Smart Energy

some notes from an article I wrote on the Visual Reasoning wiki

Engine Summer by John Crowley

Engine Summer is set in post-apocalyptic distant future, hundreds of years, at least, after a series of anthropogenic catastrophes, known collectively as the Storm, have reduced human populations to a fraction of their former billions. The teller of Engine Summer is Rush (as in reed), a member of the Little Belaire community, all of whom are “truth speakers.” Truth speakers attempt to communicate in such a way that “they mean what they say, and say what they mean.” One of the ways they do this is by telling lots of stories. As a boy, Rush — Rush that Speaks is his full name — spends time with a “gossip,” a wise woman, named Painted Red.

Storytelling allows for the creation of communal meaning; but by what cognitive means is that accomplished? In as much as Crowley’s novel is a meditation on this question, he seems to argue that the means is through perception. For instance, the young Rush is being counseled by Painted Red while they are both in a heightened state of consciousness thanks to the use of a “rose-colored substance” dabbed on the lips:

What I did notice was that Painted Red’s questions, and then my answers, began to take on bodies somehow. When she talked about something, it wasn’t only being talked about but called into being. When she asked about my mother, my mother was there, or I was with her, on the roofs where the beehives are, and she was telling me to put my ear against the hive and hear the low constant murmur of the wintering bees inside. When Painted Red asked my about my dreams, I seemed to dream them all over again, to fly again and cry out in terror and vertigo when I fell. I never stopped knowing that Painted Red was beside me talking, or that I was answering; but — it was the rose-colored stuff that did, of course, but I wasn’t aware even of that — though I knew that I hadn’t left her side and that her hand was still on mine, still I went journeying up and down my life. (359; references, unfortunately, to an oddball 3-in-1 edition.) Read the rest of this entry »

Filter House by Nisi Shawl

review by Brian Charles Clark

Call Nisi Shawl’s marvelous first collection of stories slipstream, call it speculative, call it curvy fiction for the straight-ahead twists that bend her fiction — they’re all grounded in experience. In Shawl’s stories, calling upon an African goddess is no more speculative than hailing a taxi, and following a bird to enlightenment is as normal as talking to your mother on Sunday. In Shawl’s realities, imagination is a force to be reckoned with, and the universe teems with life and spirit and desire.

Filter House is aptly named. A filter house is the structure secreted by a minuscule sea creature (an appendicularian, for the curious) that filters the sea for the wee beastie’s food. Food, dwelling, the implied hearth and heart that is fed – all these describe Shawl’s stories. Her characters are closely observed and gain quick traction in the friction of the real. Read the rest of this entry »

Death of a Dutchman by Magdalen Nabb

review by Brian Charles Clark

Death of a Dutchman
Magdalen Nabb
220 pages
Soho Crime, Dec. 2007

When Magdalen Nabb died in August 2007, she left us with a dozen pieces of delightful brain candy: the Marshal Guarnaccia crime novels.

The Marshal is a low-level law enforcement officer in Florence. He doesn’t consider himself very bright—indeed, he thinks of himself as a consummate bumbler—but that’s precisely his strength, his lack of ego. Because he doesn’t jump to conclusions, as do his superiors who warrant their own intelligence, the Marshal is able to ask the questions that crack the case.

In Death of a Dutchman, the second Guarnaccia novel, a Dutch jewel dealer turns up dead in a flat in Florence. The Marshal’s superiors write the death off as an obvious suicide, but there’s nothing obvious about the case to the Marshal. To the contrary, he wonders at all the loose ends and partial clues that point not to suicide but to murder.

And who is the mysterious woman last seen with the Dutchman? As the Marshal follows this woman around the city of Florence, we are wrapped in what Nabb does best: drawing characters out of everything, people, buildings, parks. With a few deft strokes, she brings the city and its throng of people alive.

It’s a hot and muggy summer in Florence, and the twists of the case build as the Marshal pursues the woman through the twisting allies and crowded plazas. As a thunderstorm gathers on the surrounding hillside, illumination dawns on the Marshal, and the psychological depravity of the murder case cracks open.

Nabb’s lean and elegant prose doesn’t rely on flash and bling for excitement. She told stories the old fashioned way, by constructing an intricate plot and then letting it tighten its noose around the reader’s neck as the pages turn. Originally published in 1982, Death of a Dutchman has long been out of print. Kudos to Soho Crime for bringing back the series. Anyone who enjoys a sophisticated, literary crime story will love Nabb’s Marshal Guarnaccia series.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack

Visiting with writer Nisi Shawl a couple weeks ago, I asked her what she was working on. Among other projects, she mentioned she was working on a review of Neal Stephenson’s forthcoming novel, Anathem. That got my wild up, as I’m a big fan, so she let me peruse her advance copy. Tucked in was the usual PR stuff from the publisher, in this case a letter from Stephenson’s publicist, Jack Womack.

“The Jack Womack?” I asked. “Yes,” said Nisi. “He’s Gibson’s publicist, too.”

I devoured Womack’s novels in the ’90s as they were published. I’ve been waiting for a new one for quite a while now. Nisi said she was afraid I might have to wait quite a while longer as, for some reason, his novels didn’t sell, so he wasn’t publishing. He’s publicizing. WTF? Read the rest of this entry »

fiction by Sarah Hafner, from work in progress

I am sitting at the Village Vanguard, listening to Betty Carter. At my right is Topper, a man I met when I was still in high school. I am thinking about David–I always think about him, how far away he is, earning his Ph.D. at Oxford–and about my ballet class tomorrow. Lighting a cigarette, Topper puts his arms around me, making it harder for me to smoke. I am not in love with Topper, but the more I drink the easier it is to think I am. I am getting drunk, Betty isn’t that good, and I cannot have a hangover for ballet, because my sweat will reveal my hangover, and I am frightened of college. My thoughts drift back to David, and his wild proposal of marriage, which I have kept to myself. Now I have the problem that because Topper–what is his real name?–because he bought the tickets to this club, will want to have sex and I will probably go through the motions. Read the rest of this entry »

Sarah Hafner's Quilt I

Sometime in the mid-90s, I received a manuscript from Sarah Hafner. The result was a chapbook of stories called Some Girls. Sarah’s writing was hilarious and cutting at the same time, so when she asked me to consider her novel, The Elements of Style, I said, Sure, send it on over. I loved it and tired for a long time to raise the capital to publish this fine novel. It never came to be, and eventually I sold Permeable Press. Thankfully, Vivisphere bought The Elements of Style and brought it out as a handsome paperback. As one reviewer put it:

A mature Salinger arrives on the scene and it’s a woman!

Much funnier than Salinger, though–and what struck me, when I received a copy in 1999, was that Vivisphere had lifted my idea for the cover. That impression last about three seconds until I realized that of course there would be a quilt on the cover. Read the rest of this entry »

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

review by Brian Charles Clark

After Dark
Haruki Murakami
Knopf, 2007

Haruki Murakami has always written fairly straightforward, declarative sentences. In his latest novel to be published in English, the Japanese writer’s prose is distilled down to its essence. This is not a trick of translation, as the Japanese title of the novel reveals: Afutadaku is as bare as its English counterpart and eerily suggests a universal language only spoken after the sun has gone down.

Indeed, Murakami is, as usual in his stories and novels, after some sort of universal experience. It’s just that this time the connections between people are thin, barely visible, worn down, it would seem, by years of abuse.

Murakami is anyway always interested in the sorts of connections that most people don’t see. “The gates between worlds” is perhaps his major theme, though a gate might be the bottom of a dry well (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle), the difference engine at work between the cerebral lobes of a character (Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World), or a painting (Kafka on the Shore). Hardly gates at all, really; let’s say then that his theme is the alchemical and surrealist one of “communicating vessels.” Read the rest of this entry »

fiction by Brian Charles Clark

“I’m in heaven,” Orkney sings as he and his little black bag bloom through the door. I’d swear he was gesticulating wildly, but no, it’s just his aura flaring.
I’m smacking cornflakes, sitting stoic as a reader in bed.
“Where ya been? Been specten ya.”
Orkney trips another step into the little yellow room. He grins like a refrigerator door swinging open, waves away my question.
“We’re in the news,” he says.
AWOL, base police, truncheons, court marshal, the Group W bench.
“I’m trying not to jump to conclusions here,” I say. I feel like an old felt hat. Too comfortable to have much backbone. I eye Orkney suspiciously.
He hands me his cache, snicks it on. I click the Morning with WNN bookmark automatically.
“Click on obituaries.”
“Scu me?” But I click anyway.
Flip me. There we are. Our names.
“We were killed in the war.” We were killed in the war? Did I miss something? Read the rest of this entry »

Terrence McKenna

Beatmeister James Greathouse writes:

Terrence McKenna reads the opening to Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

Made with Audacity and Sony ACID XPress 5.0 (both free).

Made on a Dell I rescued from a dumpster with a 930 MHz Intel Pentium III processor and 512 MB of RAM. All I did was add a CDRW drive rescued from a dead computer and reinstall the OS. It is hooked up to a 20″ Trinitron monitor pulled out of a dumpster. The keyboard, mouse and powered speakers came to me the same way.

I would hope that the mention of James Joyce and Terrence McKenna speaks with more meaning than anything I could say.

If these artists go unknown to the audience then I have little expectation that my musings would prove illuminating.

James Joyce

It seemed appropriate to me to use Finnegans Wake in a layered mash up. Truthfully, I doubt any other text could be more relevant to such a process.

This is placed in the genre of general semantics. The great debt semiology owes to general semantics recently came to my notice. Thank you Alfred Korzybski for saying, “The map is not the territory.” Anyone who reads Roland Barthes ought to find this meaningful. And if you don’t read Barthes, then the meaning is still up for grabs, isn’t it?

When you die, hearing is the last of the physical senses to remain.

Greathouse submitted two versions of Shot; I like them both (especially The Fall in First Shot), so here they are: First Shot and Second Shot.

Learn more about Terrence McKenna here–and download goodies, including more of McKenna reading Finnegans Wake.

Flying Saucers over Hennepin by Peter Gelman

One of my favorite writers, Peter Gelman, is up to his old tricks. He’s done up some real nice podcasts, including one of his novel “Skull of the Robot.” Pete’s also a bicycle activist with a wry and dry (and possibly extra-planetary) sense of humor, so don’t miss “Mysteries of the Bicycle Explained.” Pete’s site, Danger Quest Mysteries, has more juicy goodness, so check it out, ‘k?

Long-time Permeable Press fans will remember Pete as the author of “Flying Saucers Over Hennepin” which Paul di Filippo, writing in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, described thusly: “Serious frivolity is in short supply today … Gelman spins a hilarious tale that addresses crucial dilemmas of our modern existence via a rubber chicken upside the head.”