automatic city musings
I feel like i've written a thousand or so different "openings" to my narrative project, and each one starts out with a kind of raucously compelling affront to nature, culture, and the structure of narrative, which is exactly what i want. But invariably each time it curls in on itself (the problems of the spiral), and by now I feel like i've exhausted the possibilities of narrative itself, in my writing. Only recently have I started to look at all these "failed projects" in a different light, digging (as i have been) through older incarnations of the project itself, scattered all the fuck over my hard drive: older texts, older narratives and ancient dialogues... taken out of the light of their particular creation i actually enjoy them, and i'm starting to see a larger &, even, startlingly, cohesive narrative emerging from their disparate ends. Will Burroughs, it is famously rumored, does not remember writing Naked Lunch, and it is also famously rumored that Allen Ginsberg and that punk Jack Kera-whack found its separate pieces all over his room, and more or less assembled it for him. The neat thing here, the thing birthed from Bill Burroughs work, is the idea of the "cut-up", which is basically the idea that a narrative cannot be assembled in a straight line, but rather, must be done holistically, almost *accidentally, that is, something more in accordance with chaos theory (not to self, you can't be in 'accord' with chaos theory). Unfortunately several generations of writers have taken the idea of the "cut up" to mean that structure is dead, and that pure randomness (ie, sloppiness) can compose a successful narrative project. This is bullshit, and while I'm sure not claiming to be attempting a Naked Lunch project (but only for the reason that Bill Burroughs is so much more of a pervert & jerk than I could ever, EVER, hope to be, and also he's processed more drugs than me), I think I'm beginning to understand just what the real *problems* of narrative are, in this regard.
The first "narrative project" I undertook, a dreadfully sloppy thing I finished (the etymology of 'finish' being linked both to a deathblow and to a sex ejaculation) in like my sophomore year of college was an example of this problem, and sure as hell not a solution to it; i disavow almost all knowledge of this project, of course, but it was a necessary death to get me over the hill, so to speak.
So a few million words later i'm kind of sickened by the idea of novels, because why the fuck would you want to write one in the first place? More than that though, it implies a very particular assumption about narrative, in the way that if you go to see a Rob Schnieder movie you expect very particular things. The novel can still be effective (like the way that Punch Drunk Love was effective not in spite of, but because of, Adam Sandler); House of Leaves is possibly the only current example of this, unless you count the "naive narratives" (that is, narratives which gleefully ignore the problems of narrative) like the lovely White Teeth, Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Douglas Coupland, etc etc. And calling this a "narrative project" is, admittedly, kind of cheap, since it is just making a "dirty word" out of "novel." But it also allows an investigation INTO that dirt, which might be key. The investigation, interestingly, is in fact a trope of the structure of the detective novel, and is in fact VITAL to any narrative, something I learned while reading Dashiell Hammett (highly recommended, by the way) a while back.
So my particular narrative obsessions have been cities and deserts, since these are basically antipodal narrative devices, point and counterpoint (ideally). I'm sick of worrying about metaphor & cliche and blah ditty blee, and the only way to write about these things with any kind of reckless abandon is to give them their necessary life (and then death), to write into the desert (which is infinitely vast) and into the city (which is infinitely dense).
'course, all of this is a bunch of hoodoo jibing on my part, without the text to back it up. Thank god i have some of that, in fact a few hefty bags full by this point. This (the thing below) is a functional starting point for much of the narrative, because it describes the genesis of the city-in-question. I'm gonna paste it below in a sec . . . the origin of my interest in the city is probably most concrete in this short story i wrote a while back, which was kindly published online by the infante-terrible journal "tarpaulin sky." (co-edited by a friend here in the sfsu cw program), and you can read it at http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Winter03/DBZeno.html if you're interested, it might shed some light on the weirdness herein. Plus they publish some groovy stuff and have a new issue forthcoming, rock on. Anyway, here's a piece of the project. I'm open to any slander y'all want to toss at me (text formatting is not exact but use your filthy imaginations):
----------------
It began like this, with bulldozers. The clear-cutting of trees, the flattening of soil. The creation of an empty space large enough to make it worthwhile to fill it with buildings. Of course these days it takes money to do something like this; you can't just traipse into a few square miles of paveable land and fill it with municipality and parking meters and bundles of fiber optics.
People will notice and charge you for it.
The sheer billions and billions of dollars involved these days being of course unimaginable. The billions necessary just to get the permits. To contract the construction companies. To buy the concrete. To do the wiring. To build the sewers. To do the drywall and make sure the fire hydrants work and install the glass. To pain the walls. To fill the shops with merchandise. To assemble a city council, a board of supervisors, a chief of police. To develop and fund a public school system. To pave roads, to carve out parks. To mark off the land itself, before anything is built. To envision something standing up out of an empty place. To buy the bulldozers and hire people to drive them.
To have a string of bulldozers a mile long, coming down the highway up from the North, down through the mountains, past the foothills.
Looking at this from up on a cliffside you can see how impossible it would be. A string of perfect yellow dots creeping along the highway, tiny in the distance, small enough to cover with your thumb, if you hold it up in front of your eye. But growing larger. Preceded by their own rumbling, with terrible, heavy treads and diesel engines, the ground trembling, a hundred of them, a thousand, moving down the freeway. That would take billions of dollars:
To have all of them turn off in unison at a certain point and move-no longer a line but now a wall, a tidal wave of diesel, and carve out this land, flattening hills and uprooting boulders, and push it all off the cliffs, into a vast body of water. To flatten this all into raw space.
It would be expensive as hell to do this. Even more expensive to do it overnight: Picture buildings dropped into place by helicopters; picture ninja construction workers in the dead of night paving streets and placing mailboxes and doing the wiring for traffic lights. Stenciling the letters on shop windows while the whole world sleeps.
And you'd have to build the whole downtown before breakfast.
Of course realistically it takes a lot longer than that, but that isn't what people remember.
Realisticaly you would need seven or eight days, but that's Biblical time right there, so we'll do it for you in ten.
People remember suburbs appearing over the hills in the time it takes to fry an egg. A visionary can build a city in a decade or two; a few dedicated kids can do it in a week.
Rules are broken, out of habit. Kids can go straight from making towers in the sandbox to plunking skyscrapers together; if their perfection is going to be throttled to death by reality, then it might as well leave a sprawling mess of City in its wake:
The bulldozers clear out space. By midnight a fleet of cement mixers arrive and begin pouring the foundations for the buildings. Backhoes and drilling equipment glide effortlessly between the crews pouring the foundations and dig up what will become the roads; trenches are dug for pipes and wires and the sensors that govern the streetlights. Before you can build up you have to build down and by noon the next day a thousand backhoes have carved out the sewer systems, the underground. The foundations are finished by teatime. Huge transport helicopters carrying loads of bricks and steel girders drop these things into place; buildings creep up in real time, story by story. Ultra fast-drying concrete special ordered from Japan fuses the downtown into place while whole skeletal systems of steel girders lunge skyward in thick layers-it looks like one of those nature videos played in fast-forward, of flowers bursting through topsoil and then blooming, or the seasons swirling across the sky, bulky thunderheads twisting into clear blue and back, like oil paints wiped this way & that. By suppertime on the second day ninja construction workers, thousands of them, parachuting from planes, have installed the traffic lights and done the drywall and planted the trees in planters along the sidewalk; they have installed the glass and done the insulation and set up the power lines and bolted in three quarters of the park benches and two thirds of the fire hydrants and half of all the Laundromats. Overnight the roofs of the houses are tarred and shingled; the stench of it rises as a physical thickness and fades to the south with the dawn; by the time anyone can smell it all the fireplaces have been installed and all the front walks have been paved and all those little stepping stones have been placed in the gardens in the suburbs, where were themselves molded & patterened the previous day, and by 11:00 the next morning the internal wiring in all the buildings is almost finished, done by whole battalions of covert-ops trained electricians. Then, squadrons of helicopters with thousands of miles of cable and fiber-optics suspended between them like the shimmering strands of some enormous glistening spider web drop the phone lines and the high-speed internet lines and the TV lines and all the other lines into place; released just above their targets the wires drift in the almost-breeze of the morning gently into place; fresh ninja-electricians up on power lines and roofs and hanging from the sides of buildings catch the wires as they float down through the air-with all the gentleness and grace of catching a butterfly in cupped hands-and guide them into their sockets. Windmills dropped into place all along the hillside by Huey helicopters begin to turn; cables from the hydroelectric and solar plants down South are lashed into place, and by mid-evening the City is alive with power. There is a sudden physical humming through previously dark streets. The stars overhead are appropriatedly blotted by the new effulgence. The internal wiring of the buildings is then finished up at a fast clip, done by 1 in the morning. Standing up on the hill before dawn watching the skyscrapers creep towards their full height you suck in your breath. The city glows now; it looks like it has been spread across the horizon with a palette knife, all phantom lights glowing scattershot through the fog. The next day and a half is spent finishing the plaster, putting the walls together, screwing pieces of plumbing into place (a thousand hands turn a thousand ratchets in perfect harmony, the sound of so much metal clicking at once is eerily satisfying), synchronizing the traffic lights, installing the glass, putting tile in all the kitchens, installing the microwaves, dropping jungle gyms into the sand of playgrounds, laying sod across the park, painting everything-crews of yet more ninjas armed with high-tech spraying devices cruising along the streets up on cherry-pickers coating everything that needs it-and by the sixth day, or so, it is essentially a done City. Most of the mercenary-hired ninja construction workers disappear back into the night. The next day is spent on the last little touches: the lettering of shop windows, the hooking up of cappuccino machines in downtown coffee shops, the oiling of the springs on teeter-totters in the park.
The remaining workers, ninja and otherwise, file out. It has been a busy week and the city is completely empty for several hours: glistening untouched pavement wiped clean of the scuff marks of retreating backhoes; windows gleaming in early morning sun and the timbers of a thousand front porches settling gently into place. The freeway outside the city is empty for just a bare minute. Then, from the distance, from the opposite direction the bulldozers receded into, heralded by a sloppy cloud of exhaust smog and the din of car horns: the residents. Because you cannot build a thing like this and not expect it to be filled: Sedans and tractor-trailers and U-Hauls and vans and family wagons, loaded with noisy kids and car seats and lamps & glassware protected by bubblewrap; dogs sticking their heads out windows, making eyes at dogs sticking their heads out of the window in the adjacent lane; cats mewling in carriers; baseball caps and sun hats and laundry sacks; couches lashed to the roofs of vehicles and elbows jutting out half-open windows. The city is flooded with life; people swell to fill empty spaces, and for most of the next three days every corner of the city is glutted with unholy traffic as cars with people & possessions navigate slowly into place. Restaurants open and do furious business; everyone eats out the first night or two. The next morning everyone wakes up and finds themselves in a new place. Slowly things fall into some kind of order; rhythms are developed, PTAs are formed and meter maids begin to ticket cars. Rhythm spirals into routine, paint dries, offices and schools bubble to life, sprinkler systems announce their presence, and the sod that was laid down on a thousand lawns takes hold in its thin layer of dirt and grows, inexorably, skyward.
The first "narrative project" I undertook, a dreadfully sloppy thing I finished (the etymology of 'finish' being linked both to a deathblow and to a sex ejaculation) in like my sophomore year of college was an example of this problem, and sure as hell not a solution to it; i disavow almost all knowledge of this project, of course, but it was a necessary death to get me over the hill, so to speak.
So a few million words later i'm kind of sickened by the idea of novels, because why the fuck would you want to write one in the first place? More than that though, it implies a very particular assumption about narrative, in the way that if you go to see a Rob Schnieder movie you expect very particular things. The novel can still be effective (like the way that Punch Drunk Love was effective not in spite of, but because of, Adam Sandler); House of Leaves is possibly the only current example of this, unless you count the "naive narratives" (that is, narratives which gleefully ignore the problems of narrative) like the lovely White Teeth, Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Douglas Coupland, etc etc. And calling this a "narrative project" is, admittedly, kind of cheap, since it is just making a "dirty word" out of "novel." But it also allows an investigation INTO that dirt, which might be key. The investigation, interestingly, is in fact a trope of the structure of the detective novel, and is in fact VITAL to any narrative, something I learned while reading Dashiell Hammett (highly recommended, by the way) a while back.
So my particular narrative obsessions have been cities and deserts, since these are basically antipodal narrative devices, point and counterpoint (ideally). I'm sick of worrying about metaphor & cliche and blah ditty blee, and the only way to write about these things with any kind of reckless abandon is to give them their necessary life (and then death), to write into the desert (which is infinitely vast) and into the city (which is infinitely dense).
'course, all of this is a bunch of hoodoo jibing on my part, without the text to back it up. Thank god i have some of that, in fact a few hefty bags full by this point. This (the thing below) is a functional starting point for much of the narrative, because it describes the genesis of the city-in-question. I'm gonna paste it below in a sec . . . the origin of my interest in the city is probably most concrete in this short story i wrote a while back, which was kindly published online by the infante-terrible journal "tarpaulin sky." (co-edited by a friend here in the sfsu cw program), and you can read it at http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Winter03/DBZeno.html if you're interested, it might shed some light on the weirdness herein. Plus they publish some groovy stuff and have a new issue forthcoming, rock on. Anyway, here's a piece of the project. I'm open to any slander y'all want to toss at me (text formatting is not exact but use your filthy imaginations):
----------------
It began like this, with bulldozers. The clear-cutting of trees, the flattening of soil. The creation of an empty space large enough to make it worthwhile to fill it with buildings. Of course these days it takes money to do something like this; you can't just traipse into a few square miles of paveable land and fill it with municipality and parking meters and bundles of fiber optics.
People will notice and charge you for it.
The sheer billions and billions of dollars involved these days being of course unimaginable. The billions necessary just to get the permits. To contract the construction companies. To buy the concrete. To do the wiring. To build the sewers. To do the drywall and make sure the fire hydrants work and install the glass. To pain the walls. To fill the shops with merchandise. To assemble a city council, a board of supervisors, a chief of police. To develop and fund a public school system. To pave roads, to carve out parks. To mark off the land itself, before anything is built. To envision something standing up out of an empty place. To buy the bulldozers and hire people to drive them.
To have a string of bulldozers a mile long, coming down the highway up from the North, down through the mountains, past the foothills.
Looking at this from up on a cliffside you can see how impossible it would be. A string of perfect yellow dots creeping along the highway, tiny in the distance, small enough to cover with your thumb, if you hold it up in front of your eye. But growing larger. Preceded by their own rumbling, with terrible, heavy treads and diesel engines, the ground trembling, a hundred of them, a thousand, moving down the freeway. That would take billions of dollars:
To have all of them turn off in unison at a certain point and move-no longer a line but now a wall, a tidal wave of diesel, and carve out this land, flattening hills and uprooting boulders, and push it all off the cliffs, into a vast body of water. To flatten this all into raw space.
It would be expensive as hell to do this. Even more expensive to do it overnight: Picture buildings dropped into place by helicopters; picture ninja construction workers in the dead of night paving streets and placing mailboxes and doing the wiring for traffic lights. Stenciling the letters on shop windows while the whole world sleeps.
And you'd have to build the whole downtown before breakfast.
Of course realistically it takes a lot longer than that, but that isn't what people remember.
Realisticaly you would need seven or eight days, but that's Biblical time right there, so we'll do it for you in ten.
People remember suburbs appearing over the hills in the time it takes to fry an egg. A visionary can build a city in a decade or two; a few dedicated kids can do it in a week.
