friday's fable: down by the river

Keeping this blog has been an irregular, oddly shaped thing. It's course has wandered and my attention diverted too many times to make apologizing practical or interesting. Sitting down to write, not just this blog, but in general, there's always a tension I have a hard time shaking off. Some people talk about their inner editor, that plaguing force that has you checking semi-colons, when you should really be cranking out five thousand words in two hours.

There's some of that. Mostly, I think of it like stage fright -- a thing I never once felt when I was actually on stage. But my mind goes blank, my words disappear and I'm left with a bright, light screen and access to the internet.

Oh, and I've started to play WoW.

Recently, I applied for a job with an online content mill. Basically, it's a clearing house for freelance writers, which pays roughly minimum wage but you can wear pajamas and work from your laptop, so there's that. I carefully prepared my application, whipped up a writing sample and sent it off, already trying to figure out a work schedule. After all, I'm getting my degree in writing; there was no chance I wouldn't be hired.

The next morning there's a wonderfully polite form letter sitting in my inbox, informing me that no, actually, I was wonderfully qualified but not quite qualified enough.

Back to the blog, I haven't written much since my lovely little rejection letter from the wonderful world of online articles. Playing games and reading other people's writing has been a much more pleasant way of passing the time than wrestling with my own screen fright.

Hercules, Disney

So, there are nine muses in Greek mythology, who preside over specific areas of the arts. They were also the narrating force behind the awful Disney movie that pretended it was based off Greek mythology; I try not to hold it against them, those songs are damn catchy.

They've become best known as figures of inspiration. Stuck for an idea? Pray to the muses. Stuck in the middle of an idea? Uncooperative muses. The word's snuck it's way into semi-common usage, your mileage may vary here, with a ghost of an idea attached. I talk about muses and inspiration as a way of covering for the fact that I can't and won't sit in the damn chair and force myself to work as often as I should. But that's not the muses; that's the author.

The muses as figures in mythology were nine sisters -- and think about that for a minute -- who could and did inspire great poetic heights. Sometimes. When it suited them and you'd damn well better remember to say please and thank you. John Milton invoked Urania, muse of astronomy, in his work Paradise Lost and the historian Herodotus named each of the nine books of his Histories after one of the muses.

The muses taught the Sphinx her riddle.

Calliope was the mother of Orpheus. As the story goes, he was killed by the Maenads, who tore him limb from limb and his head continued to sing as it was carried down river. The muses sang to mourn him and collected his lyre, and in some versions his head, too, for burial. 

On the one hand, these stories are just stories. Maybe that's all they were ever meant to be. On the other hand, there's an idea hovering in the thin weave of a pattern -- inspiration and art and wisdom are all wonderful, beautiful things. They're also painful, destructive and difficult. And sometimes, as Orpheus found out, as good as they are, they aren't enough.

Gustave Moreau

destination two: of turtles and cityscapes

Author's Note: I first started this post two weeks ago, when life was calm and books were plentiful. Now, after a protracted bout of burying my head in the sand and refusing to look at anything but my pillow, I've come back to it. Whatever train of thought I'd first had has jumped the track and gone over the cliff. There may have been mustache twirling, I'm not entirely certain. The point, however, is that where the post started and where it now ends are very different places.

By?

The iconic image of a world supported on the backs of four giant elephants, who stand atop an even larger turtle, who careens through space, reoccurs in a variety of mythologies, although not usually all at once. But this is the cosmological geography of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where the Disc is carried through space by the Great A'Tuin. The elephants are, to the best of my knowledge, unnamed.

One of the challenges when setting out to explore an entire other world, be it Discworld or Middle Earth or post-apocalyptic Mars,  is finding a starting point. Diving into the literature, a well crafted tour will guide you where you want to go, without ever having to stop and gesture at the attractions. In this blog, however, a comprehensive guide to all things on the Disc is space prohibitive. So, in an entirely arbitrary decision based solely on my preference for cities, I'm starting with greatest city of them all: Ankh Morpork.

And by great, I mean, of course, polluted, corrupt, dangerous and, above all, filthy.

by Stephen Player

The twin cities of pestilent Ankh and proud Morpork are separated by the River Ankh and linked together by the bridge. It's a point of national pride that anyone is capable of walking across the water of the river, regardless of religious devotion. I would, however, strongly suggest only attempting this in very thick, very tall boots that you won't burning afterwards. You are infinitely more likely to suffocate than drown in the Ankh and if large sections of it haven't caught on fire yet, it's probably because no one in their right mind would get close enough to toss in a match.

As is true of all cities, there are grand spires announcing to the heavens and, more importantly, to everyone below, the great peaks of human ingenuity and engineering prowess. The Tower of Art, the tallest man-made structure on the Disc, is older than city and said to be even older than the Disc itself.

No, I have no idea how that works, either. But it sounds lovely, doesn't it?

In the shadow of the tower, the Unseen University and all the not-quite gleaming-but-getting-there progress of the city, there is the Shades. There's a bad side of every town, and the Shades might just be the mother of them all. If you visit, remember to buy insurance from the Thieves' Guild and try not to make eye contact with anyone.

The thing to recall most of all about Ankh Morpork, however, is that it's not fundamentally different from all those other cities in all those other worlds. Each place has it's own distinct flavor -- and I hope you've gotten a sense of Ankh Morpork's from this guide -- but they're all reflections of each other, too. Whether it's keeping up with the Jones' in cityscapes or the fact that every tourist brings a bit home of home with them... well, I'm not a very good guesser, so you'll have to decide. But the real magic of exploring a city like Ankh Morpork, or anywhere on the Disc, is seeing home through changed eyes.

