My story 'Instrument' released in a new fiction anthology

A new fiction anthology from New Lit Salon Press entitled Southern Gothic has just been released, and it contains a short story of mine entitled "Instrument."

The genesis of the story is this. In the mid-to-late 1990s, a phenomenon began at a Toronto area Pentecostal church called the Toronto Airport Vineyard. (Much as this sounds like an airport hotel, it was simply a branch of the Vineyard Fellowship of Pentecostal churches with an unusually anodyne name.) The phenomenon was marked by an outbreak of seemingly out-of-control emotional outbursts. The phenomenon came to be known as "the laughing revival" because one of the behaviors on the part of church attendees was uncontrolled laughter or crying. It lasted for years and spread to many other Pentecostal and charismatic churches.

I developed a morbid fascination with the phenomenon, which also took root in Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida. I was fascinated by the stories of wild behavior and the claims that the Holy Spirit was behind it all, when a distanced observer could clearly see it was nothing more than mass hysteria.

Despite my personal disdain for this brand of religion, I sensed that sincere people were flocking to such churches for a reason. They wanted not only experience, emotion, and entertainment, but also something genuine. They wanted what the revivalists were promising: not just an overflow of emotion, but to be truly changed.

With this in mind, I developed a story about someone who came to such a church out of curiosity. He's not a true believer, but a skeptic, a not-particularly-religious young man who looks at spirit-filled Christians not with envy but with pity. Nevertheless, he finds himself at one of these revivals, and is tempted by the offer of a truly changed life.

My character Roy is assistant manager of a Chevron station. But he has a secret wish: to become an EMT, an ambulance attendant. And when he attends the revival he is caught up in the experience and dares to think that despite his doubts his life might really change.

Southern Gothic, with my story and 14 others, is available now in many e-book formats, handsomely illustrated by Nathan Mark Philips.

The first sentences of Stephen King

The author Stephen King "spends 'months and even years' writing opening sentences" for his books, according to this article on The Atlantic.

Maybe so! Here are the first sentences from 35 of his books. Judge for yourself.

"Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick."
-- The Shining

During the days after they left the Green Palace that wasn't Oz after all -- but which was now the tomb of the unpleasant fellow Roland's ka-tet had known as the Tick-Tock Man -- the boy Jake began to range farther and farther ahead of Roland, Eddie and Susannah.
-- The Wind Through the Keyhole

An old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run.
-- The Long Walk

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years -- if it ever did end -- began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
-- It

Hapscomb's Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston.
-- The Stand

To Whom It May Concern: My name is Wilfred Leland James, and this is my confession.
-- Full Dark, No Stars

He kept doing things without letting himself think about them.
-- Roadwork

Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.
-- Salem's Lot

News item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966: RAIN OF STONES REPORTED
-- Carrie

There's a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess -- I'm the guy who can get it for you.
-- Different Seasons

My name is Edgar Freemantle.
-- Duma Key

Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons.
--The Eyes of the Dragon

Umber whunnn / yerrrnnn umber whunnn / fayunnnn / These sounds: even in the haze.
-- Misery

"Oh! Oh, Jesus! Gross!"
-- Desperation

The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:30 p.m., eastern standard time [sic], on the afternoon of October 1.
-- Cell

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.
-- The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

"Oh my God!" my friend Arnie Cunningham cried out suddenly.
-- Christine

The two things Sarah remembered about that night later were his run of luck at the Wheel of Fortune and the mask.
-- The Dead Zone

George was somewhere in the dark.
-- Blaze

She was squinting at the thermometer in the white light coming through the window.
-- The Running Man

Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened.
-- Pet Sematary

It was fourteen years of hell, all told, but she hardly knew it.
-- Rose Madder

"Daddy, I'm tired," the little girl in the red pants and the green blouse said fretfully.
-- Firestarter

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine.
-- Cujo

From the East Oregonian, June 25th, 1947 -- FIRE CONTROL OFFICER SPOTS 'FLYING SAUCERS'
-- Dreamcatcher

Dear Bones, How good it was to step into the cold, draughty hall here at Chapelwaite, every bone in an ache from that abominable coach, in need of instant relief from my distended bladder -- and to see a letter addressed in your own inimitable scrawl propped on the obscene little cherry-wood table beside the door!
-- Night Shift

On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription -- this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe.
-- Bag of Bones

Bobby Garfield's father had been one of those fellows who start losing their hair in their twenties and are completely bald by the age of forty-five or so.
-- Hearts in Atlantis

To the public eye, the spouses of well-known writers are all but invisible, and no one knew it better than Lisey Landon.
-- Lisey's Story

People's lives -- their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences -- begin at different times.
-- The Dark Half

Jessie could hear the back door banging lightly, randomly, in the October breeze blowing around the house.
-- Gerald's Game

For want of a nail the kingdom was lost -- that's how the catechism goes when you boil it down.
-- The Tommyknockers

Brian Engle rolled the American Pride L1011 to a stop at Gate 22 and flicked off the FASTEN SEATBELT light at exactly 10:14 p.m.
-- The Langoliers

"Thinner," the old Gypsy man with the rotting nose whispers to William Halleck as Halleck and his wife, Heidi, came out of the courthouse.
-- Thinner

What did you ask, Andy Bissette?
-- Dolores Claiborne

Watching over her

Here's a picture of Cris and me on the porch of the rented house in Kansas City, Kan. the night before we flew back to San Francisco.

Mid-April, 2013. Photo by Jeff Barber

It had been a cold, rainy week, but this last day was sunny. As the sun set, I glanced out the window and said, "Oh, the sun's reflecting off the skyline."  So we all went out and took pictures. At one point Jeff took this picture of me and her. 

Six months less six weeks

Yesterday Cris was uncomfortable all day with nausea. At 6:00 pm she asked me to google some search terms, and based on the results she decided to ask the doctor for some specific anti-nausea medicine. She reached the doctor's backup and he agreed to phone the pharmacy with the new scrips. About this time, Catherine came over. We didn't really have plans, but she wanted to eat. So after she spent 15 minutes talking with Cris, she and I walked over to Mission Street. My idea was to pick up the scrips and then take them along with us to dinner. So far so good.

But the pharmacy didn't have Tigan in stock, and neither did any of the other nearby Walgreens. So I had to call Cris to report this. She said she would call the doctor back and try to get an alternate. Meanwhile I figured Cath and I would have time to go eat and return to the pharmacy in time to pick up the revised order.

As we walked down Mission on the way to the restaurant, I went into a small rant. "This is so typical," I said. "Cris is the one to recognize that she needs a new med, Cris is the one to call the doctor, and when that doesn't work, Cris is the one to call him back." My voice was breaking now. "She's always the one who manages her own care. She's the one to call. I don't know how to do these things. Who's going to do that when she's unconscious?"

Catherine put her arm around me. "When she's unconscious... She'll have different needs. That's not a long period anyway. If she's at the point where she's in a coma, you just take care of the body. It only last a few days. I know, this is so hard."

I managed not to break down in tears.

The trees from my wife

This picture is our garden this morning. Much of the foliage is made up of two medium-sized ornamental cherry trees, though at the top you see a grapevine and in the lower right corner is wisteria. I took the picture from the window of the room in the rear of the house, a bedroom converted to an office.

The cherry trees were a gift from my wife for my birthday several years ago, soon after we moved into the house in the mid 1990s. The one on the left is original; the one on the right is I think the third one we planted there; two previous ones didn't survive. Now the trees are almost the same size, though one is four years older than the other. They have very different personalities, the chief difference being that the older one always blooms first and more completely.

Here they are last spring:

Right after I took the picture this morning, while I was shutting the window, a big robin zoomed in and landed in the tree on the right, and I felt joy at the thought of the creature taking up residence here.

