The way the book is structured, there’s a chapter for every day of the last ten days of Mumford Ferris Booth, or his mining town, same thing. The way book stands now, I’ve removed 167,000 words from the second draft, as compared to the first draft — that’s the equivalent of something the size of Chapter 9! Here’s the breakdown for the number of words per chapter:

Chapter 1:   47,626

Chapter 2:   39,800

Chapter 3:   25,058

Chapter 4:   38,736

Chapter 5:   50,439

Chapter 6:   47,531

Chapter 7:   176,038

Chapter 8:   131,492

Chapter 9:   167,452

Chapter 10: 108,826

 

The size of each chapter gets longer with time, but this is because I measure a day as the time between sleeping and waking, instead of as a fixed 24-hour day, which is how your computer or 9-to-5 appointment-calendar at work record it — and heaven help you if you live like a computer, if you live your life like you’ve calendar’d yourself into a corner, scheduled your time at work and at home, at a home life which therefore comes to resemble some kind of work. Each day in my book gets longer with time, time itself seems to slow down, as if time itself is a function of time. Maybe it’s because time seems to run slower in the mountains, or maybe it’s because time seems to run slower in 1930s New Mexico. But time slowly unfurls like a cactusflower on a slow summer’s day, slowly unfurling its flowers on a summer’s day that lasts all summer long — and as it unfurls, there’s an epic summer’s afternoon of the soul between the characters in my book. And if there was a Mahabharata of a smalltown 1930s New Mexican mining town, then this would be it. The Mahabharata is the national epic of India, it’s an epic which has a hundred books, each of which is composed of multiple chapters, although some chapters are only a few pages long. In one of the first books of the Mahabharata — the one called “The Summaries of the Books” — there’s a catalog of the contents of each book, and in fact, the exact number of slokas (verses) for each book. In an age where copyists and scribes were paid by the sloka to transcribe a text, this was a convenient way of measuring out how much it would cost, and thus, the Mahabharata incorporated its sloka count within its own text, perhaps as a way of preventing unscrupulous copyists from charging more than they should. In this day and age, such internal self-referentiality would be downright post-modern. Post-modern, well, or at least venal.

The way the book is structured, there’s a chapter for every day of the last ten days of Mumford Ferris Booth, or his mining town, same thing. The way book stands now, I’ve removed 167,000 words from the second draft, as compared to the first draft — that’s the equivalent of something the size of Chapter 9! Here’s the breakdown for the number of words per chapter:

Chapter 1:   47,626

Chapter 2:   39,800

Chapter 3:   25,058

Chapter 4:   38,736

Chapter 5:   50,439

Chapter 6:   47,531

Chapter 7:   176,038

Chapter 8:   131,492

Chapter 9:   167,452

Chapter 10: 108,826

 

The size of each chapter gets longer with time, but this is because I measure a day as the time between sleeping and waking, instead of as a fixed 24-hour day, which is how your computer or 9-to-5 appointment-calendar at work record it — and heaven help you if you live like a computer, if you live your life like you’ve calendar’d yourself into a corner, scheduled your time at work and at home, at a home life which therefore comes to resemble some kind of work. Each day in my book gets longer with time, time itself seems to slow down, as if time itself is a function of time. Maybe it’s because time seems to run slower in the mountains, or maybe it’s because time seems to run slower in 1930s New Mexico. But time slowly unfurls like a cactusflower on a slow summer’s day, slowly unfurling its flowers on a summer’s day that lasts all summer long — and as it unfurls, there’s an epic summer’s afternoon of the soul between the characters in my book. And if there was a Mahabharata of a smalltown 1930s New Mexican mining town, then this would be it. The Mahabharata is the national epic of India, it’s an epic which has a hundred books, each of which is composed of multiple chapters, although some chapters are only a few pages long. In one of the first books of the Mahabharata — the one called “The Summaries of the Books” — there’s a catalog of the contents of each book, and in fact, the exact number of slokas (verses) for each book. In an age where copyists and scribes were paid by the sloka to transcribe a text, this was a convenient way of measuring out how much it would cost, and thus, the Mahabharata incorporated its sloka count within its own text, perhaps as a way of preventing unscrupulous copyists from charging more than they should. In this day and age, such internal self-referentiality would be downright post-modern. Post-modern, well, or at least venal.

The last part of Chapter 10 is very sad for me — there’s a lifetime of regrets in the last few pages. But this sentence from the last part of Chapter 10 reminds me of a drive through Arcata, California on a blustery mud-puddle day. On an otherwise shadowy grimswept windswept afternoon, this scene was something funny and ironic at the same time, and if you had seen it, you would have photographed it too. It’s a little thing like this which can turn a day otherwise gray into some kind of smile on yer face.

 

The last part of Chapter 10 is very sad for me — there’s a lifetime of regrets in the last few pages. But this sentence from the last part of Chapter 10 reminds me of a drive through Arcata, California on a blustery mud-puddle day. On an otherwise shadowy grimswept windswept afternoon, this scene was something funny and ironic at the same time, and if you had seen it, you would have photographed it too. It’s a little thing like this which can turn a day otherwise gray into some kind of smile on yer face.

 

In this case, instead of a bedroll, it’s more like my sandal. I had left my sandals outside the house, and when I came back to put them on, I found this lizard inside. It reminded me of the line I quoted above, the line from my novel about shaking out a bedroll. And what, what? What’s a novel for me? It’s a filing cabinet for experience, it’s a rusty shoebox into which I stuff the odd fragment of my life — and thus, this. This lizard has nothing to do with anything, and yet, it has everything to do with nothing; it’s a detail which justifies everything!As for the other animals I mentioned — desert rattlers, spiders, scorpions, vinegaroons, centipedes, horned toads and Gila monsters — I found rattlers outside once while I was looking for pinyon nuts, I have a horned toad living under my front porch, and I have numerous too numerous centipedes in their sprawliform crawliform legs akimbo inside my house. You really don’t want to see them on the ceiling as you drowse at night, or writhing on your books — no, and you’re usually too scared to think about taking a picture of them. I haven’t found scorpions or vinegaroons of Gila monsters in my part of New Mexico yet, but tarantulas, yes, I’ve found the motherlode of tarantulas. I used to see tarantulas in pet stores when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, and I suppose there’s something fascinating about having a pet tarantula if you live by the shore, far from the desert. But now that I live in the land where tarantulas come from, I realize that old fishbowls and aquariums are not, in fact, their native habitat. No, and here’s hoping that my old sandals aren’t their native habitat either.

In this case, instead of a bedroll, it’s more like my sandal. I had left my sandals outside the house, and when I came back to put them on, I found this lizard inside. It reminded me of the line I quoted above, the line from my novel about shaking out a bedroll. And what, what? What’s a novel for me? It’s a filing cabinet for experience, it’s a rusty shoebox into which I stuff the odd fragment of my life — and thus, this. This lizard has nothing to do with anything, and yet, it has everything to do with nothing; it’s a detail which justifies everything!As for the other animals I mentioned — desert rattlers, spiders, scorpions, vinegaroons, centipedes, horned toads and Gila monsters — I found rattlers outside once while I was looking for pinyon nuts, I have a horned toad living under my front porch, and I have numerous too numerous centipedes in their sprawliform crawliform legs akimbo inside my house. You really don’t want to see them on the ceiling as you drowse at night, or writhing on your books — no, and you’re usually too scared to think about taking a picture of them. I haven’t found scorpions or vinegaroons of Gila monsters in my part of New Mexico yet, but tarantulas, yes, I’ve found the motherlode of tarantulas. I used to see tarantulas in pet stores when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, and I suppose there’s something fascinating about having a pet tarantula if you live by the shore, far from the desert. But now that I live in the land where tarantulas come from, I realize that old fishbowls and aquariums are not, in fact, their native habitat. No, and here’s hoping that my old sandals aren’t their native habitat either.

