CHANTILLY'S CAFE SAVED MY LIFE

Cafes seem to hold a special attraction for writers. I've been musing over this the last several days, after reading Sharazade's response to Wal-Mart eating my novel, Part 2, below. When I was young, I didnt use cafes to write. I wrote on a giant old Underwood typewriter at home, or wherever I lived. I spent many years hauling that machine around the world, from Borneo to India to Africa. In my 30s, I traded it for a hardy, though heavy, Hermes portable. I still have both machines: they sit in my adobe room, like hungry, prickly animals. I remember using the Hermes in Australia to write Metropolis: I'd awaken in the morning, in my flat in Henley Beach, make a pot of tea, and start typing. In the afternoon I often got on my bicycle -- an old French racing Follis that I'd converted for touring -- and hit a nearby cafe, where I'd count up my words and make notes for the next day's session. Cafes then were very much an adjunct to my work. I didnt write in cafes, I just mused. I wrote where I lived.

Some years later I rode my motorcycle into Mexico. It was a rather desperate journey: I'd been living in the U.S. for seven years, and found myself unable to write. I resolved I would either write again --  or I would die. I loaded some clothes and the Hermes typewriter into my paniers and headed south. Near Manzanillo I found an abandoned house on the beach, in a coconut grove, just below a lagoon. I jury-rigged a room to make it secure. I set up my typewriter. On the first morning, not sure what to do, I rode to town, saw Chantilly's Cafe right there on the plaza, sat down, took out my pen and notebook -- and immediately started writing on what became The Ethiopian Exhibition. This to me was a miraculous event. In three months the first draft was complete. Chantilly's Cafe saved my life.

That was 1986, I believe. I spent most of the next twenty years writing my books in Mexican cafes. Maya appeared in bits and pieces, scattered all over that country, from Lagos de Moreno to San Andres Tuxtla. I remember cafes in Xalapa, in Merida, in Morelia. In Patzcuaro, in the mountains of Michoacan, I found The Queen of Las Vegas. It was written entirely in the cafe in Los Escudos Hotel, on the big plaza. Eventually I found myself settling in Aguascalientes, a colonial city near Guadalajara. I wrote Orifice, Autobiography of a Wanderer, and most of Hag in Aguascalientes. In the mornings I would walk from my $3 a night hotel, Amuebladas Mina, to the Excelsior Cafe in the El Parian shopping center. In the afternoon I did a second session in the cafe at the Casa Teran, one of the Casas de Cultura. It was there I met my wife, the Mexican poet Jacqueline Lizarraga. About five years ago we came to Hemet, California, where I still own the house my father built. There are cafes here, too, of course, including the ubiquitos Starbucks, but the work is rather more problematic. I shall write about this another day. But meanwhile it is pleasant to think of writers and their cafes, whether Joyce in Trieste, say, or Hemingway in Madrid....

OLD STEAM ENGINES, CHUGGING ALONG: A Progress Report

There's been a bit of a delay to this work of mine, a result of my laptop computer dying on me. I had to re-configure and re-load my old Pentium 4 desktop. I used the down time to focus again on the written version of Evidence, and finished the second chapter. The book will be composed of five long chapters, so there are only three more to go: they are like three fields, already plowed and planted, waiting for fertilizer and water and sunlight. I'll get to them soon.

The computer breakdown happened during work on the movie's second section--let's call it, like the novel, the second chapter. With my programs installed, I've finally resumed working on it: the old computer is rendering a ten-second sequence now, as I write these words. Since it is a complex scene, with many figures, it will take the desktop about two and a half days to render it, chugging away like an old steam engine. The scene consists of a near-nude woman (Syrah Black, one of the wraiths) strutting across a rather industrial room, past other wraiths, to a door which slides open. Behind this door is Enoja, the first guide, dancing in a tight red evening gown. There will be several sequences mixed together: Syrah walking, the dolly camera following her; another camera swooping by overhead; a wide-angle shot of Punk, quite naked, leaning back against a pillar; Menthe, in a transparent dress, crawling along the floor: a montage of images, all leading to the opening door where Enoja greets us.

