Memphis Blues Again: 2013

11 March 2013

New author blog.

Look for future posts about this subject matter here.

27 February 2013

What I forgot. End of first chapter. Max falling asleep.

Dark in the room. Silent. Unfamiliar surroundings. Imagining flashes of ancient rifles in the dark night, sudden loud cracking shots fired from who knows where. Quantrill's pistol. Holes blown in bodies. Violence. Betrayal. No legislatures had yet voted to secede. Death.

Effects subtend causes. Remember metaphysics, my freshman year? A mistake. The philosophical mind proscribes the clinically empiric. Concepts, physical things digested away in elemental words. Abstracted abstractions. No causalogist, I. Con-sequentiality in time and con-tiguity in space. Tangere, to touch. Necessity. Sufficiency. A thermodynamic demiurge. Consequential sputtering sparking arc weld flashing linkages between events effacing time's arrow, I argued. Progressively, emphatically squeeze down the interval, a calculus of limits, and expunge time from consideration. Charlie in that class, too. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, he said, except in certain states where required by law. Quantum mechanics throws it all into doubt anyway. All grows fuzzy. And the overwhelming human demand for reductionism. Oversimplifying complexes of contributing effects or events, hungry for that one critical final lasting eternal keystone cause, almost always to confirm preexisting notions or buttress an axiomatic moral framework. A host of ingredients contribute to the mulligan stew.

Tired. I cant. I just.

Is history causal? We assume. If not a longitudinal, linked chain, can history exist? Sterile concept. Chaos otherwise. If a butterfly flutters its wings. History is a vast river system of causes and none of them proximate, all of them necessary, none of them sufficient. All time immanent in a defined space. A loaf. Bulk. That's history. Who we are, and why.

Sleep.

26 February 2013

Writing Technique.

I am at present working on the second chapter of Memphis Blues Again. I thought I'd take a moment to display some of my writing technique, if it can be called that.

Some writers simply write all the way through a manuscript and then go back and try to bang it into the shape of a story. To some degree I do the same, but in later drafts I'm also continuously going back to earlier chapters and making small, subtle changes as I go along, or jotting down notes of things to include in later chapters. The idea is to bring out certain details, or to add material at a convenient place that I'd previously neglected or forgotten, or simply to try to improve the rhythm and musicality of the text. For MBA I've chopped the original draft into a myriad of pieces and rearranged their order into a new outline which I'm assembling from the original text even while I'm taking a good deal of the expository material and dramatizing it in the form of new characters, so quite a lot of additional "writing" is involved too.

A few days ago the first chapter included this paragraph, a memory sequence engaged in by my protagonist, Max Bainbridge:

Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge drew their attention away, though. Politicians and ambitious officers. Promised glory painted across the skies, painted with unnumbered sparks, all fire and shine. They sensed in the moment's fury better ways faraway to do bigger things. A never-ending parade of padishahs and suzerains imposed in northern Missouri like a row of carnival shooting ducks, and legitimate, demoralized conscripts vying with Jennisons and Montgomerys in Kansas hell-bent on paying their way out of tyranny with blood.

Although I've moved on to other matters, already this has morphed into the following, with changes marked:

Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge drew their attention away, though. Politicians and ambitious officers. Promised glory painted across the skies, painted with unnumbered sparks, all fire and shine, the Siren's song resonant in the tide-haul of adrenalin and testosterone. They sensed in the moment's fury better ways faraway to do bigger things. Bronze stars and golden. A never-ending parade of padishahs and suzerains imposed on northern Missouri like a row of carnival shooting ducks. Guerrillas successfully tying down big chunks of the Union army with unpopular, unhappy and neglected occupation forces stranded in the rear, far away from any opportunity for triumphant laurels or promotion. The butt-end of the war. And in Kansas professional but likewise demoralized federal conscripts vying with Jennisons and Montgomerys, them hell-bent on paying their way out of tyranny with blood, or just on spilling blood, and meanwhile turning a tidy profit.

No doubt this is not the final version, but itself only a transitional phase of the process (in fact I've made a few changes while writing this blog post). This sort of shuffling, or refining, or digesting, goes on continuously when I'm rewriting. This is why writing has, to me, come to feel more like creating a sculpture than painting a two-dimensional picture in words.

And a few of the new items in my notebook, to remind me of things to do much, much later; changes which have very little to do with plot or characterization, which so preoccupy nearly all readers (if the writer's properly done his job):

20130225 1111 hr Have somebody say this: "I guess the only thing more dangerous than a man armed with a gun is a man armed with a principle. But without principles a man's life aint hardly worth livin'."

Note that I have no intention to use this quote exactly as scribbled into my notebook, but the idea is there. This would have to come somewhere pretty far into the story after a great amount of Civil War hardship has already taken place; possibly on the march to Atlanta or Savannah which, at present, would put it in Chapter NN or RR; that is, chapter 39 or 43. If I can find this note then it will be something of a miracle.

20130226 0632 hr Charlie at some point on the first day's drive makes a glancing allusion to The Outlaw Josey Wales.

This curious note is simply to demonstrate in an almost undetectable way – in about chapter I, or chapter 9 – that one of my main characters possesses at least sketchy knowledge of the Kansas-Missouri border war from having seen old westerns.

No wonder it takes me so long to write a book.

25 February 2013

Sterling Price and the Cyclops.

23 February 2013

Nebraska and Kanzas Territories, 1855.

1855 map of Nebraska and Kanzas Territories. Open in new tab for full size.

10 February 2013

Slavery distribution map, 1860.

A great amount of information here to ponder. I must admit I wasn't expecting to see so much slavery in Texas, although if normalized by acreage that may be deceiving: I haven't done the math. Note how slavery distribution tracks the Missouri River in Missouri, which helps account for the history that unfolded in that state during the Civil War. (If you right-click and open in a new tab, you can see the map and its data much more clearly.)

09 February 2013

Blanche Kelso Bruce.

I'm very happy this morning to discover that Blanche Kelso Bruce has family ties that connect him to Memphis Blues Again. For those who doubt the existence of a vast, suppressed history, know that this half-black man was nominated for Vice-President of the United States in the Republican Party in 1880, 128 years before another half-black American attained the summit of the Executive branch.

08 February 2013

Uncle Billy's birthday.

Today is Uncle Billy's birthday. Had he lived he'd be 193 years old.

01 February 2013

Is this any way to write a book?

I've spent the last week thinking about the ultimate narrative structure that Memphis Blues Again should take. Thinking about it a lot. Trying to devise a scheme by which this Brobdingnagian human ballad can function as an aesthetic whole. I hesitate to say "function as a novel." I'm doubtful that the word "novel" captures what I have in mind. I don't think of it as a novel anymore, although this vast, spreading slab of story will all be witnessed through the eyes (and other sensory and cognitive apparatus) of fictional characters.

The least common denominator of everything that happens in this book is geography. Locations in space. As far as locating events in time, that's a more problematic matter. For that reason I've abandoned concerning myself with sequentiality; in fact, freeing myself from the shackles of strict cause and effect ought to make this a good deal easier to write; to read, well, we'll see.

The thing about a book is that it is a linear device: one long chant, first word to last. And I do want this to be a linear book, not a multi-layered collection of sedimentary stories cross-connected by hyperlinks. So everything has to accrue in a manner that will make a certain amount of sense to the reader, even if the logic only comes clear incrementally. Bearing this in mind, I've just divided the whole arc into fifty modules – I won't call them chapters. These modules are simply intended to be blocks of notes and text. I'm about to begin hacking up my first draft and redistributing it into these fifty modules, to which more notes and text will also be added. When all that is done I'll start taking on these modules one by one, trying to shape them all into readable stories that all tie together. It's almost as if I'm about to take the entire first draft, chew it up and swallow it, digest it into its fundamental elements, and try to reconstitute an entirely new body out of it.

I've never tried writing this way before. I guess we'll find out what comes of it.

29 January 2013

New Orleans from Space, again.

28 January 2013

Ronald D Smith's Book -- Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General .

Historian Ron Smith discusses his new book Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General. Smith takes readers back to Bleeding Kansas, with its border ruffians and land speculators, to show how Thomas Ewing Jr. and his family played pivotal roles in the history of Kansas, Missouri, and the nation. This event took place on October 21, 2009, at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th Street, Kansas City, MO.

Amazon link.

26 January 2013

The Land Where the Blues Began.

Watch The Land Where the Blues Began.

Peter Joseph Osterhaus.

An interesting website I've just discovered about Peter Joseph Osterhaus.

25 January 2013

The Search For Robert Johnson.

23 January 2013

Preparing for Draft 2.

I think last night I hit upon a strategy for writing the next iteration of this novel.

The first step will to be to generate a rather massive tree-like structure that connects all my many story threads not in time but in space. What matters most is the intersecting locations, or nodes, where the paths cross. This will take quite some time. Afterwards I'll be rewriting everything to conform to the new blueprint; this will include generating a great deal of new material (although I've had much of it in mind for a few years now), and also transforming much of the material already set down in the first draft into a new form, especially taking expository material and relocating it in the actions and memories of heretofore unwritten scenes and characters. When all this is accomplished, the second draft will be complete.

Eventaully, in a third draft, I should be able to cut and move big chunks of the massive text around into a more aesthetically-pleasing presentation, even as I'm honing and loping down the word count. How long will all this take?

Umm . . . probably a couple years.

(I'm certain to also be writing some other stuff during this time frame.)

21 January 2013

Concerning today's South.

No one needs better health care more than the South, but it fights it off so long as Obama is offering it, its governors turning down funds for Medicaid. This is a region that rejects sex education, though its rate of teenage pregnancies is double and in places triple that of New England. It fights federal help with education, preferring to inoculate its children against science by denying evolution.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jan/21/dumb-america/

New Orleans from space.

St Louis from space.

St Louis, the Mississippi, and the Missouri Rivers.

16 January 2013

Prelude to ripping Memphis Blues Again to shreds.

I just spent six months writing the third draft of a novel called Cerberus, which is a kind of novel that has virtually nothing in common with Memphis Blues Again. That's why there's been so little action on this blog for so long. However, I'm getting ready now to dive back into Memphis Blues Again in a big way, so it may be that there will be more to see here in the months to come.

I am now a different person than I was when I wrote the first draft of this colossus, and my conception of MBA is now far different than it was then. This novel has ballooned far beyond its germinal conception, its blood-thirsty roots having ripped and clawed down through deep time, tapping into the water tables of secret history. Its main characters remain a small group of friends traipsing through the South in 2010, but other characters and their tales have welled up as well, and all must be properly written and inter-cut together into a new plastic unity. Therefore I must pull apart all that I've written so far, and outline all those precedent stories that I have in mind but that remain as yet unwritten, and figure out how properly to weave it all together into a different novel than what currently exists. What's gone before are notes and sketches for the real McCoy.

Few modern readers ever perceive beyond plot, that mechanical skeleton which jerks so rhythmically and redundantly through the shallow morality plays shackling the soul, mind-numbing in their dishwater-conventionality, turning human beings into wharfside mountains of stunned, dull-eyed fish. MBA is not and will not be a novel that panders to such conditioned desires. Plot is the least interesting element of a tale: it provides the skeleton wherein hangs the substance which, one hopes, may sufficiently startle the reader into a new experience of the world.