This packet period has proven difficult.  I feel like I have very little to show you in terms of completed, significant material and progress toward my end goal of completing The Stillness this semester.  Life interrupts: travel between the city and the farm, having to make choices about transporting the technology that makes the bulk of my art possible between locations, just needing to sit in a cemetery and not do any work for a while.  So.  Here is the packet, for better or for worse.

I’ve sent a separate package containing a video and a cd-r.  The video contains one hour and seven minutes of the raw footage I’ve taken for The Stillness.  I realize that the low-resolution screen captures that I’ve been showing you must give you little if any idea of what I’m actually working with, so I thought I’d show you all of what I have so far.  All six shots that I’ve taken this semester so far have now been downloaded onto my system at full-resolution, which should speed the editing process considerably, although I ran into some technological issues in the initial transfer that took several days to remedy, mostly space and memory constraints.  I will have a preliminary edit of The Stillness completed by the end of the semester.

I successfully made a full-sized rendering of To Wound in which I removed the five major technological blips that appear in previous versions.  I video-outed this clean copy as a master from my system and mass-produced it, creating twenty copies to send to film festivals.  Hopefully at least one will bite; I know To Wound is the best video I’ve made so far.

While my system was still working at peak performance, I successfully rendered a final cut of Happy Kitten Jamboree! and video-outed it.  The digital file appears on the cd-r I’ve sent you.  After showing my nephews HKJ!, precocious Jaden, with a mournful look on his face, asked me if the kittens’ mother had been hit by a car, so struck was he by the images of pensive kittens.  I think the selection of “Choral sur la Nom de Faure” as a soundtrack was key in creating that atmosphere.

The cd-r also contains an audio track that I created from merging two compositions.  I intend to use this as the soundtrack for The Stillness.

The business side of my life took a fun turn as I received a box of fifty copies of An End from my publisher to send to reviewers.  Twenty-three of the copies were flawed; every other page was printed upside-down.  I switched into succinct and terse businessman Paul persona for a conference call where I intensely politely discussed the need for quality control in the printing process.  Replacements are on the way.

A friend was killed in a car crash.  I don’t know what to say about that right now.

I’ve been consumed by new musical releases by favorite bands of mine: Benton Falls, Pearl Jam, Beth Gibbons, Badly Drawn Boy.  There is solace in music.  My neighbors hate me.  My neighbors hate my subwoofer even more.

I had an amazing time with fellow Goddard student Amy Handfield (G1) a few weeks ago.  We figured out that we’re the youngest people in the program, so we made the most of it by going to Mass MoCA in North Adams and seeing the fall exhibit.  Particularly striking to me was Robert Wilson’s “14 Stations” installation.  Gigantic, disturbing, interdisciplinary in its mix of voice, sculpture, music, space.  Details here: http://www.massmoca.org/visual_arts/index.html.  We went back to Saratoga Springs and indulged in $9 martinis and filterless cigarettes.  We’re planning a Dysfunctional Family Thanksgiving Dinner for the weekend after Thanksgiving, so get those plane tickets ready.

It’s interesting to watch how a simple post on the Goddard listserv can create such a response…  Thank you very much for your reply.  I’ll return to that line of thought once I’ve sorted through this packet stuff.

It’s been difficult to sort through life’s noise and make any progress on The Stillness.  I’ve taken steps to provide a measure of creative clarity these crucial next few weeks, so you can expect to see a preliminary product with the next packet.  The struggle (besides technological) has been in the difficulty of arranging these aesthetically-pleasing fragments into a coherent whole that tells the story without interruptive voiceover or placards on the screen.  I think I’ve come to a solution…  But we’ll see with the next packet.  Going to Boston this weekend for rest and repair and re-surrender.

Take care, Catherine.

Paul.
15 November 2002.
 

http://www.resurrender.net/fluffy01wmv.wmv
Happy Kitten Jamboree!: Successfully rendered full project, now available online as a Windows media file.  Full-quality video sent separately on cd-r.

The Stillness raw footage:
Sent separately on video.  One hour and seven minutes of all the footage I’ve taken for this project.  Direct video-out from Digital 8 source.  I realized that the stills do very little justice to the material I’ve shot, so I thought you might want to take a look at what I have in full-resolution so far.

