The New Man

It rained when he left the desert.
It stopped at dawn, but clouds lingered, and wind came down from the mountains.
At dawn he stood by a narrow road which twisted up the mountains and down the canyons: the road was a river and a reaching hand.
He threw a stone at a rabbit whose nose twitched as his skull split.  He salivated, skinned and slit him, spilled his guts and devoured him, cracking bones between his teeth.
He paused where asphalt’s stench dulled all other smells, held his breath and shut his eyes as he stepped onto the hard road, then looked over his shoulder at the dull red hills of home; he was lonely and afraid.
He didn’t hear the car until it was upon him: the wind tore its sound away.  It swerved and honked.  The fat man squatting at the wheel and the skinny woman by his side gaped as they raced by.  He yearned to return, but the road led on and his feet were on it.  Clouds dissolved, cars followed cars, each full of ghosts, and heat radiated from the asphalt.
He was exhausted by noon, so he walked towards a cluster of boulders while three cars roared by.  He fought the urge to look back, to watch the eyes watching him.

The Dovecote: an American Fable

False hound, If you have writ your annals true, ‘tis there

That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles. Alone I did it.

- Coriolanus, Act V, Scene 6

The Theory

I spent about six years working on a novel before I decided it wasn't much good. The six years weren't a dead loss - I did things like get married, have a child, go to grad school, etc. Besides, every novelist has a few lost manuscripts, right? And even Faulkner wrote some terrible books. I've given this novel almost no thought for several years. Recently, though, it has come back to my mind - I suspect because, for the first time since working seriously on this novel, I'm spending most of my time writing software, albeit this time on the web. I might have more to say about that later.

Since I've stopped working on it, I've spent some time and energy teaching students to write academic and semi-academic work for the web, in the form of a blog. I'm not very satisfied with the art which is out there on the web, but I have some interest in its potential.

One thing that people hated about my novel was that it was episodic: it was about characters, not events, and there wasn't much narrative force. Whatever strengths it had were in moments, encounters, bits of prose and dialogue.

Three things occured to me today, roughly in sequence.

1. A number of great works of literature have been created by cutting bad works of literature to the bone.
2. While this work is unlikely to be called great, its central problem is that its virtues are overwhelmed by its length - its virtues are in fragments.
3. The web - and blogs in particular - is about nothing if not about fragments.

I thought it would be interesting to cut this shipwrecked novel down into a series of memorable sequential fragments, complete with occasional html. It's my experiment, but I thought it might interest a few others - so here it is. Subsequent posts (until I'm done, at least), will form a radically and rapidly slashed version of a ponderous novel, for your amusement. If anyone reads it, I might use the blog for other things thereafter.