Beliefs

I don’t believe in genres. The word was invented by pretentious critics who felt a pretentious need to justify their pretentiousness. I don’t remember the last “genre” book I read, unless Vonnegut counts in which case I’m just starting one now, but the disdain towards genre is one thing that I hate in principle and in practice.

Critic 1: Hello old sport. Now, I was considering the other day: how can we seem more haughty than we do now?

Critic 2: I’m rather unsure, Rupert. What if we insult different sorts of writing?

Critic 1: Capital idea, Chester. But we’ll need a way to classify the types, so that we don’t have to think too hard.

Look at writing before the twentieth century. “Kubla Khan,” The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein – hell, Shakespeare’s two original plays, largely considered to be among his best work, are both “fantasy” stories. Supernatural and realistic co-existing: the greatest works in history utilize “genre” elements, and yet people are stupid enough to disdain “genre writing.” There’s absolutely no story that can’t be classified or grouped somehow, and there’s no story that doesn’t break classifications.

Critic 1: You know, Lord Jeffrey, I rather like this Garcia Marquez fellow. But he uses those damnable fantasy elements in his writing that I simply can’t understand.

Critic 2: Don’t be a cad, Reginald. We decided that we’d invent a new genre for him to fit into, so we can like him and remain pretentious.

Critic 1: Quite so, quite so. I had forgotten because Loretta didn’t serve brandy with my kippers this morning.

In some ways, I think, “genre” has become code for “bad writing.” This is not terrible, but it is inaccurate. Bad writing happens in “postmodernist” and “modernist” writing as much as in “horror” or “romance” writing. And it’s not the fault of the “genre,” it’s the fault of the writer.* The sad thing is people who are so interpolated into the idea that genre=shit that they disdain works with any fantastic element on principle. They miss out on so much.

*So as to I hope not seem pretentious myself, I want to state openly that I have written both shitty stories that would be called genre stories and shitty stories that would not be called genre stories.

A bit of make-up, here. Whoops.
A New Way to Pay Old Debts

This is boring:

There’s a play with this title in my Renaissance Drama anthology. It’s a great title, bright and clear and sounding like some forgotten pop song from 2002. I almost want to write a story to fit it and I almost want to read the play that goes with it. But I won’t; I don’t very much think I could do something myself that might equal the title, and I rather doubt that the original playwright could either. That’s one thing Shakespeare got right usually: titles after names aren’t difficult to live up to. Titles like “A New Way to Pay Old Debts” are, and it’s a terrible thing when a story can’t live up to its title.

* * * * *

Dreams of Mice

I woke up last Wednesday early and before my alarm. The room was light with winter morning air, and I didn’t know where I was for a minute, lying in bed half awake half asleep. And I thought of the mice that live in the dorm, coming out through holes in the closets and under the radiator, scrabbling for crumbs and waiting, waiting, waiting for the first sound, first rustle of sheets in order to dart back into the dark and safety.

It was an interesting Wednesday, better than the previous one because I didn’t have to seem pretentious in Rhet, but that moment set a surreality to the day’s events that I found impossible to shake – one of those times when I find myself wondering why I drank or smoked before remembering that I haven’t. I’m not sure if I like them.

* * * * *

Sailing Through

“What I do,” said Ryan as he opened the drawer, “is go through every room in the hotel and check the Bibles.”

“Check them? What do you check the for?” I asked, leaning on the door frame, “You’re not even religious, are you?”

“If I wanted to waste time, I’d do it with something other than cleaning out the rooms,” he said. “No, I’m checking for money.”

“Why would there be money in a Bible?” I asked. If every night on the job was going to be like this one, it might not be such a drain after all.

Ryan looked at me like I’d turned into one of those space aliens from the movies. “Okay, look. Religious types come through here, and they figure they’ll do a good deed: they leave money in the Gideons, so the next person who turns to God or whatever finds an answer.”

“An answer?” I said. “How’s money an answer?”

“Hell if I know,” Ryan said, “But I’ve found about a hundred dollars worth of them since I started looking.”

