The barman cleared his throat. He heard himself say, “Last orders, please.”
—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Creatures, DON’T PANIC! In this edition, two book notes.
I’ve read HHGTTG enough times that it takes me a while to start laughing at the jokes again. A lot of the best stuff has become so familiar that I just sort of nuzzle it and move on. This time I’m enjoying Marvin the Paranoid Android a lot more than I expected. And I’m noticing how much the opening feels like a Cold War/nuclear story. A bureaucratic mistake that ends all life on earth—an emphasis, throughout the book actually, on stupid and unexpected deaths—it’s that Crass lyric, you know, They’d almost paid their mortgage when the System dropped its bomb!
Anyway, I really just included this item so I can use this title for the newsletter, which pleased me greatly.
Also reading Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground: Selected poems 1966 – 1996. I’m not good at contemporary poetry, I find its compressions and abstractions hard to swallow—so opaque as to be kind of annoying. A lot of later Heaney is like this for me, but some of his stuff, especially the earlier work, is pure pleasure: feeling the thorny and clotted English language, the way it can knot and bristle and then suddenly smooth out and run Latinate when it wants to. The first thing of his I fell in love with was “Casualty”—a poem about a drinker and how his drinking gets him killed. I loved this thing before I’d ever been drunk myself, we know what we are I guess. It’s so good; it handles its rough hero so gently. I love the one about the blackberries:
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre,
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too.
and the one about the frogs:
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy-headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
and the one about digging potatoes, which is also about the gap between Heaney’s life and his father’s. If I were an English teacher whose kids had parents who’d done field work I might throw this at them. Somebody could make something out of this, and Samuel Delany’s short story “The Star-Pit,” and that Truman Capote joint from Music for Chameleons where he gets high with his housecleaner—a short syllabus on work and creation and procreation.
This is the kind of poetry I can fathom: what he says later, “Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable.” I like some of the sexy poems, “Undine” and especially “The Skunk”—that’s a real sly, teasing masterpiece of gender mysticism, the skunk as Eternal Woman. I like the rare flashes of anger like “Act of Union,” and the poems about what it feels like to live with state and anti-state violence: “neighbours on the roads at night with guns.” I don’t usually like poems about language—they often seem self-impressed—but I like the ones here where you can feel dialect or maybe even Gaelic as the submerged water welling and suffusing under the peat of English, evading the sharp shovel of the poem.
I respect the bog-body poems, “Punishment” and the other poems about ritual violence and the Northmen, but I don’t like them as much as I used to. They feel like a thing Heaney was working through on his way to something else.
Seeking Literary Agent for Weird Novel
Also, remember how I wrote that weird novel, about DC and a dreamworld where a slave’s vision reshapes society? It’s ready—I’ve started querying agents. If you are one, or have one to recommend, or have any thoughts on this subject, I can be reached at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com . This is what it is:
I Was Dreaming, I Was Dead is a completed, 185,000-word literary speculative fiction novel about two intertwining lives: Constance, born into privilege but legally stripped of human rights; and Felicia Webster, the queer Black girl who dreams about him every night.
In an alternate United States, a slave is cleaning a jeweled mammoth skeleton when he has a vision of his slaveholder’s beauty—a vision that will reshape his society. In an apartment in early 1980s Washington, DC, a little girl wakes from a strange dream about a slave and a jeweled mammoth. She will spend her life on a downwardly-mobile skid through her upwardly-mobile city, trying to understand why she’s been burdened with this dream. Only when she has lost everything does she discover what the dream was for. And that discovery shakes our society as deeply as Constance’s vision shook his.
It’s a tragicomedy, full of spectacle and mysticism. It’s my attempt to understand my hometown’s devolution from Chocolate City to Murder Capital to gentrifiers’ paradise. If I had to give a sense of the “feel” of it, I might say, “Sorry to Bother You crossed with The Little Flowers of St. Francis,” or, “Jaime Hernandez illustrates some themes from Plautus.”
If that sounds like a book you want to read, and you have some thoughts on how to make it happen, kick those thoughts my way! If you’re interested in why this novel happened or how I’m thinking about it, I wrote some things here.
icymi
I was on a podcast talking about gay Catholic stuff! My usual shtik, but I think it went well, so if you’ve wondered where my head is at lately, have a listen.
Now Playing
The Clancy Brothers, “Whack Fol the Diddle.” Heaney’s stuff might better fit the humiliated and complicit “Come Out Ye Black and Tans” but I like this song too.
Aliens destroying the earth via Public Domain Vectors, and used under a Creative Commons license.