Talking Heads, Hearing Voices & the Disappearing Narrator
July 1, 2010 @ 12:18 pm
“Good dialogue is all about the author being invisible and letting the characters take center stage. It’s the difference between watching people on a screen, versus spying on them through the window, versus being in the room with them. Ideally, you want your reader in the room with your characters; experiencing your story as opposed to witnessing it (or simply hearing about it). Crafting realistic dialogue is a matter of time and practice, of listening to people and having an ear (and a love) for accents. While I have a few pointers on those things, they’re really up to the individual writer to work at. However, I have learned some very practical ways for the author to disappear when it comes to writing dialogue, methods that remove the one-way mirror between the reader and the story.”
My essay on writing dialogue is live over at the Cult.
Word.
Dispatch from Interzone: The Monster, the Shaman and la Casa Cero
June 7, 2010 @ 12:14 pm
Peter Maravelis and I meet about once a month back in San Francisco. We exchange one or two brief messages to set a time and day; always the same location, known only to us. Nothing else is discussed until then. We could be swapping Christmas cards as easily as black briefcases, with nobody the wiser. Our cells are turned off, severing us from the noise grid—the phone calls, text messages, emails, status updates, tweets and news feeds—those things we were all perfectly fine without barely a decade ago. For the next three or four hours, we walk. Taxis and public transport are likewise against protocol; walking keeps the eyes open and maintains a shade of the unfamiliar on home turf. Our conversation sprouts an array of tentacles during these walks: writing, publishing, book selling, history, conspiracies, spirituality, furniture, skepticism, martial arts, family, love, death, drinking, comics, travel and whatever else the conversation wants.
Peter frequently speaks of the shaman— the designated messenger able to cross between this world and the next at will. In so doing, the shaman brings guidance and healing back to the people, but not without risk. The trip is dangerous and takes its toll on the shaman, and each time could be the last. Like Johnny Truant says in House of Leaves, “Any fool can pray.” Peter likens the role of the writer in our culture to that of the shaman in others. Indeed, some writers go places where most people can’t, and where other writers won’t. These writers leave a lasting mark on our culture and indeed, a few don’t come back.
Again and again, the shaman came up during our talks and Peter’s message was clear. My departure for South America was imminent; I would be crossing numerous boundaries, both literal and figurative, and returning with a long overdue novel (hopefully). Similar but less pronounced sentiments came from my friends, most of whom used the word “adventure.” That’s going to be such an adventure. I can wait to hear about your adventures. While I took Peter’s shaman analogue to heart, the truth was that I’d been couch surfing for ten months and bar tending work was beyond scarce. I came here because I was broke.
I’ve lived abroad before, traveled the world via plane, train, boat, car and motorcycle, and once hitchhiked through a remote stretch of Ireland after my bike died outside a Druidic burial mound (draw your own conclusion). I didn’t want another adventure; I wanted a cheap place where I could write without distractions. After five years of fighting with my third novel, I wanted back to my internal ground zero: no expectations or standards other than my own; no deadlines; no pressures or obligations beyond my notebook and coffee pot. My friends had a room for me in Bolivia, just what I wanted.
Our house is on Av. Ayacucho, at Av. Heroinas. The city’s north, south, east and west are determined relative to this intersection, and the sequence of street numbers ascending through those four sections begins here. I live in the navigational center of the city, the zero point, and I’ve written as much here over these last three months as in the previous five years back home. I seldom go out more than once a day, sometimes less, and rarely for more than an hour. My previous Interzone posts are not highlights; they account for everything I’ve seen and done more than a few blocks from la Casa Cero. Were it not for checking email or reloading coffee, cobwebs would cover my boots. No adventures. No hallucinogenic rituals, visions in the deep jungle or psychoactive snakebites. I stay indoors and write.
This novel is my best yet, and from the start I’ve been circulating chapters pretty loosely, which is unusual for me. I never show work in progress to anyone, and I’m still terrified of having close friends read my published stories. But not this time. My first two novels were deeply personal; I feel profoundly exposed to those loved ones who read them. I’m not referring to the books’ criminal elements, though I’ve been the subject of much speculation regarding the acid required to write what I do. Coming from book critics, this astounds me. Any critic who believes writing about an altered state of mind requires having one is too ignorant to merit the title of critic. As for “write what you know,” you needn’t be a killer to write a murder mystery (but it helps).
