Camera Obscura Journal

                                                                             I have recently launched a new literary and photography print annual. The Camera Obscura Journal is now open for prose submissions. We hope to feature the best literature and photography we can obtain. We will offer a featured writer honorarium of $1000 for the best story we publish in the first issue. We are also hosting a photography competition with categories for amateur and professional photographers offering $1500 in prizes. Deadline for photography entries is February, 1 2010.  All submissions are handled electronically.  Stop by if you get a chance.

Industrial Fung Shui and the Art of Pollution

The sky is your canvas and on a clear day, a clean cerulean slate with which to work. Every decision affects the chi of your factory within its frame: a valley cut by a river, sandwiched between rolling hills. Smokestacks should be spread apart for maximum coverage and staggered, allowing the roiling gray clouds, each on a unique trajectory and column of air, to facilitate collisions in unexpected ways, whipping up a black dragon to swallow the sky, the setting sun an opaque disk in its throat, its tail reaching beyond the horizon carried by a breeze. Allowing soot, the moss of progress, to gather from ashen rain on the leeward sides of the stacks.

Your plant must also find itself in calm, settling air, a valley perhaps where wind will not dissipate so quickly your contribution to the sky. Fog and mist rising from the warm water, air heavy with vapor and smoke, must meet in the middle, must join, must fuse as though your valley, like the Smokey Mountains, cups in its hands, the fruits of production. For an alternative approach: “Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.” –Frank Lloyd Wright.

MacGuffin Spring/Summer 2009

MacGuffin Spring/Summer 2009 Cover - Sue Averell

While some small press publications do survive, even fewer thrive. Many wind up as squashed bugs on the literary radiator grill in a matter of a few years, and in some cases, months. The MacGuffin has been around since 1984. I hope it lasts another twenty-five years. Behind the beautiful cover of the Spring/Summer 2009 MacGuffin designed by Sue Averell , my story “The Harlot of Baltimore” was lucky enough to land a spot beside some great fiction and poetry, including that of Jen Michalski, editor of the indie publication JMWW Journal.

“The Harlot of Baltimore” Begins:

“Day fifteen of a twenty-three day voyage began before sunup with commotion on the main deck. Myron scurried up the ladder to find a crowd, mostly crew at this point in the trip, gathered around a man wearing a bowler hat. Buttoned up in tweeds, a shine on his shoes, Finister Morgan stumbled along the bulwarks with a triumphant grin on his face. “I have beaten it,” he proclaimed, and, given his equanimity, no one had any reason to doubt him. Moments after his declaration, even as the mainsail filled with wind, Finister’s chest heaved, and he collapsed, breathless, onto the forward deck of the Baltimore Mary.”

To get a copy of the MacGuffin and support a great small press publication go to http://www.schoolcraft.edu/macguffin/default.asp.

Mother Earth: Not Just Mars in Drag

The Green movement, not unlike any other call for societal change, is propelled by one gallon of science, a pint of conscience, and two (or three) loads of bandwagon (what ultimately makes it a movement). This bandwagon–I’ll call it a “band-station-wagon” (maybe one of those mythical Chrysler electric vehicles), features a panda bear high-fiving a sea turtle on one side and a smokestack in the shape of a flower on the other, and it’s packed as tight as a clown car with well-meaning citizens who are as afraid of being associated with the “other side” as they are concerned for the environment.

You’ll find me somewhere in the backseat smoking an imaginary cigarette dreaming of a tobacco hybrid that releases zero-tar, oxygen-rich vitamin smoke when it burns.

 As more passengers come along for the ride, cliques arise, factions form, and we sometimes find ourselves at odds. Environmentalists pushing renewable energy and energy independence applaud bio fuels and Brazil for their sugar cane diesel while the conservationists worry that the proliferation of sugar cane fields will encroach into if not destroy precious rainforest in the process. Electric cars reduce emissions in the city, but the electricity needed to recharge the battery is generated most likely at your neighborhood coal or gas burning electric power plant, not to mention that the manufacturing process for the batteries is not that environmentally friendly.

All the while, Papa Gore in the driver’s seat tries to convince scientists that the “warm up” isn’t just a statistical spike in the standard warming-cooling cycle from the last ice age. Even the zero-emission vehicle I helped develop as a proof of concept, a ‘67 Volkswagen beetle (yes, again with a Volkswagen, Fahrvergnügen!) transformed to run on the expansion of liquid Nitrogen (”the cool car” we called it) would only truly be “green” if the energy expended to liquefy the Nitrogen were to have been generated using solar power or some other green fuel (reducing the “cool car” to simply an inefficient method of storing solar energy to use later).

And, a quick poll of fiction writers would suggest that while the majority profess a green leaning tendency, many of these same writers would still rather see their work in a print journal than an online lit magazine or e-published, even if the electronic publication might be seen by far more readers than the print, even with the rising quality of online publications. We still want our contributors’ copies. We want to display it on our shelf. It’s an object d’art, something that can’t be “unpublished” because the website didn’t pay their domain registration or the editors decided they would rather change aesthetic course and truncate part of their archives. POD technology solves many of the environmental concerns, but to some, POD technology has become interchangeable with the term “POD publishers” some of which have soiled the POD abbreviation making it almost synonymous with a vanity press. Electronic submissions reduce waste, but so does recycling.

Technophiles have been predicting the demise of books (printed material in general) for nearly two decades now on the basis that printed material is no longer an efficient method of storing data (even less so than a papyrus scroll by comparison to digital). But the publishing industry moves at a glacial pace (just ask any writer who has ever submitted any material anywhere or has waited for their book to finally hit the shelves). It is true though that the proverbial writing has been scrawled on the stall of the literary restroom (years ago in fact). Newspapers are now closing up shop, or converting to online formats (as even the NY Times has projected in five to ten years), and libraries are converting to electronic reference materials. People of a certain age still claim printed material is easier to read, but the upcoming generations have become much more accustomed to the electronic format. Imagine these receding glaciers we hear so much about in global warming sermons. The ice is printed material. The rocks are electronic. Kindle and his future siblings have arrived, certainly for convenience, but also to reduce mass-market bulk waste.

That leaves the books and literary journals as works of art in their own right–their content and their bindings. Just as artists still paint with brushes and oils on a canvas cloth, books will find a rightful place in the arts. As an avid lover of books, their smell, the feel of them in my hands, even the weight of the pages as a metaphor for the content, I am certain books will endure. Who will read them? Who knows?

The Weather is Here.
Wish You Were Beautiful.

At the risk of having my “green” card revoked, I will admit that I’ve always enjoyed driving my car, preferably a five-speed junker from another decade, a car with stories to tell. Even in Europe where a grid of passenger trains connects the rural crevices with the urban armpits, I clung to my road-tripping ways by purchasing, from its ninth owner, a Volkswagen camper van that had already clocked over three hundred thousand miles and chewed up two engines all under one coat of paint–the factory sunflower yellow had turned to Melba Toast umber by the time I got it. That van had an almost indescribable odor, like a Rif Valley hashish lab masking the scent with pine needles and vodka, all underneath the scent of something I’ve always called the “Volkswagen smell” (anyone who has ever owned an old Beetle will know this right away).

The van also came with a spectrum of stains on the carpet, rips in the seat, and, of course, a collage of stickers so thick on the back that I was positive people followed me just to finish reading them (or they were following me for other, more sinister reasons).

These stickers were a patchwork life story of the van in countless languages: stickers from camping sites, cities, beaches, almost everywhere it had been in twenty-plus years. My favorite was a faded bumper sticker featuring a man under an umbrella peeking over the top of his sunglasses on rainy beach. It read: “The Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful!” That play on the famous “wish you were here” postcard ranks for me in the upper echelon of all bumper stickers, in the rarified air of “Gas, Grass, or Ass, nobody rides for free,” and “If you’ve seen one nuclear war, you’ve seen them all.”

On a trip through Southern France, the engine threw a rod, just outside San Tropez (not an inexpensive place to break down), where she was put to rest, finally ending her road tripping days.

I suppose I could write what I would call a “Tales from the Van” creative non-fictionesque alter-egoist semi-humorous memoir (among other hyphenated modernisms that seem to fit), but what fun would that be. I’m much more interested in what happened in the van in the twenty years before I got it. Writing platitudes be damned. “Writing what you know,” translates for most into “Writing what you think you know,” which as it turns out, is often off the mark.

Perhaps the story begins on an automotive assembly line in 1974, or better yet, the birth canal of Mother Volkswagen.

Words in a Box :
A Literary Gedankenexperiment

Imagine that in order to determine how much money to pay the author (very wishful thinking), the local independent bookseller had to first calculate the velocity of the books as they flew off the shelves (more wishful thinking for the author and the indie bookseller). I’ll also add the constraint: the only way to make this calculation would be to hurl another book at them as they flew by, which would also require the bookseller to know the books’ location. After this thwack with the other book, the bookseller would know the velocity of the books and could calculate the royalty, but the exact location of the books to deliver to the customer would be in question–somewhere in a range of probable locations in proximity to where the books collided.

As a way to express the unique and somewhat ridiculous mathematics involved in describing quantum systems (something I won’t attempt here), and to illustrate the fallicy of appying a quantum analysis to a non quantum object, in 1935 the physicist Erwin Schrödinger conceieved of a hypothetical experiment, (no animals were actually harmed): shut a cat in a sealed box next to a piece of radioactive substance small enough such that the probablity of it producing one particle of radioactive decay in one hour was the same as it producing no particles at all. He would then outfit the box with a gieger counter rigged to a hammering device situated over a tube of poisonous gas. If the counter detected a radioactive particle, the hammer would fall, shattering the tube of gas which would kill the cat. Applying the same probability equations used to describe quantum states, after a time, the cat would be both dead and alive simultenously.

However, after opening the box, the observer would definitely see either a hot and pissed off (but still alive) cat or dead one, certainly not both. This gedankenexperiment has been interpreted numerous ways. Some theorized that a quantum state can only be known at the time of measurement (when the box is finally opened). “The many worlds interpretation” has a bifurcating universe at the point the box is opened, one with the observer looking at a dead cat and one with the observer looking at a living cat.

Since literature seems to be governed by cultural apprasial rather than physical law unlike cats and subatomic  particles. It would seem possible for a work of fiction to be in both a Literary and a genre state simulteneuosly, perhaps until the observer opens it, an observer with a predetermined list of expectations.

The litany of differences is long and varied depending on who is asked.

Genre vs. literary: craft vs. art–plot vs. character–conspicuous vs. subtle– escapism vs. illumination–aliens vs. eighteenth-century hand maidens–Hugo vs. Pulitzer–making money vs. critical acclaim.

There have been writers who have breached this genre barrier, Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonegut come to mind, but for this, I’m going subatomic, to the words themselves.

In this literary gedankenexperiment, I propose to take the words from two famous novels, one literary and one genre, throw them in a box (a shoebox perhaps), and instead of radiation, I’ll subject them to agitation by placing the box on the washing machine during the spin cycle and extrapolate the result of two sample sentences from the originals.

Gravity Well

All M.C. Escher works (c) 2009 The M.C. Escher Company - the Netherlands.
All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.mcescher.com

My daughter has a game in which a battery-operated elephant shoots plastic butterflies up into the air from its trunk. Meanwhile, everyone lucky enough to have one of the multi-colored nets clamors for the butterflies as they float to the ground. Usually, the kids (3-5 year-olds), have a try at it and invariably are unable to catch anything except by sheer luck, so they hand the nets to their parents and watch while the adults in the room scoop pink butterflies from the air, a scene only topped in silliness by watching those same adults attempting to dance at their respective company holiday parties.  

Imagine the butterflies as words, the nets pages, and the net holder, a writer in search of the story already alive inside this elephant’s gravity well, the beginning of this story its ending, drawn ultimately to rest after its pieces can float no further down.

Where to begin…Literary Pheromones

Recently in Frigg, consistently one of the best online literary journals, in an issue filled with compelling ultra-shorts by some great writers, I ran across a lively debate between Randall Brown and Joseph Young about the true definition of microfiction. It is insightful and entertaining. I can see both sides to this squabble. However, I took special interest when Randall Brown used the term “quantum physics of microfiction” to describe the “tension between words that are and words that aren’t” in very short stories.

Having endured the mathematical gauntlet of a physics education, I have often considered the physics of writing. Not the mechanics of motion to put words on paper, but on a lower level. Though I don’t fall into the category of writer Randall refers to as one who delves into the “Quantum Mechanics of fiction,” I do consider the nonlinearity of it, its chaos. But beyond the obvious “butterfly flaps its wings in De Moines and changes weather the pattern in Palau” in which the movement or removal/addition of a single word and or letter has the potential to have the same effect on a story as this mythical butterfly does on Palau, there lurks something else.

Perhaps there is a mathematical resonance within every story. Just as the enigmatic chemical substances, pheromones, are given credit for animal physical attraction, why groundhogs don’t mate with meerkats, so too might every story have a pattern, a harmonious or a discordant pattern on a level lower than rhythm and length of phrase, woven into letters and white space on the page that lures a reader through the experience or, in fact, repels them. Even after the prose has passed the smell check and all the story pockets have been patted for a beginning, middle, and end, after all characterization checkboxes have been checked, and ratios of exposition to dialogue have been tabulated, word counts approved, levels of incongruity and “avant-garde-ness” assessed, post do-I-care-about-the-character stage and after the subject matter gravity evaluation, and finally, beyond the literary “appraisal” process of “which tier does this story belong,” the literary pheromones, a pattern as basic as a simply harmonic oscillator latent within the construction of the prose, ultimately might attract more meerkats than groundhogs–unfortunate for a writer who’s audience is groundhogs.  

  Occam’s Razor, often cited in scientific communities, is paraphrased to state:  

          ”All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.”

More complexly put, the best explanation is the one that makes the fewest assumptions after being stripped of any elements not pertaining to the phenomenon in question.

 It would therefore prefer:

      “ionized particles in the atmosphere”

                 to  

      “a marital spat between Zeus and Hera”

 as the best explanation for lightning during a Thunderstorm.

This six-hundred-year-old axiom might strike some as lazy, overly simplistic, lacking in creativity, or even short-sided given that Occam’s Razor tends to shunt an “unobservable” explanation to the margin, making said “unobservable” the drunk Uncle at the scientific theory family gathering.

Occam’s Razor should certainly not be equated with “common sense”, which has no prescription for chaos theory or fractal geometry. And scientific methods of “observation,” such as tunneling microscopy, require far more faith in the predominantly empty space under the surface of a solid object than a sensible person would have. So this blog, this conceptual “lost and found,” might resemble a written word version of an M.C. Escher drawing where logic is askew just enough to allow a jaunt up several flights of stairs ultimately to the floor below. You may ask what purpose such a blog would serve. And I will direct you back to Occam’s Razor for your answer.

*

“Relativity” - M.C. Escher

All M.C. Escher works (c) 2009 The M.C. Escher Company - the Netherlands.
All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.mcescher.com

*   
The following story first appeared in the Mad Hatter’s Review. I have posted it here as it was the inspiration for this blog, and it embodies much of the logic, or lack thereof (however it strikes you), behind it.

Beacon

M.E. Parker

 11:11 a.m. Corridor

A girl with bluish hair, her name is Auburn, whirls around and locks the parlor door with a key that she found on the mantle beside her grandfather’s clock, a grandfather clock, that arrived no less than twenty-four hours ago shipboard from the continent. Her grandfather accompanied his clock. Both are quite grand, her grandfather and his grandfather clock. Both are ornate and full of crannies, one chiseled by tool, the other by time, talking and ticking with metronomic precision during a tea-time rant over the state of Grandfather’s affairs on the continent and why his stocks have fallen and his blood pressure risen, and why he has come alone and not in the company of Grandmother who would have insisted Grandfather still loved his clock more than his wife.

Auburn spins toward the corridor that leads to the locked parlor door. She twirls back toward the kitchen door, also locked. Her grandfather’s clock chimes eleven. She checks her watch and laughs. Eleven minutes after eleven. Auburn cherishes the time she spends with her grandfather, a third-generation temporal palindromist whose grandfather said of their practice “a craft more aptly described as an art that should be preformed with care as if traversing the down-going stairs that lead up to the top.”

The keys in her pocket jingle as she massages them between her fingers. Auburn cannot resist a key. Unlocked doors compel her to secure them and locked ones insult her, teasing her with the mystery on the other side. She peers through the kitchen keyhole and twists the knob, but the door is locked. From a jumble of keys spread out on her hand, Auburn grabs the brass one with a lion’s head and slips it into the lock. The doorknob turns. As soon as the door closes behind her, she locks it back again; then drops the key into the silverware drawer.

10:01 p.m. Lighthouse

Auburn pressed her face to the glass. Yellow stars twinkled at the end of the choppy sea, the lanterns on her grandfather’s ship. He had finally arrived, but the lamp in the lighthouse had gone dark. She would have to go down for supplies; there was no light in the lens. On her way around the dome, Auburn jumped as the watch room trap door fell shut. The clank of metal on metal and the mechanism in the lock froze an expression of amazement on her face. She grabbed the handle and pulled. The door was indeed locked, trapping her in the darkened lighthouse dome.

The ship’s stars drew closer turning into twinkling squares, off and on, signaling for the beacon to guide them around the black rocks. She heard the sails on her grandfather’s ship flap about in gusty puffs. Auburn leaned out the window of the lighthouse dome to warn him, but the ocean wind swallowed her voice. She watched with big eyes as a shadowy boat stocked with parcels, a grandfather, and a grandfather clock broke upon the rocks into shards of wood and gears and bones. 

10:01 a.m. Lighthouse

The steps to the lighthouse watch room spiraled around a column of stone covered with dewy patches of moss. Auburn whistled her favorite song, “Steam Shovel Cincinnati Blues,” sliding her hand along the stone as she wound up to the dome, up the throat to the ocean’s eye that peered out over the salty splashes eating the rocks below. “Oh,” she smiled and reached for the handle on the trap door, heaving the wooden door closed. She inserted a green copper key into the keyhole, and after a twist, Auburn pushed up on the watch room door to make certain it was locked and skipped back down around the stairs.

11:11 p.m. Parlor

Grandfather, with a grayish mustache that curls up at the tips, caresses the crescent moon, a mahogany moon that waxes up one side and wanes down the other of Auburn’s grandfather’s grandfather clock. “What time is it dear?” he asks, pulling the pendulum chain on his clock. 

Auburn checks her watch. “Eleven, Eleven.”

“Eleven, Eleven.” Grandfather positions the hands at straight up eleven o’clock. “How about a cup of tea dear? I’ve had a long trip.”

“What else have you brought for me besides tea?”

He rummages through his bags. “I’ve got some lime and corn cakes from the continent and syrup tapped right from a maple trunk.” He smacks the side of his head. “Oh, and I’ve brought you a book about young girls and lighthouse solitude. We all have our burdens, don’t we dear?”

Auburn stands up with excitement and grabs a key from the mantle, instinctively unlocking the parlor door. When she turns back around, her grandfather is gone.