Contrasting the dim of the city against the icy wilds of Greenland, The Vanishing Pill exposes the violent inner conflicts of our nature. As McPhedran’s liner notes state: “Dreams aren’t simple things; they’re the only fucking thing.”
The advanced reviews are unanimous…
Atlantic Tri-Monthly: “I ate it up like a rabid monkey. McPhedran stews his prose with a burning hot sauce that leaves you screaming for more.”
USA Tomorrow: “You have not lived until you have read this intoxicating yarn of lust and joy.”
NY1 Off-line: “New Yorker McPhedran’s latest explosion of prose lights up the city with a tower of anguish and delight.”
Foxy News on-line: “It’s a good book, even with all the big words.”
I was genuinely excited to read Andy Weir’s highly-acclaimed Project Hail Mary, hoping for inspiration on improving the writing, structure and marketability of my own speculative work, The Cx Trilogy.
My positive outlook waned after a few pages. It wasn’t just the undeveloped writing nor the caricatured characters – much of which seem at first draft level – but more the lack of an engaging narrative. While the premise was compelling – why is the sun getting dimmer and how can this be stopped? – there was little development of the protagonist and his journey beyond a barrage of scientific details.
I’ll cite examples to mitigate your opinon of me as a bitter unpublished author. Below that is the room I woke up in. The one with my dead friends. I sniffle and wipe a tear away. Initially, I thought this was intended as sarcasm, but I soon realized that this was a genuine expression of Ryland Grace’s emotion.
Each of them kind of look like a beetle. Each beetle has a name up top: “John”, “Paul”, “George” and “Ringo”. I’m on a suicide mission. John, Paul, George and Ringo get to go home, but my long and winding road ends here. This sense of humor permeates the book.
My students didn’t swear at me. Their squabbles were usually resolved within a few minutes, either by a teacher-enforced handshake or detention. And somewhat selfish but here it is: They looked up to me. I missed that respect. Mr. Weir has clearly never spent a day as a teacher in his life.
I could go on, but why bury myself even deeper? Mr. Weir has achieved incredible commercial success and knows how to market his work, while I’m an unpublished failure who teaches high school…which is what makes this difficult to process.
I genuinely cannot understand what it is about Mr. Weir’s work that is compelling to such a large audience. And what it is about my own writing that seems destined to never get beyond the literary agent’s automatic reply: Unfortunately, your project does not sound like a fit for me at this time, and so I will have to pass. Boo hoo. Poor me.
Turning a playing card over and over, the same thing on both sides…unable to open your phone, the wrong password, wrong fingers too.
Opening the door, seeing your partner half dressed with a stranger, knowing it would be like that, feeling sick and afraid.
The climactic end to a film oozing down from the floors above, the passage getting narrower and narrower until you can’t find the right door and are on an elevator that twists sideways and stops on an impossibly high floor, everything glass all around.
The terror digs deep, and all you have to do is wake.
Sisyphus watches the stone rush down toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again. It is during his return, that pause, that hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering; that is the hour of consciousness.
Greenlandic trail
The evidence is in the absurd divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, a nostalgia for unity; those are the contradictions that bind together. If the descent is sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth.
Grecian cave
Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. “I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred.
(Extracts from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.)
Having just read Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, I’m reminded of what excellent writing can be – not only vivid and humorous, but more importantly, deeply cutting.
My wife knew what was wanted. She had neat, hygienic ways for that too, but there were both relief and triumph in her smile of welcome; later we parted and lay in twin beds a yard or two distant, smoking.
Brideshead Revisited, BBC 1981
I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold’s horns made me lord of the forest.
I can understand a man wishing he hadn’t married and trying to get out of it but to get rid of one wife and take up with another immediately is beyond reason.
Finally, while not his words but his actions, it is interesting to note that Waugh, a failed writer at the start, attempted suicide, leaving his clothes and a note on the shore, only to retreat from the sea when he was stung by a jellyfish.
The music was muted, not the way he remembered it. It had been loud not so long ago. He wanted to get off the plane and go nowhere, stay where he was and face whatever he had to face. The consequences, that’s what they were called. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It was in him as much as it was in anyone.
Crime was an interesting word. He had never really thought about it. He had just thought that a crime was a crime, just that. There were necessary laws in civilization. That was how the world was made to work. But the world how? The world why? To propagate what? What system was being kept in place? He was justifying now. He knew that. But there was no crime, not according to the law now or ever. He would be cancelled, maybe that, lose his friends and family. That was the punishment, even if it wasn’t wrong.
Wrong. That was another word he wanted to understand. He felt like he had done something that he shouldn’t have done, something he would regret. Or was that just a thing in his head, convincing himself of that because of what he had been told by his parents and their parents to them? The world was a fucking mess, all of its laws and rights and wrongs being followed, institutions constructed like that, for the greater good, whatever that was supposed to be. He was justifying again.
There was something to all of this, following this path to wherever it was going, on this plane, away, even if that was all inside of him and he was just doing it to himself. He turned the music up until it was distorted. He liked it better like that.
I am averse to contemporary literature. I find it boring. Or trite. Or predictable. Or ridiculous. Or…what’s that word when people put on airs and pretend to be someone they’re not? Affected. No, pretentious. That’s it. I find contemporary work pretentious. And boring.
I tend toward older work, modern as they call it, like Evelyn Waugh, of which I had read some in the past – Scoop, Handful of Dust, The Sword of Honor Trilogy – but skipped the much ballyhooed Brideshead Revisited. I was unsure about reading it now, thinking I might find it predictable. I was wrong.
As irritatingly pompous (indeed affected) as the main players, Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, might be and as predictable the narrative, the prose remains compelling, funny too. Beware of the Anglo-Catholics – they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents. Or his descriptors for wine: “…shy like a gazelle…a flute by still water…a prophet in a cave.” Or more perhaps to the point, his understanding of the old English world expressed through literary allusions and Latin sayings Et in Arcadia Ego.
Death is found everywhere, even Arcadia, to say nothing of the marvelously sexy and exciting posts on social media. My point, because I always have a point, is that if Sebastian and/or Charles had a social media account, it would be like that, pretentious and dull. But Waugh wrote them in such a way as they were not.
At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and what Shakespeare possessed enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. (John Keats, 1817)
Only recently did I learn of the term “negative capability” in Mathew Zapruder’s Why Poetry, where he writes “What is important is not the cause of the feeling (of engaging with the arts) but the feeling itself, those moments of deep inexplicable feeling, of sadness or melancholy or joy that we cannot place, a feeling that is maybe only possible when one is truly alone.”
This term is a revelation for me, akin to emotional intelligence, an idea to which I have a great affinity, but didn’t know was a thing and will now use as a moment for Davis n my script, Wave That Flag, where he leaves school and to explore his negative capability through a journey on tour with The Grateful Dead.
Shockingly, I met my goal for yesterday of completing a draft of The Sacred Whore. I had two major problems in completing this latest draft. First and foremost, I had to move the primary point of view away from a male perspective, which meant not only minimizing the pimp Jefferson’s role and switching the king-pin to a queen-pin, but also expanding the voice of a number of the sex workers.
The other challenge was updating the work to present day. And since I wrote the first draft in 1988, the inclusion of phones and other technologies was paramount. Once I figured out that Dorothy could be a vlogger, everything seemed to fall into place. I also edited out much of the speech at the end. Pontification is a not an effective device.
I’m going to take a swing at Wave That Flag today and try to give Davis a little more clarity in his arc. We’ll see. Today’s writing prompt: “My favorite teacher…”
I waited outside of Mr. Carver’s class, thinking of how I could get an extension. The assignment – a 2,000-word creative self-reflection – was due that afternoon, and I hadn’t even started. I didn’t understand why I had to do it, because I had graduated long ago and was in fact now teaching at the school.
I gave up and beetled off to my classroom, the Dean of Students behind me, a row of exiting buses ahead. As I sprinted up the hill, I opened my eyes to find it was late into morning, another cloudy day. I was scared of getting back into my writing. That’s all it was.
There is a sprawl of projects to address. I have to fine tune three scripts: Ave and Dorothy need to be established as live-bloggers from the outset of The Sacred Whore. Davis’ motivation for going on tour with The Grateful Dead needs more focus in Wave That Flag. And the background stories need to be more relevant to Davis’ isolation in Just Weird.
The Vanishing Pill is a mess. Two years in, and this book remains cluttered with notes all over. I haven’t figured out the starting point or the crisis nor where or how it ends. And then there’s my teacher’s guidebook, Fuck Pedagogy. No idea how I’m going to focus that into anything relevant at all.
To paraphrase Matthew Zapruder in Why Poetry, I’m afraid of being exposed, of being seen as banal, derivative, uninteresting and stupid. That’s all it is. And so, “To bed!” I will arise at dawn and begin this battle anew! Or now. I’ll do it now. And start with my first prompt: “My favorite childhood vacation…” That was in Anna Maria Key in Florida where everything was magic, especially the gift shops.
