Sturgesia

In anticipation of the June 3 release of my second novel The Office of Shadow, I thought it would be fun to provide some background material for the book.

Each chapter begins with an epigram, taken from a variety of sources in the Fae world. Many are taken from Travels at Home and Abroad by one Stil-Eret. Here’s the epigram from Chapter one, taken from his essay “Light in Annwn.” Below it is a brief essay about Stil-Eret, and the manner in which his Travels were compiled.

The sun in Annwn perches eternally on the horizon, swimming in lazy circles that allow it to fully rise for only three hours each day. Never lighter than morning nor darker than dusk, Annwn exists in perpetual transition — always arriving, never arrived.

Annwn was discovered by the Fae long ago and was, for many centuries, a bastion of the pure Elvish folk. But it was later discovered by men from the Nymaen world, those called human, and conquered by them. Over time the two races mingled, and have now become one. Nei- ther Fae nor Nymaen, they are simply Annwni, with some of the qualities of each.

There are many villages in Annwn, but only one city, named Blood of Arawn.The city is built upon seven great ramparts of earth and stone dug out of the otherwise flat grasslands of that world.The oldest buildings of that city—the coliseum, the Penn’s villa, the temples—are built of marble, but many of these structures have since crumbled and have been replaced with more modest structures of brick. Only the obelisk at the center of the great market, called Romwll’s Needle, remains unblem- ished after fifteen centuries. Conventional wisdom holds that a pair of thaumaturges sit in a stone room beneath the obelisk, whispering bindings without cease, for it is believed that if the needle were ever to fall, then Blood of Arawn would fall soon after, and all of Annwn crumble
into dust.

Stil-Eret has become known as the first travel writer, and possibly still the best, even three hundred years after his death. He became renowned, but only posthumously. He began his career as a servant, a steward in the employ of the Secretary of States, Lord Amil Nybera. Though a commoner, Still Eret had been taught to read and write by the Arcadian priestess in his village, and he might have gone to University had his parents been able to afford it.

It became Stil-Eret’s practice to take detailed notes of his surroundings during his travels with Lord Nybera. He recorded not just the sights and sounds of these distant lands, but also the smells, the tactile sensations, and the emotions that welled up in him. These diaries were deeply personal, and it never would have occurred to him to publish them, had it not been for a chance meeting with an invalid girl.

Sinsi Alweth was the daughter of a wealthy merchant named Granwell Alweth, who had amassed a great fortune early in life, and spent his early retirement entertaining guests as noble as would deign to attend. It was during one of these fetes that Stil-Eret first encountered Sinsi; he stumbled on her quite by accident in a courtyard in her father’s house. It was a cool evening and Stil-Eret had come outside to take in the night air. She was lying in a wheeled bed, staring up at the stars, the fingers of her right hand trailing in the waters of a fountain. She had no feeling in her body below her neck save for those fingers.

Taking pity on the poor lonely girl, Still Eret took out his journal and began reading to her of his travels. He described the wind-whirled grasses of Annwn, the water dances of Mag Mell, and the curious frisson one felt when traveling through the locks. She was entranced.

When the hour had grown late, Sinsi’s nurse demanded that Stil-Eret leave so the girl could return to her rooms. Sinse begged Stil-Eret to return, and whether it was the starlight in the girl’s eyes or the simple satisfaction of being wanted, Stil Eret found himself counting the hours. He returned the next night and the night after, and gladly, for he quickly began to find Sinsi’s company as enthralling as she found his. He read to her for twelve nights, until finally his journal was at and end.

“I want to hear more,” she said, running the tips of her fingers over Stil-Eret’s arm. “I want to taste the salt in the air at Hawthorne by the sea, stand on the great steps in Estacana, feel the mud between my toes in the swamps of the Gnomics.”

“Would that I could,” said Stil-Eret, “but I go only where my master goes.”