I’ve never taken acid and never will; the monsters aren’t allowed out of the cellar unsupervised. Yes, they can come out, just as I can go down to them. In Night Time, Losing Time, Michael Ventura wrote, “If I can’t get there on my own, I’ve got no business going.” It’s like that with my monsters. Memory, identity, names, self, others, outsiders, belonging, faith and death: my thematic obsessions are just different doors to and from the same cellar. The voices, metaphors and images in each story are code for my monsters. Regardless of the codes or disguises, I’m still never comfortable opening the cellar to those closest to me. As for critics, bloggers and online reviewers, I’ve resented from the beginning any descriptions of my work as pushing the envelope. I resent even more being labeled transgressive. A writer cannot push, break or transgress a boundary without first conceding to the definition of that boundary, a definition which by nature is not their own. Thus an artist who intends foremost to shock, to transgress, willingly trades their own rules for someone else’s. They surrender their art instead of surrendering to it. And no artist creates anything worthwhile from their comfort zone. So yeah, I need my monsters. Whatever anyone else thinks, right or wrong, and however much they scare me, I need them.
I finished a first draft last week. There’s more to be done; sections to flesh out and narrative gaps to fill, but the load-bearing story points are all on paper. I needed to recharge, to work on something else until I could return to the manuscript with fresh eyes. I stared at the ceiling for a long while, rooting around in my cellar until I found a story down there in the dark and it was sunrise before I stopped writing. Nothing violent, scatological or otherwise morbid, but something so close to the bone I doubt I’ll let anyone read it. It’s that personal. Yes, I’ll finish it, of course. Then I’ll bury it.
Funny thing, monsters. They’re scariest when you don’t hear them coming.
It dawned on me during that same sunrise writing jag: I’m not afraid to share my latest novel, which is precisely why the first draft took five years. I’d been writing from my comfort zone. It began as a short called The Fade, written back when I wasn’t pulling my punches (the first time I read it to an audience was also my last). Since then, I’ve been skirting those scary spots, tiptoeing around the monsters. Maybe because of that reading or maybe not, it doesn’t matter. I can be a writer or I can be safe, but I can’t be both. If I hadn’t written a single word since coming here, that evening staring at the ceiling would have been worth the entire trip. That was the lesson I came here to learn.
I’ll finish the short piece, the one from the cellar, then return to the manuscript for a second draft. Flesh it out, triple-check story continuity and character arcs, and hone my prose layer by layer. Write and rewrite until I’m scared, until I feel exposed when a loved one reads it. This time around, the monsters will have free reign. But first I’m flying home.
The door’s top hinge was missing and the bottom remained bolted to a spearhead of wood torn from its former frame but it was otherwise pristine. A broad plank without inlays, bevels or carvings. Glossy red like a toy fire engine, lacquered so smooth Icarus could almost see his reflection.
Craftsmanship, the jumpy little man said. Old school. He knocked on the bright red door with the flourish of a stage comedian.
This door of yours, said Icarus. Where does it go?
Go? The man bent over and belly laughed for nearly a full minute, pointed at Icarus and shook his head. It’s just a door, Big Man. It don’t go anywhere.
And what would I want with a door that goes nowhere?
And so on.
-Craig
Cochabamba, Bolivia
June, 2010
Dispatch from Interzone: Shopping for Centipede Meat
May 18, 2010 @ 4:20 pm
Back in November of 2009, City Lights hosted a celebration honoring the 50th anniversary of the publication of Naked Lunch, during which a mix of local authors, old friends and colleagues of the late William Burroughs gathered at San Francisco’s Make Out Room to read passages from his seminal Beat novel. I was honored to be among them, though I’m the first to admit I’ve struggled with Naked Lunch a number of times. The book simultaneously demands and yet defies being read, at least my own attempts. Burroughs as an orator, however, has few equals. I will never forget the night when I was eleven or twelve years old, watching Saturday Night Live in one of its earliest seasons. The host, Lauren Hutton, stepped onto the stage and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. William Burroughs.”
I had no idea who he was, this man who looked older than God, resplendent in a suit and tie, his face weathered with age (and more) but intact, smiling with his eyes. Burroughs sat behind a table with sheets of a Naked Lunch manuscript and there he read to the audience a scene wherein Dr. Benway performs surgery aboard a sinking ship, the cigarette hanging from his mouth spilling ashes into the patient’s incision. Burroughs had a prominent nasal quality in his voice, laced with a predatory snarl. His pitch alternated between a menacing monotone and a cheerful rise-and-fall synched with the rhythm of his words, as though he were reading a bedtime story to a child. That was the first and last time SNL ever aired such a thing and the show has never been as daring since. William S. Burroughs left his mark on me, that evening.