Audio:
Merged “Call Me Back” composition from Packet Three with track eleven of there they are, arrest them all by Good Morning Reality, “Almost There (OK),” written in late 2000 and performed by Jacob.  Attempted to re-record the song as a solo track; gave up after failing miserably.  This new composition appears on the cd-r sent separately from this file.  Also appears in mp3 format at: http://www.thestillness.com/stillnessmp301.mp3

Webdesign:
http://www.thestillness.com/stills.html
Captures from the last shot at the cemetery now available for viewing online.

http://www.resurrender.org
Domain successfully registered, awaiting DNS propagation.  Domain re-directs to resurrender forum at illout.com.  Domain registered to preserve resurrender trademark integrity, provide quick link to site forum.

Reading:
I started and completed Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” and Samuel Delany’s “The Einstein Intersection.”  I’ve continued reading Delany’s “Nova” and have begun Allucquere Rosanne Stone’s “The War of Desire and Technology.”

Writing:
Besides two entries in my Stillness journal (attached below), I’ve done no writing of substance for this packet period.

Thank you for asking.  Yes, I'm well.  Busy, finding it hard to make time for 
my own work, but well.   One person down, the others hanging on.  You're 
having to take on a lot right now, with responsibilities for your own work 
and the farm and being with your father, so I am surprised at what you've 
produced and glad to see the quantity.   I guess you don't sleep.    The 
fluffy kittens?

One person down..  There’s nothing anyone can really say in these times, but please know that my heart is with you.  Just hanging on.  It is really beginning to disturb me, the depth and extent of loss within both my immediate circle and extended Goddard circle this semester.  Jacob lyric: “There’s something in the air between us, something in the clouds, hovering.”  Foreboding song.  But that’s how it feels.  There’s just something here at this point in the world that is converging, collapsing.  I don’t know; I babble.  I usually sleep two or three hours each night.  Life is exhaustion.  Happy Kittens was a product of sleep deprivation, coffee, and nicotine.  It’s a great diet; my friends say I look skinny.

It's an uncanny advising group.   Loss and more loss and mourning and rage 
metastasizing here there and everywhere all over the provisional little 
collectivity that we are.  Was it something behind the eyes?  Maybe solace.   
At any rate more compelling than my day job.

And I begin to wonder if only we are subject to this loss, or if it is wide-spread and we’re the only ones feeling it, channeling it, making something of it.

Of course I am entranced by the prose, but I don't easily know where to begin 
this time. A little bit further into the way your mind works, I think, given 
your writing about "being Chip Delaney"   and the passages from the new 
novel, where of course I can see you, you observed, Susan, the tv on 9.11, 
and get a glimmer of the "real" and the transmutation as it happens. 
The difference between the monologues and the dialogue is fascinating.   You 
don't let yourself have rambles or screeds when you go into dialogue.   The 
conversations are direct, very external, very observed from the outside.  The 
monologues only break the streams of modifiers by punctuation or space.  It 
makes me wonder what would happen if you pushed the idea of describing from 
the outside, rather than assuming the flow of the internal monologue.  This 
is not to "like" one mode more than the other, but to speculate about the 
results of possibly getting to a location that is neither inside nor outside. 
  This I think of as the voice in italics from nowhere, only perhaps that 
voice could be more quirky, more candid, more ordinarily human, more 
idosyncratic.  Perhaps that voice doesn't speak with so heavy a 
deus-ex-machina accent.   I'm wondering, I guess, about putting more power 
into the dialogue parts.   The monologues seem to me the most startling and 
compelling.   The dialogue sections are eerie, and move the plot along, and 
produce a narrative disjunction, but your obsessions are in the monologues, 
along with the love of long sentences and adjectives and daily life and your 
own loneliness.   The dialogue sections allay the quality of the monologues, 
soothe it, explain it.    Formally, structurally, emotionally-does that have 
to be so?  Why are these two voices SO tidily separate?   (Perhaps they need 
to be.   Perhaps there's are torques coming in your structure that I am not 
anticipatiing.  Perhaps the structure needs to be rigid enough to contain the 
monologues.)  It's the "being Paul Hughes" conundrum.   And how do offense 
mechanisms related as a writing strategy, internal to a novel?

My original intent with “Broken Tomorrows” was to create a novel from the unexplained fragments of the original two, characters and situations that I never truly explored, little plotlines never fully realized.  I know now that I began writing BT almost as an afterthought, just plunging in, without yet being ready to take on the burden of writing a novel.  As with my previous two, right now I couldn’t tell you from day to day what the story will end up being about besides the fact that it will deal with the biologically-invasive alien substance known as “silver.”  As expressed on my message boards, readers are already asking for a fourth entry in the book, but I’ve hit a creative wall that I’ve not experienced in quite a long time.  Your comments are helping me to chip away bit by bit, and I hope to have several new entries done by the next packet period.

In reading and re-reading and re-reading my previous novels, I found that the dialogue in “enemy” was the worst, stilted, unnatural, laughably bad in some passages.  In science fiction, there is such a danger of completely losing the reader with technological jargon.  When writing AE and now the new novel, I made a conscious decision to be adamant in my creation of natural dialogue…  There’s very little I hate more than proofing a manuscript where every line of dialogue contains a he said/she said he asked/she asked etc.  Other pet peeves include authors who are hesitant to use contractions or use “the hell” or “the fuck” in every sentence.  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked. “I do not know what the fuck I am doing.” she said.  Gah.  I hate cardboard dialogue.  So in AE and BT, I did and am doing my best to tone down the tech jargon and create believable vocal interactions between people, complete with interruptions, trailings-off, and a dearth of saids.  The result so far seems to be succinct exchanges, very little flowery language…  I want to give the reader the sense that this is a mission, and there’s no room to beat around the bush.  People say what they mean.  People interrupt each other.  I’ve told my students before that to write successful dialogue, you have to read it out loud; if it doesn’t sound natural, it isn’t.  When writing the “enemy” screenplay that I hope to work on again soon, it was a refreshing relief to “repair” some of the dialogue from the original novel.

Structurally, I love throwing different times and voices and universes together into one pot and forcing the reader to attempt to discover who is talking, where and when they’re talking.  I can’t imagine writing a scene that lasted for more than two pages at a stretch, and I find that when I’m forced to do so, the result is less-than-successful.  I chop my stories up, sometimes literally going back to insert a segment inside of a scene that I feel lasts a little too long.  Maybe it’s the Memento syndrome coming out in me.  In BT, I achieve this by the pirating of my ancient writing (the monologue-type segments are from old journal entries) and the insertion of the italicized voice.  I love the idea of making the italicized voice even more idiosyncratic, since right now it’s mostly lyrics and bits of my own writing from previous novels.  In BT, I want to jar the reader back and forth from the main storyline of Paul and West and Benton to the alternate pasts that my journal entries represent.  A main challenge in this new novel will be the successful integration of truth from the physical world (or my subjective interpretation of physical world events) with the purely-fictional accounts of a war outside of time and space that takes place solely in the realm of the silver world that I’ve created.  I really want to force the reader to wonder what is real, what is imaginary, what if anything actually occurred.

Also, I wonder, watching the video/audio and noticing the extreme degree of 
fragmentation and repetition as a structuring device, what the visual medium 
affords you that the writing doesn't.   You don't let yourself go into sound 
poems, for example, in the novels  (or so I think) but you do so in the video 
footage.   You do a kind of doodling that I don't see in the writing.  Is 
that a difference worth noting?  Cultivating?  It was, by the way, immensely 
frustrating to watch the video because the image quality sucked.   Majorly, 
as they say just north of where I sit.  Can you just output to video tape or 
CD?   I don't feel that I can really respond in much detail because what I've 
got are still captures and then bad motion images, so I'm not getting 
anything but a very schematic sense of editing.   I'm trusting you because of 
tape number one.  It's a leap of faith I'm willing to make.  I am not a 
religious person.

The image quality of the raw footage I’ve now sent is representative of what the end product should look like.  Sorry to send the shitty video last time; my computer was preventing me from video-outing anything of visible quality, but now I’ve fixed the space and memory issues and I’m able to export full-quality digital video to tape.

I’d like to begin “doodling” more with my writing; the difficulty lies in my writing process…  I’m afraid to present something online to readers that I’ll regret writing or dislike later.  I might have to change my tactics with this novel to a Paul-centered writing process instead of writing just so internet people stop bothering me because I haven’t updated the page in a week.  I want BT to stand apart from AE and enemy, and I’m just now starting to explore how to make that departure structurally, thematically, and personally.

