A Pond in the Rain

George Saunders is almost certainly my favorite short-story writer today, and I've enjoyed his other works over the years as well: essays, profiles, a novel. I'm not entirely sure why I didn't pick up A Swim in a Pond in the Rain when it was released earlier this year, but I'm glad that I didn't, because my brother (no, my other brother) gave it to me as a long-term-loan-slash-birthday-present a couple of weeks ago.

 

In addition to writing fiction, Saunders also teaches writing at Syracuse University, and has done so for decades. This book is an attempt to capture some of what he teaches in a seminar built around nineteenth-century Russian authors, where he and his students will read those stories, analyze and discuss what the authors are doing and how they're doing it, and use some of those techniques in works of their own.

This book includes the full (translated) text of a half-dozen stories from Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Turgenev. Each story is then followed by a friendly, conversational essay and analysis. Saunders will ask questions of the reader, then offer his own answers. What is this part doing in the story? What would be lost if it was cut? Why did the author spend so much time describing this character who doesn't do much? After reading the last paragraph, did you also go back and re-scan the story to see if that message can be applied anywhere else?

It's all great stuff from a literary criticism perspective, but Saunders is doing something different, trying to figure out why these stories are so great and how we could apply those lessons to our own fiction. Of course, his words carry a lot of weight coming from someone who has been so widely read and admired over the years.

I personally hadn't read any of these stories before. They're different from one another, despite some repeated authors, and all great. I think I might have enjoyed Tolstoy's "Master and Man" the most, in large part because of the strong moral convictions of the author that suffuse the whole story; but Gogol's "The Nose" was terrific and might have been the most fun to read. (And I liked "The Nose" even better after reading the analysis, which repeatedly drove home just what a terrible job the narrator of that story is doing, and why Gogol is choosing to make the narrator that inept.)

There's a lot of terrific insight in this book, but a few specific things really stick with me. One is his focus on what he calls "meaningful action" (as a sort of substitute for the more nebulous term "plot"). A short story should frequently escalate as it continues. We want to grab a reader's attention, and be respectful of their time. Whenever things escalate, it re-acquires our focus and makes us ask questions that we'll need to continue reading to answer. ("How will Sam get out of this jam?" "Wait, why is Susan mad at Frank now?")

He says that he's observed that, when he compares his students who have gone on to be published authors with those who do not, the former have two consistent traits. First of all, they're willing to continually revise and rewrite their work. Secondly, they're able to convey causality within their stories. Things don't just happen: they show how event A causes event B which leads to emotion C which results in catastrophe D. Without that tight sense of causality, you can have a collection of interesting well-written scenes, but you don't really have a story.

Saunders talks pretty much exclusively about short stories in this book. I'm actually not a huge connoisseur of the form, reading way more novels than short stories. My unexamined prejudice has tended to be that short stories are easier to write than novels: they're shorter, have fewer words to write, and only need to be about one or two things. After reading this, though, I'm rethinking that assessment. Saunders repeatedly points out that the economy of the short story isn't a handicap, it's the whole purpose. Everything that's in a short story should be doing something. Not because it's an interesting idea the author thought about and wanted to write down, not because she liked the sound of a certain phrase. Every sentence in a short story should be crucial, such that the story would be worse if it were removed. There's a lot of discipline and focus that goes into each story, without the flexibility for minor digressions that a longer form like the novel can support.

It's probably a sign of a well-written book that during and after my time reading it I thought "Wow, I should write some short stories!" It brought me back to my own fiction writing course way back in college, which was a lot of fun, but I haven't done anything with that since then. But of course I have done a lot of other writing, both writing technical books for professionals and writing video game dialogue for fun. Those are very different things than short stories, but some stuff in this book really resonated with me. One thing in particular was George's focus on the importance of revision and re-writing. I've always felt and often said that I enjoy editing more than writing, and that I feel like I mostly write so I can get material to edit. I've thought of that as a limitation on my skills as a writer (if I really was a writer I'd love writing more than editing), but I'm now feeling better about my heart being more oriented towards making things better. (For the hundredth time, I'll note that I don't edit my blog posts, much to their detriment.)

The term I personally have used in the past when doing this sort of editing work is "tightening up." I've already gotten down the overall content I want to share, but it's often meandering and inartful. There are some technical things I do to it, like eliminating passive voice and chopping up longer sentences into shorter ones, but I'm also paying attention to how the words sound, and whether they make sense, whether they are engaging, something I'd enjoy reading. They usually get shorter and shorter the more I rewrite them, and I'll also tinker with them to try and heighten the content, make my voice more forceful and bold, or sometimes just toss out a whole sentence or paragraph and start fresh. The end result feels a lot like the writing exercises Saunders includes at the end of this book. I'm amazed at how much better a piece of writing becomes when you cut it.

I thought a lot about video-game writing and which of Saunders' lessons might apply there. His comments on voice really resonate with me: one of my favorite aspects of writing campaigns is coming up with a distinctive voice for major NPCs, and once I have that voice in my head that generates many natural ideas about things that character would do and what opinions they would hold. I don't think video games need as laser-sharp of a focus as short stories: it depends on the game, of course, but particularly for RPGs it can be really fun to have little slice-of-life vignettes that help make the world seem bigger and more real. (Shadowrun Hong Kong would be a much lesser game without Gobbet's noodle obsession.) I think his ideas on causality are extremely important for video games, though maybe through a slightly different lens. It's important for the player to understand how and why things are happening. And, in a video game, it's usually most effective if the causality is caused by the player, if their earlier decisions lead to the later consequences. Of course this is where the art forms significantly diverge, with the player being a participant in the game while the reader remains an observer of the story.

Besides chatting about these Russian stories he loves so much, Saunders also includes "Afterthoughts" as well, which talk about his own personal experiences as a writer: how an especially bad sentence in a student's paper inspired one of his best characters, or some feedback a New Yorker editor gave him, or how a certain story surprised him as he was writing it. I recognized a few of these anecdotes from a talk he gave in San Francisco back in 2013, especially a fantastic recounting of his early desire to be Hemingway and how he eventually realized that he needed to find his own voice. The George writing this book seems exactly like the George I met in real life: humble, kind, generous, funny without ever being mean.

I doubt that there are all that many aspiring short-fiction authors out there, but I think the rest of us can still find a lot to enjoy in this book. The Russian stories alone are worth the price of admission, and the overall experience feels like a return to college in the best possible way: sitting in an interesting seminar with a great teacher, thinking critically about great writing and discussing our various opinions about it. That's a feeling I've missed over the years (and honestly a big part of why I blog about books I've read), and it felt great to recapture a part of that here.

The Bard

Oh, yeah! I read multiple books while on vacation. Short-ish reviews:

I’ve been waiting for well over a decade for the first George Saunders novel. I never thought we would get one, but now we have! It’s really good. Lincoln in the Bardo feels stylistically different from earlier Saunders, but is absolutely rooted in his moral sensibility, the aspect of his writing I appreciate most.

MINI SPOILERS

The overall conceit of ghosts hanging out reminded me slightly of Doug Dorst’s Alive in Necropolis, but Lincoln in the Bardo is more clearly literary. The structure feels a bit unique: each chapter is a series of sections, most just a couple of sentences long. These are typically either fictional historical excerpts (quotes from letters, journals, or from supposed history books), or else attributed statements. The statements are usually from ghosts. (I kept thinking of them as “ghosts,” although that probably isn’t technically the best term for the bardo inhabitants.)

One interesting aspect of these statements is that they’re always outward-looking. We don’t learn much about the minister from the minister himself: we learn much more about him from the printer. And, if the printer and the minister are talking, you’ll see all the printer’s lines reported by the minister and vice-versa. It’s a small but interesting inversion: visually, much of the novel actually looks like a play, but rather than each character saying their own lines, they’re writing the lines that they have heard from the other characters.

The single most important work in describing Saunders’ work is “empathy”, and I think that’s part of the reason for this stylistic choice. The characters aren’t just important for the content of what they’re saying. It’s significant that they’re actually getting to know one another, to understand them, to realize what drives them, their hopes and fears. This extra layer of mediation is technically unnecessary, but thematically core to Saunders’ mission.

The most compelling character in the book is also the most famous: Abraham Lincoln. He’s such a larger-than-life figure in the real world that he must have been very intimidating to take on here. Saunders does a few clever things to help get at him. One is quoting a wide and contradictory set of sources describing Lincoln, from his admirers and detractors, who vehemently disagree over whether he is kind or distant, idealistic or ambitious, even the colors of his eyes. These don’t really get resolved when we directly inhabit Abraham, contributing to the sense that, like any one of us, he is a complex person.

MEGA SPOILERS

The other major element is that we’re just seeing one particular slice of his life: a very important and gut-wrenching slice, but his mind is almost totally focused on grieving for his dead son. This private, intimate experience isn’t the sort of thing that would get written down, so it feels like we’re peering into an obscured corner of the real man’s life.

Grief dominates his thoughts: even when his mind briefly turns to politics or war, it’s colored by the tragedy he’s experiencing. The novel ends up making a very powerful and passionate statement, which I think is particularly poignant coming from someone like Saunders with strong pacifist convictions and a devotion to equality. Lincoln powerfully feels the loss of Willie, and, as he contemplates the still-burgeoning Civil War, he imagines his grief being multiplied hundreds of thousands of times. Each Union soldier he sends into battle may be killed, leaving behind parents and lovers to mourn the loss; every Confederate killed under his orders will likewise leave behind survivors, whose hearts will break even as his own is breaking.

This seems like a clear formula for indecisiveness, to pull back from the brink and take any means necessary to end the suffering. And yet, he emerges determined to stay the course, and even accelerate the war to its final conclusion. The evil of slavery is so great that it demands action to stop. Tellingly, he doesn’t conclude that the casualties will be justified or absolved by the outcome: they are still wrong, still painful. He takes that guilt upon himself, holding the simultaneous and incompatible beliefs that killing is wrong and killing is necessary. I was reminded of one of my favorite Bonhoeffer quotes: “When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it... Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace.”

END SPOILERS

This is a short post for such a great book. I don’t know whether we’ll get any more novels from Saunders in the future, but this was a pretty fantastic debut!

Decemberist

I've been taking my time reading through George Saunders' The Tenth of December. I've previously read almost all of the stories from The New Yorker, so I don't feel the same manic urge to plow through them. This is probably a good thing… I'm lingering a bit more, and noticing some new things that I hadn't before.

The book as a whole is kind of perfect. It manages to be simultaneously heartbreaking and warm, without ever coming across as melodramatic. Saunders has always been great at striking emotional chords, but this time it feels like those human elements are at the center of his stories, and not something that happens along the way. That's mostly due to the style and structure he uses in these stories, but I think part of it comes from the settings. In the past, many of my favorite stories of his have been set in a sort of near-future mild dystopia. That's true for a couple of stories here, most notably Escape from Spiderhead and The Semplica Girl Diaries, but most of them seem like (absent an invented brand name or two) they could easily be happening right now. As is always the case for Saunders, even the "futuristic" stories are primarily focused on the characters and their voices.

I found myself often thinking back to George Saunders' book-reading and Q&A at Book Passage, and in particular his comments on empathy. It's an incredibly rare gift, both in people and even more so in writing. We're so often stuck in our own heads that it can be hard to understand why other people act the way they do, say the things they say, choose their choices: we tend to interpret everything another person does relative to our own preferences, and can often ascribe malice or foolishness to the actions of others.

That's an even greater risk in aggregate. Historically, groups of people have often damned entire other groups, such as saying that all Germans are homicidal. Today, we're often striated within social groups, and apply sweeping generalizations to members of other groups with whom we rarely interact. So, we get many people believing that 47% of Americans are lazy, selfish freeloaders; or people believing that the top 1% are heartless, vindictive, rapacious exploiters; or that Christians are bigots; or that atheists are amoral. If we encounter a member of the other group, we automatically ascribe these shortcomings to them.

How can we overcome those prejudices? Usually, it takes getting to actually know someone well, and in particular to have succeeded together as a team. However, I think that Saunders shows the great potential of fiction in providing similar eye-opening experiences. He doesn't come at this from a moralistic or a judgmental angle, saying "Person X is actually really wonderful, and you should respect them for who they are!" No: he shows life in all its messiness, and its complications, and gently suggests that things may not be as clear-cut as they first appear.

That's true through much of this collection, but the best example may be from the story "Puppy". To oversimplify the story, it's about an upper-class family encountering a lower-class one. We shift between the perspective of two moms, both who want to protect their kids and make them happy. This causes some very dramatic shifts. Items that were casually breezed over by the lower-class mom are lingered over in dread by the upper-class one. What one thinks is a clever solution is seen by the other as child abuse.

There's so much I like about this. Saunders avoids any sort of simple equivalency between the two: the derision and contempt go entirely in one direction, and feel all the sadder and more real for it. And even though I was reading this for the second time, I once again felt the odd vertigo of shifting my opinions from scene to scene. I think I'm ultimately on the "side" of the woman answering the ad… but now I cringe when I read her horror at the scenery inside the house, since I'm pretty sure I would react in much the same way (with fury inside my own head and icy politeness in my mouth), and I can also feel how badly the other woman is hurt by this, and how she's really trying to do her very best by her own lights.

The few stories that weren't originally published in the New Yorker are on the shorter side. One particularly clever and frightening one is "Exhortation", which was written for McSweeney's. I was pretty astonished to find out later that it had been published all the way back in the year 2000. When I was reading it in the collection, I immediately assumed that it was written in a world aware of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and KSM. Saunders now seems incredibly prescient; that's a very dark piece to have written in pre-9/11 days.

It's interesting to think of how Saunders' stories may or may not be connected with real-world events. In the Q&A, Saunders mentioned that the story "Adams" was originally conceived during the debate over whether Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The final story "Adams" has nothing to do with that topic, which just provided a seed for it. One particular story in this collection, "Home," seems impossible to read as anything other than a description of veterans returning from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan: sure, the wars are never named, but with civilian characters discussing whether it's one war or two, and whether or not they're still going on, it seems a pretty clear invocation of the contemporary conflict.

"Home" is also a great example of Saunders' aching sense of humor, which leaves you torn between laughing and crying at the same stimulus. The running "joke" in "Home" is how everyone will say "Thank you for your service" to the narrator/protagonist, regardless of the circumstance: a clerk in the store, or a repo man taking his possessions, or a cop evicting his mother, or the man who cuckolded him. Returning to this phrase over and over again, Saunders draws out its awkwardness and banality, showing how this phrase that seems to express appreciation is actually used as a shield to deflect meaningful engagement.

I could go on, but I won't. My favorite stories are probably "Victory Lap," "The Semplica Girl Diaries," and "Tenth of December." Everything here is worth reading, and a great example of Saunders' ever-growing excellence.

SAUNDERS SAUNDERS SAUNDERS

George Saunders, possibly my favorite currently-working short-story writer (with periodic competition from Haruki Murakami), recently came through San Francisco to promote his new book, Tenth of December. When I first saw the news on his Facebook page, I was initially delighted, then slightly aghast. "They're holding it in Book Passage?" I thought. "There's no way they'll be able to fit everyone in there!"

Anticipation built in the lead-up to the event. Tenth of December has received glowing praise from some major outlets, including the New York Times, which proclaimed it "the best book you'll read this year." My brother went to his talk at Lincoln Hall in Chicago back in January, and reported that it was packed with throngs of fans. That should have tipped me off to arrive extra-early to the event, but for whatever reason I left work around my normal time, and arrived at Book Passage around a quarter to six.

It was already clearly bursting with people. Enough were standing just inside the door that getting inside would be a challenge. And, standing patiently just outside, was... George Saunders! He was speaking with a woman who seemed to be helping coordinate the event - perhaps a publicist or agent. He seemed calm, amused, and curious, gently smiling at people nearby while they discussed whatever they were talking about. Not wanting to shove past the guest of honor, I hung back for a bit until they moved on, then wormed my way to the counter and picked up a copy of Tenth of December. While the clerk was ringing it up, George worked his way back past me. Gesturing towards the variety of his books on display, he said, "I recommend you buy one of each of these." Everyone laughed. "For your own best interest, of course," he added, still shyly smiling. "Nothing wrong with self-promotion," the woman added.

I made myself as skinny as I could and endured the flow of human traffic while waiting for the event to start. Fortunately, Saunders seems to attract fans like himself: kind, patient people who accept discomfort with good grace. I didn't hear anyone complain or see anyone leave before the event was over. There's a certain sort of sacramental quality to author events, and a small element of pain can help heighten the experience.

Another woman who may be an owner or manager of the store welcomed everyone and thanked us for coming out and supporting independent bookstores. Saunders was standing nearby, and I noticed that he started off a round of applause for those independent bookstores. Neat! She gave a glowing introduction, recapping the recent praise from the Times, NPR, and various other critics and outlets; she also talked about Saunders' influence on a new generation of writers and his admirable personal qualities, then welcomed him to the microphone to the loud sound of clapping. People who had arrived even later than me were standing outside, and they had thoughtfully hooked up a sound system so everyone could hear. (Thanks to the glass walls, at least some of them were hopefully able to see him as well.)

Saunders thanked everyone for coming: I think he said that this was the first time he'd been to San Francisco since his first book tour (which, if my miniscule research is correct, would have been over 15 years ago), and that he appreciates how supportive the city has been of his books. He also showed some wonderful, self-deprecating humor. "Let's all make a pact to not read another book all year. It will save Joel Lovell some embarrassment."

He said that, since so many people were standing, he would pick a shorter reading, and then answer questions. His reading was a diary excerpt from The Semplica-Girl Diaries.

Tenth of December is a collection of short stories, most of which I've read previously in The New Yorker and a few of which have appeared in other magazines (including McSweeney's Quarterly Concern!). I'm pretty sure that Semplica-Girl is the most recent, since it was just published in the New Yorker last fall. It's an incredible story. Like many of Saunders' stories, it seems to occupy a near-future time, where recognizable trends in contemporary American life have metastasized into something something slightly more horrifying. Also like some of his recent stories, it strikes this really fascinating and challenging balance, where you strongly empathize with a character while (hopefully) rejecting their worldview. (See also the excellent Victory Lap, another story that destroyed me when I first read it in the New Yorker. In Victory Lap, we see a young boy who has accepted the values system enforced by his parents; it isn't an evil system, but one that's probably harmful. The boy is confronted with an awful situation, and every thing about his ingrained sense of morality tells him to walk away from it. He somehow overcomes it, finding within himself a spark of pure morality that tells him that he needs to act. What's so brilliant about Saunders' story is that, within the context of the tale, the boy thinks that he is sinning, thinks that he is doing the wrong thing, which makes his actions all the more brave. I want to praise him and weep for him at the same time.)

