Happy Halloween!

Today, let us all remember the emotion behind the holiday: pure, unmitigated fear. Brought to you by the Ellen DeGeneres show's writer Amy Rhodes, who takes the Universal Studios haunted house maze like a scream queen.


Via The Daily What.

The Bell at Misfit Magazine

My flash piece, "The Bell," is now up at Misfit Magazine. Check it!

Matilda Doesn't Want to Just Be Friends

Back in grad school, we used to play a game called "What should you have read by now but haven't?" Because we were people whose very lives depended on appearing extraordinarily well read, this game required copious amounts of alcohol.

Romeo and Juliet always scored big points, especially among the Renaissance crowd. Anything by Jane Austen would draw gasps. Someone would inevitably say Ulysses, which would lead to the equally inevitable conversation about how no one should read Ulysses, which in turn would lead to the even more inevitable conversation about how no one can read Ulysses.

My point is that now that I have time to read whatever I want, I've been going back through the list of things I should have read and never did, and picking up a few gems along the way.

One of these was The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis. This book was written in 1795. "Monk" Lewis was nineteen at the time - a very pervy, rather sophisticated nineteen. This book has everything - and I mean everything:

Corrupt monks!

Demons!

Innocent virgins!

Devirginated innocents!

Rape!

Murder!

Drag kings!

Sadistic Mothers Superior!

Sexy seductresses!

Ghost nuns!

Evil nuns!

Dead moms!

Dank crypts!

Satan! Satan! Satan!

Magic books!

Magic spells!

Bandits!

Disaffected youth!

Poison!

Sex!

Bastards!

Dueling!

The plots of yesteryear really were a lot more jam-packed than we tend to like 'em today. The real highlight of this book (besides the jaw-dropping and hilarious ending) is Matilda. Arguably the main female character, Matilda is perverse, passionate, vengeful, and just wonderfully wrong on so many levels. Lewis gives her a series of motivations that seem a bit random and nutty, but then - by pulling out a single thread that has been working through the plot all along - makes it all make sense.

We need more plots - and more women - like this in novels today. I wonder if modern audiences would accept them?

Goodbye, Renaissance Quarterly

...and Sixteenth Century Journal, and especially you, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. I won't miss you at all.

I've been cleaning house. Although I normally cling to books like they're some kind of papery life raft, today I took a couple of shelves' worth of academic journals down and put them in the recycling. They filled an entire blue box and I suspect there are a few more lurking in the not-so-neat rows of my bookcases. I can now reshelve the large pile of books that I have slowly accumulated beside my bed, not to mention the numerous volumes I've tucked away horizontally on top of rows of books in my bookcases.

The decision to get rid of the flotsam and jetsam of my academic "career" is really just the latest in a series of maneuvres designed to distance me from academia. The painful part was over three years ago, when I decided I couldn't (wouldn't, shouldn't) hack it as a professor. The fun part was realizing that I could embrace my lifelong dream of writing fiction, if not for a living, then at least for life. The scary part was figuring out how to replace the income I was making from sessional teaching without falling into something that would wreck my concentration or my soul. This part? The getting rid of stuff part? Feels more like picking a scab. A little bit gross, and mildly fascinating.

In January, I started decluttering my office by throwing out the dozens upon dozens of photocopies of academic articles I'd gathered while writing my thesis. There are more of those lurking in a storage unit in my bedroom--I can't wait to ferret them out and get rid of them.

I don't know why it took me so long to recognize that I no longer wanted the journals. It was probably their neat, bland spines. They made themselves innocuous among the Harry Potters and the Sookie Stackhouses, not to mention the Joe R. Lansdale canon and the plethora of Dover and Oxford and Penguin editions of classics that were actually fun to read, and which I'll probably revisit at some point. (I'm looking at you, Père Goriot!)

But last week, I don't know--I was looking at the plant on top of the tall white bookcase that sits near the dining room window, and I just thought, "I could throw those out without a second thought." Today, I took ten minutes, and I did it.

I admit, I felt a slight twinge as I looked at those Renaissance Quarterly covers. I never wanted to collect those journals, but they came along with my Renaissance Society of America membership, which in turn was a part of my conference fees. Go to the conference, pay your dues, get some journals: that was the deal. And they always looked so rich, so full of knowledge, so replete with things with which I ought to be familiar. So long as I was tied to academia, I had to hang on to them. Otherwise, how would I understand that my knowledge base was entirely inadequate? And how would I rescue myself once I decided to turn it all around and become the academic rock star I should have been?

You can see why this didn't work out, right?

I stacked them all on the dining room table, and I started taking them out to the porch, where they could wait in their blue box for next week's garbage day. I'm not totally heartless: I picked up an issue or two, and thumbed through them, looking for some redeeming feature. And I did find some promise there: there were a couple of articles on public executions--always a topic that stirred my interest. And I did find a piece or two on disease or drama--my areas of specialty. I paused, and sighed, and I read:

This article statistically analyzes quantitative data from numerous sources in order to assess changes in marriage patterns, family structure, and rates of social mobility during the period from 1282 to 1494. During this period, three systems of social stratification coexisted — wealth, political office, and age of family — but these contending status systems were not consistent in their rankings of families.

Okay, I didn't read this exactly, but I read something very much like it. And I closed the book. (No offense to this specific author--it's only an example, man.)

The academic gig offers a kind of notoriety: you can become sort of famous within academic circles; you can work a kind of magic with ideas and dazzle an elite audience and they might applaud you for it. But especially in literature studies, you're ultimately building a house on someone else's property. You might think you're living at the top of the ivory tower, but you're really just a squatter in the land of the imagination.