Uncertainty principle

In a dream: A woman who was an oracle or priestess of some kind was the guardian of a portal that was located in a cavern. The portal was a small vertical hole, only a few inches across, and you looked into it with an instrument like a microscope. When you looked into this portal you were looking into what was supposedly a microscopic world, only it appeared to be a whole universe, like the pictures from the Hubble. In other words, this microscopic world contained the whole universe, and you could look into it and see whatever you wanted to in space-time. Thus the guardian was a powerful oracle, though she was not the only one allowed to look into the microscope, indeed anyone who came to her could look into it, and she helped them.

I asked her, "Is it perfect?" meaning the universe contained in the portal. And she replied, "As long as we're here (to look at it), we change it."
 

Farce alert

A good friend, who writes under the name Amber Belldene, linked to a fellow writer's blog post about a recent release. The blog post is headed Where to Dump a Body in Austin. This immediately made me think, wow, there are a zillion places for that.

But my second thought was -- based on my visit to Austin in the fall -- that would get me in trouble right away. Because as my recent trip demonstrated, while I used to be intimately familiar with Austin, that town has changed a lot in 30 years, and if I tried to do anything there -- never mind dumping a body, how about getting a sandwich -- I'd quickly get in trouble.

So this scene suggested itself: Suppose someone like me who used to live in a place claims to be an expert on that place. And a friend comes to him asking to dump a body. No problem! But when they get to the first place, which in 1978 was a garbage-strewn ravine, it's now the grounds of a day care center outside a corporate complex. And when they get to the second place, which in 1979 was an abandoned rail line, it's now a nicely landscaped bike path. And so on. Finally they dump the body on the steps of the governor's mansion, which in Texas is always a place where you'll find garbage and plenty of skeletons in the closet.
 

Another search for authenticity ends in disappointment

A travel piece in the New York Times last week goes to a remote Indian town founded by Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabinidrath Tagore. After visiting the school founded by the sage, a museum devoted to his work (from which his Nobel Prize medal was stolen in 2004), and other local sites, the visitor encounters local color:

Toward the end of my stay, I encountered a baul singer alongside the road, strumming an ektara, a guitarlike instrument with a single string. He waved and I steered my bike toward him. With their unruly hair, matted beards and saffron kurtas, the singers (baul means "crazy") are difficult to miss. Neither Hindu nor Muslim, they are said to be insane with the love of God and wander the countryside, as they have for centuries, singing enigmatic songs about the blessings of madness and the life of a seeker. Tagore adored the bauls, and even declared himself one of them.

I sat on the ground and listened to the hypnotic music. Bauls have grown popular in recent years and, inevitably, poseurs have tried to cash in. So when another traveler, a well-off Kolkatan with an expensive camera, joined us, I asked, "Do you think he is a real baul singer?"

Clearly displeased with my question, he said after a long pause, "He's as real as you want him to be."

 

'Quasimodo predicted all this'

 

Underground for years

The following exchange was broadcast a little while ago on the BBC News Hour. The announcer, Owen Bennett-Jones, was interviewing former British Ambassador to North Korea John Everard about life in that country. At one point they reference the Google Maps of North Korea, which were just released.

Everard: You could travel freely within thirty km of central Pyongyang, which gave you the city itself and a lot of countryside. If you went outside that, the rule book said that you require permission. In practice, you could go to the beach at Nampo, heading due west from Pyongyang, and no one would actually stop you. And colleagues did the same on the beach going the other way, at Wonsan (?), going east. And on one occasion I drove about two thirds of the way up to the Chinese border to see a museum there, which I duly did, and no one seemed to (care) that I'd gone way outside Pyongyang.

ANNCR: No permission?

Everard: No permission. So the system isn't quite as watertight as people make out.

ANNCR: One of the striking things about the [just-released] Google Maps -- I don't know if it surprises you -- they've marked one of the labor camps.

Everard: Yes, so I saw. The position of the labor camps has been argued over for quite some time. And things are complicated by the fact that -- we believe -- that some of the labor camps are actually underground, so they won't show on maps.

ANNCR: Really?!

Everard: Yes.

ANNCR: Why?

Everard: Well, because, if you put a labor camp underground -- remember that these are slave laborers, often making munitions and things that the regime doesn't want to show the world. If you put them underground, you can't actually spot them from satellites, or it's a lot more difficult to do so. A colleague of mine once gained access, incredibly, to one of these places. And told me that he found that the people there had been underground for years, hadn't seen the light.

ANNCR: How on earth did a foreigner get in there?

Everard: It's a long story.

ANNCR: Which you can't tell?

Everard: Which I can't tell.

-- BBC News Hour, 2145h GMT, 29 January 2013

Everard is the author of a memoir about his time in North Korea, Only Beautiful Please.

Screenwriting columnist confirms that screenwriting is nothing but arranging clichés

Whenever I read about the screenwriting game, it always sounds to me like it's nothing more than understanding clichés as fully as possible so that they can be rearranged in such a way that's just barely different from the last time they were successfully rearranged. And nothing in the first paragraph of this fellow's column changes my mind:

Even a hero sometimes needs a push out of the front door and into the arms of adventure. Your detective needs to get himself embroiled in that mystery; your crude-humored man-child needs a reason to get a job so that the "fish out of water" hilarity can ensue; and how about your plucky secretary who is down on her luck but has a heart of gold? Well, she needs that spark to help her decide it's finally time to take her career into her own hands.

Brad Johnson in Script

Ugh. It's worse than boring. It's demeaning.
 

'Well this is arty'

I was reading a post about the film TAXI DRIVER on a cinema website and had gotten to the comments; in fact I made a comment of my own. I was about to click off the page when I noticed one of the comments seemed a bit odd, coming from someone with the name Prague Taxi Transfers:

So the taxi service in Prague was "very impressed," was it? Curious, I clicked on the name of the account, and up popped a whole series of comments made by the same account using a Disqus login. Each anodyne comment was made on a post with the word "taxi" or "cab" in its title -- 29 of them! And yet the comments have nothing to do with taxis at all. They could appear on almost any post.

Of course, what's happening is that a robot is leaving these on any blog post that has remotely to do with taxis, for the purpose of search engine optimization. The more web pages that link back to the site of Prague Taxi Transfers, the higher they appear in Google search results -- or at least that is the aim.

Taken together, the comments form a one-sided dialogue that make you feel like you're overhearing someone's gossipy phone conversation.

I have had the same thing happen to me.

It really made my day.

Well nothing amazes me.

This was very emotional.

Yes I did and thought it was shocking!

I do think it is something that deserves more media attention.
 

Sounds like a business idea to me

This tweet crossed my Twitter feed. I don't know the originator, but as you can see it was retweeted by SFMOMA:

SFMOMA, this seems like a business idea to me. Why not have a bullpen of MFAs eager to accompany visitors to your museum? They could make a few bucks and you could too.

The fictional world

With all the schadenfreude I can muster, I enjoy the uncovering of hoaxes and frauds. And the last week has been an exhausting carnival of revelations. A famed college football player's heartwarming story of a girlfriend who died; a prize winning poet; a cycling champion; and baseball Hall of Fame voters rejected the stars of the late 90s and early 00s. It's getting difficult to keep up, but Twitter and Gawker and the like are always there to spread the latest.

Also via the internet come these words of advice on writing from novelist W.G. Sebald:

You should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide. None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.

It's both reassuring and not. You'll never run out of ideas, but those ideas will be rooted in the depressing plenitude of human weakness.

Imagine a story, then, about a protagonist who invents a lover, or mentor, or literary agent, or other close partner or adviser. Someone who is close to them, who provides invaluable support, and who is, for plausible reasons, not available in person -- not now and, as it turns out, not ever. Call the imaginary person Aubrey Daniels, just to use a gender-neutral first name, and name the story "The Fiction of Aubrey Daniels," which makes ironic use of the humble word of. The story is more about the weaving of the fiction, and the uses to which the protagonist puts the fictional Aubrey, though of course the story has to include the uncovering of the hoax and the reaction of all the people who were fooled by it.

(To be fooled is to be made into a fool, an interesting grammatical construction I don't know the name of and can't think of another example of, aside from the newish term to punk someone, which means almost the same thing. Perhaps this usage is related to the joke "Call me a cab." "All right -- you're a cab." I hope a rhetorician can clear this up for me.)

Without music or media

I've been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years, with just the usual dull sounds you hear at the outskirts of town, the occasional echo of steps in the corridor and, further off, in the stairwell, someone dragging a sack, a carpet, a package, or a corpse, God knows what, along the ground; or the sound of the elevator as it slows, stops, opens, then closes and starts to rise or descend. Every so often a dog barks briefly, someone laughs or shouts. But everything dies away, soon lost in the constant low-level murmur of the street outside. That is what complete silence is like round here.

-- László Krasznahorkai in the New York Times blog

Of course, everyone in the world lived that way before the advent of the photograph and radio, the television, the home stereo system, piped-in Muzak, the "personal" media player, and so on.

Several years ago I spent six weeks in a remote mountain retreat. My mornings were spent in the kitchen, where music played all the time and made the time pass pleasantly. After that I enjoyed silence, solitude and time to work -- for a week. Then a young man moved in upstairs and blared his stereo. It took me several negotiations to get him to let me have, at least, the afternoons to work in silence. But the irony was that I had to negotiate silence at all in a remote mountain retreat.

Like time and space, the commodity of silence becomes more and more valuable -- especially as you get older.

From a dream

Fragment of an otherwise unremembered dream from Sunday night which I wrote in the bedside notebook when I woke:

The suffering would be immediate and actual, which was not to be desired, unless you compared it to...

'Readers don't care about the writer and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives'

Loved this.

Personal writing should entertain the reader. (And by this I do not mean the voyeuristic train wreck entertainment that one gets from reading, say, Naomi Wolf's account of losing the Technicolor Wizard of Oz–like effects of her orgasms. It should be deliberately entertaining, not accidentally funny.) Most readers don't care about the writer and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives, and so it is incumbent upon the writer to make them care or draw them in by being fascinating or funny or unusually observant.

-- Katie Roiphe in Slate

Carried to extremes, this attitude might be expressed with a degree of hostility:

It turned out a couple of students had complained to the chair about my comments on their stories. He showed me a page with red slashed across: "Who cares? I don't care! Make me care!"

"What did you mean by this?" he asked.

"Simply that a narrative is worthless unless the reader can be made to care about the characters and what happens to them," I said, as simply as I could.

"You were trying to tell the student that her story is worthless?"

"In its present form, it is worthless."

-- The Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag

Mu

The film segment The Heavenly Creature -- one-third of an anthology film titled "Doomsday Book," from three South Korean filmmakers -- is

... a lyrical and philosophical anecdote about a robot who works in a Buddhist monastery. The monks believe the machine has achieved enlightenment, and this presents a problem for the robot's corporation. Is it malfunctioning? Should it be destroyed? What does "existence" mean anyway for an enlightened one? This is like a koan, an excuse for dialectics between characters who assert opposing views, something to be puzzled over more than a narrative to be resolved.

-- Pop Matters

The monks believe the machine has achieved enlightenment. How could monks be that stupid? Clearly this is simply a comic premise. This presents a problem for the robot's corporation. Is it malfunctioning? A robot in a monastery which appears enlightened must be the best robot ever; how could anyone think it was malfunctioning? What does "existence" mean anyway for an enlightened one? Enlightened or unenlightened, there is no choice between existence or non-existence. He (or that) which does not exist can be neither enlightened nor unenlightened. This is like a koan. You think?

The frightening internet

Because my employer urged me to -- it seems we are all being urged to "connect with customers" over social media, not that I have any intention of doing so (I'm sure they would be the worse for it) -- I finally joined a social network called LinkedIn. And as soon as you join, they ask permission to slurp up your contacts list. No, I replied, skip it. And yet even though I had denied them the right to know my email contacts, they proceeded to present me with about 200 people who might know me. And damned if about 40% of them weren't accurate.