Anyways! He read the excerpt, after prefacing it briefly: he explained that this is an excerpt from a diary, and that "when I say 'equals,' in the text there's an actual equals sign there. It's funny if you read it. Trust me." He launched into the story, in which the narrator writes about the sudden, surprising death of a co-worker, the strange and disturbing (and inadvertently funny) funeral service, and the way it made him freshly appreciative of his own family life, his wife and his children.

I hate to admit it, but I actually don't remember reading this. I'm not sure if this was a passage that was edited out of the New Yorker version, or if the later events in the story crowded this entry out of my mind. I think I do recall the co-worker's death and how it creates an impulse to do something nice for his family, but most of the other elements in the story (the priest, the brother's eulogy) seemed original. Maybe it was Saunders' wonderful reading voice that made it seem fresh.

There's a lot of humor in that passage, leavened with sadness, and there were appreciative chuckles throughout the reading. When he was done, he asked for any questions. When nobody immediately raised their hand, he commented, "I have to say, I've been doing this for a while, and I've noticed that, invariably, the first person to ask a question is the person with the highest sexual energy in the room." Everyone laughed. An older woman faked out asking a question, but a younger man did it for real. ("Congratulations," Saunders said.)

As is my wont, I'll write up the questions and his responses, to the best of my recollection.

"I understand that you're a practicing Buddhist. Feel free to not answer this if you don't want to, but I was wondering how it has affected your work?"

Saunders has been a student of Nyingma Buddhism for many years. He used to talk about it a lot, but as he got further along, he realized that you're not supposed to discuss it. So, he can't directly address it, but will talk around the question.

Religion is important to him, and has been important to his writing. He grew up Catholic and attended a Catholic school. "And Catholic, in Chicago, is the most Catholic you can get!" While in school, the nuns would make the children go through the Stations of the Cross. It was interesting, because they would direct the children to vividly imagine being participants in the story, and specifically, being Jesus's persecuters. They would tell the children to imagine that they were a Roman soldier, and try to imagine what they were thinking, and how they would have felt about what they were doing. Saunders thinks that this kind of sacramental activity opens up a space in childrens' minds, which can be very valuable later in life.

"You grew up on the Southwest Side of Chicago Chicago. I read that you had recently gone back and visited the old neighborhood. What do you think you got from the experience of growing up in that part of the city?"

"Is your name Brian?" It turns out that George recognized the questioner: apparently, they had attended elementary school together! That's pretty incredible. (I would end up a few people behind Brian in the signing line, and overheard him say that he had lost track of Saunders, and only recently started reading about him and realized that he had become an author.) To the question: Saunders got a lot out of their neighborhood. It always struck him as a Russian neighborhood, and was one that valued quippy humor: if you could tell a good joke, and make people laugh, then the adults would take you into your circle. So, from an early age, he learned that there was value in amusing people.

"How do you strike a balance between writing based off of your life experiences, and drawing from literature?"

There ended up being a LOT of questions about writing, and even when the question wasn't directly about writing, Saunders often smoothly segued into some fascinating insight. This was unusual - many authors are famously reluctant to talk about the process of writing, and loathe questions like "Where do you get your ideas" - yet it made sense the more I thought about it. After all, Saunders is, by profession, a creative writing teacher, and he has spent decades talking and thinking about how to write good stories. At one point, he asked the audience, "How many people here are writers?" before immediately interrupting himself with, "I bet everyone here is a writer." He quoted someone (I wish I could remember who!) as saying, "America has finally reached the critical moment in its history when the number of writers equals the number of readers."

He said that, for him, life experience is the key. You need to have something to say, something that can energize your writing. At Syracuse, he often sees that when young people come into the program directly from college, they're often very bright but don't have a whole lot of experiences from the real world to draw on; because of this, they usually fall back on technique. In contrast, the people who come into the program after working for a few years are just slightly more grizzled, and seem to have some extra direction and energy that they can put into their work.

But, one of the best novels that he's read in years is from a very young man (again, I wish I could remember the name!), so it isn't as if you need to have "gone out into the world" to write something wonderful. As with many of Saunders' observations, he pointed out that he can describe what has worked for him in the past, but cautions that other people may find they work differently.

"How do you know when to stop revising a story?"

In general, he thinks that people should revise more than they do. People generally don't like doing it, but they should continue to practice revising, and they will get better as they do it. You should be merciless. He's reminded of something a musician/composer friend of his said: "When you make a new piece of music, you should immediately go and listen to one of your musical idols. Like Bob Dylan or whoever you most admire. Think about how your music compares to this. You'll think that it sucks. And that's important: it proves that you still have taste! But, you'll start asking yourself why it sucks, and how to make it better. It's a painful process, but absolutely necessary if you want to be a good writer."

This may also have been when he gave an example of tightening up a sentence. It starts with, "Bob entered the room and sat down on the blue couch." Okay. A little wordy. What does the word "down" add to the sentence? It's a bit redundant with "sat". So now, it's "Bob entered the room and sat on the blue couch." A little better. Is it important that Bob entered the room? Does it give anything new to the story? No, not really. So let's cut it out. "Bob sat on the blue couch." This sentence is working better now. Can we make it any better? Well, why is the couch blue? Am I going to do anything with that? No? Well, let's cut it out. "Bob sat on the couch." (Long pause.) Do we really need the couch? Is it integral to the story? (Long pause.) "Bob." Well, all that we have left is a noun. But it's a good noun!

"What is your favorite story that you've written?"

He claims to not be very fond of any of them, though he's grateful that people enjoy them.  He named one exception, and I'm kicking myself for not remembering which one, but he says that he didn't understand the story while he was writing it, and still doesn't understand it now, and because of that it's still interesting to him.

"You mentioned that you had discovered that you could make your stories better by setting them in a theme park. How did you come up with that idea?"

Incredibly enough, it was from a dream. He had written a story that wasn't quite working - there was something there, but he couldn't figure out how to make it good. Then, in this dream, he was in a living room, and looking out the window. He saw a button, and pressed it; suddenly, all of the objects in the room began floating up, as if they had escaped from gravity. It was a wondrous sight. Then, all these other people came into the room and started touching the objects. He got irritated, and said, "Sir! Please don't touch those!" And then he woke up. That vivid sensation he got in his dream was something he decided to put into his story, and from then on it was a tool he could draw on.

"'Adams' is one of my favorite stories. I was wondering if you could say a little about how you wrote it?"

It kind of came out during the time that George W Bush was making the case for the Iraq was by claiming that Iraq had WMDs. Like a lot of good liberals, Saunders thought, "No... no, they don't!" But he couldn't be totally sure. But he was pretty sure that they didn't, and it seemed like a lousy case for starting a war. So, "Adams" started as a piece that he wrote to try and work through the political issues he was thinking about. Over time, it transformed into something different, but that's where it started.

"As a bookseller, I've noticed that a lot of people are connecting with your work, and what's interesting is that, they often read it as poetry. Is that something deliberate that you've done?"

George is very gratified to hear that. In a way, it is what he's trying to do. When he's writing, he's very focused on language, and very focused on trying to make the words as strong they can, which is something that poetry tries to do. However, he points out that he's often working with deliberately ugly language: technical speak, bureaucratic talk, commercials. So, it may be a kind of poetry, but it's the ugliest kind of poetry.

"I heard that [a female author's name - argh, why do I write these things when I don't take notes!] taught with you at Syracuse. I was wondering whether you learned anything from her?"

Yes! They only worked together briefly, and that was eight years ago, but she was very influential, and he still thinks often about what she taught him. One thing in particular had to do with the intersection of psychology and literature. By analyzing the brains of people while reading or listening, scientists have been able to demonstrate that people have similar reactions to poems, short stories, and jokes: in all cases, the instant that you read that final period, your brain immediately jumps back to the very start of the poem, story, or joke, and rapidly replays it, analyzing it for efficiency. There's something biological that makes us evaluate the piece, and determine how necessary it was; people will know immediately after reading it whether it had unnecessary digressions, or whether something early on proved to be important later. That insight has definitely affected the way he writes.

"How important do you think it is for you to develop your own voice?"

(Warning: this paragraph contains profanity.) Everyone seems to go through the same process. When you first start writing, there's probably some writer you admire most. Maybe it's Margaret Atwood. You decide that you want to be like Margaret Atwood, and start scaling that Margaret Atwood mountain. You climb higher and higher, all excited - "I'm going to be a great writer, like her!" But, the stuff you write is shit. You keep trying to get higher, but get discouraged. "Whenever I try to write like Margaret Atwood, all I can write is shit!" Dejected, you come back down from the mountain. "I guess I can't become a great writer by imitating Atwood... how about Toni Morrison?" And then you try climbing the Toni Morrison mountain. Sooner or later, you realize that you can't compare with any of these great mountains of writers. All you make is shit. But... but it's your shit. So, you pile your shit into a little mound, and stick a flag in it that says "George." It's small, and it's awful, but nobody else is on your mountain. So, over time, you start piling on more shit, and gradually turn your mound into a hill.

