Reflections and Projections on Writing

In my previous post I mentioned that I am reading The Crow’s Dinner by Jonathan Carroll. As an author he is difficult to describe. At bookstores I have seen his novels filed with Horror, with Science Fiction and Fantasy, and with contemporary literature. Magical realism probably comes closest to defining his genre, but even that doesn’t quite get it right.

The new book is different than his others. It is a collection of short, some very short, essays that he used to publish regularly on Medium.com. I read them pretty regularly at one point but over time I had gotten way behind. The book is 500-plus pages of one to two page essays. He wrote a lot of these. I kind of love them.

Carroll brings a number of things to all of his writing. He had tremendous observational skills allowing him to capture the tiny moments of the every day that brings verisimilitude to the worlds he builds. This applies not only to the physical world, but also to people, their behaviors and motivations. It all feels very real, places and people we all recognize from our own experiences. Then, when something fantastic or magical occurs, it seems as real as everything else. He finds the magic in the mundane.

That seems even more evident in his essays where he deals pretty exclusively with the real world. He is attentive to it, relating anecdotes with clarity and vision. He is compassionate about the human condition in all of its flaws and wonders. With a concise economy of words he conveys moments of everyday magic.

If you can’t tell, I am envious of his skill.

This morning I had a conversation about writing, specifically the merits of brevity versus longer works. There’s a place for both, obviously, depending on what your goal is. This conversation was specifically about writing for comics, and how many words on a page are too many (because in comics words equal space), and how much the art should tell. It’s a fine balance and there is no right answer. That seems to be the one place where my style leans toward the more sparse and concise. But then Alan Moore of Watchmen fame puts a whole lot of words on a page and it works.

There’s a reason that my fiction tends toward novels instead of the short story. The same is true of my reading habits. To paraphrase, I like big books, and I can not lie. Big books that comprise trilogies, or more. But excessive word count isn’t always necessary. A good haiku says everything it needs to. In the current era when we’re bombarded by too much information word count can be a detriment. I’m certainly guilty of scanning web pages instead of reading them thoroughly. How much time can I spare? While I can’t deny that Twitter is powerful, I feel that much of it lacks context. Some topics simply can’t be critically addressed in 140 characters.

But there has to be a happy medium between a tweet and tl;dr.

I have a lot to learn from writers like Jonathan Carroll. In this spirit I plan on trying some new things with this blog. I won’t entirely give up my longer pieces, but I want to try my hand at shorter posts. Using his style as a guideline, without completely aping it, I want to tell smaller stories. A side effect of this, I hope, is that I will write and post more often, because I often psyche myself out with the need to write about something more in depth. I want to observe the world around me a little more closely and report what I find. I want to look for the magic in the everyday. The post that immediately precedes this one was an attempt. There will be more.

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Stay tuned.

Odds and Ends

Last week I had two experiences that ended with opposite endings to what I normally expect.

I went to the Rivers Casino here in Pittsburgh. I’m not a gambler. In the many years the casino has existed this is my third trip. The first was when it opened, just to see this new addition to my city. The next two times for the buffet (which is a different type of gambling, I suppose). I play low stakes poker with friends occasionally, but I’m far too intimidated to sit down at a professional table with strangers. Slot machines are hungry beasts that have never been my friends. But I was there, for the food, because on my previous trip I had been given a coupon for a free buffet. Twenty dollars worth of free is a good thing. I tipped my waitress five bucks and then walked through the casino to go back to my car. On a whim I stuck a dollar in a penny slot machine. Fifteen cent bet, no luck. Second fifteen cent bet... ding ding ding, lights, and sirens! I hit for $6.70. Pretty good return on a fifteen cent investment. I cashed out because quit while you’re ahead, right? So I left, full of buffet and, minus the tip, $1.70 more than I walked in with.

A couple of days later I made a trip to the library, which I do a lot of. I read a lot, and the library is free. I still need to occasionally buy books for my collection, but the library has saved me thousands of dollars in my lifetime. I had a book on hold, The Crow’s Dinner by Jonathan Carroll, one of my favorite authors. It’s a large collection of his short blogs, most of which first appeared on Medium.com. I followed it for years. While there I stumbled across a new book about David Bowie called Forever Stardust. Within five or ten minutes of reading each of them I knew I needed to own them. They cost more than the dollar seventy from my casino windfall.

I can’t help but feel I still came out ahead.

Flea Markets

I went to a Flea Market in Waynesburg yesterday. They have one every Tuesday and Saturday at the Greene County Fairgrounds. Over the years it has dwindled to very few set-ups and not much reason to go. Dad and Mom go to hang with friends, drink coffee and, in Dad's case, trade pocketknives with his cronies.

I've gone to Flea Markets with them frequently over the years. I enjoy the experience but with rare exceptions I don't really search them out on my own. I'm never really looking for anything specific, and in spite of my collection of books, comics and music I don't really consider myself a real "collector" of anything. When I'm at a Flea Market I scan the tables for those sorts of things and hope to find something cheap to read, or a CD to fill a hole in my collection that I want but would never spend full price on.

There was an extra attraction yesterday. A separate building at the fairgrounds housed a different Flea Market. All of the proceeds went to support the Greene County Humane Society. There was a bunch of donated stuff on quite a few tables and more people wandering the aisles than usually seen at the Saturday sale.

I'm not proud of this, but I spent time looking at the cheap plastic flower arrangements, the lamps shaped like clowns, the knick-knacks and bric-a-brac and wondered who had spent money on all this crap in the first place. Tacky and cheap, most of it could have been marketed, when new, as future flea market fodder or landfill. I simply couldn't imagine anyone wanting to own most of this stuff when it was new, let alone now that it was used and beat. The building felt like a graveyard of wasted money.

I found a table full of books and went to look for something to read. I found a copy of Bones of the Moon by Jonathan Carroll, one of my favorite contemporary authors. This surprised and pleased me since this is an author very few people I know seem to have heard of. I own several of his books and have read more from the Library. I couldn't remember if this was one I owned or not, but for a quarter it was worth picking up (turns out I do own it already, but now I have a gift for someone).

While thumbing though it I remembered a quote from another Carroll novel, Outside the Dog Museum, about flea markets that I had saved quite some time ago;

"Flea markets remind us of how narrow and fixed our values are: What unimaginable things can have meaning to people! A man bought a bent and rusty 1983 Nevada license plate for one hundred schillings. One woman did a brisk trade selling single used, unmatchable shoes, and empty record album sleeves. Astonished, I turned to Nicholas and asked, “How much do you think she charges for that stuff?” He said nothing, but a moment later the thought came that valuing something meant understanding it better than the next guy. To me, it was absurd buying an old license plate­–but what if the man who bought it knew better? Knew more about it, even if that knowledge seemed spurious or even insane to me. And even if it was worthless, didn’t his wanting it make his imagination broader and grander than mine?"

I like that idea, and felt immediately abashed at my prior judgement. No matter how bizarre or meaningless I personally thought an object to be, at some point someone had looked at it, bright and shiny and new on the shelf, and thought, "That's awesome... I want that." Some of the items would make the imagination incredibly broad and grand, in my opinion. But every item in this graveyard, every bent, tarnished, ratty, well-used piece of it, had once enchanted someone.

There are bits of magic all around us. We just need eyes to see it.