Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 is immediately interesting and powerful. One element that stands out in the novel is Bolaño’s love and devotion to his characters and his method of letting them be and letting them go where their natures take them. That’s a pretty sweeping way of talking about Pelletier, Morini, Amalfitano and Faith (as if they were out of Bolaño’s control, that’s not really what I mean). After the first few parts, beyond the devotion to Pelletier’s and Faith’s obsessions or drives or world views, there’s also an important devotion to geographic and linguistic spaces. Europe, for example, as a place that Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton move across as they attend conferences or visit each other, is treated as a collection of points. London is mentioned, as are other cities, but without Norton in London, or Pelletier in Paris, London and Paris mean nothing. Norton, in 2666, in a sense, is London, for without her, London would be meaningless to Pelletier. This spatial element in the novel makes Pelletier relative to London as Norton is relative to Paris. This spatial relationship makes their love stories that much more powerful.

This is a significant idea in the novel, especially in The Part About the Crimes, where, in Santa Teresa, a fictional city in the state of Sonora, which borders Arizona, numerous women are being murdered, which immediately calls to mind the feminicidios in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from my home town of El Paso. For Bolaño it’s the women that matter and Santa Teresa just happens to be the place where the murders are occurring, and Santa Teresa just happens to be a common point where all the characters must converge. Which brings me back to the first point: because place becomes a backdrop, the characters, and this means every character, from criminals, college professors, and prostitutes, are all given human respect in the novel and, at least in my mind, just the right amount of detail, as if the narratives inside 2666 develop from explosive, nuanced, elegant, and almost distinct parts. This doesn’t mean Paris means nothing or that places are placeless, it means that the people of The Part About the Critics, which is a fabulous love story, are given every ounce of energy and attention.

Examples coming. Because they’re fun.

The last two stories in the 100 Days project, currently at number 88, had interesting development. The New Geometry and The Voice happened in different ways.

The New Geometry was a late story and somewhat of a struggle. I woke up Sunday morning after a late reading at New London’s Hygienic at about 8:30 or 9, which is late for me. The dog was somewhat troubled, slashing his tail at the bottom of the stairs, and the cats were already chasing after each other. The New Geometry, which began with “The Scratch” as its title, started with an impulse image just to get things going. A man finds a scratch on his car. At first I thought the shape of the scratch would be an unnamed geometric shape (so in the back of my head I had an echo of geometry as a theme or a persistent image) and that this shape would be repeated on various other cars or places.

When I hit on the father, a suggestion came from the mother in the story, that the father would somehow return, hence the conflict and the new title. When this occurred to me, it called for fairly extensive revision, and the last item was the building facade with the chess board.

The Voice was influenced by Bolaño’s character Amalfitano, who (where I am in the novel at the moment) is hearing voices. Last night when I went to bed, I figured I’d write a story about a man hearing a voice, too. I knew how it would start but didn’t know what would happen after the line: “The man heard a voice that told him sensible things.” The next question is obvious: what are the sensible things? Next idea: if a man hears a voice telling him to do sensible things, this wouldn’t necessarily be pleasant. In the end, it seems to me that after killing the voice, the man is left in a pretty odd state, which may be entirely normal, but, then again, maybe not.

Anyway, Bolaño’s 2666 is definitely getting under my skin. Amalfitano’s tale is an extended lesson in uncomfortable landscapes, like being suspended over sharp rocks with just a few and maybe frayed strings holding you up.

In Marisha Pessl’s novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the narrator, Blue van Meer, describes a locker encounter with Zach. The encounter bears some scrutiny:

He was a tall, tan, supremely American-looking kid: square chin, big straight teeth, eyes an absurd jacuzzi blue. I knew, vaguely, based on chatter during labs, he was shy, a little bit funny . . . also captain of the soccer team. His lab partner was his supposed ex-girlfriend, Lonny, cocaptain of Gallway Spirit, a girl with soggy platinum hair, a fake tan and a marked tendency to break the equipment. No cloud chamber, potentiometer, friction rod or alligator clip was safe with her. On Mondays, when the class wrote up our results on the dry-erase board, our teacher, Ms. Gershon, consistently threw out Lonny and Zach’s findings, as they always flew daringly in the face of Modern Science . . .

He was handsome, sure, but as Dad once said, there are people who’d completely missed their decade, were born at the wrong time–not in the intellectually gifted sense, but due to a certain look on their face more suitable to the Victorian Age than, say, the Me Decade . . . ” (127)

The above are cuts from two paragraphs, the second paragraph difficult to logically interpret. The sections come directly after Blue has supplied her name to Zach in the manner of a “spasm-swallow.” It might be difficult to distinguish Zach in the first paragraph, even with the amount of imagery (I can’t see “absurd jacuzzi blue”) that describes his appearance and some of his behaviors, as in the lab. All of it is a mirror back onto Blue, revealing her concerns, her presentational style, and her inability to self-edit, layering image upon image, reference upon reference, to paint a relatively banal encounter. Blue is vastly well-read, naively punctilious, and awkward in her prep-school surrounds, involved with Blueblood acquaintances and their adventures. She adds to Zach’s temporal nature with this: “And maybe he had a secret diamond earring, maybe a sequined glove, maybe he even had a good song at the end with three helpings of keyboard synthesizer, but know one would know, because if you weren’t born in your decade you never made it to the ending, you floated around in your middle . . . ” and I’m left a tad bit confused.

Sometimes Pessl is deft with an image. Other times, there are odd trips and contradictions, as in “He ran his right hand through his hair and it was absurdly knot free like a shampoo commercial” and “I could feel his minty breath on my forehead, and he was staring at me with his eyes the color of a kiddy pool (blue, green, suspicious hints of yellow). He was searching my face as if he took me to be a cruddy masterpiece in somebody’s attic and if he scrutinized my deft use of color and shading as well as the direction of my brush strokes, he’d figure out who my artist was” (128).

Blue’s youth would certainly fixate on Zach’s appearance. Her inquisitiveness might certainly call for interesting figures. Throughout the novel Pessl’s approach amounts sometimes to interesting surprises. But it also leads to blurry edges, confusion, and imprecision. What color, for example, are Zach’s eyes? And why does it matter so much?

Despite this, I’m enjoying digging out the story.

Somewhere in the story The Day I Became a Marigold this is written:

The Marigolds celebrated on their front lawn. We’d watch from our porches as they turned and turned in unison and then lit fires and roasted pigs and ate with paper plates. The Marigolds sat in the grass. One Marigold drifted out of the sky on a parachute, landed on the highest eave, and declared, “I’m mayor now.”

The Marigolds were many and elusive. I went to school with one of them. He’d tell me on our walks home about the Trips, the Uncles, and the Oddities in various rooms, and when I told him about mine he said, “I wish I were you.”

In the first paragraph the Marigolds celebrate on the lawn; they dance; they eat “on” paper plates, not “with,” which is a mistake. Anyway, “turned and turned in unison” is an image of absence–treating an image that goes unwritten in the text, as Marigolds making random motions in the grass makes little sense. And the line was written ahead of the image, which is a habit that I’ve become accustomed to and which took time to develop since May. Another instance, which I would describe as a “sharp” image, is that of the parachutist landing on “the highest eave,” a pretty good trick for someone on a parachute, I suppose, but for a Marigold, probably doable.

Writing short short stories is not about writing short short stories for the sake of being short or as a kind of genre hack, as “I went to the store, got my hand stuck in a pile of melons, and a quick thinking clerk yanked me free, and so I kissed him” is a brief narrative but not all that compelling. It’s about writing stories that compel and that work within a constrained space and time. Within that constrained space and time, they enclose a narrative and its world and necessary populations. Nor are they the result of some issue with attention span, as one one would need accuse the Italian poets of some cognitive disfunction in the 1600s for writing sonnets.

The Image, a story I wrote a few days ago for the 100 Days Project, is a breakthrough story.  It’s hard to express why.  After I finished the story, it became somewhat of a struggle to generate ideas for the following days as Part two and The Wisdomgivers have somewhat weak concepts, and weak concepts are hard to write through.  You’d think that after a breakthrough, things would fly, but that hasn’t been the case, as after The Image I suddenly became too serious, thinking, “Hey, The Image is a breakthrough.  This must mean something profound.”  Not necessarily.

It’s difficult to express why The Image got me excited.  The explanation probably won’t make a lot of sense.  But it has to do with voice.  Voice in writing is one of those sloppy ideas, too ofen promoted.  It can point to any number of meanings: the distinct tone of a piece of writing; a sense of authorial style which distinguishes one author from another; the presence of a speaker in a reader’s head; semantic or dictive uniqueness.  I mean it in another sense, that is, the voice the author hears as her or she lays material out on paper.  In The Image I heard a voice I’d never heard expressed in my own process.

In my ear, the voice appears somewhere here (just one example):

But it also promotes a likelihood of futures. Because the image may want the viewer to consider what the woman will do as a response to “I eat raw animal intestine” or “I never want to see you again” or “I just don’t like cats and never will” or “I hate Italian food” or “I have an untreatable disease.”

It begins with “But it also promotes” and ends with “disease,” and draws from the paragraph prior as lead in. The voice has a certain beat or cadence and served to listen for required edits. In going back, I could listen for the beat and remove phrasings that either didn’t matter or supplied useless information.

However, the voice didn’t serve me in The Robbers, which was an experiment in developing two references from The Image.

So, here are a series of questions: does every successful story develop its own sense of voice sensed by the author? How much does authorial voice influence character growth/nurture? Is voice too heavy of a concept to bother with much? Can a particular story voice or character flavor influence other unrelated stories? If voice is tied to one particular work, is it unnecessary thereafter for others, or simply untappable? Does this make short short stories or flash fictions less durable as a form than the longer, more sustained sounds in longer narrative works? Does this notion of voice disrupt lexia development in hypertext, heighten the importance of rhythmic and sound qualities in hypertext, or assist in developing narrative from links and link or semantic relationships?