(Incidentally: these written words are in no way any sort of substitute for Saunders' speaking. I can't capture his funny phrases, facial expressions, all the things that make him such a wonderful speaker. Sorry. If you ever have the opportunity to see him in person, I highly recommend it!)

So: finding your unique voice is crucial. It's hard, but if you're going to write anything worth writing, you need to learn how to write like yourself. (I won't recap the well-reported and very interesting tale of Saunders' own idolization of Hemingway as a young wannabe writer.)

"When I was in college, my professor was also a good liberal guy, but he didn't care much for Kurt Vonnegut. He specifically disliked Vonnegut's fatalism, like when he writes 'So it goes.' I was wondering if you have any thoughts about that opinion?"

Saunders said that that's a question he'll need to think about, and he doesn't have an immediate answer to it. And that's fine. More generally, he says, he finds that one of the most powerful forces you can get in writing is being able to keep two contradictory ideas in your mind without making a decision about which one is right. Doing this can lead you to do some very interesting things in your writing.

As an example, he gave an experience he'd had when he agreed to write about the Mexican-American border for a travel magazine. Being the good liberal he is, he already knew the answer: open up the border! So he confidently accepted the job, figuring, I'll just head down there, maybe grab a couple of facts to support my case, and then just type it up. Well, once he got there, he was confronted with stories that immediately shook his convictions. On his very first day, he spoke with a pastor who told him about a family that tried to cross the border into Texas. They were pursued by Mexican criminals into the States. The criminals murdered the father and raped the daughter. The mother was already pregnant, and died when giving childbirth. Well. That was all clearly horrifying. So, he had a new position: "Close the border! Lock it down!" The very next day, he met a man who had come over illegally decades ago, and had literally built a seven-room house out of cinderblocks. He had a family and was living a successful life. What message do you take from that? "Open up the border! Give better opportunities to more people!" At the end of his trip, he was far more confused about the issue than he was when he started. And, he thinks, that led him to write a much better and more interesting piece.

So, going back to the original question: he doesn't have a good answer about how to reconcile an admiration of Vonnegut with a disapproval of his fatalism... but reconciliation may not be necessary, and perhaps not even desirable.

(A side, personal note: I think this is a really interesting topic. Not necessarily the question as phrased, but just the idea about how Vonnegut and Saunders might relate to one another. I enjoy both authors a great deal, and I think they both have a lot in common: both came from the midwest, had technical backgrounds, wrote from a strong moral compass that came from their own experiences, yet wrote in interesting, creative settings that seem tinged by science-fiction while still reading as literary. And I also think they're two of the most impressive humanists of the past century. Vonnegut is more explicitly humanist than Saunders, but I think both of them have, at the core of their writing, a deep love of man. Both are often described as satirical, yet I don't think either of them truly are... they see the ugliness that people are capable of, and it distresses them all the more because they also see the value of each person's life. They can use dark humor to make their points in shocking and effective ways. All that said, I would never confuse one of their stories for the other's: their styles are very different from one another, as is the way they construct their plots and how they depict their characters. I'm also intrigued by the idea that Vonnegut is a fatalist. I wouldn't use that word to describe him. I tend to take "So it goes" as a kind of quiet prayer for the sad things that have happened. The past is past; we can mourn it, but can't change it. I feel like so much of Vonnegut's writing is actually stressing the importance of action, of being good citizens of the planet, of showing compassion for our brothers and sisters. It's an obligation that he frequently depicts being broken, but that remains no less important for us to try and honor. "There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind.")

"Your characters have such interesting voices. Do you find them getting into your head, or spilling into your own life?"

Saunders has always enjoyed coming up with voices, even in a literal sense. When he was in school, he was on the basketball team. He never actually played basketball, just sat on the bench. He and one of his friends would make fun of players on the other team: they came up with nicknames, and would invent whole back-stories for them, and give a unique funny voice to each opponent. For example, there was one team with older kids, including one kid with facial hair, and facial hair on his facial hair. They called him Mister Mustache, and would crack wise whenever he went past the bench. Eventually, their coach told them that they sounded fey and to knock it off. So, he stopped doing those voices. But it isn't totally different from what he does now: he actually has a particular sound in his head for each of his characters, and if he can get that sound entertaining enough, then it will come through in his writing.

Unlike some other writers, he isn't into Method Writing or something of that sort. Other people will say something like, "I create my characters, and then they speak to me and tell me what to do." Nope. His characters are strictly one-way creations, and never talk back. And, once he's done with a story, he puts the voice away.

Finally, one anecdote from him that may have been attached to one of the above questions, or might have come from another one that I've forgotten:

I'd read in other contexts about his evolution from an Ayn Rand-worshipping young idealistic libertarian into his current liberal humanist self. I had NOT heard, though, that at one point he was in a band! I think he said that he played guitar. Another person in the band knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew someone who was in the Eagles... so obviously they were going to be huge. At one point, he had a very specific thought that ended up motivating him to change his course in life: he saw himself on a college campus. It was a very idealized college campus, with, like, men wearing sweaters with a single large letter on them. But he just got this really powerful idea that, "I'm going to go to college, and become an intellectual." While he now despises Ayn Rand ("Well, not her personally, because she's dead. I just think that her philosophy has caused so much harm."), he loved her novel since it was the first novel he'd ever read, and from her he got this ambition to become an intellectual writer, which set him on the course that has led to today.


I'm sure there were many more questions that I've forgotten, and I already feel bad about not capturing his tone correctly in his responses to the ones I did remember. He was very generous with his time and each questioner, and, as the owner/manager/whoever said at the end of questions, it felt like we'd all just completed a seminar on writing. Very cool!

The whole program, including reading and questions, ran for almost exactly one hour, after which he signed books. I always stick around for these things, and I always end up near the end of the line - not intentionally, I just either am standing in the wrong place, or move to the wrong area when the main program ends, or else am just not aggressive enough in entering the line. It was a pleasant line, but pretty long - I think I was there for about ninety minutes before I reached the front. It's all good, though. The reason it took so long was because he really engaged with each person in the line. It was pretty incredible - he shook hands with almost everyone (which might not sound like a big deal, but in my experience is actually very rare at author events - most people are understandably apprehensive about catching a cold from a stranger) and chatted for a while with each person: about his books, or about their lives, or whatever. I saw him give Brian a hug, which was awesome. George seems like one of the kindest people I've ever met in my life.

As usual, I was very self-conscious about not taking too much of his time. I gladly shook his hand and thanked him for sticking around. He asked if I was a writer. "Um, not really... well, I've done some technical writing," I stammered, then blurted out something about how much I'd enjoyed CommComm. That was the first short story of his that I'd ever read, and it made a big impression on me. He listened graciously, then said, "Well, you know, I used to be a technical writer, and we did a lot of work with the Department of Defense, back when they were closing military bases." He talked about how CommComm was inspired in part by his work at that time. "Wow, so a lot of that bureaucratic language and doublespeak came from your own experiences there!" I exclaimed. We talked for just a little more before I took my leave.

I'd been daydreaming a little about writing while I was waiting in line. I've always loved writing stories, going all the way back to "War with Venus" in the second grade. It's always been an ambition of mine, but never anything I've pursued with any diligence, and it's been years since the last time I worked on any fiction. The last piece I was even vaguely proud of was "Empty," a short story I wrote for a creative writing course back in college. Reflecting over the things Saunders had said, I realized that my own mountains that I had been attempting to climb at that time were the mountains of Thomas Pynchon, Daniel Orozco, and Robert Anton Wilson. Those are all writers who I particularly enjoyed (and enjoy!), and I was trying to recreate the wonderful chilly strangeness of their works, and became discouraged when I couldn't. I'm pretty sure that I'll never become a writer of fiction, and kind of doubt that I will give it a serious try, but I feel like if I ever do, it will be thanks to the wonderful guidance that George Saunders so generously imparted on this night, delivering an impromptu master's seminar in the process of creating a story.

The Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat! Louder than a dog! Taller than a rat!

Some random thoughts:

There was a surprisingly interesting profile of Ben Stiller in a recent New Yorker article. I'm a little ambivalent about Stiller, and I was surprised to see that he shares my ambivalence; specifically, he isn't a big fan of the franchises that have made him famous, like Meet the Fockers, and seems to often wish that he had ended up as a lower-tier director, working on small projects that he felt passionate about. As long as he's rich and famous, though, he's trying to use his powers to create good movies on his own terms. The main focus of the article was his film of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a fairly big-budget movie that Fox is backing, after an extended period of wrangling with Stiller over the budget. I was most intrigued, though, by a little snippet where he revealed that, for the past 15 years, he's been trying to make a movie out of George Saunder's phenomenal "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline." He's been able to attract a lot of talent to the project, including Sean Penn and Owen Wilson as the leads, but hasn't been able to raise the money to make it. The article includes this great quote from Saunders:

"It was the reverse of the cliche about the pandering movie guy and the noble fiction writer, because I would absolutely have sold out to get the movie made -- added car chases, a puppy cluster, whatever -- and Ben always insisted on returning to the darkest, oddest version of this story."

So, I'm a little bummed that Saunders' genius will continue to be hidden from broader American society; but, it's also encouraging to see that people are looking out for the integrity of his art.

Speaking of movie adaptations: Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash seems to be finally moving forward. It's still a long ways off from getting green-lit; a guy named Joe Cornish plans to write the adaptation and direct it, so there are still a lot of ways this could get derailed. In a recent Reddit AMA, Stephenson said that he's chatted with Cornish, but will be staying out of his way and letting him make the thing. That seems like a good approach to these kinds of projects: pick good people, then trust them to do good work with it. Stephenson also had some wise words in response to the predictable fears that people would ruin his book: "I think that fans' expectations can get out of whack when they use vocab like 'the book is being made into a movie,' which kind of implies that the book reaches some kind of apotheosis in the form of the movie, and ceases to exist as a book. That's not what happens. The book isn't going to change. It'll always be there. In addition to the book, there is going to be this other thing, a movie." That did give me pause. I often approach cinematic adaptations of literature with a mixture of excitement and dread. I enjoyed reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen so greatly that I have gone to great lengths to avoid the movie, out of fear that it would pollute my appreciation of the work. The Lord of the Rings took one of my favorite stories of all time and created one of my favorite movies of all time. I think part of the reality of the way my mind works is that I'm not great at compartmentalizing different aspects of a single work. I can watch Blues Brothers and enjoy it, but I'll also periodically cringe, because parts of the movie will remind me of Blues Brothers 2000 and how awful that was.

That said, as long as the new work is a net good, I'm in favor of it being created, even if it isn't as good as its predecessor. That probably also explains why I'm so grateful that REM stuck around as long as they did - just because they didn't create another Green or Automatic for the People didn't keep them from improving the world by giving us lots of great new songs. Snow Crash: The Movie might not contain all the awesomeness of Snow Crash: The Book, but as long as it's a good movie (either because it's interesting, or it's amusing, or it's exciting, and hopefully some combination of those virtues), I'll be glad to see it added to the universe.

Continuing to topic-hop... Louis CK is continuing his iconoclastic entrepreneurial sprint. After the rousing social and financial success of his Live at the Beacon experiment, Louis has revamped comedy touring with his upcoming shows at the end of this year. He has cut out the middlemen and gotten rid of the universally loathed TicketMaster: he is now selling tickets directly to consumers, through his website, and only playing at venues that will accommodate the way he wants to do business (no scalping allowed). In San Francisco, that means that he'll be appearing at Davies Symphony Hall, possibly the most gorgeous performing space in a city that has many to recommend. Buying tickets from Louis is such a refreshingly enjoyable experience: no extra surcharges, ticket handling fees, delivery fees, facility charges, or other cruft piled on top of the price. Just a flat $45 per seat, anywhere in the country. (We acted as a team here in the office to snag our tickets. Zac got the email announcing the tickets, and forwarded it on to Eric and me. By the time we had opened it, Zac's session had timed out so he was locked out, but Eric and I were able to proceed with the purchase. Each person is limited to buying 4 tickets, so we got 8 between the two of us, and - drum roll - we'll be in the 4th and 5th row at Davies. Nice!)

On the whole, I'm madly in love with Louis's approach. It's great for the artist, and great for the fans. However, I do wonder whether this is paving the way for a better future (a world where Ticketmaster doesn't exist and artists get to charge less and keep more), or if it's going to be a peculiar outlier that can only be offered by people at the top of their field. There's an easy analogy to make here to Radiohead's In Rainbows experiment: that was a media bonanza for them, and ended up making them a fair amount of money, but they only got away with it because they're Radiohead; other, smaller bands still need the support of record labels to publish new albums. Basically what I'm wondering is, do middlemen still have a role to play, and are we losing anything by cutting them out? Will it be harder for newer bands or comedians or authors to get big and recognized if there are no more record labels or tour promoters or publishing houses? I hope not - my ideal vision of the future is one where a wide variety of artists can connect directly with passionate fans - but I'll admit to a strain of pessimism.

Then again, there may be reason for optimism. Other comedians, like Aziz Ansari and Jim Gaffigan, have followed in Louis's footsteps with online DRM-free video sales and seem to be doing pretty well. I'd been concerned that Louis's was successful only because it was novel and got a lot of free coverage - it was reported on NPR and other surprising sources. It looks like there's a real appetite out there for honest sellers with a quality product, though. Similarly, I was very excited by the successful Kickstarter by Tim Schafer's DoubleFine, and thought that it was largely because of the novelty of old-school games making a comeback; that said, newer projects like Shadowrun have continued to do well, which makes me cautiously optimistic that the direct funding model may be a viable path forward.

Oh, on the topic of Shadowrun: Jordan Weisman is publishing a serialized story set in Shadowrun's 2050 world. The first entry is now available. I highly recommend it! I felt weirdly nostalgic when reading it; given that I had played the Genesis game for the first time only a few months ago, I shouldn't feel that level of warm familiarity with Julius Strouther and the Sega CTY-360 and Renraku Pyramid. So it goes. This kind of storytelling makes me very happy for the story-driven Shadowrun game!

Quick TV roundup:

The new season of Louie starts tonight!

I finished watching both extant seasons of Party Down. It was incredible, and I can see why people love it so much. The only downside is that, now that I've finished watching it, I have a harder time getting behind the Ben/Leslie romance on Parks & Recreation. Don't get me wrong, they're an extremely cute couple, but Adam and Lizzy had such amazing chemistry on that show that anything else is bound to feel inferior.

Game of Thrones ended on a phenomenal note! I absolutely adored the Blackwater episode, and barely minded that they got rid of the chain. That's probably the single most impressive TV episode I've ever seen. I'm actually kind of tempted to check out the director's movies now; I've wanted to see The Descent for a while anyways, and what he did here was just phenomenal. (If you like the series, or just the process of directing, I highly recommend Neil Marshall's interview with The Empire about making this episode. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that his budget for this episode is about the same as the budget he's had for his feature movies. Go, HBO! Also, there apparently really is an HBO executive whose job is to get as much T&A into each episode as possible.) The finale was also good; I felt a little let down, but mostly just because I wanted more, which is probably a good sign. (TV AND BOOK SPOILERS FOR THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH): I was really surprised that they wrapped up the destruction of Winterfell into this season; I had thought that they would delay it into season 3, just so they could introduce the Bastard properly. I'm really curious to see where they take that plot from here, and if they rejoin the book's continuity or go in another direction. I missed the awesome crazy visions that were in the book's version of House of the Undying, but the couple of scenes we got in the TV version were gorgeous. I wonder if the TV series is doing anything with Rhaegar, though? He seems pretty important in the books, and has barely even been mentioned in the show. Oh, yeah: and that final shot that closed out the season was just amazing. Army of ice zombies FTW! I was pretty impressed by the CGI there.

Finally, from the I-can't-believe-that-I'm-only-now-getting-into-this-show department, I'm filling my post-GoT depression by finally watching Deadwood, and finding that it does a surprisingly good job of filling that void. Both shows are very dense, with sprawling casts, intricate plots, surprising story turns (including a willingness to kill off major characters), sex, and violence. I now totally get why everyone reveres Ian McShane the way they do. Early on, I thought Bullock was the noble hero, and Al Swearengen his charismatic villain. Swearengen is just SO magnetic and fascinating, though, that partway through the first season he eclipses Bullock (who is hardly a slouch) and becomes the center of the story. I've loved everything, but the final episode of the first season in particular was jaw-droppingly good. It whirls and spins through a staggering number of plot threads, yet feels like a close character study at the same time. It even provided some very welcome catharsis in the form of Doc Cochran and Jewel's treatment. (Man oh man, Brad Dourif is one of the many astonishing things on that show. I've always vaguely thought of Dourif as the creepy character actor; his depiction of Doc is incredible.) The show somehow got even better in the second season: the writing, which was already good, became even more elevated, to the point where it feels like I'm watching a Shakespearean play. EB Farnum and Mr. Wolcott regularly deliver soliloquies, Farnum often also acts as a Polonius figure, and Richardson is a perfect Fool. I feel like I'm witnessing some sort of fever dream whenever I encounter that unique blend of elevated dialog and base profanity. (This show has turned the compound c---s----- into a flexible and surprisingly powerful phrase.) I can't wait to check out the third season, and am already anticipating the sadness I'll feel that HBO ended the series.

Turning away from digital entertainment... summer in the Bay Area is amazing as always. I've been ramping back up on my cycling, and have finished my last few trips up Kings Mountain Road barely breaking a sweat, so I think I'll soon be ready to make my first 2012 loop trip to Pescadero. I'm also loving the Bay Area's rich bounty. Figs are now in season! Yum! Peaches are near their peak, too; I made a Peach Puzzle a few weeks ago, and I think I've finally nailed the exact right degree of ripeness to make that turn out best. (Freestone peaches are also a crucial component.) I've been doing a fair amount of baking in general lately. I've made what may be the ultimate chocolate-chip cookie, based on the New York Times recipe. I splurged and bought some Valrhona chocolate discs for my first batch, which is pretty expensive - that stuff is about $20/pound, compared to the few bucks I normally spend on a 12-ounce package of chips - so I won't be using it often, but I have to admit that it does make them even more tasty. The cookies are so huge, though, that they're pretty absurd to eat. I love having them in my repertoire, but even if these are the ultimate cookie, there's still an opening for the ultimate PRACTICAL cookie.

