Skip to content

Year: 2010

The Lost Book Club: Fear and Trembling

February 9, 2010 • • 2 Comments

I didn’t read it.

Back when I started the Lost Book Club and decided to read all the books shown and referenced on Lost, I made a decision to focus (mostly) on the fictional/literary works and leave the philosophical and religious works to others and since the philosophy was referenced mostly in certain characters’ names (John Locke, Desmond David Hume, Danielle Rousseau, and Mikhail Bakunin) and the books didn’t actually appear, it was no problem.

The Season 6 opener “LA X,” however, introduced two books to the Lost Book Club: Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie, the book Desmond was reading on the alternate reality Oceanic 815, and Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard, which is the book found with the one-armed skeletal remains of the French guy beneath the temple wall.

I will, of course, read the Rushdie book, which I’ve got on hold at my library, and I will post my thoughts on it once I’ve read it. As for the Kierkegaard book, I don’t intend to read it (at least not now) since it falls outside the purview of my Lost book project and I had to draw a line somewhere, but I figured I’d at least try to find and post some information about it for those who may be curious.

From Wikipedia (source of all knowledge):

Fear and Trembling presents a highly original and provocative interpretation of the Binding of Isaac story as told in Genesis Chapter 22, and uses the story as an occasion to discuss fundamental issues in moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion, such as the nature of God and faith, faith’s relationship with ethics and morality, and the difficulty of being authentically religious.

[…]

In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard introduces the “Knight of Faith” and contrasts him with the “knight of infinite resignation”. The latter gives up everything in return for the infinite, that which he may receive after this life, and continuously dwells with the pain of his loss. The former, however, not only relinquishes everything, but also trusts that he will receive it all back, his trust based on the “strength of the absurd”.

From Lostpedia (source of all Lost knowledge):

The book encountered in the Temple is “Fear and Trembling” (original title: Frygt og Bæven), an influential philosophical work by Danish philosopher, theologian, and psychologist Søren Kierkegaard, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio (John the Silent). In the book, through alternative retellings of the Biblical story of the Binding of Isaac, Kierkegaard examines the role of faith and its relationship with morality and ethics. The title is a reference to a line from Philippians 2:12, “…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

The story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac has been referenced on Lost several times over the years and almost works like a background hum meant to remind viewers of how far certain characters will go to protect the island. It also reinforces the tension between faith and reason, one of Lost‘s central themes.

Based on this limited reading about the book, it seems a logical book for Lost considering that we’ve now delved into at least one alternate retelling of the story. Perhaps we should be expecting a few more alternate realities? I hope not.

The Knight of Infinite Resignation and the Knight of Faith read like descriptions of Jack Shephard and John Locke.

That’s probably enough for a post about a book I didn’t read.

Here’s a link to a post on The Fish: A Christian Look @ Pop Culture about “LA X”  that includes excellent analysis of the episode as well as some more thoughts about Fear and Trembling.

Enough about the book I didn’t read; it’s time for some half-baked theorizin’.

For nine months, Lost fans wondered whether the show would reboot to an alternate reality after the detonation of the jughead or if the 1977 survivors would be blown back to the “present.” I don’t think I’m alone in being surprised by the writers’ dispensing with the or and doing both.

Here’s my half-baked theory. In the alternate reality, the jughead destroyed the island in 1977, thus leaving the Dharma Initiative’s save-the-world work unfinished and undone. Ben, Widmore and Eloise all died, which means Penny and Daniel are never born, which means Desmond never sails around the world, winding up “just saving the world, brotha.” Come to think of it, nobody is saving the world from whatever electromagnetic anomaly now lies at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, which means someday (I’m guessing someday soon in the alt-reality of LA X) something will happen that effectively destroys the alt-reality world because Dharma hadn’t been able to do whatever it was it was supposed to do.

The alt-world ends, but not before alt-Juliet, who will have memories of both worlds just as Desmond did when he detonated the Swan Hatch at the end of Season 2, explains to the alt-survivors that there is something that must be fulfilled by them to help Jacob. After that, the two realities will reconcile with the end of the alt-reality and everything that has risen will converge.

Maybe, that’s only a quarter-baked theory. Hell, it’s barely cooked and you’ll probably wind up with some kind of mental salmonella poisoning, but that’s what I’ve got and it reminds me why I love Lost so much. It’s one of the very few TV shows I’ve ever watched that has consistently surprised me and kept me guessing. I love not knowing. I hope I’m wrong. I hope I find out how wrong I am after tonight’s episode “What Kate Does,” so I can come up with a new theory.

Here’s the link to the list of all the Lost books I’ve read. Look for my take on Haroun and the Sea of Stories in the next few weeks. I intend to read that one.

Old Photo Friday

February 5, 2010 • • 2 Comments
Mt Etna, Sicily, Italy; Early '80's

One of the few things I’ve invented in the blog world is Old Photo Friday. Maybe I invented it, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone else do it, but perhaps I only discovered it in the way that Columbus discovered America.

I did Old Photo Friday fairly regularly from June 2006 to June 2007 and then stopped. I guess I got tired of it, but lately I’ve been missing those weekly explorations of old photographs.

With thoughts of Columbus and worlds old and new, I found this shot of Mt. Etna I took with my old Kodak 110 Instamatic. We lived in Italy from 1982 until 1985 and during that time, I visited Sicily twice. Once with my family and once with my Boy Scout troop (395, the best alive). This is from the Boy Scout trip, which I’m guessing was either in ’83 or ’84, in which we went camping on the lower slopes of the volcano.

We took the train down from Naples and crossed the straits to Sicily on the ferry, which was all very exciting, though being inside the train cars in the cavernous hold of the ferry wasn’t my favorite part of the trip.

Etna was erupting at the time, but it’s a big mountain so we were safe enough, though occasionally we felt a rumble and some of the guys claimed to have seen a small explosion near the summit, but even that didn’t seem like too a big a deal since our school was on the slopes of La Solfatara, a mostly-dormant volcano that frequently spewed foul-smelling clouds of sulfur into the air so the whole area would smell like rotten eggs and farts.

Mt Etna didn’t smell bad, and it was a good place to camp and hike and explore. We were especially interested in the shrines set up along the trails with their votive candles, old photographs of people taken when they were young and piles of Lira, sacrifices, we imagined, so the dead would have some change to buy Cokes in Heaven.

The Lost Book Club: Everything that Rises Must Converge

February 2, 2010 • • Leave a comment

It’s hard to believe that Lost will begin its final season with tonight’s premiere. Even harder to believe I’ve stuck with the commitment I made at the end of Season 2—way back in May 2006—to read and blog about every book that appears or is referenced on the show.

Now that I’ve finished reading Flannery O’Connor’s short story collection Everything that Rises Must Converge, I am caught up. That’s 38 books I’ve read to better understand this show, but it’s also 38 (mostly) really good books I’m glad I was encouraged to read. The full list along with links to my individual posts is here.

O’Connor’s stories are exquisitely crafted slices of southern life in the 1960s. Her characters struggle to understand and make sense of a rapidly changing world full of astronauts and civil rights, but change never comes easy. Many of the stories center on generational conflicts wherein strong-willed characters attempt to bend others—usually loved ones—to a “better” or “more enlightened” way of thinking. Sometimes it works, but the cost is steep and many of the stories end with unintended consequences for the protagonist: often violence or the death of a loved one. Often those who would teach a lesson are forced to learn the most painful lessons of all.

The book made its appearance in “The Incident,” the Season 5 finale. The mysterious Jacob was reading it in a flashback scene just moment’s before Locke was thrown out of the window by his father where he would break his back and eventually become lame and the first to enter Jacob’s home many years later, which was what was playing through the back of my mind when I read “The Lame Shall Enter First,” a particularly devastating story of the terrible toll on a father and his estranged nine-year-old son when the father takes in and attempts to save a juvenile delinquent.