Here's the thing: I've done the academic trip. I've done it until it couldn't be done any more, at least from a student perspective. I got the mother of all degrees. And I am not at all anti-education. The most valuable thing I take away, however, is the ability to read just about anything every written in the English language, and a little smidge here and there of stuff written in Latin. And what academics do--the endless analysis, the combination and recombination of other people's theories and other people's creativity--it's neat and all, but it isn't story. It won't save you. It won't help you figure out your life. It won't add value to the richness that is you.

And maybe story won't do that either--maybe fiction is ultimately fluffy and insubstantial. But it feels real to me.

I'm writing now--I'm working creatively. I'm sacrificing my time to the sable goddess of speculative fiction.

There's no room for Renaissance Quarterly on this ride.

Go See This: Inception

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

Basically, I don't have much to say about Inception that Roger Ebert didn't say already. I'll just add that it's been a crappy summer for movies, and people, if you want to have your brain massaged, stretched, and messed with in a most delightful way, this is your chance. It's really, really nice to know there are people making films who don't think we're all dumb.

Read This: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

One of the worst parts of being a grad student in English literature was slowly coming to look upon the act of reading as a chore. When you have to read, process, and produce gobs of insight in short order, it can really crush the enjoyment factor right out of you.

One of the best parts of being a grad student was having great professors who had incredible taste in literature. One of these, a very nice man who ran a course called "Modern and Postmodern Novel," introduced me to Riddley Walker.

Now that the emotional dents caused by grad school have started to smooth themselves out, I've been going back over my bookshelf and picking up things I remember thinking were cool back in the day. I just finished re-reading Riddley Walker, and let me tell you, it's everything I remembered and more.

Riddley Walker is basically post-apocalyptic fiction meets Tom Sawyer. It's 2300 years after some kind of man-made catastrophe, probably nuclear in nature, has plunged humanity, or at least England, into a new dark ages. Riddley Walker has just turned twelve, which makes him a man by his culture's standards. Through a series of happenstances, he finds himself running away from his semi-nomadic group and heading off for adventure with a pack of wild dogs and a boy his age called "the Ardship of Cambry." Hilarity, heartbreak, explosions, and an encounter with Mr. Punch ensue.

The thing that makes Riddley Walker both challenging and fascinating to read is the language. Reading page one of this book is like cracking open The Canterbury Tales for the first time. Your brain processes it at first as "foreign language: cannot read." By the time you're done page one, you're sort of getting it, but the language continues to be surprising and amazing through the entire book.

Here's what I mean:

Where they are theyre up side down in the groun. Like youwl see a picter of your self up side down in the water theres a stoan self of your self in the groun and walking foot to foot with you. You put your foot down and theywl put ther foot up and touching yours. Walking with you every step of teh way yet youwl never see them.

Theywl stay unner the groun longs youre on top of it. Comes your time to ly down for ever then the stoan man comes to the top of the groun they think theywl stan up then. They cant do it tho. Onlyes strenth they had ben when you ben a live. Theyre lying on the groun trying to talk only theres no soun theres grean vines and leaves growing out of ther mouf....them stoans ben trying to talk only they never wil theyre jus only your earf stoans your unner walkers. Trying ot be men only cant talk. They had earf for sky wylst you had air.

My spellcheck went crazy while I was typing that.

The entire book is full of the tragedy of everything Riddley's world has lost, as well as the natural energy and hope associated with change - change that Riddley himself helps to perpetuate. It's everything that great science fiction should be: rigorously imagined, and fired with the passions of its characters. There's enough difference between Riddley's language and ours that Hoban gets to sneak in some concepts not fully imaginable to most people today, but obviously real and true in Riddley's world.

Statistics Obsession

In the original Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, I always loved the scene set in the amazing garden-o-candy. No, not because of "Pure Imagination." Everyone loves that song, sure. Alongside "Rainbow Connection" from the Muppet Movie, it expresses a major sentiment of my youth, rah bah bah.

I like the garden-o-candy scene because of the moment when Augustus Gloop is stuck in the uptake tube from the chocolate river. Willy Wonka looks on eagerly and says:

The suspense is terrible...I hope it lasts.*

Ripping off Oscar Wilde, of course, like all clever people do if they want to seem even more clever.

Here's the thing. I've become very caught up with Duotrope statistics.

Duotrope tells you so much about a magazine. Their average return time on manuscript submissions is among the most useful information they track. But they also list average return times on rejections and acceptances, as well as my favourite stats right now: most recent response received on a manuscript, and the date the writer originally submitted that manuscript.

The reason why I'm all caught up in these stats is that I've got two stories out right now. One of them has been out for a full three weeks longer than the most recent manuscript returned by the magazine I sent it to. And the other's been kept back a few days longer than some of the manuscripts sent in around the same time as I sent mine. Both of these markets keep the pieces they tend to accept longer than those they're rejecting. Can you see where I'm going with this?

It's likely, given how things are playing out, that both of these stories have been held back so editorial can take another look at them. I think I can be fairly certain of that, and hey, that's awesome. And maybe, just maybe, I've got a shot at getting them accepted.

I'm bugging every time I open my email. I am trying not to get my hopes up, but after a whole heck of a lot of hard writing and editing, my hopes are quite in need of getting up.

Say it with me now:

The suspense is terrible. I hope it lasts.

*This is the version I remember. It might have been some variation on this turn of phrase. I'll straighten it out the next time I watch the movie. It's been too long, anyhow.