I’m revising the first four chapters of Hylozoic these days, incorporarting all that new aktual stuff that I’ve been blogging about lately. Doing the rewrite feels like coming back to a canvas and adding another layer of painting. It helps the texture.

Last night we saw Dweezil Zappa leading the “Zappa Plays Zappa” band in Berkeley. It was a great show, the band tight and intricate. I still can’t believe Frank is dead. I always related to his mixture of spirituality and vulgarity. He rarely spoke of spiritual things, he let his guitar solos say all that better than words. A master.

Recently I’ve been writing some seriously heavy descriptions of visions or trippy transformation—like where Jayjay gets aktualized—and I was thinking that’s my kind of “guitar solo.”

I’ve been reading William Gibson’s new book Spook Country. The site has a little video of him talking about his book, which makes it more fun to read, as then his voice is fresh in your mind. The book is sheer pleasure: witty, full of great images, wonderful language, and fascinating insights.

I’m heartened to see that Bill has shares a number of my obsessions that I do, not that he and I ever end up writing about something in the same way. He takes more of a sociological and documentary view, and I’m more oriented towards philosophy and romance. I’m happy to see the overlaps, as it gives me a sense of solidarity with a writer I admire. Here’s links into my blog for my takes on some of these topics, along with Gibson quotes on the topics.

* Locative art and the global positioning grid. “ ‘See-bare-espace,’ Odile pronounced, gnomically, ‘it is everting.’ … ‘Turns itself inside out,’ offered Alberto, by way of clarification. ‘Cyberspace.’” p. 20. “‘And once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the [GPS] grid, we’re here. This is the other side of the screen.’” p. 64.

* Cepahlopods. “Ten feet above the orange tape outline, the glossy, grayish-white form of a giant squid appeared, about ninety feet in total length, its tentacles undulating gracefully … The squid’s eerie surface flooded with light, subcutaneous pixels sliding past in distorted video imagery, stylized kanji, wide eyes of anime characters. It was gorgeous, ridiculous.” p. 55

* Ants. “Another cousin, relocated from New Orleans in the wake of the flood, had spoken of seeing a swarming, glittering ball of red ants in the water. This was how ants avoided drowning, it seemed…” p. 13. “Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown … and had come to the US from Germany … in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt school, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipostors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia. Milgrim always enjoyed this part; it had an appealing vintage sci-fi campiness to it, staccato and exciting, with grainy monchrome Euorcommie star-spawn in tweek jackets and knit ties, breeding like Starbucks.” p. 126.

* Hieronymus Bosch. “He saw the IF [a guy they’re spying on], for whatever reason, as a bird-headed Bosch creature, pursued by Brown and Brown’s people, a brown-hooded posse astride heraldic beasts taht weren’t quite horses, their swirling banner inscribed with slogans in the IF’s Volapuk. Sometimes they journeyed for days into the stylized groves bordering that landscape, glimpsing strange creatures in wooded shadow.” p. 48.

* Tulpas. “…the celebrity self is a sort of tulpa … A projected thought-form. A term from Tibetan mysticism. The celebrity self has a life of its own. It can, under the right circumstances, indefinitely survive the death of the subject. That’s what every Elvis sighting is about, literally.” p. 102.

* Spectral beings that live in the woods. “But past Philadelphia, and after taking another tablet, Milgrim began to catch glimpses of spectral others, angels perhaps. The late-afernoon sun dressed the passing woods with Maxfield Parrish foxfire, and perhaps it was that epileptic flicker generated by teh train’s motion that called these beings forth. He found them neutral, if not actually benign. They belonged to this landscape, this hour and time of year, and not to his story.” p. 208.

* Continuous valued cellular automata. “‘It [a certain computer program] implements finite difference methods for the solution of partial differential equations, on block-structures, adaptively refined rectangular grids.’ Sarah made a brief and probably unconscious face.” p. 273.

On the whole, I found Spook Country humbling. The work is so polished. The dialog, the descriptions and the apercus. Good characterization. Hip.

You’re rooting for all the characters, they aren’t contemptible as my Hylozoic characters, Jayjay and Thuy, threaten to become. There’s a simple clear climax that the whole book builds towards. It’s not a gnarly four hundred pound yam.

Be that as it may, right now my only path is to finish writing Hylozoic to the end, get a rough version, and then go back and polish up the dialog, the descriptions and apercus, and the characterization. There’s no particular reason it actually needs to be like Spook Country. A writer can’t keep changing course. That way likes madness.

Gibson takes about four years to write a book. That’s a lot of polishing Maybe if I polished my book for a couple more years I could make it really shiny. Oh well. Maybe some other time I’ll polish a book for four years. I think I’ll do Hylozoic in about a year and a half, as usual.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 10:17 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.