The manipulation of Locke’s good intentions and pure faith by evil men is one of the central tragedies on Lost, and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” reminded me of how often he has tried to do right and how his core goodness has always blown up in his face. If Lost follows the trajectory of this or any of these stories, a happy ending isn’t likely.

With its focus of family conflict, many of the stories mirror the arcs of so many characters on Lost, particularly in the relationship between Jack and his father, Christian. Jack taught Christian a hell of a lesson back in Season 1, and it ultimately led to Christian’s death and copious guilt for Jack. That is, in essence, the plot of the title story “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” in which an earnest young man attempts to teach his mildly bigoted mother a thing or two about racism.

Considering the role that the dead Christian Shephard has had on Lost, I can’t help but wonder how much of Season 6 will be driven by a convergence and reckoning between Jack and whatever it is that has been animating his dead father all these years.

We also see a parallel in that O’Connor’s protagonists, especially Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation,” are so convinced of their moral superiority and their role as “good guys” that it genuinely shocks them when they are forced to confront their misdeeds. As I read, all I could think about was the number of times we’ve heard various caharcters on Lost, most recently Ilyana claim to be “the good guys.”

The final story, “Judgement Day,” features a protagonist who imagines himself shipped from New York City back to Georgia in his coffin only to jump out and surprise his friends with the fact that he still lives. Again, his fantasy sounds like the one that anti-Jacob has pulled off.

Finally, there’s the title itself. According to Lostpedia (take it for what it’s worth):

The book’s title is a reference to a work by the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard De Chardin titled the “Omega Point”: “Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.”

This convergence could mean many things, but I think the writers are hinting toward the convergence of the time-traveling survivors of Oceanic 815 and the survivors of Ajira 316. They will come together, and I think the mechanism for that will be Jacob’s touch as revealed in the flashbacks in “The Incident.” I think that’s what he meant when he said, “They’re coming.”

Juliet will not converge since Jacob never came to her.

Then will come judgement day and the last battle (to take it back to all the Narnia references).

That’s about all I’ve got.

Be sure to check out Lost… and Gone Forever and EYE M SICK for more serious Lost theorizing, and don’t forget to check out my Lost Book Club Index for all the books on the show and my posts about them.

The Decision to Self-Publish

February 1, 2010 • • 3 Comments

Writing that guest post for Author! Author! on my thoughts about self-publishing got me thinking about the experience and something I didn’t address in that post: how I came to the decision to go the self-publishing route with my first novel, A Place Without a Postcard.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s how I got there.

I’ve been asked many times why I self-published Postcard back in 2003. Rejected by every agent and publisher in the land? Nope.

It had more to do with my own entrepreneurial streak and maybe some inspiration from the indie films and punk rock albums I’ve always loved. A Place Without a Postcard is about neither of those things, but its journey is related.

It started as a screenplay for an indie film I imagined I’d someday make with a bunch of friends and a stack of credit cards. I never did that, but a few years crewing films taught me my talents, temperament and passions lay with the pen. Well, okay, the word processor, but that doesn’t quite have the proper poetic ring to it, does it?

I submitted it as my writing sample to the graduate screenwriting program at The University of Texas at Austin. I got in and it even won me a James Michener Fellowship from the Texas Center for Writers.

Not bad for a quirky story that straddles the worlds of science fiction, mystery and modern myth.

In grad school, I wrote a number of scripts and work-shopped Postcard in a revisions class. Somewhere in grad school, though, A Place Without a Postcard became a story that needed to be a novel and so after I graduated, the screenplay became notes. Because the protagonist is blind through much of the story, I wrote most of it without any visual descriptions. The experience taught me a lot about how we hear and smell the world, and in the end I had a solid manuscript.