From the Colour of Magic BBC production

on blogs and literature and other things

By? Let me know

The idea for this blog was fairly simple: write a travel journal; the only catch was that the areas I discussed would be fictional. Despite the continued lack of an itinerary, I did sit down and attempt to form a list of locations that would be touched on in the blog. The first drafted included only books and the vast majority were  genre novels.

However, much as I do love my books, they weren't the end all and be all of what I was absorbing or reading or devoting my time to. By the time I made my first post, the itinerary had hugely expanded and I ended up writing about a television show rather than the book series I'd originally chosen.

The rather winding point of this whole introduction is, simply, literature is expansive. I sat down thinking of a literary travel journal that dealt only in books and wound up with a blog that would cover any and all forms of literature that struck my fancy -- television, movie, graphic novel, whatever. In my typical, roundabout way, this brings me to the nature of blogs. Are they literature? I want to say yes and not only because I'm now writing one. Many straddle the line between memoir and self-help with heaping doses of absurdisms and pictures to help it all go down. There's a part of me, reflexively clutching my Milton and Austen, that resists the idea of cat macros and paint pictures being put anywhere near Paradise Lost and Persuasion.

Then I get over it.

Half the books on my shelf, which are cuddling much closer to the sainted relics of the classical tradition, are pulp and genre and wonderful in their own right, but doing something completely different from highbrow literature, which is an absurd concept in its own right. A book that doesn't get read fails, on some level. Words on page can be beautiful, but if they don't find their audience, what good are they?

Back to blogs. Popularity isn't the end all and be all of all writing, but I think that the right audience is. Room to Think is mostly a memoir, but beautiful. The most recent post, Florence Friday, opens up to pictures of the ancient amphitheaters and a phenomenal discussion of architecture and place. This is probably my bias speaking, but the strength of voice and perspective in that post is, to my way of thinking, worth more than a blog that has eight thousand followers and enough retweets to silence Aristophanes (if I'm lucky, two people will get that. If I'm not, I hope two people will google it).

The beauty of blogs, then, is a freedom from popularity, though so many strive for it anyway.  If you think of the publishing industry in its current form, something I don't particularly suggest unless you have chocolate and maybe alcohol handy, books are reduced to sales figures. The question isn't: does this have something to say? It's not even: will this be read? The question is only: will it sell? Small presses pick up a great deal of the slack that the major publishing houses have created, focusing more on the content and less on the bottom line.

Blogs, however, are outside of this equation entirely. A good blog is beyond its numbers and followers and for as long as the author publishes it, it has something to say. This can lead to a lot of awful blogs, but mainstream publishing led to Twilight, so I think we can all agree that no system is perfect.

And, at the end of the day, good blogs return conversation to literature. This is my entirely subjective patch of ground, on which my entire virtual ideology is based. Literature, whatever form it takes, should speak to its audience; it's job is to start a conversation, even if the conversation is mostly 'private detectives are cool.' I'm not asking for profound sentiments, here, just a dialogue and, maybe, a new idea and a bit of inspiration here and there. Blogs, however, carry the possibility for an evolving conversation, one that goes both ways and gives life back to text.

Having now run out of things to say on the subject, I still need to draw in some other example from the blog roll (no, not mine, it's nonexistence would make that challenging) before I bring this to a close. As in all assigned writing, it's not really an assignment until you realize that you're missing an element. Bear with me and here goes.

Wandering Earl is an excellent example of the conversational element I just finished babbling on about ad nauseum. The most recent post on 'How to Survive an Eastern European Winter' boasts both a great deal of conversation happening in the comments and having been inspired by another post from another blog. It's a fantastic nexus of literary microcosms in blogging  with which to wrap up this post, at long last.

In a bit of housekeeping news: Friday's fable will appear this evening (no, really!) and the next destination will be posted this Saturday. I know, I know, three posts in two days, who can hope to keep up? Don't worry, I'll return to my glacial pace once the weekend's over.

friday's fable: on schedules and dreams

This has been a hectic, sleep deprived, caffeine fueled week of madness inducing workloads. I've written ten thousand words in a little than three days, mostly by working through the night and not seeing my bed until close to five in the morning. And through it all has been the constant refrain of 'just 'till the week, just make it through until Friday.'

Scheduling has become less about pacing out my work to avoid burn out and more keeping my head down and promising all sorts of delights and rewards if only I can survive the week. And what, precisely, happens when I finally reach home on Friday? I begin a two day long marathon of sleep.

Endymion and Selene by Edmund Dulac

Endymion, a prince beloved by the goddess Selene, is an eternal sleeper. It's a tale as old as time: goddess sees attractive guy; falls in love; goes to Zeus and asks for the guy to live forever and, incidentally, never age or wake up again. I suppose, if you're a goddess of the moon, sleep is an attractive look on a partner.

And so Endymion lives in dreams, though what he dreams of, is anyone's guess. The madness of the world and deadlines and time no longer touch him, thanks to Selene. But while he is unchanging, dreams are mutable, shifting, strange things. What do those landscapes start to look like, without the concerns of the real world to weigh them down or balance them? When the inner life is given free reign, is it better? Or just disconnected? What does Endymion dream about?