“James Ellroy meets David Lynch in this addictive mix of noir and supernatural horror.”

-Publisher’s Weekly

“Imagine if Raymond Chandler wrote Steppenwolf.”

-Stephen Graham Jones

We asked Gordon Van Gelder, editor and publisher of the long famous magazine FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION a couple of questions recently about the impact of “speculative fiction” interests and techniques on fiction at large (or small).  Here are Gordon’s answers… 

 2 FORK HWY
How has the growing influence of science fiction and fantasy elements on “literary fiction” affected genre writing? Are the borders breaking down?

GVG
That’s too big a question to do justice to with a short reply—in fact, I’m scheduled to spend an hour talking about it with Jonathan Lethem at Readercon next summer—but my quick answer is: no, the borders are not breaking down. They’re shifting. They always shift. But the reason why I say they’re not breaking down is because the foundation underlying those walls hasn’t changed. And that foundation is that some readers simply don’t like reading fiction with fantastic/imaginative/speculative elements to it, and other readers simply don’t enjoy reading mimetic/literary/mainstream fiction. As long as that’s true (and I suspect it will always be true), there will always be some sort of walls for readers in both camps.

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What’s been your biggest personal thrill as an editor, either in the publishing trade or as a magazine editor? How does a leading editor define
his role?
GVG
My biggest thrill? I don’t know how to pick one, but when you asked the question, my first thoughts were of cases where I saw something in a book or story and then published it so that other people saw what I saw. Bringing out Brad Denton’s BLACKBURN, for instance—which was a book that got bounced by several publishers—and then reading reviews and hearing from people who were affected by the story as much as I was, that was great. Or watching George Pelecanos develop from the slushpile to becoming one of the major writers of crime fiction—that was at least a hundred thrills along the way. And seeing Julie Phillips’s bio of Tiptree get the attention it deserved after she worked away on it for ten years, that was wonderful.

A guy I know who hung around with Stanley Kubrick in the ’50s said that directors are basically voyeurs, they’re happiest peeping through keyholes at other people. In the same way, editors are pimps or yentas who get their a lot of their thrills by seeing others hook up in meaningful and satisfying ways. (The other thrills tend to come from helping a writer produce the book they meant to write or from coming up with a book idea and then seeing it to fruition.)

The annual Writer’s Edge Conference run by FC2 in Portland, OR is one of the best events for writers that we know of. The caliber of faculty presentation and commitment is very high, as is the attendee participation. The event is short but intense and very inspiring. July 25- 27 in downtown Portland (on the University campus), which is a fabulous city in summer. For more information, visit the FC2 site.
http://fc2.org/edge/edge.htm

“Color is the place where our brain and universe meet.”

-Paul Klee

“Nature is more depth than surface.”

-Cezanne

“There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.”

-Colette

Saknussemm will be reporting in detail about his recent mammoth Asian adventure (including a sustained hunt along freezing North China rivers for giant aquatic salamanders) but the people met, the mishaps and art events he was taken by and taken in by are simply too rich for one or even 20 posts.

Unquestionably, the discovery of Brooklyn born and based jazz virtuoso Eric Wyatt in Shanghai and the Vietnamese painters Doan Hoang Lam and Tran Luu Hau at the superb Arch Angel Gallery in Hong Kong (58 Hollywood Road, Central) were major artistic highlights that will be savored for a long time.  (Please see the featured interview with Eric Wyatt in our Fork Heroes section.)

But here now are some at-a-glance delights / confusions from the expedition.

The taste of raw river salamander inside a tent in the sleet of a village where everyone proudly introduced me to their new tractor (they call it “The Dragon”)…new friends in Hong Kong, Canton, Hanoi, and NYC and Tokyo via Shanghai…Chinese opera (how did I live before?)…Chinese weddings…scanning the Shanghai Daily for the latest “civic courtesy” message…scanning the Shanghai Daily for the latest health scare / environmental crisis in Guangdong Province…knowing now at a glance the difference between a 7th and an 8th century T’ang Dynasty cocoon jar…pig organ soup (a choice of organs!)…a fortunate misunderstanding with a dumpling of a monk at a Buddhist temple, heavy scent of incense in the rain…green curry in Soho, Hong Kong, less a district, more a medieval-oriental three dimensional dream board game…the realization that tall buildings have the ability to move and creep at night speed that’s proportional to the number of Irish whiskeys you’ve downed with crusty British expatriates and how many dances you remember with gorgeous Filipinas, and is an exponential factor of the distance of the last bar from your hotel…the way the black dragon on my tea cup turns blue and red when the boiling water pours in…the spiel of Indian pimps in the aptly named Mong Kok district (particularly when you ask them to say it again into the tape recorder)…the curses of Indian tailors when you begin to leave their shops (particularly when you ask them to say it again into the tape recorder)…seeing my name spelled in Chinese and Arabic–and then smudged in lipstick on a napkin by a KLM flight attendant with an hourglass figure…smoking a hookah and listening to the muezzin from the Sultan Mosque down the brightly painted streets of Kampong Glam (what a great name for a band)…sipping fresh Cambodian coconut in a thronging market, hearing the Scottish tourists say, “Where did he get that?”…the MahaDeviBot (”a mechanical musical instrument which extends North Indian musical performance scenarios as a pedagogical tool”), by which they mean a radio drum controlled 12-arm robotic Indian percussion machine–and I want one…Jai Alai (why isn’t this game on 24 hours a day–and what happened to the $2,000 US I won in my first betting round–and why was I detained by police in Macau with that woman from the New Territories with the facial disease that had eaten away her nose and that awful Berlin couple who’d been ejected from the pai gow table?)…barbecued stingray and Tiger beer under a neon umbrella in 100% humidity…Malaysian women (every last one of them)…the echo of a loudspeaker announcing that “Mr. Saknussemm will not be joining the tour (couldn’t have said it better myself)…”Bahaya,” the Malyasian word for Danger…my new remote control kite (find a better talisman if you can)…the sudden clarity of insight why the street people hawk Kleenex in the satay markets late at night…catching the blind man who I was helping negotiate a tricky alley trying to pick my pocket (sometimes you have to let people know who they’re dealing with–he’ll find another cane, and a hot spring roll down the trousers is an excellent learning aid)…having a beggar without hands accept money in his teeth…filming the lead drummer and the Head of the Dragon in the Lunar New Year parade rehearsing in a back alley–and then putting the head on myself…front row seats for the badminton championship between China and Korea, the whole crowd going berko, beating long plastic French bread looking sticks in national colors…being invited in out of clove smelling rain by a cackling group of toothless old people in the ruins of an empty barbershop to play mah jong (and whipping their asses–sometimes you have to let people know who they’re dealing with)…and did I mention the Malaysian women?

More later on giant salamanders, jamming on the Singapore River, Thai girls, amazing artists, the importance of not being detained by Chinese police and the special diplomacy needed when you’re confined at close quarters with a frustrated family from Mumbai 200 feet in the air and you make the tactical but well-intentioned error of suggesting that the crisis is a great video opportunity.

Everyone would be almost unbearably interesting if you knew absolutely everything about them.

There’s something about mishearing and misreading that always sparks new thought patterns.  The difference between “Run from the Kids!” and “Run for the Kids!” is truly a world of difference.

Walker Percy devoted a chapter of his engaging meditation on language, THE MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE, to this theme:  “Metaphor as Mistake.”  It’s been a source of inspiration for the Surrealists, cartoonist Gary Larson and the Oulipo writers, to name but a few.  Here are some of the latest misunderstandings that have tickled us:

Primate Dining Room

Only You Can Prevent Wildness

Doughnut Assistance (as Saknussemm says, “It was a drought assistance information station, and I was driving by fast.”)

The Institute for the Traumatic Arts

“The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.”
-Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

THE FEATURED WORD

Mucus

It really hits you, doesn’t it? Five little letters, but so rich in texture and sensual conjure. And a biological necessity to boot. Where would we be without mucus? What would we be?

And for anyone who thinks, “Aw, gross,”isn’t it interesting how both the sound of the word and the visual impact of the spelling delivers so much”as opposed to say “Offal,” which you could argue signifies something much more distasteful” if you’re squeamish. (And isn’t “Squeamish” a delicious wriggling, bashful thing!)

At one step up in the conveyance chain, not even “Tripe”with its contrast between sharp single syllabic bite and the frothy chambered hint of “Ripe” and “Trout” can put as much awful in the category of offal as little mucus offers the set of bodily fluids. No, you have to go all the way to “Head Cheese” to match it for vividness, and at two words that’s not really fair. We love mucus. We like the Latinate links to focus, locus and nexus. We like its associations with other lovely words like Abacus and Proboscis. (Who cannot imagine an abacus with a proboscis?)

Please share with us your favorite words, words you love to see “to hear or say aloud” to shout. Words that you think punch over their weight in impact, soothing or discombobulating. Give us your polyps and wingnuts, your rhinoplasties and radar, your syndromes and globules, fevers, fidgets, spasms, belches, breezes, sneezes, quirks, qualms and cadavers. We throw good parties for words.

Famous Last Lines

While there many assemblages and lists devoted to famous / best first lines in novels, we humbly offer the following as our nomination of the best last line. We welcome your recommendations.

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
-Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of On the Road

(Saknussemm wrote the following for a course presented at Seattle University.)

“Wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.”

In just one of many, many memorable lines written in a life that sparkled and burned out early (like the fireworks and the great jazz musicians he admired) Jack Kerouac embraces vast contradictions. In this case, the difference in world views between the karmic sense of reincarnation he picked up from his studies of Eastern religions and his own native French Canadian depressed New England mill town Catholicism.

The list of contradictions rolls out like the highways he wandered. One of the most celebrated literary travelers, he never had a driver’s license. Notorious as the “father of free love,” he spent many of his adult years living with his mother. Christened King of the Beats, he despised the later hippies who followed in awe in his footsteps. Frequently associated with bohemian San Francisco or the glittering lights of 52nd Street and Times Square in New York, he in a very real sense never escaped his small town upbringing in Lowell, Mass. Often credited with igniting the social forces that led to the political radicalism of the 1960’s, he remained staunchly conservative and famously voted for Eisenhower. Considered by some critics and a legion of readers to be the most important postwar American writer, Truman Capote gave him the oft repeated dismissal, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

There is no one frame of reference that can contain the contradictions of Jack Kerouac, poet of the Railroad Earth. But here are some points that can be advanced with confidence.

Along with other principals Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gary Snyder (other writers were involved, but not of their stature), Kerouac created the Beat Movement, which may well be the last American artistic literary movement to go really big time as a cultural phenomenon. (Arguably the very success of the movement was the cause of his premature death from alcoholism”the demands and pressures of mainstream fame have their price.)

What made the Beats a movement is twofold. One, their loyalty to promoting each other’s work (over the years there were as many rifts between them personally as there was friendship and love, but they remained staunch advocates of each other’s art). Two, they introduced a genuine program into American letters and culture. Often chaotic, it was then and remains today, coherent. An interest in anthropology and Native American culture, Africa-American culture and jazz music, the working class heroism of 1930′ literature and white roots music, the mystic Western religious traditions, an interest in Buddhism and Hinduism, the use of drugs, a freedom of sexuality including a strong homosexual element, the celebration of automatic writing, free association, and the surrealism of the Europeans, and a concern for the environment all came together in a wild patchwork of expression at the same time that other writers like John Cheever were writing about gray flannel businessmen commuting on suburban trains into Manhattan.

Looked at as an “agenda of transformation” the Beats’ concerns and obsessions read like a roll call of American social trends over the last 50 years. It’s impossible to stroll the streets of any university district in America and not feel their presence, their influence.

Kerouac’s contribution to the movement cannot be overstated. He brought together in one turbulent body of work a strand of American populist / working class poetry that goes back to Walt Whitman and embraces such hearty figures as Jack London, Carl Sandburg and Thomas Wolfe. To this he added a Buddhist / Hindu inspired sense of world culture, and one of the first and certainly the most articulate white appreciations of African-American music, with its emphasis on improvisation and immediacy of performance.

Writing for Kerouac was a performance, and often fueled by potent amphetamines and cheap wine, he brought a jazz-driven sense of improvisation to the page, creating a unique technique and a sprawling narrative line that at its best is as distinctive and mesmerizing as anything Faulkner ever did stylistically. His friend and fellow Beat Writer John Clellon Holmes once said of him that “he is a prose writer and experimentalist with language who can be mentioned in the same breath as James Joyce.”

It is as a prose experimentalist and an expander of the American rhythm of writing and speech that Kerouac will endure. His ferocious dragonfly lyricism that can touch on, combine and explode scene and language into a new whole for readers opened doors for many writers”¦and in its repositioning of the authorial perspective directly into the narrative description, anticipates many directions in both the Postmodern literary movement and the New Journalism. Long, long before TV journalists were “embedded,” Kerouac was embedded in his situations and descriptions. He created a new relationship between author and subject matter”¦and he bet his whole stack, so to speak, on his ability to sustain this, not through imaginative storytelling invention, but through as pure a linguistic performance as you are likely to ever encounter.

Kerouac would’ve liked more critical respect for his artistic commitment, rather than the mass fascination with his subject matter, which the conservative press of the time further sensationalized. Loose women, wild parties, interracial relationships, gay affairs, drugs, travel, be-bop music” people ended up paying more attention to Kerouac’s anthro-journalistic pioneering than his attempts to change the velocity and vision of American writing.

But his influence on both writing and mass culture continues to be felt. Without Kerouac, we would not by their own admission have had:

Bob Dylan
Jim Morrison and the Doors
Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead
Hunter S. Thompson
Tom Waits
Tom Wolfe
Tom Robbins
Kathy Acker

…to name just a few.

Like Kerouac, all those people are still selling well. The inspiration continues.

Five Tips to Avoiding Total Disaster as a Novelist
from a Poor, Wretched Fool Who Had to Learn the Hard Way
by Kris Saknussemm

(Those who know me will note more than a touch of irony in some of these recommendations” or rather an on-going inner conflict”the best kind!)

The problem with good advice is that it’s either something you already know, i.e. your diet should include more fruit and vegetables than cheeseburgers and martinis”or it’s something really difficult (like consuming more fruit and vegetables than cheeseburgers and martinis). So, based on my own stumbling, fumbling experience, I offer the following list of things I would strongly advise aspiring and despairing writers not to do. I doubt that simply by avoiding these pitfalls you will be guaranteed international fame and fortune, but I’m confident that you will at least escape many unnecessary frustrations and defeats, so that you can be fresh for the really poignant failures and setbacks that will either make or break you”and with any luck will do a bit of both.

First Tip. Do not spend years gathering interesting material, odd quotations, overheard remarks, colorful phrases, bits of trivia, weird statistics and obscure facts in the hope that you will one day find a story to contain them. I ended up with a literal warehouse of such stuff and I can tell you now with considerable confidence that the larvae of the human botfly bore into the skin and gorge themselves, emerging as centimeter long maggots, while a Joshua Hendy nine-thousand horsepower steam turbine delivers a cruising speed of 16 knots at 78 rpm. There is nothing wrong in knowing that if left underwater for years brass gives off a bright verdigris stain or that the first Birds of Paradise shipped back to Europe had their legs chopped off to facilitate packing, but the collection of details is like any acquisitive habit, potentially obsessive. You can end up with a novel that reads like the Gospel according to St. Matthew translated into the Duke of York Island language and a response from the publishing industry reminiscent of a deserted poolroom on the shore of Sheepshead Bay. Put bluntly, burn your notebooks and clear you head.

Tip #2. Do not spend years experimenting with different forms of writing and various intellectual follies such as cut-ups and verbal collages, intricate multiple person narratives, dream stories, recipe books, anatomies, imaginary academic theses and the like. Yes, it’s true that some of the world’s most interesting literature has elements of these forms, but that was then and this is different. If you are serious about getting a work of fiction published today you need quick sharp answers to the following questions. In what section of a bookstore or retailer’s website will your book be found? Which authors can your work be likened to? In three sentences or less what’s your novel about?

Tip #3. The Puritans believed in covering the body for modesty’s sake. Yet they developed a sexualized fascination for the ears of women and the noses of men. My point? (See Tip #1) In apparent restriction there is unexpected release. Dickens created over 800 individual characters and laid down some of the most intense cultural satire in English but his writing really came into focus when Wilkie Collins hipped him to the detective story. I struggled for years trying to find a form for my writing, flitting around like a Ulysses butterfly. The moment I gave myself permission to write an action/adventure story, things started falling into place. Modern art has provided artists with unparalleled and some might argue paralyzing freedom. Don’t waste time trying to create a new form. It’s given to very few people in any medium to do that and many of their achievements end up looking like legless Birds of Paradise later. A seemingly simple repetitive musical style like the Blues has proven capable of expressing the full spectrum of human experience and has inspired countless variations and mutations. Give yourself over to an established structure and follow its guidelines, and suddenly interesting points will emerge to surprise you. Like a full, sensual ear lobe.

Tip #4. Read your work aloud, to some willing victim ideally, but at least to yourself. Storytelling began as an oral form and the ear (however erotically appealing) has a trueness to it that will reveal what’s working and what’s not in a more immediate and decisive way than simply scanning the page. This discipline will also slow you down psychologically and bring you into more intimate contact with your story. In the end, it will take no more time than reading back a page silently.
Tip #5. Ignore all reasonable sounding advice like write about what you know, read as much as you can, or try to write every day. If you need to hear this advice you are in the wrong game. But more importantly, reasonableness won’t get the job done. One day in an ice-stricken back alley in Boston I saw a fat little Irishman with one eye and a bad back beat the daylights out of four larger, stronger assailants. When it was over, and it was over astonishingly quickly, he brushed himself off and said simply, “I had to get unreasonable with ‘em.”
Unless you are willing to face the unreasonable in yourself unless you are willing to entertain some strange notions (and deal with them when they stick around), unless you are willing to get lost, confused and even terrified, then what you’re doing won’t have any meaning. The famous device of conflict upon which all stories are supposed to hinge starts within the writer. You are all the characters in your dreams and so too with a novel. You can’t put your creations into jeopardy or into embarrassing or miraculous situations without going there yourself, and that is not a sensible ambition for a grown person to have. As a writer who has made more mistakes than most, my goal above all else is to be very, very unreasonable.