Xark!

The Never Ending Trail

On the recommendation of friend and fellow distance runner, Cara Finnegan, I recently read Pam Reed’s The Extra Mile.  Finnegan and I have individually played around with the idea of trying a few ultamarathon events at some point in the future and Reed’s book, subtitled One Woman’s Personal Journey to Ultrarunning Greatness, seemed to be a great place to start thinking a bit more seriously about it. 

Ultramarathons are loosely defined as any race going beyond the normal 26.2 (and change) miles required by a marathon.  When distance is the defining characteristic, normal ultramarathons are 50 and 100 miles (although there are odd numbers and some are much longer).  When time is the defining characteristic, ultramarathons are normally set at 24 or 48 hours with the “winner” being the person who covers the most distance during that time period. 

There are a number of aspects of an ultramarathon which make it interesting, especially as you get a bit older.  For one, my times in half-marathons and marathons are going down rather than up.  I see no feasible personal records in my future.  As a result, an ultra would give me a different way of judging myself.  Given that there are so many of them of so many different lengths and on so many different terrains, I imagine I would never have a personal standard against which to judge. 

Secondly, there’s just something romantic about the idea of such long distances.  I find myself particularly attracted by the idea of the “timed” race, even if it means going around and around on a track.  I can imagine the brain working in extraordinarily odd ways in such a race, and I can imagine a very strong sense of community between those who finish such a run. 

It was with a mind like this that I approached Reed’s book, then. While I expected that her words would only add to the romanticism with which I was approaching ultras, there are ways in which Reed’s book—and subsequent reading--work against such romanticism. 

The Seduction of Identity

I came relatively late to Jim Webb’s Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.  Indeed, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I knew very little of Webb at all until I watched him from time to time during the 2006 Senatorial campaign in Virginia.  From the first time I saw him speak, however, I was hooked.  There was something about the gritty, plain spoken demeanor that was comfortably familiar to me. 

After hearing me talk about Webb ceaselessly after his election, and after watching me do endless imitations of him, Bonnie threw her hands up and bought me a copy of Born Fighting, hoping, I think, to either get me over my fascination or to not have to listen to me during the times when I was reading.  It didn’t work.  Each night I read the book and would shout out lines in an almost giddy fashion.  For one born and raised in the South, especially close to the highlands in North Carolina, this book did so much to affirm me—perhaps to a fault—that I’ve only gotten louder.

The Look of Betrayal

Sometimes you really only grasp the meaning of a situation—in a human, emotional sense—when you hear a story in person, when you watch the body and face of the subject of the story, when you feel its impact on the body rather than in the abstract.

Thus was the case for me last week when I attended a talk to Valerie Plame Wilson, author of Fair Game:  My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.  There’s little need here to introduce the author—she’s the former CIA agent famously outed by Scooter Libby and the White House in retaliation for her husband, Joe’s, editorial in which he accused the White House of lying in their rhetorical case for the Iraq War.   In Wilson's talk, drawing from the book, she tells the story of her love of country, her life in the CIA, the public outing, and her family's life in New Mexico.

As a result of being provided with “dignitary” seating in the front row (this simply because I know someone who knows a student in the organizing committee for the speech), I had a very close up view of Wilson as she told her story.  To be honest, while I’ve always felt for her in the past, and while I’ve always been angry at the Bush White House for their part in outing her, it’s always been somewhat “theoretical” to me.  That is, I knew that what was done to her was wrong, but I didn’t feel it: I wasn’t emotionally shaken by it.  This is where the body comes in.

Books in the Belly

On Sunday morning, while reading The Tennessean and having a pleasant time of it, I was reminded of one of those odd articulations between “gender” and “activity” that frustrates the dickens out of me.  There, in the Living section, was a rather lengthy article about book clubs and what amazing communities they help women build.  Could someone please explain why “book clubs” have become so closely articulated to women and why it’s so difficult to break this articulation?

A few months ago, my Bonnie and I were at one of our local bars, having a drink when we ran into a couple we know.  Bonnie and her female counterpart engaged in a conversation about the next book their club was reading.  A light bulb goes off, so I turn to her husband, a guy I’ve gotten to know through conversations over beer now and again, and I say, “Why don’t we start a book club for men in the neighborhood?”  I swear: the guy’s face turned white, and he acted as if I had asked him on a date.

Something is amiss when you ask a guy about reading books, and a moment of homosexual panic breaks out.  And it’s not just this one guy.  Regardless of how I approach the topic, men don’t simply act uninterested; they act as if there is something horribly amiss about the idea.  Guys, we need book clubs; we need them now:

Sean Penn and the Better Story

Ten years ago, like a lot of the rest of the country, I found myself intrigued by the story of Chris McCandless as depicted in Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild.”  My reactions to it were perhaps predictably conflicted.  On the one hand, I’m one of the large multitude of people who, especially as a young man, was very attracted to the idea of doing something extreme—hiking the AT straight through, walking across the U.S., that sorta thing.  I loved to think about how long I would have lasted had I been one of the guys on Stephen King’s Long Walk, or how far I could have run with Forest Gump. While not attracted to the idea of trying to live “in the wild” for any period of time, there was something about the romance of McCandless’s quest that I did find compelling.

On the other hand, I couldn’t help but picture the guy as being a member of the arrogant- self-righteous-mystical-I-walk-alone-but-want-you-to-know-it tribe.  As one of my friends (who was reading the book at the same time) remarked, “I knew tons of guys like this in high school.  Always so self-righteous, always so full of themselves.  I didn’t like them then, and I don’t want to read about them now.”  I knew what she was talking about.  In a way similar to the old equation I used to hear in the late 1970s--“I like the Doors; I just don’t like the people I have to hang out with to listen to them”--I liked the romance of extreme self-reliance, but I didn’t like the people I had to hang out with to dream about it. 

My primary problem with Krakauer’s account, however, wasn’t with the representation of McCandless so much as with Krakauer’s over romanticism of it.  If you’ve read the book, you’ll probably know what I mean:  Krakauer not only writes an apologia for McCandless by telling a story about his own youthful extremism that makes both their acts seem like reasonable masculine rites of passage, but he also creates elaborate explanations to explain McCandless’s ultimate demise.  Krakauer’s explanations—which now demand a great deal of scrutiny—ultimately work to suggest that McCandless’s journey was a remarkable masculine adventure, one only foiled by a few very unfortunate bad turns.  In my mind, Krakauer’s account went way too far to make McCandless’s “great Alaskan adventure” appear admirable with no inkling that it might have been simultaneously reckless and damaging to others.

Reading Douglas Coupland

From The Gum Thief, writing as Bethany, a 20-something Staples employee:

Days like today get me thinking more about the end of the world. I look back on when I was younger, back in the 1990s, and how naive and goofy everything was back then, but it was like this happy bubble, a time snack, a little patch of bliss before the shitstorm.

There's such a difference between the world I grew up expecting and the one I got, but everyone my age has probably felt the same since the dawn of man. I didn't expect a world full of jetliners impregnating office towers, or viruses jumping species or, shit, according to Yahoo!, pigs that now glow in the dark. The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder. The few animals that remain here with us -- when they look at me, or when I hear them cheep or bleat or meow -- they're not animals anymore, they're the voices of the dead trying to warn us of what's coming. According to government statistics, I'm supposed to leave the world in 2062, but I can't even see 2032 in my head.

(emphasis added)

When Silence Isn't Golden

In Speechless: The Erosion of Free Speech in the American Workplace (Berrett Koehler, 2007), Bruce Barry has written a book that should be required reading for citizens, regardless of their political orientation.  Simultaneously clever and conversational, Barry takes the reader on a journey through workplace free speech cases that leaves one angry and confused about the practical meaning of, and limits to, free speech. 

While the rules are different for “public” and “private” workplaces, the news Barry delivers is the same:  while there are historic moments for optimism, in the most general sense, workplace free speech is not only more limited than you might imagine, but the constraints are getting tighter, and more and more confusing.  As Barry notes after looking at multiple court cases concerning free speech in “public” workspaces:  “To sum it up in one sentence:  as a public employee you have rights to free expression except when you don’t” (p. 74).   The difference between the things you can and can’t say are so confusing that silence becomes the ruling norm. 

The same is true in different ways in public workplaces.  A fairly recent example cited by Barry:  Lynne Gobbell, a factory worker drove to work with a John Kerry bumper sticker on her car.  Her boss—who had put pro Bush inserts in employee pay envelopes--demanded that Gobbell remove the sticker or lose her job.  She lost her job.

'On The Road' at 50

On The Road, Jack Kerouac's most famous novel, is turning 50. The exact date is apparently squishy, as I can't find it in any of the news reports I've searched, but apparently September is the month the anniversary will be observed, because Viking has new goodies for us to buy (a hint: They're already out).  And yes, I will buy them. First up: 

...not just "On the Road" itself but the hitherto-unpublished "scroll manuscript," a 1951 draft that Kerouac typed without a paragraph break on thin drawing paper (not Teletype paper) taped together in a single 120-foot roll, powered by coffee (not by Benzedrine). Kerouac was then a writer with a forgotten first novel ("The Town and the City") who wanted a nonstop, unpaginated flow appropriate both to his convictions about spontaneous composition and to the narrative itself...

The scroll has the real names—Jack, Neal, Allen Ginsberg—and scenes later cut for fear of obscenity charges or libel suits. In an introductory essay, English novelist Howard Cunnell calls the scroll "a markedly darker, edgier, and more uninhibited text than the finished book." In particular, the official version dances around the subject of homosexuality: Ginsberg, Cassady and Kerouac all hooked up. And it bowdlerizes the encounter with a gay man who gives them a ride: "Neal proceeded to handle [him] like a woman, tipping him over legs in the air and all and gave him a monstrous huge banging. I was so non-plussed all I could do was sit and stare from my corner." In the published novel, this becomes: "Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the bathroom."

Good. I'm over my adolescent need to deny the truth about Kerouac's sexuality. The Scroll is the book I've always wondered about, the one we all wondered about, a mythic artifact untainted by The Establishment. We'd approached it, I thought, with Visions of Cody, supposedly a novel of outtakes. And yes, The Scroll could be just as awful. But The Scroll intrigues me.

