Category: blog

Demons

Nicola writes today about the official exorcist of the Westminster diocese… Apparently, I am essentially a “rational satanist” and am going Straight To Hell without even a milkshake or anything.

From my perspective this priest is easy to dismiss: I’m not Christian and his threats of hell have no power over me. They are literally meaningless to me. And that’s when I got interested. Because I am curious about what demons mean to people who believe in them. I ask from genuine curiosity. Would anyone be willing to speak here about your understanding of demons? What are they, how do they manifest? Do they frighten you?

Pale blue dot

After I left high school, I spent a year at Northwestern University. Going to St. Paul’s was one of the five best choices I’ve ever made, and going to Northwestern was certainly one of the five worst. Utter misery. I fled after a year. By this point, I had been away from home for five years, and I felt completely out of sync with other 18-year-olds. Dislocated, rootless. So I moved back to Tampa and lived with my mom and enrolled in the theatre department of the University of South Florida.

There are a million stories from those years. This one is about Cosmos.

Cosmos was a television show about science and the universe, presented by Carl Sagan. We loved it. We’d cook dinner and sit on the floor at the coffee table in front of the TV, eating tuna casserole or spaghetti, absolutely enraptured. And then we’d talk and talk about what we had learned.

Sagan was astonishingly good at making science personal. He was luminous with love of the universe, and passionate about stewardship of the earth. He was clear-eyed about the fact that our planet and we ourselves are both cosmically insignificant, and that we are also amazing, astonishing, capable of extraordinary things. He told us that everything here, including us, was made of star stuff. He made me remember that I did have roots — on this little blue planet on the fringes of the Milky Way, itself only one of a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars. He single-handedly restored my sense of wonder in a universe of which, it turned out, I was not the center. Good lessons in so many ways.

I can highly recommend his nonfiction works, of which there are many (The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain, and Pale Blue Dot, the list goes on). He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, which was made into a movie starring Jodie Foster.

Every single time I saw or heard or read him, it was so clear that he was stone in love with life, the universe and everything. It was all just amazing to him, and he wanted the rest of us to understand how precious it is.

April Gornik

I am an artist that values, above all, the ability of art to move me emotionally and psychically. I make art that makes me question, that derives its power from being vulnerable to interpretation, that is intuitive, that is beautiful. — April Gornik

I have been wanting for a while to write about April Gornik’s paintings. But instead I just get lost in them, and then eventually wander away from the computer feeling full of light and stillness, full of the under-the-skin hum of a storm on the horizon, full of something bubbling up from deep places.
Storm Above Sea by April Gornik, 80" x 71"

These paintings punch into me and grab tight, pull me close, closer, right into them. Me inside the painting, the painting inside me. That amazing ecstatic moment of utter connection with the art and with myself.

This is what I look for. Connection with others, connection with self. The fascinating conversation where minds vibrate on the same frequency and time disappears while people wander around in each other’s heads. The meal and the drink that are perfect for the moment, whether it’s nine courses with ancient Margaux or curry and a beer. The kind of sex that is also love and discovery. Music in my headphones, or coming alive right in front of me as the band begins to play. Dancing. Writing something that makes me feel fierce and focused and for that moment totally aligned inside, the tumblers of me all coming together and unlocking parts of myself that I have always hoped would someday be free. The heart-stopping beauty of a dragonfly against a blue sky, or storm clouds, or cool, careless wind rising against a gray autumn sky that makes me feel so full of possibility.

I look for that which will lever me open and expand me, and I find it in April Gornik’s work.
Dune Sky by April Gornik, 70" x 81"

Gornik says her work is non-narrative but yes, full of story. I think so too. The story is there the light — my god, the light. It’s in the size — immense and yet so intimate, so personal. It’s in the motion and the stillness. It’s in the structure, the particular focal points that draw me in, that make me want to find my way into the distance of it and just keep going.
Field and Flames by April Gornik, 76" x 81"

I think of these works as internal landscapes — Gornik isn’t painting a patch of planet Earth, she’s painting her own interior, and mine too. I stand on the edge of these paintings and feel as though I am stepping into myself. If I follow that green path as it begins to burn, in the forest beyond something is waiting to happen, something that already makes me feel huge inside…

Not a narrative, but a story that I understand not so much with my head as with my heart.

…visual arts are and always have been a certain kind of virtual reality. The real power of the visual arts in their capacity as virtual reality is the physicality of the experience, the somatic connection that remains between the work of art, the artist who made it, and the person looking at it. That connection is an essential part of the human experience…
— “An Artist’s Perspective on Visual Literacy” by April Gornik

Amen, sister.

See April Gornik’s work at her website. Read about it here.

And watch this excerpt from a 2007 interview in which Gornik speaks about her work and takes us into her studio as she paints.

I talk in this blog a fair amount about what it means to me to be a human being and a writer. It’s an absolute pleasure to write this little love letter to an artist who talks back to those essential parts of me.

April, thank you for permission to use your images, and thank you so much for your work. I really love it.

Knowing where to find it

On Lisa Gold’s new research blog, you’ll learn that Samuel Johnson didn’t actually say “œThe next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.” Although he should have, it’s a lot more pithy that what he did actually say… which you can read for yourself in Lisa’s post.

If you’re a writer, or a research junkie, check out the blog and get in on the ground floor — there is already a pile of useful information, with the promise of much more to come. Lisa is a research specialist with years of experience and a lot of good pointers for finding those needles in the great big haystack of the internet. Next time I don’t know where to find something, I’m betting that she will.

A Monday giggle with Eddie

I think Eddie Izzard is fantastic. He’s a great film and television actor, and a brilliant stand-up comic. He’s an English Catholic Jesuit-educated cross-dressing straight man who speaks three languages (at least) and is blindingly smart about many things. His comedy shows are full of historical references and stories, musings on language, and wry observations of pop culture, human nature and the vagaries of the universe.

An added spice for me in watching his work is that he does a thing that I learned to call “role shifting” when I studied American Sign Language. ASL grammar includes role shifting as part of storytelling. If I’m telling you in English about going to the movies with three friends, I will generally use pronouns (he said, she said) or name them (then Jane punched Susan) when I report something about them. But ASL uses role shift instead, which includes locating multiple characters in space (Jane is here, Susan is there, Tom is at the end), and taking on characteristics of whomever is speaking (he said, she said) or acting (then Jane punched Susan). It’s a really cool part of ASL grammar, and I’ve never seen a hearing performer do it like Izzard. I believe it makes the experience that much richer for everyone.

I had the great good fortune to see him live in Seattle last year, a wonderful evening which included a completely ad-libbed conversation with a moth… a funny, smart man who clearly loves his work.

I couldn’t decide between these two clips (both from his show Dressed to Kill). The first takes on historical mass-murderers like Hitler and Pol Pot and why they get away with it. Like much good comedy, it is based in hard and uncomfortable truth. Then we move to imperialism and flags. The clip ends with the famous Cake or Death sequence. The second clip is a take on British versus American films.

And because the clips are from the same show, if you watch them both, you’ll see how Izzard’s themes keep re-emerging so that the show becomes a sort of tapestry.

These are absolutely positively not safe for work!

Have a giggle. Happy Monday.

A nice day

It turns out that I do not have a single interesting thing to say today about changing paradigms or the state of publishing or the power of story, or anything else. I am just living life right now, doing things that are of great value to me but perhaps not so fascinating to the rest of the world. Yesterday I made banana bread because Nicola loves it. And then I went dancing — not a work evening, just a night to dance on the floor. There was a baseball game, and parking downtown was hopeless. Then a homeless man helped me find a parking place, and I gave him some money, and we talked to each other like people about the heat and driving, and we wished each other a good evening. And we both knew that our definitions of “good” were pretty different in our personal contexts. It was hot in the club, and they brought two enormous box fans (almost as tall as me) that blew a cool wind through us, and the women danced, danced, danced. And the men who worked at the club, who brought out the fans, tried hard not to look at the dancing women, and I wondered briefly what it is like for (presumably straight) men to be in a place where looking at women is wrong. DJ Stacey played “Relax” for me (thanks, Stacey), and as it came up I bowed to her and she smiled. I talked to a 50-year-old woman who just came out a year ago and is being brave about everything, including coming to these dances and talking to strangers and maybe even thinking about putting her essay collection out there into the world for publishers to consider… you go, Rebecca. And when it was time to leave, I went out into the street and said no, thank you, I think I’ll be fine to the nice bouncer guy who offered to escort me to my car, and I walked in the custard light of a city sunset past bars and pizza palaces and people sleeping in corners, through the smell of urine and phad thai, through the sounds of the baseball game on someone’s radio, past the watchful gaze of other bouncers in their red-roped doorways and the impassive visual sweep of a cop on patrol. And I got in my car and came home to Nicola with a great big cheeseburger and fries and a chocolate shake that I drank on the way home. And then we had a beer and I told her everything I’ve just told you, and she told me about her evening full of Anglo-Saxon rings and Indian food and the frustration of regionalized DVDs (c’mon, world, can we all just get together on the DVD format if nothing else?) and all the things she was thinking in the quiet peace of our house while I was moving inside the bass beat of music.

It was a nice day.

Low Spark

My parents read this blog, so if the rest of you will just give us a second…

Hi, Mum! Hi, Dad! (blows kisses to parents). I know you’ve heard lots of my bad girl stories from high school and beyond, but I’m not sure whether you’ve heard this one, so let’s go over here into this little corner of the internet while I tell you that I took some drugs in high school you might not know about yet. I’m sure you assumed (correctly) that I occasionally drank liquor and maybe smoked some pot. And I’ve still never snorted cocaine or taken speed or been to one of those parties with a punchbowl full of pills. But I did (okay, here it comes now) drop acid about half a dozen times or so.

Okay, whew, there’s nothing like a little public confession to really put a Saturday in a whole new light. And in front of all these other people!

Hi, everyone, thanks for waiting, I’m back now and I’m pretty sure my folks survived (blows more kisses to parents).

So, yeah, when I was a junior in high school I discovered blotter acid, courtesy of the So Cool girl next door in the dorm who decided that I needed to expand my horizons. I never had a bad time at all. It was always pretty easy for me to yank my mind back from wherever it had wandered off to, if it was necessary.

One necessary time was out in the woods one Sunday afternoon with a group of about eight or so. One of the girls began to unravel around the edges — she couldn’t remember her own name, she was convinced her identity was melting away. She didn’t know who she was. So I blinked and the shiny edges around things dimmed a bit, and I gave her a hug, and took her for a walk, and told her everything I knew about her.

And then at some point she was okay (time gets pretty funny on acid), and I was okay too, but she had, as we sometimes say in our house, harshed my mellow. So my friend Matt and I wandered back to campus and went to the cafeteria for dinner.

But we were too early (that time thing…), so we sat in the common room where, sadly for those around us, there was a piano. Matt and I commandeered it.

What’s your favorite song? he asked.

The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, I said.

Holy shit, me too! he said, eyes bright. And without further discussion, we launched into a duet of Low Spark. I played the actual piano line and he played the melody. I was hugely impressed that he knew it.

And we sang. I’m sorry, but we did.

And we played.

For 45 minutes.

Until finally, another kid came over to us and said, in the tone of someone on her last nerve, Could you guys PLEASE STOP PLAYING THAT SONG?!

So we did. But I’ve never forgotten that time in the common room on a spring afternoon. And Low Spark is still my favorite song. It still delights me, moves me, describes me. Still takes me right into myself.

So I thought maybe you’d enjoy it too. I’m off now to make banana bread for my sweetie, and I feel a long (good) way from my baby acid-queen days, but it’s nice to remember the time when I was discovering what music was for — that songs could be about me, could make me see more clearly who I am and who I’d like to be.

Happy Saturday.

And enjoy The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. (Traffic, 1971)

Kelley in the low spark days

Gone from the game

In case anyone was wondering, this is why I love her. One of the many reasons. I love that we feel the same way about what we do: this urge to tell a story so well that it takes you, heart and mind and body, so that you are inside the story and it’s inside you, and you become each other for a while. And perhaps when you put the words away, some small scrap of the story lives on inside you.

I love that Nicola speaks so fiercely of her work, and I love that I am feeling so fierce about mine these days. That I have given myself to it in a whole new way. And even so, even with all that re-found passion and the tidal wave of change it has brought into my life, I have still been struggling with a thing….

Here’s a story. Last year, when Dangerous Space was released, I had occasion to spend time in a bar with one of SF’s pre-eminent critics, someone whose conversation I’ve enjoyed over the years and whose professional skills I have always respected. This person told me they were reading the collection and considering it for review, but had noticed that most of the stories had been published previously. That’s right, I said.

Well, said the critic, that’s not much to show for 20 years, is it?

I answered politely that I hoped quality counted for more than quantity. But I was hurt, and I was rattled. And ultimately there was no review from this critic, so perhaps I gave the wrong answer.

And since then I have been chewing on this, trying to understand the helplessness and the anger and defensiveness that I felt. Who cares what this person thinks? Well, clearly I cared. And what I have come to believe is that it’s not about this person specifically — it’s about my certain knowledge that a lot of people feel this way about writing, or any other creative and/or professional pursuit. Many people will believe that the worth of my collection is diminished by the ratio of old to new work, and that my worth as a writer is best measured by my churn rate. That quality is only important in concert with quantity.

This is a game that I can never win. Many writers can — they produce good work very quickly, and all props and happiness to them. I think it’s a good thing they can do that. But why does this have to be a zero-sum game? If it’s good they do that, why must it therefore be bad that I do not?

Eleanor Roosevelt said No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. And she was right. But withdrawing that consent is not as easy as stamping one’s foot and saying Stop diminishing me right now! It is a process, and I have been processing.

And today I read Nicola’s post, and I felt the cumulative rush of all the moments of good work I have done in 20 years. Every time I wrote a sentence and felt it ring true. Every time I felt a character come a little more to life within me and on the page. Every time I’ve read the stories or the novel and bam, I’m back in worlds and characters that I love, fictions that vibrate with some of the deepest real things within me, things that I’ve managed to transmute into stories that make other people vibrate in turn.

And you know what? This is where I want to play. Consider me gone from the other fucking game. I will do my best to write everything I want to write, as best I can, and I hope I make a boatload of money. But none of that is the measure of my worth. My worth as a writer is measured by what I write. End of story.

As I’ve said recently, it’s huge for me to be a writer, and I am in charge of how I feel about that. And here’s how I feel: in 20 years, I have said things that only I can say, and other people have heard them, felt them, shared them. I have burned, and I still do. I have done well, and I still do. I have found my own way here, in my own time, and it’s been a marvel. I’m looking forward to doing better and burning harder the next 20 years. I intend, as Nicola does, to reach so far inside you that you’ll have to dig me out with a spoon.

And anyone who doesn’t think that’s much to show for 20 years can go fuck themselves.

If you were invisible

Invisibility has always been a powerful metaphor for what happens when we step outside — or are forced outside — our own group. When someone becomes “other.” It’s such a common experience of adolescence, and it lingers into adulthood. It’s everywhere in fiction and memoir, television and film. Someone is not like us anymore, or she never was, and we ostracize her and she becomes invisible to us, dead to us. She’s simply not there, even though someone who looks just like her is trying to fumble her locker open with tears in her eyes.

And we become invisible when we are not “real” in other ways. Minority people are invisible as individual human beings to the mainstream culture. Information that the systems of power don’t want revealed stays hidden. And go read How to Suppress Women’s Writing for a cogent look at all the ways to make art “disappear.”

And then there are the invisible monsters. What we can’t see frightens us — the ghost, the seemingly-supernatural serial killer, the shark in dark water. Invisibility is powerful when it’s used to hurt. One way to make a human monster in fiction is to make them literally invisible, and then watch — they get up to all kinds of evil nasty stuff, because they can. They spy. They sneak. They learn things about us that they aren’t supposed to know. We are vulnerable.

And of course invisibility can be cool, too. Harry Potter’s cloak, using the Force to pass undetected, the good guys slipping through the cracks in order to confound evil and carry the day. Because in fiction, the invisibility that is such a weapon against outsiders in the real world becomes the way the outsiders win in the end.

Invisibility is a complex notion for humans, like telepathy and magic. Lots of fodder for story.

But what if you could really be invisible?

What would you do?

I know, I know — if this were available to folks, there would be a whole new list of ways for evil to play out in the world. I’m not interested in hearing how being invisible would improve the effectiveness of murderers and rapists and creepy stalkers, okay? But I am interested in your ideas about what ordinary folks might do if they thought no one could see them. Would they run naked through the streets at lunch hour? Would they have public sex? Would they sneak out of high school past the security guard and then have to sneak back into class later and convince the teacher they were there all the time? Maybe celebrities would use it to get in and out of clubs and courthouses.

What would you do if you could be invisible? What do you think other people would do? And would it always be like it is in fiction, dehumanizing, turning us into uncaring soulless monster creepy folk? Or would there be some good?

I think invisible public sex is the most interesting personal use I can think of right now, in terms of pure fun that hurts no one (or maybe it just shows my lack of imagination, who knows?). And the creepiest personal use I can think of came to me the other night… Nicola and I were sitting on the back deck as the sun went down, drinking beer and talking about being invisible. It’s very private back there, no one can see us. And then I imagined an invisible neighbor or a stranger leaning against the deck railing, just listening to us, feeling the particular power of invasion and secret knowledge. And even though we weren’t saying anything particularly personal, I suddenly felt so vulnerable.

If we could all be invisible, would any of us ever be able to trust again that we are alone? That we are unobserved? Will we ever have a moment that we truly trust is private?

I’m good at purposely forgetting the spy satellites and the systems that monitor all our phone calls and emails and that is probably scanning this innocuous little blog post right now. Those systems are out there — I can’t touch them, I can’t control them, and they aren’t really about me. But someone standing on my deck, watching me — that’s personal.

So invisibility is a cultural weapon, as long as it’s metaphorical, emotional, psychological. When it becomes real — well, then the invisible become very powerful indeed. I have to say that it gives me pause.