NaNoWriMo 2006 success.

Madison.

National Novel Writing Month is over. As of last night. For me. I even have the purple bar to prove it.

I ran into a minor snag in this year's novel, the sort of thing I'd never had trouble with before: the novel ended early.¹ Previous efforts, with the exception of 2004,² were sprawling, endless messes that were even less resolved at the end of the month than they were when I'd started. It may sound interesting, but there's a deadening quality to it, an inertia to the whole story that's maddeningly difficult to overcome after the inevitable December writing rest. I haven't bothered to re-read the earlier semi-novels, let alone make any real effort at continuing from where I left off. I should, just to clip out the good bits, but...

Finding the worthwhile parts requires slogging, hip-deep or worse, through the rest of it. And there's a lot of the rest of it. Since I do it all on the typewriter, it's rife with spelling errors. As a stickler for spelling, it's tough to read, but when my fingers hit two keys in the wrong order,³ I just decide to live with it. Only the most gut-wrenching mistakes end up covered in a series of quickly-tapped xs.

Last year's novel took until midway through the fourth line before I hit a typo. This year, it's the eighth word.

That same spelling-error-retaining quality also prevents me from making use of a popular NaNoWriMo padding technique: going back to a part you've previously written and expanding upon it. Add some extra description or dialogue, or even an entirely new chapter. I can't do that. What's written is written, nearly set in stone, if you will. So, when the novel ended, and I counted up the last of the words, I needed to do something new.

I wrote a short story. It has nothing to do with the novel. It's its own, entirely self-contained entity, eight pages of refreshing change.

This year's novel is titled "Red Hawk Cemetery", changed from the original working title of "Ghost Town". It's a Western horror story, about a group of train robbers on the run from bounty hunters who end up in an isolated village in the Rockies. They all end up trapped in this halfway-abandoned village, hunted by grave-robbing monsters that lurk in the shadows. You know, pretty regular stuff. Guys try resolving violence with more violence, and end up done in by it. Pretty brutally, at that, but, hey, it's horror.

The short story, the extra words, is titled "Tin Robot". It's just a little story, not much more than a nugget of an idea, about a robot who moves in next door to a young couple. A big, boxy robot named, appropriately enough, Tin Robot.

Sharon commented that I must really like robots.⁴ I don't know that I do. I'm really more fascinated by them, as a handy symbol of technological dependence and omnipresence. Think Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick or Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's film adaptation. Or even better, find a copy of Dick's "The Electric Ant". It's a bizarre and wonderful short story about a man who discovers he's a robot and starts experimenting with himself. By monkeying with the input tape that controls his senses - this was back during computer punch-card days - he ends up warping (and destroying) reality.

I do know that I really like typewriters. One downside of using mine all month long is that I end up really confused about the locations of certain keys.⁵ Curious how mine stacks up against your regular keyboard layout? Here it is:



* * * * *

¹48,246 words, to be precise.

²I only made it about halfway that year, to somewhere just over 25,000 words.

³But not too close together, so that they get stuck. Sometimes, usually when I'm trying to type by, the force of the y key colliding with the returning b creates a ghost of a b beside the original. It's happened so many times that I'm starting to like it.

⁴The previous two novels both featured robots. 2004 had little robots as the gimmicky, halfway-pointless technology that consumer culture surrounds itself with, the equivalent of mobile phones and iPods; the main character's job was repairing them when they broke down. 2005's main character was a robot himself, but only realized this after a messy motorcycle crash. With no known precedent for it - no more robots around than we're used to today - he becomes obsessed, to the point of cutting himself open to study his robot-ness further.

⁵The same thing happens with foreign computer keyboards, when you're traveling. If you're gone for a long enough stint, you get the fun of being confused again when you travel home.

NaNoWriMo wordcount.

Madison.

Ah, NaNoWriMo. That marginally sane November writing extravaganza that's going to keep me from posting much to this blog. For those who're interested, you can watch my progress on this little wordcounting widget:



Keep in mind that I'm writing this year's novel - as I did for the last two years - on my traveling typewriter. (Yes, that's a picture of my typewriter to the right.) That means that I count my words one by one, by hand with a red pen. I'm not always able to update the wordcount on the website on a regular basis, so the wordcount may jump forward in big chunks.

So far, so good.

A movie not recommended for that first date.

Madison.

It's nearly November - meaning the start of NaNoWriMo is nigh - and I'm struggling to select a concept. I'd come up with four ideas around mid-October, with the intention of fleshing them out so that I could select one to pursue. It's slower going than expected. I've eliminated two of the initial four options, leaving me to choose between a western-inflected horror story and a Cronenbergian¹ story about people seeking thrills through amateur surgery and self-mutilation.

I'm leaning toward the western, because it lends itself to plugging in simple cliches when necessary. The second story, in order to keep it from being thoroughly unreadable dreck, needs some serious thought and, potentially, time-intensive research. NaNoWriMo doesn't offer that sort of time luxury. That said, the half-formed parts that've been dancing in my head for some time are really the most fascinating of all of the noveling options. Perhaps it's best that I give them a more serious opportunity at a later date.

Alone for the weekend, and without much to fill my schedule, I decided to rent some movies and stay home.² I hadn't really thought too much about it ahead of time, except that I knew I wanted to watch at least one disturbing film. Just about all of the good³ horror films were out - Night of the Living Dead was high on my list - as expected. I ended up with Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa, Fistful of Dollars by Sergio Leone (a Spaghetti Western remake of Kurosawa's film), and Crash by David Cronenberg⁴. Without intending to, I had selected three films that could be quite influential on the upcoming novel.

Also: auteur central.

Yojimbo looks like a Western⁵ in samurai togs; Kurosawa readily expressed the influence John Ford, among others, had on his films. The plot, in brief: Sanjuro, a ronin played by Toshiro Mifune, arrives in a small village controlled by two competing gangs who gamble and fight constantly. The only honest man who can make a living is the cooper who builds coffins. Sanjuro plays both gangs against each other in an escalating series of deadly battles. Full of action, beautifully composed shots - as though one would expect anything else from a Kurosawa film - and humor, it's about as free of complicated morality as any Kurosawa film could ever be. Basically, it's a well-made popcorn film. Note: most of what we now consider cliches, like the wise-cracking action hero in Yojimbo, or pretty much everything about Seven Samurai, was clever and original to Kurosawa's films. (Or else archetypes.)

Sergio Leone, another great director with a love for all things Americana, remade Yojimbo as one of his antihero-based Westerns. The US marketing sold this film - along with For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly - as one about "The Man With No Name", played by Clint Eastwood. He has a name, actually. And is a different character - though he dresses the same, and has many of the same characteristics - in each of the three films. First Joe, then Monco, then Blondie, even though he's got mid-range brown hair. Beats me.

The camera angles - including the juxtapositions of wide-angle landscapes with extreme close-ups - in Fistful of Dollars are pure Leone. Ennio Morricone⁶ did the score, which was his first time working with Leone, and it's fun, even though it's not as memorable⁷ as the themes to The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in The West. As usual, Leone picked actors with very distinctive features; you'd never expect to see faces like those in this movie working in Hollywood today. He also, like in all of his films, had his actors deliver their lines in their native language, then dubbed over it as necessary for different releases. It can make following the dialogue a bit difficult at times, but I've got to believe he did that to get better performances from actors selected, in some cases, more for their wrinkled, sun-toughened looks than their dramatic chops. If nothing else, the films of Sergio Leone can be appreciated purely for their style, long before Quentin Tarantino arrived on the scene.⁸

Crash has nothing to do with those films. Okay, there's a brief moment where we see a videotape of a pornographic film titled A Fistful of Bimbos on the floor of James Ballard's car, but that's just Cronenberg humor.⁹

Promotional posters for the film prominently featured the phrase "sex and car crashes" from a critic's review, and that covers the plot territory pretty well. In short, a car crash draws a man suffering from a sort of sexual burnout into an underground group that fetishizes and recreates famous car crashes. James Ballard and his wife, Catherine, can't drum up the interest for sex anymore without telling each other about their extramarital affairs. After the crash, James and Dr. Helen Remington - the other driver, whose husband is killed in the accident - discover Vaughan, the mastermind of the car crash recreators and a man deeply obsessed with celebrities, cars, and death. Also sex: all of this car crashing is very sexually charged, but filmed in such a way - a cool, metallic color palette; an aloofness from the characters that borders on clinical detachment; Howard Shore's creepy score¹⁰; and it's a sexual fetish that's just too far out there to be real - that it's like pornography that's arousing intellectually, but not physically. If you don't feel weirdly conflicted by that while watching, it's probably because you're having a hard time actually looking at the screen. (Or you're focusing on exposed flesh while ignoring the story itself.)

That wouldn't be unusual. Crash was given an NC-17 rating, and it's definitely not the sort of film you'd want to bring your kids to.¹¹ Among other things, it includes: realistic (i.e., not Hollywood-type stylized) car crashes, complete with steady shots of the bloody aftermath; full frontal nudity; and sex - lots of it - both heterosexual and homosexual. And, unlike just about every other film ever made,¹² the sex scenes are integral both to the narrative and to the flow of the film. They're not simply separate scenes that act as a pause or break in the story arc; they're necessary and need to be in the film in their entirety, graphic sexuality and all. And, boy, are they not a turn-on.

I think this film requires that you bring a lot to it; as a result, reviews cover a wide range of emotional ground. You can't watch it without being affected by your own visceral¹³ response, and the film is so detached from its characters that you need to bring some of your own baggage along to start interpreting. At least, that's what I did. Granted, I need some serious digestion time before I can get around to writing up my own impressions of the film, but I can say that I think I actually liked it. I definitely respect it, and would recommend it to anyone not immediately turned off by the premise.

Just don't expect it to go over real well in a crowd.

* * * * *

¹Cronenbergesque? Anyhow, the idea's based on what little I know of David Cronenberg's abandoned script, Painkillers, as well as his film of J.G. Ballard's novel, Crash.

²The riot-inducing Madison Halloween festivities are another good reason to lounge on the couch. I'm guessing that the "tickets-only" restrictions kept the shenanigans to a minimum this year, but it's still not my scene.

³Meaning straight-up horror. Nothing ironic, regardless of quality.

⁴Not the more recent movie that used the same name, which is officially not cool. Really, couldn't they come up with an original name? It's one thing to title a film like an un- or tangentially-related book/song/whatever, but swiping it from another movie? And one that took a Special Jury Prize at Cannes? Cheap.

⁵It was based on a detective novel - Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammet - which is a genre equally as rooted in American individualism, machismo, and the notion that you don't really need to follow up on the bloody aftermath of gunfights.

⁶I just noticed, next to Monday's New York Times crossword puzzle, a brief Arts article noting that Morricone will be directing his first American concert at Radio City Music Hall in February. The program is drawn from his film scores, and features a 200-piece orchestra and choir. So, who'd they get to play the mouth harp?

⁷As in the way Morricone's best stuff just burrows deep into your brain and refuses to leave.

⁸Tarantino has noted Sergio Leone as a strong influence on his films, and it shows, particularly in Kill Bill.

⁹Yes, Cronenberg's full of humor. It's what prevents his films from being unwatchably disturbing.

¹⁰This isn't about Howard Shore, but it occurs to me now. Shore has written the score for just about all of Cronenberg's films; the key exception is The Dead Zone, for which he was unavailable due to other work. Instead, Cronenberg hired Michael Kamen. While writing the piano score in his London apartment, Kamen's neighbors begged him to stop playing it because it was giving them nightmares.

¹¹I say this because, when seeing Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, a zombie film with no shortage of graphic violence, Sharon and I watched with surprise as a young mother came into the theater with her two children, the older of whom couldn't have been more than five or six.

¹²Excepting pornography, of course, which is about sex for the sake of sex. Roger Ebert described Crash as "anything but pornographic" and "a dissection of the mechanics of pornography".

¹³Matthew Dessem makes a good point about the use of the term "visceral" in his review of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò o le 120 Giornate di Sodoma. His blog, The Criterion Contraption, an attempt to review the Criterion Collection DVD releases in spine number order, is worth reading if you're into, well, the sorts of films that Criterion likes to release. Salò is the sort of film that I'd like to have seen; I'm not sure I'd actually like to see it. (My apologies to Mark Twain.)

NaNoWriMo 2006 signups begin.

Madison.

It's October. Though that certainly means a number of things: market produce undergoes a significant shift after the first frosts; blankets move from the closet to the foot of the bed; leaves begin to change colors, reds and golds that look brilliant in the evening sun. It also signals the impending arrival of National Novel Writing Month¹, the month-long writing fest that takes place every November.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, a few basics:

• NaNoWriMo takes place every November. This is its eighth year, and an estimated 75,000 people are expecteed to take part. This is in contrast to the mere 21 participants in 1999's inaugural event.
  
  
• The goal is to write a novel - defined as a fictional work of 50,000 words or more - during the 30 days of November. All of the actual writing has to take place in November, but associated activities, such as research, writing outlines, etc., are allowed at any point. Since just about everyone² writes their novel on a computer, the NaNoWriMo website takes care of the official wordcount verification.
  
  
• There is no prize for winning. Sure, you get a downloadable winner's certificate, an icon you can put on your website, and a purple wordcount status bar on the NaNoWriMo site, but the primary reason to attempt it is to succeed at a personal goal. Lying about it and fooling a word-counting robot aren't difficult to do, but that's like cheating at solitaire.
  
  
• This is a definite quantity-over-quality experience. In my experience, wooden characters, hackneyed story elements, horrendous spelling and grammatical errors, and abandoned plot threads are par for the course. Avoiding one's inner editor and writing for writing's sake is a critical key to success. Though I'm usually happy to lend out my manuscript after the event, I'm always sure to point out that it's awful. It's truly, truly awful, and that's an unavoidable side effect of the compressed time frame.
  
  That said, I can happily say that, of the past three times I've attempted this, I've succeeded twice. They may be pure schlock and rather incomplete, but I've written two novels.
  
  
• So many people attempt this that local groups have sprung up all over the world³, facilitated by the NaNoWriMo website forums. In addition to online and local support from fellow participants, there are forums devoted to tapping the vast collective brain of the WriMo community, like the 'Character and Plot Realism Q&A', which is where you can be sure that someone knows the answer to your obscure question⁴. Or can at least make up an answer convincing enough to keep you from having to do any actual research.
  
  
• It's both maddeningly difficult and giddily fun, sort of like a runner's high. For those willing to give it a shot, I wholeheartedly recommend No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, the man whose marginally crackpot idea this was in the first place.

As for what I'll be writing this year, I haven't a clue. Every year, I end up batting around a series of half-formed ideas that get brushed aside once November arrives. Previous years' efforts have included: robots; car crashes; magical storytelling; road trips; hired assassins; and nattily-dressed terrorists. Among other things.

This year could have anything: zombies and post-apocalyptic wastelands; western-style gunfights and train robberies; space alien invasions; or awkward family holidays. Perhaps all of them. I have no idea what direction the novel will end up taking. I only know that it'll be hastily written, unashamedly formulaic, and both hilarious and cringe-worthy by the end.

I'm okay with that. For those who are also okay with that, I can only ask that you give it a shot.

* * * * *

¹NaNoWriMo, for short; NaNo, for shorter. Those participating are called WriMos. Yes, I'm aware that it doesn't make perfect sense, but it works well enough.

²I'm one of the few not writing on a computer. I use my Olivetti traveling typewriter, which, despite its various problems, is my preferred fiction-writing tool.

³Yes, everyone at NaNoWriMo knows about the "National" thing and the vast array of international participants. It just rolls off the tongue so much better that way, in both its full and truncated forms.

⁴Such as: Could a chimpanzee drive a go-kart? What about an orangutan? Let's say it were running on biodiesel; would the smell of french fries be a serious impairment to the chimpanzee/orangutan's driving abilities?

On gin and laudanum.

Madison.

I'm ever so cheered to see folks rooting for the gin martini. There's even a point - albeit small - scored for vermouth. Then again, I spent much of college drinking sweet vermouth, on the rocks with a twist¹, as an after-dinner drink. Dry vermouth's a bit much for regular drinking, but if you don't like it, don't order a martini. Ask for gin or vodka, straight-up. Most bartenders don't care what sort of glass you want it in, and it's not like they're keeping tabs on the number of olives left in the jar.

Sometimes I feel like a college indie kid again. Yes, I want good gin to be popular enough that I can be assured of finding it in liquor stores and bars, but I don't want it to be so popular that I feel silly ordering it. Then again, I'm fully creeped out by the notion of sugary-sweet "martinis," those of the chocolate, or raspberry, or whatever persuasion. Couldn't they have latched onto some moniker that wasn't something I genuinely like?