The next day, Granwell Aleth came to Stil-Eret at his home. Sinsi was dying, he told Stil-Eret, of the wasting sickness that was so prevalent in those days. But he believed that Stil-Eret’s stories had given the girl a new lease on life; her cheeks were redder, her eyes brighter. He’d begun to believe that she might actually recover. He offered pay Stil-Eret’s expenses to travel wherever his daughter wished, on the condition that Still Eret would return and beguile Sensi with the tales of his voyages. Stil-Eret was loathe to leave the girl, but the world called to him, and he pledged to do just as Granwell Aleth asked.

And so Stil-Eret left his position with the Secretary of States and lit out for lands near and far, visiting places that no other in the City Emerald had seen in centuries, if ever. He stood on the balconies at the Locks of Mab’s Glorious Union. He sailed to the Eastern Isles and swam with whales. He journeyed farther south into the Gnomics than any Fae before or since, and sailed to the center of the Lake of Tears. And after every trip, he returned to the home of Granwell Aleth and regaled Sinsi with his words, so evocative and detailed that the girl felt as though she had been transported, allowed to leave not just her bed, but the boundaries of Seelie experience.

After his third trip, he pledged his troth to her. After his fifth, they were wed. Their marriage was never consummated in a physical sense, but perhaps their love was all the purer for it.

It was during his sixth journey, to the Nymaen world, that she finally succumbed to her illness, despite Stel-Eret’s and her father’s best efforts. Upon his return, Stil-Eret was heartbroken. He never unpacked his chest, but left the city the next morning, traveling West, never to be seen again.

After five years had past, and Granwell Aleth reached the conclusion that Stil-Eret was either dead or missing forever, the merchant compiled Stil-Eret’s writings and published them as Travels at Home and Abroad, with a lengthy dedication to his daughter. The book did poorly; fewer than two hundred copies were ever sold. The Fae are a notoriously parochial and incurious race.

Sadly, not a single copy of the Travels remains. In fact, Stil-Eret might have been forgotten entirely had it not been for the court poet Everide, who decades later chanced upon a copy of the book in Titania’s library, and learned the story of its publication from Aleth’s grandson. From this, Everide composed the Romance of Sinsi and the Traveler, which was a modest success in its day. It was not until a century later that scholars began to realize the importance of what Everide had preserved.

The only remnants we have today of Stil-Eret are the excerpts that Everide quotes (at length, happily) within the text of his romance. Further, Everide was more interested in poetry than precision, so it is not known how much of Stil-Eret’s original text has been modified for the sake of literature. Yet despite these impediments, modern scholars recognize the remaining fragments of the Travels as one of the great works of Fae letters, and many of his journeys have never been duplicated.

I’ll be at the San Diego Comic Con in a few days; here’s my schedule in case you’d like to come say hello or tell me off to my face:

WEDNESDAY
6-7pm – SIGNING: Vertigo booth

THURSDAY
2-3pm – SIGNING: Vertigo booth
5-6pm – PANEL: JSA (Room 5AB)

FRIDAY
12-1pm – SIGNING: Vertigo booth
5:30am-6:30pm – PANEL: Vertigo Editorial Presentation (Room 5AB)

SATURDAY
3-4pm – SIGNING: Vertigo booth
4:45-5:45pm – PANEL: Vertigo Voices: Fables Forum (Room 6DE)

SUNDAY
10:30am-11:30pm – SIGNING: Vertigo booth

I am very personable and do not bite — so please feel free to come and talk. But don’t ask me for money, ’cause I’ve been burned before with that.

Next saturday, from 2-3 pm, I’ll be signing copies of Midwinter (and presumably some comic TPB’s as well) at the Barnes and Noble in Round Rock, Texas.

Link to details.

My dad is an interesting guy. I could go on for hours about what a decent human being he is, how he always took care of me and my brother when we were growing up, or how he taught me virtues like responsibility and honesty.

But I’m not going to talk about those things, because although they’re great, but they’re also pretty boring. Instead, I’m going to talk about some of the pointless, silly, and very dad-esque things that my dad taught me, which I hope to pass on to my children when they’re old enough.

Here’s one. Did you know that you can spell the word “fish” G-H-O-T-I? It’s true!

• gh as in “enough”
• o as in “women”
• ti as in “motion”

That’s pretty silly. I might argue that the true spelling ought to be G-H-O-T-I-O, according to that formula, but now we’re just getting ridiculous.

Along the same lines, dad would spell “bird” as B-1-R-D and “seagull” as C-G-U-11. In my hazy recollection this has something to do with his being a Navy pilot, although I can’t imagine why Navy pilots would be interested in spelling birds with numerals. They should really be worried more about not flying into them.

My dad taught me to never split infinitives, and that prepositions are bad things to end sentences with. The rules themselves aren’t pointless, but the delivery is pretty silly.

By the same token, he taught me the difference between “who” and “whom,” and how to conjugate English verbs in the subjunctive. Both of which, sadly, are becoming more and more pointless with every passing year. Would that they weren’t.

Whenever we’d ask my dad how long something would take, he’d answer “How Long is a Chinaman.” I don’t really know what that means, but I thought I’d throw it in anyway. Maybe one of you can explain it. Note that this was a long time ago, when saying “Chinaman” wasn’t generally thought of as offensive.

Along those same lines, when my dad was really pissed off at us, he’d say, “If you don’t stop that, it’s going to be ‘Katie bar the door.’” Again, I have no idea what that means, but I know that I never cared to find out.

My dad taught me how to make a little waterspout by holding part of your fist underwater and squeezing in just the right way. That one, I’ve discovered, impresses the hell out of little kids.

My dad taught me that hay is for horses. Again and again and again and again.

He taught me how to fish with a rod and reel, which wouldn’t be pointless for most people but is to me because I hate fishing. See also: soldering.

If we’re being perfectly honest, the list should include a number of rather off-color jokes, but we won’t get into those because most of the ones I remember would be considered extraordinarily offensive in this day and age.

My dad taught us how to make a caculator read GOOSEEGG when turned upside-down (although it was my brother’s friend Mike who showed us how to make it say BOOBIES, which we much preferred).

So yes, my father did indeed teach me some really cool things (how to fire a gun, how to ride a motorcyle), and some really worthwhile things (physics, calculus, computer programming, grammar) and some really important things (honor, ethics, decency.) But in the end, there’s just one thing that really matters. And that’s the little waterspout you make with your fist. Because man, that is pretty fucking cool.

Whenever I find a newspaper lying around at a coffee shop or a doctor’s office, I don’t go for the sports, or the front page, or the comics. I like obituaries.

Maybe “like” isn’t the right word. I’m engrossed by obituaries. Obituaries are one of the few places in life where we’re forced to confront death as a real entity, as something that could happen to you, or to me. It’s there, in black and white, in the paper. Carol and Alan and “Bozo” and Wallace (all names from yesterday’s obits) are all dead and there’s something to be gained by confronting it.

Of course, we don’t really confront death even when we’re confronting it. You don’t often see, “Joe died,” in an obituary. You see, “Joe was drawn into the arms of his Heavenly Father,” or “Joe passed away,” or “Joe set off on a new adventure” (my favorite). Sometimes you get a glimpse at the cause of death, but only if it’s something totally mundane; “Betty passed away in her sleep after a long struggle with liver cancer.” You never see, “Jake electrocuted himself,” or “Biff overdosed on caffeine and had an aneurysm. ” And you never ever ever see “Jane committed suicide.” We, as a people, are utterly freaked out by suicide.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting closer to 40 that I’ve started re-examining my ideas about death. You cruise for a long time on the notion that you’re not going to be dying anytime soon. Certainly when I was 23 and making all of the most dangerous and irresponsible choices of my life, it never occurred to me that the consequence of any of those choices might be my own demise. There’s a name for that feeling of invulnerability: the Personal Fable. I like that name. We are each the protagonist of our own Personal Fable, and at 23 we haven’t gotten far enough along in the story for it to make any sense were the protagonist to die. “Siddhartha left his father’s house and set off to find enlightenment. But on the way, he stepped on a rusty nail, and died of tetanus.” That just doesn’t read right. But you start pushing 40 and you notice that people your age do in fact die from time to time and it starts to eat at you. If you die before the age of 40, they’ll say it’s a tragedy. If you die after 40, they’ll say “She was so young.” As if to say, “Yeah, at this age people are known to buy it, but usually not this early.”

So, yes, I admit that part of the reason I read the obituaries is to inoculate myself against the fear of death. Why do we get so weirded out by something that is an utter certainty? It’s scary, sure. But also kind of intoxicating, even liberating. Life is so much bigger than the mundane, day-to-day bullshit that I’m all caught up in at any given moment. Life, which is what you’re sitting in the middle of at this very moment, is really fucking important. It matters. The acknowledgment of death is a wake-up call to your ego, saying Time is short. This is all fleeting. Live now.

There’s something else trippy about reading the obituaries. Very often you’ll get a three or four paragraph summary of the deceased’s life, from birth, through war and marriage and career and retirement and death. (You also get a list of everyone still living that they’re related to for reasons I don’t quite understand. Seems like if my dad died, I wouldn’t need anyone to tell me that I was related to him. Maybe it’s so my friends will be nice to me? Are my friends reading the obituaries?) In most of these summaries there’s a certain sameness, especially those of my grandparents’ generation, so many of whom were raised in the Depression, went off to war, came home and started familes and careers in insurance or advertsing or wholesale grain distributing, worked for a long time, retired, played golf or hunted or fished, and then got really old and died. Nothing particularly exceptional about any of it, but presented as a neat little package, there’s a lovely elegance to it. The wonder of having lived through all that suffering and strangeness and confusion and boredom and melancholy and contentment and pleasure and joy.

Now here’s the trippy part. If you read enough of them, the epiphany hits you: this is true for everyone. Everyone you see, everywhere you go. Everyone you’ve ever met, seen in the grocery store, talked to on the phone, flipped past in the phone book, fought past in a crowded movie theater. Each of these people has a life that is filled with dreams and disappointments and hopes and fragility and at least some measure of beauty and grace. Each one of them has a point of view, a way of looking at the world. Each of them, except for a very few unlucky ones, loves and is loved in return. Think about how complex and textured your own life is and then apply that complexity to everyone around you. Histories. Secrets. Sins, angst, romance, revenge, ecstasy, violence, terror. It’s all out there, all woven into the fabric of every single person. If you try to drink it all in at once it will totally blow your fucking mind. Give it a shot sometime. The next time you’re standing in a crowded room, or driving past an apartment building, or sitting in the bleachers. Try to imagine the breadth of life that inhabits each person around you. It is intoxicating and fearsome, and it is all around you all the time.

Just like death.

For some reason it was the suicide of David Foster Wallace that made my own mortality seem icily real. Wallace was just a few years older than I am. He was simply brilliant; Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books of all time. And so I felt a certain kinship with Wallace, and I always felt that here was someone who had “made it.” Someone like me who was intellectual and self-conscious and obsessed with the strange minutiae of life, and he’d written this brilliant book and it was beloved by many, and he was the toast of the town, and there’s that part of me that thinks, “Well, once you’ve gotten to that point, you’ve made it. You’re safe. Everything’s okay.”

But of course that’s not how it works. You never “make it.” That would imply that your life has come to an end. David Foster Wallace had achieved a certain kind of perfection, and what it instilled in him was a terror that he would neve be able to reach such great heights again. That instead of having the pressure off of his shoulders, it was now that much more intense. He was a person who had suffered terribly with depression. The bad stuff. The serious sit-on-the-bed-in-a-darkened-room-with-a-gun-in-your-mouth kind of depression. Very depressed people often fantasize about killing themselves, sort of a wish-fulfillment thing, which seems very weird if you’ve never been really depressed, but there it is. But for David Foster Wallace, one day it just got to be too much and he opted out.

Confronting the idea of death is one thing — confronting the idea that life might one day become too much to live is something that nobody wants to dwell on. The title Infinite Jest, of course, comes from Hamlet, Hamlet describing the old Fool Yorrick’s personality as he regards the dead man’s skull. The “infinite” part seems fairly leaden from that perspective. Hamlet is repelled by the thought that the man who carried him on his back as a child has come to this ignoble end, and it strikes him that this is what happens to everyone. He makes the weak joke to Horatio, “Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?” Even Alexander the Great is dust, and that dust could end up anywhere. Hamlet sees life as absurd and painfully so. Probably Wallace did, too.

I try not to. I like the obituaries becuase there’s a certain charm in them, a hominess. The obits say, we’re all in this together, pal. You and me and Carol and Alan and “Bozo” (whose nickname was never explained, more’s the pity). We’re all headed in the same direction sooner or later, and so maybe it’s not so big a deal.

And anyway, it’s not like it’s going to happen anytime soon.

When I was a kid, as now, I had an extremely active imagination. One of the games I used to play frequently was this: when in the car, going over a hill or around the corner, I would imagine that on the other side there would be an ocean. There would be a sparkling seashore with a town nestled at the water’s edge and we would be driving toward it, instead of wherever it was that we were actually going (the grocery store, school, etc.). And even though it never happened, I retained that childlike faith in the one-day appearance of that Mythic Ocean for many years. If not this time, then maybe the next. But each failure took its tiny toll; it’s the same feeling you get when you realize you haven’t won the lottery. There was that brief moment that you thought, “Well . . . maybe,” and then that tiniest of hopes was dashed. You probably barely noticed it was gone.

Right after I moved to San Francisco in my mid-twenties, I found myself on a bus on a quiet street (the buses in that city are electric, and run connected to wires above the street). The bus mounted a hill and then turned left across the pinnacle. I looked down and there was my Mythic Ocean. Okay, not technically an Ocean but a Bay, San Francisco Bay, which is cooler than any real ocean anyway because it has Alcatrazz in the middle of it. It was a very brief moment, maybe two or three seconds before the bus passed out of view of the Bay, but it was as though that childhood hope against hope had been handed to me on a silver platter. It wasn’t magical in the supernatural sense, but it was the closest I’ve ever come. It wasn’t an actualization, but more of a teaser-trailer. This is what it will be like.

And yet I still haven’t given up on the Mythical Ocean. That one is still out there, lurking, waiting. Someday, I continue to believe, I will turn a corner in Waco, Texas or Kansas City, Missouri and there it will be, glittering, sailboats skittering across its surface.

I just realized the other day that this same hope exists, albeit on a much smaller scale, in my gmail. Every time I look and see that the tab reading Gmail – Inbox has become Gmail – Inbox (1), indicating the arrival of something new, that same small hope whispers to me: This is it! This could be the one! The email that you’ve been waiting for! Now, What the content of that Magic Email might be, I don’t know. Maybe that I’ve been recognized as the rightful ruler of Bhutan. Maybe that a movie producer has deciced to option a story I wrote my junior year of college called “Conscience and the Letter Q.” The little hopelet that rears up in me never gets very far in its fevered reasoning. It just shouts This is it! and lets me fill in the details.

But unlike oceans, which rarely turn up unexpectedly, sometimes you do get nice emails, like the one that told me that I was nominated for an Eisner for Jack of Fables (I lost, but not via email). Which maybe makes it all the worse when you realize that your new email is for penis enlargement, or a forwarded joke from your wife’s aunt, God bless her, or just some seemingly random string of Cyrillic characters, that may contain the secrets of the Universe, but probably are also advertising penis enlargement. Email hopes are dashed in degrees.

Still, the hope remains. Somewhere in The Sentimental Education, Flaubert notes that the excitement of visiting a prostitute for the first time turned out to be far more pleasurable than the act itself (or something along those lines; it’s been years). Maybe this is the allure of the Mythic Ocean and the Magic Email. They are embodied anticipation. They will never come, and that makes the hope for them remain utterly pure.