tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20130991164547625942024-03-13T06:09:45.751-04:00Ultimate IndivisibilityA writing and publishing journey, as well as ruminations about the nature of RealityBrent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-81334549812054233142024-01-29T14:30:00.001-05:002024-01-29T14:30:31.125-05:00HOW CAN A BOOK HAVE NO AUTHOR? (in which I interview myself)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirE8sfJW3zNMlrzIlHv3ccswV85a5oQhXJYJOOAWWtZ6zuOyF4tkfSftk2RyMYYdGbD-u6EXxQjsppKbab21eTV1imEE0JjBIyburul_FnNb5PucZBC-8KcNnG3NmwX6skQ1wW68sHAh5b78um6RxxEIXJr7AQuWqBS7eYfJYD6XY_LlG3GxR3AvPBUkk/s640/comics-151341_640.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/openclipart-vectors-30363/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=151341">OpenClipart-Vectors</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com//?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=151341">Pixabay</a>" border="0" data-original-height="523" data-original-width="640" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirE8sfJW3zNMlrzIlHv3ccswV85a5oQhXJYJOOAWWtZ6zuOyF4tkfSftk2RyMYYdGbD-u6EXxQjsppKbab21eTV1imEE0JjBIyburul_FnNb5PucZBC-8KcNnG3NmwX6skQ1wW68sHAh5b78um6RxxEIXJr7AQuWqBS7eYfJYD6XY_LlG3GxR3AvPBUkk/w200-h164/comics-151341_640.png" width="200" /></a></div>My new novel is called <b><i>A Book with No Author</i></b> (see the cover in the right-hand column). Like a child just launching into the big wide world, this book is very demanding. It’s asking for support. It wants me to talk about it more, so I will heed its wishes. Maybe the best way is to do something that could almost be a scene from the novel, in which identities are multiple. I’ll interview myself. Or rather, BR1 will interview BR2.<br />____<br /><br />BR1: A book without an author? Is this a joke?<br /><br />BR2: Hold on. Let’s do this without a condescending attitude.<br /><br />BR1: Okay, my apologies. Why the paradoxical title?<br /><br />BR2: I like paradox, so it’s a title that would appeal to me as a reader. It may seem that I’m negating myself as an author, and maybe that’s true because sometimes it seems that stories come out of the ether rather than out of the lump of gray matter inside my skull. I often wonder, what is authorship, exactly? Is it really creation from scratch or is it something more like taking dictation from the cosmos?<br /><br />BR1: Maybe those are the same thing.<br /><br />BR2: Maybe. But to bring the title a little more down to earth—there is a book within the book, an abandoned manuscript whose author can’t be found. The search for the elusive author is a central plot element of the novel.<br /><br />BR1: Hmm…a search for the author. Sounds like a metaphor.<br /><br />BR2: Well, I want readers to interpret it in whatever way appeals to them. The book is also an exploration of identity, as well as—<br /><br />BR1: So it’s a metaphysical detective story. I heard that’s a thing.<br /><br />BR2: Okay, I guess it could fit that category. I don’t like categories, but apparently books require one these days. I was just going to add that this novel is also a story about people’s everyday struggles with relationships, family, work, substance abuse, religion. And place.<br /><br />BR1: Where is the story set?<br /><br />BR2: It takes place mostly in Manhattan and New Jersey, and there are several significant scenes out west in Utah. The final section is set in the town of Woodstock, New York, where I live. And where you live, too.<br /><br />BR1: Of course. And I happen to know that there is a character in the book with my name. Which is also your name. What’s up with that?<br /><br />BR2: I like playing little metafictional games, like we sometimes see in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov" target="_blank">Nabokov</a>’s work, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Auster" target="_blank">Paul Auster</a>’s work, and others. It makes writing more fun for me. And for readers as well—maybe they have a richer, more multi-layered experience, when they can wonder about the fuzzy borderline between truth and fiction, and think about other things besides the plot.<br /><br />BR1: You still haven’t actually said much about the plot of your novel.<br /><br />BR2: Well, it’s rather convoluted. In the book within the book, a freelance videographer in New York City, recovering from a difficult divorce, discovers that someone else has written and published fiction about his private life. This puts him into a spiral of dysfunction that exacerbates the pre-existing problems with his ex, his kids, his livelihood, his own self-image. On another level, the man who reads this story in a manuscript that arrived in the mail by mistake, also becomes obsessed with finding the author, and encounters his own set of problems.<br /><br />BR1: Sounds a bit like 3D chess or something.<br /><br />BR2: Well, one reader called it a Rubik’s Cube, which I like, but it’s much more than just a puzzle to be solved. She also said it was “tenderly invested in characters,” which is what I hope to do in all my work. To ground it in human issues, and then take flights of fancy that question reality, et cetera.<br /><br />BR1: This all seems to be an exercise in poioumenon.<br /><br />BR2: In what? Did you just make up that word?<br /><br />BR1: No, it’s a real thing. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature#:~:text=Poioumenon%20(plural%3A%20poioumena%3B%20from,about%20the%20process%20of%20creation." target="_blank">Poioumenon</a>. It refers to a specific type of metafiction in which the story deals with the process of creation.<br /><br />BR2: Okay, if you say so. I like it!<br />____<br /><div><br /></div><div>Thanks for reading. To learn more, please visit the <a href="https://recitalpublishing.com/a-book-with-no-author/" target="_blank">Recital Publishing</a> website.<br /><br />To hear me narrate an excerpt from the book, as well as answer some real interview questions, I hope you’ll relax for a half hour and listen to this episode of <a href="https://thestrangerecital.com/" target="_blank">The Strange Recital</a> podcast:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8hooNxw0aZU" width="320" youtube-src-id="8hooNxw0aZU"></iframe></div><br /><div><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span><span><!--more--></span></div>Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-58237632916898841832023-06-14T10:55:00.001-04:002023-06-15T10:44:07.103-04:00A Genre-Busting Nordic Thriller<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://recitalpublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Berserkers-ebook-cover-e1674095986410.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="The Berserkers, Kindle edition, Recital Publishing 2023" border="0" data-original-height="467" data-original-width="311" height="320" src="https://recitalpublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Berserkers-ebook-cover-e1674095986410.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><p style="text-align: left;">Prominent on the lists of popular commercial fiction and television today is a category called “Scandi-Noir” or “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_noir" target="_blank">Nordic Noir</a>,” characterized by a police point of view, plain language, bleak landscapes, a dark and morally complex mood, and murder, of course. As I began <a href="https://www.vicpeterson.com/" target="_blank">Vic Peterson</a>’s novel <span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://recitalpublishing.com/the-berserkers/" target="_blank">The Berserkers</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> (Kindle edition, Recital Publishing, 2023), I was anticipating exactly that sort of genre experience. The first chapter, depicting a crime scene investigation on a frozen lake, did not begin to alter my expectations until its final two paragraphs:</span></p><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1fcf138-7fff-4763-37f1-4477a79b026d"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“A pale tangle lay beside the hole the girl had been sunk in. It then dawned on me that the pale tangle was the girl. Her body lay sprawled on top of the ice, displaced by the minor tsunami of the sinking car, and ejected from the ice like the cork from a champagne bottle. Her clothes spread about her in wet snarls lurid under the dim sun, a cape and corset and stockings. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The girl's pallor was blue and ruinous. My jaw slackened. I tried to utter some words, any words, whether of shock, wisdom, or warning. No sound emanated from my lips. For a pair of large wings had begun unfolding around the corpse, beautiful, wispy, shivering with each gust like the pinfeathers of a hatchling drying in the dying light.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">We quickly learn in the next chapter that No, this is not a dead angel, nothing supernatural is going on. The murder victim is a girl in a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkyrie" target="_blank">Valkyrie</a> costume. More police arrive, character quirks and hierarchies continue to be established, certain foibles of the narrator (decidedly </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">not</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> a detective) are exposed, a subtly comic tone suggested in the first chapter becomes more pronounced, and, well… </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">maybe</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> we could still be in a Nordic Noir novel. But the third chapter removes all doubt: something else is going on here. What is it?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Genre-busting, in my view, is a key consideration in dubbing a work “literary.” I’m always intrigued when an author rejects the security of meeting reader expectations in order to follow a more personal muse. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Auster" target="_blank">Paul Auster</a>’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The New York Trilogy</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> subverts detective story tropes. In </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Gravity’s Rainbow</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon" target="_blank">Thomas Pynchon</a> leaps past science fiction conventions. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy" target="_blank">Cormac McCarthy</a>’s western novels are much more than their settings and cowboy details. These authors are using genre elements as vehicles to explore themes, philosophies, or even writing styles that reach beyond what most readers of a commercial genre expect. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Peterson is doing something like that in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The Berserkers</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">. We follow a Pynchonesque assemblage of characters through fabricated Scandinavian settings on a wild ride that is at once a Gothic comic book, a Sword & Sorcery quest in a gritty industrial landscape, an exploration of heavy metal music and soccer hooligans, a moody mystery told in lyrical prose, a comedy of errors, and an homage to ancient Norse sagas. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The story’s narrator, Grammaticus Kolbitter, is a hapless police records clerk who moonlights in an aspiring heavy metal band named in honor of the frenzied Viking warriors called </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker" target="_blank">berserkers</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">. He finds himself on a quest for justice accompanied by two other misfits, a retired (or rather, fired) cop and a legend-loving young woman who suffers from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigantism" target="_blank">gigantism</a>. The villains they chase are like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kray_twins" target="_blank">Kray twins</a> on motorcycles, but with </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)" target="_blank">A Clockwork Orange</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> bloodlust and collars trimmed in wolf fur. Other vividly drawn weirdos populate the cast, but I want to focus on one in particular: the Constable.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI44f2z4_rlTPchaKUxYHxk-MyFQS7HNpNIlDLQ1j6HWvNTje-6Kktp2U6-N2g-qDeRsYFFOUzxADdIhXRvNZY31BDEwOSzGSX9-bdyZ6jx9ZUTYpiUFNYcb6LXFZnOOXbsoFwR_jYLpNjqGPwHw-qBmfFXmGDiOMLN4FDjiq3cI5Po7PsU3WKjxz6/s879/medium_SMG00083673.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="879" height="131" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI44f2z4_rlTPchaKUxYHxk-MyFQS7HNpNIlDLQ1j6HWvNTje-6Kktp2U6-N2g-qDeRsYFFOUzxADdIhXRvNZY31BDEwOSzGSX9-bdyZ6jx9ZUTYpiUFNYcb6LXFZnOOXbsoFwR_jYLpNjqGPwHw-qBmfFXmGDiOMLN4FDjiq3cI5Po7PsU3WKjxz6/w200-h131/medium_SMG00083673.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>The nameless Constable is the imperious police authority whose whim or precognition assigns Kolbitter to the case for no apparent reason. He wears a black cape-like greatcoat and glasses with the left lens blacked out to cover an empty eye socket, and he has two pet ravens, Minne (Memory) and Tanke (Thought). <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin" target="_blank">Odin</a>, king of the gods in Norse mythology, is also blind in one eye and keeps two ravens as familiars. The Constable is often behind the scenes, his presence felt but not seen. One of the elements that elevates the novel beyond its plot is the strangeness of the Constable’s two contradictory autobiographies, found in pages that Kolbitter steals from the Constable’s home. These texts-within-the-text are both exotic fictions, each describing a different bizarre family, youth, education, career, dramatic loss of an eye. His first autobiography opens with this:</span><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“Shall I venture a brief yet grand portrait of the man? When I look at his face, what do I see? His face, in a mirror, a shop window, a pond? Volutes of hair, their mercury sheen. Epidermal crevasses. A black lens. Although this blemish has traveled with him, or me, many years, it is in this scar I recognize the creature most fully—him, myself—and oblivion. Attributes of a sorcerer, indeed. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So begins my authentic biography.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Facets of a hidden clockwork. His humors play out in planetary swings. His relationships are secretive, reckless, trusting, and gravid with both admiration and disappointment. Harsh. One might suppose this man hewn with a mallet and chisel, like a woodcut. I have observed him in private moments, when he thought himself least on display, surprisingly happy, voice strong, engaged among police cadets, those earnest youths with muscular forearms and razor burn and shower-wet hair.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">This version of the Constable was </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“the son of a hipster couple who lived in an avant-garde circus, street buskers borne on stilts and trapezes, with lefty and lofty political intentions.”</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> The son grows up to choose a different kind of life: he becomes a quantitative analyst in the investments business, a wealthy capitalist viewing the world from a glass tower. But then, as financial markets crash, an aged business colleague gives him a strangely potent drink and stabs out his eye. He is now </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“A one-eyed specter haunted the corridors, fingertips running the walls to keep his balance under his new optic discipline, his face a bombed church.” </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Several chapters later comes the Constable’s second autobiography, in which he is a spoiled young nobleman tormenting his parents with feigned madness in a brutish kingdom centuries past, where the oppressed masses threaten revolt. Drinking and gaming in a tavern, he encounters a riddling old man with a magic drink that </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“was icy and stung my throat. It was as if a shard of glacier had pierced me; yet, simultaneously, as if I had licked honey straight from the comb.”</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> A few moments later:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“Thus, swifter than I could have supposed, the old corpse made a poniard appear in his claw and thrust it at my face. I threw my forearm up in what was a useless gesture. The steel slit the flesh of my left eye. I fell to the floorboards. The liquor winked silver on the hearthstones. Blood ran between my fingers.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘You wanted release?’ the mad stranger hissed. ‘This is your release. The vast cycle of ages will advance without disruption. The price? Sight for sight; vision for vision. You will remember everything, and see everything, and you shall wander haunted among mortals, seeking meaning.’”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">When he returns to his great ancestral hall, it is in ruins. He seeks out his parents:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“I immediately recognized their forms, impossibly hardened into statues of glass. Clear, shimmering glass, glowing with a misted light from within. Deliquescing. Father in his opera hat, worn too low, the corners of his thin mouth sloped down toward the folds of his cheeks. Mother, liripipe framing her face, clutching a sprig, staring off into an unpeopled country.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Clearly, none of this is standard Nordic Noir fare. And these florid passages are not typical of the prose style in the rest of the book. What do these weird tangents have to do with the plot, the police investigation, the quest to bring to justice the murderers of the winged girl in the ice? Nothing. These flights of fancy are not there for the purpose of advancing the plot. Nor are they simply character development. They are atmosphere, enrichment, art for art’s sake: color, brushstroke, chiaroscuro, counterpoint, dissonance, coloratura—confidently applied. Their effect is to lend the entire work a moody strangeness, an edge of unpredictable lunacy, a dark ballast of aesthetic complexity underpinning the humorous, TV-friendly surface. This is not the artistic choice of a calculating follower of genre formula.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1641745445403-8f8fd3cee113?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxzZWFyY2h8MTJ8fHJ1bmVzfGVufDB8fDB8fHww&auto=format&fit=crop&w=500&q=60" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="500" height="150" src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1641745445403-8f8fd3cee113?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxzZWFyY2h8MTJ8fHJ1bmVzfGVufDB8fDB8fHww&auto=format&fit=crop&w=500&q=60" width="200" /></a></div>So… the odd crew of justice seekers lead us from the frozen lake through bleak northern cities, antique library volumes, a mead factory, a tawdry brothel, a clash of hardcore soccer fans, a bar fight, a tangle with a trio of rune-casting witches, a risky chase and deadly combat inside old mine-shafts in an island mountain, a heavy-metal battle of the bands, and more—all rendered with Peterson’s unusual mix of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien" target="_blank">JRR Tolkein</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lynch" target="_blank">David Lynch</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henning_Mankell" target="_blank">Henning Mankell</a>. <p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But the Constable’s autobiographies are what I found most fascinating. When Kolbitter asks him about his conflicting life stories, the Constable is suitably cryptic. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“‘Sometimes,’ he says slowly, ‘a fable tells the greater truth. Not easy to get your head around, but poetry takes a little bloodletting. Look at the changes wrought in you since that day on the frozen lake.’”</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> But how many autobiographies can one person have? According to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation" target="_blank">many-worlds interpretation</a> of quantum mechanics, perhaps an infinite number. Maybe that’s what all of us who write fiction are doing: just writing an authentic memoir from another dimension in the multiverse.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">###</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">NOTE: This review appeared originally in <a href="https://dactylreview.com/2022/12/29/the-berserkers-by-vic-peterson-2/">The Dactyl Review</a> 12/29/22.</span></span></p>Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-47752701993935551332023-01-07T11:17:00.003-05:002024-01-08T22:14:41.615-05:00Imaginary Auster & Double Layers of Story<a href="http://www.benorlando.com/"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.benorlando.com/" target="_blank"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.benorlando.com/" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41wt+QCuk4L._SY445_SX342_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="279" height="320" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41wt+QCuk4L._SY445_SX342_.jpg" width="201" /></a></div>Ben Orlando’s debut novel, <b><i>Lost Journals of Sundown</i></b>, is two things at once: a fascinating exercise in metafictional homage, and an unusual standalone mystery story.</div><br />For readers who are not familiar with the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Auster" target="_blank">Paul Auster</a>, Orlando has created an entertaining, oddly slanted pseudo-detective story. In a slightly off-balance version of New York City, a suicidal writer adopts a false identity as a private investigator and desperately embarks on a vague quest to protect a couple of misfit strangers from their villainous father. He imagines this adventure will keep him away from the noose in his closet. During his rather inept surveillance, he uncovers the father’s darker, more twisted campaign to ruin lives and potentially destroy civilization, one psyche at a time. He faces the dual challenge of both stopping the madman and finding his own salvation.<br /><br />But there’s more. Readers who know Paul Auster’s “City of Glass,” part of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Trilogy" target="_blank"><i>The New York Trilogy</i></a>, are treated to an extra layer of meaning and enjoyment. If you’re in the know, you can smile at Orlando’s sly wink from the very outset of the book, with the wrong number phone call, the detective pretense, the name Stillman, and more. Orlando has crafted his story to parallel the plot of “City of Glass”—with key correspondences, structural touch-points—but also to ultimately be entirely different in both broad strokes and finer details.<div> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51h2kf7dWVL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="268" height="200" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51h2kf7dWVL.jpg" width="134" /></a></div>Auster’s <i>The New York Trilogy</i> is known for subverting detective story tropes to go beyond the genre mystery into some new form of hybrid literature. The trilogy can be seen as a prototype of "metaphysical detective fiction," in which the world is one of questions, not answers; interpretations, not solutions; and the sleuth is seeking not "Whodunit" but "Who am I?". For more on this subject, see <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2011/05/nondual-auster-metaphysical-detective.html" target="_blank">an earlier blog post of mine</a>. <br /><br />Orlando’s authorial style and concerns are entirely different from Auster’s. Where Auster is spare, Orlando is colorful. Where Auster is philosophical, Orlando is psychological. Where Auster raises questions, Orlando seeks answers. His book sits more squarely in the mystery genre, while tipping its hat to the outsider, Auster. Orlando’s most impressive feat is the balance he finds, in which he pays metafictional tribute through both imitation and conscious reference, yet at the same time maintains his own vivid style and tells an entirely unique story—all the while addressing two audiences.<br /><br />Late in the book when Auster himself shows up as a character, and the actual “City of Glass” is unmasked as the template for a con job, the two different types of readers have different experiences. Those not familiar with Auster accept the story twist and either learn about an author they didn’t know before, or perhaps simply assume he and his novella are fictions—either way, the story outcome is the same. The Auster fans, however, see their secret insider’s knowledge suddenly made public, an experience of both satisfactory vindication and, perhaps, a twinge of disappointment. At the same time, it’s fun to see a fictional version of a real person brought into holographic second life on the printed page. And perhaps they nod—yes, all this nicely reflects the way <i>The New York Trilogy</i> and other Auster books investigate blurred identities and “doubling.” <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71zQ67v0PhL._SY425_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="275" height="200" src="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71zQ67v0PhL._SY425_.jpg" width="129" /></a></div>As an Auster aficionado, my experience with <i>Lost Journals of Sundown</i> was pleasurable on a couple of levels. Since I’ve read much of the substantial Auster academia (he seems to inspire scholarly analysis), I enjoy seeing new additions to the catalog. Also, I see Orlando’s book as perhaps a companion work to my novel, <a href="https://recitalpublishing.com/ponckhockie-union/" target="_blank"><b><i>Ponckhockie Union</i></b></a>, influenced in both style and content by Auster, and in which Auster himself appears as a secondary character, but fictionalized to be an unpublished novelist working in small-town journalism. I wonder what other writers may be putting their Auster inspiration right out on the page. I’d like to read those books too.<br /><br />On another coincidental side note, I even enjoyed the references to a tiny hamlet in the Catskill Mountains called Sundown, which in real life is just 18 miles from my house. Orlando has created a history for that town that, as far as I know, is a wild fabrication—but that’s his privilege. He’s a fiction writer.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/Paul_Auster_BBF_2010_Shankbone.jpg/800px-Paul_Auster_BBF_2010_Shankbone.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="600" height="200" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/Paul_Auster_BBF_2010_Shankbone.jpg/800px-Paul_Auster_BBF_2010_Shankbone.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>In both our books, the imaginary Paul Auster is a good guy. He attempts to bring some sanity to the scattered, impulsive mind of Orlando’s protagonist, Daniel Reed, and is a fatherly helper behind the scenes as the story nears its end. In my book, he assists the narrator, Ben Rose, in his escape and hideout from a shadowy assassin, and the writings in Auster’s journal act as a Greek chorus of sorts, commenting on and interpreting some of Rose’s story. Orlando drops in the names of characters from Auster’s oeuvre (another wink), and I include mention of Auster’s real-world wife and daughter, even as I construct their lives to be alternate-timeline fictions.<br /><br />In both cases, readers experience two levels of story: one on the pages and the other in “reality.” Like memory, like deja vu, like dreams, they operate simultaneously, overlaid upon one another like double-exposed film. Orlando has Auster tell Reed that life is like a lucid dream: with awareness and a little attention, it can be controlled. As humans, we are story-making creatures, and stories are dreams made physical. We walk through multiple dimensions every day.<div><br />So… how many ways can two different stories exist in the same book? It all depends on the mind-frame of the reader. When you read <i>Lost Journals of Sundown</i> you’re bound to have an entirely different experience from mine. That’s as it should be. Writers and readers are co-creators. As the <i>Talmud</i> says, <b>"We don't see things as <i>they</i> are. We see things as <i>we</i> are."</b></div></div>Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-84168766283871678592022-12-13T09:50:00.000-05:002022-12-13T09:50:20.902-05:00Coincidence, Precognition, Rock StarsI’m writing this in a cafe where I am the sole customer. A forkful of herbed chicken salad with greens, a bite of crusty peasant bread, a series of keystrokes, a sip of iced tea, repeat. Words and phrases emerge from the blank white screen. Out the window is a forest shrouded in mist under a low gray sky. The old Lovin’ Spoonful tune, “<a href="https://youtu.be/dfqwx7pMsqs">Didn’t Want to Have to Do It</a>” plays softly in the background, taking me back to high school days in Colorado, when I had all their albums, when <a href="https://www.johnbsebastian.com/">John Sebastian</a> was a hero of mine. Is it a coincidence that much later and thousands of miles away, I am growing old in the town where he lives? That I had a nice chat with him at a mutual friend’s home?<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span id="docs-internal-guid-a56dab84-7fff-c4a2-0a84-077f897551ab"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/614b359374f1fc55151ce61e/87537ecb-d28b-4c67-9df8-15bd076588ca/John+Sebastian+(7).jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="534" height="200" src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/614b359374f1fc55151ce61e/87537ecb-d28b-4c67-9df8-15bd076588ca/John+Sebastian+(7).jpeg" width="134" /></a></div>This is not about John Sebastian. Maybe it’s about coincidence… I’ll find out as I follow the lead of my fingertips. <br /><br />Recently I’ve been thinking about <i>coincidence</i> (a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection), wondering about how it overlaps with <i>precognition</i> (knowledge of something in advance of its occurrence) and <i>intuition</i> (the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning). I’ve wanted to boost my ability to recognize coincidences in my life. I’ve been thinking about writing on the subject, but no door was opening.</span><br /><br />Until right now. Maybe this is a form of <i>serendipity</i> (a happy accident): I was wanting a way into the coincidence topic, and then while I’m having lunch this old song plays….<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://prodimage.images-bn.com/lf?set=key%5Bresolve.pixelRatio%5D,value%5B1%5D&set=key%5Bresolve.width%5D,value%5B600%5D&set=key%5Bresolve.height%5D,value%5B10000%5D&set=key%5Bresolve.imageFit%5D,value%5Bcontainerwidth%5D&set=key%5Bresolve.allowImageUpscaling%5D,value%5B0%5D&set=key%5Bresolve.format%5D,value%5Bwebp%5D&source=url%5Bhttps://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9781644115701_p0_v1_s600x595.jpg%5D&scale=options%5Blimit%5D,size%5B600x10000%5D&sink=format%5Bwebp%5D" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="595" data-original-width="394" height="200" src="https://prodimage.images-bn.com/lf?set=key%5Bresolve.pixelRatio%5D,value%5B1%5D&set=key%5Bresolve.width%5D,value%5B600%5D&set=key%5Bresolve.height%5D,value%5B10000%5D&set=key%5Bresolve.imageFit%5D,value%5Bcontainerwidth%5D&set=key%5Bresolve.allowImageUpscaling%5D,value%5B0%5D&set=key%5Bresolve.format%5D,value%5Bwebp%5D&source=url%5Bhttps://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9781644115701_p0_v1_s600x595.jpg%5D&scale=options%5Blimit%5D,size%5B600x10000%5D&sink=format%5Bwebp%5D" width="132" /></a></div>I’ve recently connected with Dr. Bernard Beitman. He is a psychiatrist and the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Coincidences-Synchronicity-Serendipity-Happen/dp/1644115700">Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen</a>. He has initiated <a href="https://www.coincider.com/the-coincidence-project">The Coincidence Project</a> to gather people’s stories of meaningful coincidences in their lives, to encourage awareness and discussion, and to bring the study of coincidences and their meaning into the field of science. Synchronicity, serendipity, seriality, simulpathity, the psychosphere, the collective human organism (CHO)… Learn more at <a href="https://www.coincider.com/">Coincider.com</a> and on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@Coinciders">YouTube</a>.</div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://theband.hiof.no/band_pictures/it_all_comes_back.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="330" data-original-width="332" height="199" src="https://theband.hiof.no/band_pictures/it_all_comes_back.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Now the cafe soundtrack is “Small Town Talk,” written by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Charles">Bobby Charles</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Danko">Rick Danko</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/5gjyOdeidTc">first recorded</a> here in the town of <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock,_New_York">Woodstock, NY</a> – but what I’m hearing now is the great <a href="https://youtu.be/_QCpsPok6GU">Paul Butterfield’s Better Days</a> version, also recorded in Woodstock. This is the version I loved since I first heard it when I was 21, living in Utah – when I hadn’t the faintest clue that the album cover image was taken in the Catskill Mountains just a few miles from where I would spend my senior years. I live on the same road where Butterfield once lived. <i>It All Comes Back</i>, indeed. * <br /><br />What does it mean that the <a href="https://thestrangerecital.com">literary podcast</a> I now co-host is recorded in a home studio not a hundred yards from where <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan">Bob Dylan</a> lived at the time of the mysterious motorcycle accident (1966) that allowed him to retreat from the cacophony of fame after his electric revolution, and do the woodshedding with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Band">The Band</a> that would result in yet more world-changing music that I listened to avidly as a young man… what does it all mean? Is this some sort of cosmic synchronicity?<br /><br />Well, let’s think clearly about this. These were famous people loved by millions all over the world. I’m just one of those millions. And Woodstock is a very small town. If you live here for a few years, odds are extremely high that you’ll come into direct contact with the artifacts of its world-famous musical history. The few incidents I’ve related barely scratch the surface of my experience.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://t0.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcTJyuswp7FEngb8nI876xlSc9DeycuKhQ1ysWS9yj7AjlYyICe2fxfbMK7hJ5T6OMqR" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="497" data-original-width="800" height="124" src="http://t0.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcTJyuswp7FEngb8nI876xlSc9DeycuKhQ1ysWS9yj7AjlYyICe2fxfbMK7hJ5T6OMqR" width="200" /></a></div>Also, Woodstock is a destination town, a lovely, artsy little place just two hours from what John Lennon called the capital of the world, New York City. Many people visit; some stay. Its association with the widely known 1969 concert that bears its name is, of course, one reason. My wife-to-be had moved here from “the city” in the early 90s and I soon followed her. So… if <i>synchronicity</i> (meaningful coincidence) is defined by numerical odds, then the fact that I ended up here surrounded by reminders of my heroes of the distant past is probably not synchronicity, not even coincidence at all. <br /><br />Nevertheless, it <i>feels</i> meaningful. To me, just a nobody from an anonymous suburb out west, it feels highly unlikely. After all, to live in Woodstock was never a goal of mine, and none of my high school or college friends ended up here. If synchronicity can be defined by the <i>feeling</i> of meaningfulness, then maybe it qualifies.<br /><br />Does precognition create coincidence? Can tastes be shaped by precognition? How does precognition figure into my youthful attraction to Sebastian, Butterfield, Dylan, others who are specifically associated with the town of Woodstock? Did the fact that I would feel the pleasure of living in their neighborhood as an older man guide me to their music as a younger man? Why was it these particular artists whose music I loved? I was the only person among my high school friends who was a serious Lovin’ Spoonful fan. And my choices as a limited-budget record buyer did not go in directions that many people my age followed – toward, for instance, Led Zeppelin, who have no connection to Woodstock. I was certainly a Jimi Hendrix fan… but Hendrix lived for a time in a house just two miles as the crow flies from where I live now. He practiced for the Woodstock concert at <a href="https://youtu.be/HzGBUsCpurQ">Tinker Street Cinema</a>, the little movie house near the center of town. <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9781644112694_p0_v1_s600x595.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /><img border="0" data-original-height="595" data-original-width="396" height="200" src="https://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9781644112694_p0_v1_s600x595.jpg" width="133" /></a></div><br />Did I precognize my future? Is it a case of “retrocausation”? I’m sure Eric Wargo would have some ideas about that. Wargo has been a recent guest on Dr. Beitman’s podcast but I have followed his blog, <a href="https://www.thenightshirt.com/">The Nightshirt</a>, for years, and my fiction writing has been influenced by his ideas. His latest book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1644112698/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0">Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self</a>, is a tool I’m currently using to explore my dreams and how they interact with my waking reality.<br /><br />Quantum physics has shown that, at the most fundamental levels of reality, no distinction can be made between cause and effect. The relation between two events can be either causal or retrocausal. I imagine time not as a line but as a surface – let’s say the surface of a pool. An event in my consciousness, perhaps given power by emotion, is like a pebble dropped into the pool. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images.pexels.com/photos/220213/pexels-photo-220213.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&w=1260&h=750&dpr=1" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="800" height="107" src="https://images.pexels.com/photos/220213/pexels-photo-220213.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&w=1260&h=750&dpr=1" width="200" /></a></div>Ripples flow outward in every direction in time. As a 15-year-old, I felt a connection to John Sebastion because fifty years later I would meet him. But wait… doesn’t the power in that moment come only from my pleasure in encountering my boyhood hero? What if as an old man I hadn’t met him – would my young self have paid no attention to his music? What is cause and what is effect? It’s an endless loop, an Escher image of the mind, like the cover of Eric Wargo’s first book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Time-Loops-Precognition-Retrocausation-Unconscious/dp/1938398920">Time Loops</a>.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://recitalpublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/PONCKHOCKIE-UNION-COVER-4.4-front-e1560259303919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="311" height="200" src="https://recitalpublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/PONCKHOCKIE-UNION-COVER-4.4-front-e1560259303919.jpg" width="130" /></a></div>The time loop trope is common in fiction, but I don’t use it. My novel <a href="https://recitalpublishing.com/ponckhockie-union/"><i>Ponckhockie Union</i></a> and my story collection <a href="https://recitalpublishing.com/the-principle-of-ultimate-indivisibility_2/"><i>The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility</i></a>, as well as another novel and another story collection in progress, use coincidence, synchronicity, and other riddles as the atmosphere in which recognizable characters like you, me, and our neighbors face life’s multiplicity of challenges. My premise is that the world is not as it seems – it’s much more wonderfully mysterious. The unanswerable questions are my inspiration.</div><div> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://recitalpublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/INDIVISIBILITY_21-front-e1626434146291.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="481" data-original-width="311" height="200" src="https://recitalpublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/INDIVISIBILITY_21-front-e1626434146291.jpg" width="129" /></a></div>But… skepticism is also very high on my list of values. I do my best to live by the motto: <b>Believe nothing; question everything</b>. I am always self-monitoring for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias">cognitive bias</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias">confirmation bias</a>, or any unfounded assumptions. I am a self-diagnosed “epistemological obsessive,” always demanding of myself and others, “How do you know?” So with all this talk of invisible interdependence, I have to ask: How much am I a victim of apophenia? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia">Apophenia</a> – a common condition that in its extreme form is a precursor to schizophrenia – is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The conundrum here is: who decides what is “unrelated” and exactly how do they decide? While I don’t want to be apophenic, I also do not automatically accept someone’s authority about whether I am or not.<br /><br />Speaking of untrustworthy authority, which is increasingly evident as the world falls to pieces around us – is there a valid reason for rambling about coincidence and fiction? One writer friend of mine can’t write because of his anxiety about the problems in the news. Another only wants to write <i>about</i> the problems, in protest. My own preference (or is it intuition about what is healthiest for me?) is to follow my perennial interests no matter the current events, but I harbor an old secret fear of being a dysfunctional daydreamer – most likely, a vestige of parental voices in my head. Right now I am consciously putting that fear aside – my own small gesture of sovereignty.<br /><br />I appreciate Wargo, Beitman, and others such as <a href="https://noetic.org/profile/dean-radin/">Dean Radin</a> (see his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Universe-Scientific-Psychic-Phenomena/dp/0061778990">The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena</a>) in their efforts to give solid scientific study to “psi” or parapsychology. After all, who knows what truths about the universe we may be missing when ultimate authority is given to reductionist, materialist <a href="https://bigthink.com/13-8/science-vs-scientism/">Scientism</a>?<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://dbx6c2burld74.cloudfront.net/migration/1551192438-a631a0fe3080365754c6545f42c2c471.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="640" height="150" src="https://dbx6c2burld74.cloudfront.net/migration/1551192438-a631a0fe3080365754c6545f42c2c471.png" width="200" /></a></div>So I continue with my quest to enhance my awareness of coincidences in my life, and to interrogate their meaning. Old songs, rock stars in Woodstock, my meandering path to this place and time… I’m glad intuition led me to follow that unexpected trail of thought as I ate lunch. What does it mean? After some pondering, I can say this: coincidence, synchronicity, precognition, intangible vectors of influence – the vast, intricate web of interconnectedness that sparkles just outside our normal sight – this is what inspires me to create. And creation is what keeps me sane and somewhere on the edge of happy and content in this Insanity Stew of a culture. Without a doubt, my fiction will continue to explore those mysteries. <br /><br /><b>“Artmaking is making the invisible visible.”</b> ---<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp">Marcel Duchamp</a></div><div><br />* For more information about the musical history of Woodstock, see the book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Small-Town-Talk-Morrison-Woodstock/dp/0306825341"><i>Small Town Talk</i></a> by Barney Hoskyns.</div>Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-84060331509240409932021-01-18T15:37:00.001-05:002021-01-18T15:37:37.616-05:00Missing Ted Denyer<div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp9yNYMkn_gpfKsl9kmvvU4qEunzFzKxmC8ZNqCQbP3AIUW_F7rBmGCsiBAz6Y4dj5zxrv1MOvML50iVd2645HnQUqGJFrKZhYlJKfkf0vvucyOsUhrNQUECQjrWaP9IJlVsbT8rolRNw/s1648/photo-of-Ted-Denyer.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Ted Denyer" border="0" data-original-height="1648" data-original-width="1500" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp9yNYMkn_gpfKsl9kmvvU4qEunzFzKxmC8ZNqCQbP3AIUW_F7rBmGCsiBAz6Y4dj5zxrv1MOvML50iVd2645HnQUqGJFrKZhYlJKfkf0vvucyOsUhrNQUECQjrWaP9IJlVsbT8rolRNw/w182-h200/photo-of-Ted-Denyer.jpg" title="Photo by Susan Quasha" width="182" /></a></div>This month marks 15 years since my dear friend Ted Denyer left this planet. I miss him a lot, but I'm also glad he did not have to see the dismal condition of the world today. He would have been bewildered and sad.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Ted was a painter dedicated to making visible the invisible. I'm extremely pleased to see his life's work catalogued on this fine website: <a href="http://teddenyerart.com/">http://teddenyerart.com/</a>, a creation of his son-in-law Efrem Marder and grandson <a href="https://www.penwave.com/penpress/" target="_blank">Ben Marder</a>. I hope you'll check out the evolution of his paintings, and take 16 minutes to watch a video documentary that my wife <a href="https://www.wendydrolma.com/" target="_blank">Wendy</a> and I produced about him in 1996.</div><p>As I began to write here, I realized the futility of attempting to capture the profound impact one human being can have on another. Every two weeks for ten years, Ted and I had dinner together in a cozy little loft room that overlooked his painting studio in his home in Mount Tremper, NY. I grew from my forties into my fifties, he from his seventies into his late eighties. Our conversations ranged widely, but the words and topics were not the important part of those evenings. There was often a feeling of timeless suspension. Perhaps it's not going too far to say we entered a parallel dimension of communion. We were in tune, <i>sympatico</i>, kindred spirits, but also... I had never been close to an older man before. My own father had frequently felt like a stranger. Ted's warmth, interest in others, fascination with truths below the surface, cultural hunger, self-reliant individualism, curiosity, laughter, young-heartedness, even his sometimes too-crusty opinions about art, gave me a role model. This was the kind of man I wanted to be as I too moved past middle age toward the final days.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgONKKBDFUa9ycQDZd1aKcm4798Fwp86WQFj-xgDYW9192AP0ymnJIde9-9vIUjif5_nTkWyfEXqOVAv1X0ekNOK7R0FI5BoaoyIOXZwSRhZ7IF8-NkqxheernnOanZqBsd_kgbc4cTm2k/s400/Ponckhockie+Union+cover+small.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a></div>By way of tribute via imagination, I gave Ted a very brief appearance in my novel <a href="https://recitalpublishing.com/ponckhockie-union/" target="_blank">Ponckhockie Union</a>, which is primarily set in my local environs in the Hudson Valley. The character called "Ted" is one of the elements in the protagonist's recovery from a devastating life crisis. His one "on camera" scene is in a chapter that focuses on some of the history of the town of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia,_New_York" target="_blank">Phoenicia</a>. You can hear me read that chapter and answer some interview questions on the podcast I co-produce, <a href="https://thestrangerecital.com" target="_blank">The Strange Recital</a>. I was glad to be able to say a little about the real man that inspired the character. The episode is 24 minutes long.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nf3uG2vzS-k" width="320" youtube-src-id="nf3uG2vzS-k"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">(See <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2020/06/sample-my-novel-1-2-3.html" target="_blank">this previous post</a> for more audio glimpses of the novel.)</div><p>Another tribute to Ted that I wrote not long after his passing, is this odd little venture in prose (less than 2 pages), called "<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/18WdF6AH0yeokHkvAmc1gn1uBkq7a9WmJ/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">The Abstract Painter</a>."</p><p>The future on this planet seems potentially very strange and difficult, not what I'd hoped for in my later years. My memories of Ted, the example he set for how to live a creative life and face death with courage, are among the things for which I am most grateful.</p><p>(Photo of Ted Denyer by Susan Quasha)</p>Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-87582245660831233042020-06-10T21:13:00.003-04:002020-06-11T17:00:04.304-04:00Sample My Novel: 1-2-3<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-908830c7-7fff-1807-3f92-5d10ae945c8a" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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It seems necessary to acknowledge this truth: a blogger I am not. My last post here was nearly two years ago. I had reached "The End" of my novel <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">Ponckhockie Union</a>, not knowing it would grow a bit and get better in the next few months. Occupying too much of my time and attention to allow thoughts of blogging, the book finally completed its gestation and was born into the world in July of 2019. Since then I've been on the road of promotion, while also launching two other books through our startup <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">Recital Publishing</a>, plus maintaining a twice-monthly schedule on <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">The Strange Recital</a> podcast. <br />
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Time to catch up! But why the weird title? What does it mean? Come back to this blog for a future post about that. For now, here's the description from the back cover:<br />
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Benedict Arnold Rose is a documentary filmmaker in a troubled marriage. His history-focused life is suddenly derailed by shadowy assassins with multiple identities, indoctrination in a dark cell, seduction, betrayal, the finality of fire, and the unexpected kindness of a stranger. He must journey within, but what is real? And who is asking? Coincidence and paradox abound as Rose negotiates his passage into a new life…but the questions without answers still remain. </blockquote>
Encounters with a fictional version of the well-known author <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">Paul Auster</a>, and with a mercenary soldier who is also a devotee of the Indian spiritual guru <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">Nisargadatta Maharaj</a>, entwine the <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">metafictional</a> with the <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">metaphysical</a> in a speculative swirl of mystery, history, and self-inquiry. Check out <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">John Burdick</a>'s insightful viewpoint in <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">Hudson Valley One</a>.</div>
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If you’d like a direct glimpse into Ponckhockie Union, here’s a good start: three episodes of The Strange Recital that feature audio excerpts from the book, but also have a little fun with supplementary material (as in “author interviews” that go a little astray). And music! <br />
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Start with this one, the opening of the novel, with a particularly local focus (thank you, <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">Woodstock, NY</a>):<br />
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This one features an important character (not Ben Rose, the protagonist) and a different voice:
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And here’s a bit of the backstory, some context for the marriage crisis that is a key element in the plot:
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I’d love to hear from you if you have thoughts or questions about what you just heard. Find me on Facebook at <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">https://facebook.com/robisonbrent </a>or Instagram at <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">https://instagram.com/robisonbrent52</a>.
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Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-78320588804346949602018-08-12T15:35:00.000-04:002018-08-12T15:35:05.793-04:00Memoir in Fiction, Truth in Lies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Note: if you prefer audio-visual media to reading, here's an opportunity -- skip to the bottom and listen to the podcast while looking at a pretty picture! But I do hope you'll read first, then listen.<br />
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Even I, despite my intentional avoidance of mainstream news media, know that a lot has been said recently about the nature of truth -- a lot of words but not much substance. "Alternative facts," "fake news," etc. -- phrases whose very existence necessitates an opposing argument, but the entire exchange devolves into Us against Them. "Truth" deserves different definitions depending on the category of reality we're talking about. But the sound-bite world can't tolerate discussion with any depth.<br />
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Simplistic thinking is a cultural trend that may never abate, but I intend to continue quietly defending the boundaries of a tiny territory where everything co-exists in equilibrium with its opposite. Where there is no two, only one. Call it Nonduality Nation.<br />
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In the literary realm, this might be expressed in the old dichotomy between Memoir and Fiction. Granted, this is useful categorization for the marketing and selling of books -- but that's a mundane level that doesn't interest me much. Also, in my own internal experience as a writer, the distinction is very clear in intention and process: memoir is reportorial, fiction is imaginary. The act of writing in each of those modes simply <i>feels</i> different from the other. So yes, there are categories in which the dichotomy is accurate.<br />
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But for some people, Memoir = True, Fiction = False. In Nonduality Nation, this proposition is not valid.<br />
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Memory (on which memoir is based) has been proven highly unreliable. See the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus" target="_blank">Dr. Elizabeth Loftus</a>, then go even further with the bizarre speculations of <a href="http://mandelaeffect.com/what-is-the-mandela-effect-video/" target="_blank">The Mandela Effect</a>. So there is certainly no direct correspondence between an author's memory of an event and the objective "truth" of that event, if such a thing even exists. When we write memoir, we just do our best to remember and report. It's a faulty venture at best, but it can be a very rewarding one.<br />
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Fiction is a different exercise. My own fiction is subtly and inextricably laced with events and characters "borrowed" from my actual history. I suspect every fiction writer does this to one degree or another. We make conscious decisions to pull a scene, an image, a bit of dialogue, from our database of memories when it feels right for the otherwise entirely imaginary story we're telling. Or maybe those memories inspired the story to begin with. They are the foundation, and they get heavily embellished with imaginary (yet equally important for the story) scenes, images, characters, events -- which, by contrast with memory's "truth," must be "lies."<br />
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In that way, truth begins to mix with falsehood to make an undifferentiated soup. To anyone who's thought much about the subject, all this is obvious. But it's only the beginning. My conscious decisions to create that mixture are not as powerful as the inevitably unique expression of my subconscious mind. Every idea, emotion, image, sequence of events -- even word choice, sentence structure, punctuation -- is an expression of me. If I attempt to strictly control those things, as if to bypass my subconscious, the control itself becomes the expression. I can't escape it.<br />
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Fiction or non-, every book is a portrait of its author. (I have more to say on this subject... in a future post.) It's entirely possible that a work of fiction might contain more psychological and emotional truth than does a fact-filled memoir by the same author. "The Starry Night" might say more about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh" target="_blank">Vincent Van Gogh</a> than any of his self-portraits. Of course, nothing is certain.<br />
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So, in that light, my newly completed novel, <i>Ponckhockie Union</i> (yet to be published) is both true and not true. Also, here in Nonduality Nation, events in imagination are just as concrete as those in conventional actuality. The story takes place in a reality that is almost, but not quite, the same reality you (the reader of these words) and I (their author) are in right now, in this present moment. But the continuum of "real" to "not real" is just as subject to over-simplification, or just as blurrily overlapping, as "true" and "false."<br />
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That's one reason why I prefer questions over answers. Here are a few of many questions raised by my novel: Was my protagonist, Ben Rose, actually threatened by a shadowy international assassin, or is it all in his mind, a metaphor? Who would the well-known author <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Auster" target="_blank">Paul Auster</a> be if he had never had publishing success? What if <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat" target="_blank">Yasser Arafat</a> of the PLO was actually an impostor controlled by a hidden elite? Did a mercenary killer ever sit at the feet of the guru <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisargadatta_Maharaj" target="_blank">Nisargadatta Maharaj</a>? In what ways does national history entangle with personal history? And how much of the book is actually autobiographical (in other words, haha, "true")?<br />
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I get a secret pleasure from the idea that my readers are asking the autobiography question as they read -- always wondering what is my "true story," or memoir, and what is "made up," or fiction. I hope they come away with an ineffable understanding that it doesn't matter. Those things are one and the same.<br />
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With all this in mind, I wrote a very brief, confessional, tell-all memoir. No more secrets and lies! I call it "Vagabond for Beauty." <a href="http://tomnewtonwriter.com/" target="_blank">Tom Newton</a> and I recorded it as a podcast for <a href="http://thestrangerecital.com/" target="_blank">The Strange Recital</a>. My reading is followed by a lovely bit of guitar music by <a href="http://www.davidtemple.com/" target="_blank">David Temple</a>, then an author interview that explores some of the foregoing ideas, and offers others. The whole thing lasts 23 minutes. I hope you'll listen.<br />
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(The photo of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicate_Arch" target="_blank">Delicate Arch</a> is by me, taken over 30 years ago.)<br />
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<br />Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-32479888679465924312018-05-19T15:54:00.001-04:002018-05-19T15:54:52.292-04:00Alternate Lives: Books by Paul Auster and Jim Murdoch<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A picture of two books.... Okay, so in their physical presence these two novels are completely different. So what?<br />
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<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/4-3-2-1-Novel/dp/1627794468" target="_blank">4321</a></i> by <a href="http://paul-auster.com/" target="_blank">Paul Auster</a> is a 6.5 x 9.5-inch hardcover with dust jacket, 866 pages (a brick!). Published by Henry Holt and Company, a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, one of the Big Five.<br />
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<i><a href="http://www.fvbooks.com/jmurdoch/jmurdoch8.htm" target="_blank">The More Things Change</a></i> by <a href="http://www.jimmurdoch.co.uk/" target="_blank">Jim Murdoch</a> is a 5 x 7.75-inch paperback, 329 pages. Published by Fandango Virtual, a homegrown effort.<br />
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The point of this little essay is not to compare them, but rather to explore them and to honor them, with an eye toward their shared meanings. And part of the context here is an invisible (so far) third book: my own novel, currently undergoing final edits. My book (working title: <i>Ponckhockie Union</i>) is perhaps more different from these than they are from each other. But I mention it here because of the topic of alternate lives. A key character in my novel is "Paul Auster," an unpublished novelist working as a local journalist in the Hudson Valley, married to a successful writer named Siri. He is almost, but not quite, the world-famous Brooklynite, husband of <a href="http://sirihustvedt.net/" target="_blank">Siri Hustvedt</a> and author of <i>The New York Trilogy</i> and so much more<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">—</span>just as the world in which my book takes place is almost, but not quite, the one we live in and think we know.</div>
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<i>4321</i> is Auster's latest, and longest, novel. It has already been much praised and<span id="docs-internal-guid-31491e7b-36ff-d790-d01a-99a26710af49"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">—</span></span>like all Auster's work<span id="docs-internal-guid-31491e7b-36ff-d790-d01a-99a26710af49"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">—</span></span>much criticized. It tells four stories in one: four of the perhaps infinite number of possible lives of one young man, Archie Ferguson. Starting from the same point (birth in New Jersey, 1947), each Archie takes a different path as a result of apparently random occurrences in his life and the lives of his parents, family, and friends. Part of Auster's impressive achievement is the depth of well-observed and well-imagined detail with which he describes the hopes, fears, interests, challenges, and loves of each Archie<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">—</span>all seem equally authentic. Which one is Archie's "real life?" They all are. For me, this gets into the territory of the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation" target="_blank">many-worlds interpretation</a>" of quantum mechanics, which suggests that all possible alternate histories and futures are real, each representing an actual world or universe. On a less scientific plane, it evokes the <a href="http://mandelaeffect.com/" target="_blank">Mandela Effect</a>, in which memories don't seem to match reality<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">—</span>possibly explained by the suggestion that some of us occasionally slip between parallel, very similar, realities, or "timestreams."<br />
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Jim Murdoch is a Scottish author living near Glasgow. I've reviewed past books of his on this blog: <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.ca/2014/03/book-review-making-sense-by-jim-murdoch.html" target="_blank">a story collection</a>, <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.ca/2010/10/review-jim-murdochs-this-is-not-about.html" target="_blank">a poetry book</a>, and <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.ca/2013/01/book-review-milligan-and-murphy-by-jim.html" target="_blank">an earlier novel</a>. <i>The More Things Change</i> is his latest, and longest, novel. It tells the story of Jim Valentine, a teacher-turned-author, an ordinary guy whose journey is anything but. He is living a life without distinction, job and marriage in a state of torpor, dreaming of being a writer but never actually writing. As Murdoch says, "Jim was forty and had been since he was thirty." Then one day in the park he meets an old codger who claims to be God. They have a long philosophical conversation over the following days, and the next thing Jim knows, he is standing in front of an apartment door, key in hand, with no memory whatsoever.<br />
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A fresh start, a re-birth. Thus begins Act 2 of his life, in which he writes a major bestseller and a less successful follow-up. This part of the story is told from 20 and then 40 years later, after he's fallen again into isolated obscurity, been divorced by his wife, and come to the end of his ability to write. Or has he? Could there be a third book in progress, one that circles us back to the beginning? Once again he meets the old man in the park and their dialogue (or is it repartee?) brings into focus the alternate life Jim has just lived, and the next (or is it simultaneous?) life he may be embarking on. He is, after all, a character in a book, subject to the metafictional whims of the Author. As, perhaps, are you and me<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">—</span>see <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/" target="_blank">this article</a> about the "simulation hypothesis."<br />
<br />
Murdoch is a master of a particular kind of narrative voice: a very subjective, internal flight of fancy, a torrent of ideas large and small, busily skewering cliches and deconstructing conventional thought, a careening monologue in which the events of a storyline seem almost incidental<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">—</span>all delivered with wry wit and good humor. His narration is funny, but never at the expense of his characters, for whom he always has affection.<br />
<br />
Auster's book is also full of affection for his characters, perhaps more heartfelt than any of his past novels. I was surprised to find myself moved almost to tears more than once. But he is a storyteller first. Even when his story is twisted and strange, he moves straight ahead to address the question "What happened next?" I see Murdoch, on the other hand, as a philosopher first, entwining his plot in a complex tapestry of playful ideas and big, unanswerable questions. And he's funnier than Auster could ever be.<br />
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Both of these books are dense, presenting pages of text rarely broken by paragraphs and more rarely by dialogue. These authors ignore the tired writing-school trope of "Show, don't tell." To their credit, this indicates the courage to be true to one's own unique expression, rather than courting the biggest possible audience. Also, both use unusual structures. I've already mentioned Murdoch's jumping through time, but he also spices the book with short enigmatic snatches of dialogue in playwriting format, a way of embodying another layer of reality. Auster's four parallel lives are tracked in interleaved segments numbered 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, then 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, and so on. It's very organized but the reading experience can blur the framework. I soon surrendered to the experience of never being sure, when I began a section, which story I was following. I found this a sort of delicious disorientation that served to blend the four lives into one, a perfect way of making a concrete reality out of a mental concept: how thin the boundaries are between one life path and another.<br />
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A final note about Auster's book: I only wish he hadn't dealt me a final twinge of disappointment with a too-easy, reality-bound ending, which I won't spoil by revealing. Perhaps there are many readers, those who like mysteries to always be solved, who will be glad for that ending. I appreciate the fact that Murdoch chose, with a smile and a wink, to keep the questions alive beyond his last page.<br />
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Bottom line: I enjoyed both of these books very much. Both are smart, brimming with verbal and cultural intelligence. Both are impressive achievements in the craft of writing fiction. So the question arises: what makes some people famous and others not? Could it be that each of us plays a scripted role, as I explored in my story "Wild Roses"? (Hear the story in audio form <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2018/04/five-audio-storiesplus-more.html" target="_blank">here</a>.) Maybe, in some alternate life in a parallel universe (or simulation), Auster is the obscure one (as in my novel), and Murdoch, like his character Valentine, enjoys (or endures), a brief, brilliant moment in the well-deserved limelight.<br />
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<br />
Relating Writings: Follow <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2011/05/nondual-auster-metaphysical-detective.html" target="_blank">this link</a> for more of my thoughts about underlying meanings in Auster's work, and go even further with <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2009/12/austerrific-moment-my-first-blog-post-3.html" target="_blank">this link</a> to a long-ago post. Follow <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2012/06/aah-memory-review-of-and-she-was-by.html" target="_blank">this link</a> and <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2013/09/can-stranger-share-your-memories.html" target="_blank">this link</a> for other book reviews that explore thoughts about the connection of memory to "self," as well as my opinions about the "mystery" genre.</div>
Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-54781195335523583522018-04-02T10:45:00.000-04:002018-04-02T11:56:19.915-04:00Five Audio Stories...plus more<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1wZDd-vkM3zBLNBioOArcypnnOiQjQlVOlSBl69t9sz0Fx2g6-dENmVJ9cNM9xwSCbp-tDmXWUfbRGmcxpZo5bhJ_Rbem5_Mit9VaZiXlN5bJq8WgAxdL3kGzbxBnYWrRwo8RR8SRihM/s1600/kintsugi21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1wZDd-vkM3zBLNBioOArcypnnOiQjQlVOlSBl69t9sz0Fx2g6-dENmVJ9cNM9xwSCbp-tDmXWUfbRGmcxpZo5bhJ_Rbem5_Mit9VaZiXlN5bJq8WgAxdL3kGzbxBnYWrRwo8RR8SRihM/s200/kintsugi21.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">© tsugi.de</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
A blogger I am not. An entire year has passed since my last post here, the one about my father.<br />
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It's been a busy year, as all years are. Like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi" target="_blank"><i>kintsugi</i> gold</a>, the cracks between the priorities of family, job, and home have been filled with two things: finishing a novel (celebrate!) and continuing my collaboration with <a href="http://tomnewtonwriter.com/" target="_blank">Tom Newton</a> on our twice-monthly fiction podcast, <a href="http://thestrangerecital.com/" target="_blank">The Strange Recital</a> ("a podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality").<br />
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Among the 40 episodes we've released are several of my own stories. Some are new, some are old. Some are read by me, some are not. Each episode is roughly 20 minutes long and includes a bit of good music plus an "author interview" that may be a little twisted (in a good way 😉). I'd love it if you would listen and let me know your thoughts.<br />
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In reverse chronological order, here are the stories of mine that have come out in the past year. Just click the player arrow below the picture:<br />
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<h3>
Barney Rudolph</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUwY6J3P7jZjc4aJcoaU_-hb4MGn1IpMsF8jJDozZtxKF3TN6SzYFS7JbGlmcQXPORFBI2dakQH-HeucYNMgCNzgSMsPsGHZb8czz3gn9VAooU9QQIomPOCC0VuVoCpPg-q1gKqhrzesk/s1600/Not+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUwY6J3P7jZjc4aJcoaU_-hb4MGn1IpMsF8jJDozZtxKF3TN6SzYFS7JbGlmcQXPORFBI2dakQH-HeucYNMgCNzgSMsPsGHZb8czz3gn9VAooU9QQIomPOCC0VuVoCpPg-q1gKqhrzesk/s200/Not+2.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
"Barney Rudolph was a solitary man. This is what he silently said in his private story of self. Alienated, a loner, lone wolf, outsider. Always an outsider."<br />
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Can a movie be made that is not a movie? Can a man be not a man? Maybe each of us is just something happening in a sea of happenings.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" height="30" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/6405154/height/30/width/310/theme/standard-mini/autonext/no/thumbnail/no/autoplay/no/preload/no/no_addthis/no/direction/backward/" style="border: none;" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="310"></iframe><br />
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<h3>
Ferret Love</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUtlrICDO_zbD5ViSHejqqAVXuDcssbV7unpqvJQq9WEkYnJ2_X7pN-40s2ARVgFEp_FeWKhJC3j8pMEZOwbgDuueedr6FdojEz_VJRWIbFHzYH29V9e_IQeNDyCFLhuyj94INXGCKr5c/s1600/lipstick1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUtlrICDO_zbD5ViSHejqqAVXuDcssbV7unpqvJQq9WEkYnJ2_X7pN-40s2ARVgFEp_FeWKhJC3j8pMEZOwbgDuueedr6FdojEz_VJRWIbFHzYH29V9e_IQeNDyCFLhuyj94INXGCKr5c/s200/lipstick1.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
"It was last spring, early, when I fell in love with the ferret woman. The first beautiful day, exquisite whirlybird of a sunny blue day, and I’m in the park, lying on the lawn."<br />
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Where does obsession come from? Why do people have pet ferrets? And shouldn't somebody warn the boyfriend?</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" height="30" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/6147242/height/30/width/310/theme/standard-mini/autonext/no/thumbnail/no/autoplay/no/preload/no/no_addthis/no/direction/backward/" style="border: none;" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="310"></iframe><br />
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<h3>
Wild Roses</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl-JPanbtF4oLJ5Jv1TWdiwjDh9D3BMS68RRGODKATXtkgj-6So8Wemii6L4i2IQ-0O4P3Li9mbbdoMLpcumsztzxxsE5tULhgOQ6EcQlsrIPKh5IdBqLC6Kc2VVnvzoHYL4vBZvJFVKM/s1600/5-thorn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl-JPanbtF4oLJ5Jv1TWdiwjDh9D3BMS68RRGODKATXtkgj-6So8Wemii6L4i2IQ-0O4P3Li9mbbdoMLpcumsztzxxsE5tULhgOQ6EcQlsrIPKh5IdBqLC6Kc2VVnvzoHYL4vBZvJFVKM/s200/5-thorn.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
"On the border between Millbrook and Pleasant Valley, just off Route 44, there’s a little patch of woods where my boyfriend hanged himself."<br />
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A visitor from the other side... real or hallucination? Should you heed their message? Yes or no, it's already written in the script.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" height="30" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/5936128/height/30/width/310/theme/standard-mini/autonext/no/thumbnail/no/autoplay/no/preload/no/no_addthis/no/direction/backward/" style="border: none;" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="310"></iframe><br />
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<h3>
Messenger</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwvBWzKcBIG5v8c3k2oPPO-zixU7QNqdJ-0Qziw0Jj0KPICAhsMC3zhSw1IB3Ncax2jZvG24uB_HzqIKXGCtOonimS68K6cus65oesjPCCQZXWC8LYc_s_hI-ZRjuQYQm018Gr8xkrIRM/s1600/lightning-storm-1615930-crop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwvBWzKcBIG5v8c3k2oPPO-zixU7QNqdJ-0Qziw0Jj0KPICAhsMC3zhSw1IB3Ncax2jZvG24uB_HzqIKXGCtOonimS68K6cus65oesjPCCQZXWC8LYc_s_hI-ZRjuQYQm018Gr8xkrIRM/s200/lightning-storm-1615930-crop.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
"In the final year before the onset of Destruction, on the blessed anniversary of my birth, there will occur in the heavens an astrological Grand Cross. Yea, verily, He hath spoken!"<br />
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There are many kinds of messengers in this world. Hmm... should we heed the messages, or not?<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" height="30" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/5478704/height/30/width/310/theme/standard-mini/autonext/no/thumbnail/no/autoplay/no/preload/no/no_addthis/no/direction/backward/" style="border: none;" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="310"></iframe><br />
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<h3>
Dewey and Fern</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtqEQBW9FIS3JqrNEpQSl8APJ5Tlf_XE9Wt0HPlwXrfZakSgXUf-NbXd1ImdX75ORKh9gJwnQijNFaSdNXxOsYC2FJG4nzQYC0WTD3sHrhDij-eGZQ8OvDAQF77jKMmeLnTfI90yCPwKo/s1600/D%252BF-bridge1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtqEQBW9FIS3JqrNEpQSl8APJ5Tlf_XE9Wt0HPlwXrfZakSgXUf-NbXd1ImdX75ORKh9gJwnQijNFaSdNXxOsYC2FJG4nzQYC0WTD3sHrhDij-eGZQ8OvDAQF77jKMmeLnTfI90yCPwKo/s200/D%252BF-bridge1.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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"When Dewey Bustle found the shriveled monkey finger, he just didn’t know what to think. He asked his buddy Fern...."</div>
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Can love persist in the face of harsh circumstance? Maybe we are all like these, the small and the lost.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" height="30" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/5249714/height/30/width/310/theme/standard-mini/autonext/no/thumbnail/no/autoplay/no/preload/no/no_addthis/no/direction/backward/" style="border: none;" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="310"></iframe><br />
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Many thanks to Tom for his audio wizardry and good ideas.<br />
Thank you for listening, and stay tuned for glimpses into my forthcoming novel (title TBD)!Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-74084109121731281322017-03-30T16:13:00.000-04:002017-03-30T17:08:42.420-04:00Thoughts About My Dad<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq0WEjx3WZWQZ95ZTIGgVpmVl39b_1VPzqju_fOg__XaQcReZvnIQj3ANqbFi6P0qQmVhtt8fhkj3RhPCefHjiDNS55SeA_gP-WFWELiIcfBPDU7xsahVklGmdJV7W614BP2CCYNuDBMM/s1600/dad+002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq0WEjx3WZWQZ95ZTIGgVpmVl39b_1VPzqju_fOg__XaQcReZvnIQj3ANqbFi6P0qQmVhtt8fhkj3RhPCefHjiDNS55SeA_gP-WFWELiIcfBPDU7xsahVklGmdJV7W614BP2CCYNuDBMM/s200/dad+002.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My dad and me, 1952</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
If my father, Cal Jack Robison, were still with us in this temporal reality, he would be 90 years old today. I last saw him alive twenty years ago, the day he turned 70.<br />
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In December 2015, I took advantage of a few days in an <a href="http://authenticwriting.com/" target="_blank">Authentic Writing</a> workshop to explore some thoughts about him. Here are some of those exercises. The headings are the writing prompts we were given. I hope you'll read to the end.<br />
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<h4>
<span style="color: #93c47d;">Vagrant</span></h4>
The snow began drifting down not long after we started walking. The sky was low, the color of old porcelain, above the many shades of gray-brown and muted green of the rocky, brushy slopes, where stands of pines filled the ravines. Duane had moved on ahead of us and disappeared, his rifle slung over his shoulder. “That long-legged son of a gun,” my dad said. “We’ll have to meet back at the cabin later.” They knew from many hunts together that my dad’s short legs could never keep up—his pace was better matched to mine, the kid, ten years old. I’d be taller than him in just a couple of years, and I already told him frequently how to spell words, but now, out here, there was no sense beyond this: he was a man, I was a child.<br />
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I walked behind him, staying quiet, no sound but the crunch of our boots on stones and leaves, and the snow continued to fall, heavier, thicker. I often wondered: why is there so much walking when we go deer hunting? Wouldn’t it make more sense to stay still? Aren’t we scaring them away just by moving, just by entering their silent home with all our loud rustles and creaks and snapping twigs?<br />
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We hiked higher and higher, where the view of the surrounding wilderness should have widened, but by now the wind had picked up and snow swirled around us so thickly I could see nothing but my dad’s back, his rifle over his shoulder, his boots making one track after another. The ground was no longer visible under the deepening snow. Pines would appear as looming shadows in the white-out, then pass away behind us. Flakes caught on my eyelashes and I knew my hat and earflaps and shoulders were covered in white. A gust blasted my face. We kept walking. Should I be worried? I stayed silent. With him, this was my way.<br />
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Out of the swirling whiteness appeared a huge fallen tree, it’s tangle of roots jutting up as tall as my dad. He walked around it, where the other side was against a huge boulder. He stopped and turned to me.<br />
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“In there,” he said. “Quick.” Under the roots of the fallen tree, walled in by the boulder, was a little dry space, no bigger than a bathtub, all earthy dark brown, perfectly sheltered from the blizzard.<br />
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We crouched in the tiny cave together and suddenly I knew that he was scared. But he tried not to show it. “Hell of a storm, I’ll tell you what,” he said. Together we found a few sticks and dry leaves and started a miniature fire. We warmed our hands. I didn’t know if my dad and I were going to freeze to death, buried under a mountain of snow—whether I would ever see my mom or my little sisters and baby brother again. But somehow, I didn’t care. There was some sort of fierce joy in me—with my father, facing the elements in a battle for survival. I was being taken care of by him, but at the same time, and more importantly, I was somehow his equal. Two men, strong, smart, brave, surviving together. The rest of the world didn’t matter.<br />
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I don’t know how long we sat there in our little shelter. Maybe it was only an hour until the blizzard died down and we climbed out, resumed or ended our hunt, met up with Duane again, drove down out of the Uintah Mountains to our little cowboy town. Back to school, church, then my dad’s different jobs that took him away more and more, then moving to another town and another like vagrants… the routine that continued until, gradually, before I reached the end of high school, he was entirely gone from our lives, off with a new woman and a child on the way.<br />
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And I was expected to be the man of the family, a job that no hour under a tree in a blizzard could prepare me for.<br />
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<h4>
<b><span style="color: #93c47d;">Exploring</span></b></h4>
In 1993 I lived in downtown Jersey City but had explored the streets of Manhattan well enough to give good directions to out-of-towners. No other members of my family had ever been there. It was Christmas time and I was 41, newly in love. I decided to take my New York born and raised girlfriend to Utah for her first time, to meet my family—my mother and her husband, my father and his wife, my teenage son and daughter. In Salt Lake City we picked up my kids from my ex, piled into a rental car, and headed south. First up, my mother’s house in Orem, next door to Provo, the home of Brigham Young University, the dark heart of Mormon country and my mother’s lifelong home. Surely my mother had no idea what to make of this tall young woman in her beret, black leather jacket, long scarf and slim black jeans, but I had long-since ceased to care and we enjoyed a surfacey chit-chat amongst the family photos and Jesus tchotchkes. Then on the road again.<br />
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I hadn’t seen my father in many years—possibly only once since my younger brother’s funeral in 1982. It might have been ‘88—I had driven down to Washington, DC, to meet my dad and his third wife for a tourist afternoon. His only trip to the East Coast, made for the sake of visiting his wife’s daughter in Virginia, but driving a half-day north to New Jersey to visit me was more than he could do.<br />
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Now he lived in a ranch house development in the small desert city of Saint George, in the southwest corner of Utah, retired from the oil field, working part-time in a country club shop and playing golf in all his spare hours. Maybe I’d been opened up to hope by the dizzy state of new love—I had the notion that he and I would do a lot of warm and honest talking. We’d reconnect.<br />
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But it was only an hour into our conversation in his living room, barely enough time for introductions and shallow catch up, that I saw an exchange of glances between him and his wife. Then his expression changed to one I’d seen before: the guilty, apologetic little boy. He seemed to squirm as he said something about having made a reservation for us in a motel nearby. At first I couldn’t take it in, as if he were speaking a different language. Then I understood. They had been expecting us for days and had never told me that we weren’t welcome to stay in their home. There was room for all of us; that wasn’t the issue. It was only later that I realized: his wife had never liked me. She thought I was a bad son, and my sisters were bad daughters, for not somehow spending more time with the father who abandoned us and never made an effort to reconnect himself. And through adult eyes I now saw the man I’d only glimpsed before: an overgrown child who followed his own convenience and the wishes of whomever was closest to him at the moment, never living by any principle or deeper thought.<br />
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But I was also the hurt boy, the artsy introvert, whose loud, unconscious dad had never understood him. I stood up to my neck in the motel pool under the red sandstone cliffs and raged in a whisper to my new love, my wife-to-be, about this man who was the father of my body but never of my soul.<br />
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<b><span style="color: #93c47d;">Tentative Love</span></b></h4>
There is a photo of my dad standing in a doorway—young, grinning, cocky—his torso from neck to waist and his entire left leg encased in a white plaster cast. Under one arm, a crutch, and in the other: me, a baby under two. He had fallen asleep at the wheel, driving alone at night. A broken back and leg did not cure him of that narcoleptic habit; it was forever a source of tension on family trips.<br />
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Maybe it was to keep him awake that I was sent with him on an overnight trip away from home to another small Utah town some hours away. I was a pre-teen, maybe younger, and remember nothing about the purpose of the journey and nothing about our conversation, if it occurred at all. I remember only the rugged scenery out the car window and, most vividly, our night in a dingy roadside motel. I had never seen a Gideon Bible before. I felt awkward about sleeping in the same bed with my dad and I lay still and awake in the darkness, listening to an amazing parade of noises—rustle, shift, creak, sigh, cough, burp, shift, rustle, sigh again. He probably farted but I must have blanked it from my memory since my mother never allowed such things. Eventually he snored and I slept too. But it made me wonder: is this what it’s like to be an adult, a man? To have a big noisy body that can’t relax, that fills a dark room with its presence?<br />
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Maybe it was the next morning, or maybe it was some other morning on some other trip, just him and me, that we drove a drab main street of a little Utah town in the slanting light of dawn. A ragged, drunken Indian man staggered across the street in front of us. We went into a divey coffee shop, all shadowy with glints of chrome, and sat at the counter with a few other silent men. No children, no women. Men. I had never done this before. My dad actually ordered coffee, something no Mormon is supposed to drink. Of course I said nothing. I was just the student, learning. I suspect he ate eggs over-easy with plenty of pepper, and maybe I did too—although I preferred scrambled—to copy him, to try out being a man. My memories are as if I was not physically present at all, but was only a pair of eyes, always watching him. Looking up.<br />
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There is another photo from over thirty years later, 1997. I stand with my dad, my two sisters, and my half-sister from his second marriage. We are in front of his house in Saint George, Utah. I am the tallest in the image. He barely stands to my chin. It’s been many years since I had to look up to see him. We’re all smiling in our summer clothes in the sunshine, although it’s only the end of March, there in the southern Utah desert. The only indication in the photo that anything might be wrong is that his head is bald. No sign of the thick, curly, dark hair that had begun going silver. We are gathered from several states, with our children, his grandchildren, to celebrate his 70th birthday. To celebrate while he’s in a good period, feeling healthy for now, during his battle with leukemia—the leukemia caused by a doctor’s prescription of two contraindicated medications while he recovered from heart surgery. The doctor who retired before any justice could be served. Not that my father or his wife wanted to sue for malpractice—too much stress, you know, and that’s not how you should treat doctors anyway. Better just to die. </div>
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Three months later in the sun-blasted heat of June, I was back in Saint George to speak at his funeral.<br />
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<b><span style="color: #93c47d;">The Right Way</span></b></h4>
"The right way to live is according to the revealed word of God as delivered to his chosen servants: the Prophet, his two Counselors, and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Any other way of living will lead only to unhappiness in this life, and to an eternity of disappointment in the next."<br />
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My grandfather the Mormon bishop made sure this message was taught to all his children, but I suspect that by the time his sixth child and youngest son, my father, arrived, his teaching energy was fading. Cal Jack had a bit of a wild streak. He <i>knew</i> the right way—all Mormon kids do—but it hadn’t imprinted in his cells deeply enough to guide his behavior. He was too full of fun to walk the straight and narrow path.<br />
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For that I am grateful. When I imagine who I would be if my father hadn’t had a spark of rebellion in him, the vision is too horrible to contemplate.<br />
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Let’s say he had denied his urge to roam, to hunt and fish on Sundays, to drive cool cars he couldn’t afford, to wear kangaroo-skin boots and polished agate belt buckles, to flirt, to drink, to whistle while he worked, to tell crude jokes and laugh loudly. Let’s say he had settled into a bank job, stuffed himself into a suit, stayed twenty years in one suburban ranch house with his wife and kids, instead of following the oil wells across all of the far-flung deserts and mountains of the west, dragging family along, or spending months alone in his little geologist trailer at the end of a hundred-mile dirt road, communing with wolves and moose. And let’s say he had bowed his head and stayed a Mormon, never missed a church meeting, done his duty in pious silence. Let’s say he did that—then who would I be?<br />
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I’d be dead. The spark that makes me live would have been snuffed out before it had a chance to grow. For all the ways he failed to live the right way, I thank him.</div>
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Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-26395617833357260682017-02-15T14:02:00.000-05:002017-02-15T14:02:00.569-05:00The Calling by Jamie Turndorf<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I am not typically a consumer of the "whodunit" genre, but I have studied its tropes as part of my self-education as a fiction writer. I can confidently state that <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Calling-Dr-Jamie-Turndorf/dp/0692812008/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487184632&sr=1-5&keywords=jamie+turndorf"><i>The Calling</i></a> by Jamie Turndorf will satisfy aficionados of the genre: a twisty plot launched by a late-night anonymous phone call, an atmospheric murder scene, a hero with inner conflicts, cops with their own agendas, ambiguous clues, courtroom shenanigans that distort justice, a time-pressured chase for final answers... oh yes, and sex. One entire chapter is dedicated to an explicit scene that is best described as a universal male dream come true. Definitely more fantasy than realism, but hot!<br /><br />Full disclosure: Dr. Jamie Turndorf has been my therapist for nearly a decade. Her deep understanding of the effect of childhood emotional wounds on adult behavior is one of the strengths of this novel, lending empathy and subtlety to the psychological struggles inherent in following a priestly calling… or deciding not to. A foundational theme addressed in this book may present a serious challenge for dutiful Catholics: the story is a loud statement of opposition to the rule of celibacy for priests.<br /><br />The fact that this tale’s lone hero investigator is a Catholic priest puts the novel on the fringes of the popular priest-as-detective tradition that may have begun a century ago with G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. But <i>The Calling</i>’s Father Bernardo is no amateur sleuth looking for crimes to solve; he’s a reluctant detective forced by circumstance to try his best to save the life of an unjustly-accused fellow priest, his childhood friend. He succeeds because that is the genre convention: the mystery must be solved. The mystery cannot be allowed to remain a mystery because questions without answers are just too uncomfortable! Or so the conventional wisdom insists.<br /><br />In this case, another agenda is added: the mystery must be solved so that a real-life Church coverup can be exposed. Jamie Turndorf’s late husband and co-author of this novel was once a prominent Jesuit, so he provides authentic insider knowledge. According to the marketing blurb, the novel is “Based on a never-before-revealed Vatican cover-up….” While the promise of Vatican-level intrigue is never fulfilled, we do get a priest’s convincing view of rampant sexual hypocrisy in a northern Italy diocese in the 1960s - 70s.<br /><br />For me, the best “mystery novels” are those where the plot’s mystery (the unsolved crime) is really just a pointer toward deeper mysteries, existential or even cosmic, the unsolvable kind -- questions without answers. So that’s what I look for. In <i>The Calling</i>, the most important investigation, in my opinion, is not about the murder at all. It is Father Bernardo’s search for his elusive Self -- that congruent core that is his truest inner being, free of the controls of Mother, Duty, or Church. In those passages, the book enters my preferred realm of “metaphysical detective fiction,” in which the world is one of questions, not answers; interpretations, not solutions; and the sleuth is seeking not "Whodunit" but "Who am I?"<div>
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(For more on this subject see my earlier post: <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2011/05/nondual-auster-metaphysical-detective.html" target="_blank">Nondual Auster, Metaphysical Detective</a>.)</div>
Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-56065509075127840132017-01-16T14:07:00.000-05:002017-01-16T14:30:08.769-05:00Till Human Voices Wake Us by Alan Brooks<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl9Xd2cCG3cc2ORATTZIYgc4BAjYI6niCqLZ2AsbcfAmJzgKze8OWhe15Q4X9Cz2eENB5Ai7uvVYsUNOY_AnRQ_JaUnayHr9wbeelFyX-5BVXCkkAqs16UF04PTNWnebyED1TLhxK02iE/s1600/51i2nDDrO-L.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl9Xd2cCG3cc2ORATTZIYgc4BAjYI6niCqLZ2AsbcfAmJzgKze8OWhe15Q4X9Cz2eENB5Ai7uvVYsUNOY_AnRQ_JaUnayHr9wbeelFyX-5BVXCkkAqs16UF04PTNWnebyED1TLhxK02iE/s320/51i2nDDrO-L.jpg" /></a><br />
My friend and neighbor Alan Brooks' latest book is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Till-Human-Voices-Wake-Us-ebook/dp/B01LPF4YDW/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8"><i>Till Human Voices Wake Us</i></a>. Other reviewers have accurately described the book’s plot, and I agree with their comments about its strengths: a convincing future world, recognizable characters, a believable math/tech milieu, a tightly paced narrative. For readers of both thrillers and science fiction, <i>Till Human Voices Wake Us</i> will not fail to satisfy. Brooks has deftly merged noir and sci-fi, with the admirable creative choice to set the story not in outer space, but in inner space: underwater.<br />
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That’s where my thoughts begin to depart from the standard review. I’m interested in the meaning that can be found just off the page, at the borderlines of the text. The decision to set the story in a world drowned by climate change is more than either a timely topical gimmick or an activist’s plea for environmental awareness. Undersea = subconscious. I suggest this is a dreamscape, where nothing is merely what it seems.<br />
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The first point of view we encounter is a whale, a natural denizen of the deep, looking from the outside in through plexiglass to the world of the intruders, humans. The whale belongs; the humans don’t. We’re not equipped for underwater life; we live in glass bubbles… that is, our essential makeup is to remain separated, perhaps for our own survival, from the primal forces of our actual psychological environment. Dreams give us our only glimpses.<br />
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In dreams, objects and ideas can be frustratingly elusive to the grasp. The hero’s discussion of how secrets are hidden in the tech world -- lock it up, hide it, keep it moving -- sounds very much like the organic security system at work in the depths of our minds. Or… of our, it could be said, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat">brains in vats</a> (because we can’t prove otherwise).<br />
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Early in the story, the protagonist encounters a bit of software that appears to be able to forecast his future behavior. Among other things, he’s seeking that predictive code... a metaphor for self-awareness. How do I find the part of me that can predict what I will do? Do I really want to know? Or… what exactly is leading me? What is buried in my subconscious (or my repressed memory) that determines my choices despite rational logic?<br />
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A recurring story device -- that is to say, dream symbol -- is the submarine. Whether the hero’s broken down jalopy sub or his enemy’s sleek high-tech one, the submarine is the one instrument that can navigate the murky, dangerous subconscious. And, in the end, it becomes the vehicle for a final deliverance from the threat of death.<br />
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Another symbol is the interface pad or portal used by techies in this future world. It’s the tool, like our mobile devices today, through which so much amazing work gets done. In this advanced world, the pad rolls up into a slim tube that is a visual metaphor for a magic wand. When these are wielded by opposing geniuses, the meta-image is of archetypal dueling wizards.<br />
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Two women have major roles in this dream drama: a brilliant, foul-mouthed, principled punk, and a brilliant, elegant, unscrupulous scientist. Both are beautiful and sexy, two halves balancing out the dreamer’s fantasy mate.<br />
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A secret equation that promises great power for either evil or good, pursued at great expense by both sides and ingeniously hidden in circular logic, is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin">MacGuffin</a> in this plot. It’s the device that powers the self-discovery storyline, but, exactly like a dream, it is never revealed. The final sentence in the book is “He picked up the stylus and began to write.” What he wrote is…unknown. After that: only the blankness of the empty page. <br />
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In other words, we have just awakened from the dream and the profound insight we discovered has suddenly evaporated. But fortunately we’re left with the delicious remnants of the whole dream: snippets of visions never before seen, the buzz of danger survived, the satisfaction of thought provoked, the aura of mystery ongoing.<br />
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Because I prefer questions over answers, here’s a final one: in the title, who is the “us” that may be wakened by human voices? Is it that denizen of the deep that opens the story? Or is it you and me, the sleeping dreamers?Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-26093031971777530972016-11-23T21:25:00.001-05:002016-11-26T07:51:31.004-05:00Launching The Strange Recital<div class="tr_bq" style="text-align: left;">
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Seven months ago I embarked on a creative venture that is unusual for me because it’s a collaboration -- a thing for which I’d come to believe I have no talent. Fortunately, my collaborator and I seem to think alike in a few ways that are important for this particular project, so now the landing gear is up and we’re off the ground, gaining altitude slowly but steadily.<br />
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It may actually have started over a year ago, with one of those dog-walking meetups. My wife met a fellow pooch owner on Woodstock’s Comeau trail, a guy who wanted to find local writers-for-hire to create an episodic genre fiction podcast, a commercial venture. She referred him to me, I gathered a few likely folks, we had meetings, then the whole thing took a left turn and disappeared. But meanwhile, I mentioned it to my new acquaintance, local author-musician-audio engineer <a href="http://tomnewtonwriter.com/" target="_blank">Tom Newton</a>, during our very first get-together over coffee at Bread Alone. It was a connection born on Facebook; I had read and reviewed Tom’s surreal e-novella (<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=9781408872840" target="_blank">Warfilm</a></i>, Bloomsbury Publishing) before I ever met him in person.<br />
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So would Tom later have suggested collaborating on a podcast anyway, or not? No way to know. But suggest it he did, and when I said <i>yes let’s do it</i>, he came up with several stories, the title, the audio tag, the music, the graphics, and the website itself (which is why I think of him as the Mad Renaissance Genius of Byrdcliffe). I contributed a subtitle: "a podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality."<br />
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Since then we’ve each reached out to our pools of writer friends and now have a pipeline of stories in various stages of production, lined up to be released twice a month into the indefinite future. I’ve learned the ins and outs of podcast distribution, a whole new way of getting good writing and ideas out into the world, a great addition to the book production skills I’ve gained over the years as a small indie publisher.<br />
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Explore our website here: <a href="http://thestrangerecital.com/" target="_blank">The Strange Recital</a> -- and join our email list. Or listen at one of our various other venues: <a href="http://thestrangerecital.us14.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=7eee24092f7754bc5dae705e0&id=2603483a43&e=8c895c9ae2">iTunes</a>, <a href="http://thestrangerecital.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=7eee24092f7754bc5dae705e0&id=389ec18aec&e=8c895c9ae2">Stitcher</a>, <a href="http://thestrangerecital.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=7eee24092f7754bc5dae705e0&id=6609e8368d&e=8c895c9ae2">Soundcloud</a>, <a href="http://thestrangerecital.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=7eee24092f7754bc5dae705e0&id=7fccb5cd58&e=8c895c9ae2">Google Play Music</a>, <a href="http://thestrangerecital.us14.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=7eee24092f7754bc5dae705e0&id=0ba2dc571d&e=8c895c9ae2">Facebook</a>. It's all free.<br />
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Always a highlight of my week, Tom and I get together in The Palace of Materialized Dreams (his studio) as often as we can, usually with a writer/reader friend. We do a little recording and editing, and then he performs more audio magic into the wee hours. We're hard at work subtly undermining conventional ideas of reality... and having fun while we do it.<br />
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In dark times, is it enough to simply pursue what you enjoy? Maybe it is, but I like to think there's a little more to what we're doing than a pleasurable literary pastime. I agree with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin" target="_blank">James Baldwin</a>:<br />
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“You write in order to change the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” </blockquote>
Our eighth episode (just out this week) is this story written and read by me:<br />
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<b><span style="color: #93c47d;">The December Ninth Study</span></b><br />
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"Amid fits of laughter and clouds of pot smoke, Dave and I would debate: Do thoughts have density? What is the weight of sadness, the volume of anger?..."<br />
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Is this story a glimpse of a vast synchronistic web of invisible interconnections, or is it mostly a convoluted but loving tribute to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Need_Is_Love" target="_blank">John Lennon</a>? You decide.<br />
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And listen to the author interview (of a sort) that follows. A smile is good.<br />
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All you need is....</div>
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Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-319673869933857892016-10-19T20:48:00.001-04:002016-10-19T20:50:38.389-04:00My Radio Interview<br />
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I had a very enjoyable time being interviewed by my friend Bonnie Lykes-Bigler on The Writers' Voice radio show on <a href="http://wioxradio.org/index.html" target="_blank">WIOX</a>, 91.3FM, Roxbury, NY. For the first half-hour, we talked about writing and publishing: my past influences, my current projects, my creative process. We touched on both <a href="http://blissplotpress.com/" target="_blank">Bliss Plot Press</a> and <a href="http://thestrangerecital.com/" target="_blank">The Strange Recital</a>. In the second half, I got to read from the beginning of my novel in progress, <i>Ponckhockie Union</i>. The whole thing was a lot of fun!<br />
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Maybe there's something in this hour of audio you can learn from, be inspired by, or just use to ward off boredom. Please listen and tell me your thoughts. Just click here:<br />
<a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-262879014/sets/brent-robison-wiox-the-writers">https://soundcloud.com/user-262879014/sets/brent-robison-wiox-the-writers</a>Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-88105273799231128022016-09-21T11:51:00.001-04:002016-09-21T13:04:12.739-04:00Refresh My Memory<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Benson Randall awoke one morning with someone else's memories..."<br />
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How can you be absolutely sure that your "memories" are not just a broadcast your brain is receiving? Or an accidental download of someone else's thoughts? Is a "self" just a life story?<br /><br />Listen to me read my new short story on <a href="http://thestrangerecital.com/" target="_blank">The Strange Recital</a>, a fiction podcast I co-host with my friend <a href="http://tomnewtonwriter.com/" target="_blank">Tom Newton</a>. Plus an interview (of a sort) afterward.<br />
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More to come about The Strange Recital!Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-71118954138706890132016-03-04T22:32:00.000-05:002016-03-04T22:32:11.408-05:00A Journey into the Dark Woods<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There is a myth that by middle age, one is fully formed; growth should be finished, the mountain scaled, the work done. Fred Poole’s memoir, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Aqua-Mustang-Detours-into-Past/dp/0996412204">The Aqua Mustang: Detours Into My Past</a>, puts the lie to that idea. He looks back thirty years to when he was fifty, a time of powerful change rather than of resting on laurels, of conscious forward movement rather than a tired surrender to stasis.<br />
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In an introspective narrative voice that reminded me of strongly subjective first-person novels like Knut Hamsun’s Hunger or Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Poole weaves a story that travels from dim childhood memories in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to exotic international dangers, to New York City’s streets, art museums, and ACOA rooms, and back again to rural New England. But the journey is not about geography. It is a journey of self-awareness.<br />
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It takes courage to hunt down and confront the phantoms in one’s own psyche, to dive like Beowulf to battle the monsters at the bottom of the lake -- to kill Grendel and his mother and lift the longtime curse from the kingdom of the self. That’s what Fred Poole is doing on his bike around the streets of Manhattan, and in his aqua Mustang on the shadowy country roads of his family history. His story is his own, but it’s also classic. As John Yorke says in <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/into-the-woods-excerpt/421566/">The Atlantic</a> (Jan 1, 2016): “In stories throughout the ages there is one motif that continually recurs—the journey into the woods to find the dark but life-giving secret within.”<br />
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I'm pleased to have made this video to promote The Aqua Mustang:<br />
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</span>Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-48786012832345262962015-12-17T15:50:00.000-05:002015-12-17T15:50:23.979-05:00Fierce Subjectivity: Mean Bastards Making Nice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.djelloulmarbrook.com/" target="_blank">Djelloul Marbrook</a>’s fiction is like no one else’s. Perhaps it’s the rich stew of being half-Bedouin, half German-American, born in Algiers, raised in New York’s art world, educated in a Brit-run boarding school, helped by a Sicilian stepfather, then going on to a stint in the US Navy, a newspaper career, years living on a sailboat, and a classic ten-thousand hours of poetic practice—all those ingredients and other less visible ones—that worked an alchemical magic on his sensibilities and vocabulary.<br />
<br />Full disclosure: Djelloul is a dear friend of mine. I don’t always love his work, but I always respect its powerfully idiosyncratic intelligence.<br /><br /><i><a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/Mean-Bastards-Making-Nice-Two-Novellas-Djelloul-Marbrook/9781909849129" target="_blank">Mean Bastards Making Nice</a> </i>is a slim volume from small UK publisher <a href="http://leakyboot.com/" target="_blank">Leaky Boot Press</a>. It contains two novellas related by theme and setting. It’s a thoroughly New York book, but that doesn’t mean stock Big Apple accents or tired tropes from TV. It means both city streets and upstate forests are simply there: as integral as the air the characters breathe.<br /><br />To gloss the surface: “Book One: The Pain of Wearing Our Faces” introduces a painter, a composer, their shared alcoholism, and a mysterious woman who is a muse for both of them, but a dangerous one. “Book Two: Grace” follows a girl on the run from country to city, her discovery of her own warrior strength on the streets, and her profound impact on a few of the city’s art-world glitterati.<br /><br />However, for a Djelloul Marbrook story, a plot description cannot begin to capture the actual reading experience. Nor can a mention of the astonishing lexicon he employs. Instead, it has to be acknowledged that the journey a reader takes between these covers is primarily a journey into the author’s mind. His voice is profoundly subjective.<br /><br />Which is certainly not to say Marbrook only writes as Marbrook. Each of these novellas is about a woman, and one is narrated in first person. Both women are painters. Marbrook is neither a woman nor a painter, but the masks he creates are so vivid they transcend categories. The sensibility that drives the storytelling, that crafts the sentences, is recognizably a product of a singular author’s interior.<br /><br />Granted, every writer’s narrative voice is subjective to some degree. It can’t be otherwise; at the level of everyday living, every human is a solo consciousness encapsulated inside a sensory apparatus. One point of view for each of us. But when we communicate, and especially when we use the consensual abstraction of written language (music and visual art not so much), we are moving into a zone of commonality, a dilution of our lone uniqueness. Writers, whether they know it or not, are embracing that dilution—especially those content to work with a fairly limited database of words, the words they’re confident their readers will understand. That means most of us—but not all.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Marbrook, a seasoned, professional newsman, is skilled at prioritizing clear, communal message-sharing above personal, idiosyncratic expression—all the better for journalism, but his fiction is something else entirely. It shows a conscious choice to resist the diminishment of unique subjectivity. To, instead, master the tools of the art form—vocabulary, syntax, metaphor—until a distinctive, muscular, uninhibited (but never sloppy), even hallucinatory voice emerges, seemingly without effort.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />This is prose that reminds me of film school: Russian cinema pioneer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Eisenstein" target="_blank">Sergei Eisenstein</a> claimed that meaning in <i>montage</i> (editing) came from the “collision” of adjacent shots. Marbrook’s prose accrues its dense power from the continual <i>collision</i> of words, phrases, images, ideas.<br /><br />In addition, Marbrook puts the lie to all those Internet writing sites that say a fiction author should be invisible so the story can come through without distraction. He proves the stupidity of that idea. What would art be if all artists made their expressive style invisible so the subject matter could be seen without distraction? Van Gogh would have been a photographer taking mundane snapshots.<br /><br />As a reader, submerging yourself in these novellas is like being lost in some sort of fever dream, a foreign land that’s familiar but somehow off-kilter, a parallel universe, an impressionistic, almost psychedelic vision simultaneously more vivid and convoluted than your own. To choose a convenient example, the book begins with these lines:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
I don’t trust words. That’s what he said. They’re swindlers, mean bastards making nice, he said.<br /> I felt like swatting his words out of my head as I swarmed into Bloomie’s on Christmas Eve in full city roast. I needed gloves. I needed a new head. I’d left my rabbit-lined Danish gloves in a cab. The cheap wool mark-ups I bought made my two first-water rubies and clitoral opal itch. You don’t want to itch anywhere, but in Bloomie’s razzle of cut-glass perfume pumps and dazzle of capitalist excess itching is a criminal impulse. I gulped three Benadryl caplets with my own spit.<br /> On a good day my sexual jewels are eyes for seeing in the dark, sensors to explore ocean floors, microscopes. On a bad day, they’re nails to bleed me on a cross, tear me apart. Today they itch and shine at trouble up ahead, like all good jewels. Isn’t it what they’re for? I’m an artist. I never know trouble in my head, it’s always somewhere else, tactile, fragrant, unwilling, unable to be put off. Why else would a woman want to be an artist?</blockquote>
You ask: <i>Who speaks this way?</i> Answer: <i>Marbrook’s people.</i> <br /><br />You ask: <i>What does it mean? What’s going on? </i>Answer: <i>I’ll re-read, and I’ll notice how I feel. And I’ll keep going, and I’ll observe the cumulative effect of this deluge of image and language, and viscerally, I’ll understand.</i><br /><br />Marbrook is an award-winning poet. Perhaps a poet’s fiction is to be expected to deliver this sort of fierce subjectivity. Perhaps not. All this is to say: read him. <br /><br />Here’s a video I’m pleased to have produced to promote the book:<div>
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Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-87265841614073057112015-11-11T20:28:00.000-05:002015-11-11T20:28:30.352-05:00Warfilm / Wind-Up Bird - Dreams Redux<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Consider this Part 2 of my previous entry, <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2015/10/warfilm-wind-up-bird.html" target="_blank"><i>Warfilm / Wind-Up Bird</i></a> (please read). No sooner had I finished and posted it than I realized I had more to say about those books and other ideas they sparked.<br /><br />I’ve been thinking and reading, as always, about stuff like lucid dreaming, Möbius strips, precognition, quantum effects, nondual awakening, memory… the endlessly tangled strands of Mystery we live in. I’ve always been attracted to lucid dreaming, in which one is aware of being in a dream and so is able to control events, but I’ve never applied the self-discipline to learn how to do it. Right now I’m feeling pushed a little closer to taking it on.<br /><br />Quick detour: To talk about lucid dreaming, we first have to dispense with the obligatory reference to the blockbuster movie <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception" target="_blank">Inception</a></i>, in which writer/director Christopher Nolan squandered his opportunity to do something deep in favor of making one more Hollywood shoot-em-up thrill ride. It is not included in the discussion to come. No more to say. Onward….<br /><br />If both Tom Newton’s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Warfilm-Kindle-Single-Tom-Newton-ebook/dp/B0119QBIL8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1444419850&sr=8-1&keywords=warfilm+tom+newton" target="_blank">Warfilm</a></i> and Haruki Murakami’s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wind-Up-Bird-Chronicle-Novel/dp/0679775439/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1444421061&sr=8-1&keywords=murakami+wind+up+bird" target="_blank">The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</a></i> are, at the macro scale, depictions of dreams, then how should we look at the dreams their characters experience <i>inside</i> the story -- these dreams-within-dreams? Newton’s protagonist in <i>Warfilm</i>, Franz, under the hypnotic influence of the mysterious Lord Strange, slips into sleep and dreams himself into a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico" target="_blank">DeChirico</a> landscape scarcely more surreal than those he’s seen in the book’s “reality.” While there, in the dream-within-a-dream, he murders Lord Strange, who is never seen again in the book. It’s tempting to think this suggests the power of dream action to impact “reality”... but it’s <i>all</i> a dream, just different layers circling back upon themselves, like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher" target="_blank">Escher</a>-style edifice of doors and stairways that he attempts to navigate before he wakes up. <br /><br />If, as psychotherapy suggests, all objects and characters in a dream are aspects of the dreamer, did Franz kill himself? Maybe, but maybe not, because Newton’s third-person narrative point of view, as I discussed in the earlier post, is crafted to never answer the ultimate question: “Who is dreaming this dream?” We are left with the response: “We all are.” <br /><br />Or: “I am.”<br /><br />There’s no evidence that Franz was lucid dreaming in his dream-within-a-dream, but Murakami’s first-person protagonist in <i>Wind-Up Bird</i>, Toru, is very intentional about entering the dreamspace and forcing events to go his way. He isolates himself at the bottom of a well until, as he says,<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“The darknesses inside and out began to blend, and I began to move outside of my self, the container that held me.” </blockquote>
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This sounds a lot like astral travel, an out-of-body experience (OBE). Toru finds himself in a labyrinthine hotel, makes his way to Room 208, and in the darkness there kills an unseen man who was threatening him. Later, back in “reality,” he learns his cruel brother-in-law has had a stroke and lies incapacitated in the hospital, never to trouble Toru again. Does dream impact non-dream? Does metaphor equal fact?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />If I have to choose a one-word answer to that last question, I’ll go with “yes.” Metaphor and fact are like the infinite recursion of facing mirrors. When <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Kane" target="_blank">Charles Foster Kane</a> walks through his hall of mirrors, does it really matter which of the many Kanes is the “real” one? Also, Murakami muses in <i>Wind-Up Bird</i>:</div>
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“To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.” </blockquote>
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So maybe “self” is a belief system we invent for ego survival, a mirror that needs only its own double to explode into an infinite conundrum. <br /><br />But in the final analysis, the multiples are illusion. There is just One (as in: Ultimate Indivisibility). In perhaps my favorite passage in <i>Warfilm</i>, near the end, Franz encounters for the last time a recurring character who drops in to offer bits of trickster wisdom. His name is just a number, a different number each time he appears. This time he is Forty-Five:</div>
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“He reached into his pocket and pulled out a rectangular strip of paper.<br /> Watch this.<br /> He looped it into a ring by holding the narrow edges together then he twisted one edge and rejoined them.<br /> See? A Möbius strip, a closed Möbius strip, a non-orientable object. It has only one side and one boundary. Two planes have become one. The inside is the outside.<br /> He ran his finger along the plane to illustrate his point....<br /> For example, take the idea that two planes become one and map it on to the concept of self, then you might see the boundary between one self and another is dissolved, so you and I could be the same person. I said that I oscillated between existence and non existence. If you applied the Möbius strip poem to that thought, you could say that I just oscillate because are not existence and non-existence the same thing? Then maybe you would deduce that I do not exist, for with only one plane, what is there to oscillate between? Take your question and answer obsession. The questions are the answers are the questions are the answers ad infinitum. You can do what you like with it.”</blockquote>
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Forty-Five is showing Franz a glimpse of the deepest nature of the universe, and the funny thing is that it puts Franz right to sleep. “He had been so tired he might have dreamed it all,” the narrator says a bit later when Franz awakes. He awakes just in time to step outside of surrealism into mythology for a fateful meeting with an entirely unexpected band of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maenad" target="_blank">Maenads</a>. <br /><br />I found myself wondering: is Franz living a Möbius strip life? Does he proceed seamlessly from the end on a Greek hillside to the opening sentence, “He was an ordinary German, walking one night on a Berlin street…,” over and over in an endless loop? Is he a recurring dream in a realm where time has no direction?<br /><br />One of Murakami’s <i>Wind-Up Bird</i> characters says,</div>
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“One by one, with my own hands, I had to make this thing I called 'I'-- or, rather, make the things that constituted me.” </blockquote>
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According to some, “self” is an edifice built of our memories. My current favorite blog is <i><a href="http://thenightshirt.com/" target="_blank">The Nightshirt</a></i> by brilliant science-writer-on-the-fringe Eric Wargo. In “<a href="http://thenightshirt.com/?p=2791" target="_blank">Feeding the Psi God: Precognitive Dreaming, Memory, and Ritual</a>,” he mentions his hypothesis that “the function of dreaming is the formation of long-term memories through playful associations, the art of memory operating automatically while we sleep.” But he also makes a case for the non-linear, simultaneous nature of Time, with precognitive dreams as evidence. About a 9/11 dream of his own, he says,<div>
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“My dreaming mind hadn’t peered into the shut envelope, in other words; instead it picked up on the most emotionally salient event in the landscape of my near future. That event bore a chicken-and-egg relationship to the dream that precognized it. It was truly ‘acausal’ or even Moebius-like in precisely the way we should predict could occasionally happen in a science-fictional world where information can travel backward in time.”</blockquote>
By “science-fictional world” I take him to mean the very world we live in. In a later post, “<a href="http://thenightshirt.com/?p=2857" target="_blank">The Great Work of Immortality - Astral Travel, Dreams, and Alchemy</a>,” he ventures into the arcane territory of old alchemical texts, discussing how lucid dreams, astral travel (OBE), and “enlightenment” are on a continuum. He argues that the <i>Mutus Liber</i> (Wordless Book) of 1677, with its enigmatic depictions of a man and woman gathering morning dew on sheets and wringing them out to be distilled, is an illustrated cypher:<div>
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“So I think that the <i>Mutus Liber</i> is basically a Baroque astral projection manual disguised as chemistry: The stuff of dreams is the materia prima, the murky raw material that must be taken, analyzed, worked with, to create true philosophic gold: a special 'blended' state in which the soul (alert consciousness) fully joins with the spirit double/'energy body' on its nightly travels.”</blockquote>
I love this esoteric stuff, and long ago used the following quote from the <i>Mutus Liber</i> as the epigraph for <i>Prima Materia</i>, the literary journal I published: To find the philosopher’s stone,“Pray, read, read, read, read again, labor, and discover.” But I digress….<br /><br />As a dreamer, I confess I’m pretty illiterate and unconscious. But I have ambitions to begin moving toward more dream awareness, in the direction of exactly what Wargo suggests in <i>The Nightshirt</i>:<div>
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“If anyone’s innocence is lost here, it should be yours: Time is not what you were raised to think it is. Neither is your own mind. Dreams are a royal road to discovering the bizarre Moebius structure of time and mind; if you are not already keeping a dream diary, what are you waiting for?”</blockquote>
On the other hand, there is always the option to forego such busy striving in favor of the supreme stillness of the “I Am,” as taught by my favorite Indian sage:<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTrclHX98_Ydcwbu78HtqQbhaftdLvaEMMf6s4OofvotL4rOhb49nRET8BnLNaoQrz7Dl0smHHn7iP4la-E3G07BoSErAyf_h-ujKw4J7oZksUdN-W8my2VDx6ly-7YTMzWdelxPtXw4g/s1600/nisargadatta.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTrclHX98_Ydcwbu78HtqQbhaftdLvaEMMf6s4OofvotL4rOhb49nRET8BnLNaoQrz7Dl0smHHn7iP4la-E3G07BoSErAyf_h-ujKw4J7oZksUdN-W8my2VDx6ly-7YTMzWdelxPtXw4g/s200/nisargadatta.jpg" width="160" /></a></div>
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“The very idea of going beyond the dream is illusory. Why go anywhere? Just realize that you are dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out. The dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of the dream and not another. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs to be done.”</blockquote>
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~ Nisargadatta Maharaj, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_That" target="_blank">I Am That</a></i></div>
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Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-75827504756715980242015-10-09T16:12:00.000-04:002015-11-11T21:03:57.124-05:00Warfilm / Wind-Up Bird<div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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A few observations about two books I read this summer: Haruki Murakami’s hefty (600 page!) <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wind-Up-Bird-Chronicle-Novel/dp/0679775439/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1444421061&sr=8-1&keywords=murakami+wind+up+bird" target="_blank">The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</a></i> and Tom Newton’s debut novella, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Warfilm-Kindle-Single-Tom-Newton-ebook/dp/B0119QBIL8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1444419850&sr=8-1&keywords=warfilm+tom+newton" target="_blank">Warfilm</a></i> (128 virtual pages on Kindle). Very different books, unexpectedly similar.<br />
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What we’re talking about here is dreams. According to the famous and dead writer/teacher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gardner_(American_writer)" target="_blank">John Gardner</a>, the art of fiction is creating a vivid and continuous dream. So fiction as dream is one way of seeing the artform in general, a valid way. But the two books I’m looking at here go further. Rather than fiction as dream, we might call them dream as fiction.<br />
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Imagine you’re asleep. dreaming a dream that begins with Hitler as a movie director embarking on the most epic film production in history: World War II! Cool idea, but this is not a novel of ideas or politics or speculative fiction; this is not a novel at all, this is a dream. A novel might take a cool idea and develop its coolness with logical allegory, consistent characters, mandatory narrative arc, etc. But this is a dream, and dreams don’t roll like dat.<br />
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Dreams go other places. Dreams surprise you. <i>Warfilm</i> is a dream, and while its WWII shell and its concreteness of detail feel entirely “real,” it does nothing you’ll expect. It lands you in a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico" target="_blank">DeChirico</a> painting where you’ll be trying to get your bearings until suddenly the dream is over. You’re awake. Or are you?<br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind-Up_Bird_Chronicle" target="_blank">Much has already been written</a> about Murakami’s dreamlike narratives, and <i>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</i> may be the pinnacle of his work in that vein… the Twin Peaks-like merging of mundane reality with strange, twisted, dark dream-worlds, and no predictable resolutions. One interesting note is that World War II also plays an important role in this book, but it’s the Pacific War rather than the European War.<br />
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So the War and the imagistic illogic of night dreams are common between these books. But their difference is in point of view: the objective camera that views everyone from an equal distance, versus the subjective camera that acts as one character’s eyes. Newton’s omniscient third-person narration moves from character to character without an identified “self.” It’s detached and dispassionate, as opposed to the internal nature of Murakami’s first-person narration, limited to one individual. Murakami’s protagonist is the one having the dream, and the other people who enter his dream may tell their first person stories, but it’s all happening to just one “self.” <br />
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What this means is that Newton’s work embodies “dream as universal human reality” while Murakami’s view, surprisingly, would seem to emphasize the individual over the collective. Philosophically, Newton seems more Eastern, Murakami more Western.<br />
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To go a little deeper, Newton’s narrative POV and the surreality (reality heightened, exaggerated) he depicts work together to suggest that we are all sharing the Big Dream: life is a dream although we don’t recognize it as such. We see life’s banality first, a mask that screens its deeper magic from our awareness. With this book, Newton is doing what Melville’s Ahab urges: “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”<br />
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Newton might be suggesting, as do <a href="http://www.spiritualteachers.org/jed_mckenna.htm" target="_blank">Jed McKenna</a> and other gurus, that the “wall” is the illusion we call Reality and we are prisoners until we can break through it to see the inexplicable, the ineffable, the nonsensical truth... to acknowledge the quantum field from which we arise, in all its inexplicable whimsy, its anti-classical weirdness. Remember Plato’s Cave: to those who know nothing but the shadows on the cave wall, anything else seems impossible nonsense.<br />
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Let’s have more dreams, more invisible made visible, more impossible nonsense!<br />
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(For Part 2 of this review, see <i><a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2015/11/warfilm-wind-up-bird-dreams-redux.html" target="_blank">Warfilm / Wind-Up Bird - Dreams Redux</a></i>)</div>
Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-55860760861435726192015-03-22T14:04:00.000-04:002015-03-22T14:07:30.010-04:00Poetry and Video: Brash Ice by Djelloul Marbrook<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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An entire year has passed since I last posted on this blog. Wow! But I don't follow the new wisdom that "if it wasn't blogged, it didn't happen." The year was full of actual living.<br />
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During 2014 my friend <a href="http://www.djelloulmarbrook.com/">Djelloul Marbrook</a> celebrated the publication of his third volume of poetry, <a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/Brash-Ice-Djelloul-Marbrook/9781909849150">Brash Ice</a>, from UK publisher <a href="http://leakyboot.com/">Leaky Boot Press</a>. The term "brash ice" refers to "accumulations of floating ice made up of fragments...; the wreckage of other forms of ice." An apt metaphor for a long life.<br />
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I'm happy to showcase these two video "samplers" that I created to support the book. Each features three poems, read by the author. Enjoy!<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z6Np1-iSL0I" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UowPr7fIw1c" width="400"></iframe><br />Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-26908466135042210662014-03-09T16:08:00.001-04:002014-03-09T16:10:09.758-04:00Book Review: Making Sense by Jim Murdoch<div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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Is there any socially redeeming value to “making stuff up” - in other words, writing fiction? And does fiction offer any benefit for a reader beyond entertainment?<br />
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Unlikely as it may seem in this clangorous world, there are scientists studying those quiet little questions, and the first, best answer is one word: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy">Empathy</a>.<br />
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To my mind, empathy is what <i>Making Sense</i>, <a href="http://www.jimmurdoch.co.uk/">Jim Murdoch</a>’s fifth published book, is all about. This book is a showcase of the uniquely human ability to understand the interior life of another conscious being; to transcend the limits of the self.<br />
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<i>Making Sense</i> is a slender collection of 19 brief stories, each exploring a different character, who is also usually the narrator. These are not plotted stories, but character vignettes and voice-driven monologues. Nearly half the narrators are women, and the range of ages and types is wide; they are not just thinly disguised versions of the author. All but two of the stories are narrated in first person, but even the third-person omniscient narrator uses a very conversational, first-person-like voice and even addresses the second person (the reader) with lines like, “Do you see that man over there….”<br />
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The whole collection is full of a lively energy, like meeting real people. Murdoch has a gift for imagining himself into the minds of others and capturing their ways of speech. The differences in the subjects, in their voices and their lives, is what provides the empathic spine of this collection. All these engaging voices show us that the Other is really just like ourselves, and that is one of the most crucial messages for a divided, brutal world.<br />
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George Ovitt explored this subject rather brilliantly in his <i>Atticus Review</i> article “<a href="http://atticusreview.org/fiction-and-empathy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AtticusReview+%28Atticus+Review%3A+six+degrees+left+of+literature%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher">Fiction and Empathy</a>,” which I highly recommend.<br />
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And to dig a little deeper (getting back to my earlier statement about scientists): a series of experiments support the fiction/empathy claims above, and show that the empathy effect is strongest with literary fiction as compared to genre fiction, factual non-fiction, or not reading at all. Perhaps the first empirical data on the subject, the studies were recently published in a top journal, <i><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377.full">Science</a>,</i> and subsequently well covered in <i><a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-finding-reading-literary-fiction-improves-empathy/">Scientific American</a> </i>and the <a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/i-know-how-youre-feeling-i-read-chekhov/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0"><i>The New York Times</i></a>. (Thanks to the <a href="http://www.onfiction.ca/2013/10/research-bulletin-literary-fiction-but.html"><i>On Fiction</i></a> blog for bringing it to my attention.)<br />
