I've been thinking about this blog post for a long time, and thinking about the subject for even longer. But as is often the case with such things, a picture gives you the important information faster. :)

And in case that's not clear enough:

I have author copies, they are beautiful, and the book is available on Amazon now, though at the moment there are only 11 5 2! left in stock.

Kiba, as you can see, is quite excited.

Nothing I could say would be even remotely adequate. I have memories of walking through the aisles at Crown Books at ten years old and thinking about how amazing authors were. I remember being midway through a fantasy book once and being suddenly existentially struck by what an amazing thing a book is. That we think of it as a finished object, a thing, but what we don't consciously wrap our minds around while reading is how every word put down is a moment in another person's life, that each page and collection of pages is a chronology of experiences, probably multiple experiences, days and weeks and months of hard work and pure invention.

And now I have one, and, perhaps in part because I work in games I am unusually aware of the number of people that go into this (and yet I'm not as aware as Lou Anders is, who actually works with them all). In Prometheus's case, right around fifty hardworking people who all touch every book at some stage of its production. Which basically multiplies the complex work of the story, refines it, polishes it, makes sure that every moment of your reading experience is a crafted one, carefully considered. They did a hell of a good job.

It's obvious, I think, from my shield-banging about sustainability and organic food and conservation activism that I am a pretty passionate environmentalist. My tax return so attests. And I love technology, and I love what it's doing to the experience of reading. But crafted objects like this, touched by so many people, delivered to you, the reader, are what will keep paper books around, at least for the next while. And though I am biased (ridiculously biased!), this one is a treasure, and I am humbled to have it. If you seek it out (or if I throw it at you -- cough), I hope you enjoy it too. And if you do, or even if you're just interested and haven't taken the plunge yet, I'd love if you'd consider joining the party on the Andovar World Facebook page, where there will be info, links, giveaways, and more. :)

If you want to read more of my thoughts about game design, storytelling, and a bunch of other things, before I was flummoxed by this meteor of awesome, Jeremy Jones was kind enough to interview me for Clarkesworld Magazine. If you take a gander I'd love to know what you think.

Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test is an enthralling read for anyone who is even the slightest bit odd. (And if you're reading this, chances are I mean you.) It's a wild ride, a Philip K. Dickian roller coaster through some of the darkest crevices of human behavior, spiraling out into the macro-levels of societal power structures and human history, and then back into the minutiae of everyday people living lives with the greatest intentions of normalcy. And in its way it is an act of torah, in the universal sense -- a paean of love for humanity, of love that looks closely and does not flinch.

Be warned that if you go in and go deep you will probably go a little crazy. And perhaps the great honesty of the book is that it dives in deep here as well, pushes you to reflect on your own crazy, and the expanded crazy of the greater semi-conscious social system that we live in.

It will make you think about your friends, your enemies, your coworkers, your family. I know people who are capable of violence. Some of them great violence. You know people like this, too -- maybe you even are one. One of the questions at the heart of this work is one asked by dystopians for centuries, and yet one that seems to get sharper with every increase in our civilization and technology: where do you draw the line around what kind of abnormalities should be eliminated from society, by imprisonment, by medication?

To draw that line is to say that we have found the pattern. We want so badly for there to be a decisive list, for there to be labels and boxes, for things to be clean. We are pattern-seekers. Patterns make a chaotic world comprehensible, they lull us into functionality. And so ultimately, we need books like this, the world needs books like this, that peel back the skin of reality and have a good sticky look inside, to challenge the artificiality of the psychological borders that keep us safe. And as all truly well designed things are, it achieves a life of its own by being entertaining, by taking us from Douglas Hofstadter's Strange Loop to Bedlam to Mississippi industrial ghost towns, from Wall Street to the brainstem of psychiatry to mass murderers, from Scientology to DSM IV, from opulent Florida mansions to four-year-old children being treated for bipolar disorder.

In the end, once we have gone through the wormhole of inquiry and emerged onto the far side, changed, the concluding question is: if there were a "normal", truly, would we want to be it? Even considering the consequences of the vast systems around us, their need to contain us, to statistically filter out danger and potential disruption?

Hopefully, the answer remains no. Hell no. My cold dead hand no. God is dead no.

And yet, being the social animals that we are, it is inevitable that we try. And that's okay. And also a little bit crazy.

In which I digress (much) further about the not-coming apocalypse.

This is long. Sorry. I tried to break it into two parts, but it just wasn’t happening. Thanks in advance for your kind attention.

The Popol Vuh is the Mayan creation myth. The version available to us today was written in secret between the years 1554 and 1558 by three anonymous philosopher-priests of the Maya religion, during the early years of the Spanish occupation of Mexico, when Catholic missionaries under Friar Diego de Landa were systematically destroying all evidence they could find of indigenous religion and culture. In order to preserve it, the authors of the Popol Vuh spirited it away somewhere in the Guatemalan city of Chichicastenango (underneath a Christian altar, perhaps, as was a favorite tactic of the Maya, preserving the old beneath the new) until 1701, when it was discovered, copied, and translated from the original Roman alphabet transliteration of Quiché into Spanish by Francisco Ximenes, another Catholic friar. His copy is the only one that survives today.

All of which is to say that the contents of the Popol Vuh as we know them have been deeply, irrevocably compromised by the influence of a conquering culture. Some evidence mitigating against this has come to light fairly recently: a stucco frieze dating from before 100 BC has been uncovered in the ruined Mayan city of Mirador, which depicts in detail a scene from the Twin Gods cycle of the Popol Vuh myth. That’s some impressive continuity, considering what an incredibly diverse range culture and belief can be seen across mesoamerica—even from one Mayan sacred site to the next. Still, there is a huge gulf of uncertainty in the 1600 years between those two points, and in the 450 years between then and the winter solstice, 2012. And it’s exactly that kind of gulf from which new-agey doomsday conspiracy theories are born.

It used to be that the big source of mystery and wild speculation about the Maya was what happened to them—why, when Cortés and De Soto arrived in the 16th century, they found jungle ruins instead of thriving cities. Where did the builders of these cities go? They were abducted by aliens! They ascended to a higher plane of reality, like those Brahmins who set themselves on fire!

But that part isn’t really a mystery anymore. We know what happened to the Maya: they’re still there, still living in the same jungles, speaking in the same tongues, following the same traditions. What happened to them was the same thing that happened to the American settlers of the southwestern plains states in the 1930s. Their civilization “advanced” so far that it exhausted its natural resources. They used up their water supply through overpopulation and careless irrigation, exhausted the fertility of their soil through overfarming, undermined its stability with too much quarrying and monumental construction. They were living beyond their means. And when the droughts came, they suffered for it. Over the course of generations, they were forced to come to terms with their mistakes, step down off their thrones and the shoulders of their slaves and go back into the jungle, to live the way their ancestors had.

Sound familiar? Maybe it will.

Doesn’t make them sound particularly like the sort of people you’d look to for spiritual wisdom, does it? Let alone the unprecedented understanding of the nature of time and existence that would allow them to prophesy the end of days.

But look at it like this: they’ve already lived through it once. They’ve had the chance to learn from their mistakes the hard way. And they want to pass on what they know, through myth and story, for the next time history repeats itself.

The Popol Vuh opens like the New Testament: with god moving on the face of the waters, and with the Word. Sovereign Plumed Serpent, with the aid of his cronies, the deities of lightning, thunder, the hurricane and the sky, parts the oceans and raises the earth, creates the plants and animals. But this isn’t enough. The gods want to be believed in, worshipped, praised. They need these things. The world needs people to understand and keep the order by which it operates, to observe the patterns and cycles and assign them meaning. So we come to maybe my favorite quote from the Popol Vuh, which appears perennially in the upper left corner of The Mossy Skull as inspirational quote of the season:

“Our recompense is in words.”

— Hurricane, Sudden Thunderbolt, Newborn Thunderbolt and Heart of Sky, upon the creation of humans. The Popol Vuh

But the Maya gods aren’t perfect. It takes them a couple of tries. The current race of humanity, the ones who keep time with a calendar, observe the movements of the heavens, and write stories to explain the things they learn and see, are the third incarnation.

The first humans were made out of mud. They couldn’t do much more than walk and wave their arms and mumble. They weren’t intelligent enough to perceive the actions of the gods, the nature of existence, or to do much of anything at all. So the gods unmade them. The second humans were of wood. They were stronger, smarter, they lived, had families, worked and made tools. But they didn’t worship the gods. They were arrogant and forgetful. The story of their destruction is maybe the closest thing the Popol Vuh has to an apocalypse. The wooden people’s own serving animals and tools, their own houses, even their food rises up against them and overthrows them.

There came a rain of resin from the sky.
There came the one named Gouger of Faces: he gouged out their eyeballs.
There came Sudden Bloodletter: he snapped off their heads.
There came Crunching Jaguar: he ate their flesh.
There came Tearing Jaguar: he tore them open.

This goes on a long time, comprehensively brutal. And the second race of humans ends up as the monkeys in the forest, reduced to jabbering and swinging from the trees, which is where that quote from Dennis Tedlock’s introduction that I posted the other week comes in. I can totally see how it might inspire a CGI explosive doomfest—or, for that matter, an apocalyptic prophecy some people might actually believe.

Which brings me back to December 21st, 2012. The gods create the third race of humans out of corn. Those humans do remember to honor the gods and keep their calendar. And they keep it up until the present day. The Mayan people are still living in the jungle, as humble, poor and wise as they’ve been since they stepped down off their thrones back in the year 600. And meanwhile, a new “advanced” civilization has sprung up around them, and has already begun to desperately backpedal as they try to avoid screwing up their resources so badly that they too have to give up their iPhones and cheap Chinese imports and go back to the jungle. The current administration of Guatemala is allowing industry and uncontrolled population growth to pour waste matter into Lake Atitlan, a sacred Maya pilgrimage site mentioned in the Popol Vuh as one of the four corners of the Maya world, causing an algae buildup that, unless they stop, will kill off every other living thing in its waters and no doubt cause havoc for the kickass sunken Mayan temple residing on the lake bottom. The modern Maya are getting kicked off their land to make way for American nickel mining. I could go on. Logging in the Amazon. Individually-wrapped toothpicks. Toilet paper made from old growth trees. I am inclined to go on. But I’d rather you read the rest of this and not be driven away by my angry. You’ve heard it all before.

You’ve heard it all before.

“Circular Time” is the title of a 1941 essay by Jorge Luis Borges, in which, in three and a half fanciful, impeccably researched pages, he outlines the history of ancient and modern Western culture’s interaction with the notion that history repeats itself. Starting with Plato:

…who, in the thirty-ninth paragraph of the Timaeus, claims that once their diverse velocities have achieved an equilibrium, the seven planets will return to their initial point of departure in a cycle that constitutes the perfect year.

The Mayan calendar follows a similar logic. Using the orbital periods of Venus, Mars, the sun, moon and stars, their ritual and secular year consisted of a set of interlocking cycles—one 20 days long, another 260, another 365. I’m not going to get into the math, you can go read about that elsewhere. It’s enough to say that when all these cycles are fitted together, they generate one enormously big circle of time. Represented in the modified base-20 of the Mayan reckoning (with the dots between numbers representing a decimal place), day one, year one of the current 5,125-year cycle, which fell on August 6th, 3114 BC in the Julian calendar, is represented 13.0.0.0.0. And December 21st, 2012, the last day of the last year in that cycle, is represented 12.19.13.19.19. I think. Look it up. On December 22nd, it will be 13.0.0.0.0 again.

However—even though the Long Count, as it’s called, only uses five decimal places, the Mayan calendar is actually designed to account for a much, much longer span of time: something like 26,000 years, the orbital period of the star grouping we refer to as the Pleiades, which the Maya refer to as the Four Hundred Boys, whose gruesome death in the Popol Vuh marks the final event before the first rising of the moon and sun.

In other words, the calendar doesn’t end on December 21st, 2012. It just resets. Time starts over at the beginning—the same way it does for us Westerners every calendar year on January 1st, only on a far larger scale. Looking at it that way, the 2012 prophecy starts to bear a resemblance to the Y2K prophecy. Two thousand years since the birth of Jesus! Shit! The antichrist! The whore of Babylon! Big ole computer glitches! As we know, that prophecy went out with something of a whimper.

But these things are all metaphorical—that’s what the 2012 doomsayers don’t seem to get. If we can find a meaning in these myths and apply them to the stories of our own lives, why not? That’s what myths are for. The world didn’t end in the year 2000, but in a sense, it was reborn. The world is reborn every year, and every moment for that matter. The present renews itself eternally, and we’re reliving the past all the time, starting over from scratch. Death doesn’t change, and neither does birth. Perception doesn’t change. Time doesn’t change. Yet everything is changing all the time.

So what will happen when time resets itself in 2012? Maybe our tools and food, our fossil fuels and copyrighted corn will rise up and overthrow us, as they did to the wooden humans, and Sovereign Plumed Serpent and his cronies the Hurricane will create a fourth iteration of humanity, a further refinement on the flawed mold of the third. Or maybe there won’t be a need. Maybe we’ll have learned from the warnings of our predecessors, handed down to us in the form of myth and ruined cities overgrown with jungle, listened to the ticking of the universe’s clock, marked the time, and understood that we needed to change.

But it won’t happen with a bang, nor with a billion dollars’ worth of CGI destruction. It’ll happen over generations, just like it did the last time, and the time before that.

Long have I been familiar with the Grateful Dead ballad of that name, at whose lyrics I once giggled mischievously and thought I was getting away with something as I listened on my walkman headphones in bed late of a school night:

Come round the bend
You know it’s the end
The fireman screams and
The engine just gleams
Drivin’ that train
High on cocaine
Casey Jones you better
watch your speed

Years later I heard the traditional version by Mississippi John Hurt, with that one eerie verse that always sticks in my head, about his wife’s cold practicality upon hearing of her husband’s death:

Mrs. Casey when she heard the news
Sitting on her bedside, she was lacing up her shoes
Children, children now hold your breath
You will draw a pension at your Papa’s death

And of course there’s the Johnny Cash version… and Josh Ritter has a line about him in To the Dogs or Whoever, which I figured was a reference to all these other roots folk songs, since that’s sort of his M.O…. So I always assumed Casey Jones to be a purely folkloric figure, like Clementine, Peggy-o, John Henry, Fennario and Ichabod Crane. Specifically, I thought he was ye archetypal train engineer, in blue and white striped overalls with soot all over his face and a corncob pipe in his mouth, whistling dixie as he drove The Little Engine that Could up that mountain.

Not so, as it turns out. In fact, Casey Jones was a real, flesh and blood train conductor in the 1890s, who was so dedicated to his job and so good at it that he ended up as a national hero, with his face on a stamp and everything. He once saved a little girl from getting run over by a train by climbing down out of the cab onto the cowcatcher and snatching her up right off the tracks. He drove the famous “cannonball run” at eighty miles an hour between Chicago and New Orleans. He had a special way of blowing a train whistle so that whenever a train he was driving pulled into a station, you knew it was him at the tiller. And in 1900, on a densely foggy night passing through Memphis, Tennessee, he stayed onboard a doomed locomotive to save its passengers and crew. There was a stationary train idling on the same track as his own, and though he couldn’t prevent the collision, he managed to slow the train enough before impact that he himself was the only casualty.

Hence all these songs about him.

And what do you know, there’s an even older version of the song, by a fellow named Wallace Saunders, who was a friend of the real Casey Jones and worked with him on the railroad, which tells the story of his death.

Trust research to destroy your childhood illusions.

Foucault’s Pendulum is an 800-page novel about the representatives of a vanity press, hell-bent on fabricating historical conspiracy for profit, who discover too late that they have fabricated truth, or something sufficiently indistinguishable from truth in the minds of its beholders to be worth killing for. The Name of the Rose is a 1000-page novel about the catastrophic failure of an investigation into a series of murders committed in a repetitive, mazelike library devoted to absurdly complex, meaningless religio-bureaucratic apocrypha.

Borges never wrote a novel. He wrote sketches for novels, two- or three-page treatments, spare and ephemeral, yet which laid out the bones of ideas so fathomless and colossal that, coming to the end of one, my thoughts are pulled in as many directions as though I had just completed something four hundred pages long.

I remember reading a comment of his upon this preference, in which—with that typical combination of self-effacing humility and absurdist ambition—he judged himself both unskilled or undisciplined enough to muster the great effort required to go from sketch to novel and consummately uninterested in the task, since another idea just as immense was always waiting. It was the creation of such kernels, the ambiguity and the possibility of them, that interested him most. Or so I recall him having said. Perhaps I am projecting. I’ve read so much Borges, in so many obscure, pencil-thin editions with titles varying endlessly upon the motif of tigers multiplied by optical illusion, dug from wonderful book-glue-mildew-smelling university library stacks where I had no business being, that I’ll likely never find that precise quote again. I have a vague impression of it coming from an introduction to someone else’s work—a heterogeneous anthology or a collection by Bioy-Casares…. But it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that at the end of this passage forswearing the long form, Borges encourages other authors to do with his ideas what he will not: make novels of them.

And so we get these labyrinthine, Borgesian novels of the real and unreal, of conspiratory mass-self-delusion and headlong dives into the carefully-delineated infinite, things like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Carlos Ruis Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, to name two distant poles within that spectrum. And we get Umberto Eco.

And me. I hope. Someday.

What follows are Brillat-Savarin’s rules for achieving the perfect meal. As far as I’m concerned, among the poetry of the rational they ought to be considered on par with The Art of War, Ovid’s Art of Love, and the Phaedo. They open with a solemn invocation to a Muse of Eating invented on the spot, and they close with immortality—but what’s in between is the stuff of everyday, run-of-the-mill happiness.

But the impatient reader may ask, how, in this year of grace 1825, must a meal be contrived in order to combine the conditions which procure the pleasures of the table in the highest degree?

That question I am about to answer. Compose yourselves, readers, and pay attention; Gasterea inspires me, the prettiest of all the Muses; I shall be clearer than an oracle, and my precepts will go down the ages.

Let the number of guests be not more than twelve, so that the talk may be constantly general;

Let them be chosen with different occupations but similar tastes, and with such points of contact that the odious formalities of introduction can be dispensed with;

Let the dining-room be well lighted, the cloth impeccably white, and the atmosphere maintained at a temperature of from sixty to seventy degrees;

Let the men be witty without being too pretentious, and the women charming without being too coquettish;

Let the dishes be few in number, but exquisitely choice, and the wines of the first quality, each in its class;

Let the service of the former proceed from the most substantial to the lightest, and of the latter, from the mildest to the most perfumed;

Let the progress of the meal be slow, for dinner is the last business of the day; and let the guests conduct themselves like travellers due to reach their destination together;

Let the coffee be piping hot, and the liqueurs chosen by a connoisseur;

Let the drawing-room be large enough to allow a game at cards to be arranged for those who cannot do without, yet still leave space for postprandial conversations;

Let the guests be detained by the charms of the company and sustained by the hope that the evening will not pass without some further pleasure;

Let the tea be not too strong, the toast artistically buttered, and the punch mixed with proper care;

Let retirement begin not earlier than eleven o’clock, but by midnight let everyone be in bed.

Whoever has been present at a meal fulfilling all these conditions may claim to have witnessed his own apotheosis; and for each of them who which is forgotten or ignored, the guests will suffer a proportionate decrease of pleasure.

—Jean-Anthelme Brillat Savarin, Physiologie du goût, ou Méditations de gastronomie transcendante

It’s hard not to notice: the man’s got an ego on him. But he’s not wrong, is he? This stuff is gold. Interpret some of these things metaphorically, the way I do, say, that line about giants in the bible, and he could really be talking about my local writing group in Noho the other week, a recent weekend with my gaming pals, a night of blissful exhaustion and bisquick pizza cooked over a propane burner on a trail somewhere under the stars, or a protracted dinner with the Homeless Moon. Some of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

is tonight, at the Barnes & Noble on 1741 Willow Street in Manchester, NH. Four of the five writers who make up the Homeless Moon will be there, plus a whole bunch of other clever and hilarious people, each of whom will tell a story in five minutes or less. It’s great, silly fun.

And I’ll be reading a new William-O story. Woo!

William-O the Pirate King, if you are unfamiliar, is my swashbuckling, one-eyed cat hero, who battles foes both real and supernatural in defense of his farm and family.

If you can’t make it, fear not, I’ll probably post an mp3 of the new story here in a couple of weeks.

Liz Hand closed her summer reading LJ post the other day with an ironical apology for the absence from her list of any Proust, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky. What means this? thought I, who happened to be reading Anna Karenina. I’ve heard of War and Peace referred to as the end-all antithesis of mindless beach reading. And I have no doubt at one point or another performed similar pseudo-intellectual self-flagellation with Crime and Punishment. But I didn’t exactly pick up Anna Karenina for that purpose—it was more just one of those spur of the moment things, at a loss for reading material before a bookshelf assembled for other tastes than my own. And you know, I don’t actually feel particularly oppressed by it. Granted, I haven’t attempted to get anywhere in the book while using it as a sun-shield on the beach. But for someone who reads as slowly as I do, it actually has been flying right by. No comparison to Dostoevsky, really, either for the bleakness of the material or the density of the prose. It might even be easier to decipher than somebody like Jane Austen, who among ye classic 19th century novelists is much more likely to be stereotyped as a beach reading option.

I’m not very well-versed in Tolstoy. I’ve read “The Death of Ivan Ilych” a few times, which strikes me as being much more tongue-in-cheek satirical than Anna Karenina, more influenced by Gogol. The main intent in Anna Karenina, rather than sending up the ills of a society as a whole or attacking its hypocrisies, seems to be to illustrate, in painstaking nuance and verisimilitude, the series of core character types and variations on the core that make up society and cause it to function as it does. So we get a lot of extensive, internal character sketches, an incredible number of and an incredible willingness to shift between POVs. The elements of plot and conflict seem very deliberately designed to provide opportunities to show us these characters in all possible lights and from all angles. Which I guess makes it less titillating, less of a page-turner, than say a Pride & Prejudice or Crime & Punishment, if either of those works can be said to possess any such quality. But it also means reading Anna Karenina requires less vestedness from the reader, allowing it to be picked up and laid aside with surprising carelessness. And since what I’m reading for isn’t the next twist in a gothic romance, but rather the next facet of a wise and exhaustive survey into human nature, I feel much freer to dally and skim as suits the moment and my mood. So—not your typical summer reading in the usual sense, but for me, at least, it works really well.

My favorite parts are the occasional, brief tidbits of generalization Tolstoy interjects to explicate a character action or tendency we have just been shown, but which in almost every case can be applied with equal ease to every situation ever encountered, in real life or in fiction, among people of the type being discussed. Because Tolstoy is just that perceptive.

This, for example, is the reaction of the tortured, true artist Mihailov to the idle hobbying of the bored, wealthy Count Vronsky. One of the bitterest instances I’ve come across, but I like it.

He knew that Vronsky could not be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew that he and every other dilettante had a perfect right to paint what they liked, but it was distasteful to him. A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to take his doll and go and sit down in the presence of a man in love, and start caressing his doll as the lover caressed his beloved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Mihailov had just such a feeling of distaste at Vronksy’s painting: he was amused, irritated, sorry, and affronted.

I’m pretty sure I’ve been on both ends of that feeling.

Titus Petronius Niger, the man scholarly consensus seems to agree is the author of the scandalous, fragmentary narrative of debaucherous and decadent abandon known as the Satyricon, was a consul in Nero’s senate in AD 62; subsequently, he became something akin to Nero’s personal social director, granted the unofficial title “Arbiter of Elegance”. Tacitus, in his Annals, describes Petronius as a man who treated idleness as his profession, “one who made luxury a fine art”. “In the end,” says Tacitus, “Nero’s jaded appetite regarded nothing as enjoyable or refined unless Petronius had given sanction to it.”

In AD 66, after a rival poisoned Nero’s affections against him, Petronius made effort to flee Rome, was thwarted, and so decided to preempt his likely torture and execution with suicide. He threw an extravagant dinner party, during which he opened his veins and bled himself slowly to death to the accompaniment of feasting, wine, music, satiric poetry, and pithy conversation.

There’s a dude who stuck to his principles.

I think I’ve been aware of Petronius as a historical figure for a while, but had until not so very long ago considered him among the ranks of Machiavelli, the Marquis de Sade, and Nero himself: egomaniacal pretend intellectuals championing amorality for no other purpose than to further their own fame—the people who brought us Charles Manson.

I have to admit, though, that hedonism, at least in a watered-down form, has gained a certain abstract appeal for me. Pseudopagan pantheism does seem to lend itself to a philosophy of pleasure. And the ideas involved do have a great deal of practical relevance for me, if not necessarily as a human being, then as a writer. What with the centaurs and all.

So I’ve been reading the Satyricon—in a used Penguin Classics edition, translated by J.P. Sullivan, which is a lot of fun in that it couches all the homoerotic innuendo and hypermasculine grandstanding in the terms of stiff-upper-lip 20th century British slang. And it really is a pleasure. The characters are actually quite reasonable people, even wise, in their approach to their debaucheries. As a window on the culture and period, it’s utterly fascinating, an unplumbable resource. And the parallels with modern culture—and by extension, with human culture across geography and era, whenever a society has passed its peak—are just astounding. For example, certain passages—street chases and a vicious love triangle between two men and a boy—remind me very much of the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. The wealth of pithy witticisms evoke Oscar Wilde, the party scenes Rabelais. Even the scene structure and pacing seem to prophesy a good few thousand years into the future.

All these parallels with later stuff are so numerous and engrossing, it took me awhile to realize that the Satyricon also looks a lot like a prose reinterpretation of the epic poetry form. There are nested stories, comparisons to the exploits of gods and legendary heroes, and points at which the narrative is temporarily arrested for a long soliloquy on aesthetics or philosophy—though, in the case of the Satyricon, such soliloquies are as likely to be about the etiquette of sharing a nubile youth among a roomful of older men as about the death of art.

In short, I highly recommend it to anybody with the capacity for patience and detachment necessary to look past all the gorging and fondling and see the Satyricon for the solid gold it is. If you appreciate the centaurs, I think you’ll be as fascinated by it as I am.

To close, a piece of ageless wisdom on the plight of the struggling writer from Eumolpus, the Satyricon’s sexpot poet:

‘No doubt about it. If a man sets his face against every temptation and starts off on the straight and narrow, he’s immediately hated because of his different ways. No one can approve of conduct different from his own. And secondly, those who are interested in piling up money don’t want anything else in life regarded as better than what they have themselves. So lovers of literature are sneered at by whatever means possible to show that they too are inferior to wealth.’

I just stumbled onto possibly the best object lesson in showing, not telling in fiction I’ll ever get.

In 2005, I wrote a story called “Hope and Erosion”, about a kingdom living in a sandcastle threatened by the rising tide. It was the second story I’d ever sold, to a Christian fantasy e-zine called Dragons, Knights and Angels. I was very proud of it at the time. At the time, it was the best story I’d ever written.

In 2004, all unbenknownst to me at the time, Jeffrey Ford wrote a story called “The Annals of Eelin Ok”, which was published in Datlow and Windling’s The Faery Reel, and won the Fountain Award for that year (and on whose website it can still be read for free). It’s based on the exact same premise: a tiny, fantastical being living out his life in a sandcastle made by human hands. His story is way better. I just listened to it on a Podcastle show from a couple weeks back, read by Rajan Khanna, who may be my new favorite podcast reader—his voice is understated, quiet and calm and eminently listenable, but somehow capable of hitting just the right emotional notes with the strength of a clapper striking a cathedral bell. It almost made me cry.

Here’s the lesson: everything about a story is more powerful when you’re experiencing it right there with the character. “Hope and Erosion” is told like a parable. Hermit, the hero, is a hero in the classic fairytale sense, the way Sir Gawain is a hero, or the Red Cross Knight. Which is fine, but there’s no understanding that kind of hero as a person. He’s away up there on the pedestal of myth.

Eelin Ok is a fairy, but he’s a person. His whole life is there on the page, his heart is open, and you’re in it.

I suppose this lesson may work better on me than on you, gentle reader, since you may not have had the luck to have written the exact same story as Jeffrey Ford. But if you feel so inclined, you might could get a similar effect if you read the two stories side by side.

Read the Jeff Ford story, anyway, if you haven’t. It’s awesome.