And this is just a small part of the movie's second chapter. There's the Interview, five or six encounters with Young John, and--since Enoja is a dancer--a couple of dance sequences, just for the hell of it. This is all very time-consuming work: remember, I am a single man doing all this myself: there is no army of animators, no "rendering farm" of computers like the studios have. My desktop chugs away, I chug away, old steam engines, both of us....

Oh, and if anyone has a fast computer they want to sell--or donate!--a duel core, say (which my laptop was, a snappy critter till it died on me), or a quad, let me know....

WAL-MART ATE MY NOVEL: PART TWO

Of course, a day after Wal-Mart ate my novel I got it back. I'd gone to Customer Service, described the notebook, and left my phone number. The next day a rather cautious voice called to say they had a notebook--"something to do with, uh, Evidence of a Lost City?" "That's it," I said. Someone had turned it in. So my pages of notes and typed out pages are back.

A couple days later, my cat Mini, who had been with me nearly 15 years, vanished. That morning she had curled against me, as I set out her food, rather more insistently than usual. I spent a little extra time petting her. I never saw her again. How is that possible? She never left the back yard. Had she crawled off somewhere to die? I searched through all the area, in my underground room, in my piles of spare lumber. She wasnt there. There has been no sign of her since.

A couple days after that, at the cafe, my fast laptop computer suddenly died. I took it to the shop. The motherboard is kaput, they told me. I cant afford to replace it. I've fired up my old Pentium 4 desktop and am using that for my Evidence movie any my websites. But it is not nearly as swift, as capable, as my laptop was.

So what does all this mean? If this were a dream--if these events were nightmares--what would they signify? Perhaps Wal-Mart has indeed swallowed my novel, plus my cat and my computer, and what has been regurgitated are no more than dregs....

WAL-MART ATE MY NOVEL! (Part One)

What a feast that must have been! Imagine the Goliath of American Retailing gobbling up these pages, and then—what? Spitting them out? Suffering indigestion? What an indignity!

We had gone to the Goliath to pick up a few things for the week ahead. As usual, I let my wife and her daughter do this work while I went to the built-in McDonald’s to sit in a plastic chair with a cup of coffee and my manuscript and big black notebook. This is a strange thing for me to do: I despise the arrogantly commercial atmosphere of both Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. Years ago I would occasionally force myself to go to our local Wal-Mart to just sit and watch the people: a fascinating, and horrifying, experience. But this was America. Wal-Mart was the American Dream, personified. I had to see it, look at it, study it, in the same way one studies the artifacts in a museum. My wife points out that our weekly journey there is a practical matter: the huge Wal-Mart has everything from shoe laces to cinnamon rolls. One stop takes care of our major needs for the week. And this is true, of course. As a practical matter it makes sense to go to Wal-Mart. But I am not a practical man, so I sneak off to the McDonald’s, get a cup of their coffee—it’s only 75 cents with the senior discount—and sort of crouch down in a plastic chair, spread out my notebook, and do some work. The perversity of this arrangement actually intrigues me. My novels are truly un-American. They are built on an entirely different value system. They will never be sold in a Wal-Mart. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people who shop at Wal-Mart would hate my novels. My way of life grinds against the Wal-Mart interface. In Wal-Mart/McDonald’s I hunker down, duck my head, sneak over to a table at a far corner, and using whatever poetics I can summon, make a subtle foray against the Wal-Mart way of life.

Last Saturday I joined my wife at the checkout counter. Her cart was filled with colorful, cheerful things. Each thing passed through the scanner with a little beep. She paid with a rectangle of plastic. We went outside, pushing the cart, to our car, a nice black ’97 Honda Accord with a V-tec engine. All the bright, cheerful things were put in the trunk. I drove us home, feeling rather cheerful myself—I had written a piece of dialog for the Evidence movie. When we unloaded the car, however, I couldn’t find my notebook. It wasn’t there, in the trunk, with our groceries. In horror I realized I had left it in the shopping cart, in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. I jumped into the Honda, fired up the V-tec engine, and raced back. The notebook wasn’t there. The carts scattered around the area were empty. I went inside to Customer Service, waiting anxiously in line as people returned packages they no longer wanted or which they had found, in some way, lacking. The packages were all cheerful looking, the people all drab and angry. No one had returned my notebook. I went home drab, angry, depressed, alarmed.

I am accustomed to look at events as though they were dreams. If this were a dream, I asked myself, what would it mean? I had lost my novel at Wal-Mart. My dreams had been devoured by the monster. I staggered into my house like a beaten soldier. (More later)

A TIN SHACK IN THE JUNGLE

I once lived in a tin shack in Kudat, a town on the northern tip of Borneo. In those days this part of Borneo was still a British colony: British North Borneo. I had been smuggled into the country by Moro pirates from the island of Sibutu in the southern Philippines. I found a job as operations manager for Borneo Mineral Developments, a grandiose name for a few stone crushers in the jungle, making gravel. Aside from my paltry salary, I was given an Austin motorcar for my own use, and—to park my body—a tin shack. This was place—which of course a novelist always needs. A place performs two vital functions: as a kind of anchor, where your story is fastened; and as a kind of inspiration. Things can arise there, in that tin shack and its environs, that cant naturally arise elsewhere. I visualize the shack, and immediately events begin to occur: not just memories, but things entirely new: the face of a Bajao woman, for instance, with her betel-red mouth. She slides beneath a white shroud of mosquito netting. This occurs effortlessly. This vision leads me to something more. I dangle myself over the scene and watch it unfold. With just minor shaping it becomes a part of the novel…

I could, of course, place this woman—in the book I call her “Nemesis”—anywhere I wish. I could place her in an American suburb, or a Mexican desert. I have a few times crossed the northern Mexican deserts on a motorcycle. I slept in a cave one night, another time in a dry stream bed, watching the moon float overhead. I can imagine myself there once more and something will, again effortlessly, arise, perhaps an old farmer with his gnarled hands. I could transport him to Borneo too, if I wished. But the point is—each place is redolent with different images. A good place is rich with imagery. Mexico was always wonderful in this way. It is a country filled with contradictory images. I found my novels there, littering the streets. But Borneo was rich too. I never wrote much about it—bits have appeared in some of my novels and a few stories, but only bits. In this new novel, however, in Evidence of a Lost City, my tin shack in Borneo seems to have acquired some importance. It has inspired a whole chapter. I am intrigued by this, because the inspiration of “art” has always seemed mysterious to me. Mostly I have been inspired by women. Something about a woman will set off a strange conflagration of imagery. A story grows out of a woman’s smile—or sneer. But here, my tin shack seems to be the source. For me there is a real richness to this shack, and the jungle around it. The shack of course—for this novel—has two appearances: the diurnal shack and the nocturnal one. The nocturnal version sprawls deeply into the jungle: this single-room shack

“...became a kind of ramshackle palace, with rooms stacked upon rooms, corridors meandering off into the forest, dipping into streams, doors that opened onto other passages or onto balconies which overlooked more rooms, all of them of rusted corrugated metal, against which loitered creatures, some humanoid, female, others animal, fierce dogs, slinking panthers, crocodiles glimpsed through screened windows—a labrynthine edifice in which he was alternately lost or imprisoned, seeking tickets, passports, guides, sometimes attacked, assaulted, etc., etc., his dreams as endless as the endless buildings….”

The woman Nemesis is here too; it is an appropriate place for her. I am very curious to see what she will do.

CAGED MEN, CAGED WOMEN

There is something primal, I suppose, about men fighting. In this case they were fighting in a cage, which has its own primal connotations. My wife and I went because her daughter's boyfriend was one of the fighters. There were eight fights in all, each composed of three rounds of two minutes duration. A couple of the fights were rather fierce, with evenly matched, strong competitors. The others were quite one-sided. The occasion sparked a few conflagrations in my mind. Evidence of a Lost City, of course, attempts to uncover something primeval: it occurs mostly in an archetypal, Jungian underworld. A primitive battle between two gladiators would not be out of place. Does masculinity, at its deepest level, always display itself as battle? Let us suppose for a moment that it does. In our modern world this urge is sublimated, as a rule, into such pesky competitions as who makes the most money or drives the toughest car or scores the most women; but we still have athletic contests, which are mostly male and overtly physical, especially sports like boxing and wrestling and this cage fighting. But why fight in a cage? It is not to protect the audience, not like the cages in a zoo which separate the beasts from the tourists. It seemed to me the cage was a kind of emblem: society takes this masculine fierceness and isolates it, encages it. This is what culture does. That primal urge to do battle is dangerous. This urge, uncontrolled, erupts occasionally, sometimes in nationally approved ways--Bush's war in Iraq, for instance--but more often in irrational angry outbursts: husbands murdering wives, dissed gang members exacting revenge with a pistol. We do our best to keep these emotions caged, quite properly, and offer some symbolic, safe ways to channel and express them.

