rezendi

The Panthéon in the golden hour.

( the last pictures from paris, with bits of London and Calais )

Sunset over the Seine.

eta: here's the whole set.

Au revoir.

...for the record, I have namesquatted "rezendi" on Dreamwidth. I don't really expect to use it, but I suppose if everyone else jumps off the Eiffel Tower, I will too. I'm all stridently independent like that.

Also, this book I am writing? It may not suck. I mean, who can tell? Certainly not me. But the possibility exists. This third draft is going slower than I'd like, but also - so far - better than I expected, which is a tradeoff I'll take any day, even though I told my agents it'd be in their inboxes by mid-May. I still might even make that self-imposed deadline.

Also, did anyone else see El Clásico yesterday? Holy crap was that a great game.

Later tonight I cease my dog-, cat- and orchid-sitting, and move to my new home across from High Park. I hardly know the park (Toronto's largest) and am lookin' forward to exploring it at both high and low speeds over the summer. (The weird knee and ankle twinges I was feeling in Paris have ceased, knock on wood.) And I'm gonna try to get into a yoga-every-other-day habit, too. Conveniently there's an ashtanga studio just blocks away.

eta: Have moved in. New place has Internet, albeit wonky. (note to

wealhtheow and

lapsedmodernist: not as wonky as Paris.) Let the summer begin.

Almost finished with the second draft of Swarm. Its word count, somewhat ironically, is going to be almost identical to that of the first draft, but look, they're better words, OK? I swear. It actually works as a book now, instead of an incoherent mess.

I'm not saying it works as a good book. A third draft is definitely required. I dunno. I'm at that point where I'm so close to it, and have read its words so many times, that I can't really judge whether it's good. Parts of it seem to gleam with that burnished crystalline elegance of publishably good prose, and fit together seamlessly and smoothly. Parts ... do not.

There will be another draft, and I fear it needs more than just polish. I've broken a few motivations while fixing the plot, but far more seriously than that, the characters just need to be more compelling. Sounds so easy to say, doesn't it? (hollow laugh)

I also think the climax is hideously implausible and ridiculously over-the-top. But then I always think that of my thrillers, and believe it or not, no one but me has ever complained about any of them yet. I dunno. I guess people like big booms.

Incidentally, this is totally a science fiction novel. Told in thriller mode, and sufficiently near-future that "technothriller" is the most likely marketing niche, but it's really out-and-out SF.

Other things:

I am intrigued by Dreamwidth. Anybody got a spare invite?
Some unused numerical goodies from the UK, found in the corner of my wallet:
- An hour's worth at that Internet cafe in the corner shop along the exterior of the east side of Leicester Square - Internet City Ltd at 11 Charing Cross Road, according to the receipt - via time code XNES3, good for another day or two.
- A prepaid UK Talk Direct phonecard, payphone access 00800 55 00 55 11, freephone 0800 376 4827, london 0207 075 3391, PIN 6347071885, good for another 3.5 weeks or so.
I am finally going to fly Lufthansa, for the first time ever, back to Canada on Sunday. I look forward to their ruthless Teutonic efficiency.
This may just be a side effect of lots of writing, but I think I am growing bored of the Internet.
Also, with a similar side-effect caveat, I am beginning to wonder, perhaps heretically, if we collectively don't spend just a little too much time reading about / observing / thinking about made-up worlds and fictional characters. Or maybe even considerably more than just a little too much. Story, I'm beginning to think, is like fat or sugar; some is necessary, and it tastes great, but too much is ultimately bad for you.

Selections from the second half of John Higgs's I Have America Surrounded: The Life Of Timothy Leary:

The local authorities initiated a zero-tolerance policy with the 'long-hairs'. Scores of arrests followed, as did many allegations of beatings and police brutality. People were arrested for jaywalking. Laws against riding skateboards were introduced and enforced. A 'Gay Squad' was created to entrap homosexuals. According to Rolling Stone [ed. note: in an article by Joe Eszterhas, who would go on to script Basic Instinct and Showgirls], other measures to defeat the menace that were raised at council meetings included permanent police barricades on both of the roads into town, the dynamiting of the caves in Laguna Canyon where the hippies were believed to hang out, and the mandatory removal of vocal cords of all resident dogs at birth to prevent the hippies from using guard dogs to alert them to police presence. A local columnist even went as far as to argue for conditional use of permits for the building of sandcastles. "No sandcastle may be built if the shape deviates from the established norm of sandcastle construction," he proposed. "A copy of the norm is on file with the chief of police."
It was announced that [Leary] now had a $5 million price tag on his head. The figure referred to what the bail would be if he were captured, but many people misinterpreted this as a bounty. The district attorney of Orange County, Cecil Hicks, justified this astronomical figure, the highest bail in American history at that point, by claiming that "Leary is personally responsible for destroying more lives than any other human being."
On the third day they were visited by a nephew of the Afghan king, who had been educated at Berkeley, where he had followed Tim's guidance to create a spiritually guided LSD trip. He was honoured to meet Tim and vowed to do all he could do to help. He brought some opium and a tape recorder, and offered to do an interview that he could use to influence important people.

With the tape rolling, Tim gave an accurate overview of the events that had led them to Afghanistan. He then explained that his capture at the request of America was "an insult to the independence of Afghanistan." He said that he considered it an honour to be "one of the first American exiles" and that he would not live "as a prisoner in that country of slavery." [...] "I say this to the American government," he said. "If they try to take me back by force they will take a free spirit but a dead body. I will die before I go back to America!"
The press seemed more concerned about what Joanna's aristocratic English family would think about her association with the despicable Dr. Leary. Tim's plea to immigration officials for asylum was referred to the Home Office and quickly refused. After only an hour and a half in London they were back in the plane and heading for Los Angeles.
She announced that she was Mrs. Joanna Leary and that she would be speaking for her 'husband.' In her exhausted state she was less than coherent, and the press described her as a "dishevelled acid freak." To Joanna this was an outrageous slur. How dare they call her 'dishevelled'?
Tim took the stand in a suit that had been borrowed from Joanna's previous husband. He gave his name and announced that his occupation was 'neurologician'. Both the judge, Richard F. Harris, and the jury must have known that they were in for an interesting day when Tim went on to explain that this was a word he had made up himself.

That admission would come to look positively normal by the time Tim had finished. He went on to explain that the reason he had compared himself to people such as Socrates and Jesus Christ in his escape note was because his escape was the result of eternal patterns that repeat throughout history. From this perspective, his escape had been unpreventable and he couldn't really be held responsible for it. As a result of "12 years of deliberate and disciplined research with drugs and different forms of yoga," he explained, "my nervous system travels through historical times and to become Timothy Leary is like getting into a car and turning a key. I'm not Timothy Leary most of the time. I'm not in the twentieth century. None of us are." [...]

It was, it is fair to say, an unusual defence [...] But it is worth remembering that what Tim said in court was no crazier than his conversations throughout his exile.
He was sent to the infamous Folsom Prison, the last stop for lifers, the unrepentant, and those the system has given up on [...] The only company he had during that period was a voice that drifted in from the other side of his cell's brick wall. And that was the voice of Charles Manson. [...] When the light and dark icons of psychedelia talked for the first time, in the lowest and most brutal hole in America's prison system, the subject of brainwashing was quickly raised. [...] Manson realized that if Leary was not going to impose his will on the young, there was no reason he could not take that role himself. Indeed, Manson's strange hold over his generation continues to this day, to the extent that he has reportedly received more mail than any other person in the US prison system.
It was during his stay in Folsom that Tim would truly cement his reputation as a brain-fried casualty [...] the concept of "panspermia," which argues that life originated not on Earth, but somewhere in the vast interstellar space beyond, soon became an important part of Leary's philosophy.
If we were to plot how crazy Tim appeared throughout his life on a chart, we would now be looking at its highest peak. This was the Timothy Leary who heard about the approach of the comet Kahoutek. It was a signal from an intergalactic intelligence, he egotistically believed, to mark the change in human consciousness that he had brought about. It was coming for him. It was coming to free him.
Joanna continued to try and sell Tim's ideas to the world, and sent them to research labs and universities that studied astronomy and space flight. The admirably polite and restrained reaction from the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University was perhaps typical. "I read [Leary's manuscript] with interest," they wrote, "but still cannot distinguish what is intended as fact from what is intended as metaphor..."
Their ideas had become increasingly far-fetched and desperate. At one point Joanna had been approached by a hippie from the Midwest who believed that he could build a flying saucer. Joanna's plan was to equip this saucer with bright flashing lights and speakers that blared out "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" by Procol Harum. The saucer would then land in the prison exercise yard and Tim could jump aboard. Inside he would find Joanna, naked apart from a pair of long white gloves and a shotgun, and together they would fly off into the future. The guards, according to the plan, would be so stunned that they would drop their weapons and forget to shoot.
Tim had repeatedly refused to inform, but eventually, by April 1974, he had a change of heart. All his other options had been exhausted by this point, and he faced a straight choice between remaining in jail and becoming a snitch. He chose the latter.
The underground was overcome with panic and horror. Paranoia reached hysterical levels, for it was believed that Leary was ratting on anyone who had ever shared a spliff with him. Within a week of Tim taking a stand, the activist Jerry Rubin and the writer Ken Kesey had formed an organization called PILL, for People Investigating Leary's Lies. [...] They arranged a press conference in an elegant Georgian room at the St. Francis Hotel [...] Rubin spoke first. He denounced Leary as a "traitor." His condemnation, however, was interrupted by the appearance of a man in a kangaroo suit who burst into the room and attempted to hit Rubin the face with a custard pie.
There was now little that the FBI could gain from Tim's continued collaboration. More importantly, the political pressure to keep him locked up had now ended following the post-Watergate administration changes. It was a combination of these factors that explains why, on 21 April 1976, Timothy Leary was given his freedom.
He would later add in an apologetic introduction to Neuropolitique, "The first version of Neuropolitics was written in the years 1973-76 ... I must confess that at the time I was alienated, a bit daft and given to fits of irritation ... I hope those at whom I railed from jail will understand. I particularly regret my whining comments about Bob Dylan." It also did not help that Leary was preoccupied by science fiction during this period and frequently disguised real people and events under B-movie identities. He would refer to himself as Commodore Leri of the Galactic Intelligence Committee, for example. Eldridge Cleaver would become the 'Master of Space', while he was the 'Time Traveller'. None of this helped rescue his reputation as a great thinker.
[...]a travelling debate with his old Millbrook nemesis G. Gordon Liddy, who had since served his time for his role in Watergate. The subject was duty versus freedom. It was a big hit on the college circuit [...] Behind the scenes they grew first respectful, and then friendly towards one another. Of course, neither could persuade the other to alter his opinions. Liddy had famously forced himself to eat a rat as a test of his will, so Leary offered to do the same if Liddy would try marijuana. Tempting as this deal might have been, Liddy refused on the grounds that he would not break the law.
His attempt at scientific credibility was doomed to fail, partly because he was the infamous Timothy Leary and his reputation would always tower over him, but mostly because it simply isn't good science to create a theoretical model and claim that it represents different things at the same time. This thinking was, essentially, occult or mystical, and would never be taken seriously by the establishment. Those who took the trouble to study his model, such as the writer Robert Anton Wilson, would come away declaring it one of the greatest achievements of the later twentieth century. [ed. note: and if you can't trust Robert Anton Wilson in matters of scientific veracity, who can you trust?]
By the mid-1980s, Leary had become increasingly fascinated by computers. [...] He wrote articles for computer magazines, declaring that individuals had to reclaim the computer culture from corporations. His house became full of young, intelligent people, and his garage full of equipment. In 1992 they built one of the first personal websites for him. [ed. note: leary.com was the first site I ever saw advertised, on bus shelters in NYC in 1995.] [...] The PC was, Tim would claim, the greatest thing since acid.
In his role as 'stand-up philosoper' on lecture tours, Tim argued that philosophy, like baseball, was a numbers game. It was okay, and even necessary, to be wildly wrong on occasions.
"I'm Timothy Leary and I'm seventy-five years old, and as a matter of fact I believe that I have just now died. It was a wonderful experience. Awesome. It's exciting, it's the most important decision you make in your life, as to how and when and with whom and why you die."