Organic Process goes live

Over the past few weeks I've been helping out some friends of ours with a website they've been remaking, and I've waited to write about their project until the site went live.  But this is not about their site (which is a perfectly nice site, designed by the fine folks at Fuzzco): This is about creative people who are redrawing the lines between art and journalism and activism and commerce.

Her name is Farrah Hoffmire. His name is Mitchell Davis. They both grew up in Summerville, both graduated from C of C. She started off to be a mental health counselor but became an artist. He started off as a musician but became one of the founders of BookSurge.com, one of those magnificent little software-commerce marriages that's just so smart it practically squeaks when you rub up against it. When BookSurge sold to Amazon a couple years ago, Farrah and Mitchell moved to Seattle to help integrate their company into the mega-bookseller's operations. And while they were out there, Farrah decided to learn to make films. That was the spring and early summer of 2005.

In late August of that year, Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and swamped New Orleans. A few weeks later, Farrah packed up her camcorder and headed to the Delta, where she began recording her own personal history of the aftermath of the storm.

Reading William Gibson: Media

"In the early 1920s," Bigend said, "there were still some people in this country who hadn't yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That's less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a 'recording artist'" -- making the quotes with his hands -- "took place toward the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing that which they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn't reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star, as we knew her" -- and here he bowed slightly, in her direction -- "was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media."

"Of--?"

"Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world."

"As opposed to?"

"Comprising it."

-- Hollis Henry, lead singer of the long-defunct indie-rock band The Curfew,  gets a lesson in the New World Order from for-profit spookworld entrepreneur Hubertus Bigend in Chapter 20 of William Gibson's new novel, Spook Country.

Reading William Gibson: Terrorism

"A nation," he heard himself say, "consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation." He opened his eyes and confirmed Brown there, his partially disassembled pistol in his hand. The cleaning, lubrication, and examination of the gun's inner workings was ritual, conducted every few nights, though as far as Milgrim knew, Brown hadn't fired the gun since they'd been together.

"What did you say?"

"Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?" Milgrim heard himself ask this with a sense of deep wonder. He was saying these things without consciously having thought them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable.

"The fuck --"

"If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specificially, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That's why they call him 'terrorist.' He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society."

Brown opened his mouth. Closed it.

"It's based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen."

There was a look on Brown's face that Milgrim hadn't seen there before. Now Brown tossed a fresh bubble-pack down on the bedspread.

"Good night," Milgrim heard himself say, still insulated by the silver membrane.

Brown turned, walking silently back into his own room in his stocking feet, the partial pistol in his hand.

Milgrim raised his right arm toward the ceiling, straight up, index finger extended and thumb cocked. He brought the thumb down, firing an imaginary shot, then lowered his arm, having no idea at all what to make of whatever it was that had just happened.

-- Drug addict and hostage Milgrim lectures his captor during a rare moment of semi-lucidity in Chapter 29 of author William Gibson's latest novel, Spook Country.

There's a new William Gibson novel! There's a new William Gibson novel!!!

It comes out next month, and I'm putting in for a review copy, like, RIGHT NOW...

Spook Country. Sounds an awful lot like the Xark concept of "Spookworld"... Here's the synopsis, such as it is...

Gibson, in a short promotional video (which is available on his site):

"It's about cultural changes in the United States since (9/11)... The real flavor of real spook country is the flavor of rumor... of 'you heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy'...

"The core of how politics and technology work together for me is that technology is very seldom legislated into existence. Technology will eventually take us to a point where something changes so much, that beyond that point we won't be able to recognize any of it at all, and whatever is left of us, of our species beyond that point, looking back, won't be able to recognize us as being the same species."

Have you noticed how Gibson, a science fiction writer who used to write about futuristic technology, has written both of his last two novels in the present? Is that what happens to science fiction at the moment of The Singularity?

Kurt Vonnegut: And so on.

Now I'm thoroughly depressed, and it's only 8 a.m.

Q&A: Tiffany Jonas

We met Tiffany Jonas of Charleston several years ago, back when she and her partners were woodshedding ideas for a new and unusual book publishing company. It was going to emphasize literary speculative fiction, an interesting sub-sub-niche in the fiction universe, but what really stood out in those early discussions was the group's intense interest in publishing books that would be -- for lack of a better term -- things of beauty.

Their vision became Aio Publishing, and I recently got around to reading its first title: The Summer Isles, by Ian R. McLeod (I've since bought Aio's whole list). Not only did I love this short novel, but the book -- as an object -- got me thinking about quality all over again. Here was a book that was built for people who love to read, and yet it cost no more than a regular hard-cover from a major publishing house.

I asked Jonas to answer a string of e-mail questions for Xark because I'm fascinated by people who see things they want to do and then go right out and do them. There's something more, too: At a moment when the established publishing industry is experiencing all manner of soul-killing degradations, this transplanted Midwestern thirtysomething went out and built a publishing house out of little more than the shared passion of a group of people who just happen to love a particular kind of novel.

Here's that interview: