Dexter Palmer's Blog

Sometimes I look at my blog and figure that I ought to post here, just so it’s clear that I haven’t abandoned it entirely–blogging gets a smaller audience than my Twitter account, but it doesn’t have a 140-character limit, which is a point in its favor.

As for what I’m doing–most importantly, I’m starting work on a new novel in earnest, though my expected completion date at the moment is “when it’s done.” (Version Control took me roughly seven years between the day I began writing and the day I turned in a finalized draft, which was published nearly a year later. Though I do feel like I’m getting a little faster with writing these days, and so I hope this new work won’t take quite that long.)

One thing that I’ve noticed has changed greatly each time I begin a new book is that the research process gets a lot easier. In particular, this time I’m finding the Google Ngram Viewer to be a lifesaver, a useful tool instead of an interesting toy. (Though this project will still require regular trips to the library, and there will be times when a full day’s worth of reading yields only a single paragraph of writing.)

Version Control was published in paperback last week–my period of active self-promotion for that novel is more or less over, but I’m glad to see that new readers are picking up the book after its initial hardcover release.

As far as recreation, I’ve been playing Skyrim on the PS4 on and off since December, my first time with the game. It fits well with a writing schedule for me–compelling, but not compulsive. With something like Civilization, the only way I can play it is to essentially hook up an IV drip and write off a weekend–games like Skyrim, on the other hand, have a constant drip feed of accomplishment (a level-up, a completion of a quest, etc.) so that a good stopping point seems to arrive every ten or fifteen minutes. I suspect this is a year in which I play very few games (Skyrim will keep me busy until Persona 5 comes out in April, and if the game takes 100 or more hours to complete as I’ve read, I’ll be playing that into summer).

I foresee myself dialing down my time on Twitter this year in order to get some writing done, but perhaps I’ll post here more often–we’ll see. Anyway, back to work.

I haven’t posted here in . . . over 3.5 years, looks like. No time like the present.

The good news is that I’ve been busy in the meantime: as is obvious from the redesign of the site, I’ve got a new novel coming soon, Version Control. Pre-publication reviews have been good so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing it on shelves (February 23). The publicity machine is spinning up, slowly but surely; a couple of events are scheduled around the book’s publication date, with a few more to come in March and April.

I’ve also got a short story in the upcoming anthology Bestiary, edited by Ann VanderMeer and published by Centipede Press: that’ll be out in March 2016 in a luxuriously appointed hardcover edition. And there’s another small project I’ve worked on that should see the light of day this year (probably this spring), but I’m not ready to say much about that yet.

In the meantime, I may (or at least I have the intention to) start blogging here again regularly. The redesign of the site led me to do some thinking about what blogging is actually for in an online environment dominated by social media. I deactivated my Facebook account a while ago, but I use Twitter daily, and it’s something of a window onto the world for me: most of the links I visit show up on Twitter first.

But Twitter’s format is limiting–I use Twitter because in many circumstances that limit is a virtue, but sometimes I want to say something that’s longer than 140 characters, and I don’t want to think about how many likes or retweets it’s going to get. Indeed, sometimes I don’t want to see any feedback at all. Not every online utterance needs a number affixed to it that pretends to indicate its popularity; nor does each utterance necessarily need to be the start of a dialogue.

So this blog will become a repository for things that, for one reason or another, I don’t judge to be suitable for Twitter. I can’t promise that I’ll post here regularly (and if writing fiction picks up speed, I may go silent here again for a few years). I won’t worry about page views or comments. I may or may not link to this site from Twitter, depending on how I’m feeling, but at the moment I’m thinking this blog shouldn’t be something I’m constantly inviting readers to visit, but something they come across through serendipity, or of their own volition.

A quick note: my blogging will probably continue to be extremely sporadic for the foreseeable future, since almost all of the writing I do each day is for the novel in progress (which’ll be done… whenever it’s done). And I rarely check my Facebook account. But I’m relatively active on Twitter (@dexterauthor): I seem to be able to find 140 characters to spare every once in a while.

Once I start reading a book, I’m always extremely reluctant to put it down without finishing it. It always seems like I could be making a mistake in doing so, that I’m returning the book to its shelf just before reading the page that would justify all the time I’d invested in it before. Still, though, there are a few books I’ve abandoned and haven’t yet returned to: here are my confessions.

—Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (I got to page 292 out of 1,150—the bookmark is still in the Penguin paperback that sits on my shelf). I picked this up some time after the NATO involvement in the Bosnian war. West’s descriptions of landscapes and cultures are gorgeous and perceptive as I remember them, but graduate school got in the way of my being able to stay with the book. I can see me taking another pass at this—it’s available on iBooks with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, and an electronic version with a search function (along with quick access to the Internet for the glossing of names and places) would make it easier to get through.

—Imperial by William T. Vollmann (I reached page 181 out of 1,125). Vollmann’s books are generally doorstoppers that deal with unpleasant subjects, but he’s a pleasure to read because he’s so considerate of his readers, without making undue concessions to them or dumbing down his subject matter. The seven-volume edition of Rising Up and Rising Down that was published by McSweeney’s is an exhaustive catalog of all the ways in which one human being can be horrible to another, but I was able to get through it in six weeks of steady reading because Vollmann has a beautiful prose style, he’s acutely conscious of structure (so that even if you don’t always know where he’s going, you’re always sure that he’s going somewhere), and he has frequent chapter breaks, so that you can read him for ten minutes or two hours and reach a good stopping point. Rising Up and Rising Down is one of the most profound reading experiences I’ve had—I regularly found myself not agreeing with Vollmann about the nature and motivations of violent acts, but the process of figuring out why I didn’t agree was immensely rewarding, and his discussion of expediency changed the way I think about human behavior.

So why didn’t I finish Imperial, which is shorter by two thirds? I think it was probably because having read Rising Up and Rising Down (3,352 pages) and The Royal Family (774 pages) I just decided that I’d read enough of Vollmann, as much as I like him. (By comparison, my three-volume Library of America edition of the complete prose of Herman Melville clocks in at roughly 4,000 pages.) But I can see myself coming back to Imperial at some point later in life, too.

—The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (I got to page 232 out of 800). Again, this is a case where reading for graduate school got in the way of my pleasure reading. It wasn’t a difficult read; it just wasn’t the best time right then for me to read it.

—The Witching Hour by Anne Rice—the only Rice novel I’ve ever picked up. I think I got through a third of it—I don’t have the copy on my shelves. This would have been twenty years ago. As many a well-meant rejection letter from an agent or editor says, it was “not for me.”

—The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. I admit it: I was bored by this one. Though later on I did end up reading Radcliffe’s The Italian at someone’s suggestion, and got on with it a lot better.

—Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas: Hoo boy. I still feel conflicted about this one, which I just abandoned this morning, closing the book on page 320 of 1,133. (It was published on the same day as Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, another brick that I did actually complete reading.) My immediate feeling is that I’m not sure that I’ve come across another book that is so long that also wants so little to be read, and the only other novels I’ve read that have such a dimly nihilistic view of human nature are Patrick White’s The Vivisector and William Gass’s The Tunnel.

But those two books, as hard as they can be to get through, have shapes, and a kind of narrative momentum. Parallel Stories, on the other hand, seems to be deliberately, obstinately shapeless, with narrative arcs that have beginnings and no endings, or endings and no beginnings, or sometimes only middles. Some reviews indicate that the resistance to traditional narrative convention is a deliberate choice on Nádas’s part, that it’s meant to echo the shapelessness of human life as it’s lived, but there are ways in which other writers have successfully portrayed that shapelessness while still retaining control of their story (William Gaddis’s The Recognitions does this, I’d argue).

On a sentence-by-sentence level, or even on the level of individual chapters, the writing is beautiful. The absence of quotation marks that’s criticized in some reviews as an instance of pretension isn’t really a problem—the difference in style between dialogue and narrative is clear enough without them (though at times it can be hard to tell who’s speaking in a room full of people). And in the first third there are some amazing set-pieces: in particular, I’m thinking about an intense thirty-page chapter that consists entirely of a depiction of people living in separate rooms in a building, all of them listening to a ringing telephone, each of them expecting or willing someone else to drop what they’re doing and answer it.

But when it comes to seeing the forest rather than looking at each of its trees, I’m just not getting along with the novel. After 300-odd pages of tiny print I’m seeing a book that is defiantly uninterested in the basic pleasures of plot; nor does it offer the philosophical weight of the writers to which Nádas is regularly compared (Musil; Mann; Tolstoy) that could conceivably make such plotlessness an asset instead of a liability. (Though, to be fair, I think the similarities to those writers are claims that others are making for the book, rather than claims the book is making for itself—I don’t think Parallel Stories is meant to be a philosophical novel on the order of The Man Without Qualities or The Magic Mountain, so much as a meticulous series of character studies.)

Though with 800 pages left in the book, I could be wrong about it—that’s the thing. It’s going back on the shelf, but an abandoned book is never really abandoned—if you don’t finish a book, it doesn’t disappear. (It took me three tries to get all the way through Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow when I first came across it, and I ended up going from not really liking it at first to writing a dissertation chapter on it.) I may wait to see if people are still talking about Parallel Stories in ten years, though. If it’s good now, it’ll be good later.

In the meantime, I’m taking a trip to New York City today, and I have to say, perhaps with a touch of guilt or regret, that it’s a relief to know I won’t have to lug that book along with me on the train.

Blog posting has been infrequent lately, because most of my writing each day is going into a new novel. But in my spare time I’ve been into these things:

—1Q84, by Haruki Murakami. I’m about two-thirds of the way through it, and all I’m ready to say about it is that I can see why critics are divided over it. The book works best for me when I read not less than two but no more than four chapters a day, the pace I think it’s designed for. Not because it’s particularly intellectually challenging and requires time to digest, but because the repetition of events and phrases gets to me in large doses. However, at a slower pace, the subtle differences between the repetitions becomes more apparent, making those repetitions read more like variations on a theme. Unlike many long novels that seem to assume that readers have the ability of total recall in addition to huge blocks of time to dedicate to following a narrative, 1Q84 seems to be designed for people who are thinking about lots of different things at once during the day, who don’t have a lot of free time, and who might need regular reminders of past events in a storyline. Which I appreciate. And the perception of those ever-nebulous “pacing problems” (which I thought the book had at first, when I was going through it too quickly) can sometimes be the result of a reader in too much of a hurry.

—Walt Simonson’s run on The Mighty Thor (recently collected in a Marvel Omnibus). You know, if you were to just describe the character of Beta Ray Bill to someone, it’d sound like the dumbest thing ever, but here it works because Simonson plays the character so straight (and also because Simonson is a great storyteller and his art is gorgeous). The attitude seems to be that if you’ve already suspended your disbelief enough to accept comic-book versions of Norse gods, why not go the distance and buy this bionic alien, too?

—Final Fantasy XIII. Late to the party on this, but my Pile of Shame currently consists of over sixty games, and that’s only current-gen stuff. So I’m attempting to whittle it down this year. Sometimes I think FFXIII is barely even a game—in the early chapters, it’s more like an interactive anime that requires me to press the X button now and again—but after a getting a fair distance into it I’m starting to see how the battle system could be interesting later on. And to be fair, I’ve never gotten bored with looking at it. Eye candy, sure, but what’s wrong with that?

But these days I’m primarily focused on the new novel, which is chugging along each day. I’m adding more to the manuscript than I’m crossing out, which is the best position to be in.

It’s common to hear writing advice that says you should write every day, no matter what, but I’ve found that procrastination is an essential part of the writing process, and any reasonable timetable for completion of a long work will account for it. I’m in a procrastination period now, but that’s not a bad thing: the impulse to procrastinate is a phenomenon best defeated by embracing it. And procrastination has its uses.

A secret to effective procrastination is to use the time to accomplish mildly unpleasant tasks that you’ve been otherwise avoiding. Video games, for example, don’t work, and will merely prolong the time you spend procrastinating; surfing the Internet doesn’t work, either. Cleaning one’s desk in preparation to write does work (and I spent two evenings last week doing that, even though a desk stacked full of papers has somehow never stopped me from writing before). As a sign of how cluttered my desk was, I should point out that buried beneath a pile of papers I found a whole entire laptop, an old Titanium Powerbook G4 (that I used to write most of the second draft of The Dream of Perpetual Motion. And getting that computer up and running again–it needed a new battery–was another avenue for effective avoidance of writing. Looking through its folders reminded me that it’s the only Mac I have in the house that can run Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin, a game that I’d like to go back to spending time with, but again: video games don’t actually bring a period of procrastination to an end.

The other trick to successful procrastination involves completing tasks that aren’t mentally demanding. Part of the reason words aren’t showing up on paper right now is that I’m in a problem-solving phase of the composition process–prior experience has taught me that the more time I spend thinking about possible problems that could crop up during the writing of a long work, the less time I’ll have to spend with rewrites and edits on the back end. So while I’m emptying drawers full of old papers, and vacuuming the floor, and deciding whether or not to alter the system I have for shelving books (for instance: should Presidential biographies and autobiographies get their own separate shelf, organized chronologically by the time their subjects served?), I’m actually thinking about how to solve narrative problems, composing bits of dialogue in my head, and other things like that. So work’s getting done.

Eventually, when I’ve done enough thinking (or, more accurately, when I admit to myself that I’ve done enough thinking), I’ll put pen to paper again. Which reminds me that I should probably run out to the store today to buy a new ballpoint pen–I have a pile of perfectly functional pens here, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have the right one.

For those who haven’t seen this, here’s an interview I did by e-mail with Sam Montgomery-Blinn for the Summer 2010 issue of Bullspec. It’s mostly about The Dream of Perpetual Motion, but other subjects show up, too.



———-

Interview by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

How long have you been working on the story behind The Dream of Perpetual Motion, and what made this the right time and the right story for you to tell in your first novel?



I started working on the novel in 1996. I got the idea for the setting when doing research for a paper I was writing in grad school on H. G. Wells—when I was searching through the library stacks for secondary material, I came across a book called Futuredays: A Nineteenth-Century Vision of the Year 2000. It’s basically what it’s advertised to be: reproductions of a collection of French cigarette cards, illustrated by artist Jean Marc Côté in 1899 and depicting his whimsical idea of what life would be like a hundred years later. Some of his predictions are dead-on: for instance, an image of a man who receives up-to-date news reports via audio recording. But some are hilariously inaccurate, like an illustration of a family warming itself at a fireplace that has not wood in it, but a hunk of radium sitting on a pedestal.

I thought it would be fun to set a novel in that world—essentially, an alternate version of history in which the science is sometimes egregiously incorrect. But I also thought that writing a story there would somehow dovetail neatly with ideas I was thinking of that would turn out to be part of my dissertation research—basically, questions of whether a given text has a single best meaning that’s intended to be ferreted out by the reader, or whether a text is an inert, meaningless object that doesn’t have any sense to it at all until a reader interprets it, or whether the truth is somewhere in between. More importantly: is it in the power of mass communication technologies to change the answers to those questions? Consider how many texts we see these days are mass-produced: even the most intimate sentiments can be professed (or signified) by the purchase of a greeting card in a drugstore. If that’s the case, how does that change the nature and the status of our affections? Does such a culture make it impossible to express genuine emotions, or is that just an unjustified Luddite’s fear? Or is the truth somewhere in between?

Are you happy with your book being labeled as being “steampunk”? What does that word mean to you?

When I started writing this novel, fourteen years ago, steampunk wasn’t the big thing it is now: not only was it far less well-known, with far fewer works to its name, but its meaning was far more restricted. I doubt that in the ‘90s, people would have looked at a book like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s excellent novel The Difference Engine and a book like The Dream of Perpetual Motion (had it been complete) and said that they were in the same subgenre; I also doubt that anyone would have called Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea “steampunk” back then, though it’s regularly referred to as that now.

I would say that in the intervening years between when I started the book and when it was published, steampunk has undergone an expansion of meaning, much like the expansion of meaning that the term “cyberpunk” underwent in the 80s and 90s as it grew in popularity. At the height of the public’s interest in cyberpunk, scholars, critics, and fans were constantly tagging a variety of disparate works of literature as such in order to bolster claims of the subgenre’s vitality, popularity, and cultural legitimacy. (For instance, I remember critics asserting that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow is cyberpunk, just as some critics now claim that Pynchon’s Against the Day is steampunk, even though those two books have much more to do with each other, and with Pynchon’s habitual concerns throughout his career, than either of those books has to do with what cyberpunk and steampunk were originally thought of as.)

So to ask whether I’m “happy” with The Dream of Perpetual Motion being labeled as steampunk is perhaps the wrong question—I don’t really feel one way or the other about it, since at this point the term is so inclusive that it’s hard to say what it means, or what it’ll end up meaning. I’m aware that for some people there’s a stigma attached to the term—the feeling among those detractors seems to be that it’s derivative and played out—but concerns about stigma, labeling, and status anxiety are nothing new to SF. You shrug at those and move on.

What ultimately matters are the works themselves, more than the labels that are placed upon them—when steampunk is no longer trendy and fades into obscurity, the works of art that were once considered part of that trend but that are also worthwhile on their own merits will still, I hope, find their readers.

In her review in The Washington Post, Elizabeth Hand called The Dream of Perpetual Motion “an elegy for our own century and the passing of the power of the word, written and spoken.” Do you read your book as an elegy, as a call to arms, or as something else?

I don’t want to get into questions of what my personal interpretation of the work is, since that runs the risk of giving the impression that a certain way of reading the book is “correct.” That said, it’s possible that an elegy can also serve as a call to arms—a requiem for the dead can also represent a future we can work to avoid.

Your background includes “staging the first academic conference ever held at an Ivy League university on the subject of video games.” How do video games and fiction borrow from each other, or is it a mistake to so strictly separate the two?

I see video games borrowing more from narrative fiction than the other way around at this point (with the exception of some summer movies—CGI spectacles can seem to me like watching someone else play a video game on a really nice setup). Video games as a medium are still (I believe) in their infancy, and so their narrative beats are still a lot like the narrative beats of books and movies—in most cases, we still have to pause in the middle of what we’re doing to read several blocks of text, or watch a cutscene. There are a few games I’ve played that almost completely integrate narrative and gameplay into a successful hybrid, though—Ico and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne among them. But I’m coming to think the drive to include narrative makes games suffer more often than not.

You’ve revealed through your Twitter feed your continued interest in gaming, from “enjoying” Nintendo’s DSi XL, to complaining about the reticence of “video game final final bosses [to] ever reveal their super-powerful ‘true form’” and characterizing the Hades area of God of War as “actually malicious.” How did your passion for games start, and what makes a game hold your interest?

How did my passion for games start? With the original Bard’s Tale game from Interplay, which I played on the Commodore 64. I spent much of a summer between school years making maps of its dungeons and towers on quadrille paper.

What makes a game hold my interest? Any of a number of things. I like fully realized game worlds, for one, but those are so prohibitively expensive to create that they’re few are far between (and so time-consuming for me that I have to restrict myself to one of those games every year or so). I spent a lot of time with Fallout 3 last year—I wasn’t interested in the plot, really, but I liked wandering around the landscape with my character, doing occasional sidequests and looking at things. I’m looking forward to getting into Red Dead Redemption, but haven’t had time yet.

I’m also a sucker for almost anything that involves leveling up characters and tweaking statistics. (Like many, I’ve lost hundreds of hours to Diablo II.) I also like games that have elaborate menus; I like character screens with lots and lots of numbers. I’ve played several of the Nippon Ichi games (Disgaea; Phantom Brave; Makai Kingdom; etc.). They’re basically like playing spreadsheets—their mechanics are like parodies of the mechanics of other RPGs—but if that’s the sort of thing you like, they can be ridiculously engaging.

Games of world conquest like Civilization and Europa Universalis also scratch that same itch for me, if I’m in the mood for something more intellectually challenging.

And I like games without any pretense to narrative, games that tend toward abstraction. The choice to abandon narrative entirely can free a game to do things it couldn’t achieve otherwise. I really enjoyed Demon’s Souls last year, which has almost no narrative at all. No cutscenes to get in the way; no interruptions to gameplay so the boss can explain his motivation for evil. But it’s genuinely terrifying at points, in a way that I didn’t think a video game could be to an adult. The near-total absence of narrative works to make the game completely immersive.

You’ve been blogging your way through the La Fura Dels Baus staging of Wagner’s Ring cycle for Tor.com. Giant robots and cranes? Is this steampunk on stage or something much more strange?

I just finished watching the final act of the final opera in that cycle, and… I’m not sure what it is! But I liked the experience of viewing it, and I can see myself watching it again. It was sort of a re-imagining of Wagner’s series of operas (which are themselves based on German myths and folktales) as science fiction, and it was notable for its use of iconography lifted from science fiction movies—Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, of course, but also Star Wars and (I’m pretty sure) Battlefield Earth. It didn’t always work well for me as a staging (though the performances were excellent). But when I was annoyed by it, I was annoyed in interesting ways, and I appreciate that. Many SF and fantasy movies borrow from Wagner liberally in their scores, so an SF version of the Ring can be seen as returning the favor, in a way.

What’s next, after 14 years of “Perpetual Motion”?

I’m working on another novel, slowly but surely. I don’t want to say much about it now, except that it’s not going to be much like The Dream of Perpetual Motion—the setting’s different, and it’s turning out to pose a different set of challenges for me. It’s taking me in new directions, and after having spent an awfully long time with my first novel, it’s nice to stretch a bit and change things up. ■

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve finished up a playthrough of Atlus’s new game Catherine. It’s the hardest game I expect to play this year (unless I can make time for Dark Souls when that comes out), but if it weren’t as challenging as it is, it wouldn’t work as a game.



I’m going to forgo an in-depth description of the game’s basics—you can check out reviews for that. But to me, the interesting thing about the block-pushing puzzle sequences that take place in the nightmares of the protagonist, Vincent Brooks, is that they induce the anxiety of indecision in the player that Vincent feels in the real world as he tries to figure out what to do about his infidelity. In the Persona games (which are by the same team), the link between the video-gamey half of the game and the relationship-simulation half is more overt: you can easily see how success in real-world relationships grants your character statistical bonuses in the fantastic dungeons. In Catherine, though, the link between the two halves of the game is more emotional than anything else, and therefore more subtle.

If the puzzles were easier, or if they took place in a less oppressive environment without the nuisances of time pressure, noise, and bosses that ruin your plans to build stairways out of blocks when they’re not trying to kill you outright, then that anxiety wouldn’t be so palpable (and I can’t recall being quite so unnerved by a puzzle game—more often than not, puzzlers these days try to lure you into a trance state with bright colors and ambient beats). Catherine is a case of a work of art deliberately inducing an unpleasant emotion in the player in order to achieve a dramatic effect. When you finish a nightmare stage (which more often than not will consist of dying and retrying over and over and over and over again), the feeling isn’t so much of victory but of relief from anxiety, the same relief that Vincent feels when he wakes up.

I’m not entirely sure that I can say I enjoyed playing Catherine. On completion I felt a sense of accomplishment that I rarely feel from modern console games; at the same time, I was glad to be done with it. But it’s increasingly rare for a video game to try to provoke some feeling in the player other than mere wish fulfillment—while the characters of video games are often good with guns they’ve never seen before as soon as they pick them up, and their acquisition of godlike skills is guaranteed to happen as long as the player hangs in for long enough and presses the X button enough times, Vincent is a loser from the beginning of the game, and only gets better at the puzzle sequences because you get better at them. For that reason alone, I can see revisiting Catherine again (though I do admit to hoping that on a second playthrough, it’ll feel easier).

The release of the new volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, which several of my friends are either reading or getting ready to read, has got me thinking about digression again.



I like reading fantasy and SF series when I have the time, but as a rule, I only read them when they’re complete (meaning that the final volume is explicitly identified as such, and at least has a firm release date). I learned this hard lesson from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series—if I remember correctly, I was a high school sophomore when The Gunslinger came out, and by the time the series was complete I had a Ph.D. The wait between volumes wasn’t pleasant (especially when I was an impatient teenager with a low tolerance for cliffhangers), and the conclusion, when it finally came in a rush of three fat volumes published within eighteen months of each other, left me somewhat unsatisfied (but fans have spent millions of words hashing that ending out online, so I won’t go into it here).

In comparison, I remember seeing a trade paperback of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World in a Barnes and Noble one day (this is back when The Wheel of Time was intended to be a trilogy) and thinking, “Well, I’ll just wait until the last volume comes out in a couple of years, and then I’ll buy them all at once.” That decision may have inadvertently granted me an extra several months of life (since my habit was to re-read all the earlier volumes in a series before the new one arrived in stores, and I can’t imagine doing that with The Wheel of Time).

So I admit to feeling a little left out with all the hubbub that’s presently surrounding the publication of A Dance with Dragons—I remember from reading his stories in the Wild Cards shared-world series that Martin’s a strong writer, and whenever I leaf through one of the volumes in A Song of Ice and Fire, good sentences tend to jump out at me. But if the series of books is intended to be perceived as a single work instead of a series of discrete stories, then I’ll read it when it’s complete, and if it’s good now, it’ll be good in ten years. So I’ve yet to even read A Game of Thrones—I watched the first episode of the HBO series, but that’s it.

However, I’m starting to think that there may be an upper limit to how long a narrative can be before it ceases to be a narrative in the traditional sense and becomes something else, a shaggy-dog story. Earlier this year I finished reading the Penguin translation of The Arabian Nights (which is about a million words), and the joke of that (as I mentioned here) is that due to its metafictional conceit, we’re allowed to experience the pleasures of digression without feeling that we ourselves are being taken for a ride. Sure, it’s a shaggy-dog story, but it’s explicitly identified as such (and pays off in the final night of the sequence with a couple of very good jokes that I won’t spoil here). But The Arabian Nights is pleasant because you’re not King Shahriyar, not the one being strung along unknowingly.

In general, I love digressiveness, and I often feel that there’s not nearly enough of it in contemporary literature, which regularly seems to me to hew needlessly close to a rigid, linear, three-act narrative structure inherited from commercial films. (The other night I was talking with a friend about Les Misérables, and she described its inclusion of a fifty-page description of the Battle of Waterloo as “something you can’t do anymore.” But that description pays for itself, even if you don’t know why it’s being included until you reach the end of it.) But if given free rein, is there a point beyond which digression inevitably stops adding flavor to a work and becomes cancerous instead, suffocating the central narrative and killing its ability to provide a feeling of continuous progression (however slow and carefully measured), or the satisfying sense of an ending? Or, like anything in art, is this merely a matter of taste?

Which is to say that if and when I do finally read A Song of Ice and Fire (which, if I stick to my rule about fantasy series and Martin sticks to his production rate, will be quite a while from now), I’ll read it wondering if it will turn out to have the shape of a story. A tale of that length with a measured pace and lots of asides and lovingly rendered details sounds like a rare gift to me, a work that makes me forget to look at a clock.

But the longer a work gets, the harder it is to end satisfactorily, and though there are as many ways to structure a story as there are possible stories, endings matter. (A work of narrative art is always remembered as marred if it’s seen to have a bad ending, no matter what comes before it, but a strong ending can convince an audience to forgive all manner of prior sins.) The laudatory New York Times review of A Dance With Dragons says the series has already exceeded 1,700,000 words, leaving The Arabian Nights well in the dust. With the last two volumes still unwritten, a strong ending could happen—nothing’s impossible, and what I’ve read of Martin’s writing, I’ve liked a lot, so my guess is that if he can’t pull it off, it’s because no one can. But either the series as a whole will be deeply disappointing, or miraculous.

Personally, I am hoping for a miracle, and I’m looking forward to blocking off time for it in my calendar.

In an earlier post on acquiring an iPad, I said it was “halfway between a clever toy and a useful tool.” That was when I didn’t know what it was for. I know what it’s for now—it’s for reading The Waste Land.



Wow. Basically, you get the complete text of the poem, presented cleanly with a minimum of fuss, but:

—if you turn the iPad sideways, a series of annotations appears on the left side of the screen. If you want to see an annotation for a given line of text, then, holy crap, you just point right at the text. That’s nuts!

—swipe your finger and you can switch back and forth between the final text and Eliot’s typescript, marked up by Ezra Pound.

—tap the screen in a couple of places and you can hear one of several different audio versions: T. S. Eliot (two different recordings); Alec Guinness; Fiona Shaw; Viggo Mortensen; and Ted Hughes. And tapping on a particular line snaps you immediately to that part in the recording. It’s a great way to hear how much a reader can bring to his or her own interpretation of a text. Listen to the way the different performers read line 60 (which is, in its entirety, “Unreal City”): Eliot declaims it; Shaw sort of blurts it; Mortensen flatly states it; Guinness purrs it.

—oh, and there’s a video recording of Shaw reciting the complete poem, too.

—oh, yeah, and there are also a series of video recordings of talks on The Waste Land by various scholars, editors, and authors.

You could argue that it’s the unique nature of The Waste Land that lends itself to this kind of presentation—with the density of its allusions, it is a sort of proto-hypertext, and so if any text is ripe for electronic conversion, it’s this one. But there are other, equally allusive modernist works I’d like to see get the same treatment. I’d pay significantly more than the $14 I spent on The Waste Land for a similarly tricked-out edition of any of the books I studied in grad school that required me to have a separately bound set of annotations beside me while reading, especially (and this isn’t out of the range of imagination) Ulysses. An iPad edition of Ulysses with this level of quality would be a dream come true.