulfo at the Ágora in Mexico City.

Is there any better way to get to know a city in a sedentary key? If the walking man deciphers the lay of the land by looking, the man of the café understands his time by listening. Coffeehouses afforded me a valuable exercise: being in the city without being absorbed by it, seeing others at the moment when they excuse themselves from their habitual codified conduct. The urban custom they turn to most often in that enclosure is a certain type of conversation, one that foregoes conclusions and aspires only to continuation.

The infinite needs strategies in order to become intimate. Mexico City is inexhaustible in a provisional way, like a cup of café cortado.

About the Author

Juan Villoro is the author of El testigo, Dios es redondo (God is Round), Los culpables (The Guilty), and other books. His journalistic and literary work has been recognized with such international prizes as the Herralde de Novela, Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, Rey de España, Ciudad de Barcelona, Vázquez Montalbán de Periodismo Deportivo, and Antonin Artaud. He has been a professor of literature at UNAM, Yale, and la Universidad Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona. He is a columnist for the newspapers Reforma and El Periódico de Catalunya.

About the Translator

Philip K. Zimmerman is a writer and a translator from Spanish and German. Born in Madrid, he was raised in Upstate New York. His work has been included in the Berlin International Literature Festival and the New York International Fringe Festival, and he recently completed a translation of Helene and Wolfgang Beltracchi’s autobiography, Selbstporträt (Self-Portrait). He lives in Munich, Germany.

This essay is excerpted from Juan Villoro’s El vértigo horizontal: la Ciudad de México

Read other essays in Electric Literature’s The Writing Life Around the World series.

The Wisdom of Loving The Folly of Loving Life

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The penultimate story in Monica Drake’s debut short fiction collection, The Folly of Loving Life, is called “S.T.D. Demon.” That, in itself, reveals a whole lot about the tone of these stories: knowing, darkly funny, collapsing under the weight of the past, auguring an inevitable and painful future.

A quote from the same story reveals more: “The motive of all pathogens is to reproduce. Same thing with humans, we just have baby showers.”

That’s Nessie — Vanessa, and occasionally Nessa — one of two major recurring sister-protagonists from an isolated home in country-turned-strip-mall territory outside of Portland, Oregon. So is this:

I weighed nothing. That was where we lived: an anorexic town. Girls worked hard to be less, expect less. When I wanted something, I’d say no. I’d say, No thanks, no way. But what I was always saying really, behind those words? One thing: Love me, motherfuckers.

Nessie is the tall, flirty, waifish elder sister. She wears high heels and drinks heavily, falls for hockey players and deposed dictators, drug addicts and dealers. She wanders the continent in discontent. We watch her grow from a damaged teen to a mother finally figuring out what it means to trod across an apathetic world that shifts under your feet.

Her sister, Lu — Lucille, and occasionally Carrion, at her own request — has her own struggles. Perpetually forgotten, withdrawn and lonely, she goes the goth route rather than following in her sister’s brassy act. She works at a fast food joint as a teen, and has “Fry-O-Lator” permanently seared into her forearm, courtesy of a cruel manager and one bad night. She attends a local college and gets high a lot.

Like Nessie, Lu stops eating, but for different reasons. The fast food joint is one. Another is a disturbing foreign exchange student who lived with her and her family one year after Nessie moved out. He died at the kitchen table while eating, and out of spite for him and his sexual overtures, Lu decides to eat one of the sausages remaining on his plate. She was fourteen.

It’s been thirty years. I feel like that mistake is still with me. I ate a dead man’s greasy sausage, and what if some part of it is still in my body? …I’d have liposuction if a doctor could promise to find exactly the fat cells plumped by that single hot, dripping sausage. I want everything about it to go away. When you see women who don’t eat? Or women who cleanse, detox and purge? I think they’ve done something like this. They’ve eaten in a way that’s left a memory, a creepy ghost, a body inside their own body.

All of which is to say, The Folly of Loving Life makes its most obvious point of comparison, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, look positively sunny. (Well, at least partly cloudy.) Much of that is because the portrayal mental illness and addiction from women’s perspectives across a span of twenty years or so adds a whole secondary weight.

It’s also due to the sheer scope of this world’s brutality. Nessie and Lu are the products of a broken home — in the collection’s first story, their mother has a mental breakdown, imagining the ghosts of children murdered in their new home calling out to her at night. But their family’s misery isn’t unique. All of these characters are broken — mental patients and drifters, drone operators reeling from PTSD, addicts desperate for their next fix.