Oh, I'll just get it out of my system. As far as I'm concerned, there should be several ground rules for the martini:

• A martini requires gin. If it's made with vodka, it's a vodka martini. You can't make a margarita with rum or vodka or bourbon, at least not without pointing that out ahead of time.
  
  
• A martini requires a significant portion of vermouth. Dry, preferably one-sixth to one-quarter, so you can actually taste it. This may depend on your preferred gin and vermouth.
  
  
• The only sweet drink you can call a martini is a sweet martini, which swaps out the dry vermouth for sweet. Garnish with a strip of orange peel rather than an olive. Still gotta be gin.
  
  
• Anything hewing close to the martini recipe - gin + dry vermouth - can be called a martini, but only when its name spells out the modification. For example, a dirty martini gets a little olive brine added in, if that's your thing.
  
  
• The Gibson is cool enough to have its own, un-messed-with name. You may not fiddle with the Gibson as you would the martini. Something has to be preserved.

But enough about booze. What's more exciting? Opium!

Yeah, opium. As in, that very pretty flower that can get you stoned out of your mind if properly prepared. You can grow this at home, assuming you don't know that you can use it to make illicit drugs. If you do know, growing it is illegal. If you just think they're nice flowers - and they really are - you're probably okay.

Sound crazy? Take the time to read Michael Pollan's 1997 article on the subject. It's all sorts of maddening.

The high points, as I recall them:

• The seeds of "opium poppies" - primarily Papaver somniferum, among other poppy species - are readily available from gardening catalogs. Also from the spice section of your average grocery store. Perhaps on bagels, but I'd expect they might have trouble germinating after being baked.
  
  
• Seeds: legal. Plant: possibly legal, possibly not, depending on how many you have, how much you know, and who's asking. Seedpod sap and other extracts: all sorts of illegal.
  
  
• You want to buy some really out-there books? Until recently, the go-to place was Loompanics Unlimited. If no one else was willing to publish your book on, well, just about anything, Loompanics was the publisher of choice.
  
  
• Opium tea is a standard thing at certain Middle Eastern funerals². Marijuana is also perfectly acceptable in many cultures in that part of the world. Alcohol, though... not a chance. I guess you pick your poison.³
  
  
• Despite what some would have you believe, it's entirely possible to cultivate poppies in places other than southeast Asia. You can grow them here in Wisconsin, although I'd suppose illicit drug manufacture would require a suspiciously large flower garden.
  
  
• The Bill of Rights doesn't seem to apply in drug cases. You know, that whole "due process" thing? Get caught doing something illegal and drug-related in your home, and the authorities can seize your house, land, etc., then sell or use them as they see fit. Regardless of whether or not you're ultimately convicted of any crime. If you rent, you can be evicted, again, without actually being found guilty of a crime. Or even charged. Fun, huh?
  
  
• Opium sap is fiercely bitter. Add this one to the list of consumables that it's hard to imagine anyone discovering in the first place.⁴
  
  
• Rational behavior does not seem to come naturally to the drug enforcement authorities in this country. Or to drug-related taboos in just about any culture, anywhere, anytime. I quote Pollan, because it's hard to paraphrase his summary:
  

  The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative. The taxonomy on behalf of which this war is being fought would be difficult to explain to an extraterrestrial, or even a farmer like Matyas. Is it the quality of addictiveness that renders a substance illicit? Not in the case of tobacco, which I am free to grow in this garden. Curiously, the current campaign against tobacco dwells less on cigarettes' addictiveness than on their threat to our health. So is it toxicity that renders a substance a public menace? Well, my garden is full of plants—datura and euphorbia, castor beans, and even the stems of my rhubarb—that would sicken and possibly kill me if I ingested them, but the government trusts me to be careful. Is it, then, the prospect of pleasure—of "recreational use"—that puts a substance beyond the pale? Not in the case of alcohol: I can legally produce wine or hard cider or beer from my garden for my personal use (though there are regulations governing its distribution to others). So could it be a drug's "mind-altering" properties that make it evil? Certainly not in the case of Prozac, a drug that, much like opium, mimics chemical compounds manufactured in the brain.

• My favorite nugget of ironic humor: many of the hatchet-wielding hardliners of the Women's Christian Temperance Union were said to unwind at the end of a long day with their "women's tonics." Primary ingredient: laudanum, also known as tincture of opium. An alcoholic extract of the opium poppy. I find that all sorts of funny.

Suffice to say, I probably won't be growing poppies anytime soon.

Incidentally, my personal favorite high is from chillis. Eating enough seriously spicy food will get you feeling very, very good, presumably from all the endorphins the brain's pumping out to deal with the onslaught of capsaicin.⁵ Just thought I'd share.

* * * * *

¹Yeah, the drink from Groundhog Day. Benefits for college students of legal drinking age: is perfectly drinkable at low prices, unlike wine; keeps indefinitely^a and is ready-to-drink at room temperature, unlike beer; won't get you too intoxicated to do something useful, should you feel like it, unlike spirits^b.

^aRelatively, anyways. It's not like we were saving this for special occasions.

^bScotch is lovely and all, but I consider my evening effectively complete by the time I sit down with a glass.

²Opiates are powerful painkillers, true, but they also help eliminate depression. Though I can't substantiate it, I've heard that morphine works, not by reducing pain, but by making you no longer care. If the pain exists, but you're completely non-plussed about it, you might as well not have any.

Then again, you could have the great fun of withdrawal in your future. Whee!