The passages about your father and art and memory and imagining the loss of 
you yourself are dynamite.  (I've read them three times, for the love of 
reading.)  Also the destruction of the bonfire pit, the site of memory and 
therefore loss, a loss that you prevent by destroying the problem in advance. 
 Does there have to be so much more than moments of intense life and intense 
writing?   How do you want to be remembered?   Do you consider the pages you 
write as an homage to yourself or representations that you will inevitably 
judge insufficientt?   Consider the distance between the desire of 
immortalilty (=belief that you can control the memory of you) and the Tibetan 
Buddhist approach:   Death has happened, so nothing can hurt you.   

Is this art?   Art has happened.  Nothing can hurt you.

“Art has happened.  Nothing can hurt you.”  Probably the most meaningful statement I’ve encountered during my time at Goddard..  Thank you for that.  I delved at least a little bit into how I define myself with the “the other” post on the listserv, although those signifiers mean very little in my everyday life and I doubt anyone who knows me would define me by any of the fragments I listed.  I don’t know how I want to be remembered…  I just hope someone someday will see me behind their eyes each night before they fall asleep and wish that I were there with them.  I don’t want to be remembered as a famous author, a rich recluse, an obsessive depressive freak.  I don’t know.  I know there’s no real answer to that.  This is the journey upon which I’ll discover what aspects of Paul I want the world to remember.  I already judge many of my creations insufficient representations of who I am..  I’ve considered taking two of my books off the market because I’m hesitant to perpetuate that Paul, although I now know that I’m no longer the person who wrote those accounts.  But then again…  Art has happened.  And after this year, I wonder if anything can truly hurt me again.

Don't worry about looking at exactly what I say to look at, or how long it 
takes.   You've got a lot to take care of right now.   Writing and shooting 
and editing are enough.

The Goddard library informed me that none of my ILL requests were successful.  Libraries don’t seem to want to share videos.  Oh well.  I will certainly stay busy these next three weeks with editing.

Looking forward to sharing the costs of a dinner...

Dinner and a movie?  Hot dog!  I really liked Red Dragon and Punch Drunk Love, but mostly because I’ve had a gigantic crush on Emily Watson ever since The Boxer.

Take care, Catherine.  Thanks for everything! 

Cliff Notes compiled by Mark Brand

Intro:

Admittedly, knowing the author has provided me with a unique insight into
this novel, and therefore must at some points skew my perceptions and color
my criticism of it.  That aside, I will try to be as succinct and objective
as possible.  Needless to say, I enjoyed this book quite a lot, and some of
the errors that were hiding beneath the surface of Enemy were corrected and
improved upon in An End.  Given the inclusion of characters from the former
novel, and similar passages and descriptions of events, it is left largely
up to the audience to determine whether An End is a sequel to Enemy.
Because I know more than the average reader, we will assume for the
remainder of this review that An End is a sequel.

Story:

