Art as Magic

One of the things I’m looking forward to in 2014 is the final novel of Lev Grossman's Magicians Trilogy. The series follows Quentin Coldwater as he attends Brakebills, a school for young magicians in Upstate New York. In high school Quentin is the smartest of the smart kids, but he soon finds himself among equals and betters. The books are labeled as urban fantasy, and an easy description would be Harry Potter for adults. Brakebills is a college, and the characters face problems you would expect college students to run into.

A big difference from Harry Potter and Hogwarts is that the magic system Grossman creates is one of ridiculous complexity. Harry waves a wand, utters some Latin, and he defeats the troll. In Quentin’s world the students have to be geniuses just to take the admissions test, and the magic is based on multiple archaic languages (Latin, Greek, German, Church Slavonic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Chinese, to name a few), their grammars, and an accompanying set of hand movements, all of which must be adjusted for the “Circumstances” the magician casts in, of which there are five levels, each level itself containing different conditions like location on the earth, the season, the stars, distance to closest body of water, all of which have an effect how the spell is cast. Each spell can have thousands of permutations. So being born with the ability is not enough; you have to be smart, and more importantly, you have to work very hard at craft.

When I reread The Magicians over the summer, I couldn't help but think that Grossman was treating magic in the novel as an analog for writing, and, at a certain level, what was said was a sort of ars poetica. While doing my poetry MFA it became a running joke to label a poem we didn't understand as an ars poetica (a poem, really any piece of art, about writing poems, or creating art). It’s an easy out when faced with explicating a difficult poem. Lots of nebulous abstraction, incoherent imagery, complex syntax? Well, then it’s an ars poetica, because writing poetry is an abstract, incoherent, and complex process. It really isn't. It’s just hard work, lots of trying, lots of failure. To be good at it means doing the same thing as it takes to be good at anything else: practice.

So when Quentin and his classmates learn magic, I can’t help but think Grossman is also talking about the creation of art. Yes, you need some innate ability, but success comes down to hard work. (Also, I’m not saying I’m a genius. Quentin is way smarter than I could ever be.) Grossman comes from a literary family. His brother works on the production of video games and has written two novels. His father is Allen Grossman, a poet whose book, The Sighted Singer, traveled well the corridors of UC Davis, where I did my undergrad studies, and who also taught at Hopkins, though he retired before I showed up. Lev is also the a book critic for Time. 

The easiest connection between magic and art is the creation of something from nothing, pulling something from the ether and making it exist in the real world. But I was more drawn to the magic school itself, how the students were taught and how they interacted with each other. They drank like camels at an oasis, and while the link between alcoholism and artists has become somewhat of a cliche, drinking was almost as common as reading among the fellows in my cohort.  One of the other problems that Grossman forces his young magicians to face is the "What are you going to do with that degree" question after graduation. You may think (I did), "Come on. You can do magic. Do whatever you want." But Quentin and his friends experience something of a post graduate ennui that leads them into trouble and acts as a motivator that moves the narrative into the final act. Anyone with a fine arts degree (or even a PhD in the humanities) battles with the "what are you going to do with that" question. There are even books to help wayward graduates find their way outside of the academic institution. 

The most dramatic use of the metaphor of magic as art comes to the surface in a scene where Quentin and his classmates are a day away from graduating and the dean conducts a secret ceremony. They stand in the darkness of the equivalent of a crypt under the school grounds. The stodgy headmaster, Dean Fogg, passes around a bottle of bourbon, and before tattooing demons into their shoulders, gives a little speech about what it means to be a magician:

“I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain […] because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.” The dean goes on to say that magicians use this inner pain and “burn it like fuel” in order to change the world they feel needs changing. 

Magicians, artists, feel the wrongs of the world, feel its beauty, feel its grit between their teeth, more keenly than others, and only they can do anything about it. This is what drives them. They have something to say. But first they must know their craft, practice and hone it, and only then will it have any effect on the world they wish to change. 

Truman's First Christmas

2013’s holiday season is coming to an end. Truman has experienced his first Christmas. Despite the awesome lion play station we gave him, I don’t think this will be a memorable Christmas for Truman. We’ll show him the pictures, proving he in fact was alive on Christmas day, 2013, but try as he might, he won’t remember.

A baby’s first Christmas is really a parent’s first Christmas, a family first Christmas. I’d say ours was a success. We opened our few presents. Truman played with the wrapping paper. I did my fatherly duty and put together Truman’s toy.

To my wife’s chagrin, we resorted to our usual holiday gift-giving practice of agreeing on gifts to buy ourselves online, though she did buy for me a very nice flannel shirt. One of my resolutions, other than maintaining this blog, will be to be a better gift buyer for April. I’ve never been good at this, be it Christmas, birthday, anniversary, or any other occasion requiring a present.  (Even April’s engagement ring wasn’t much of a surprise; she’d picked it out from an artist’s Etsy. When I bought it, April had been watching the item on the site, so she asked me if I was the buyer once she saw the ring was no longer available.) So I got a nice shirt and April got a yarn swift and a necklace.