I'm finally starting David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. It's pretty good so far, but I'm curious to see where it goes.

Still loving Fallen London. (Slight gameplay spoilers follow for the rest of the paragraph.) I'm continuing to build up my character's primary qualities, although I haven't acquired much equipment lately. I've come to realize that it's almost always better to hold on to your goods rather than sell them, and it often costs 12 echoes or more for a simple +1 piece of equipment with no negatives. You can advance quickly enough as-is that it doesn't seem worth the expense, and besides, it's much more fun to unlock an option in an Opportunity card with your 500 rats on a string than it is to sell them and try to pick up some clothing. I've encountered a glitch in the game that game me a massive undeserved boost to my Dangerous quality; I now have a Dangerous of 79, while all my other stats are in the 40s. I've gotten much better at managing my Menaces. Early in the game, while I was trying to open the way to the Forgotten Quarter (i.e., the Fourth City), I went insane while studying the London streets. That was actually pretty cool, but made me very cautious about how I manage my negatives. Unfortunately, I'm now trying to increase my Watchful, and I'm finding that Nightmares are hands-down the most difficult Menace to keep under control. With a low Scandal, you can start doing "Attend a Church Service," which usually succeeds and not only lowers Scandal but also increases your Church connection. You can Attend to your Wounds, which usually succeeds as well. There's a Storylet in Spite that lets you blackmail a Constable to lower your Suspicion, which also increases your Shadowy progression. With Nightmares, though... the only storylet in your lodgings is "Confess your Fears," which requires (1) a Sudden Insight, which I tend to immediately and unintentionally consume while raising my Watching; and (2) a willing Friend, who is penalized and receives no benefit for their help. After your Nightmares get up to 5, you can try to Ignore the Cheery Man, but this only has a 50/50 chance of working, and no other benefit whether you succeed or fail. Anyways... as a result, I'm extremely cautious when increasing my Watchful, which has me sticking to very easy challenges, and also using extreme care to keep my Nightmares as low as possible. I don't want to get into the story here, but it's been a lot of fun. There's an astonishing variety of mini-arcs, and you generally get a fair amount of choice in how to complete each one.

I've picked up Mass Effect 2, and am absolutely loving it. I'll probably do a full write-up later on about the story, so for now I'll mostly restrict myself to the gameplay. I'd heard before that Bioware had streamlined it, and for the most part I'm very happy with how that turned out. They've gotten rid of the most tedious micro-managing aspects of the game: there's no longer any inventory, no more omni-gel, and no selling anything. As a result, the game tends to move much more quickly; it's kind of astonishing just how much time I spent clicking through a list of 50 weapons in the first game. Powers have also been simplified a great deal; I think that in the first game, most characters could build up 8 powers, which each had a maximum level of, um, maybe 12 points; Shepherd had 12 powers available. In ME2, each character has only 4 powers available, with 4 levels for each. It's a bit easier to manage, but I'm a little disappointed at how similar the progression is for the powers. In most cases, the final level 4 is a choice between "This attack has a wider radius that affects multiple enemies!" and "This attack does more damage!". A few powers like Overload have more interesting choices at the top tier, like choosing a form that makes robots explode.

I generally like the structure of the game, which has changed from a largely free-roaming experience in ME1 to a more focused series of linear levels in ME2. That's in contrast to my usual preference for open worlds in games like Ultima and Elder Scrolls, but Bioware takes great advantage of these crafted levels and makes them a lot of fun. My big complaint here is that they've put crucial power-ups in each level, sometimes in places that aren't very easy to find, and since you aren't allowed to re-visit levels afterwards, I end up being way too OCD on these levels: instead of just having fun and moving forward, I'll defeat a group of enemies, then comb over every square inch of the room to make sure that I'm not passing up a new Heavy Pistol or a Biotic Damage research project. In retrospect, I kind of wish that Bioware would give you some way to acquire items that you missed on your initial run-through, perhaps by letting your purchase them at another location or having them show up in later levels.

 Oh, and the worst part of the game is definitely the rare but infuriating bugs. Specifically, there are some cases where enemies get into invisible locations where you can't kill them and they can't hurt you, and there are some cases where you'll get stuck against a pillar or outside the geometry of the map. In both cases, the only solution is to reload your last save and try again. Much like the problem with hidden research projects, this keeps me from enjoying the action of the game in a long and fun burst, and instead drives me into the OCD behavior of maniacally saving after every successful fight, to minimize the pain of running into bugs. Granted, I've only gotten stuck this way a half-dozen times, but it's made me change the way I play every aspect of the game, which is a shame. It seems like it would have been easy for them to fix, too... just some equivalent of the /stuck command in SW:TOR that would put everyone back into a valid map location.

As long as I'm complaining... while ME2 has largely gotten rid of the tedious and time-consuming aspects of ME1, it introduced a new burden in the form of scanning planets. This is technically optional, but if you want to unlock the full capability of your weapons and squad, you'll need to do A LOT of scanning to gather the resources necessary for research. Each planet can take a minute or more to scan, and it's mind-numbing: sweep your cursor back and forth, back and forth, listening and watching for spikes, then launch a probe, wait for it to land, then resume sweeping.

The hacking mini-game is also a bit annoying, but mostly just because I'm coming off of the awesomeness of the hacking games in Deus Ex and Shadowrun, so ME2 feels like flim-flam in comparison. The two games here are no worse than the "get to the middle" mini-game of ME1.
That's pretty much it from the complaint department, though. While levels are linear, your overall progress through the game is pretty much wide open, and you can pick which planets to visit and when to go to each. Resource management is a breeze. I really love the squad combat in this game; it was already good in ME1, but it's been further simplified in ME2, so you no longer need to select which weapon each teammate is using during a fight, and they're good about using their powers at appropriate times. (The "go to" commands that you can trigger by pressing Q and E seem pretty awful, since as far as I can tell they'll go to that location and then just stay there, no longer entering cover. So, I just don't press those buttons any more.) On the whole, I think ME2 does a fantastic job of letting you focus on the most fun aspects of the game. Heh... there's even some in-game commentary on this from a nerdy Salarian on the Citadel who runs a game store. At one point he says something like, "The new RPGs aren't as good as the old ones. Today's games are all about big choices and character customization. I preferred the old games where you needed to remember to drink water, and it took five hours in real-time to fly somewhere."

That's it for now - more anon!

Books! We got books!

I have recently returned from a wonderful weeklong vacation with my family to upstate Minnesota. During this time, I was reminded about how incredibly fortunate I am to have grown up among these folks. If you dropped in at random during the week, odds are high that you would have found at least half of us stretched out reading our books. Now, reading isn't the only thing we do - we had a blast by the lake, went on a long bike ride, explored the nearby small town, spent hours talking and catching up, even participating in a remarkably democratic kitchen. Still, there's no escaping the fact that this is a scholarly family that loves words and learning, and I owe them for any success I've found in life.

This relaxing and serene environment meant that, rather than squeezing in a chapter between a busy workday and necessary sleep, I was able to devote hours to catching up on things I'd been meaning to read. I brought along two books that have thwarted me in the past: Gravity's Rainbow and Midnight's Children. I never did get around to the first (one of these days, Pynchon! One of these days!), but the long stretches available for reading allowed me to conquer Rushdie's aggressively obtuse prose. It was well worth it.

I've been meaning to read Rushdie for a while now. I think it's the contrarian attitude I take towards censorship, and no modern author has been so famously censored as him. Beyond that, though, he was always at the periphery of my modern English lit classes, and several people I respect have spoken highly of his writing in general and this book in particular.

But the language... ah, the language! Now, I am the last person to complain about an author's adherence to the strictures of the English language. I still think that Ulysses is the most amazing book I've ever read, largely because of the phenomenal way Joyce manipulates the language. That said, I fully accept that I never would have finished Ulysses if the book hadn't been required reading for a college course. The combination of external pressure to push through the reading, along with access to resources and insights from my classmates, turned a solitary chore into a collective joy.

Outside the framework of a seminar, I had to motivate myself to get through this book, and it was tough.... I have to admit that up until around page 250 I didn't like the book. I'll get to the narrator in a moment, but even apart from the character of the narrator, the way he expresses himself is an active challenge. He slings together nouns and verbs in series without any connections or punctuation; his sentences run on; he fills expository passages with authorial interjections; and, perhaps most frustrating to me, he uses dialect throughout the novel. Now, I respect Rushdie the author's choice to use these techniques, but it does mean I need to work much harder to understand what the heck is happening, and only recoup some of that effort in better storytelling.

Besides speaking in a scattershot voice, the narrator may be the least reliable I've read. Now, this part I didn't mind so much, and by the end of the novel, it was actually pretty fun. He forgets what he's saying, realizes that events couldn't have happened in the year he described, suggests that he has been exagerrating or diminishing characters to conform to his prejudices, even admits towards the end that he lied about certain things. As long as you view the whole thing as a yarn, it's all in good fun. Now, the narrator is speaking to the reader, but within the text, he is also describing these things to Padma (I think that's her name...), a young woman. He describes how he carefully watches her to see how she reacts... if her face shows she doubts him, he will backpedal and try to convince her; if she is engaged in the story, he will rush onward, spinning out more for her.