An End proceeds from beginning to end in non-linear fashion, often jumping
around a fluid timeline even within the same chapters.  Characters who die
early in the story are explained in the later chapters, and events which
must be taken for granted early in the book are only explained later in
disjointed paragraphs, often tucked between other plotlines.  This technique
works well for the most part, though some problems with characters emerge
late in the book.
The best summarization of the story, as far as I can tell, is that it is a
tale of several couples, often drawn to each other by something that
supercedes their outward antagonism.  Hunter and Lily, Joseph and Helen
Windham, Maire and JudithGod, Whistler and Jo, Berlin and Kath, Reynald and
Hannah, Task and Elle, Paul and Susan.   Nearly all of these present the
reader with different variations on the same theme: a sort of star-crossed,
love/hate, inevitable train-wreck romance.  Redemption is not to be had in
any of these cases.  The love that exists between them is either fragile and
trodden-upon by reality or is so tenacious that the lovers end up destroying
each other inadvertently.  Of the eight romances listed above (though there
are other even subtler references to other alternate versions of this
reality) there exists no closure for any except the one between Hunter and
Lily.  This closure only precipitates, as the title suggests, an end.  There
is no redemption or vindication or justification.  There is simply an act of
supreme sacrifice in order to make things right in a world that has provided
the protagonist with nothing but adversity.
The ironic dichotomies listed above are the novel's strong point.  The
plot, if it could be called a plot, is concerned largely with a sort of
intergalactic virus that turns everything it touches to silver.  There is
Maire (Also called Mother) who apparently either created or spread this
silver virus.  It is unknown where Maire or the silver itself came from, or
if it is known, it is known only to the author, who sees fit to reveal only
the vaguest clues.  There are the heroes (if indeed they are heroes and not
simply antagonists to Maire's hero) Hunter the boy, Hunter the man, Zero the
Hunter projection-clone, Lily the girl, Lilith the woman (also called
Fleur), The Catalyst (a weaponized version of Lilith who is used against her
will to scorch worlds with the silver), and a host of secondary supporting
characters including several young men and synthetic men (Berlin, Task,
Tallis, Joe Windham, the painter Whistler, Reynald (who we can only assume
is the same Reynald who piloted Judith Maggie in Enemy), the author himself
Paul Hughes, a cowboy version of the author named Hank, and God (who,
according to one of the book's best lines of dialogue, is not a retard).
The plot plays out in space, on a doomed planet in the middle of a war of
macro-universe proportions, on other nameless planets and spaceships, and
ultimately at the end of the world in the center of the earth with an
omnipotent Maire/Mother/Child who seems to grow younger.
As I said, don't look for a compelling plot here.  There really isn't one.
Or if there is, it's understood only by the author.  The compelling element
of the story is its diverse and winding storylines concerning the large and
colorful cast of characters.  Having read the earlier versions of Enemy,
previous to its publication, I remember drafts of that story which included
several extra characters and a simpler more direct plot.  The final version
of Enemy condenses the characters into several main personalities that had
been separate and distinct.  With all due respect, I had always considered
this a mistake on the part of the author, and I think An End is the final
proof that I was right.  In a novel where there is only the thinnest and
most vague of plots, the diversity and individuality of the characters holds
the story together and keeps the reader turning the pages.

An End as a Sequel:

As far as An End being considered a sequel to Enemy goes, there are several
main elements that indicate a strong bond between the two stories.  First,
there are common characters.  Most notably, there is Jean Reynald, who we
remember as the captain of the doomed Judas ship Magdalene.  There is a
briefly mentioned President Jennings, who appeared in the first story as the
President of a doomed earth, father to Patra Jennings, who owned what was
ostensibly Hunter Windham's talking toy, Honeybear Brown.  There is a
reference to the book written by Simon Hayes in the first novel Deus Ex, and
Jean Reynald mentions Hannah, the First Circle Judas Commander from Enemy.
Though none of the talking Judas ship personalities appear in An End, there
are several new ones including Archemedes, Gary the Warship, and Machine
(Hunter's vessel in the first chapter).  It is left up to the reader, in
most cases, how deeply the link between the two novels is construed.

Chapter One: Amidst Silver

The first chapter of the book opens during an event that we are apparently
not supposed to understand.  A young woman (Fleur/Lily/Lilith) is injured
and recaptured before she is able to do whatever it was that she was in the
process of doing.  She is taken to the center of the earth to meet Mother, a
godlike creature who looks like a child.  Fleur is escorted to the center of
the world by a group of people named Whistler (as in the painter), Nine (the
ninth projected synthetic counterfeit of a man named Hunter) and Hank (a
cowboy that smoked Marlboros).  Fleur is chastised by Mother and told that
there is one final duty that Fleur must perform.  At this point the concept
of the Extinction and The Catalyst is explained.  As far as we know, Fleur
can somehow precipitate a horrific volume of destruction by virtue of simply
being Fleur.  Mother kills Hank and replaces him with a projection
counterfeit.  They meet Gary, the foulmouthed Warship, and the characters
witness a spacecraft that is created by gutting an entire planet.
Meanwhile, a man named Hunter floats within a biological spacecraft named
Machine.  He is accosted, boarded, and taken prisoner by a man named
Stranger and told he has been lied to his entire life.  The two men go to a
place called Heaven.

Easter Eggs:

-The original title of the novel was "An End Of Sorts".  It was later
changed to simply "An End".

-The original title for this chapter was "Of Beginnings Amidst Silver."  It
was later changed for the novel publication.

-The character Hank in Amidst Silver gives us some clues that he is based
somewhat on the author.  Hank is described as owning a shiny golden Zippo
and smoking Marlboro cigarettes.  Paul Hughes himself owns at least one
Zippo lighter and enjoys smoking Marlboros (often referred to as Cowboy
Killers).  He also is known to wear, from time to time, a large cowboy hat.
 

