A Chirstmas gift to our readers.

A brief note: If you celebrate another holiday, then consider the title to be a seasonally appropriate salutation, since, well, I and Thomas are Catholic, myself, if only fashionably and it feels a bit too off the mark to say a holiday gift. So, as you probably figured, no offense is meant.

Shopping at Borders shouldn't give me an existential dilemma. It, however, did. As I passed the clearance books (after picking up a copy of Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick and Common's Universal Mind Control for my brother's Christmas gift), I saw something that was so value packed it defies my best attempts at an explanation as to even begin to chart or map it. On sale for eight dollars was the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Eight bucks for his complete works?

You could spend hours looking at the Raven and still never truly suck all the meaning out of it, and you know what? There's about forty-odd other poems there, not to mention the seventy something stories. It's so massive, I don't know where to begin. I didn't buy it, (Zach might shoot me, but to do that, he'd first have to read this, which I'm pretty sure doesn't happen.) because I already bought two other books from Borders just yesterday, The War Within by Bob Woodward and a book of Islamic poetry by a man called Rumi. (As is my want, I've gotten 12 chapters deep in Woodward's book by now, and haven't started Rumi.)

Looking again at the book, which appears now, to be about roughly three quarters the size of a throw pullow and twice as deep, could I ever have gotten to it? Also, my bag was bulging from the two books and CD I had already bought. I have enough books that I've started to finish, which include:

the Arab Predicament by Fouad Ajami
the End of Faith by Sam Harris
the Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto
But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland

If I'm lucky, I'll finish three of the four by the middle of January.Thus, an upwards of seven hundred page book, most of it requiring in depth reading, I don't know if I'll ever get through just doesn't seem worth it, even as a complete discography, just to have purchased it once and be done with it once. That said, I'll almost certainly go back to Borders later on this week and pick it up then because it's everything Edgar Allen Poe ever wrote for eight bucks. I'll find something, I'm sure.

That's when I realized: There's far too much media, whether it's music, literature, TV shows, movies or games to sift through everything I want in one life. I've got lists and lines of games and records and books and almost everything else. Hell, I have Killzone in my PlayStation 2 right now, with Odin Sphere, Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 on deck. I have no idea if I'll be able to finish another one of those games within the time I return, and hundreds of CDs on my computer sent to me by PR people that I don't know when I'll get the time to listen to.

I guess now is a good a time as any for a huge pronouncement, it feels to me like there's always going to be something else to read, listen, watch or play before I die. But, beyond all that, now I have another goal, but hopefully this one encompasses many smaler ones: I just want to write something one day that's worth the investment of time.

So. We'll (Who am I kidding, I) will try to keep posting here when I have something to say that doesn't fit into the other writing projects I have. May your next week be without hassle and as little stress as possible.

Here's to never having enough time!

Secret Cartographies: Persia, Sri Lanka, Great Britain, and Rhode Island.

The old Persian name for Sri Lanka was Serendip. The name first met the English language in the form of a children's story, and the place became a word through the attentions of Horace Walpole. When I was young, I was told that it was the West that found Sri Lanka and called it Serendipity. They'd been looking for India, for spices and tea and exoticisms, and found this other place, instead.

Sri Lanka is not actually closer to Europe than India, of course, so I'd always been left to wonder exactly why these men in boats felt so lucky to have stumbled upon it, or, alternately, why Serendip, an island that had been charted by the outside world in the time of the ancients, would have developed the reputation for being a place in which one could stumble into luck. It has less, apparently, to do with our finding Sri Lanka than what clever Sri Lankans, and clever children, can manage to find.

Here's another: the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, when he died, was buried on his family's farm under an apple tree. In recent memory, the government of the state of Rhode Island decided that their founder deserved some sort of monument. The old maps were lined up with the new maps, and they found that his grave was in someone's back yard, which was far more convenient than its being under someone's house. As it happened, the apple tree was still there, ancient and thick. They began the exhumation in order to move the dirt that was once his body to some more prestigious spot.

Through the use of their science, they knew they were in the correct place, and they noted that the roots of the apple tree had grown through the place where the coffin once would have been. No matter; they'd dig around it. But the root had a form to it. It had an arm, in fact, and fingers. There was a torso, and legs, and even toes. The tree, finding the tasty dead thing, had eaten it, inch by inch, starting at the shoulder. Using their science once again, they found that the capillaries of the tree had borrowed the body's arteries, tracing a strange organic map.

I've always been terrifically jealous, of the tree, and the corpse, and those who found it. Alas, it seems that the root, cut away from its tree and exposed to the air for display, began to decay quickly. One can still tease out the shape, but it lacks the same majesty as finding a headless underground man made of wood.

If you require more tales of strange things that happen to the dead, I recommend After the Funeral, the funny little out of print, extremely cheap book from which my second story was stolen entirely. If you require more cartographies, sometimes secrets, always bizarre, I might recommend the often thoroughly delightful blogue, Strange Maps. If you want to increase the likelihood that you, too, will be eaten by a tree, I suggest that you look into the growing green burial movement.

So, like, hi, I post here!

REVENGE FANTASY OF THE DAY



Elevennames.com - the essence of professionalism.



I'm still alive somehow! I'm watching MTV, because I hate myself. The entire station appears to be populated by self-obsessed tools. But they're pretty good looking, so I guess I should keep watching. Hooray for teevee!



Regardless, the theme of this week is The Howling of a Pack of Wolves. Which have a kind of strange beauty to them - you can understand how people can be inspired to wear a T-shirt with big wolves on them. Hell, I want to wear a T-shirt with a big wolf on it. But the important thing is that I'm imagining wolves tearing apart the people on Parental Control. I swear - what is going on with the West Coast? Are people really like that? Is there some kind of radiation west of the rockies that turns everyone into a douchebag? Wolves go rar! Tools say eeek and splork, and "oh no we is bein' eatin!"



A man can dream



SO I NEARLY DIED IN THE STRAND BOOKSTORE TODAY



My diet, since coming to new york, has faltered significantly, i.e. James told me I was anorexic. But it's working! I lost eleven pounds in two weeks! And I'm pretty sure that not all of it was muscle mass. Here's what I usually eat every day.



- 4-6 strawberries

- Sometimes a cracker with cheese.



SEE? Diet revolution! There are side effects, though. They consist of apparently never having to go to the bathroom, and not being able to stand up to fast. Case in point. I was at the Strand bookstore today (18 miles of books, and not a good-looking person in sight!), when I caught sight of a book I used to read a lot when I was but a lad (Irish Ghost Stories! OooOoooOooh!). Anyway, I hunches over and leaf through it, gingerly recalling my youth, re-reading bits and pieces of stories full of silly fake Irish words. Then a beglassess'd employee looks expectantly at me, one book clutched in her paw, and asks politely "Excuse me". I stand up immediately, and let the woman pass.



Insantly, a billion bursts of white light cloud my vision, the pixies of low blood pressure. They persist for about three solid seconds, and I slump against the opposite stack of shelves. I was transported, dizzily, to a land of pure radiance, and it was pretty scary. I'm waiting for New York's wonky banking laws to stop screwing me, and let me access my damn bank account - I miss food groups.

Interstitial

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to what is, with any luck, not at all a terrible idea. My name is Zach, and I hope to be one of your hosts for the foreseeable future. There are many things to be done and said, but I vanish off the face of the internet for the weekend in a few scant hours, so let me be brief, now, so that I can be longwinded later.

There are three of us here.

We are here to write, and support each other in our writing efforts.

We are here to write with as much talent and skill as we can muster.

We will write about whatever strikes our fancy, and we will do so in whatever fashion we wish. There may, and probably will, be theme weeks.

Right now, the theme is saying hello.

Hello.

And now, so that you don't feel like this was a complete and total waste of your time, let me talk to you a bit about William Gibson's Virtual Light, which I finished today as part of my ongoing effort to read his books in the least chronological order possible, providing you started with Neuromancer. (And didn't we all?)

As briefly as I can, because I can certainly use whatever sleep I can get:

The central image of Gibson's Virtual Light is not the augmented-reality eyewear that the title references--sunglasses which manipulate your optic nerves electromagnetically, allowing you to see things that aren't there at the native resolution of your brain, without any light striking your eyeballs: literal virtual light--but the abandoned and then repurposed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which gives its name not to the book, but to the entire trilogy.

A trilogy I read in reverse order, and with other books of Gibson's mixed in between.

This is an approach that worked surprisingly well.

All Tomorrow's Parties hooked me with the richness and the weirdness of its language, the strange structure of its narrative, the way it seemed to twist and turn and cavort, and how little of the character's pasts were explained, and how little that mattered. I always knew enough to keep reading, feeling like I was assembling a puzzle.

When I got to the end, I found myself wondering about the beginning.

Idoru was next, and in it I found characters I thought I knew and characters I thought I didn't, and another winding tale where the protagonists came at a situation from all sides, met once, and spun off again in different directions, sometimes together, sometimes not. And the details of the vision and the immense skill of the writing drew me in deeper, but I was never sure which books belonged together.

So I read more Gibson, over the course of most of a year, picking up books and devouring them as I found them. But it wasn't until today that I finished Virtual Light, and traced the threads back as far as the author intended them to go, and caught a glimpse of the shape of the whole.

The bridge at the heart of the books is not so much an edifice as a space, a gap, an opportunity.
An interstice, to borrow the man's own terms. The world of the bridge is an interstitial community, as the book is a story that exists in the spaces between worldshattering events, and the characters are people between, always coming or going but never seeming to arrive.

A space outside of normal society, where a new society has been created. Characters that have been displaced from the normal context of their lives, moving in the spaces between other people's worlds, and changing.

In the spaces between monoliths, life flourishes.

Welcome aboard.