Intelligence

In 1823, William Olmsted put forth (in his seminal work An Examination of the Consciousness of Man) the hypothesis that what we call “intelligence” was actually the direct result of exposure to hallucinogenic agents released into the air by a rare species of iguana plentiful in the Amazon Basin. A study conducted two years later by the University of Virginia and led by noted biologist Alexander Shanower led Olmsted to modify his hypothesis: it was not the iguanas themselves releasing the hallucinogen; rather, it was the species of fern on which the iguanas occasionally subsisted. The hallucinogen had entirely permeated the atmosphere; by the time an infant had reached the age of fourteen months, Olmsted theorized, he or she had ingested enough of the substance that the brain’s composition was fundamentally altered enough to begin generating byproducts that fit the traditional definition of intelligence. The origin of this traditional definition remained unclear until 1836, when Olmsted announced that he had discovered (through innovative experiments on the soil of Death Valley) that it was created ex firmamento by the great Hebrew thinker Maimonaides. In short, William Olmsted didn’t believe in intelligence and neither should you.

Scene and Not Scene

I was walking down Fourth Street yesterday in the rain and winter fog when I thought I saw something coming towards me. I was already disconcerted – fog and rain in the summer are manna, but in winter I’m not sure there’s anything I like less. So I’m walking, hands dug into pockets and head down as if that’ll keep the wind out, and worrying what this thing is coming closer. It’s big and dark, I know, and this is of course the part of Fourth with the trees and without the lights, so I can’t tell who it is. I think of London and Jack the Ripper, then try to laugh at myself. I’m not sure I can.

* * * * *

I never knew but now I do

The safe deposit box was always a mystery in our family. Dad kept the key on him at all times – clutched in the folds of his fist while he slept and on a chain around his neck the rest of the day.

He never told us what was in the safe deposit box, never in a million years.

They found the key around Dad’s neck yesterday when they fished him out of the East River, all bloated with water and all nibbled by minnows.

Today I opened the safe deposit box, and inside there was Dad’s old pair of glasses – the ones he wore in high school photos that always made him look like a frog.

I don’t know still what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t that. I want to make up a story for the glasses, like maybe he was a pirate and used the to spot full-loaded galleons, or maybe he was a scientist and wore them to fit in with his colleagues as they discovered a cure for AIDS-cancer-Alzheimer’s, or maybe he was Superman but in reverse. There must be something special to them, something important, something meaningful. Something we can all smile and nod at and fell better off because of. Something that makes this a story to make my life more interesting.

And I can’t stop thinking, no matter how much I try, I can’t stop thinking maybe Dad had to tell stories to himself, sometimes, maybe at the register he could secretly squeeze the key while making change and secretly smile.

And I can’t stop thinking sometimes glasses are just glasses.

In case we've forgotten: random topics, once a day, 100-ish words. Here and here

In the Devil’s territory
The Devil has no territory but that which we grant him. When we lean on our fences and look at the sky and say It takes a vengeful god to make weather like this and frown, then we give him the roads. When he walks up left leg limp and strange bump in the back of his coat and we say Hello there sir, what are you doing this day? then we give him our houses. When the Devil offers us a pen that writes by itself or a basket that always holds bread or a field that doesn’t need seeding and we say Yes sir, thank you sir, then we give him everything.

* * * * *

Cracked
Our engineer went mad today. The hull of our ship is strong enough to withstand the most intense pressure our scientists believe we could possibly encounter, but some pressure leaked in nonetheless. The hull will not warp as we mine the asteroids, it will not bend under the vacuum of space enveloping us. Jimmy bent, though, deep in the labyrinth of the ship’s works, suffocating on the machine-perfect air. He didn’t tell any of us, and any note he left was disintegrated in the blast of the coils, short-circuited when he jumped between them.

The alloys protecting us are thick, they are dependable. The only errors in this ship are the humans running it.

A return to regular updates. Looking back on those earlier entries, I'm not at all sure how Anne and I managed to come up with such random topics, much less write about them every day. Though some days definitely had better writing than others.

The class workshopped my story today.
I have classmates who know what they're talking about, which is nice. A couple people in particular were very good. "Isaiah Johnston..." was, I think, a fairly successful experiment. Now it's time to move on to something entirely different, and that's the best part.

My next story is going to be a series of conversations on a spaceship three days from a collision with the sun which will result in the deaths of the people aboard. Or else it's going to be about diamonds, which medieval alchemists believed could make a person invisible. As a last resort, it'll be a story of exploring an ancient city uncovered by a tsunami. But that's a bit too obvious right now, I think.