100 Days is progressing. We have 86 more days to go. On my I end, I wonder what I’m learning after fourteen consecutive pieces of work, some of which have floated to the surface out of a swirl of ideas. Each has been different and with each I’ve tried to introduce something new.

There are a few rules. Each has to be a “story.” Each should be constructed in a day, which is somewhat of a task. Last year, I wrote a poem following Carianne’s work, and we’d talked about flipping the scenario as a follow-up project. Now that the scenario has been flipped I’ve been able to consider the differences between the poems and following Carianne and writing stories as a kick off to the day and then, throughout the day, considering how John’s, Jessica’s and other artists work influence my thinking.

Writing a story a day is not “the” task. Last year I was able to write several poems a day. When Carianne posted her work, I was ready to write something unique. But writing stories takes different muscles. While I write several ideas a day, and maybe even a few stories, I find myself moving into the next day sooner because I can’t let the ideas sit.

The first consideration is time before, time during, and time after. Warm up, work out, and cool down are pretty much usable metaphors. These periods are different for every story. Let’s say we need to get Hank onto the beach where he finds a body washed onto the sand (maybe it’s someone he knew, maybe someone who’d threatened him.) It may be that Hank isn’t at the beach. He’s at Harold’s place. Or he is at the beach and the “maybes” take center stage. (It me just a few moments to write this–time spent).

. . . and there you have it. Each thought breeds another and the writer is stuck with Hank until his issue has been dealt with. In my case, image drives the poetry, but character demands different questions, as do the other works being created by John and Co.

Both White Dwarf and The Rabbit, Part 2, the latest stories in the 100 Days Project, at least on the story side of things, are narrative experiments.

Given the material that’s developed, my intention has changed to some extent. Over the last couple of years, I’ve focused on examining images by way of “compressed language,” which is an attempt to pack as much concrete detail or energy into as few rhetorical parts as possible. But what about plot? How much suggestion or narrative net can be gained with the application of compressed language.

In The Rabbit, Part 2, for example, the woman protagonist follows Pelgram.

He leaned to a cab at a line. She had to time this one well, better than she’d had to other days. “Can you follow that one?” she asked the cabbie, who said, “Yup.”

Here lots of things happen. Pelgram goes to a line of cabs and is driven away. The woman goes to the line, too, enters a cab, asks the driver if he can follow Pelgram’s, and he agrees. But it’s a small part of the narrative, which would include circumstance, reasoning, sequencing, and, most critically, closure. Several points of player action are excluded from the above, because “timing,” “speed,” and “tension” are keys.

Likewise, in White Dwarf, conflict is “suggested” or “restricted” by dialogue, the source of which the reader can infer.

“Look how the water explodes from the sole’s of his sneakers after he walks through puddles on stormy days. They needed four grown men to pull him from the concrete he stepped into. The ferry rides low, you know the work day’s done.”

In this section, I was trying to get a large amount of data to the reader with as little narrative insulation as possible, using dialogue as the sole device of carrier of conflict, character, and time.

Almost every paragraph in White Dwarf expresses closure or attempts to. This is not, however, true of The Rabbit series, which I can already see as developing into a sequence of linked stories. In White Dwarf “setting” is conveyed through dialogue and through response to environment. I don’t know how many paragraphs I had to write to find the first paragraph, but I went back to it a lot.

They said he was a strange volume, scariest in flight. “My god, you’re torturing this boarding ramp,” a large woman in a business suit said.

I remember the first go, which I wrote after the plane was already over Chicago. It was

They said he was a strange volume.

I added the boarding ramp object and business woman because I wanted to suggest the protagonist’s problem “in action,” not as a narrative description, with something like: “On the boarding ramp, a woman looked at him and said . . . ” The story did not want to “show” the protagonist as a described agent, as this would have revealed “too little.” Revealing “too little” has become one technique to explore further in future stories, but not in all of them. The concept driving this I think has to do with the look and feel of short Chinese and Japanese poetic forms or landscape design, where curve or color may be drawn by interrelations and not necessarily by a single object in space, much as in hypertext.

In this, I’m also learning from sound and image being produced by other members of the project, as I’ve coming back to the stories via different senses and different focal points.

100 Days is proceeding. I already have the opportunity to reflect on the lists I’ve had in Tinderbox. Over the semester it was difficult to consider narrative in depth. Already the flood gates have opened and story notes won’t stop. It’s difficult to sit down and NOT write a story until early morning.

At the soccer field the other day during a conversation with a friend a particular subject sent me to my moleskin and I jotted down an idea, an idea that I’ll develop in the morning, but structure will be in mind, built around the two story requirements–conflict and complication. For example, in Tinkerton, I had the ands and ors in my head for the past month, but did not know about squirrels or pigeons or war. But I do know that in The Rabbit, there’s a rabbit, but why, and to whom is this rabbit connected?

Furthermore, I can already see the seeds of character relationships inside certain ideas. There are lots of narratives on the back burner, but I can already sense which stories will extend through multiple POVs.