Humbletron 2000

REMEMBER:
1. I’m not a genius. I just like books.
2. I can be a little off-task at times.
3. I’m not exactly topical.
4. I never claimed to have good taste.


This week: How to keep writing even when you’re pretty sure you suck at it. The advantages of brain damage. Does anyone know some good work music?

So I’m writing a book. I’m about 250 pages in, which I suspect is a little over halfway. It’s a historical adventure set in the Republic of Venice in the early Fourteenth Century. It won’t change anyone’s life, but I think it will be good fun to read: and I don’t think there’s anything essentially ignoble about a little escapist literature. I had a title I thought was pretty good, but then I found out that another book had pretty much the same one. Clearly that won’t do, so the book is a bit unnamed at the moment. The closest thing I’ve got at to an idea at the moment is The Arrowcatcher, but that seems a bit corny. I’m open to suggestions.

Anyhoo, I sent the first chapter to fifteen literary agents a month or so ago. And I’ve heard back from all but three of them (rejections) so that’s a bit of a bummer. But that’s part of the process. I’ve started hanging all my rejections around the full-length mirror in my hallway, the one I always look in right before I leave the house. I’m calling this device the “Humbletron 2000,” and it’s a revolutionary new weapon in the fight against ego. I’m working on a model for the general public, it will utilize DMV photographs, love letters from girls who don’t love you anymore, and reminders of times you were publicly embarrassed, typed out in haiku-form like this:

An outdoor lunch date
Sticky birdshit in my hair
Freshman year sucked bad

It’ll catch on, just wait; everyone will have a Humbletron.

Enough. Let’s talk about Solnit’s River of Shadows, like I’ve been threatening to do for weeks.

This book is difficult to discuss because it’s hard to pin down what exactly it’s about, or even place it in a definite genre. One could point out that it focuses on the life and career of a man named Edweard Muybridge, and thus call it biography. Or one might notice how much it has to say about his work (photographer, photographic innovator) and call it art history. Then again, it lovingly describes the society and conflicts of California in the 1870’s, so maybe it’s just plain history? Of course, one can’t discount Solnit’s careful, scientific analysis of the changes wrought on the human psyche by the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the invention of the motion picture…so, sociology maybe?

Enough. This book, finally, reminds me of a number of other titles I’ve read and enjoyed that use a human life as a lens through which to view a distant time and place. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror is a famous example of this kind of writing, and also, more recently, The Devil in the White City. I love these kind of books, they have the combination of escapism, exoticism, and education that one finds in the best histories, but they also give the reader a protagonist to root for.

The main character in River of Shadows is the above-mentioned Muybridge. He is the daddy (or at the very least the granddaddy) of the motion picture. Apart from his passion for pushing the boundaries of photography, he was also a pretty interesting cat in his own right. He comes off the page as a kind artistic Prophet of Doom: an unkempt, excitable, glowering Michealangelo with vats of volatile chemicals (essential for that era’s cumbersome photography) rather than a serene painter’s palette. He is one of the horsemen of an apocalypse long-past: the end of the natural world that included humans as an integral part, and the beginning of our own age of separation from nature. He was one of the men who helped, as thinkers of his era phrased it, to “destroy time and space.” For the motion pictures he helped create can be thought of, at their core, as a technology for nullifying the effects of time.

The nineteenth century was all about destroying time and space; with the advent of the railroads time needed to cross vast areas was so reduced that the world seemed to shrink. The human race stopped living by the natural rhythms of sunrise and sunset and began to live on the industrial standard of railroads and factories. Muybridge’s part in all this was multifaceted, which is why he is such a good subject for this book. Solnit makes a compelling case for this man being the zeitgeist. He was a photographer who took pictures of the world as it was ending: capturing the transcontinental railroad’s inexorable march across native America, with each tie laid bringing death to herds and tribes. He documented Indian wars, ruins, and earthquakes. His photographs were some of the first to have a mood to them. Before him landscape photography was a collection of clear, still, straightforward pictures of mountains and rocks, images fit to be painted on teacups. Muybridge was the first photographer to prize cloudy, brooding skies and heaps of jagged rubble, to prize a landscape for its upheaval and disorder. He enjoyed photographing falling and running water, which appear white and ghostly at 1870’s shutter speeds.

One aspect of Muybridge’s life I found very interesting was the theory put forward by Solnit that the man’s passionate, moody, and at times maniacal creativity was the result of brain damage. The artist’s life can be divided neatly into a before-and-after, with the central event being a grisly stagecoach accident that nearly killed him. Before, he was a prosperous San Francisco bookseller, seemingly self-satisfied. Afterwards he was Edweard Muybridge: artist, innovator, and future murderer (he shoots his wife’s lover, good for him). So, in short, in the pursuit of personal creative development, I’m currently seeking volunteers to bash me in the face with a sledgehammer.

In other news: I’m looking for some good writing music. I like writing while listening to things that are cool and have no lyrics. I normally write to Erroll Garner’s Body and Soul, but I’ve completely worn it out. Suggestions?