Chain smoking

He took the cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and hit it against the heel of his hand until two or three cigarettes were higher than the rest. He pulled out the highest, then shook the pack so the other two descended again and put it back in his pocket. He took the butt of his last cigarette, burned almost to the filter, and put it in his mouth. He put the new cigarette tip to tip with the butt. He breathed in deeply. The coal of the dying cigarette flared and lit the new one. With a jerk he took butt from his mouth and snuffed it in the already too full ash tray. He brought the new one to his lips and inhaled deeply. His fingernails and the tips of his fingers were stained yellow.

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A paragraph from my novel (at this point, only stray paragraphs exist.) An attempt to describe the chain smoking of a skitzophrenic acquaintance of mine. The attempt, as with the commuting pieces is to find a style that maps to reality.

Coming to One's Self

Only here, in rare moments when you are not absorbed in the tasks at work, the tasks at home, when you are not occupied by the mechanics of coming and going, of getting from one place to another; only here, at rest for a moment on the bus, your book still in your book bag, no one in the seat beside you, do you come to an awareness of yourself as your self, separate from any outside concern. It is not an entirely comfortable awareness. You catch your reflection, half sketched, transparent, lost like a ghost in the sea of the window's muddy glass. How did I get so old, so gray? You feel finite, unexpectedly fragile, aware of the arbitrary briefness of this, of all moments, of the infinite stretch of dark time before and after.

The continuity of the self, the narrative that we tell ourselves to connect moment to moment, day to day, year to year, is mostly illusion. When we are at work, we are the work, the task at hand absorbs us. Our awareness is of the task, of what is required for the task. In moments of relaxation, when we read, we are lost in what we are reading; when we watch TV we are lost in the television show, with it's own illusions of continuity punctuated by commercials. Even when we are doing nothing we avoid the confrontation, thinking about the past, daydreaming about some unlikely future. Our actual selves, the consciousness of self, is full of gaps, lacunae, vast swaths of memoryless, lost time. We are a collection of bright fragments like dust motes in a shaft of sunlight. Our life histories are stories we tell ourselves to connect the dots. That was me when I was in college. That was me in when I first starting work. Real memories mingle with imagination and we cannot tell the difference.

You cannot look too long at the reflection in the dirty window. It is too empty, too lonely. It brings up an emotion, nameless, but akin to the emotion that you have viewing gulls flying in silhouette over the gray surf on a desolate beach. You look away and pull a book from your bag to read.

The Accident

The car, an old orange Chevy, cut too closely in front of the bus trying to get ahead of it in the express lane. The bus struck it just behind the right fender. For a long second the bus just pushed the car down the highway, then with a screech of metal, the car broke loose and spun into the lane to the right. It hit a van that was beside the bus. The van slid into a semi truck and trailer that was in the next lane over. A pickup truck smashed into the back of the semi. Everything came to stop.

Everyone on the bus looked around at the other passengers, in a moment of shocked silence. Nobody had any obvious hurt. I had seen and heard it all unfold, but, on the bus, there was almost no feeling of impact. Pure physics, I suppose. The mass of the bus was so much greater than the car's.

People began to talk. What was that guy thinking? Is the driver hurt? A few jokes. I didn't want to go to work today anyway. It's all your fault. You sat in the wrong seat today. It disrupted the whole balance of the universe. How long do you think we will be stuck here?

The bus driver could be heard calling the accident in to the dispatcher. Then she turned to the passengers. "Everyone alright?" there are mummers of assent. "Anyone see what happened?" Several people nodded or said yes. The bus diver pulled out a small stack of white cards. "Anyone who is willing to be a witness, would you please fill out a card." Several raised their hands. She walked back through the isle passing out cards. I took one. The woman in the seat in front of me said "sorry, I was asleep."
The bus driver nodded. Finished passing out the cards she returned to the front of the bus.

There was a moment of silence as people looked over the cards, then, almost as if on a signal, people began pulling out their cell phones to call work. Hello, yes, I am on the bus. We just had an accident. I will be late getting in. I don't know how late. I'll let you know as things get figured out.

I didn't call. There wouldn't be any one in the office yet.

After the phone calls people started talking again. People who had never spoken to each other now talked freely. I have been riding for fifteen years and this is the first accident I have been in. It's my third. I was in another one one the freeway about a year ago, similar to this one. Somebody cut into close in front of the bus. I have been on buses that broke down many times, but. . .