How the hell did that happen, I wondered. How did they get the name of someone who contributed to Frighten the Horses, the sex-and-politics zine Cris and I did over 20 years ago -- an era before email and the internet -- and whom I've corresponded through email exactly once since then? It was fucking eerie.

This blog entry helped me understand. Both the entry itself and, especially, the fourth comment, which points out that those people are already on LinkedIn and they did share their email contacts list. So that artist who did the piercing layout for us in 1992 was actually on LinkedIn before me, and shared my email address, so when I popped up, there she was as one of the people I possibly knew.

I was glad that I recognized only 40% of those 200 people (which is still a lot). Because that means that 60% of them know some other Mark Pritchard. And they can have him.

This America

Driving in the South of Market district this morning, I stopped at a traffic signal. I'd just been to the supermarket and then to a coffee bar and was on my way to a freeway onramp to come to work. I noticed a pedestrian in the crosswalk. He was a young man, no more than 25, and a little overweight. He had a shambling gait and was making weird motions, digging the knuckles of one hand into his cheek and jaw as if tightening invisible bolts; with each second that I watched him, as he slowly made his way across wide Bryant Street, I was more convinced that he was mentally ill. He wore a light jacket, not enough for the cold morning. But what struck me most was that, with the temperature about 42 F., he was barefoot.

One sees mentally ill people on the streets of every American city. The only thing that distinguished this guy was his youth and appearance. He wasn't dirty or unshaven; except for his shoelessness, he might have taken off that morning from whatever home or facility he lived in, a place where his clothes were washed and he was well fed. But his gait and general behavior revealed his illness.

I felt compassion, and thought of actually stopping and giving him my shoes and socks. I have hiking boots in my car which I could have put on, and a spare pair of socks at work. But I did nothing.

"What is hell?" asked Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamozov. "I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."

Entanglement between evangelical churches and adoption industry

I've been hoping someone would look into this story for ages, ever since my fundie brother adopted two kids over 15 years ago and spoke of it as something many people in his acquaintance were doing. I knew somebody had to be making money. Finally there's a book:

The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption
by Kathryn Joyce

Publication Date: April 23, 2013
Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of abortion. But as award-winning journalist Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become entangled in the conservative Christian agenda. To tens of millions of evangelicals, adoption has become a new front in the culture wars: a test of "pro-life" bonafides, a way to reinvent compassionate conservatism on the global stage, and a means to fulfill the “Great Commission” mandate that Christians evangelize the nations. Influential leaders fervently promote a new "orphan theology," urging followers to adopt en masse, with little thought for the families these "orphans" may actually have. Christian adoption activists have added moral weight to a multi-billion dollar adoption industry intent on increasing the "supply" of adoptable children, both at home and overseas.

The Child Catchers is a shocking exposé of what the adoption industry has become and how it got there, told through deep investigative reporting and the heartbreaking stories of individuals who found that their own, and their children's, well-being was ultimately irrelevant in a market driven by profit and now, pulpit command.

Kathryn Joyce is a journalist based in New York City whose work has appeared in the Nation, Mother Jones, Slate, the Atlantic, and other publications. A 2011 recipient of the Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion, she has also been awarded residencies and fellowship support by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund, the MacDowell Colony, the Bellagio Center, and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. She is the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement and associate editor at Religion Dispatches.

Infra-noise leads to ghost reports

And then there is sound we can't hear — infrasonic. In 1998, a group of scientists working in a laboratory began to feel as if they were in a haunted house: They thought they saw blurry gray figures and were full of dread, a science journal reported. They finally traced the effect to an extractor fan, whose infrasonic noise happened to be "at just the right frequency to make eyeballs vibrate and so perhaps to generate visual illusions."

-- from a review in today's NYT by Katherine Bouton of
Discord: the Study of Noise, by Mike Goldsmith