As unmemorable as this Christmas will be for Truman, I will never forget it. Our small family, in our small apartment, with our small presents under our small tree, there’s not more I could ask for, and nothing more that I need. 

Zombies, Part 1

I'm planning some upcoming posts about zombies. Ever since I saw The Video Dead at my grandparent's house as a small child, I've had a fear of zombies. That fear has turned into a fascination (we try to control our fears by understanding them, perhaps). And zombies are currently shuffling and snapping their way through my nanowrimo novel, so they've been on my mind, and in my dreams.

Don't worry, I'll still post on Truman. I'm sure pictures of his cute face are a much larger draw than my musings on zombies in movies and fiction and what they mean. But as I work through my zombie nano it will be helpful to get some of the ideas running through my brain down into words. So I'll alternate between the two subjects here on KOW.

For this post I'll be brief. Zombies are the great equalizer. No one is special. There is no chosen one, or The One, or hero. Zombies don't care who you are, they just want to eat your arm off. I find that many of the most popular stories we are told in films and books center around a main character that is destined to do what he or she does. The protagonist is chosen. This might be more prevalent in Young Adult fiction, which is where a lot of our movies are coming from. Harry Potter is a good example, and Twilight, from what I gather, is another; also Percy Jackson, The Mortal Instruments, Divergent, fit the mold, all of which started as YA books that were then made into movies, but Star Wars and The Matrix also fit.

Zombies don't care. It's survival of the fittest, or smartest, or luckiest. There is no cosmic hand guiding the hero on his or her journey. There is only screaming, running and hiding.  

Truman Has to Eat

Babies are all firsts. First breath, first cry, first car ride, first fart, first smile, first laugh. They roll over, it’s a first. They roll back, it’s a first. There are the big ones: first tooth, first word, first step. And then there’s minor firsts—no less picture-worthy in the minds of doting parents, but trivial, I would guess, to onlookers: first time he grabs something, first time she turns her head, first sitting up for more than a few seconds before their top-heavy heads carry them off at an oblique angle into the couch cushions. For these small first we applaud, we cheer, we say good job, cameras always at the ready for round two.

All these firsts just happen. Truman grabs his rattle for the first time, we yell out in wonder at his dexterous abilities, and then take a picture. He probably grabbed something while we weren't looking, but it’s a first for us. He stands up while I hold him in my lap: Wow, how he is growing! Another photo opportunity. He rolls over on his play mat, how strong! but he needed little coaching from us. (A small confession: we were concerned about his inability to roll. He remained stagnant while his cohort from breast feeding group rolled around like cirque-du-soleil acrobats. April actually looked up coaching methods on youtube. He refused to roll until one day he didn’t. No coaching needed. We were then worried he’d roll off the bed. Now we think he’s forgotten how to do it, and we don’t know if that’s good or bad.) Truman experiences these firsts on his own accord, more or less.

So when it comes to first food April and I have a bit of a philosophical conundrum. This first we control totally. (Let’s hope. He is grabbing everything, so his first food could easily be a chunk of the cat fur he’s just wrested from Prufrock’s tail.) What do we give him? Nothing processed like baby food from a jar. We want it to be something natural, something we see as food in shape and taste before we give it to him. The contenders, as of this writing, are avocado, banana, or sweet potato. On a whim, we tried to give him the tiniest sliver of avocado, but it slid from the corner of his mouth on a sled of drool before anyone realized we didn’t have a camera ready. April’s vote goes for sweet potato. I think I’m with her, but I also like the idea of giving him some avocado. It feels more “Californian.” There is a tradition of saving the pit and planting it, but then I think of the last avocado tree we tried to cultivate. New England winters are not kind to subtropical fruits.

At the end of this week Truman will be seven months old and he’ll be one hundred percent milk-fed. People are starting to ask if he’s eating solids. Our pediatrician talked to us about getting him on some food to help with his sleep, which has been a battle in and of itself. Truman has to eat food at some point. I’m really less concerned with what we give him and more concerned with the back end of the process. Breast fed babies have pretty easy poops. [SPOILERS! As in, the following poop talk might spoil your appetite.] They’re liquidy with little texture. Easily contained in diapers, barring any blowouts. The smell is minimal. But with the first real human food comes the first real human poop. The thing we are biologically, evolutionarily, repulsed by, will be waiting for me in the night.

Whatever we choose, I know we’ll have the camera, iPhone, and iPad ready, so this first will be a first forever immortalized on facebook and flickr. I think I’ll keep the subsequent poop under wraps. God knows there’s enough on the web about the different types of baby poop and what each means. Though it would be funny if a poop picture of ours was sold to some third party by facebook.

Official Number of Poops in this Post: 6

The One Where We Almost Died

                The first big storm of the season has come and gone, leaving a good eight inches of snow on the ground. I've done my duty, digging out the car, moving it so the plow could clear the parking lot, and moving it back. For the job I donned my old army poly-pros. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about Afghanistan (it never really leaves my mind) because of the snow, because it’s been ten years since I was there, but mainly because Afghanistan is my setting in my Nanowrimo novel.

                The title I’ve chosen for this post partakes in some sensationalism. I confess we were never in any imminent danger. No, I use this title as a nod to the show Friends, which used the phrase “The one where…” in all its titles: “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate” for the pilot, “The One Where They All Turn Thirty,” “The Last One,” for the series finale.   

                We watched a lot of Friends, seasons one through nine at least twice, plus whatever we could buy of season ten on the black market. When we first arrived in country, bootleg DVDs ran about a dollar a disk. By January, only six months later, demand had driven costs up to five dollars. (Despite the fact that stateside DVDs went for at least fifteen bucks, we were outraged. For some perspective, I remember buying the first season of X-Files as soon as it was released on DVD for something like eighty dollars. It’s $16.56 on Amazon today.) I watched so much Friends I had memorized the plot of each episode and a good chunk of the dialog. Especially the punch lines. My knowledge of the show proved to be a bit of a parlor trick, if not amazing, then bemusing anyone who happened to be around me when an episode was on cable. “How do you know so much about Friends?” someone asked a party where we passed around Trivial Pursuit cards based on the show. “From Afghanistan,” I’d say.

                In December and January op-tempo slowed because of weather. The locals told us it had been decades since they had seen so much snow. We were also down to two men, our third team member having been promoted to a staff position at HQ up in Bagram. There wasn’t a lot going on in town either—much of the populace had migrated for the season to the warmer climes of Pakistan, much like retired New Englanders head off to Florida at the sign of the first frost. And even though Humvees are branded as all terrain, they didn’t do well in snow on the small roads that covered the countryside. So there wasn’t much to do. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Come on, you should have gotten out there, searched for Taliban, or Al Qaida, done something better than watching sitcoms,” that’s fine. I will take full responsibility for losing the war in Afghanistan. That is, if anyone ever decides if that war was won or lost.

                We sat in Mags’s room, he on his cot, I in a folding camp chair, playing the DVDs on a laptop perched on a desk Mags had made himself. Our living quarters was a small mud building, with a long common room and three small bedrooms off the side. On the opposite wall of the bedrooms sat a small army-issued heater. It was gravity fed, drawing fuel through a hose attached to an inverted diesel can on a stand in the corner of the room. When the wind blew down the chimney pipe, the heater rumbled and belched, emitting smoke and fumes. It kept the main room a steady fifty degrees and did better than the previous heater, an older “potbelly” model that had caught fire. For extra warmth during our Friends binge, we’d lit the mesh grate on a blue propane tank. It hissed along as we watched, pumping heat into the small room, the wires of mesh growing orange over time.

                Each of us had a propane tank in our room. The heating grate could be changed out for a burner, which we used to boil water for tea, instant oatmeal, instant mac and cheese, or any other instant food for which the only preparation was “add boiling water and stir.” The tanks were all sorts of colors except for the white you find on tanks under barbeques here in the US.

We watched a good three or four hours of season seven, or maybe season eight. Chandler and Monica are about to get married, or Rachel is pregnant and the question of paternity drives the narrative. Things get fuzzy in my mind. Episode after episode, hour after hour, we watch. Mags has timed perfectly the fast-forward of the opening credits. All the while, the propane heater hisses on, filling the room with steamy warmth and carbon monoxide.

At some point I realize I have a terrible headache. Chandler would say in his sarcastic cant, “Could I have a worse headache?” Mags tells me his head is killing him. Staring at a small screen for hours couldn’t have helped, but Mags looks at the heater and says we need to get out of there.  I don’t remember what we did next. Went to the chow hall, maybe. More likely we popped some muscle relaxers we’d traded the medic for, or bought from the pharmacy in town. I honestly can’t say. Did we think about almost dying in that small room, our bodies subjected to the unending loop of the Rembrandts theme song? Not at all.  

                The Military Industrial Rumor Complex had churned out the rumor that soldiers had died from carbon monoxide poisoning from propane heaters. There was no proof of this, but after that day I could see it happening, if not to soldiers, then to civilians unprepared and under-dressed for a snowy winter. Another hour, perhaps, and we could have nodded off into a long nap. We didn’t use the heaters when sleeping, and I suspect that any deaths caused by carbon monoxide poisoning were due to using the propane tanks at night.

So no imminent danger, just the creeping, silent kind. We didn’t think ourselves lucky, just not unlucky, this brush with danger only significant in hindsight. And, unfortunately, our Unit’s luck wouldn’t hold through the end of January.

Like a second language learned in college, my encyclopedic knowledge of Friends has waned from disuse. I can still remember the Mandarin word for love, for friend, for WMD (some things are hard to forget), and I still remember the larger story arcs of the series, but the small details, the setups and punch lines are lost. I’ll still mention to April when I’m reminded of an episode’s plot. And if I run into an episode while channel surfing, it’s like running into an old war buddy. Remember that day on the firebase? The one where…