Some of you know I’ve played in a lot of bands from the time I was 14 years old. More accurately, I guess, I played in a lot of bands from the age of 14 to 21, then took a nine year break, then played in basically one band since then. This one band that I’ve been in since 2001 has had a couple of name changes (from Los Profes to The Gravitropes to, now, threejays), and there was one major change in lineup when Dennis, one of the most skilled guitarists I’ve ever been allowed to play with, stepped away to tend to his tinnitus. But in most other ways it’s basically been the same band.
As the three remaining members of the band age–I’m 56 years old, and John and Jeff are in their early seventies–it feels like more and more of a mystical journey for us to play a gig. So I was touched and enthused when my friends Tanya, David, and Tyler hosted a threejays party at their house. They have an unforgettable, beautifully designed common space they converted from an old garage, and it had been a year since threejays had played out anywhere.
I did my best to celebrate the occasion by wearing the green jumpsuit I bought this summer. As my wife might say, there’s no being shy when you’re wearing a Big Bud Press jumpsuit.
Photo credit: Carlyn Eames
We were loud enough that practically all of the partygoers–and we had a sweet turnout–listened to us from the porch outside the Taj Garage. Nonetheless, I thought we sounded pretty good. Jeff and John are remarkable musicians, and I did some serious woodshedding over the last weeks to hold up my end of things. We sounded, at least, like we’d practiced these original songs every week since 2021, which was indeed the case.
threejays through the window–photo credit Robert Hughes
Probably my favorite photo of the night is the one below: my friend Damian (a wonderful fellow bassist, by the way) was obsessed by how much love this old Fender Precision has gotten, as evidenced by the wear patterns.
The bass is Jeff’s, but I’ve been playing on it for 25 years. Photo credit: Damian Lynch
I would have liked to record the whole show, but it was beyond me to get that set up. A number of friends took little videos, though–this was one of the best of them. The song is one I wrote many years ago, “The Girl With the Artichoke Heart.”
Video credit: David Tovey
As a teacher, I’ve been dismayed over recent years at how few of my students play any kind of musical instrument. I tell them the truth: it’s not that hard to learn to play a few chords on the guitar, and if you know a few chords, there are 10,000 different songs you can play. If you can get good at playing a few songs–maybe a half dozen, say–people will invite you to their parties and you can make music with your friends. There are very few things in life that have brought me more joy than that.
My lovely wife, Carlyn, in her awesome party dress. Photo credit: David Tovey
Carlyn and I went to see the great Sean Hayes (the Petaluma folkie, not the wonderful Will and Grace actor) at Polaris Hall in Portland a couple of weeks ago. It was probably my sixth time going to a Sean Hayes show, this time a fantastic duo concert with guitar master John Courage. It was also an opportunity for Carlyn and me to introduce our very special friends, Tanya and David, to Sean Hayes’s music. I am crazy for how Hayes builds a song out of practically nothing. I’m a decent songwriter myself (for a hobbyist, anyway) and I am in awe of how Hayes does his work: it seems sometimes like he builds his songs out of a three note lick and a refrain repeated 16 times.
There’s one kind of joy in finding a songwriter who writes songs more or less the way you do but does it better than you can. There’s an entirely different kind of joy in finding someone better than you who also happens to write songs in such a different way that you can’t even tell what he’s doing. Listening to Sean Hayes gives me this second kind of joy.
And yet, Sean Hayes has only 47,695 monthly listeners on Spotify. The word only is misleading here: I think 98% of Spotify performers have fewer than 1,000 monthly listeners, and 80% of performers have fewer than 50, if Claude is to be believed. And a figure of 47K monthly listeners is still amazing compared to my readership as a novelist–probably higher by two or even three orders of magnitude.
So when I say “Sean Hayes has only 47,695 monthly listeners on Spotify,” it’s because there are some far less talented songwriters who have more fans than Sean Hayes–again, two or three orders of magnitude more. As Ecclesiastes tells us, the race goes not to the swift.
I got to thinking about Hayes’s fandom partly in the context of Devon Halliday’s recent Substack essay, “Literary Fiction Has Lost the Plot.” This essay, which seems to have gone viral in my corner of Substack, offers a close reading of the first pages of two famous current novelists and takes them down a peg, basically arguing that the writing on page one of each novel is so bad that there’s no good reason to move on to page two.
There’s a lot Devon Halliday and I agree about here. The writers she takes down are both very famous–one of the writers has won the Pulitzer, and the other has been longlisted for the Booker Prize–and neither of the first pages of their novels is (in my opinion) anything breathtaking. In the case of the Pulitzer winner, I think you could make the case that his first page is actively bad.