Chapter 2:  The Stillness Between

The Stillness Between opens with a scene of Lily (a child version of
Fleur/Lilith) being escorted in a walk through a city by an artificial
person (angel) named Nan.  Lily loves chocolate milk and dislikes having to
walk in the city because she knows on some level that the people she sees
are doomed and the little boys are sad because there are no longer any other
little girls.  She is protected from the war that is going on outside.
People are being killed and men are being "sent to the stars" to go to war.
The next scene introduces Hunter (the child version of Hunter Windham /
Zero) and his mother Helen Windham.  It is clear from the beginning that
Hunter's father has already gone to the stars, and Hunter's only friend is
Honeybear Brown, a toy stuffed animal with one eye ripped out.
Next is a short confusing scene which shows Lily being summoned to meet
Mother.
A flashback to when the war was going on between people, and Helen Lofton
meets Joseph Windham in the middle of a street-ambush battle.  They meet and
fall in love.  A scene in a coffee shop where another couple sits,
apparently also falling in love.  The other woman is named Maggie.
Another scene where Hunter and his mother Helen run outside as a huge
planetary gun shoots into timespace and shatters the buildings.  The planet
is apparently under attack, and Lily is put on a transport to send her to
safety.  Helen dies in the attack and Hunter manages to make it to the same
transport which contains Lily.  They escape from the planet.  Intertwined
are two sections containing the characters Jo and Whistler in an apartment
long ago.  Whistler showing her only the barest of courtesy.  And another
series of short segments which include the characters Paul and Susan.  Paul
first reading a paper concerning the painter Whistler and his work "The
White Girl", and then talking to Susan about writing a book and buying a
ring.

Easter Eggs:

-Paul Hughes had a sometime-girlfriend while in college named Lilith.

-Paul Hughes had, at the time of the writing of these chapters, a girlfriend
named Susan.

-The segment of term-paper read to the art class is taken from a paper that
that author actually wrote for an art class.  The professor in the scene was
one of his most beloved mentors, the late Betsy Rezelman.
 

Chapter 3:  A Loss So Dear

This chapter opens at what is apparently the end of the story, or very
nearly the end.  There is an accident and Fleur is killed.  Hunter finally
confronts Mother.  There is a long-ish section which concerns several
characters named Berlin, Task, Elle, and Berlin's late wife Kath, the
botanist.  Berlin explores, against the advice of the other characters, the
remains of a world that has been completely destroyed by the silver.  A
character named Judith, who is apparently capable of talking to God, is used
to connect to another Host Body, in which the deity is reincarnated.  This
turns out to actually be one of the most bizarre and unintentionally funny
sequences in the novel.  God is brought to life, and Maire (Mother) manages
to kill the remaining characters and people by planting the silver in the
host body and ambushing them at her "sentencing".  It is feared that the
silver will travel back along unseen lines and destroy the worlds that are
still free from the silver.

Easter Eggs:

-Kath is a reoccurring character in Enemy and An End.  It may or may not be
loosely based on the author's high-school friend Kathy.  Maggie Flynn, the
heroine from Enemy was originally named "K" as in K-Level Styx.
 

Chapter 4:  The Machinery of Night

This chapter is the most disjointed and incoherent of the book.  The
segments jump from timeline to timeline giving the reader a few more moments
of each place and time in order to piece together what has happened.  Hunter
and Lilith finally consummate their love, and in the process, Hunter
contracts the silver himself.  More about Paul and Susan and Whistler and
Task and Tallis and Mother and JudithGod.  A scene where Lilith is being
used as a weapon.  The segments of this chapter seem connected only by words
and phrases and thoughts.  Plot-wise, they jump all over the storyline.

Easter Eggs:

-The line "Delaney's gonna' sue you." is a reference to the one of Paul
Hughes' favorite science fiction authors, Samuel Delaney, author of
Dhalgren.  Several lines from this book are used throughout Paul Hughes'
various stories and works.

- Bic pens are the author's favorite writing device.  The first draft of
Enemy was written in spiral notebooks using a Bic Metal Roller.

-Another of the author's favorite books, Hermann Hesse's Demian is mentioned
repeatedly.
 

Chapter 5:  Les Soldats Perdus: A Plague Journal.

