Involution: The First Two Years of Line Zero

The soul of publishing, I'm increasingly convinced, nestles in the bosoms of small presses. The big publishers might get the publicity and the bestsellers, but the chances and challenges, the risks and the dares, come from the publishing houses you've seldom heard of.

That artistic spirit thrives when readers keep the true indie publications alive. Line Zero picked up my first published story in its second year, and I'm tickled to announce that the magazine is still chugging along. Not only is it rolling down the tracks, but it's doing well enough to warrant a retrospective.

I'm really tickled to announce that my story, "Such a Lovely Girl," is included in that anthology. Involution: Stories, Poems, and Essays from the first two years of Line Zero just came out, and the Kindle e-book version is available now on Amazon. (For those, like me, who still enjoy the flutter of pages, Pink Fish Press has the hard copy available here. But, you know, you could already be reading the Kindle version by now. So it has its advantages.)

(UPDATE: The print version is now available on Amazon, as well. Prime eligible!)

Thank you, Microphone readers, for supporting me and my writing career. Thank you, Line Zero, for supporting dozens of artists like me. Be sure to hang on to your early copies of the magazine, because I have a feeling many of the contributors could turn out to be stars.

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut

As a writer, I can vouch that a primary writer’s worry is whether or not our fictitious worlds are plausible. Believability is key. Never mind that a story exists as a façade of ink and paper, or e-ink and screen, or voices. We want the story to transcend the medium and transport the reader into a world as vivid -- more vivid! -- than the "real" one.

To let the construct of "story" show is like revealing your panties on the playground.

Sometimes, I wonder why authors go through all this trouble to shroud the fact that we work in words and metaphors. Readers know the seams are there. We can either spend all our time muting the seams and hiding our undergarments. Or -- like an open-raftered building, or a pinup magazine -- we could let the supports become the show.

You want to know why most writers don’t drop the veil? Because it’s a hell of a lot easier to putty over the cracks than it is to incorporate them.

Kurt Vonnegut figured out how to make the workings of a story become the story, like a watch with a transparent back or a Japanese chef who cooks at your table. He figured out that his voice drives his stories, and that people read them not for Billy Pilgrim or Kilgore Trout, but for Kurt Vonnegut. The author is the main character, his antics the reason to follow the other characters.

So in Breakfast of Champions, he made himself an actual character. The author-within-the-story decides who should meet whom and what calamity should drop next. And in the best commentary on writing I’ve ever read, the characters he creates enact themselves against him, despite his being the Creator of this little Universe.

By the rules of writing, I should not believe for a moment that this story is "real." My disbelief should never be suspended. And yet... I still care. The book still compels me to read. I still cannot wait to see what happens, even after Vonnegut tells me what will happen.

The strip is no longer the tease. The seams become the show. And the fireworks are no less spectacular, no less magical, even though I watched them get lit.

Necessary Evil, by Ian Tregillis

Pulp fiction (not the movie) intends its readers to breeze through it. The thoughts that smut novels evoke aren't supposed to be worth the paper and ink in the book itself. Volumes of pulp exist to fill shelves, to decorate windows, to sell quick or go in the trash. If pulp writing has that reputation, then how can I fault literary types for so often leering at genre fiction? Science fiction, fantasy, detective stories, comic books, romance, adventure, mystery -- tradition dictates that these are printed cheaply and read mindlessly.

Anyone who reads such smut, though, knows differently. Raymond Chandler went from hack to Supreme Being of Hardboiled Detective Writing. J. R. R. Tolkien made fantasy cool in the fifties... and in the seventies... and again in the aughts. And Ian Tregillis, in the final book of the Milkweed Triptych, proves that cross-genre fiction can be smart, witty, devilish, and addictive.

Plus, the writing is deceptively smart. All three books have lured me into reading speedily because they are snagless. I read them too quickly, actually; someday soon, I want to re-read the whole set to see what I missed.

(They're the kind of books that will be different the second time through. You'll know what's going on... but instead of spotting the seams, you'll gape at the fine needlework.)

The books are so enjoyable that, as you can see, I spend my time going off like a fanboy about how TOTALLY WICKED they are instead of musing about their themes or what deep implications their pages hold.

But honestly, these books are so good because you don't feel like you're reading a diatribe. Ayn Rand's books are a tin-can shell for her philosophy. But for all the immense and torrential thought Tregillis puts into his books, they are first and foremost stories. No spoonfuls of sugar here.

(He let me hurl questions at him over on the New Mexico Mercury, if you want to sample his take on humanity's potential and read about his next projects.)

High school teaches most of us to pick apart literature like a baked chicken carcass without letting us eat the good meat. I think we get more out of books when they spark us to think, to examine, to wonder, while being themselves enjoyable. Necessary Evil (along with its predecessors) is just that kind of book.

The literary snobs shy away from hedonism as if a book must be obtuse to be worth reading. Give me the high-quality pulp any day.

The Average American Male, by Chad Kultgen

Honesty is really difficult to take, isn't it?

I lived in Germany for a year, and the part of the culture that took the most adjustment for little American me was not the openness of sexuality, the drinking on the train, or having a genuine rail system in the first place. The most difficult aspect was the honesty.

No niceties from my colleagues about my dramatic haircut. (I blame my translation skills at the hairdresser's.) No mincing of words from my roommate about splitting the phone bill. No holding back about my shortcomings as a foreigner from folks at the Diskothek. Honesty was right in my face; once I got used to it, I quite appreciated it.

Even so, honesty is difficult to implement in my everyday American existence. I don't mean not telling lies; I mean not glossing over the improprieties and not burying criticism in compliments. The situation only gets worse when someone tries to make new friends or, heaven help us, get a date. Honesty means sharing despicable, embarrassing, and improper thoughts! Honesty means feelings could get hurt! Who wants to get coffee with a truly honest person?

Remove the filters, remove the censures, and you get a book like The Average American Male. Yes, honesty is sometimes revolting, sometimes shocking, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes incredibly meaningful. This book is what we'd all hear from someone, sooner or later, if we could be completely honest with one another.

But what about being honest with ourselves? For all the narrator's crass honesty, he doesn't recognize what he really needs from life. A culture of compliment sandwiches encourages softening the truth, and that's especially accurate when we deceive ourselves. True honesty doesn't stem from being blunt with everyone else in the world, but from cultivating self-awareness and self-honesty.

The German experience didn't make me honest. If I can be forthcoming with anyone about my feelings, my opinions, my desires, and my perspectives -- and if I can take such forthrightness -- it's because I am learning to know myself, and to trust myself.

(Since we're on the topic of honesty: I can't suggest this book for minors or relatives. If you are a minor or my relative, and you read this book, you do so independent of ever hearing about it from me. Unless you are my grandparents; in which case, just don't read it, period.)

Dark Lies the Island, by Kevin Barry

 

Stories -- powerful, effective stories -- pack your bags and send you traveling to places boggy and foreign, and to places darkly familiar. To lands where the slang puzzles your reckoning, and to realizations that you never would admit to yourself but are as true to you as the wrinkles on your palm.

If those are the criteria for a strong story, then Kevin Barry has some darn muscular ones in Dark Lies the Island.

Stories this insular, with their peculiar dialects and speech rhythms, with their reliance on local geography and entrenched politics, with their undoubtedly Irish sensibilities and remoteness, are as particular to Ireland as the Gaeltacht. Reading them places you as soggily in the rural counties as reading Mark Twain places you rocking upon a river boat. And yet... you'll find a piece of small universality in each of them. These are truths that fit inside our psyches and transcend oceans.

No doubt about it, Barry's writing quirks the usual. (In ways like verbing "quirk." And verbing "verbing.") But sometimes, you learn more by studying the world through funhouse lenses. When the same old isn't the same and it isn't old, it reveals itself. It discovers itself. And once it finds a home in a story, it brings you along for the ride.

Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis

Think of the pleasures you have wished would never end. A glorious day in summer, a perfectly seasoned dish, a first kiss, a good book. Do you linger to prolong the pleasure? Do you stay outside until the sun is chased by the evening cold, leave aside a final bite until its sauce has firmed and cooled, dive in for one more soft peck, read the penultimate page again to avoid turning it?

I do. I'm a professed lingerer. I always figure that by drawing out the enjoyment, it lasts longer, and in some way the memory will be fuller for it.

One passage in Out of the Silent Planet might have changed how I feel about pleasure. The character Ransom (a human, or Hman) is trying to figure out how the Martian hross lives his life, because it seems not to be in pursuit of repeated pleasures. The hross, Hyoi, elaborates:

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure.

"How could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back -- if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?"

Pleasures are transient; pleasures are ephemeral. Yet the memory of pleasure may live as long as the one who experiences it. The memory will naturally grow in its own way, but is that not part of the pleasure?

When next I encounter a stunning view, or go to a revolutionary concert, or taste a delectable beer, I won't rush through it just so I can get to the memory. But neither do I intend to linger, and thereby reduce the memory by reducing the initial pleasure. When the sun sets, the music fades, and the pint glass empties, I'll understand that I still have the memory -- and with it, an extension of the pleasure itself.

One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia

Children are so often relegated. Not to any lower realm or back shelf in particular. Just relegated. Period.

Children's and young adult books are less serious endeavors than grown-up literature. (Don't believe me? Eat lunch at work or school while reading Harry Potter, and then again while reading Finnegans Wake.) Children's opinions, no matter how well-informed, are less valid than adult rantings. (Don't believe me? Check and see the last time your state legislature had a member of the high school speech and debate team in to give a presentation on a controversial topic.) Children's perspectives in history, and the way historical events affect children, don't expend much ink in history texts. (Don't believe me? Go to the library and see what you find that isn't related to Anne Frank.)

Which is what makes One Crazy Summer such a special -- and important -- kind of book. Its narrator, Delphine, and her sisters get caught up in the Black Panther movement in Oakland in 1968. Children are present for, and affected by, all the great political and social movements.Their experiences and responses are genuine and human. So what if their take is different than the canonical history? Doesn't that make our understanding of the past all the richer?

Wearing the harmless cloak of the "children's book" label, novels like Rita Williams-Garcia's can fly under the radar of those who relegate children in the first place. Once they make their escape, however, these books have the power to show us our world through different eyes.

Isn't that what all books, for readers of any age, aspire to?

UPDATE: Same day I wrote this, I came across a great and relevant line from C. S. Lewis: "A book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then." Sometimes, these stuffy old dons really knew where it was at.