Selections from the first half of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, by John Higgs:

Chino, a maximum security prison, was where convicts were evaluated and assigned to the most suitable prison to serve their time. On his third day at Chino he was sent for the mandatory psychological assessment and presented with a set of tests. A significant part of those, he was shocked to realize, had been written by himself, 14 years earlier, when he had been one of America's leading psychologists [...] The completed tests clearly showed, to the surprise of anyone who had read newspapers during the previous decade, that Dr. Timothy Leary was docile, conformist and meek. He was, the paperwork insisted, in no way an escape risk, and no one was prepared to argue with the paperwork.
The idea of magic mushrooms had become known to mainstream society only a couple of years earlier, following an article by R. Gordon Wasson in the May 1957 issue of Life magazine. Wasson, an ex-vice-president of J.P. Morgan and Company, had the unlikely hobby of ethnomycology, the study of mushrooms in human society.
Leary put together a study proposal entitled A Study Of Clinical Reactions to Psilocybin Administered in Supportive Environments [...] The proposal did raise a few eyebrows, for ultimately it was a licence for a bunch of academics to hang out in nice places, take as many drugs as they wanted and learn to have a really wonderful time. But academic freedom was an important principle in the culture of Harvard, and the department approved the proposal.
As luck would have it, Aldous Huxley was at the time a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a short distance from Harvard. Tim wrote to him and asked for his advice in setting up his Psychedelic Research Program, and they met for lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. The soup of the day was mushroom. They both ordered it.
Huxley introduced Tim to Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the British psychologist who had coined the word 'psychedelic' [...] who later said to Huxley, "But don't you think he's just a little bit square?" Osmond would later describe this impression as "a monumental ill judgement."
"Why are you scared of me?" the convict asked.
"Because you're a criminal. Why are you afraid of me?"
"Because you're a fucking mad scientist."
They both laughed, a connection was made and the atmosphere started to improve.
Later experiments also confirmed that the number of people who reported a religious revelation after taking a psychedelic drug was as high as 90 per cent when the drug was administered in religious circumstances. Indeed, when the volunteers were tracked down 30 years later, they still made the same claims for the profound nature of what they had experienced that day.
Time published a favourable article about the research and its implications, but it was met with a wave of disapproval and criticism. (Time and Life were run by Henry Luce. Luce and his wife were early users of LSD and had a number of positive trips together.)
[The CIA] would ultimately spend many millions of dollars researching LSD. Initial reports, greeted with much excitement, claimed it acted as a truth drug. Later reports declared that it was utterly useless as a truth drug, and went so far as recommending that agents be equipped with a dose that they could self-administer if they were captured and interrogated. This would prevent them from being able to reveal secrets, or indeed, say anything coherent at all.
Alarmed by the idea that enemy agents might spike CIA operatives with the drug, the Agency started administering it to their own agents in order to train them to recognize the effects. Initially this was done in controlled circumstances, but eventually it was felt that it would be more valuable to spike operatives without their knowledge. Clearly on a roll now, this scheme was eventually broadened so that it covered not just the unit involved in the research, but the entire Agency, and for a while surprise hallucinations and incapacity became something of an occupational hazard. The scheme was eventually stopped after a plan to spike the punch bowl at the CIA office party was discovered.
Drug-addicted prostitutes in San Francisco were hired to pick up men and bring them back to a CIA safe house that was operating as a brothel. Here the prostitutes would administer the drug in drinks so that the CIA could observe the results.
Leary believed that LSD was more important than Harvard, and he wanted everyone to know it.
In Washington he was approached by Mary Pinchot Meyer, who had recently divorced Carl Meyer, an influential CIA agent. She explained that she intended to organize LSD sessions for a group of "very powerful men" and their wives and mistresses. A mistress of JFK, she was shot dead by an unknown assailant on a canal towpath in October 1964. It was Meyer, Leary claimed, who convinced John F. Kennedy to try acid while in the White House.
"LSD is so powerful," Tim remarked, "that one administered dose can start a thousand rumours."
Parents were becoming concerned. They were paying a lot of money for a Harvard education because they expected their children to become future leaders of American society. They had not expected telephone calls from their sons and daughters announcing that they had found God. They were not happy when they decided to drop out in order to study yoga by the Ganges.
The pair began to fight during a group acid trip. "There were, like, 14 people sitting around us in a circle," Alpert recalled, "and Tim felt that what we were really fighting about was sexual in nature and so he took off all his clothes and offered himself to me, really. So we rolled around on the floor and then worked it out and we all went swimming the next morning. There wasn't any real sex between us; not that time or ever. Tim was threatened by homosexuality. I think he'd had some unpleasant episodes in his life that he wanted to forget."
Only slowly did stories about the lifestyle within start to circulate, and the realization that the new "lords of the manor" were devoted to strange drugs, group sex and the most un-Christian interpretation of religion imaginable. It did not help matters that the grounds backed onto those of Bennett College, a private girls' school.
Guests paid $60 a head for a weekend, and would find themselves meditating alone in empty rooms while cards containing written instructions were occasionally slipped under the door. Guests had to dress in togas and eat meals together in total silence. For full-time residents of Millbrook, who gobbled endless LSD tables and giggled away in the background, the whole thing was completely ludicrous.
And so became a strange regime of "deconditioning" behaviour patterns. It owed a lot to the Armenian mystic and writer Georges I. Gurdjieff, who attempted to bring his followers to enlightenment through tools such as shock or mind-numbing exertion, such as cutting a lawn with a pair of scissors. At Millbrook, food would be dyed strange colours to confuse the senses. Communal parenting was introduced, much to the dismay of non-parents, who suddenly found themselves with the responsibilities of unpaid nannies. [...] Sexual hang-ups and jealousy are a big part of our conditioning, so they clearly had to go. The third floor was designated as an "anything goes" area, and all beds were open to all comers. Initial enthusiasm for the idea gradually declined, however, and it was grudgingly accepted that the plan was causing more tension than it relieved.
Like Leary's Harvard position, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest helped to lend a certain legitimacy to the LSD experience.
The original LSD was a semi-synthetic compound manufactured from natural ergot. Street acid was made from a synthetic substitute called ergotamine tartrate and, according to Michael Hollingshead, "the subjective effects were really quite different from those reported at Harvard." [ed. note; I am particularly skeptical of this bit.]
There is nothing like an impending 30-year jail sentence, it seems, to focus your attention away from religious studies and on to more practical matters.
The Millbrook estate was raided by local police. They were led by G. Gordon Liddy, who would shortly become the local district attorney [...] Liddy would then, of course, go on to help organize the burglary of the Watergate Hotel that brought down the Nixon administration.
[While testifying to the US Senate] "If I was to give you an IQ test," Kleps declared, "and during the administration one of the walls of the room opened up giving you the vision of the blazing glories of the central galactic suns, and at the same time your childhood began to unravel before your inner eye like a three-dimensional colour movie, you would not do well on the intelligence test."
It is hard to find an iconic event of the 1960s at which Tim and Rosemary were not present. They were at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 'Bed-In', and sang on the recorded version of 'Give Peace A Chance.' They were even name-checked in the last verse. Tim was in the helicopter with Mick Jagger when it flew into Altamont, and sitting at the side of the stage when a member of the audience was killed by the Hell's Angels. He was involved in the formation of the Youth International Party, or 'Yippies', and he testified at the Chicago Seven trial.
Timothy Leary was not a modest man. By now he saw himself as part of a lineage of great thinkers, such as Socrates and Galileo, whose ideas fundamentally overturned the existing model of reality. As he would later write, "It was my duty to escape." And by duty, he meant his duty to history.
Tim realized he was now in the hands of a radical terrorist group who were perhaps the only people more hunted by the FBI than he was [...] The following day he was driven up into the mountains to be handed over to the leaders of the Weather Underground. [...] Out stepped two "turret-jawed heroes" and a "beautiful girl": Bill Ayers [ed. note: yes, the "palling around with terrorists" guy], Jeff Jones and Bernardine Dohrn.
It was a statement of support for violent uprising. "There is the day for laughing Krishna and the day of grim Shiva," it began. "The conflict that we have sought to avoid is upon us [...] This is a war of survival [...] There is no choice left but to defend life against the genocidal machine [...] Blow the mechanical mind with Holy Acid ... Dose them ... Dose them [...] Aim for life. Shoot to live."
Some people refused to believe it [...] Even Charles Manson was critical, in an open letter to "General Tim Leary" from his jail cell.
He stood by it. He made this crystal clear to journalists who tracked him down in Algiers. "Every policeman is an armed, fascist, bully murderer," Leary told Donn Pearce, the screenwriter of Cool Hand Luke. "If he is not he should take off his uniform and quit. No one can be friendly with a pig, any more than you can be friendly with a Nazi. It is war. It is 'our nation' against the US Government [...] I would not urge or tell anyone to off a pig. But I would support, defend and glorify such an act on the part of someone else."
"On January the 9th of 1971", Eldridge Cleaver narrated, "I issued an order to Field Marshal DC, who works in our Intercommunal Section here in Algiers, to go to Leary's apartment and take Leary and his wife, Rosemary to another location and to confine them there until further notice." Cleaver's notice to the psychedelic community was stark. "Your God is dead," he said, "and your High Priest is crazy."
A year after their trip in Bou Saada, Tim and Brian discovered that in 1909 the occultist Aleister Crowley and the poet Victor Neuberg conducted a magical ceremony at exactly the same riverbed in the dunes outside Bou Saada [...] Mescaline was used, as was sexual magic, with Neuberg at one point buggering Crowley at an altar in a makeshift stone circle and dedicating the act to the god Pan [...] [They later claimed that] The entity that possessed Crowley's body rushed at Neuberg and "flung him to the earth and tried to tear out his throat with froth-covered fangs." Fortunately, Neuberg had been armed with a consecrated magic dagger and managed to fend the beast off.
Leary started to think of himself as a 'continuation' of Crowley, as opposed to a 'reincarnation' as it is normally understood.
[The arms dealer Michel Hauchard] took them to the finest restaurants and gave them lifts in his limousine. There were parties on speedboats and endless champagne. It was a lifestyle that agreed with Tim immensely.
For a psychedelic historian like Horowitz, the experience of Hofmann recounting the experience of the first LSD trip to Timothy Leary whilst they drove the same route was about as good as it gets.
Tim visited William Burroughs, who was staying in Valais, and who gave him a vial of speed and an autographed picture.
The arrival of so many new, young people was, of course, a good excuse for an orgy. Tim's notes about the event are somewhat vague. "Tuesday," he wrote in his diary, "orgy." It was initiated by Brian Barritt, who is at least a little more forthcoming. "I remember that there were a lot of legs," he says.
"Wrote three rock songs (lyrics and tunes) in one six-hour session. Solve et coagula!!!" [Tim] wrote the following week. "Turns out I have a pop star rock vocalist somewhere inside, and it was awesome to listen to the tapes of this strange Jagger-Hendrix voice shouting out the lyrics to 'Velvet Genes', 'Right Hand Lover', 'Power Drive', etc."

I am in Calais. I am not supposed to be in Calais, I am supposed to be in a ferry en route to Dover, but the French fishermen chose today to go on strike. No, that's not right; a strike would be if they stopped fishing. They chose today to go on blockade. Basically they're stopping all sea traffic between England and France.

So I am in Calais. And frankly I saw enough of Calais last night. It's a grim little town. Tasty pastries, though. Also, crowds of refugees hoping to get to England, and an unusual number of heavily-armed soldiers in my hotel, dozens of 'em, toting assault rifles all over the place.

Well, as

phrawzty says, you have to take the bad of living in France with the good. I'm down with strikes. Strikes are cool. But blockades? For the right to further overfish the world's already-hugely-depleted cod stocks? C'mon, fisherpeople. Way uncool.

The people at the ferry information desk said they thought the blockade might be resolved today. The media, however, report that there might be a meeting in Paris, possibly tomorrow, between the government and the fishermen. Kinda hard to see the armada heading home before that. Also, the last time this happened, the blockade lasted nine months.

There is a tunnel. There is a Eurostar station here. Tickets are available. But a ticket would cost me way more than I had budgeted for this trip. On the gripping hand, unexpected disasters cause unexpected expenditures, c'est la vie. Hmm, he said, hmm.

On a clear day you can see England from here. Today is not a clear day.

From the last week or so:

From the Musée Curie. I bet you didn't know radium was good for your skin. Neither did Pierre or Marie - "Dr. Alfred" was no relation.

( et plus )

Stop massacring the English! (A bad picture, for which I apologize, but one I am grateful to have captured at all; I've been hunting this ad since first I saw it.)

Not bad, generally, but I expect

lapsedmodernist's to be much better. No pressure.

I almost never write about writing, but what the hell, let's talk about my opening paragraph.

This was the first paragraph of the first draft of Swarm:

On the day that the end of the world began, I went for a run. The air was crisp and clear, devoid of L.A.'s usual smog, and the sun shone gloriously on the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains – but I found myself unable to appreciate nature's splendor. The paralyzing quandary of if, when and how to break up with my girlfriend of three years lay heavy on my mind, so enormous that any greater concern hardly seemed possible.

It was rewritten approximately one hundred times, because it was always the first thing I saw when I opened the file. As is often the case the constant rewriting has caused me to lose all perspective on it, but here's what I think when I see it now:

The opening line isn't bad. Sets a tone of menace and suspense from the beginning, and tells us something about our protagonist. The rhythm is weird and a bit unbalanced, though. I took that comma out and put it back in about twenty times before I gave up.

Crisp and clear is a bit of cliché, and clichés are always to be avoided. I toyed with clear and crisp, but that just sounded weird. I could of course have just removed crisp entirely, as it's both unnecessary and potentially misleading - but that would have screwed up the rhythm. Right now the first two phrases are two lines of iambic meter:

the air was crisp and clear,
devoid of L.A.'s usual smog

and if we dump two words from the first line we lose all syllabic balance.

(Please note: it's not like I ever consciously think "iambic meter" and "syllabic balance" and so forth when I'm actually writing. I'm only aware of that crap after the fact when I look at the words analytically, which is close to never. I'm just semiconsciously aware of whether the words run together musically or not, and try to tweak them so that they do. Gene Wolfe once approvingly quoted Harlan Ellison saying "Most people will never be writers because they can't hear the music." I think this may be what he meant.)

(Anyway. Back to the commentary.)

The use of L.A. is a little troubling because it's misleading; we actually start in Pasadena, and Pasadena is part of the L.A. region, but will the reader know that? Well, we can establish it later on.

Snow-capped is also a cliché, but it's a relatively useful one, in that it concisely conveys a particular image. One of those details that makes the scene more vivid, and (for those who know Southern California) helps set the time-of-year. We'll let it slide.

And then an emdash. In the first paragraph. Dude. I totally overmisuse em-dashes and semicolons, mostly for unconscious rhythmic purposes (all of the various punctuation marks have different pause lenths in my head) and then have to fix them afterwards. A mid-sentence em-dash, other than those used to bracket a secondary thought, is kind of like banging a small gong. I could use a semicolon. In fact, I think it started its life as a semicolon. On the other hand, I could just use a freakin' comma already.

That last sentence - as as sentence, it's not bad, but are we talking if or when? Yeah, yeah, the point is sort of that he's not sure, but we're asking a lot of suspended judgment of the reader here. Also, and this is a total macro level thing, I'm not saying we want to fill the book with True Romance, but aren't we kind of making our protagonist a bit of jerk-until-proven-otherwise before we've even ended the first paragraph?

So. I am some 3/4 of the way through draft 2 of Swarm. Here's the current first para:

The day that the end of the world began dawned bright and cold. I watched that sunrise from our kitchen. The air was crisp and clear, devoid of L.A.'s usual smog, and the sun shone gloriously red behind the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains as the streets of Pasadena filled with light, but I couldn't appreciate nature's splendor. I hadn't slept. I couldn't sleep. The discovery I had made that night lay heavy on my mind, so enormous that any greater concern hardly seemed possible.

It's better, I think (obviously.) A little less distant, somehow. The "hadn't slept / couldn't sleep" repetition is a very crude tool but an effective one, and look, I'm not writing Ulysses here, OK? Plus we've already set up a point of suspense - what discovery? What kind of discovery? - on top of the usual starting-the-story suspense ("our who?") and the macro suspense ("waitaminute, end of the world?")

At one point I had "awful" before "discovery", but that was unnecessary editorialization. I miss "paralyzing quandary", but hey, kill your darlings. Still dubious about "crisp and clear", and I still worry that putting both Pasadena and L.A. into the paragraph might seem confusing, but hopefully the context makes it clear that L.A. is the greater region and Pasadena the smaller.

Anyway. This has been your terrifying glimpse of a this professional writer's mind at work; that kind of word- and sentence-level analysis is one of the zillion things I do ~~all day~~ for a few hours a day ... though as you can see, it often connects to the macro story- and character-level stuff as well. What a tangled web we weave, etc.

Now, if you'll excuse me, page 321 awaits.

So I looked at my "Most Interesting" Flickr pictures (as determined by some mysterious All-knowing Algorithm of theirs) for the first time in a while. I was pleased to see that one of my all-time favourite pictures has climbed to the top of the list:

(That's Annapurna I in the distance. If you view the picture full-size you can see

whythawk by the mana wall - this was taken scant minutes before we first met. Since then we've hung out on three different continents.)

(Remind me to go back to Nepal some year.)

However, bewilderingly, this one has been catapulted into fifth spot:

and for the life of me I can't figure out why. It has zero comments. It has been favourited zero times. (128 out of my 130 most interesting photos have been favourited at least once; the other exception is this one, at #83.) It has been viewed sixty times (my most-viewed photo, which is #12th in interestingness, has 12,000 views; my 100th-most-viewed shot has 220.) It belongs to one set and no groups, and has five tags, none of which are particularly unique. Its contrast and colour range are if anything boring. It was never in Flickr Explore. There is, in short, absolutely nothing statistically special about it.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad picture. You don't often capture gust patterns on water like that, which actually makes it quite, well ... interesting. But how did the algorithm know that? Is Skynet lurking deep in Yahoo!'s server racks? Desperate minds want to know.

Language centers are weird. Today I noticed myself making all kinds of soundsalike typos - "convenients" instead of "convenience", "content with" when I meant "contend with" - that I would normally never make. I blame French, the use of which is naturally expanding in my brain due to my reimmersion; I think it's crosstalking with English.

I noticed these sorts of things happening last time I lived here, too, and in retrospect that may be part of why I got no productive work done during those three months - just the Invisible Armies false-start and an interesting but fatally flawed screenplay. It's a little worrisome, since I'm theoretically here to work ... but I'm rewriting not writing, which is less language and more structure, so hopefully it won't be a problem. Anyway I seem to be making good progress so far.

Other amusing language things:

* it wasn't until my fourth day here that I stopped saying "si" instead of "oui" and "con" instead of "avec", thanks to all my Spanish-language travels of late.

* last time I lived here, I started thinking in French, but only for basic needs/navigation stuff; then, when my stream of consciousness wandered onto some more abstract/complex concept, I could feel my mind more or less shut down for a second or two while I changed linguistic gears back to English.

Ah, brains. Needlessly but wonderfully balky and bizarre, they are.

Here, have some Gallic data for your optic nerve:

You'll never win a staring contest in the Catacombs.

How do you get here? Practice, practice, practice!

They started building this cathedral in the 11th century. Meaning it's almost one thousand years old.

The ultramodern skyscrapery district of La Défense is full of wacky art.

Of interest this week:

Daily
Boy A (Crowley 2009) 87 Mistral: 18.30, 20.15, 22.00 (My interest is only mild, but it's around the corner and my film agent was one of its producers (it's unusual for agents to wear multiple hats in most fields, but anything goes in movieland) so I feel a certain call of duty.)
I was a male war bride (Hawks 1949) 64 Brady: 19.30
Deadline USA (Brooks 1952) 24 Action Christine Odeon: 14.00, 16.00, 18.00, 20.00, 22.00
The Horsemen (Akerlund 2008) wide release (Dennis Quaid! Ziyi Zhang! Four serial killers who apparently turn out to be the four horsemen of the Apocalypse! Or something! Sounds like a big ol' stupid Hollywood time. And sometimes that's exactly what I want.)
Monsters vs. Aliens (DreamWorks 2009) very wide release (though version originale might be hard to find)

Wednesday
Cocaine Cowboys (Corben 2006) 83 L'Entrepot: 17.40
Che part I, The Argentine (Soderbergh 2008) 18 Grand Action: 19.00

Thursday
Nosferatu le vampire (Murnau) 20 Reflect Medicis: 17.55 (I can't believe I've never seen this.)
Chung Kuo (Antonioni 1972) 61 Max Linder: 19.30 (A four-hour documentary about China in 1968. Directed by Antonioni. The mind reels. (Sorry.))
El Topo (Jodorowsky 1971) 14 Accattone: 21.40

Friday
Punishment Park (Watkins 1971) 11 MK2 Beaubourg: 11.25
Accattone (Pasolini 1971) 14 Accattone: 15.30 (Never seen any Pasolini.)
Rancho Notorious (Lang 1951) 100 Mac Mahon: 16.15
Che part I, The Argentine (Soderbergh 2008) 18 Grand Action: 19.00
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen 2008) 82 Denfers: 22.00 (still haven't seen it.)
Cocaine Cowboys (Corben 2006) 83 L'Entrepot: 22.10

Saturday
Drunken angel (Kurosawa 1948) 14 Accattone: 14.10
Rashomon (Kurosawa 1950) 14 Accattone: 15.50
Time Bandits (Gilliam 1981) 18 Grand Action: 16.30 (It's been years.)
Nosferatu le vampire (Murnau) 20 Reflect Medicis: 17.55 (Can't believe I've never seen this.)
Frankenstein (Whale 1931) 22 Studio des Ursulines: 18.00 (Can't believe I've never seen this either.)
Che part I, The Argentine (Soderbergh 2008) 18 Images d'Ailleurs: 19.20

Sunday
The Bicycle Thief (de Sica 1948) 77 Escurial Panorama: 11.00 (one of my very favourite movies, have seen it three times on the big screen before, would happily see it n more.)
My neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki 1988) 22 Studio des Ursulines: 11.30 (never seen it.)
Santa sangre (Jodorowsky 1989) 14 Accattone: 13.40 (this sounds really messed up.)
Time Bandits (Gilliam 1981) 18 Grand Action: 14.00
Rancho Notorious (Lang 1951) 100 Mac Mahon: 14.00
Cocaine Cowboys (Corben 2006) 83 L'Entrepot: 22.00

Monday
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Wilder) 24 Action Christine Odeon: 14.00, 16.30, 19.00, 21.30 (never seen it. Forgot it even existed until now, actually.)
Che part I, The Argentine (Soderbergh 2008) 18 Images d'Ailleurs: 19.20
Red desert (Antonioni 1964) 14 Accattone: 17.30 (Never seen it, and I am, sort of, an Antonioni fan.)

Recommendations from this selection are welcome.

French moviegoers really are different. Pariscope includes weekly and cumulative box-office results, measured by number of tickets, not euros. By next week Gran Torino and Slumdog Millionaire will both have outgrossed The Dark Knight, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona is in the last-52-weeks top ten. Watchmen, by contrast, flopped big time.

Well, that was weird. I came back from lunch and a perusal of the first issue of the redesigned International Herald Tribune (short version: not impressed. Most of its content is warmed over from yesterday's NYT, and the actual physical paper seems really flimsy) and was going to go wander, but found myself thinking, "maybe I'll just lie down for a bit."

I spent the next six hours shivering under my warm covers, in a dazed but not unpleasant mental haze.

Then suddenly it was gone and I popped out of bed feeling great. I even did a quick ten-minute 100-pushups 100-situps workout, and felt no weakness. A six-hour flu? WTF?

Oh well, all's well that ends well. To work.

There are of course many reasons to love Paris. There are "the cuisine and the chic chicks and the churches", to quote an email from my cousin who will hopefully be visiting. There is the fact that "living in Paris means living surrounded by beauty," to quote a book I probably shouldn't. But one of the lesser-sung reasons for us cinemaphiles is the city's cinemania. There is no better city in the world for the movie lover. Not even close.

The cinema listings in yesterday's Pariscope occupy 68 closely spaced pages. Aside from the incredible diversity of the recent releases - which include the new John Woo movie, and a Peter Greenaway from 2007 I've never even heard of before, among dozens of others, the reprisals being screened this week which might conceivably interest me are:

Title (Director Year) Theatre: Showtimes
Accattone (Pasolini 1961) Accattone(!): Fri 15.40
Drunken Angel (Kurosawa 1948) Accattone: Sat 14.00
The Aristocats (Reitherman 1970) Pantheon: Wed 10.00
The ghost and Mrs. Muir (Mankiewicz 1947) La Filmotheque du quartier latin: daily 16.00, 17.55, 19.50
Time Bandits (Gilliam 1981) Grand Action: Wed 15.30 Sun 16.45
The Cameraman (Keaton 1928) l'Archipel: Sat 14.00
Casanova Fellini (Fellini 1976) Accattone: Sun 20.50
Cocaine Cowboys (Corben 2006) l'Entrepot: Sun, Tue 22.00
Howl's Moving Castle (Miyazaki 2004) MK2 Nation: Wed, Sat, Sun 10.40
Castle in the sky (Miyazaki 1968) MK2 Gambetta: Wed, Sat, Sun 10.30
Moonfleet (Lang 1955) Reflect Medicis: Sun 11.30
The Battleship Potemkin (Eisteinstein 1925-1950(?)) Accattone: Tue 13.40
The Decameron (Pasolini 1950) Accattone: Wed 17.30
El Topo (Jodorowski 1971) Accattone: Thu 21.40
The Boston Strangler (Fleischer 1968) Action Ecole: daily 14.00, 16.30, 19.00, 21.30
If... (Anderson 1969) Accattone: Thu 12.00
Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock 1951) Le Champo: daily 11.45
The Garden of the Fitz-Continis (de Sica 1970) Studio Galande: Sun 12.30
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Chan-wook 2005) Le nouveau Latina: Sat 0.00
Miracle in Milan (de Sica 1951) Accattone: Fri 13.50
My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki 1988) Studio des Ursulines: Sun 11.30
Nausicaa (Miyazaki 1984) MK2 Bibliotheque: Wed, Sat, Sun 11.00
Night of the Iguana (Huston 1964) La Filmotheque du Quartier latin: daily 13.50, 21.50
Permanent Vacation (Jarmusch 1980) MK2 Beaubourg: Thu 20.00
The Passenger (Antonioni 1974) Accattone: Wed 21.40
Punishment Park (Watkins 1971) MK2 Beaubourg: Fri 11.25
Rashomon (Kurosawa 1950) Accattone: Sat 15.40
Salo, the 120 days of Sodom (Pasolini 1975) Accattone: Sat 21.40
Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973) La Filmotheque du Quartier latin: Thu 21.40
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Chan-wook 2002) Le nouveau Latina: Sat 0.00
The Shanghai gesture (von Sternberg 1939) Mac Mahon: Sat 14.00, 20.30, Sun 18.15, Mon 16.15

(Most will be version originale, ie in their original language with French subtitles, although a few will be v.f. I prefer the former even if it's in a third language; I can generally get the gist from French dubbing but I do better with subtitles.)

Oh, and that's not counting the movies-about-journalism festival.
And the Audrey Hepburn festival.
And the sadomasochism festival.
And the ongoing "100 most beautiful films" festival.
(This week: Some Like It Hot, Andrei Roublev, Apocalypse Now.)
And the movies-about-trains festival.
And the romance festival.
And the family-drama festival.
And the political-films festival.
And the Finland festival.
And the literary-adaptations festival.
And the Kubrick festival.
And the Sean Penn festival.
And the Mankiewicz festival.
And the Israeli film festival.
And the Coen Brothers festival.
And the Gus van Sant festival.

Again, that's this week alone. I might make a habit of posting a movies-that-interest me schedule on Wednesdays, actually, to use as my own personal calendar. Although realistically I might see like three or four a week, maximum. But it's still nice to be very temporarily living in the heart of the world's greatest cinematic cornucopia.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

And you may ask yourself, How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself, Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself, This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself, This is not my beautiful wife!

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...

Water dissolving...and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Carry the water at the bottom of the ocean
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!

And you may ask yourself, What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself, Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself, Am I right?...Am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself, MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/in the silent water
Under the rocks and stones/there is water underground.

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Same as it ever was..Same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...
Same as it ever was...Same as it ever was...

Current Location: Paris, France

George Orwell once said, "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness." I too find this to be true - of first drafts. The month or two I spend writing the first draft of a book is almost like a fugue state; I just keep grinding mindlessly onwards, cranking out an average of 2,000 words per day until I stumble onto THE END at (in this case) the 125,000 mark, and forcing myself to ignore the fact that I hate the process.

But I am now rediscovering something I always forget: second drafts, even if they involve major surgery, are so much easier and more fun than first drafts. It's mostly a mental thing, in that I'm no longer digging into hard ground and mining for half-shapeless masses of ore, I'm sculpting a single pre-existing block of stone, and my mind is more suited to that. And it's partly that the first draft is rarely if ever as awful as I feared while I was writing it.

What pleaseth me most so far is that I think I fixed the opening. All my other thrillers begin in media res with Something Bad happening to a traveller in some faraway place. This one starts off in civilized lands and Something Bad doesn't happen until page 32, an eternity in thrillerland. There are reasons for this, but I wasn't sure if they were good ones. Now, though, I think I've worked enough tension and what's-going-on into the setup to justify the relatively passive opening, and heck, I even snuck a little reversal and an escalation twist in as early as page 15, which ain't half bad.

So things seem to be going swimmingly so far. Of course, I'm just the author, what do I know? Also, the second half of this book needs much more work than the first half, but I'll worry about that in Paris.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of clusters of Beasts of New York reviews, discovered while ego-surfing yesterday. And a recent reader insisted on PayPaling me money, even though I went out of my way to avoid suggesting any such thing on the book's site, which was kind of gratifying.

Oh, and I have finally assembled all 160 pictures of South America into a single Flickr set. Feast thine eyes. (Even though only four of them qualified for my Supercool set.)

Am back in Toronto. What happened to all the snow? Jeez, you guys, I leave for six lousy weeks and everything goes all to hell.

Well, in lieu, have some pictures of ice:

( more brrr )

Note tiny expeditionary force.

I am dogsitting my sister's Pomeranian. This may possibly cause me to lose some macho points. Especially when I take him for walkies.

Also, I sent postcards from Patagonia last week, but for reasons too tedious to get into am uncertain whether they will actually arrive, so if you got/get one, lemme know, willya?

Tonight I recommence work on Swarm. The idea is to have a good head of steam worked up by the time I head for Paris.

1. Operation Get Back Into Shape has commenced. My fitness regime has slacked off shamefully since August (due mostly to travel) with the exception of December. Also, while I did indeed lose weight in Brazil, I promptly gained it all back thanks to Argentinian beef and ice cream, and am now north of 185 pounds, which is a bit much. (My ideal weight with my current amount of muscle mass is 180.) Five weeks in Paris aren't going to help either cause much, but at least I can get back into a near-daily routine.

2. My how to rent a car post earned me an entertaining email from a woman who wanted advice because she needed to rent a car in France with a suspended license, was distraught at the thought that Thrifty might a) spot her transgression b) take her license away. It was certainly a change from the usual fan mail. I wish I knew how that worked out for her.

3. A couple who are both old friends of mine have separated. As amicably as can be, but still, ugh, it felt like a bit like receiving news of a death.

4. I have spent much of today daydreaming about writing software. And blogging about writing software. And now I'm blogging about that. Oh, the shame.

5. I am halfway back to civilization, ie in Florida, and I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Sunshine State is the weirdest state.

OK, now I've been everywhere:

(from World66)

I jest, of course. Aside from those places I haven't been to at all yet (Indochina! The Stans! Eastern Europe! Most of the Middle East! Mozambique!) all those red countries just represent places where I've barely scratched the surface enough to learn how much more there is to do and see there. Heck, I've spent more'n two months travelling through relatively small Zimbabwe, and could easily name five places/things there that I'd like to but have yet to visit, without even beginning to count the ones I want to go back to. It's a big huge incredibly diverse world out there, still.

I do, however, feel like I've at least sampled most of the dishes at the buffet.

I didn't really write up my Central American trip, in part because a lot of that energy went into a 2,000-word piece about Colombia, cocaine, and Gabriel García Márquez which, sadly, seems doomed to never find a home, despite the efforts of my agents and kind words tinged with regret along with exhortations to send future work from editors at Granta, Harper's, Mother Jones and I forget where else. Perhaps I will post it at some point.

Anyway: this here is my second-last night in South America this time 'round, and I'm in a room at the Hostal America del Sur in El Calafate, Patagonia, Argentina (thanks to a tip from

midendian) and am not in the mood to join the barbecue festivities in the common room – pre-post-trip blues, maybe – so instead I shall struggle to put this last month into some vague approximation of narrative form. (eta: actually am posting this the next day, after a long bike ride which was great except for the part where the gears ate my jeans.) But don't expect magazine-quality work. Ya get whatcha pay for, OK?

Let's see... perhaps it's best if we partition it geographically, as I do my entire life, and so begin with:

( new york city )

( rio )

( brazil )

( iguazu falls )

( buenos aires )

( patagonia )

But it's El Chaltén that stuck with me most, and the ride there and back, which has left me with a deep desire to come back some year and road-trip through all of Patagonia, down the coast and up the interior, or the other way, or maybe both. Oh well. Next time. It's always good, in a bittersweet way, to leave a place already wanting to come back.

Not that anyone reads LJ on Friday nights, but here's where I spent today:

You can hear the glacier cracking and calving (it advances 1.5 metres/day) and watch/hear ice floes plunge from it into the water.

Note tiny human silhouettes beneath vast wall of ice.

Over there, thataway.

That was my third 7-hour rough-ground hike in four days, and this one with crampons on, to boot. (Har har.) My legs are pleading for mercy. Perhaps I shall reward them with a long bike ride tomorrow.

Also, check out this awesome photostitch

girl_on_a_stick did of my Lago Torres photos from a few days ago:

( 1024 pixels wide )

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