This is the chapter of revelations.  The story is told a second time,
almost from beginning to end, this time only from Hunter's point of view but
it includes the beginning, middle, and end in a semblance of chronological
order.  All of the secrets come together, the dots are connected, the story
is finally told, long after the reader has suffered with the eight couples
and has seen the demise of their relationship.  The plot of An End, almost
an afterthought, a punctuation to the lives of the characters (obviously
paramount to the author), is told with detached sullenness, and punctuated
at the end by an act of redemption that turns out feeling more like an act
of defiance.  The last refuge of a desperate man.  Or, perhaps, the last
refuge of a man who is past the point of desperation.

Easter Eggs:

-One of Hunter's friends in the novel is named Brendan.  Named presumably
after a college friend with whom the author sang in the a cappella group The
Singing Saints.

-The warship Rebecca is named after another college friend, who figures
heavily in the author's book [dyingdays].

-The character Berard was named after one of the author's college
professors.

-The lines in French at the end of the chapter are from a song by Gabriel
Faure entitled Cantique De Jean Racine.  This song was part of the set list
for the 2000 Laurentian Singers tour, of which the author was a part.
 

Atlantis and Other New York Tales: Samuel R. Delany reads at the Judson Church.  Videotape. Dir. Eric Solstein. Voyant Publishing, 1999. 82 min.
• Reading books like “The Motion of Light in Water” and “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” is one thing.  Actually seeing Delany read passages from these books to an appreciative audience is an entirely different experience.  While Delany’s writing is far from uninteresting or sterile, his performance of selections from his fiction and non-fiction offer his enthusiasts a new dimension of appreciation: vocal inflection, stage presence, playful interaction with the audience.  I’d seen him once before on a History Channel documentary about the history of science fiction.  That thirty-second blurb gave no clues as to the commanding presence that is Chip Delany in front of an audience.  I’m thinking of transferring to Temple just to take his classes.

Delany, Samuel R. The Einstein Intersection. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan, 1967.
• One of his first short novels, I found “Einstein” to be a red-headed stepchild of a book written between “Babel-17” and “Dhalgren.”  While it exhibits many aspects of both, the ambiguous sexual hierarchy of the alien race, a main character named “Kid,” explorations of the fluidity of language and application of that exploration in idiosyncratic grammatical constructions, I found myself dissatisfied with the book.  Delany presents a world far in Earth’s future, now inhabited with an alien race trying to make sense of the cities and myths left over from our time, but he never truly develops the characters or the plot into a coherent or compelling story.  Once the book was finished, I still felt he could have kept going for several hundred more pages, so many loose ends were left untied.

Delany, Samuel R. Nova. New York: Doubleday, 1968.
• Although I’ve not yet finished this book, I’m already struck by Delany’s talent at de- and re-constructing our English language into unique ways of expressing foreign or alien dialogue.  The story is told in a non-linear fashion, something I myself use often in my fiction.  The characters are bold and typical atypical Delany.  Mouse, the young protagonist, plays an instrument called a sensory syrynx that combines music, scent, sound with a projected holographic image; it’s a pretty good argument for Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation.

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.
• A huge fan of the film, I finally decided to sit down and read the book.  It took me three nights to finish it.  I am struck by the clarity of the images Palahniuk presents; perhaps it is this clarity that lent itself so well to an almost-verbatim transfer of dialogue from the novel to the screenplay.  Reading the book has given me a new appreciation for the work David Fincher did with the film.  Perhaps as early as next semester, I intend to start work once again on the screenplay of my first novel.  Fight Club as book and as film proves that a film adaptation, while making some changes to the story, can create a worthy visual interpretation of a written work.

Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
• I’ve just begun this book, but I already very much appreciate Stone’s use of anecdotes to explain certain points amid the heavy theory that she’s writing about.  Personal stories and trivial details about ARPANET, MUDs, online personae, etc. really break up the string of academic writing with real-world examples that make it easier for someone like me, who hasn’t been steeped in years of academia, to understand.  I am particularly intrigued by Stone’s idea of technological and communicative prostheses, a concept that I’d never really considered but now makes so much sense: the telephone is a communicative prosthesis between active agents in an exchange; although you talk to the phone, you are actually talking through the phone to another person.  Sounds like common sense to us, but to the first telephone users, it was another experience entirely.