Sirens could be heard, faint at first but getting louder. Within a couple of minutes two ambulances, a fire truck and three police cars were parked around the accident scene. Only one lane of cars was getting by on the right shoulder.

A policeman came on board the bus. "Is everyone alright here? Did anyone see what happened?" He waited for a response. If you would give me your names and a contact number, please." He came down the isle with and took names in a notebook. "Thank you. Another bus should be here in twenty or thirty minutes. We will transfer you onto that bus and you can continue on your way. Until that time please remain on the bus and be patient. Any questions?" One passenger laughed and said "thanks for riding Metro."

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What I am looking for, what I am trying to achieve in these scenes from the endless commute, is a style, a sense of a style, that can convey accurately and simply what happened, what is happening. Poetry I have thought about, form and structure, metric, language, rhetoric, genre, but I have never given such thought to prose. Now I have a novel in mind, maybe my only novel, and I find I want to actually think about sentence structure, the flow of narrative, the presentation of detail, capturing what I see, what I hear, smell and taste. My daily commute is an exercise in patience, frustration, exhaustion and now also an exercise in writing, in memory and precision. I am sure there will be as much frustration and wasted time in the written commute as in the actual, but, perhaps, in the end, something novel will come of it.

Parking Lot

Strangely, and perhaps sadly, the best part of my commute is often in the morning at the Safeway parking lot. When I emerge from the store, having purchased a tall drip coffee, black with no sugar or cream, and walk out onto the parking lot, I look up for the briefest moment and see the horizon with its clouds just brightening with the morning sun and I see the buildings around the lot and the cars on the road and a flock--a "murmuration" of starlings, a few crows, and, in that moment, feel the cool of the air on my face, and, for only a second, a certain exhilaration, the sense of what I can only describe as "the freedom of the road," the sense of new places and strange horizons, of novel destinations. It is, in short, a feeling of escape. But then I get back I'm my car and pull out onto the möbius of my daily route, taking a sip of my black and satisfyingly bitter coffee.

Roadside Crosses

Those crosses beside the highways and the country roads that mark the spot where a speeding teenager, or a drunken driver, or a driver hit by a drunken driver, or a tired driver, or a distracted driver, or a driver who was simply unlucky flew off the road and, in a variety of tragic, gruesome ways, died; I have observed them at various times over the years. At first there are flowers and balloons, teddy bears, sometimes--sometimes a portrait of the deceased printed on computer paper, scraps of a poem, some words from friends. Over time the flowers wilt and are replaced only on birthdays or anniversaries. The balloons deflate and lay in the long grass like so many latex snakes. The teddy bears are carried away by stray dogs. The pictures tear and blow away, caught in the wires of a nearby fence or in the twigs of bushes. One day the cross itself is gone and there is only grass and sky, road and fence and the muddy ditch beside the pavement.

Bus Stop at Night

Commute, from the Latin com, "with" mutare "to change." To change places, moving from home to work, work to home. The transition, a place between places, a (parenthetical) world between worlds, with it's own laws and weathers, it's own events and stories, consisting of car interiors, park and rides, bus stops, busses, trains, the landscapes sliding past the window like endless variations of an old film. The commute contains other changes as well, the change in selves: the work self with its focus on tasks and deadlines, it's hierarchical relationships, it's mixture of reinforcements and humiliations; the home self with its different relationships balancing authority and intimacy, with it's own special rewards, worries and humiliations. The commute is a time for the self, itself, to transition. I have been commuting for fifteen years.

The bus stop at night. Is that a place to begin? But then is any place a beginning? Leaves and litter rise in little whirls behind the bench shelter. There seems to be some sort of wind tunnel here--the breeze off the water funneled between the buildings, breaking into turbulence on the sidewalk and street in swirling eddies and brisk gusts. He pulls his coat collar closer around his neck and pulls his cell phone from his pant's pocket to check the time. Fifteen minutes. Bad timing. He got to the stop too early; too long to wait comfortably, but not long enough to go somewhere warm and get a cup of coffee. He looks down the street. A pair of headlights shine on the pavement under a swinging traffic light.

A half dozen people are also at the stop. In the garish light of the streetlight they are huddled shadows. Most are bent over their cell phones or IPods. A couple of weathered men talk in Spanish beside the posted schedules. One man leans on the light pole itself smoking a cigarette. Beside him, under the shelter's plastic roof, a women in a pale blue sweat shirt stands silently.