Peter Maravelis asked if I had any preference as to which passage from Naked Lunch I’d like to read for the event. I said I had none, that I was fine with whatever he chose for me. Peter selected an excerpt in which Burroughs gives the reader a prolonged and sweeping panorama of Interzone, “A Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.” A massive, open-air, free-trade circus that is all at once grandiose, depraved and spectacular, Interzone is a confluence of Mexico, South America and Morocco, all places where Burroughs had lived while either running from the law or writing or both. Burroughs created his Interzone as a place where everything under the sun—licit and illicit; real or imagined—could be bought or sold:
“…Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmaline, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang- utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war…. A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum…”
Peter Maravelis knew my plan to expatriate to South America and finish my novel, and he knew the plan was well under way. His choice of that passage from Naked Lunch was far more deliberate and prophetic than I appreciated at the time. It was after I understood his subtle message that I dubbed this travel diary Dispatches from Interzone.
My first foray into the open-air market, the Cancha, of Cochabamba, Bolivia, was the day I landed. Jet-lagged and sleep deprived after twenty-two hours on three planes and four airports, I hadn’t adjusted to the city’s altitude. I was about a hundred IQ points shy of what I’d left with and I’d need a few days to grow them back, for my body to amp-up its red blood cell count to compensate for the thin air. But I’d promised my friends and loved ones back in San Francisco that I’d set up a cell phone as soon as I arrived. The moment I set foot in the marketplace, I saw just how real the Burroughs brainchild of Interzone could be.
Traffic laws don’t apply in the Cancha. Nor, apparently, do the laws of physics, of the time-space continuum. Turn your back on a fruit vendor and you’ll miss the rippling in the air and that fruit vendor is gone. I can’t see the hills from most points in the market, and the hills around the city are the best way to orient myself (I’ve been cursed with a complete lack of any sense of direction; if the Devil has a compass, I’m the needle). The fastest method to find something in the Cancha is to give up looking. The Cancha knows what you want, it lures you in then silently shuffles the grid around you. Try getting out and you’re suddenly lost; get lucky and find your way, and there in front of you is the thing you’ve been looking for all afternoon. You make your purchase—the spices, the whiskey, the bootleg dvd—and you’re suddenly tired, parched. Maybe a bit hungry. So you wander a little further, look for a cholita selling tucamanas, or cooking sonzos or anticuchos over a grill, with hopefully some ice left in her bucket of sodas. Then the sun goes down and the streets change again. The Cancha knows.
Each street is a mixture of permanent shops—small concrete bunkers with metal roll-up doors—temporary kiosks, booths and small tents, along with vendors pushing carts or barrows. Most of them have a phone next to their display of candy bars or screwdrivers, so you can make a call while you peruse their selection sink stoppers, straight razors or plantains. Some merchants stake their claim of pavement with just their wares spread across a blanket. Oh, the blankets… woven from llama wool dyed in screaming bright pinks and blues. The cholitas use them for everything, lugging to and from the market with the blanket wrapped around their shoulders and knotted across their chest, their cargo slung in back— produce, electrical tools, a portable gas grill or an infant.
The market’s commerce is loosely organized by aggregates of similar vendors. One street is all flowers, another is hardware. There’s an entire block of shops selling bicycles and bicycle parts, but I seldom see bicycles in Cochabamba, and almost never outside the market. Another street is all shoes, another nothing but liquor. Off the streets and into one of the massive tents covering the entire block, the commerce is likewise segregated.
But this is the Cancha, not a shopping mall. There is no piped-in music or central fountain or carousel. The shopping mall is artificial, an insular and static environment where nothing is random and everything is predicted. The Cancha is alive. It thrives on the random and the unpredictable, the unforeseen and the dangerous. For every street of kindred sellers, there’s another that’s pure chaos:
Scores of dogs and small children. A tiny girl with black braids longer than my forearm. A cage of live chickens. A man selling individual bandaids from a roll. Two men selling baskets of fruit, most of which I have never seen and couldn’t identify on a bet. Cholitas hawking fresh baked bread from wicker hampers. A boy pushing a wooden cart filled with new socks. Canvas booths offering whiskey and tequila beside another booth stocked with stationary and children’s school supplies. A row of cholitas on sidewalk blankets selling votive candles pulverized herbs, rat traps and women’s underwear. Fortune tellers, seven or eight of them, divining with tarot cards or coca leaves. One booth showcasing pump shotguns, extendable batons and curling irons; the next specializing in confetti, enormous burlap sacks of it, sorted by color. Another cholita churns out sandals from a mound of scrap rubber. She uses nothing but a simple kitchen knife sharpened on the rock beside her; each shoe from start to finish takes her as long brushing your teeth.
Cloves of garlic the size of tangerines. Cords of sugar cane and cinnamon bark. Bees swarm around honeycombs fixed to a plank nailed across the middle of a bright red wheelbarrow filled with honey. I pay ten bolivianos to an old man in a cowboy hat. He ladles honey into a half-pint plastic jar that I imagine will last me three weeks but it’s gone in a matter of days. It tastes like wild sage and is the best honey I’ve ever had. I’ve yet to see him again.
Doctors and dentists, some with their waiting rooms exposed to the street, all with hand-painted signs listing their services: curaciones; sueros; inyecciones; rayos-x. I see a doctor in one of the lobbies, a clipboard and a copy of Mein Kampf under his arm. Other merchants sell medicines harvested from the nearby jungles, dense displays of herbs in bags and bottles and teas, labeled for every conceivable ailment. Small gaming rooms house forty year-old pinball machines adjacent to gambling parlors with a cashier, a half-dozen games that resemble pachinko machines and a few others I don’t recognize. One shop specializes in glass laboratory supplies, another sells second-hand dental chairs.
Canopies cover the interior of the block. Turn off the street, go inside and you’ll once more find similar merchants gathered in close quarters. Butchers, produce vendors and others with enormous bags of pasta, crates of eggs or boxes of laundry soap. But keep going. There’s an arcade with nothing but opulent white cakes on both sides running the length of the block. One intersection has stalls with every regional hat from Bolivia stacked to the rafters. Still another arcade is nothing but children’s shoes, and another nothing but fabric vendors. The bolts of cloth go from floor to ceiling and before you reach the center, the walls have muted the mayhem of the surrounding Cancha. It’s one of the quietest places I’ve ever been. Further on, piles of the luminous llama wool blankets, then a white grotto crammed with devotional paintings and statues like a small warehouse. A chain blocks the entry, but a table of votive candles sits within reach, should you have a cause to pray. A blind man has his own tiny booth beneath the canopy. He wears an enormous cross around his neck, carries his red and white cane in one hand, a bell in the other, and keeps a bucket for donations on a stand beside him. He speaks in rapid-fire tongues as though cranking through radio stations in his head and he chimes his bell at regular intervals. He’s surrounded by listeners, presumably those seeking his access to God. Across from the blind prophet, two cholitas stand behind a wall of four-foot burlap sacks nearly overflowing with freshly harvested coca leaves. I buy a larger bag than usual, hoping they’ll let me take a photograph, but they don’t.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m okay with shopping malls; they have their place. Mostly I’m there for the movies but sometimes I buy clothes or Christmas presents. But at the Cancha, I can buy a wedding cake or a live chicken. Or both. I can keep the chicken and give it a name or use it for food or ritual sacrifice. At the Cancha, I can learn my fortune on the street, then pray for a better one beneath the tent. I can talk to my friends from a pirate music vendor’s hotwired landline and I can talk to God through a blind bell ringer. I can eat fruits I’ve never seen before or ever will again. Hear a language spoken nowhere else in the world, by fewer people than the population of my home town. I can gamble on strange machines; buy liquor or a psychoactive plant, freely and openly. A plant that’s outlawed anywhere it’s incapable of growing, which is almost everywhere else. And when I’m done with the liquor and the leaves and the gambling, I can be healed. By a doctor, a medicine man or a preacher. It’s all here, salvation and damnation by the god or devil of your choosing. Or maybe you just need food for yourself and your family. Shoes for the little one, a lightbulb for the kitchen.
I miss home, as much as I love it here. Every day I think about my friends and loved ones, my favorite bars and places to eat, the coffee shop down the block from my brother’s house where I spent my mornings writing. I miss luxuries, things like a mattress and potable water. But I know once I’m home again, I’ll miss the Cancha and its vibrating soundless hum.
The novel is coming together. After five years I’m finally within sight of a finished, working draft. But I can’t afford to change my flight or extend my visa, so I’m working as much as I can until it’s time to go:
Mr. Edison, you don’t have to worry about me. As for that package, it’s yours. But I’d be remiss in my messenger detail if I didn’t forespeculate some bad news making way for the good. Something about hearing your name makes the hair on your soul stand on end. None of my business. I’m just saying, you want to cut loose that moldy mojo, you got to walk through the worst of it to get to the better.
And so on.
-Craig