MINI SPOILERS

The narrator is, really, a cad. He doesn't like himself all that much, even if he does have an inflated opinion of his importance, so I don't feel bad making that judgement. His failures in life seem of a piece with his failures as a writer.

That said, I don't particularly enjoy reading about mediocre, miserable people. So I only started perking up once the book began delving into the more mystical aspects of the story: the special powers held by the Midnight Children. Even though these proved to ultimately be a bit of a red herring, the mere introduction of the supernatural gave the book a charge it was missing. I feel like the start of the book (which begins, excruciatingly, with his grandfather, many decades before the narrator's birth) was trying to get by on portent and clever writing. After Saleem appears on the scene, and even more once he reaches adolesence, the book turns much more into a story... there's meaningful action there, not just words.

Again, the turning point for me came when Saleem snorts a drawstring and becomes telepathic. I fell in love with the book when he describes the nightmare he has of the Widow's hand. It was this passage that convinced me that his prose wasn't an obstacle, wasn't just necessary for this character, but actually could contribute wonderful writing that is impossible in standard proper English. The nightmare contains all the things I complained about before - run-on sentences, stacked unlinked words, etc. - but they transformed the piece and made it a living nightmare that actually frightened me, even as I was sitting on a sunny porch near a beautiful lake. Here's an excerpt:

The Widow sits on a high high chair the chair is green the seat is black the Widow's hair has a centre parting it is green on the left and on the right black. High as the sky the chair is green the seat is black the Widow's arm is long as death its skin is green the fingernails are long and sharp and black. Between the walls the children green the walls are green the Widow's arm comes snaking down the snake is green the children scream the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow's arm is hunting see the children run and scream the Widow's hand curls round them green and black. Now one by one the children mmff are stifled quiet the Widow's hand is lifting one by one the children green their blood is black unloosed by cutting fingernails it splashes black on the walls (of green) as one by one the curling hand lifts children high as sky the sky is black there are no stars the widow laughs her tongue is green but her teeth are black.

Isn't that AMAZING?

The only comparable thing I can think of is the poem Fear by my favorite poet, W. S. Merwin. And that's really special. At his peak, Rushdie is crossing the ancient boundary between poetry and prose. Not content to waste words on merely telling a story, he elevates the language above the story, calling attention to it, playing with it, and making this ultimately a story about words and storytelling.

By the end of the novel, I was very impressed with it as a whole. Rushdie has truly created a unique voice here, and I can understand why this book made his reputation.

END OF MINI SPOILERS

The other major catch-up I made over vacation was The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. Saunders is my favorite active short story writer, but this is a collection of his essays. I was delighted to find that his essays are just as trenchant, funny, and observant as his fiction. Not only that, they can be just as subversive, creative, and beautiful. He has a wonderful essay on Britain in there, based on several pieces he wrote for The Guardian, and you have to approach it the same way you would approach one of his short stories... it is non-fiction, nominally, but non-fiction with the tongue so firmly planted in cheek that it might as well be fiction. (I think I'm leading off with this essay because it seems of a piece with the Midnight's Children observation above... you need to have a clear understanding of the difference between Saunders, the author, and Saunders, the narrator, to "get" what these pieces are doing.)

The title piece, The Braindead Megaphone, is arguably the most important piece. It is a thoughtful and damning indictment of the present state of the media in the United States, and how our relationship with it has warped the national psyche. I previously agreed with pretty much everything in this essay, but don't think I'd ever previously heard it said so eloquently.

He's also a very accomplished travel writer. His pieces on Dubai were fascinating, both for their early insight (he published these pieces before Dubai became a common topic here), and also for their musings on the role of culture and the future of nationalism. Some of his conclusions reminded me of Neal Stephenson's Disneyland tangent in In The Beginning... was the Command Line. Near the end of the book he visits the Buddha Boy, and along the way experiences the wretched life lived in Nepal. In between he spends more time in Texas than I ever will as he explores the border between the U. S. and Mexico. That piece may be the most interesting of the trio, as he spends time with the Minutemen (many of whom actually sound like nice people) and grapples with the implications of "the immigration issue."

Gosh, I really can't describe every chapter in here... it's all solid stuff. In terms of theme: he also has a few pieces about writing, all of which are excellent. One is semi-autobiographical, discussing "Johnny Tremain", the first good book that he'd read, and how it opened his mind to what good writing meant. The evolution continues with an appreciation of Kurt Vonnegut, who turned him from being a mediocre writer trying to channel Hemingway into who he is today. Finally, he offers one of the most concise and insightful evaluations of Huckleberry Finn that I've seen.

This also collects some of the great "Shouts & Murmurs" pieces that he's done for the New Yorker. If you missed them the first time around, you'll be heartily amused; otherwise, you'll enjoy seeing them again.

It's good to know that Saunders is a man of many talents. He's shown that he can write amazing short stories, great columns, and beautiful essays. Now he just needs to write a full novel, and we'll be set!

The Brief and Terrifying Stories of George Saunders

This isn't exactly a review, but I feel compelled to give an extended shout-out to George Saunders. I've been seriously digging his writing for a few years now, and he's one of those rare authors I enjoy so much that I try NOT to immediately read everything by them - I think it would be depressing to not have any more Saunders left to look forward to. Unlike most of my favorite authors, though, Saunders has the advantage of being alive and still writing, so I can delight in what should be many more years of great stories to come.

I first stumbled across Saunders while sitting in an airport. As I often do, I'd brought along my most recent issue of the New Yorker - they're meaty enough that I can get a lot of reading out of them, and the magazine form factor is very appealing when you're camping out by a gate. Anyways, if I hadn't been traveling that week, I might not have read that story. I tend to enjoy fiction in the New Yorker, but only in a distant way, and it's usually at the bottom of my list for things I'll read from an issue. The stories tend to be more moody or character-driven than I personally prefer, so unless I recognize the author, see that the story is very short, or am waiting in an airport with very little else to do, I'll usually keep on flipping.

Boy, am I glad that I read it, though. It grabbed me within the first paragraph. At first I was just kind of amused - "Heh, what an interesting voice." I rapidly became engrossed - "Whoa, this is getting intense." Ultimately, I was simply amazed. "Wow. This is incredibly good." I simply sat there after I was finished, staring into space, while the bustle of the airport around me receded in the distance.

I tend to not be much of a short fiction guy. I like novels, I like worlds, I like elaborate constructions, I like self-supporting visions and systems. Don't get me wrong, there are individual short stories that I dearly love, but most of them were gems I was exposed to in one of my many English classes; given the chance for independent reading, I'll almost always seek out a good novel instead. Just to give you a better standing of what I consider "good," here are some of my favorite pre-Saunders stories, in no particular order:
1. "Araby" by Joyce
2. "Orientation" by Daniel Orozco. (I can't find the text online, but it's well worth seeking out. When searching for the text, I found that This American Life had a piece with it a while back - click on "Full Episode" and start listening around 50:30.)
3. "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" by Borges.
4. "In the Penal Colony" by Kafka.
5. "The Vane Sisters" by Nabokov.

Oooh, the New Yorker has CommComm online. Good for them!

Didn't I mention that before? The story that so captivated me was called CommComm. I eventually realized that, in fact, it had NOT been the first Saunders work I'd read. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and there were a few Shouts & Murmurs pieces that I had greatly enjoyed, without recognizing the author's name. After reading CommComm, though, I became Saunders-primed, and every time I receive a new New Yorker issue I'll scan the Table of Contents, hoping to see his name or Malcolm Gladwell's by an item.

How to best describe Saunders' writing? It's really hard - I'm very tempted to say "indescribable" and hope that you'll try it for yourself. If pressed, I'll use adjectives like "funny," "dark," "smart," and "sinister." More than anything, though, it's just really good. The stories are always fresh and surprising, and he does amazing things with his narrators and points of view. Thematically, he is solidly rooted in the American experience, and he regularly returns to the themes that have the greatest impact over our daily lives: our consumerist culture, the breakdown of the family, facile politics, and unrewarding careers. Obviously, I love him, but he definitely isn't for everyone. Most people will be able to decide quickly whether to follow his career or not. (The one exception I'll make: it's probably possible to like his fiction while disliking his essays, or vice-versa. I love them both, but there is some difference there.)

My brother Pat started getting into Saunder at almost exactly the same point that I did: unbeknownst to each other for several months, we had both read the same CommComm story, in both cases while we were at airports. Needless to say, this is freaky and I don't like thinking about it much. We'd tossed some Saunders pointers back and forth, and then he surprised me with two excellent gifts: the only two story collections he then had in print, Pastoralia and Civilwarland in Bad Decline. These books did a few things for me. First, they reaffirmed that Saunders is an excellent writer, and has been so for some time. I hadn't realized how long he's been turning out excellent work. Second, they reminded me why it's probably good that I'm not reading all of his work at once: too much Saunders in too short a space can make someone feel depressed about humanity and life in general. Saunders is stylistically very different from Vonnegut, but they're both satirists, and both have that special skill for inflicting pain when they make you laugh.

Over the last couple of years, the Saunders "scene" has expanded, as he has gradually become more and more well known. This is fine by me - as much as I enjoy being among the elite group who knows of this totally awesome author, I think it's better for the world to spread his gift as far as possible. Probably the single biggest boost he got was winning the MacArthur "Genius Grant" in 2006.

As you might be able to guess, only a handful of writers in America are able to make full-time careers out of it, and as a short story writer, Saunders wasn't one of them, and he has somehow made time for writing while maintaining a day job. Upon hearing the wonderful, surprising news, I was optimistic that the fellowship money would help free him up and give him more time to write... including, just maybe, someday, a novel.

We haven't gotten the novel yet, but the grant has already proved its value, as his output has recently accelerated. The Braindead Megaphone has brought Saunders' extremely sharp essay-writing skills to the fore, establishing him as a thinker and commentator in his own right.

As a side note: George Saunders has also written a children's book. It's called "The Very Persistent Gappers of Fripp," and is illustrated by the same person who drew The Stinky Cheese Man and James and the Giant Peach. Not being a child, I'm probably not authorized to comment on how good it is, but I will say that it has what may be the best final sentence in the English language.

The reason why I'm writing this post today is because I recently started reading through In Persuasion Nation, and fell in love all over again when I read "Jon." This pulls off the jazz technique of producing bad writing and making it sound good: the whole story is a series of mistakes, but they're purposeful mistakes, and the story as a whole is even better and more effective than it would be if it was written "correctly".

As in most of Saunders' stories, there is a first-person narrator. In this case, the narrator is a teenage boy, a trend-setter in the future. Saunders breaks all the rules you can think of even within the permissive realm of short fiction: he uses passive voice, poor grammar, and violates my Creative Writing teacher's one absolute rule: he uses brand names. Copiously and constantly. And you know what? It all WORKS. The semi-literate run-on sentences talking about KFC and Pfizer and MetLife become oddly beautiful by the story's end.

Just wanted to share. If you're ever in the market for some mind-blowing fiction that you can finish in a quick read, you could do much, much worse than picking up Saunders. Enjoy!

Can this one count as, like, five posts?

Things that I could turn into long posts but won't.

I've started to (very, very, very, very) casually think about making a trip to Japan sometime next year. While looking for tourism information, I ran across an excellent official FAQ, including this gem of a question. Yes, that's the result of the American educational system, folks. I especially like the helpful map that the Japanese have hopefully included, believing in vain that it will explain the situation to people asking this question.

As threatened, I bought that nice hard drive from Tiger Direct on Sunday. I've since learned that not all online retailers are equal. I've heard plenty of good things about Tiger Direct and will certainly consider doing business with them in the future, but this experience has made me realize how spoiled I am by Newegg. The drive didn't even ship until last night, more than 4 days after I ordered it, whereas with Newegg I probably would have received it yesterday. Since this isn't a crucial component I'm not upset or anything, just thought I'd share my experience.

I picked up all sorts of goodies while home for the holidays, but one of the most immediately wonderful was a collection of short stories by George Saunders. They're really excellent. I first encountered him in a gripping New Yorker short story that I started reading casually, realized about 2/3 of the way in that (a) I was reading something wonderful and (b) I had no idea what was going on, and ended up poring over multiple times. These collections ("CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and "Pastoralia") are really similar; some of them directly touch on the same sorts of themes as that first story (loneliness, bureaucracy, ghosts, violence), but they all share an incredibly sharp wit, an engagement with America that is simultaneously affectionate and despairing, and a brilliant thread of absurdism. It is this last part that most attracts me to Saunders. It is just so rare to get an American author who can treat important themes with surrealism and phantasmagoria; it feels like the use of these wonderful tools has been all but abandoned to genre writers. After finishing these, I'm elevating Saunders to the same class as Vonnegut and Pynchon in my hierarchy.

On a related note, I think I want to start blogging about books more. Not necessarily reviewing or anything, just doing that sort of living record stuff. I spend nearly as much time reading (including the New Yorker and online sources) as playing games, but... I guess I haven't been writing about books largely because I'm less confident in my analysis (despite my degree in English Lit, or perhaps because of it). When it comes to games, I feel like my analysis is as valid as anyone else's, something I'm less secure in for literature. Except when I'm really passionate about it, like Saunders. But in either case, I should at least be able to occasionally write "I just finished XXX, and I really (dis)liked it."

Continuing in the literary vein, I'm finally starting to read "His Dark Materials." This trilogy has been on my radar for about four years now, ever since I read on Slashdot that it was being considered for a movie adaptation by Terry Gilliam. (For reference, the only other adaptations discussed on Slashdot are "Lord of the Rings," "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and "Ender's Game".) Gilliam is probably my favorite director, so that piqued my interest, though I didn't know much about the series. Later I learned that they were "Children's books," but well-regarded in literary circles. I just finished an interesting profile of Philip Pullman in, yes, the New Yorker, where I learned more about the series and finally decided to try it. I started the first book, "The Golden Compass", and am growing enthralled. The obvious comparison is with "Harry Potter" or "The Chronicles of Narnia", but so far I'm drawing a stronger connection to the "The Dark is Rising" series that I loved so much growing up. However, even though HDM is technically not set in this universe, I feel like it is less escapist than TDIR, and what I've read so far combined with the teasers in the New Yorker article gives me very high hopes for this. I'll try to remember to check back in once I'm done with the trilogy.

And what's up with children's literature, anyways? How come some of it is so awesome? There are some books and authors I read twenty years ago that gave me images which still resonate with me. For whatever reason, though, I don't revisit them now, and apart from HDM I haven't ventured into the Young Adult stacks for many years. It bothers me, and I'm not sure whether this is reflecting some sense of elitism I have or what. Somewhere along the line I bought into the fallacy that more difficult books are better, and make myself feel guilty when I read something simple. I hope I can unlearn that prejudice, because if HDM is any indication, I'm missing out on a lot.

Not to mention that I'll be able to read all three books in less time than it took me to read "Circe" in Ulysses.

I love my New Yorker subscription. It was a very thoughtful gift from my parents two years ago and each issue is something I treasure. I love its cultural coverage, its political insight, even the often-snarky "Talk of the Town." The one part I often have trouble with is its fiction. I don't know just what to make of it... you have stuff like George Saunders, which was so good that it would make up for 40 mediocre stories. That's hardly the only good story I've read, but so many were forgettable, and more than half the time I don't even manage to finish the story, which for me is an atrocious record. (Remember, I'm the one who has only two books that I didn't finish over my entire educational career.) I don't know if there's exactly such a thing as a "typical" New Yorker story, but if there is, it's a first-person introspective character study, which can be a fine display of the author's chops but which I personally find interminable. Of course, there's only so much one can do with a limited number of pages, but... I don't know. I just want the stories to be better more often.

I've already chronicled my history with Apple. After last week's announcement I went through a typical period where I thought, "Huh, that looks really pretty. Maybe I'll buy one. Wow, that's really expensive. And none of my games will run on it. Oh, well." Of course, one of the most exciting things about Apple moving to Intel chips is the increased probability of third-party emulators appearing that will run such applications. If a robust emulation/porting community emerges, I'll give serious thought to taking the leap and grabbing one of those sweet Powerbooks.

You know how you have that list of tasks to do? And you keep on adding stuff and taking things off, so the size remains roughly constant, but there's a few things on there which never get done, and you get tired whenever you think about it? Well, for me, that task is going through my blog and linkifying my posts. In particular I want to cross-reference posts that refer to one another so that, for example, one could click in the paragraph above and go to the post about Apple. Of course, I usually don't have many links at all in my posts, unless they're specifically about other web pages. In one way this is good, because it means that in the future I won't need to go through and clean up dead links when pages inevitably move or disappear. However, links within Blogger should be pretty constant. The big issue here is just my method of composition. 90% of the time I write my posts in Notepad or GVim instead of in Blogger. I like this because it allows me to spread the composition over multiple sessions; the longer posts generally take more than a day to finish. Of course, Blogger supports a Drafts option for posts, but it's simpler for me to just edit a plain text file, and besides this protects me against the dreaded "Close the wrong browser window and lose 30 minutes of work" curse. So it's great, but the downside is that it isn't easy for me to look up posts while editing the post. When a post is done I'll open up Blogger and copy-paste the post in. By then I'm usually impatient to just get the darn thing up and will say "Well, I'll look up the URLs later." Of course, I almost never do, and the result is the solipsistic blog on your monitor now.

Returning to an earlier offhand comment: I feel weird whenever I write something like "I went home for Christmas." Everyone here who has ever gone to college has felt the same sort of weirdness: is "home" where your family is, or is it where you live most of the year? If you asked me straight up, "Is your home here or in Winfield?" I wouldn't hesitate before saying it's here in San Jose. And yet, I regularly find myself referring to our house in Winfield as home. What I'm wondering is, when do people stop referring to their parents' place as home? I get the feeling that if I ever got married and started having kids, "home" would become "Grandma and Grandpa's". Who knows, though. I guess that, though I've always thought of "home" as a single defining location, maybe it's possible (especially in today's extraordinarily mobile world) to have multiple places that one thinks of as home. I know I feel just as comfortable in my parents' house as I do here, so maybe that's what the word means.