³Or, rather, your culture and associated law-enforcement bodies pick it for you.

⁴Also: coffee, chocolate, huitlacoche, other delicious mushrooms that look a lot like poisonous ones, and so on.

⁵The accompanying beer to mediate the burn doesn't hurt.

Books I should have read years ago. Part One.

Madison.

I've been reading a lot of nonfiction lately. A fair bit of it food-related, which isn't surprising. I think I'm ready to dive back into fiction for a change, though; in some ways, it's decidedly less disturbing.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Krakauer's first-person account of the 1996 disaster atop Mount Everest. Aside from the general terrors accompanying the trip - frostbite, seracs¹, all manner of hypoxia-induced problems - there's the storm that strands several mountaineers on top of the world. Which, as one might imagine, is generally fatal. One man - Beck Weathers - manages to survive, long after being thought dead, though not without horrific frostbite and multiple amputations. Another, mountaineering guide Rob Hall, slowly freezes to death, in radio contact but beyond rescue, on the very top of the mountain. It takes more than a full day, and it's gut-wrenching to read.

What disturbs me the most isn't any of this, perhaps because I harbor no visions of dragging myself to Everest's peak. What gets me is the unreliability of Krakauer's account, a fact he is more than careful to point out. He makes this a central focus of the book, telling his story and later dissecting it with the actual facts. In the instance with the deepest ramifications, he confuses two hikers - two men hardly alike in any way - and gives rise to a confusing explanation as to how one died atop the mountain. Other clues seem to back it up, but fall apart under closer inspection. It isn't until much later that the mistake is realized, through a chance comment in conversation, and Krakauer is left to try to make amends.

He doesn't succeed, not entirely. His writings - he's a journalist, and his expedition was funded in exchange for his story - make enemies. The truth, the actual events on the mountaintop, sits beyond reach, and speculation takes the place of the memories of the dead. At times, it swerves closer to fiction, as the line between memory and imagination becomes blurred. Fuzzy. Perforated.

Not being a mountaineer, it's hard to take too much from Krakauer's account, but I suspect the same is true for climbers, too. It's a snapshot, slightly out of focus, of a brief period when nature overwhelmed a group of alpinists, some well-prepared, some not. Bad luck played a key factor, as did a growing cascade of decisions that seem poor in retrospect. In context, especially given the deleterious effects of extremely high altitude, it seems like tragic misfortune. Our understanding, as fragmented as it is, serves to remind us of our own individual unreliability. It's not particularly heartening, but a worthwhile consideration.

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
Banned in Illinois! In some rationality-challenged suburban Chicago school district, at least, as I overheard on WBEZ, Chicago's NPR station, one morning. Why? Because it discusses marijuana.² Also plant sex. Kinky, kinky plant sex.

Of course, being banned might get more kids to read it, and that's not a bad thing.³ It's an excellent book, a study of how plants - four in particular - have used us to further their evolution and range about the planet. Pollan selects these four based on their gratification of certain human desires, in much the same way that many flowering plants gratify honeybees (or bumblebees, who have a slightly different ideal of beauty).

Those desires - sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control - have some excellent corresponding examples: apple, tulip, marijuana and potato. And our current understanding of what each of those is - the notion of the apple that accompanies the word - is because of what humans have done to help the plants evolve. A wild apple growing in the Kazakh mountains, it seems, isn't the sort of thing you'd want to put in your mouth. The plant we imagine to be the wild precursor to the potato isn't even edible.

All of this is fascinating enough, but Pollan approaches from what, at first, seems a bizarre angle: this plant evolution is not a product of our mastery of agriculture. Rather, the plants have been using us to further their own ends. We're honeybees, as far as they're concerned, animals enthusiastically spreading their genes further than they could alone. Agriculture may not be man dominating nature; it may be the grasses and their ingenious plan to dominate the trees, using us a tool in that effort.

Of course, he doesn't say it quite like that. Not without qualifiers. There's no intelligent, focused effort by corn and soybeans to dominate the North American continent, but their ability to gratify our needs has pushed them there. By selecting for preferred traits, and by making room for these plants, we've really helped them be everywhere. If someone hadn't noticed the proto-tulip in what is modern-day Turkey, it would still be a nearly unremarkable wildflower.

In addition to this fascinating discussion of our influence on plants, he weaves in all sorts of information about the lengths we'll go to in order to get what we want:

• Stretched to its limits, the apple is beginning to lose the battle against pests and disease. Being an example of extreme heterozygosity - the offspring being different from the parents - apples can't be directly seeded. Not unless you want an orchard of mostly inedible apples, with every tree unique. Every once in a while this produces something great, and those trees are continually grafted to new rootstocks to maintain that fruit.
  
  Every Granny Smith apple comes from a grafting of the one original Granny Smith tree in Australia. Or from a grafting of a grafting, etc. Plant those seeds, and the one thing you won't get is another Granny Smith tree.
  
  The most significant downside of this is that while we've been propagating clones, the various apple pests have been evolving their way around the plant's natural defenses. When plants can continue to evolve, it becomes a back-and-forth dance between competing species. When one can't evolve, it's just waiting to get clobbered. Apples are at that point. Only increasing quantities of chemical pesticides are able to hold back devastation, and the pests are evolving past those.
  
  One of these days, not far off, the Golden Delicious may just be a memory - just like the Black Gilliflower or the Hay's Winter Wine.
  
  
• Tulips, in Holland in the mid-1630s, drove humans to near insanity. Bulbs, and eventually pieces of paper promising futures in tulip bulbs, nearly destroyed the Dutch economy. Tulipomania. If you were lucky enough to have a very special tulip "break," you could trade a single bulb for an absolute fortune.
  
  Though none of these amazing flowers still exist, the Dutch commissioned paintings of flowers they couldn't afford, so we can see some examples. The most expensive tulip ever was the Semper Augustus, and it's indeed a very pretty flower. Worth trading your house for? It seems that some thought so.
  
  Mania, indeed.
  
  
• Oh, marijuana. What had been a fairly gentle drug in the sixties is now far more powerful. While it's still not anything particularly dangerous - since it doesn't affect the brainstem, the control center for basic life functions like heartbeats, you can't overdose - it's definitely not the same drug. That extra horsepower is due in no small part to the war on drugs, which has accelerated the development of cannabis along the same sort of lines that the apple took over thousands of years.
  
  But in a few decades.
  
  Where the apple was selected for sweetness - for eating and cider - and enjoyed, year after year, marijuana couldn't do that. Plant a big ol' garden of illegal plants, and the authorities'll put an end to that, right quick. Plus, it's a tropical plant, which makes growing it in most of the US and Europe less than ideal. For the plant, remember - this is a book from the plant's perspective. So it needed to adapt to grow faster, to be more potent, and to be smaller. Those were the human desires, and the plant rose to meet those challenges.
  
  What's very interesting is how Pollan points out that all human societies have had plant-derived intoxicants. Well, except the Eskimos, but that's only because of the complete lack of plants. Along with intoxicants come taboos, applied with an odd sort of complicated and inconsistent logic. And it's those taboos that have allowed the marijuana flower - ugly beast that it is - to end up worth more than its weight in gold.
  
  
• Monsanto, in its - in my opinion, dangerously misguided - quest to dominate the plant world through poison production and genetic engineering, has combined the two efforts. The NewLeaf⁴ potato, for example, produces its own Bt toxin - a poison to the Colorado potato beetle that's normally produced by a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis. So now, it seems, agribusiness monoculture operations are no longer satisfied by planting acres and acres genetically identical potatoes waiting for the blight to come along. They're upping the ante and helping pests evolve an immunity to one of the organic farmer's best last-ditch pest control tools.
  
  Note that any good organic farmer doesn't really have to use Bt very often. Just when an infestation is getting out of hand. But it's really useful, and there's no organic backup. When Monsanto inadvertently breeds a superbeetle, the options get pretty limited.
  
  The potato, of course, is all about control. We feel like we're completely in charge, until something - like the Irish potato blight - pulls the rug out from under us. Plant a monoculture across an entire country, and you're just waiting for disaster. The pests are busy evolving, and if our plants aren't doing the same, they're bound to lose out.

Other books I'd meant to get to, but are just going to have to wait:
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

* * * * *

¹Teetering columns of glacial ice, "some as large as office buildings," as Krakauer puts it. The climbers need to weave through a massive labyrinth of these ice spires, any of which could topple at any time. And, in the process of acclimatizing to the altitude, the climbers go back and forth through this section of the Khumbu Icefall over and over.

²Yes, the conservative Christian fundies are behind this. Has the woman spearheading this latest effort at ideological censorship actually read the book? Or any of the others on the list she's demanding be banned? Of course not! (Silly question.) She googled it. Anything to do with sex, drugs or anything else controversial, it seems, must be eliminated. Open, educated discussion and critical thinking, apparently, aren't the sort of things we should be teaching kids.

I'm hardly the first to mention this fact: high school kids are already having sex and doing drugs. Nobody's going to read Pollan's discussion of the evolution of marijuana over the past forty years and think, "Hey, I should start smoking weed!"

³I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. Not that I want to see The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn banned, or Slaughterhouse-Five, but it does get some folks reading a little more critically, with more interest.

⁴They no longer produce this little monstrosity, thankfully. What's replaced it, though, I don't know. Chances are that I don't like that, either.

Red Cars.

Madison.

I can't recall what, exactly, I was looking for when I stumbled across a brief article about David Cronenberg in the Toronto Star. But there it is.

I usually ignore films that are merely "announced", since they're unlikely to ever make it to the screen¹, so I wasn't aware of Painkillers². Should it ever be made, I'd be very interested to check it out. Not crossing my fingers, though. As engaging as his science fiction (and whatever genre Naked Lunch falls into) films are, it no longer appears to be a necessary element for him to be able to make a film, and I'm thrilled that his less fantastical work is gaining more mainstream approval. That way, I stand a reasonable chance of catching it in the theaters. As near as I can tell, it doesn't appear to have softened his edge.

If nothing else, without the buffer of unreal sci-fi elements, the films become even more disturbing.

I'm also fascinated by Cronenberg's book, Red Cars. Though I've never been remotely interested in auto racing, since it seems synonymous with NASCAR. And I can't imagine why anyone would want to sit and watch cars drive around a track all day long. Drag racing? Yes, I can see the excitement. Auto racing on actual roads, with trees and mountains and scenery? Yes, I can see where that'd be neat, like watching a marathon or a bike race. But hours and hours around a track?

Not that I'm a huge fan of brightly-colored corporate sponsorship, either.

And, like ice fishing: if you're just doing it because it's a way to hang out and drink alarming quantities of beer, wouldn't you be more comfortable at home? Or barbecuing in a park? At least, if you're ice fishing, you could conceivably come home with something for dinner.

Red Cars, though, is from back in the day when people had heard of the Mille Miglia³. And it (being a script, in addition to a coffee table book) is also really about the personal conflicts between the racers, the car owners, their lovers, etc. Like Cronenberg's fiction, but deeply rooted in fact. Due to the Ferrari family's opposition, it's unlikely to be made into a film, but at least the book exists.

Too bad there're only a thousand of 'em, and they're (I'm guessing) unbelievably expensive. You need to contact the publisher directly, and I can only assume that means it's well out of my price range. Oh, well.

* * * * *

Entirely unrelated, but... funniest spam email name yet: Coincides Q. Dizziness.

* * * * *

¹Exception: Harold Ramis has announced he'll direct a film starring Owen Wilson. There're no guarantees it'll be great, but I have to believe it'll be worth the price of a movie ticket. No idea about any details, but I'm intrigued.

²Cronenberg wrote the script himself. As near as I can determine, it's about a detective pursuing people who get painful surgery for their own perverse pleasure.

³Means "thousand miles". The original race was declared over in 1957, but has been resurrected for antique racing cars buffs. It's a thousand-mile auto race through Italy, a lot like the Tour de France with cars. Cars have to be authentic from 1927-1957, with all original parts. The race itself is broken into several stages, over three days, but the actual record, in the 1955 race, was about ten hours. Stirling Moss, a British racer, drove across Italy for ten hours at an average speed of a hundred miles per hour. Now that's auto racing.

On The Road.

Chicago.

Since Sharon's using her Spring Break to visit her folks back in Downingtown, I took the opportunity to drive down to Chicago while I had the available daylight. With a bunch of storms moving through, the day was flat and gray. Not ideal driving weather, but far better than two and a half hours of glaring headlights. With warm days of late, the snow's melted away to reveal the earth ready to awaken from winter. Farmers' fields, mostly contours of cornstalk stubs, and pockets of woods slowly give way to suburbs and office parks as the highway slides closer to Chicago, at roughly the same rate that traffic increases. By the time you can't afford to take your eyes off the road, there isn't much worth looking at anymore.

Not that the Interstate system lends itself to scenic drives - certainly not if you're behind the wheel - but I've come to like the gentle hills and farmland of southern Wisconsin. Illinois, being essentially flat, seems so much less interesting, not much different than the haul across Indiana. I've heard horror stories about Kansas, describing it as like eight or more hours of brain death. These weren't Kansans telling me this, of course, so I'm sure there's a little inherent bias. Can't say I'm anxious to find out for myself, though.

Living in southern Wisconsin, and working in an architectural field, in Chicago, I end up hearing mention of Frank Lloyd Wright from time to time. I'd imagine he's probably the most recognized architect, at least in this country, but his architectural designs are the second thing that occurs to me on hearing his name. What really fascinates me about him is his annual cross-country drives from Taliesin, in southern Wisconsin, to Taliesin West, in southern Arizona. I'm sure that this was a typical sort of activity for the well-to-do, back before the automobile was an American crutch, but Wright's the only one I know any details of.

Even today, with multi-lane superhighways, with speed limits of 65 mph and up, it's a hell of a long drive. Must've taken him days, weaving through the small towns, struggling over the Rockies, moving at, what? 35 mph, maybe? Something that seems interminably slow to us, I'm sure. The scenery must have been phenomenal, though, as the world shifted from northern Midwest autumn to the semi-arid winter of the Southwest. An experience not unlike what Robert Pirsig describes in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, winding along the back roads of the Dakotas and Montana on a motorcycle. Watching the red-winged blackbirds. Feeling so insignificant, so happily lost beneath the Big Sky.

Bill Bryson did something like that road trip, which he describes in his book, The Lost Continent. It's an altogether different experience for him, I think. It's a trip on the back roads of America, to the El Dorado that is small-town America. Of course, he approaches it from a much different tack than the other writers of the road experience. Pirsig uses it as a serious philosophical exploration. Kerouac and the beat generation - and their ideals and experiences - have long passed. The old roads of Wright's era are broken and buried under the expansion of the Interstate system. For Bryson, using it as a chance to mourn his father's death, to reconnect with the cross-country travels of his childhood, it's something else entirely. His curious humor and cynicism make it yet another unique take on the American road.

Would any of these mirror my experiences, if I ever had the time, the opportunity to undertake the same sort of thing myself? I doubt it. For now, I really only experience the road as a void between destinations. Granted, the Madison-to-Downingtown drive is long enough that I'd just as soon not drag it out any longer than necessary. Twelve or thirteen hours, with just the minimum of stops for gas, food and toilets. Usually with a limited window, such as the last few vacation days from work, so I'd rather have quality time with family than with the land in between us. I wonder what I'm missing.

There was a time, in college, when Sharon and I drove from Downingtown to the Catskills for a long weekend. Rather than take the highways through New Jersey, around New York City, we opted to take smaller highways through the Poconos, drifting along the Appalachians. We took every excuse to pull over for scenic views, to see the waterfalls tumbling down the mountains, to enjoy driving at slow speeds with windows down. They're purely good memories, spending the bulk of a day enjoying the travel, postponing the destination. I imagine a grand road trip to be like that day, drawn out over weeks and all sorts of places.

It's the road trip I'll likely never take, but I think I'm okay with that.

Rough drafts in ink.

Chicago.

Last night, for the first time since early December, I sat down in front of the typewriter again. I only managed to churn out about a page and a half of pure dreck, but it felt good. I think I've moved beyond caring that my fiction writing is - at least on the first pass - rambling streams of junk. For the most part. I like the process of writing more than the final product. Or so I like to think.

For pounding out a rough draft, nothing beats a typewriter. Mine's an Olivetti MS 25 Premier Plus, which is an awfully fancy name for a cheap, plastic, all-manual machine with a tendency to skip spaces and smear red ink into the black. But I like it. It'll work anywhere. It fits, without too much difficulty, on the back of my bike. The clattering of keystrokes, particularly during an intense bout of writing, feels deeply reassuring. And it's far more legible than my dodgy handwriting, doubly so when I'm scribbling as fast as I can.

The best part, though, is its permanence. It's a liability for letters or resumés, when you can't make a mistake, but a rough draft is all mistakes. On a computer, it's far too tempting to edit as you write, deleting words and entire passages, getting nowhere. On the typewriter, you just have to charge forward. There's a hard copy, provided you don't destroy the actual pages, something you can always refer back to.

It's like an old architecture professor used to tell us about sketching. He'd flip out when he saw someone using a pencil, because you never get anywhere with one. The temptation to erase, to fine-tune a line to perfection, is hard to avoid. Nearly impossible for a student. With a pen, you can't erase. You need to work with what you have on the paper. It also teaches you to be more cautious about what you do, but then to do it boldly. It's a simple lesson that I think most of the other students forgot - no one else seems to recall it - but it struck a chord with me.

Now I always sketch with ink.

Action! Adventure! Intrigue!

Madison.

For some reason, I can't stop thinking about Philip K. Dick today. In particular, my mind keeps returning to an early short story of his called "The Defenders". I've never read it, because I haven't been able to find a copy, but I recall him referencing it in one of his later stories. It fascinated me, and stumbles back from memory every once in a while.

"The Defenders" strikes me as a Kilgore Trout kind of story, primarily because I only know it through a very brief summary. It goes like this:

Mankind lives deep underground, following a massive war. Rather than fight the war themselves, the humans built armies of robots to battle each other. Isolated from the surface, the humans eagerly follow war reports from above, waiting for the day when they can go home.

The robots, however, have this whole system figured. Rather than kill themselves fighting a war they can't really win - after all, it's not like they'll have much purpose when the humans reclaim the earth's surface - they've settled down into a fairly comfortable life. They build homes for themselves, tend their gardens, and do all of the sort of idyllic 1950's suburbia stuff, all the while sending bogus reports of continuing battles down to the subterranean colonies.

The story itself unfolds when someone discovers the ruse, but I don't know any details on it. It's a Kilgore Trout story, the short story equivalent of a B-movie. Just think of any old B-movie poster, say, for a sci-fi flick, a hard-boiled noir thriller, or a kung fu action film. If it's a good poster, it grabs you, draws you in with promises (usually in big, bold text, with exclamation points, and sometimes even in a brightly-colored, spiky bubble) that there's no way it can keep. Movie trailers are really good at this, too. If the idea's too good to be true, it probably is, and you're probably best off sticking with the fragmented version living in your imagination.

I have a lot of those sorts of films in mental storage. Every time I stop into Four Star Video Heaven, something - probably in the "Foreign" section, but "Horror" has its charms, too - calls out to me. It almost always has highly suspect production values or a title that suggests the producers included plenty of gratuitous nudity in order to get someone, anyone to see the film. (Example: that masterpiece of the Italian cinema, Nude For Satan.) I have no intention of renting any of these until I've managed to exhaust all other DVD-rental opportunities, but they're still impossible to forget.

Also in the "mental film" category: Richard Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. The novel is deeply fascinating, and characteristically bizarre. I've enjoyed Linklater's stuff - especially Waking Life and the perfectly matched pair of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. I even love the rotoscoping effect that Linklater used so effectively in Waking Life, and, judging from the previews, expect it to match the dreamlike, paranoid quality of Dick's writing. I just wonder if my expectations have already gotten too high.

Lost in translations.

Chicago.

I've been delving into The Odyssey the past few days. I recall tenth grade English class, when we whined about having to read the whole thing and managed to whittle it down to group work on individual books, presented in ten-minute skits to the rest of the class. Fun? Yes. Helpful in understanding? Not entirely. I was puzzled before I realized that the majority of the crazy action - the Lotos Eaters, the Kyklopes, etc. - occurs when Odysseus recounts his travels. You tend to miss these things when your memory of a great work of literature is chiefly informed by high school class presentations and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Rather like comparing Naked Lunch, the Cronenberg film, with Naked Lunch, the Burroughs book. In the same spirit? Yes, but I wouldn't count on the movie to act like Cliffs Notes.

The Robert Fitzgerald translation also has a strange allure for me, enough that I felt compelled to seek it out specifically. I prefer his spellings of ancient Greek names - Akhilleus instead of Achilles, Kirke instead of Circe - because they help reinforce how they're pronounced in ancient Greek. Granted, I have only a marginal grasp of the various accent marks, but hard Ks replacing soft Cs and extra vowels where Anglicizing took a shortcut are steps I can handle. At times, the text seems a little awkward, a little too formal, but it doesn't really affect my enjoyment or understanding. I think I use the Matthew Ward translation of Camus's The Stranger as my gold standard, but that's unfair to texts that aren't written with that Hemingway-esque style that I really like.

Compare that with some translations of Dostoevsky that have proven so dull I couldn't finish a short story. (David Magarshack's "Notes From The Underground" springs to mind.) I enjoyed The Brothers Karamazov enough to read it twice - and again some time in the future - so I doubt it's the author. Maybe that's a good guess on my part, maybe not. Still, I'd prefer to accept a less-than-perfect version from which I can take something (or can, at least, plow through), over one that is truer to the author's intent but unreadable.

- - - - -

And, on a wintry weather note:

Today in Chicago? Rain and maybe some sleet. A flat, gray day.

Today in Madison? Six to ten inches of snow. Plus what fell last night and will continue to fall tonight. I'd be giddily excited if I didn't have to drive home through it tomorrow. (So, I suppose, I'm just "regular" excited.)