Drake wrote two novels before this, and it shows. The collection is almost a novel in snapshots, told from a few different points of view. Nessie is the primary narrator, and Lu after her, but there are others, like one of Lu’s exes. Sections called “Neighborhood Notes,” told from a few perspectives, serve as glances into the lives of America’s forgotten and broken, trying and failing always to escape.

External escape evades these characters, but internally, it’s only as far from them as their resolve. “The road dead-ended again,” Nessie recalls in her final chapter. “I turned around in that funhouse maze, determined. I’d get us out of this.” She’s the only one, in the end, to say it, even to herself. Maybe that makes it true.

The Impossible Bleeding Man: On the History and Mythology of Artificial Life

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by Michael Peck

Sometime in 1739 King Louis XV paid a special visit to a duck being displayed in Paris.

The inventor of the duck, Jacques de Vaucanson, was regarded as an inventor of mechanical life par excellence, someone who’d been lauded by the unimpressible Voltaire and by Denis Diderot (the latter spoke of him in superlatives in both D’Alembert’s Dream and again in his Encyclopedie’s section on automata). He’d charmed imperial salons with his 1737 flautist and a number of other curiosities, including a tambourine player, and a calligrapher.

Vaucanson would load the creature with tiny pellets, and it was these the duck defecated to wild applause.

The Mechanical Duck was his greatest invention yet. An intricate mechanism of cams and levers set the animal in motion, making it waddle like an actual canard. Each wing was composed of approximately 400 individuated parts, the whole apparatus made of copper. “The Duck with Feathers”, as the showman advertised it, splashed around in a small pool and pecked grain out of an audience member’s hand. Ingenious tubes aided the Duck’s digestion, but before each show Vaucanson would load the creature with tiny pellets, and it was these the duck defecated to wild applause.

automata duck

A fake shitting animal was a national treasure, said Voltaire facetiously, and without it “…you would have nothing to remind you of the glory of France.” Soon, the Duck would be a fixture in parlors and cabinets of wonder across much of Europe. With this and other mechanical contraptions, Vaucanson’s aim was to synthesize beast and machine. He’d even had wrapped human flesh around his flute-player’s hands to smooth out its awkward movements, while a dog’s tongue waggled in his Talking Head, making a daring first step into cybernetics. One of his prototypes was called “profane” by a distinguished guest, who then had Vaucanson’s laboratory destroyed. His child handwriter was so marvelous that the Inquisition impounded it, believing it the result of casual necromancy.

So Louis had come to the exhibit with a question that would have been ridiculous to anyone besides the inventor. Taking Vaucanson away from the crowd, he inquired whether it was possible to construct an entirely artificial man.

Before Vaucanson, legends about automated beings recur throughout the ancient and the medieval worlds:

-4th Century B.C.E.: Archytas of Tarentum, Greek Pythagorean philosopher, gives steam-powered flight to a wooden pigeon.

-circa 150 B.C.E: Before unveiling the very first vending machine and robot theater, Hero of Alexandria fashions a moving body with a non-detachable head.

-12th-13th Centuries: Robert Grosseteste designs the first of a flurry of brazen heads that could “telle of suche thinges as befelle”; the churchman Albertus Magnus has a brass figure whose demoniac speech so infuriates his student Thomas Aquinas, that the latter smashes it to bits; later, Roger Bacon and his assistant, a Friar Bungy, are accused of cavorting with Satan, who’s allegedly taught them how to make a bronze or brass head on a pedestal that could dispense prophecies; when they miss their opportunity to summon the devil, the head immediately explodes.

-13th Century: A quartet of musicians serenades the viewer from a small boat, as invented by the Persian clockwork manufacturer El Jazari; Giovanni Fontana, a self-styled magus, produces miniature clockwork devils and creatures given movement by rocket propulsion.

-15th Century: In Japan, Hisashige Tanaka, (aka “The Gadget Wizard” and founder of what would become Toshiba) builds an android archer.

-1494: Leonardo da Vinci devises an empty, automated suit of armor.

-1562: When the son of King Philip of Spain is near death, the monarch calls for Diego de Alcala to be placed in his son’s bed; the holy man has been dead for close to a century; nonetheless, the decree is carried out. In the morning, the heir-apparent is cured, claiming that the monk spoke to him in the night. Philip hires a watchmaker to construct an android based on the monk’s likeness: the wood and iron faux-monk can walk, hold up a cross and open and close his mouth like a nutcracker.

-1649: As a child, Louis XIV is given a toy carriage with synchronized horses and footmen.