Having said that, I think Halliday is wrong about the importance of first pages. As she says of the first novel, Emma Cline’s Switzy,
You probably think I’m being too harsh. Switzy is a long and complex novel that tracks the unraveling of a mind—maybe the later pages will justify this slow, vague, broody opening!
So what if they do? The first page of a novel must justify itself.
While I do think it’s true that “the first page of a novel must justify itself,” I also think it’s a shame for us to conclude that the first page of a novel must justify itself on the first page. To my mind, that is an extremely modern and mostly made-up problem, a result of millions of people self-publishing their novels and web comics and music and poetry–we’re all squawking for attention like the geese in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and you’d better hook your audience fast because they grew up on TikTok and will only spend a few seconds, if that, waiting for you to amuse them.
But I bet you can come up with counter-examples of novels, even relatively recent ones, that sneaked up slowly on you. My most recent read, Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, is a classic example: if you judge by the first ten pages or so, it sounds like the book is going to be about a guy looking for his lost cat in the alley behind his house. But the story slowly, and with great creepiness, turns into a surreal, noir exploration of the soul of Japan.
That slow pacing is the fruit of a literary reputation. Literary reputation is a kind of emotional line of credit that can be drawn down very slowly before the reader is going to demand that the writer produce a justification for what they’re doing. I’m a decent writer, but I’m no Murakami–to return to a musical analogy, if Murakami is someone with the literary reputation of David Bowie, I’m more like a busker at the top of the subway stairs. If someone discovered a lost Bowie track today, millions of people would listen through it with the most generous ear imaginable, because hey—this is a previously undiscovered David Fucking Bowie track! The opening chords could seem anodyne, or poorly mixed, or even boring, and we would keep listening because Bowie was surely going somewhere when he wrote that intro.
But my situation, the busker’s situation, is the situation of most writers. In my case, I’ve got about 15 seconds, if that, to impress you with my busking before you start descending the stairs to the trains. (And even then, you might not notice even if the playing and the composition are the most brilliant thing to touch your ears all year. Remember that Washington Post experiment where Joshua Bell played Bach in a DC Metro station and practically everyone walked right by him. I think only one adult over several hours—a serious violinist himself—ultimately noticed that it was Joshua Bell. For what it’s worth, lots of little kids paused to listen before their parents dragged them away.)
Writerly jealousy is a non-trivial problem in the creative writing classes I teach. As befits an open door community college, every class I have ever taught contains a broad mix of student ability: there are many students who are more earnest than skilled, but there are promising and even scarily talented writers as well. So there’s a lot of jealously: some students care a lot about their work, and they are often good enough readers to see that their writing isn’t as strong as that of some others in the class. The challenge is compounded by the fact that some of the most talented writers are also the least interested in devoting themselves to writing long term–often enough they are engineering or biology majors taking an “ice cream class.”
So every term I tell my students about Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young at Woodstock. Hendrix and Young were friends; according to legend, they even arrived together at Woodstock in a hotwired pickup truck, some agent or promoter having sent them to the wrong regional airport. Both men played guitar at the festival. And, I tell my students, of the 500,000 people that were at Woodstock, I doubt that anyone in the audience thought that Neil Young was the better guitarist.
But Neil Young is awesome. And the world of guitar has plenty of space for Neil Young. More importantly, there are ways that Neil Young plays a solo that never would have occurred to Jimi Hendrix for all his talent, or to any other human being, for that matter.
(One might add that Neil Young is also still alive, and that some, like me, consider Neil Young a greater songwriter than Jimi Hendrix. But that’s all beside the point: even if Jimi Hendrix were a better human being in every way than Neil Young, Neil Young remains a priceless and indispensible musician.)
There are a million ways to write a story, to write a song, to play a song, to engage with the world. Work hard at what you’re doing, the way you’re doing it, then belt it out. People will give you the 15 seconds or they won’t. If they don’t, and your work is nevertheless wonderful, the point is that you made wonderful work. The race goes not to the swift.
Here’s one way of writing and singing a song that you should listen to, I’m telling you: Sean Hayes doing “When We Fall In” at Le Poisson Rouge a few years back. I first listened to it before Carlyn and I were even married, and I knew as soon as I heard the first eight bars of the song that I was, in fact, in deep with her.
I’m late to report this news as I was out of town when it happened, but the great John Crowley died last week at the age of 83. He was a writer of fantasy and science fiction who utterly transcended the genre.
If I asked you to make a list of the hundred most popular writers today in any genre–or the thousand most popular–I would feel easy saying that Crowley was every bit as good as any of them (and better than all but a few of them). His novel Little, Big was a revelation to me, a big, sprawling, multigenerational family drama written with all the skill and nuance of George Eliot or Charles Dickens, but in a thoroughly original fantasy mode. I can’t remember what reviewer called Little, Big a secret history of America, but the appellation fits: the malevolent demagogue Russell Eigenblick is a scarily accurate portrait of Donald Trump, written almost forty years before Trump rode down his golden escalator like a meteor striking the earth.
There are many wildly popular books today that will slip into oblivion before you know it: I doubt a single person will be reading Dungeon Crawler Carl or Legends and Lattes a hundred years from now. But there is a good chance people will still be reading Little, Big in the year 2126. In any just world, at least, that’s how it should be.
For much of my adult life, I would have said swords & sorcery was a guilty pleasure, the adolescent male libido-fueled stuff of Conan the Barbarian and Frank Frazetta chainmail bikini posters.
Schwarzenegger’s Conan–swords and sorcery for the Reagan years.
But I’m learning to give up on needless guilt. Early in my friendship with Carlyn, I said some music I was listening to (I don’t remember what) was a guilty pleasure of mine. She replied “I intend not to feel guilty about my pleasures.” It was about the wisest thing I had ever heard anyone say. Reader, I married her for that reason as much as for any other.
So, swords & sorcery–morally complicated pulp fantasy. Less heroic, more hard boiled. Lots of fragments, at least the way I’m writing it. The city where my story is set, Kyrenaikos, is as noir a place as Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, Raymond Chandler’s LA, or Adventure Time‘s City of Thieves.
I’m learning, too, to feel comfortable with pulp fantasy’s one sentence paragraphs, bane of my career as an English teacher.
And my story is definitely post-Conan: the protagonist is nonbinary, and the main badass is three and a half feet tall. I’m trying to draw more on the weirdness of Michael Moorcock’s Elric and the sass of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, leavened with my classic Pitkin open endings and wry asides.
It’s also a classic Pitkin career move for me. Swords & sorcery is one of the least popular subgenres of fantasy today. Today all the buzz is around romantasy (think Sarah Maas), cozy fantasy (think Legends and Lattes), LitRPG (e.g. Dungeon Crawler Carl), and the Critical Role Industrial Complex. I definitely know how to spend dozens of hours writing something the market never asked for.
But I believe swords and sorcery is the right subgenre for the Trump years. Not just because of the noir qualities of the moment, the chaos and corruption and amorality and incompetence of the times (though for those reasons, too). Not just because Elon Musk seems almost literally to be an evil sorcerer of overwhelming power. But even more, I want to exhort readers, or maybe just myself, to (in the words of an old bumper sticker) remember who I wanted to be.
Swords & sorcery, like its sister subgenre hard boiled detective fiction, follows flawed people in corrupt situations who have a tough job to do. The protagonists of these stories may be conflicted; their motives may be impure, even mercenary at first. But they always seem to find that their moral universe cannot simply be handwaved away. The protagonists of swords and sorcery may be immoralists, but they are not amoral.
I am (like many of you) a lackluster moral example, certainly not the kind of person you’d want to rely on to restore the American republic. But we’re all we’ve got. So I teach community college by day, volunteer for Indivisible on the weekends, and write about more or less good people fighting to keep their moral compass under impossible circumstances.
And even if swords & sorcery wasn’t the right genre for this cataclysmic, corrupt moment in American history, I’m having more fun writing this story than I’ve had in a long time. I commit to taking my joys where I can find them today.
My quick take on Chistopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, now that I’ve finally seen it:
The movie is a thoroughly modern take on the ancient epic, and that’s a good thing. Homer’s poem, which I love and have taught, is steeped in Iron Age values, looking back nostalgically towards mythical Bronze Age values. Nolan takes much about what is timeless about the story—the iron law of hospitality, the value of craft, the primacy of solving problems with the mind—and leavens it with a modern acceptance of trade-offs, with our struggle with unintended consequences.
I can see why some (especially those who would prefer to return to a Bronze Age world of rapine and plunder and tribalism) would dislike the casting choices or the ending of the movie, which is a significant departure from the poem. But to me, Nolan’s movie is as successful a remix of this ancient cultural touchstone as Madeline Miller’s Circe or the Coens’ Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
WordPress was kind enough, or wily enough, to include my review of Doctor Faustus in its “Freshly Pressed” program last week. I am grateful for the traffic, which brought over 100 likes to that post–that is to say, over 10% of the total likes my posts have received over the 11 years that I have been posting to this quixotic effort I call a blog. How do I know? Well, WordPress was also kind enough, or wily enough, to award me a “1000 Likes” badge last week. I feel honored and flattered to have been liked one thousand times.
I try to be a promiscuous liker myself, and I hope that if you happen to see this post, you drop a like on a post that could use a little more love today.
One of my favorite characters from my novel Exit Black is Kassie Ng, the easily-underestimated Instagram influencer sent to chronicle her adventures on the world’s first orbital hotel. It might surprise no one that her name comes partly from Cassandra of Trojan War fame–my nod, I guess, to Homer. Her last name, though, is an homage to one of my favorite songs, the They Might Be Giants classic “Ana Ng.”
While the original song is amazing and should be much better known than it is (which I suppose one could say of most TMBG songs), perhaps my favorite version of the song is this one, by the masterful banjoist Charles Butler. I noticed today that Charles Butler’s Spotify page has exactly the same number of monthly listeners as this blog has subscribers. So from a writer who could use more readers to a musician who deserves more listeners, I salute you, Charles Butler.
My wife and I went out last weekend to see a Canon Shakespeare Company production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus on a whim. I loved that a small scrappy company was taking it on—I had never seen the play, though I once taught the text at my college 20+ years ago. It was wonderful to watch nine actors with little more than a stage dagger and a bunch of borrowed library books for props conjure up this Renaissance classic in a theater called, appropriately, The Wyrd Hut. It was a very Portland experience.
While I often classify Marlowe and Shakespeare together because of the period in which they wrote, every time I actually encounter a Marlowe text, I am reminded that he is no Shakespeare. Comparing the two feels to me a little like comparing Georg Phillip Telemann with Johann Sebastian Bach: they were contemporaries and worked in the same stylistic language, but the depth of Shakespeare’s characters is simply of a different order than Marlowe’s.
Still, for as clunky as some of the characterizations and plot elements are in Doctor Faustus, I realized only on later reflection how perfect that play is for these times. Faustus, the German medieval genius who has grown weary of all the books and fields of knowledge that litter his desk, has decided that his real future is in magic. Why not summon the devil? Why shouldn’t he pledge his soul to Lucifer in exchange for unlimited magical power?
Sound familiar? I was reminded the next morning of Sam Altman’s infamous 2015 quip (which was apparently not a joke) “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” It’s easy enough to dredge up similar self-regarding twaddle from Altman’s nemesis Elon Musk: “In less than 20 years, working at all will be optional… like a hobby pretty much…” and “If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course.”
Faustus shows the same mix of (apparent) brilliance and extreme lack of introspection. And his use of the powers that Mephistopheles lends him has the same disconnect between lofty goals and tawdry, even ridiculous, triviality. Faustus’s dream is to rule the world, to remake reality for his purposes:
FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass,
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg;
I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk,
Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad;
I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring,
And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,
And reign sole king of all the provinces;
Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war,
Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge,
I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.
And yet, once he has the “servile spirit” of Mephistopheles to do his bidding, much of the action has all the gravitas of a Three Stooges short: Faustus becomes invisible so that he can steal the Pope’s hat; Faustus places cuckold’s horns on a mouthy knight; Faustus presents Emperor Charles V with a deepfake of Alexander the Great and his paramour.
And by the end? This brilliant doctor who once dreamed of liberating his country and altering the course of the Rhine has decided to enter into a romance with an illusory Helen of Troy. I am reminded of all of us LLM users in this moment, contemplating a servile spirit that will “read [us] strange philosophy,” unless of course we just want to use all that water and electricity and compute to cook up an AI girlfriend instead.
No spoilers (or no more spoilers), but the play doesn’t end well for Faustus. I’m more guardedly optimistic about how our Mephistophelean AI servants will treat us, as well as how the world may improve for all humanity over time. But we’d be wise to look to Faustus, that brilliant, self-deluding renaissance nerd who sold his soul and got nothing real in return for it.
Today, after a peer critique of the fifth or sixth fantasy story we’ve seen this quarter, I asked my fiction writing students how many of them were into fantasy. All but three of them raised their hands.
Then I asked how many of them had read A Wizard of Earthsea. Not one of them had.
Every once in a while, I’ll wonder what I’m doing, what inner problem I’m attempting to solve by working at a community college. Then I’ll have a moment like this, and I’ll realize that if my only contribution to my students’ lives is that I turned a few of them on to Usrula Le Guin–a woman who wrote practically all her books just a couple miles away on Thurman Street in Portland–I will have done something good with my life.
And you, dear reader, do you like fantasy? Have you read A Wizard of Earthsea? If you haven’t, go pick up that little book and check it out: you’ll see something that isn’t a hundredth as famous as Lord of the Rings, and which didn’t make a thousandth as much money for the author as Harry Potter did for J. K. Rowling, but Earthsea is better than both of them. Read it, and then contend with your desire to sue J.K. Rowling for plagiarism.
And as a bonus, if you aspire to be a fantasy or science fiction writer yourself, read just the first paragraph of A Wizard of Earthsea and see how much Le Guin accomplishes without a scintilla of infodump. What’s a dragonlord? you may ask as you read that first paragraph, What’s an archmage? The answer is who knows? It won’t matter, because you’ll already be hooked.
The Subway Test 