Welcome to the new blog!

Here’s a snippet from what I’ve been working on today. Peeps who attended the Plotting class yesterday (which was AWESOME) – this is the steampunk horror story that I showed you the initial notes for.

A frenzy of fretwork adorned the house’s facade, but it was splintery, paint peeling in long shaggy spirals that fuzzed the puzzled outlines. The left side drooped like the face of a stroke victim, windows staring blindly out, cataracted with the dusty remnants of curtains.

Marshall Artemus Smith thought that it would have given a human man the chills. He glanced back at Elspeth to see how she was taking, but her face was chiseled and resolute as a fireman’s axe.

“You all right?”

She swabbed at her forehead with a bare forearm, leaving streaks of dark wet dirt. “Thank your lucky stars you don’t feel the heat,” she rasped.

Hot indeed if enough to irritate her into mentioning that. He chose to ignore it.

The house sagged amid slumping cottonwoods, clusters of low-lying groves, their leaves indifferent ovals of green and pale brown. Three stories, and above that, two cupolas thrust upward into the sky, imploring, the left one tilted at an angle.

His spurs jingled as he clanked up the front steps. His eyes ratcheted over the scene for clues, but it was clear that their fugitive had entered by the front door, which hung a few inches ajar.

Wood creaked under Elspeth’s slower treads. “This was his mother’s house,” she said.

She’d gone over the files meticulously as always, then summed up the details for him as they’d ridden along. He ticked through them in his head.
“The scientist?”

“Angeline Pinkney, yes. She helped discover how to harness phlogiston. They had her working on the war effort till she was dying of rotlung. Then she retired out here and lasted another two years.”

Phlogiston, the most precious material in the world, capable of fueling marvelous machines like himself. He carried a scraping of it, small as a fingernail clipping, deep in his midsection. Once a year, it was replaced, but it was valuable enough that he’d had people try to kill him for it before.

So far none had succeeded.

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One of the distinctions that I sometimes hear people making is “regular” Sf and “literary” SF, usually with some baggage about the literary SF being art. I say, if you’re making something you don’t really interact with for food, shelter, or clothing (and even then, in some cases), you are probably making art.

Word-wrangling is art, no matter whether it is used for the lowest purposes or the most exalted, and the artist who relaxes and enjoys it learns to use artful techniques for the entertainment or edification of her/his readers. And they may, in that process, create something lasting.

At the same time, a dose of art in whatever form — visual, music, verbal — can shake things loose in our heads to the point where better and more interesting words fall out. This is why you should read books like Poetry as Insurgent Art.

Here’s Ferlinghetti himself on the notion of rejecting poetry, aka all that artsy stuff.

Don’t let them tell you poetry is bullshit.

Don’t let them tell you poetry is for the birds.

Have a good laugh at those who tell you poets are misfits or potential terrorists and a danger to the state.

Don’t let them tell you poetry is a neurosis that some people never outgrow.

Laugh at those who tell you poetry is all written by the Holy Ghost and you’re just a ghost-writer.

Don’t ever believe poetry is irrelevant in dark times.

If you’ve ever been inside Ciy Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, you’ve walked the same floorboards as Ferlinghetti, who co-founded the store with Peter Martin in 1953. He and Shig Murao, the manager, were arrested in 1956 on obscenity charges for selling copies of Allan Ginsberg’s Howl.

Why should you read this? I tell you what. I’ll let Ferlinghetti speak for himself by quoting the beginning of Poetry as Insurgent Art.

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age? What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it. (A voice in the wilderness!)

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerers with words.

If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.

Ferlinghetti should be read as a subversive act:

The idea of poetry as an arm of class war disturbs the sleep of those who do not wish to be disturbed in the pursuit of happiness.

The poet by definition is the bearer of Eros and love and freedom and thus the natural-born non-violent enemy of any police state.

Read this for the sake of poetry, “the last lighthouse in rising seas.”