-circa 1670: Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the megaphone, introduces various clockwork figures, including a statue that listens and speaks

From the late 17th and early 18th centuries, self-correcting machines combined the Enlightenment-era pursuits of magic, mechanics, spectacle and philosophy into a unified field theory. Even before the automata-boom, mechanical tinkering was being used to explain nature and the universe. Rene Descartes, pretty much the founder of Continental philosophy, asserted in Treatise on Man (1629–1633) that the animal kingdom bears a closer affinity to clockwork than to divine handiwork. (Descartes was an early adapter of mechanical objects. He supposedly fashioned a wind-up doll and called it Francine after his beloved dead child. During an ocean voyage to visit Queen Christina of Sweden in 1649, the superstitious seamen and their captain tossed Francine overboard, blaming her for the turbulent weather they’d been experiencing.) But the philosopher’s theories, tinged with impiety, reached a blasphemous apotheosis in the hands of Julian Ofray De La Mettrie, who said bluntly that man was nothing more impressive than a refined automaton.

Rene Descartes asserted that the animal kingdom bears a closer affinity to clockwork than to divine handiwork.

La Mettrie was a one-man Enlightenment. Where others vacillated between faith and reason, he plunged in headfirst, refuting the soul and having the audacity to call man a “living representation of perpetual motion.” The Histoire naturelle de l’âme (Natural History of the Soul) was an opening salvo against god and superstition, exploring a hallucinatory state as the result of physical processes. Even in the relatively free-thinking Netherlands, La Mettrie’s materialist theories caused a scandal, forcing him to flee the country.

In Holland he published his 1747 magnum opus, l’Homme Machine (Man, A Machine), one of the most influential materialist tracts of its era. Man was a mechanical being, La Mettrie stated, not ruled by god, but by his own mechanistic impulses. Copies of l’Homme Machine were quickly consigned to the bonfire, and once again La Mettrie was consigned into self-exile with his heresies. This time La Mettrie journeyed to Berlin, where he was welcomed by another iconoclast, Frederick the Great.

In a roundabout way, Louis was asking Vaucanson to bring La Mettrie’s condemned ideas into practice.

Louis had a few reasons for wanting a man-machine to be built. Like Frederick in Germany, Louis embodied the scientific worldview of the Enlightenment, and the mascots of science seemed to be ever more complicated machines. Many scientists and men of letters denigrated mechanicians as mere “toymakers,” but Louis sided with the scholar Hermann von Helmholtz; for them, automata were a means of peeking into the enigmas of human biology.

At age 5 Louis ascended the throne in 1715, after a series of familial tragedies. Mechanical toys offered a respite from the traumas of his childhood, and his fondness for automata never waned during his topsy-turvy reign. He’d always been sickly and frail, and his attention turned naturally to medical research, a wholly neglected field when he assumed power. Louis called on legions of quacks, homeopathists and pseudo-scientists throughout France to palliate his ailments. Probably in this way, he came across the work of Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, a cantankerous surgeon whose interest in biological simulation renewed Vaucanson’s own dabblings in automation.

The proceedings of the Academie de Rouen notes the attributes of the model, and concludes with, “God forgive us, all that follows from him.”

Le Cat himself tinkered with androids, too. In 1739 he diagrammed a “living anatomy” that would feature respiration and “the secretions.” The proceedings of the Academie de Rouen notes the attributes of the model, and concludes with, “God forgive us, all that follows from him.” But Le Cat’s intention for the machine wasn’t just to be mind-blowing and showy; it was to unravel the human body’s design. Together Le Cat and Vaucanson worked on the rudimentary android, but Vaucanson tired of the collaboration and set out to make his own automata.

Activities of the blood was an all but unknown process up to this period; doubtful physicians engaged in bloodletting — a practice that had more in common with Russian Roulette than anything provably ameliorative. At that point, practicing medicine was guesswork and accepted myth. The king set out to rectify the often deadly fads in physiology, and to do this would require analyzing circulation. Instead of experimentation on a living person and risking a public outcry, Louis hatched his audacious plan to replicate human functions in an automaton. And there was no one more suited than Vaucanson to assemble the king’s android.

Man-making belonged to the domain of god, and to preserve the secrecy of their project — while also bringing the inventor’s considerable proficiency with machines into his employ — Vaucanson was installed as the Inspector of Silk Manufacturing in the city of Lyon. The country lagged behind England in that industry, and between 1745 and 1750, Vaucanson practically invented the assembly-line, and for that matter, kickstarted the Industrial Revolution. His innovations in weaving led directly to the Jacquard Loom, and infuriated the many hundreds of workers who were being replaced by mechanical levers. In addition to threatening notions of the soul with his inventions, Vaucanson was now putting livelihoods at risk as well. Unrest followed close on the heels of these modernizations, and weavers who hadn’t been made redundant went on strike throughout the city. Vaucanson was violently attacked in the streets and forced to flee to Paris disguised as a monk.

Meanwhile, he was at work on the king’s “L’homme saignant” — the Bleeding Man. Using an intermediary, the Controller-General Baptiste Bertin, to funnel jewels and gold to Vaucanson, Louis kept their arrangement hidden from the Church and the public. Besides the three of them, the undertaking was absolutely secret, known by a few of the king’s ministers and Vaucanson’s assistants, making the project into something quite similar to a cabal.

For two dedicated hypochondriacs like Louis and Vaucanson, the Bleeding Man was a representation of the ideal anatomy: a being crafted without the frailties of human existence.

He was given total autonomy; in exchange, the king stipulated that the automaton should mimic human bodily functions as closely as possible; it should masticate and digest, breath, bleed. Later, when Louis got bouts of vertigo and could barely move, he ordered that the Bleeding Man be able to stand up and walk around. Consciousness, it would seem, was to be the only human trait not programmed into the schematics for their hybrid. Transparent wax would coat the automaton, its organs and blood-flow exposed to observers. As Vaucanson envisioned it, their almost-human mannequin was a combination of metal and glass, powered by clockwork and hydraulics.

For two dedicated hypochondriacs like Louis and Vaucanson, the Bleeding Man was a representation of the ideal anatomy: a being crafted without the frailties of human existence.

But the artificial model was likewise running into glitches. Vaucanson’s trouble involved a lack of suitable material. Wood and other common materials had sufficed for his previous showpieces, but this new machine was an order of magnitude removed from tambourine players and ducks, and more on par with resurrecting a golem. A malleable, yet rigid agent had to be procured for the arteries and veins of the Bleeding Man. Adding to Vaucanson’s difficulties was the utter secrecy of the undertaking. He could not correspond with other scientists for suggestions.

Rubber was the solution to Vaucanson’s first problem. Charles Marie de la Condamine, a scientist and explorer, had found the substance in the South American jungles a few years earlier. Condamine returned to France with a sample of cahuchu, as Amazon tribes called it, delivering a paper on its properties to the Academie Royale des Sciences in 1736. The limited supply by then being imported to France, however, was not enough for Vaucanson’s purposes, and he asked the king for more. Louis launched a surreptitious rubber-gathering voyage to Guyana, then under French control, to bring as much rubber to Vaucanson as he desired.

David Brewster’s 1832 Letters on Natural Magic offers an altered version: “It was agreed that a skillful anatomist should proceed to Guiana to superintend the construction of the blood-vessels, and the king not only approved it but had given orders for, the voyage.” Instead of rubber being imported to France, the king would deploy a scientist into the jungles to make the artificial man’s innards and these would then be sent by steamer back to Vaucanson. Regardless, the Guyana expedition was embarked on and a king-sponsored ship crossed the ocean for the sake of the Bleeding Man’s completion. As with Le Cat’s blueprint, Vaucanson also hoped that rubber would allow him to mold vocal chords for his contraption: The Bleeding Man, as he fancied him, would also be endowed with speech.

For sundry reasons, the plot to import rubber, and hence the automaton itself, was a failure. The Bleeding Man was at no point a very real feasibility. That didn’t stop the crowned-head of a world power and one of the great scientists of his age from their conspiracy to conjure a human replicant.

Louis’s consuming pursuit for the man-machine became overshadowed by national concerns. While praised for his support of the sciences, his reign was a hodgepodge of minor wars and failed treaties. He perished of smallpox in 1774. Unlike previous monarchs, his heart was not removed and preserved; fearing contamination, quicklime and alcohol was poured directly into his coffin by attendants.

Vaucanson also hoped that rubber would allow him to mold vocal chords for his contraption: The Bleeding Man, as he fancied him, would also be endowed with speech.

Ruthless in his drive for mechanical perfection, Vaucanson was unanimously called a difficult man. Among his many assistants who didn’t leave in fury, Herve Foucault (his grandson would invent the namesake Pendulum) likened his cold, inflexible personality to that of an automaton itself. Vaucanson fiddled off and on with the man-machine until his death in 1782, but officially he was done with the king’s impossible scientific dream, remarking only that he was “disgusted” with his involvement. Whether that disgust came from the sacrilegious nature of their cloning venture, or out of frustration at the unavailable resources needed to perfect the Bleeding Man, he never did elaborate.

In a 1790 allegory of the French Revolution, Francois-Felix Nagaret published “Le Miroir des événemens actuels, ou la belle au plus offrant,” or The Looking Glass of Actuality. Nagaret was influenced by the astounding mechanical beings of his day, chiefly those made by Jacques de Vaucanson. The work is about the invention of an automaton that is brought to life. Its inventor went by the name of Frankenstein.