By 2002, and after many rounds of revisions, I noticed new things in the publishing world. Print on demand (POD) technology was going to change everything (and I suspect it still will change a lot by reducing the inherent risks of large print runs) by democratizing publishing. POD only required minimal resources and a firm belief in one’s vision. My friends in bands were recording their own CDs. Filmmakers were making and releasing their own films. All without anyone’s permission. Could POD be the key to allowing publishing to go DIY like music and film?

I learned about xlibris and iUniverse, the two main self-publishing POD companies at the time*, and liked what I saw. Their services weren’t bankrupt-you expensive—they were much cheaper then—because only books purchased would be printed, a fact that also appealed to the tree-hugger in me.

In December of 2002, I made my decision and decided to trust myself. In January, my book was available on the iUniverse website and within a month, it was available through Barnes & Noble online, Amazon, Book People and Powell’s (though with weirdly mis-colored  cover art on those 2 sites) as well as most other online booksellers.

Then the selling work commenced. I got interviews in a couple of local papers, a review here and there, did a radio interview, a reading and signing, and even got a small indie bookseller to stock it. I sold more copies that I expected and even made my money back, which they say is hard for a self-pubbed author to do. I met a lot of people and learned more than I could have imagined.

In all, it’s a decision I’ve been happy with.

—

*If I were to do it again, I’d look at createspace and lulu and the many other options out there now.

Thoughts About Self-Publishing

January 30, 2010 • • Leave a comment

I’ve got a guest post up over at Anne Mini’s Author! Author! blog in which I share some thoughts about the experience of self-publishing my novel A Place Without a Postcard back in 2003. Here’s the link: Thoughts about Self-Publishing by guest blogger James Brush. Go read it, Anne says nice things about me and my book.

If you’ve not visited Author! Author! and are interested in anything relating to publishing, check it out. Author! Author! is a veritable treasure house of useful information for anyone trying to navigate the world of agents, editors and publishing companies, and Anne is truly committed to helping writers succeed in that quest.

And, since we’re on the subject, if you haven’t done so already, I hope you’ll consider purchasing a copy of A Place Without a Postcard. Here’s the back cover copy:

Paul Reynolds, a photographer who creates fake photos for tabloid magazines, wakes up with no idea where he is or how he got there. He can’t even recall his name. A strange man lurks nearby, breathing heavily and slowly flipping through a book. Paul hears the man’s breath, but he cannot see him. He realizes with mounting panic that his eyes no longer function.

He remembers racing down a desolate West Texas highway. He remembers a cop who pulled him over for speeding. He remembers a shotgun-brandishing cook chasing him out of a diner. And he remembers a life abandoned, but he cannot put together the jigsaw puzzle that brought him where he is: blind, wanted by the law, and in the company of this invisible stranger.

In the backcountry town of Armbister, Texas, where temperatures hover around a hellish 110 degrees, Paul’s memory, intangible as a heat mirage, lies just beyond his reach, and God may be a coyote.

Thanks. Plug over.

iCoyote

January 28, 2010 • • 18 Comments

After days on the road, Robbie ran out of numbers for counting road signs and clouds, which was fine since he’d already counted all of them anyway. He switched to counting things that weren’t there and ticked imaginary numbers off in his head whenever he didn’t see something.

He thought he didn’t see a motorcycle but the absence was only a mirage, he realized when a black-clad biker gang rumbled past, stirring the desert to thunderous life before returning to the kind of silence that inspired Robby to consider counting things he didn’t hear as well as things unseen.

He thought he didn’t hear a coyote, so he eased his pickup off the highway to make sure the animal wasn’t there before adding it to his tally. Robby was scrupulously honest with himself about all things and wanted to ensure the accuracy of his count especially since the coyote, if it wasn’t there, would be the 500ith item on his list.

When he stepped out of his truck, the wind tore at his hair and clawed his jacket. He looked around trying to see if there was nothing there to count, but the desert, much to Robby’s disappointment, was full of things and besides he wanted that coyote to be the 500ith thing that wasn’t there. Nearly i0 hours from the road, he didn’t see the coyote, which wasn’t sitting in a three-legged chair. He resisted the urge to count the chair’s missing leg.

He approached iCoyote slowly and knelt before his absence, staring up at the thin clouds in the sky where iCoyote’s head would have been.

“I thought I’d be able to see you,” Robbie whispered, his voice nearly lost in the wind as he added iCoyote to his tally.

“Divide out the i’s,” iCoyote didn’t say.

Robbie thought back to half-remembered math classes, wondered if i worked like a variable, could be solved like x. “I’d have to do that to both sides of the equation, wouldn’t I?” Robby asked and noticed that he’d lifted his hands like an equal sign between them. “To balance it out, right?”

iCoyote didn’t say, “You’ll get your proof.”

Robbie divided out the i and saw the coyote grinning at him from the chair. The coyote hopped down, walked through Robbie as if he were a mere fraction reduced to the lowest terms of what he had been, and trotted off in the direction of Robbie’s truck.

Robbie looked around and saw all the things that weren’t there. He subtracted frantically, his list cratering before his open eyes. In the distance, he didn’t hear his engine start and he didn’t hear it drive down the highway without him.

—

This is a response to Read Write Poem prompt #111, a picture of a guy kneeling in front of an empty three-legged chair. It’s a remarkable photo.

I never know what to label stuff like this. Short story? Flash fiction? Prose poem? Prose poem feels right since that’s the intention I started with.

I have no idea if I got the math right. As with Robbie, my math classes were a long time ago.

Be sure to read what others did with this prompt.

A Walk Through the Memory Palace

January 28, 2010 • • 14 Comments

Welcome to the first stop on Read Write Poem’s latest virtual book tour. The touring chapbook is A Walk Through the Memory Palace (qarrtsiluni, 2009) by Pamela Johnson Parker. Memory Palace was the winner of the 2009 (and, I hope, first annual) qarrtsiluni chapbook contest, judged by guest judge Dinty Moore and managed by qarrtsiluni managing editors Beth Adams and Dave Bonta.

Moore chose an amazing manuscript and Adams and Bonta produced a lovely chapbook with cover art by Carrie Ann Baade. In addition to the paper copy, they created an online edition, which I really like since they eschewed the .pdf route and actually built a website, which is, in essence, an online book. You can also listen to Parker read her poems there, thus making the online edition something more than just a book posted online.

So, on to the book. I tend to start a book by thinking about its title and this one required a bit of research. A memory palace is a tool used for memorizing sequences and recalling memories. I did a quick walk through parts of the modern collective memory palace of the internet to come to an understanding of the term.

Based on reading at Wikipedia and a post on Litemind, it seems the basic idea is that in order to remember things, the memorist creates in her mind a visualization of a familiar place. By filling that map with objects and associating those objects with memories, she can walk through her memory palace and recall those memories. Sequences can be recalled by taking the same route through the memory palace that was taken when the memories were associated with the objects within the palace.

With this in mind, I found myself sitting back in my chair and allowing myself to walk through a house I lived it when I was growing up, trying to see things that were there. These objects led to stories and other associations from my memory and as I walked through this pre-constructed memory palace, I realized what a fascinating tool this could be for accessing the subconscious and developing a series of poems.

Perhaps this is how Parker began her project wherein she creates a beautifully wrought memory palace into which we are invited to enter. The poems are full of vivid images and the kind of precise and evocative diction that makes me want to reread. I think I’ve read most of these poems 3 times now over the past few months, but two stood out for me: “78 RPM” and “Some Yellow Tulips.” Both poems deal with the subject of memory and the way objects trigger those memories.

“78 RPM” masterfully captures a moment between two young lovers fooling around to the tune of a Billie Holiday record while the speaker’s aunt is outside. Parker captures the heat and intensity of this young lust moment with appropriate tension and sensual elegance:

Heart rising and
Falling like Billie’s
Song, cool water poured

To the top, brimming,
Then spilling silver
Notes, and his lips

On yours for —
The stylus bumps
Its paste-paper

Center; you hear
The screen door’s
Thump against its

Frame, hear Aunt’s
High heels tick
Across the porch.

I found it easy to lose myself in the moment and expected a different response from the aunt than the one Parker shows us. I felt as if the aunt knew what was going on, and understanding the futility of stopping the hormones from a-raging, simply offered iced tea “for this heat.”

If “78 RPM” is a poem about memories of heat, then “Some Yellow Tulips” is about memories of fire. In this powerful piece we find a holocaust survivor tending her garden with a kind of military precision. Parker uses words like ruthless and blitzkrieg to describe Mrs. Sonnenkratz at work in her garden, imposing order on her flowers and the world around her, but despite her best efforts it is only an illusion:

She smokes and shakes and smokes. Each flowerbed’s
As neat as graves. She stubs out ash. The heads

Of these tulips wore bright turbans, tight-wrapped
And now unwrapping. In Berlin, she was slapped:

Sie ist ein Jude… Dry-eyed in Dachau, how
She’s crying over bulbs bloomed too far now.

In a world of absence, presence leaves a scar.
Each tulip’s ravelled to a six-point star.

Despite what I imagine to be a beautiful garden, Parker’s use of words like smoke, graves, and ash suggests someone unable to escape the hellish memory palace that is the holocaust as each flower in her garden triggers these terrible memories despite her best efforts to control and retain them.

The whole poem is about control and our inability to truly control and put away that which we might wish to forget, and I wonder if that is one reason this poem alone is written in metered rhyme.

I suppose as a reviewer I’m supposed to offer some criticism or talk about something I didn’t like in the book, but it was hard to come up with anything. There were a few that didn’t speak to me immediately (“Archaic Fragments” and “Unreal Gardens Without Toads in Them”) but that’s more a matter of my tastes than Parker’s abilities as a poet.

Other highlights include “Breasts” a brilliant meditation on the way the past predicts the future in terms of the speaker’s family history with breast cancer, and “Reading Keats in a Japanese Garden” wherein we see beauty as transitory and almost more beautiful for that.

Good stuff, all around. Now go order yourself a copy because the print version is beautiful (and not transitory) or read it online. Either way, it will be time well spent and you’ll find yourself looking forward to the next time you walk through this particular memory palace.

Here’s the schedule for the rest of the tour:

Feb. 2 — Daniel Romo at Peyote Soliloquies
Feb. 4 — Jill Crammond Wickham at Jillypoet
Feb. 9 — Lawrence Gladeview at Righteous Rightings
Feb. 11 — Sarah J. Sloat at The Rain in My Purse
Feb. 16 — Nathan Landau at Poems About Nothing in Particular
Feb. 18 — Dave Jarecki at Dave Jarecki
Feb. 20 — David Moolten at Edible Detritus

Lines Discovered in an Aging Ornithologist’s Field Journal

January 25, 2010 • • Leave a comment

 

When the end comes, don’t
plant me in the ground, trapped
in just one piece of earth.

Why not leave me by
the highway for the vultures
and maybe for the crows
who will take my sleeping eyes.

Then, at last, I could soar,
finally fly on dusky wings
outstretched,

buried in the sky.

—

“Lines Discovered in an Aging Ornithologist’s Field Journal” was one of 3 poems originally published at Thirteen Myna Birds in July 2009. Poems don’t stick around long over there before they fly away, so I’m posting them here for those who may have missed them back in July. This is 3 of 3. It has been slightly modified from its original form. The others can be found here and here.

I’m continuing to dabble with audio blogging, this time seeing how it goes reading one of my poems. I don’t know how often I’ll do this, but it was surprisingly easy to get the reading. I even edited a little bit since I liked the end of one take and the beginning of another.