The audience, as we can see from the photo, was sparse. It was composed fairly evenly of men and women. We can understand what the men are doing here, but what about the women? Let me suggest that women's primal battle has to do with attractiveness, and is expressed most obviously in beauty contests. In their everyday life women collect suitors in the way men collect conquests. They vie for the priciest gems, the most desireable designer outfit, the wealthiest husband. Occasionally they murder an errant lover or a too attractive competitor, but in general their rages are channeled just like those of the men. We are a safer world because of this channeling. At this event, I wondered if I would see--well, lets call them primeval women, attracted to a primeval battle. And there was an official "primeval" woman: the round announcer, in this case a young, slender black girl who paced within the cage with a placard announcing each round. She wore very short cut-off jeans and a halter top, and bounced around quite happily. Within the ring she was barefoot, but outside she wore high-heeled gladiator sandals, which I thought were quite appropriate. But she was the only woman thus dressed. Well, my wife's daughter wore high-heeled boots and tight pants, and looked quite charming, though not overtly sexual. Otherwise I saw the usual flip-flop sandals, baggy clothes, graceless unisex outfits for both the men and the women. You could hardly tell the genders apart. This, I mused, is the result of a great cultural shift that has been occuring in our world. The line between maleness and femaleness is largely erased, or at least turned into a vague gray area. We are no longer men and women, we are consumers (which reflects the triumph of the Corporation) and wage-earners and practical people, and we all dress alike. In a perverse sort of way this gives rise to some interesting channeled effects: women can covet and buy some very expensive high-heeled shoes, for instance, designer shoes, even if they never wear them. I know women whose closets are filled with designer dresses that never see the light. This primeval femaleness is closeted, encaged, just like the fierce maleness of our cage fighters, and--alas--is seldom given an opportunity to express itself.

I am old enough to remember when women generally wore dresses. They kept one eye on the men: what would a man like to see? Tight skirts, high heels, makeup were all more common years ago. Stockings, too, which I particularly like. Girdles and corsets: a whole underwear/underworld convocation of primeval desire. I acknowledge that I miss that world. I would have liked to see, at the cage fight, primeval women: bright red lips, slinky dresses. Silken legs. Which leads us to my novel-movie: Evidence of a Lost City is filled with these women. There, at least, the primal can still exist.

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL

I watched this Bunuel classic last night, and was struck by a few musings. Technically the movie seems rather old-fashioned: the camera work, for instance, is graceful and slow: none of the quick jumps, fast cuts of the modern directors. This gives the film an appropriately elegiac feel. To enjoy the film one's attention must be more than superficial. This, of course, would pose too great a demand on most viewers. Modern movies, like modern novels, are more flash than substance. They are designed for short attention spans and a kind of adolescent mentality.

The ending of The Exterminating Angel made me wince a bit (the gathering in the church, the flock of sheep), but except for these couple minutes the film explains nothing. The guests at the dinner party are unable to leave the room. No one tells us why: there is no Freddy in his mask and steel fingernails standing guard at the door, no special effects aliens with gore-dripping mouths. Everything is internal, I told Jacky, my wife's 20-something daughter, who was rather lost and bored. It is like a dream. It occurs beneath the surface of our normal life. The movie requires you to look deeper into yourself and deeper into the reality around you. Why cant these dinner guests leave the room? Well, why cant you leave a bad relationship? a job you hate? a life-style you despise? The guests slowly degrade. There are suggestions of savagry. Isnt that what happens to us, when we are trapped in a life we cant leave? We become brittle, angry, sour. Our shirts are stained with sweat, our collars dirty. We smell of defeat, rot, despair.

But this message is implicit, not explicit. We are told nothing. It is like life itself: there is no teleprompter, no narrator with a portentious summation, no easy solutions.

Art requires something, I tell Jacky. Art looks beneath the surface. There is a kind of archetypal reality lurking beneath our paved streets and gypsum walls. Something rather primitive, primal. The job of art is to suggest such things, whether in film, or novels, or dance, or music....