Rules are broken, out of habit. Kids can go straight from making towers in the sandbox to plunking skyscrapers together; if their perfection is going to be throttled to death by reality, then it might as well leave a sprawling mess of City in its wake:
The bulldozers clear out space. By midnight a fleet of cement mixers arrive and begin pouring the foundations for the buildings. Backhoes and drilling equipment glide effortlessly between the crews pouring the foundations and dig up what will become the roads; trenches are dug for pipes and wires and the sensors that govern the streetlights. Before you can build up you have to build down and by noon the next day a thousand backhoes have carved out the sewer systems, the underground. The foundations are finished by teatime. Huge transport helicopters carrying loads of bricks and steel girders drop these things into place; buildings creep up in real time, story by story. Ultra fast-drying concrete special ordered from Japan fuses the downtown into place while whole skeletal systems of steel girders lunge skyward in thick layers-it looks like one of those nature videos played in fast-forward, of flowers bursting through topsoil and then blooming, or the seasons swirling across the sky, bulky thunderheads twisting into clear blue and back, like oil paints wiped this way & that. By suppertime on the second day ninja construction workers, thousands of them, parachuting from planes, have installed the traffic lights and done the drywall and planted the trees in planters along the sidewalk; they have installed the glass and done the insulation and set up the power lines and bolted in three quarters of the park benches and two thirds of the fire hydrants and half of all the Laundromats. Overnight the roofs of the houses are tarred and shingled; the stench of it rises as a physical thickness and fades to the south with the dawn; by the time anyone can smell it all the fireplaces have been installed and all the front walks have been paved and all those little stepping stones have been placed in the gardens in the suburbs, where were themselves molded & patterened the previous day, and by 11:00 the next morning the internal wiring in all the buildings is almost finished, done by whole battalions of covert-ops trained electricians. Then, squadrons of helicopters with thousands of miles of cable and fiber-optics suspended between them like the shimmering strands of some enormous glistening spider web drop the phone lines and the high-speed internet lines and the TV lines and all the other lines into place; released just above their targets the wires drift in the almost-breeze of the morning gently into place; fresh ninja-electricians up on power lines and roofs and hanging from the sides of buildings catch the wires as they float down through the air-with all the gentleness and grace of catching a butterfly in cupped hands-and guide them into their sockets. Windmills dropped into place all along the hillside by Huey helicopters begin to turn; cables from the hydroelectric and solar plants down South are lashed into place, and by mid-evening the City is alive with power. There is a sudden physical humming through previously dark streets. The stars overhead are appropriatedly blotted by the new effulgence. The internal wiring of the buildings is then finished up at a fast clip, done by 1 in the morning. Standing up on the hill before dawn watching the skyscrapers creep towards their full height you suck in your breath. The city glows now; it looks like it has been spread across the horizon with a palette knife, all phantom lights glowing scattershot through the fog. The next day and a half is spent finishing the plaster, putting the walls together, screwing pieces of plumbing into place (a thousand hands turn a thousand ratchets in perfect harmony, the sound of so much metal clicking at once is eerily satisfying), synchronizing the traffic lights, installing the glass, putting tile in all the kitchens, installing the microwaves, dropping jungle gyms into the sand of playgrounds, laying sod across the park, painting everything-crews of yet more ninjas armed with high-tech spraying devices cruising along the streets up on cherry-pickers coating everything that needs it-and by the sixth day, or so, it is essentially a done City. Most of the mercenary-hired ninja construction workers disappear back into the night. The next day is spent on the last little touches: the lettering of shop windows, the hooking up of cappuccino machines in downtown coffee shops, the oiling of the springs on teeter-totters in the park.
The remaining workers, ninja and otherwise, file out. It has been a busy week and the city is completely empty for several hours: glistening untouched pavement wiped clean of the scuff marks of retreating backhoes; windows gleaming in early morning sun and the timbers of a thousand front porches settling gently into place. The freeway outside the city is empty for just a bare minute. Then, from the distance, from the opposite direction the bulldozers receded into, heralded by a sloppy cloud of exhaust smog and the din of car horns: the residents. Because you cannot build a thing like this and not expect it to be filled: Sedans and tractor-trailers and U-Hauls and vans and family wagons, loaded with noisy kids and car seats and lamps & glassware protected by bubblewrap; dogs sticking their heads out windows, making eyes at dogs sticking their heads out of the window in the adjacent lane; cats mewling in carriers; baseball caps and sun hats and laundry sacks; couches lashed to the roofs of vehicles and elbows jutting out half-open windows. The city is flooded with life; people swell to fill empty spaces, and for most of the next three days every corner of the city is glutted with unholy traffic as cars with people & possessions navigate slowly into place. Restaurants open and do furious business; everyone eats out the first night or two. The next morning everyone wakes up and finds themselves in a new place. Slowly things fall into some kind of order; rhythms are developed, PTAs are formed and meter maids begin to ticket cars. Rhythm spirals into routine, paint dries, offices and schools bubble to life, sprinkler systems announce their presence, and the sod that was laid down on a thousand lawns takes hold in its thin layer of dirt and grows, inexorably, skyward.