Solstice

Happy summer solstice, everyone—though it really is the more somber of the two occasions. For the next six months we're on a downward slope towards winter. We wax, we wane, we change, we change. Through the accumulation of recognizable cycles we come to find ourselves unrecognizable. All things on this little Earth and the unfathomable cosmos beyond.

Anyway.

A few things I've neglected to mention here:

Back in May, a short story of mine called "And the Angels Ministered unto Him" appeared in EAP: The Magazine.


I've been doing some blogging for Carve lately. The highlights so far: an interview with Carve's associate editor, Old Media in a New World, and Books Are Not Immersive—And That Might Be a Good Thing. I've got an interview with Spenser Gordon set to appear next week, so take a gander at that when it appears.

And I wrote a blog post for The Town Crier about "The Fighting Game," which I wrote for The Puritan last winter.

I have another novel coming out next month—I think. Stay tuned.

From The Simplicity of Disorder

William Carlos Williams:

I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.

("The Simplicity of Disorder," 1929)

Photinus Pyralis

Marc R. Hanson, Firefly Dance

 Busy lately. Been revising a batch of short stories written in the last six to eight months and trying to find homes for them. Doing some blogging over at Carve. (I'll provide links later this month; the posts are written some weeks in advance and several haven't gone up yet.) Just finished an "author's notes" post for The Town Crier about a short story I wrote for The Puritan. (I'll also post a link to that whenever the Town Crier folks put it up.) And I'm finally beginning to work on that Bob's Burgers writeup to complete the Bouchard Buffet. This all means I haven't got much to offer this week.

Hmm. The fireflies have started to appear in the backyard. Once again I find myself missing my two-year home in Pennsylvania. The fireflies out here only appear sporadically; they're nowhere near as abundant as they are in the Crum Woods or even in the forests around the family digs in Jersey.

Since fireflies were on my mind tonight, I thought I'd share a short poem about them. A short poem that I wrote—written long enough ago that I can shrug off any criticism with "yeah, whatever, it was a while back, I know better now."

I had a hard time finding it on my flash drive; I'd forgotten that I'd saved the file under the name "hotaru" and changed the title at the top of the document to "firefly" whenever I shared it with somebody.

"Hotaru" requires some explanation. Thanks to SNK, I'm aware that "hotaru" is the Japanese term for the type of insect that English speakers identify as "firefly" or "lightning bug." (In the United States, the most common species is Photinus pyralis; Japan has Luciola lateralis and Luciola cruciata.) And I have to admit I've preferred the term "hotaru" to "firefly" or "lightning bug" because they are such awful names for the thing they denote.

Maybe awful is too harsh a word, but the appellations are certainly misrepresentative. When I use them I can't help feeling like I'm doing a kind of semantic injustice to this creature that I love.

Here's what I mean.

First, "firefly." A compound of "fire" and "fly."

So we're using two words—one for the light, heat, and flame produced by the process of combustion, and the other for an insect of a totally different order—to describe Photinus pyralis. One of the words in the compound is inappropriate; the other is unfortunate.

"Fire" blazes. It consumes, rages, blisters, scorches, crackles, incinerates, calorifies. To use the word "fire" to characterize the soft chartreuse flashes of Photinus pyralis is as malapropos as using the word "horse" to describe a dog.

As for "fly:" none of the most salient qualities we attribute to the rapid, noisy, shit-eating, maggot-breeding pest Musca domestica are shared by the gentle Photinus pyralis but the fact that they are flying insects. Again, we are calling a horse a dog. (More literally, we are calling a member of the order coleoptera a member of the order diptera.)

Second: "lightning bug." Is this any better? Not really.

"Lightning" is no more analogous to bioluminescence than "fire." A flash of lightning is brilliant; the flicker of Photinus pyralis is faint. Lightning is quick and violent; Photinus pyralis floats gently and harmlessly. Lightning BOOMS; Photinus pyralis makes no sound we can hear.

"Bug" is maybe a better noun for this compound than "fly" for its vagueness, but all sorts of animals can be called "bugs:" spiders, caterpillars, maggots, silverfish, gnats. "Bug" is suggestive of something with hundreds of legs, a stiff carapace, and pinching mandibles crawling up your pant leg. "Bug" might also be something so small and insignificant that it might as well be squished. Photinus pyralis deserves better than "bug."

I always thought "hotaru" is such a nice term for Photinus pyralis because it names the creature without reference to unrelated animals or bad metaphors. And also because I never did my research.

Lafcadio Hearn writes:

Written today, the Japanese name of the firefly (hotaru) is ideographically composed with the sign for fire, doubled, above the sign for insect. The real origin of the word is nevertheless doubtful; and various etymologies have been suggested. Some scholars think that the appellation anciently signified 'the First-born of Fire' . . .

Well, fuck it all. You know what? Now the stupid poem is going to be called "Photinus Pyralis"—a term which has its roots in the Greek term for "light" and the Latin term for "funeral pile." It seems humanity is afflicted with longstanding lack of imagination with regard to these animals.

Anyway, here's the damn poem about some bugs that I wrote a bunch of years ago.


Photinus Pyralis

What do they all——
these things that I carry——
what money I spend——
and titles I've earned——
what objects are mine——
what facts I presume——
what do they mean,
these things that I carry——
what purpose have they
for the voiceless ones
who need only love
to light up the
dark?

Stories and ska and such

Catch 22

On the drive home from work the other night I was listening to Catch 22's Keasbey Nights and the memories came flooding back. Driving around in Charlie's Econoline van, working with Jack at FYE, hanging out with the band and drinking forties in Joe's basement—which was really, truly bizarre because none of that actually happened. It was all stuff I made up for The Zeroes.

I remember listening to tracks from Keasbey Nights at the whim of the randomized 100-disc CD changer at the Hot Topic I worked at in high school (don't laugh), and I chose it to name it as the favorite record of The Zeroes' protagonists simply because it had left somewhat more of an impression on me than the other ska records on rotation. I never even listened to it from start to finish until after finishing the first draft of the manuscript (but I listened to on loop for hours while fleshing it out in the revisions).

Strange. I wrote the The Zeroes from a first-person perspective, and I guess being in that guy's head for so long caused me to absorb some of his music-related memories and nostalgia. I imagine this must be sort of what it's like for the stage actor who has be Prince Hal, Walter Younger, or Pryor Walter two hours a night for six months: the character they become gets under their skin and never really completely bleeds out.

Thinking on this makes me a little anxious about novel #2 (titled "All the Lonely People"), which I'm still planning to toss up on the Kindle and in paperback sometime in July. It's written in the third person and is much more impersonal—born of a concept rather than the kind of emotion that inspired The Zeroes. I don't think there's much of a chance I'll be getting myself and my memories mixed up with the main characters' anytime in the future. Should I be worried about that? Could that mean it simply won't be as good as The Zeroes?

Time well tell, I guess. In the meantime, I'm going to put it out there, expect it to be read by a handful of people, and then that will be that.

I guess all that's important is that I try, try, try.

(Also: trying to get better at replying to comments. Sometimes it takes me a week or longer, and I often don't have much to say, but I am reading and responding to them!)

Xavier and the Crab: The Accretion of Myth onto History

My stepfather really came through for my old mum this Mother's Day, getting tickets for our whole little tribe to go see The Book of Mormon at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Aside from being bawdy and shocking and hilarious, it presents a rather astute example of how history, myth, and cultural exigency coalesce as religious doctrine. It made me think back to a section of History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom (a book we've already looked at a few times before) expounding on the life and posthumous myths of St. Francis Xavier, a sixteenth-century missionary who became canonized as a miracle-worker in the seventeenth century.

This is a fairly long excerpt, but it makes for a fascinating read.

May Day Monkeymind

The other day I arrived to work an hour earlier than I was scheduled (I could swear they told me to come in at noon) and had sixty minutes to pass through before I could clock in. It just so happens that the shopping plaza hosting the grocery store I work at sits astride the Northwest Branch Anacostia River, and a stretch of the Anacostia Tributary Trail System runs along its banks.

I'm really enjoying my new digs in Maryland. I don't mind my job, I love my roommates, the neighborhood is lovely, and being able to walk five minutes to the Metro and take a twenty-minute ride to the Smithsonian and United States Botanic Garden is pretty fuckin' sweet.

The one thing I've really missed are the woods. My hometown in Jersey has a wonderful public park system; the Quaker center doubled as an arboretum, and it was a ten-minute walk from an impressive forest. Since I've been down here, I haven't found any open spaces I can reliably lose myself in (the unusual savagery of this last winter might have something to do with that), and so the hour I spent getting acquainted with a tributary of the Anacostia River was indescribably refreshing.

The storms of the previous day had swelled the river, and the water was running fierce and heavy. I took a seat on a boulder and listened to the crashing of the rapids.

"Crashing?" Is that the word for it?

"Crashing" implies a discrete impact; I don't think "crashing" aptly characterizes the sound I heard. Would it be "rushing?" I don't know—rushing describes movement, not sound. "Murmuring" and "babbling" don't touch it: both imply vocalization, and one suggests mutedness. "Splashing?" No: a frog hopping from a pond makes a splash; a tot in a kiddie pool splashes around. "Purling?" It comes closer in that it indeed does refer to the sound of running water, but gently running water. "Hissing" just means the sound of a voiceless alveolar sibilant, sustained for some time; and the sound I heard hissed and crashed, but neither word by itself approaches the sound to be signified.

Is there a word in English for the sound of water tumbling into water? The sound is unique, but I can't find a unique word describing it. And I'm sad for that because—aside from the cultural disinterestedness for an ancient natural phenomenon it would seem to indicate—that sound, whatever you'd call it, intoxicates me. I get lost in it.

But never lost enough, and especially not during my hour on the banks of the Northwest Branch Anacostia.

I wanted that sound to be the only sound I heard. I wanted to see nothing but the sun on the leaves and the ochre water and foam to. I wanted my experience of that moment to consist wholly of my immediate perception of it.

But there was just too much noise. Not in the environment, but in myself. I sat there and I was thinking about a bit that Brian Regan performed during one of his appearances on Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. "Karma Police" by Radiohead was on loop in my auditory cortex. I was thinking about Mega Man 2 and (god help me) Final Fantasy XI. For a few minutes I was remembering my EDH deck and pondering how it might be tweaked with some cards from the new sets.

Noise. Noise noise noise noise noise noise noise.

Earworms. Brainworms, thoughtworms. A lifetime of speakers, screen, and games has filled my brain with niggling little parasites.

I'm still hearing these things, seeing them, and playing them, even when they're miles away. Even when I've turned them off in the physical world, they're still plugged in inside my brain, and I'm watching them, listening to them, and playing them even when what I want is to be doing is nothing but letting myself be wholly in the place that I am in the moment I am.

During that hour on that afternoon, if it were possible, I would have gone back in time and muted every speaker, switched off every screen, and walked away from every game if it meant I could have sat for just five minutes in the sun of a late spring and heard nothing beyond and nothing within myself but that primordial sound for which my language seems to have no name.

On groceries and goodness

Andrea Del Pesco, Supermarket

Since I began working at a grocery store a few months back, I've found myself to assessing the overall character of people I meet on the job by a single criterion: does this person help me bag his or her groceries?

You're in the checkout lane with a shopping cart filled to capacity with groceries. It's a Sunday afternoon; the store is mobbed, I haven't budged from the cash register in nearly two hours, and there are six people in line behind you. I have to tally up your groceries; you have to pay for them. And one way or another, all of your stuff has to be bagged neatly and swiftly and placed back in your cart.

You can't help me ring up your stuff; I can't help you pay for it. But you can help me bag up your $300 load of groceries. Nobody's forcing you, of course: if you'd prefer not be bothered, I'll just have to do it by myself.

In this situation it absolutely does not matter to me what you might feel or believe about me or anything else. Maybe you're the kind of person who listens to Rush Limbaugh every day. Maybe you believe climate change is a hoax and think that gun-toting public school teachers are a great idea. Maybe you're looking at me and just seeing some sluggard who never got a "real" job. Maybe, for some reason, you plain don't like the way I look, dress, or talk. I don't care. Provided you aren't being nasty to me, as long as you're helping me bag your groceries—putting in a small effort so that things will move along more smoothly for me, for the people behind you in line, and ultimately for yourself—you're okay in my book. We might not ever be friends, but I'm not going to say you're a bad person. You're the type who's willing to do a small, friendly thing to help out a stranger, and that's a fine quality for a human being to possess.

Contrariwise, I don't care who you are—you could be a lecturer and activist who travels the country facilitating workshops on justice and equality; you could be a brilliant artist or writer; you could be the head of an NGO dedicated to mitigating climate change, improving literacy rates, and/or solving the urban "food desert" problem—if, while I'm ringing you up and bagging your tremendous load of groceries all by myself as the six people behind you in line are seething with impatience, you're gabbing away on your phone, texting, or just staring at me from across the counter with your arms at your sides, I don't care who you are or what you do in your life beyond the sliding glass doors. You can't be bothered. You're an asshole.

MORAL. Our definitions of "good people" probably tend towards the self-involved, if not self-serving.