A bus pulls up, not the one he needs, but the one that comes only about ten minutes before. A woman, dimunative, only about five feet tall, stands on the sidewalk by the bus schedule sign and shouts at the bus driver as the passengers disembark. "You bastard, I know you. You're a cop. You're CIA or a sheriff. I know you from before. You are trying to go undercover, but I know you. You can't hide." The bus driver ignores her. The passenger part around her like a stream splitting around a rock, not looking at her, not meeting her eyes.

After the bus pulls away, she comes up two him. She is wearing an old red nylon coat.the sleeves are frayed and ratting. There is a tear in the side revealing dirty white foam. "I am sorry about that," she says, "but he had it coming. She looks up into his face, her eyes slightly amused. "Do you have any change? I need to pay my rent." He reaches into his pockets. "I have 38 cents, that want do much toward your rent." She takes the money placidly and moves down the bus stop not stopping to talk to anyone else. The woman, standing near him, her face half hidden in a pale blue hood, smiles up at him, knowingly. He smiles back.

The bus arrives and the half dozen people waiting line up to climb aboard.

Three by China Mieville

Overview

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China Mieville is an author who has been on my reading list for a long time. He came recommended by friends and by many reviews. I finally decided to take the plunge. I read his three most recent novels. Brief reviews follow. He is as good as his reputation. His novels are strange, intriguing and often beautiful.

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The City The City

Think of Berlin before the fall of the wall. East Germany separated from West Germany, each half of the city with separate politics, economics, destinies. Now imagine a city just as divided as Berlin was, but with the wall existing purely in the mind. The citizens of one city are walled off from the citizens of the other city by a reinforced habit of thought. Each citizen carefully "unsees" the citizen of the other city, even while avoiding the vehicles and pedestrians of the unseen city. Clues in clothing styles and architecture help with the unseeing, and a secret police force called "The Breach" enforce the separation.

The story begins with a murder investigation: a prostitute, seemingly, dispatched and then dumped in a garbage filled lot in one of the cities. It seems a simple case, but a couple of things don't add up. The chief investigator is too good to let it go. He follows the leads to find links to a revolutionary movement, a possible breach and the conspiratorial myth of a third city that somehow exists in the interstitial boundaries between the other two.

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In many ways this novel is a classic detective story, but with an underlying strangeness that gives it an odd, somewhat disturbing beauty.

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Kraken

There is a secret London, filled with cults and strange religions each with their own gods and their own particular apocalypses. There are also, in this secret London, people with Knacks and powers. All are on edge because a giant squid has mysteriously vanished from its display in the Museum of Natural History. Somehow this disappearance is a preamble to a total apocalypse nobody wants.

The protagonist of the novel, Billy Harrow, is a curator in the section of the Museum that housed the squid. After its disappearance, he is sequestered by a squad of police who specialize in cults. He escapes to find out for himself what is going on. He quickly finds himself immersed in the secret London underground and especially in the cult of the Kraken itself.

In many aspects the novel reminds me of the work of Neil Gaimen, especially Neverwhere. In fact it often seems like an attempt to out Gaimen, Gaimen. That being said, it is an enjoyable novel. The cults and religions are intriguing. There is suspense, humor, and occassional flashes of poetry

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Embassy Town

Of the novels reviewed here, this is the most complex and interesting. It is about "Language" both literally and metaphorically. The novel takes place on a planet at the edge of navigable space. The atmosphere is toxic to humans, but the aliens, known to the local human population as the Hosts, have made an area livable for human colonists.

The Hosts speak "Language," a very peculiar speech. For one thing, the Hosts have two throats and speak simultaneously through both. The Host can only understand language spoken by living sentient beings., Recordings or synthesized speech are incomprehensible to them even when it reproduces the sounds of words perfectly.Secondly, Language can only express factual statements. It cannot express contrary to fact conditions. There is no "what if." Language cannot lie.

Humans have created genetically engineered clones called ambassadors who can speak simultaneously and be understood by the Hosts. The Hosts too have tried to expand their Language to communicate better with the outsiders. The use real people, set up in situations that can be used as similes--metaphore is beyond them.. The narrator of the novel is such a person. As a child she was used to create the simile, "she who ate what was put in front of her."

Language is visceral to the Hosts, so much so that a new ambassador's voice accidentally becomes an addictive narcotic. To free themselves from it the Host must either horribly mutilate themselves or learn to lie.