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So it’s true: stories that delve deeply into characters’ internal worlds, depicting the complexity and unpredictability of real life, effectively teach us how to empathize. Our world leaders desperately need to read more literary fiction!<br />
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In the never-ending struggle between dark and light forces, Murdoch’s <i>Making Sense</i> adds to the positive side.<br />
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There is just one more aspect to the book I want to address. Murdoch uses a few of these stories to experiment with technique: how to create distinct regional dialects or accents on the page so that they will sound authentic in the reader’s inner ear. While his urge to capture a unique voice is admirable, I found these stories less successful. As I struggled through the altered spellings and syntax for Scots, Cockney, and New York accents, I lost the fluid rhythm of the speech and even the line of the story. A lighter touch, just hinting at the dialects, would have been more to my taste (especially for New York, where I’ve lived for 25 years without hearing an accent like the one depicted here).<br />
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In the end, this is a valuable investigation. I respect the care and thoughtfulness with which Murdoch approached his dialect stories, and perhaps the effort serves best to illustrate how thoroughly immersed each of us is in the speech we hear every day. Language is indistinguishable from thought; it’s like the air we breathe.<br />
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In other words, there are simple, universal human sensibilities under the complex exterior of such stories, like the root language of which the dialects are just surface variations. This entire book supports the idea that we are One.</div>
Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-76440341198871797742013-09-23T14:15:00.000-04:002013-09-23T14:15:12.464-04:00Can a stranger share your memories?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-782d59db-4bdc-2f5b-0880-0750fa8c9e05"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This entry could be considered a follow-up to last year’s post, <a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2012/06/aah-memory-review-of-and-she-was-by.html" target="_blank">Aah, Memory... A Review of “And She Was” by Alison Gaylin</a>. I hope you’ll read that one too.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Can a stranger share your memories?” asks the blurb on the back cover of Alison Gaylin’s new(ish) suspense novel</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Into-Dark-Alison-Gaylin/dp/B00ERJL0KE/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1379959905&sr=1-1" target="_blank">Into the Dark</a></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. For me that’s an intriguing question, a place from which to launch an investigation. So that’s what this post is: an investigation, not a book review.</span></span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-782d59db-4bdd-213a-daa5-27adce0afa6a" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am addressing the same question in the novel I’m currently writing. But I’m approaching it from a very different angle.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Into the Dark</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s recurring protagonist, private eye Brenna Spector, is blessed/afflicted with a rare condition called HSAM, or Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (also called Hyperthymesia). When she encounters someone who seems to have knowledge of past events only Brenna or her missing sister could know, she is launched into a fast-paced whodunit with personal impact and an escalating body count.</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">SPOILER ALERT! Because this is a genre mystery, of course there is an explanation, and this one is both clever and surprising: a stolen diary. A filmmaker and his hired actress have managed to get possession of Brenna’s missing sister Clea’s teenage journal and are exploiting it for the sake of “art” (pornography, actually). And, a genius touch: the diary itself has a name, as if a person in its own right.</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I love the rich questions and implications entwined in this plot: Does autobiography become fiction if authorship is claimed by someone not the author? Might it be legitimate for an artist to co-opt the private life experiences of a stranger (especially if that stranger is dead or missing)? Is this comparable to “found object” art? Or is it thievery because what is in question is not merely an object (a book), but the content found within, content whose value may be proportional to its private, personal nature?</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If the diary were not “true,” would there be a crime? How can such truth be verified? Whose intellectual property is the diary of a dead person; who owns the copyright? If the crime is plagiarism, based on verbatim use of Clea’s writing, would it have been legal if altered, even if the core events remained the same? Legalities aside, where are the boundaries between ethics and art? Isn’t that what writers and filmmakers do all the time: rip off stories from people’s lives, tweak them a bit, put them out as art (“grist for the mill” and all that)?</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What relationship to the “real” Clea does the actress have as she performs Clea’s private writings? If the actress is adopting a persona (Latin for “mask”), and the content of the persona is the intimate life memories of another person, who is really behind the mask? Might personal identity, the “self,” be actually nothing more than the book of memories we carry, the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are?</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let us not forget: this entire story occurs only in the mind of Alison Gaylin, and subsequently, in the mind of the reader. Brenna is a fiction, whose fictional “memories” are the only place Clea exists. So Clea is something even less “real,” a fiction once removed, whose own “memories” (now twice removed, just a diary) are spoken by a fictional actress posing as someone not herself -- not even as a person, but as a book with a name. It becomes a spiraling fractal, a fiction-within-a-fiction-within-a-fiction. Speaking both metafictionally and metaphysically, this is a perfect metaphor for the illusory nature of “self”-- the Big Truth that every mystical tradition tells us in one way or another: “You” are simply an aspect of the Absolute, a single viewpoint in the One Consciousness. As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts" target="_blank">Alan Watts</a> puts it, “I” is just the Universe “eyeing.”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet, like characters in a novel, we must carry on, acting out our lives, fully engaged in our roles. The only thing we may have that imaginary characters don’t is awareness -- the capacity to hold both truths at once: our own Duality within Nonduality.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="vertical-align: baseline;">So, “Can a stranger share your memories?” Because it is masterfully true to its genre, a pop artifact embedded in a culture founded on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)" target="_blank">mechanistic</a> / <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism" target="_blank">materialistic</a> philosophy, </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Into the Dark</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"> would answer “No.” The memories were not really shared, because there is a “real-world” explanation: a stolen diary. Mainstream mysteries need solutions; questions must have answers -- or so goes the conventional wisdom. I don’t necessarily agree. To my way of thinking, “mystery fiction” could more accurately be called “no-mystery fiction.”</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-782d59db-4bdf-40dc-60d1-2da6ea298407"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;">That’s why I’m drawn to what is sometimes called the “<a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/1297.html" target="_blank">metaphysical detective story</a>,” ala Paul Auster’s </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Trilogy" target="_blank">New York Trilogy</a></span><span style="vertical-align: baseline;">, in which answers never come. The real search is internal, for the seeker’s own identity. And in addition, external: a postmodern, metafictional exploration of the nature of authorship.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For me, questions are lovely: aromatic, enticing, delectable. They linger. Answers are pedestrian; they fall with a thud. Mysteries are rich, subtle, sweet. Solutions are just endings: “Done. Next!” </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-782d59db-4be0-8323-6072-dca37a17cf41" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b></span></span>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Granted, the reading public may not share this sentiment. So be it (sigh). Carry on.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b></span></span>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now… what if there were no pilfered diary at all, but one’s memories still appeared to be stolen by a stranger? In my novel-in-progress, that’s what happens. The question “Can a stranger share your memories?” might be answered, “Yes, but I can’t explain how it works; it’s a Mystery.”</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></b></span></span>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Trouble is, I am also a product of this mechanistic/materialistic society (and I don’t love most science fiction or fantasy), so I want to have some sort of a foundation that makes sense to me. Fortunately, a combination of ancient philosophy and cutting-edge science begins to provide one. It goes like this: if my personal memories are not actually locked away inside my skull, like a little armored safe -- if instead they exist like television signals in the open air -- then maybe someone else, someone with just the right kind of mental “receiver,” can dial them in.</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1y_rXfq2Vo8rZ16nS8mxyOBsEdt1ArY3no7YxjnQXSngZ6PKhWJq8UlekV_P2XUtOEuHyHxh2F7TlPN_jq6Zo7SaSwp9S-WuzhsnmF88m3bDhNrlzmbkTvBDAEevdt9d3EzxCbo0buR0/s1600/rupert6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1y_rXfq2Vo8rZ16nS8mxyOBsEdt1ArY3no7YxjnQXSngZ6PKhWJq8UlekV_P2XUtOEuHyHxh2F7TlPN_jq6Zo7SaSwp9S-WuzhsnmF88m3bDhNrlzmbkTvBDAEevdt9d3EzxCbo0buR0/s200/rupert6.jpg" width="147" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><br /><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="vertical-align: baseline;">The latest book by controversial British biologist <a href="http://www.sheldrake.org/" target="_blank">Rupert Sheldrake</a>, </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/31/book-review-science-set-free/" target="_blank">Science Set Free</a></span><span style="vertical-align: baseline;">, challenges the “10 Dogmas of Science.” Dogma Number 8 is “Memory is stored in material traces in the brain.” In an interview found <a href="http://www.seekeraftertruth.com/rupert-sheldrake-mind-memory-and-archetype-morphic-resonance-and-the-collective-unconscious/#sthash.03mVI2jk.dpbs" target="_blank">here</a>, he says: </span></span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;">In considering the morphic resonance theory of memory, we might ask: if we tune into our own memories, then why don’t we tune into other people’s as well? I think we do, and the whole basis of the approach I am suggesting is that there is a collective memory to which we are all tuned which forms a background against which our own experience develops and against which our own individual memories develop. This concept is very similar to the notion of the collective unconscious.</span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">He goes into more depth in <a href="http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/446/wrong_turn" target="_blank">The Sun Magazine</a>, February 2013, interviewed by Mark Leviton:</span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b> Leviton:</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> If, as you say, memory does not reside in the brain, then where is it? And can it survive the death of the individual to whom it belongs?</span><b id="docs-internal-guid-782d59db-4be4-8d0a-ad5c-159f5f68bf26" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b> Sheldrake:</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “Where?” is the wrong question. Memory is a relationship in time, not in space. The idea that a memory has to be somewhere when it’s not being remembered is a theoretical inference, not an observation of reality. When I met you this morning, I recognized you from yesterday. There’s no photographic representation of you in my brain. I just recognize you. What I suggest is that memory depends on a direct relationship across time between past experiences and present ones. The brain is more like a television receiver. The television doesn’t store all the images and programs you watch on it; it tunes in to them invisibly.</span><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> It may sound radical, but this idea was put forward not only by Bergson [Henri Bergson, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Matter and Memory</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">] but also by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. They all challenged the notion that a memory has to be somewhere in the brain. The whole of the past is potentially present everywhere, and we access it on the basis of similarity. I think we’re tuning in not only to our own past experiences but to the memories of millions of people who are now dead — a collective memory. It’s similar to psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious or Hinduism’s akashic records, which store all knowledge on another plane of existence.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Yes, there’s the potential for the memory to survive the death of the brain. Whether there’s survival of an individual’s memory, my theory doesn’t predict one way or the other. It leaves the question open, whereas the conventional theory is that, once the brain decays at death, all memories are wiped out.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">For conventional science, an even <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness" target="_blank">harder problem</a> to explain than memory is consciousness itself. Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance theory may be supported by brain research conducted by physicist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose" target="_blank">Sir Roger Penrose</a> and anesthesiologist <a href="http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/orchOR.html" target="_blank">Stuart Hameroff</a>. Their “Orch OR” model gives evidence for the non-local (that is, not confined to an individual brain) nature of consciousness. Extending that theory even further, here is the abstract of a paper called Quantum Consciousness co-authored by Hameroff and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepak_Chopra" target="_blank">Deepak Chopra</a>:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-782d59db-4be6-89ca-5179-b7658652b478"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The concept of consciousness existing outside the body (e.g. near-death and out-of body experiences, NDE/OBEs, or after death, indicative of a 'soul') is a staple of religious traditions, but shunned by conventional science because of an apparent lack of rational explanation. However conventional science based entirely on classical physics cannot account for normal in-the-brain consciousness. The Penrose-Hameroff 'Orch OR' model is a quantum approach to consciousness, connecting brain processes (microtubule quantum computations inside neurons) to fluctuations in fundamental spacetime geometry, the fine scale structure of the universe. Recent evidence for significant quantum coherence in warm biological systems, scale-free dynamics and end-of-life brain activity support the notion of a quantum basis for consciousness which could conceivably exist independent of biology in various scalar planes in spacetime geometry. Sir Roger Penrose does not necessarily endorse such proposals which relate to his ideas in physics. Based on Orch OR, we offer a scientific hypothesis for a 'quantum soul'.</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I enjoy this thick sciencey stuff, walking the murky borders of the unknown, although I get quickly lost trying to dig into the technical meat of it. One of the main points of this whole investigation for me, and one of the things that motivates all my writing, both fiction and non-, is touched on by this quote from <a href="http://www.skeptiko.com/184-dr-rupert-sheldrake-sets-science-free-from-dogma/" target="_blank">Sheldrake</a>:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span id="docs-internal-guid-782d59db-4be8-fcd0-d262-6dd8de4bf7a1"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So for materialists it’s a simple two-step argument. Memories are stored in brains; the brain decays at death, therefore, memories are wiped out at death. Whereas, if memories are not stored in brains then the memories themselves are not wiped out at death. They’re potentially accessible. That doesn’t prove they </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">are</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> accessed, that there </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> personal survival. It just means that’s a possibility, whereas with materialism it’s an impossibility. So one position leaves the question closed and the other leaves it open.</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Potential! Possibility! Whether we’re choosing among personal philosophies or approaches to scientific inquiry, I say let’s choose Open over Closed. How solid are scientific “facts,” anyway? I agree with <a href="http://www.deanradin.com/" target="_blank">Dean Radin, Ph.D.</a>, Senior Scientist at <a href="http://noetic.org/" target="_blank">IONS</a>, who says in his book, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Conscious Universe</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That scientific assumptions evolve should come as no surprise. One of the most profitable consequences of science as an "open system" of knowledge, as opposed to rigid dogma, is that the future Laws of Nature will bear as much resemblance to the "laws" we know today as the cellular telephone does to smoke signals.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, I seem to have wandered far afield from where I started. In </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Into the Dark</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Alison Gaylin did her usual excellent job of keeping readers intrigued, tracking like bloodhounds the scent of an answer. I hope the story I’m trying to tell, currently titled </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Midnight at the Diner</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, can do something similar, keeping you rapt and curious, fully immersed in a question.</span><br />
<span id="docs-internal-guid-782d59db-4bea-e3c7-fa57-952b2d85a5e3"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Can a stranger share your memories?” Yes. And who knows what other amazing, marvelous things are possible in this infinite Universe?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span>Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-87046723725396716842013-05-17T13:32:00.000-04:002013-05-17T13:44:33.777-04:00More Moments<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKx7UtKsGNSSc8iWfOTYN7hnOz5DbKSQGJFmjUwIZiladwlIcObnhbikXMLXJ2e3dVw3Gwh0_RAykuBQDD4iCrUBoyjJ_UWl74Q_DPJ3YdHxYUL7M8T7n-BtKkJQWu_YSJkw_iNXdqeGQ/s1600/now_watch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKx7UtKsGNSSc8iWfOTYN7hnOz5DbKSQGJFmjUwIZiladwlIcObnhbikXMLXJ2e3dVw3Gwh0_RAykuBQDD4iCrUBoyjJ_UWl74Q_DPJ3YdHxYUL7M8T7n-BtKkJQWu_YSJkw_iNXdqeGQ/s200/now_watch.jpg" width="192" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b343-3fe0-4e1c-5916329f47e5" style="font-weight: normal;"></b></span><br />
<b id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b37d-3bd6-f507-bcfb3ecd110e" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This post is a follow-up to the one called “<a href="http://brentrobison.blogspot.com/2012/05/moments.html" target="_blank">Moments</a>” from almost exactly a year ago</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I hope you’ll read that post as well, and watch the videos!</span></b><b id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b37d-3bd6-f507-bcfb3ecd110e" style="font-weight: normal;"></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Just today I was looking back through one of my old journals, 13 years past, and discovered that it was this very week in 2000 that the idea and the title for my collection of short stories,</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~blissplotpress/indivisibility.html" target="_blank">The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> first popped into my mind. The title came from a story I had already completed, “Family Man,” and all I knew was that I wanted to expand on a feeling of connection between members of the human family. That was a little moment of inspiration that has rippled through my life for all the subsequent years. I had just begun to study independent publishing, and I then proceeded to go on a detour away from my own writing to publish others, in the form of <a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~blissplotpress/index.html" target="_blank">Bliss Plot Press</a> and the literary journal, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~blissplotpress/primamateria.htm" target="_blank">Prima Materia</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It wasn’t until 2009 that I birthed the finished book of my own stories into the world, and the years since have been frequently occupied with shepherding its slow growth.</span><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b37d-3bd6-f507-bcfb3ecd110e" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, obviously, a single moment can be profound: a turning point in one’s life. But that is not really what I’m exploring here. Rather, I’m interested in those moments that either simply pass by with little consequence, too often unnoticed, or those moments into which we fall like a meditation, a brief creative trance outside of time, here then gone.</span></b><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b37d-3bd6-f507-bcfb3ecd110e" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The “occasional video” art project I described a year ago has continued: short spontaneous videos shot with my little Bloggie camera, with no editing except for trimming head and tail. In that project, I look for a balance of random banality and ephemeral beauty, something that might fit the Japanese aesthetic called</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: black;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi" target="_blank">wabi-sabi</a></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which suggests that poetry and grace can be found in the "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete."</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From the past twelve months, here are my latest four video moments (about 1 minute each):</span></b><br />
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<b style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Moments: Sitting in the Watery Boneyard</span></i></b></div>
<span style="line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><i><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="197" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/P2ohJ0SQS24" width="350"></iframe></i></b></span></div>
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<b style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Moments: Sidewalk Politics & Window Shopping</i></b><br />
<span style="line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><i><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="197" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/baj4xqs2A4E" width="350"></iframe></i></b></span><br />
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b343-3fe0-4e1c-5916329f47e5"><span style="font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><i>Moments: Accidental Video While Walking the Dog</i></b></span></span></div>
<span style="line-height: 18px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><i><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="197" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ZH7lfVxh_SM" width="350"></iframe></i></b></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b343-3fe0-4e1c-5916329f47e5"><span style="font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><i>Moments: My simple way of enduring a shopping trip...</i></b></span></span></div>
<span style="line-height: 18px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><i><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="197" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/B4nx0eq9XVM" width="350"></iframe></i></b></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b343-3fe0-4e1c-5916329f47e5"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b382-9f63-740f-1bdd42a0e0cd" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And here’s a different kind of moment from my current novel-in-progress. The protagonist is feeling various stresses: ex-wife, kids, money, and a new mystery: who is stealing his life story? So this is how he uses a little slice of time to escape all that.</span></b></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b343-3fe0-4e1c-5916329f47e5"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> At Father Demo Square, he found the perfect view up Sixth Avenue and set up the tripod. He loaded a roll of Ektachrome 160 into his Canon SLR, attached the quick-release plate using a nickel in the screw slot, and seated the camera on the tripod head with a solid click. He screwed the delicate cable release into the top of the shutter button. Then he framed through his zoom at about 150 mm, with the flow of traffic in the foreground, the Bleecker Street sign at the middle left, and the glowing red and blue spire of the Empire State Building piercing the black sky in the upper right.</span><span style="line-height: 1.15;"> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b343-3fe0-4e1c-5916329f47e5"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> These shots were going to be time exposures, turning taxis into streams of light and people into ghosts, all motion gone liquid and translucent, rivers of life flowing through the concrete immoveable canyons of the city. On his budget, film and processing for the sake of experimental art had to be strictly rationed. He had one roll, 36 exposures, to work with tonight, and he hoped for at least one beautiful image from the roll. He worked carefully, selecting different combinations of f-stop and shutter speed, writing down each exposure in a tiny notebook. He pushed the plunger of the cable release with his thumb as he counted along with the second hand on his watch, lit by a miniature flashlight held in his teeth. Five seconds, seven seconds, ten seconds, f 5.6, f 8, f 16. For the last third of the roll, he brought out his flash unit and, without attaching it to the camera, held it high over his head and sent a bolt of illumination into the scene as he held the shutter open. Any moving object catching the beam would appear a little more solid than the surrounding swirls of cloudy motion.</span><span style="line-height: 1.15;"> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b343-3fe0-4e1c-5916329f47e5"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> He was like a boulder in a stream, standing still while everything flowed around him. With his full attention given to the work, he experienced time in an all new way. The moment stretched out without limits, nothing existed but the immediate task, all past and future forgotten, his very self and all its stories gone, melted entirely away, merged with the air and sky and all the vibrating waves and particles of the animate and inanimate worlds upon worlds surrounding his centerless center.</span><span style="line-height: 1.15;"> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b343-3fe0-4e1c-5916329f47e5"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> It lasted a few minutes, a quarter of an hour, and then he packed up and walked home, smiling.</span></span></blockquote>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-3c3b82b3-b382-30a7-9ca8-83004ce39e80" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I invite your thoughts about the value of being mindful of moments, and about the challenges of capturing them in art. Thanks for visiting!</span></b> </div>
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Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-1368552199069663212013-01-12T14:31:00.001-05:002013-01-12T14:35:51.738-05:00Book Review: Milligan and Murphy by Jim Murdoch<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjJBgJP1o-1Ccgpv2cBS2330YwSat8oB_Z5rP2aIjdvLGh7bgUBOP1-AtUEqk20XU-GY3ZHgGoucXYf4ZwW6kKB_gFQ6rD5u_o1VgF-I78yyCJq0IXN9y3y7fv31a6IXKSTRMPW3YBo-E/s1600/bc_milligan_tn(fv).png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjJBgJP1o-1Ccgpv2cBS2330YwSat8oB_Z5rP2aIjdvLGh7bgUBOP1-AtUEqk20XU-GY3ZHgGoucXYf4ZwW6kKB_gFQ6rD5u_o1VgF-I78yyCJq0IXN9y3y7fv31a6IXKSTRMPW3YBo-E/s200/bc_milligan_tn(fv).png" width="129" /></a></div>
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.6181255462579429" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve always been fascinated by stories of doubles, twins, doppelgangers, minds and actions mirrored (perhaps as a reaction against the profound truth that each of us is utterly unique, and therefore alone). Jim Murdoch’s short novel, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Milligan and Murphy</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, is not really one of those stories, but it toys with the trope of twins who together make a single person. The half-brothers Milligan and Murphy (both named John!) are not twins but are enough alike that their non-twinness is just a technicality. Murphy, the firstborn, may be a shade more introspective, and Milligan a trifle more action-oriented, but essentially they are one mind, and the fact that they inhabit separate bodies is primarily a storytelling device. Without it, the extensive dialogues exploring their limited reality would become claustrophobic solipsism. Such is the reason for the respectable literary history of twins, brothers/sisters, bosom buddies, even the hero/sidekick construct: it works.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com/2012/01/becketts-pseudo-couples-part-one.html" target="_blank">Murdoch</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, an active blogger, plainly acknowledges his interest in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett" target="_blank">Samuel Beckett’s</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> pairs of wanderers, and as we follow his unassuming Irish duo through a barren landscape, setting out on a whim to walk who-knows-where (</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">doppelgange</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">r is German for “double walker”), we carry with us the phantoms of Vladimir and Estragon waiting on the road for the elusive (illusive) Godot. But there are other phantoms as well: the mythological twins <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux" target="_blank">Castor and Pollux</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, whose inseparability is immortalized as the constellation Gemini... Lewis Carroll’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweedledum_and_Tweedledee" target="_blank">Tweedledum and Tweedledee</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, whose convoluted conversations feel simultaneously demented and true... and for me, the image from my childhood of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_missionary" target="_blank">Mormon missionaries</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, young men dressed alike going two by two about the world on a philosophical, impractical quest -- tilting at windmills, one might say (and Quixote had his Sancho Panza).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote" target="_blank">Quixote</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, another lens through which to read </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Milligan and Murphy</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">picaresque</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. In current usage, that term refers to “an episodic recounting of the adventures of an</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-hero"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">anti-hero on the road” (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picaresque_novel" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). So </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">M. and M.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is picaresque x 2. Critic <a href="http://noggs.typepad.com/oncriticsandcriticism/2012/03/one-thing-after-another.html" target="_blank">Daniel Green</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> writes, under the title </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One Thing After Another</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, “There's not really a sense of progression in the picaresque narrative, just a series of episodes, and usually the protagonist remains more or less unchanged, undergoing no transformation or ‘epiphany.’” I agree with him when he goes on to say that a revival of the picaresque is in fact, a welcome break from “the tyranny of story--the creation of narrative tension by which too many stories and novels are reductively judged...” and that this form (not “formless” at all) frees the writer for effects not generally available in today’s conventional “workshopped/crafted” psychological narrative. Murdoch has handled the form masterfully, which comes as no surprise if you’re familiar with his <a href="http://www.fvbooks.com/jmurdoch/jmurdoch5.htm" target="_blank">other works</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, not a conventional tale among them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps the key factor in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Milligan and Murphy</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s success is Murdoch’s confident use of a narrative voice that is all too rare these days. It is a variety of third-person omniscient that some critics have dubbed “universal omniscient.” The difference is that the universal omniscient narrator reveals information that the characters do not have, and makes clear the fact that the narrator is not involved in the events of the story. This is sometimes called "Little Did He Know" writing, as in, "Little did he know he'd be dead by morning." (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_mode" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) Murdoch’s narrator observes both inner and outer action from a bit of distance (more than arm’s length, less than bird’s eye), with a dash of wry wit and an almost paternal fondness for his protagonists. This narrator likes the hapless brothers but never spares them when their behavior is less than stellar. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But Murdoch takes third-person a step further. Much to my enjoyment (because I appreciate multiple levels of meaning), he mysteriously, occasionally introduces the first-person pronoun so that we wonder, who is this unnamed being who knows all? There is no answer. This is a narrator who shares some of the dry, witty tone, with asides and commentary, of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemony_Snicket" target="_blank">Lemony Snicket</a> (</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A Series of Unfortunate Events</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">)</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but unlike Snicket, is never revealed as an actual character in the story. This is a narrator who acknowledges he is telling a story to “you,” the reader. It’s fun to read, but it’s more than that. Murdoch is using a postmodern metafictional device to thrust us into the midst of a Big Question. Every meditating yogi is facing something similar: who is the Observer?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The mysterious “I” first appears on page two with this sudden insertion in an expository passage about the brothers’ history: “<i>I bore witness to each confinement and have followed the boys’ lacklustre progress with something of a paternal interest over the years</i>.” Then again on page six: </span></b><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Our story, such as it is, begins with our heroes, such as they are, sound asleep in bed. That is to say, they were asleep in their own beds. I’ve mentioned that they were close and I’m not about to take that back but it is equally true to say that it had been many years since they had enjoyed the one bed, nevertheless they continued to retire each night to the same room, the bedroom they had shared since infancy.</i></span></b></blockquote>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This charming self-referential witness appears perhaps another half-dozen times throughout the book’s 169 pages, doling out information, opinion, and wisdom, and adding immensely to my reading pleasure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From a philosophical point of view, I can’t be sure what Murdoch intended, but I can say what he actually did, on the level of emotional subtext. He wrote an anti-atheism book. I won’t say a religious book; it thankfully stops far short of that. But in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Milligan and Murphy</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Murdoch posits a universe in which we are not alone. It is a universe with a Supreme Being. If the narration had been strictly third-person omniscient, this would not be so, because the reader would not have been given an explicit reference to an observing consciousness. In </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">M. and M.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, there is a Someone, a super-character, the “I,” who watches over our simple heroes (</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">naifs</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, everymen). This Someone knows everything about everything, but does not participate in the action. The “I” remains unnameable, a benevolent, ever-present mystery. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A skeptic might say, well, in every book there is the obvious parallel: author/creator = god. However, I am not referring to the author here, but rather to the persona “hired” by the author to narrate this particular story. Within the world of this book, there is a God. I am not a “believer” but I do not find this objectionable. Rather, I find it true to my felt experience as a human on this strange planet. Murdoch has personalized Awareness, the field in which all experience exists.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A sly bit of evidence is at the end of a scene in which the brothers meet an old man who has been waiting by the road, waiting for someone who never arrived, waiting even beyond the death of his longtime companion. Of course, if we know Beckett (which the brothers don't), we recognize him... is it Didi or Gogo? As they turn to go, Milligan says:</span></b><br />
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.6181255462579429" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>“...I wonder who he was, Murphy.”</i></span></b></blockquote>
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<i>"<b id="internal-source-marker_0.6181255462579429" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">God alone knows, Milligan. God alone knows.”</span></b></i></blockquote>
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<i> <b id="internal-source-marker_0.6181255462579429" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That He did.</span></b></i></blockquote>
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.6646597464568913" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the two John M.s wander the muddy roads under rainy skies, from town to gray town, and encounter a handful of characters who equal or surpass them in grit and wackiness and homespun wisdom, their final act is simply... to keep going. They’ve reached the sea, and perhaps here, Beckett’s couplet applies: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” There is a ship in the harbor needing hands and the brothers get lucky (and, let us remember, the twins, Castor and Pollux, are the patrons of sailors). As M. and M. gaze at the dark waves, I’m reminded of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Hamsun" target="_blank">Knut Hamsun’s</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> unnamed hero in his seminal 20th-century novel, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hunger</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, who starved and suffered senselessly until he was done, finished with this phase of his life, then simply got on a ship and sailed away into an unknown future.</span></b><br />
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.6646597464568913" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is then that Murdoch’s benevolent observer appears one last time to deliver the book’s beautiful final lines:</span></b><br />
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<i><b id="internal-source-marker_0.6181255462579429" style="font-weight: normal;"><i style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Neither of them moved. The ship sailed on regardless; the earth kept spinning on its axis and circling the sun whilst the whole universe continued a sigh begun twenty million years before. And that’s the end of our story as much as any story has an ending.</i></b></i></blockquote>
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<i><b id="internal-source-marker_0.6181255462579429" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>I, of course, know exactly what will become of of them but that really is another tale, the ending of which you more than likely know already.</i></span></b></i></blockquote>
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.6646597464568913" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Milligan and Murphy</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a quick read and fun, but it is never shallow. If you look for alternatives to the garish and trendy, this book’s for you.</span></b><br />
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.6646597464568913" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps irrelevant, perhaps not, here’s a final note: two local treasures here in Woodstock, New York, Mikhail Horowitz and Gilles Malkine, giving us their own Beckett homage: “Rappin’ for Godot” (video by Stephen Blauweiss). Enjoy!</span></b><br />
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Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2013099116454762594.post-20519759019264508472013-01-02T20:26:00.000-05:002013-01-02T20:28:10.440-05:00Happy New Publishing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3gcgu_qjJxCmR6T6e1U2NFSEzEWoiZmTtegIW5d4aXuegIpuFIzAXhX5mmHFuSqH8VMfOLItP8UGv2l_WllhFTvKgKdQqRhH8VYcSoBDz-F2rhrW0_rzFrORtvjQBv7N6ZEv3-tAEofA/s1600/Cover_January_2013_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3gcgu_qjJxCmR6T6e1U2NFSEzEWoiZmTtegIW5d4aXuegIpuFIzAXhX5mmHFuSqH8VMfOLItP8UGv2l_WllhFTvKgKdQqRhH8VYcSoBDz-F2rhrW0_rzFrORtvjQBv7N6ZEv3-tAEofA/s200/Cover_January_2013_2.jpg" width="152" /></a></div>
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.7949291300028563" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The world just ended, then began again, faster than the blink of an eye. It’s a new year and we’re all reborn. I choose not to look backward at this blog’s empty months, and I don’t intend to make predictions about its future (futures don’t exist). But I do want to draw attention to an article by Nina Shengold in this month’s <a href="http://www.chronogram.com/" target="_blank">Chronogram</a> magazine about the healthy state of self-publishing in the Hudson Valley. I merit a couple of minor mentions as well as appearing in the group photo, and I think it’s safe to call myself a veteran in this rapidly changing field since I’ve worked in it for over a decade (see </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://blissplotpress.com/" target="_blank">Bliss Plot Press</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">).</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Read the article here: </span><i><span style="font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.chronogram.com/hudsonvalley/brave-new-books/Content?oid=2138661&storyPage=1" target="_blank">Brave New Books:</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.chronogram.com/hudsonvalley/brave-new-books/Content?oid=2138661&storyPage=1" target="_blank"> Hudson Valley Self-Published Authors Take the Reins</a>.</span></i></span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m sure each of us surveyed provided a wealth of information that Nina didn’t have room to use. Want to know more? I’m happy to share my experiences with anyone who asks.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you think self-publishing might be for you, but you need help finding the services that will bring your book to a professional level, please feel free to contact me. As the one-man production team for Bliss Plot Press, I’ve developed solid skills in both editing (in addition to Bliss Plot, see </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Learning-be-Human-Jason-Stern/dp/193033754X/ref=tmm_pap_title_popover?ie=UTF8&qid=1357166837&sr=1-3" target="_blank">this</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) and book design (also </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Truth-Poems-Lana-Gurney/dp/1463727631/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357167002&sr=1-1" target="_blank">this</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Pond-DeAnn-Louise-Daigle/dp/1467931306/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357166979&sr=1-1" target="_blank">this</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), but I have a rather full schedule, so I would gladly act as connector to hook you up with very competent editors and designers that I know.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Also, browse <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/robisonbrent" target="_blank">my YouTube page</a> for eight video book trailers (among other things) I’ve produced.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Happy New Era of Author-Friendly Publishing!</span></b>Brent Robisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06882060411376854563noreply@blogger.com4