Image from the back cover of Fantastic Adventures magazine, January 1940:

Sometime in late 2003, I was traveling through Thailand, and I came down with a serious illness. I was laid up for a while in a jungle hut on the Gulf of Thailand (in the town of Bang Saphan Yai, where the huts cost $4 a day). I’m not sure how I became sick; it might have been because I was swimming in the Gulf of Thailand, and I only realized after swimming in it that it was polluted with raw sewage; there was nothing alive in the water, trash was floating on the waves, and hypodermic needles had washed like driftwood onto the beach. My illness worsened, my fever climbed to 105 degrees, and I had hallucinatory fever dreams for days. In one of these fever dreams, I saw an illustrated copy of my novel — but it had been plagiarized by someone else, redone with different characters. Where there were once people in the novel, there were now sluglike worms, seals with snouts. There was one scene in particular, from Chapter 2 of my book, where these sluglike worms were prostrating themselves before Ferris like he was some kind of god, or perhaps he was an Emperor of Byzantium on a throne. It was a strange dream, but illustrated through.When I returned to America and began to re-edit my book, I was surprised one day when I was going through my old sci-fi magazines, re-familiarizing myself with the spirit of the late 1930s — and I chanced across this illustration from the back pages of Fantastic Adventures magazine. It was the same scene which I had seen in my Thai fever-dreams! Even the colors were the same. I must have dimly remembered this illustration when I was feverish, dredged it somehow up to the surface of my mind. Strange to think that I was offered this as some kind of solace when I was sick in the jungle — feverish below the chameleons on my hut’s roof, I was scared of the howling monkeys outside, the gusting rainstorms, and all the other strange sounds shrithing in the dark night.

Image from the back cover of Fantastic Adventures magazine, January 1940:

Sometime in late 2003, I was traveling through Thailand, and I came down with a serious illness. I was laid up for a while in a jungle hut on the Gulf of Thailand (in the town of Bang Saphan Yai, where the huts cost $4 a day). I’m not sure how I became sick; it might have been because I was swimming in the Gulf of Thailand, and I only realized after swimming in it that it was polluted with raw sewage; there was nothing alive in the water, trash was floating on the waves, and hypodermic needles had washed like driftwood onto the beach. My illness worsened, my fever climbed to 105 degrees, and I had hallucinatory fever dreams for days. In one of these fever dreams, I saw an illustrated copy of my novel — but it had been plagiarized by someone else, redone with different characters. Where there were once people in the novel, there were now sluglike worms, seals with snouts. There was one scene in particular, from Chapter 2 of my book, where these sluglike worms were prostrating themselves before Ferris like he was some kind of god, or perhaps he was an Emperor of Byzantium on a throne. It was a strange dream, but illustrated through.When I returned to America and began to re-edit my book, I was surprised one day when I was going through my old sci-fi magazines, re-familiarizing myself with the spirit of the late 1930s — and I chanced across this illustration from the back pages of Fantastic Adventures magazine. It was the same scene which I had seen in my Thai fever-dreams! Even the colors were the same. I must have dimly remembered this illustration when I was feverish, dredged it somehow up to the surface of my mind. Strange to think that I was offered this as some kind of solace when I was sick in the jungle — feverish below the chameleons on my hut’s roof, I was scared of the howling monkeys outside, the gusting rainstorms, and all the other strange sounds shrithing in the dark night.

Image from the cover of Astounding Stories magazine, March 1940:

An alchemical image of the midnight sun has been Photoshop’d over Uranus, seen occulting the sun.In creating the character of the cowboy, I wanted him to have background references to sci-fi pulps of the 1930s, comic books, Saturday morning matinee serials, etc.

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Image from the cover of Astounding Stories magazine, March 1940:

An alchemical image of the midnight sun has been Photoshop’d over Uranus, seen occulting the sun.In creating the character of the cowboy, I wanted him to have background references to sci-fi pulps of the 1930s, comic books, Saturday morning matinee serials, etc.

No Need to Click Here - I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster