Comments on: A sailor’s life

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By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 23:36:50 +0000

Karen – If it were only about writing, i might do it. But getting a book into the hands of readers is work. I’d rather just blog.

Bill – You kidding me? You hayseeds will be eating my dust!

O.K., not really. But I may post an audio clip from time to time, if i can get some cheap recording equipment.

Tom – I’ve heard that, too, but I’m not sure I understand it. Should I get an E-flat harmonica so I can play along?

By: Tom Montag

Tom Montag — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:06:34 +0000

The universe plays in E-flat by the way, usually several thousand octaves below the E-flat on your cello. Or perhaps, broadcasting your improvisations out to the far reaches of the interstellar net, you already know that. In which case, never mind…. :)

By: Bill

Bill — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 10:58:30 +0000

I dearly hope when you get DSL your blog won’t become so pixel-packed that you will leave your slow-connected readers behind.

By: Karen

Karen — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 10:46:23 +0000

Dave, I guess so… but I’d be happy to read the whole book too.

Podcasting… hyuk, hyuk! Didn’t notice that the first time. (Sometimes you really do have to hit me over the head with it!)

By: Brenda

Brenda — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 22:19:52 +0000

Dave, I would put it in the category of brilliant, but I do think there need to be a few more hints, and so I would agree with your assessment in your last comment.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 20:04:02 +0000

Brenda – Two other readers may not be a respresentative sample! You know the way things work in this end of the blogosphere: if someone doesn’t understand or like something, 99 times out of a hundred they keep their peace. If I don’t get too many comments on something, I figure it either flopped, or it stunned people into silence with its brilliance. :) This piece probably belongs more in the “flop” category: not enough clues. Or so your comments lead me to suppose. I should have followed the instinct that told me to put some comment about the disappearance of most marine life forms in the narrator’s description of his first encounter with the ocean, but then I though nah, keep it mysterious. But now I’m thinking that one or two more hints like that would make it a lot more comprehensible and compelling.

Speaking of Bloglines, it’s been really acting up lately, holding up random feeds – at least I can’t see a pattern to it. I’m thinking of switching aggregators, but that of course would be a hell of a hassle (at least until i get DSL, hopefully around Labor Day).

By: Brenda

Brenda — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 18:24:22 +0000

Oh, I will say that the eugenics at the centre of the story did come out loud and clear to me, it was banging inside my head all night and then I had to comment, but it wasn’t picked up by any of your other readers in comments they left…

It’s what the whole story’s about for this reader anyway. It was like a red flag waving: controversy, discuss me!

By: Brenda

Brenda — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 18:21:48 +0000

Perhaps it’s just too well done, then. I didn’t get the underlying irony through two reads before deciding whether to comment or not – perhaps I’m a bit thick, though. I like the passion of your last comment a lot, and wonder if there’s a subtle way you can work that back into the story for the thick-headed like me? Leaving an authorial perspective (versus the narrator’s perspective in the story) in your comment stream, does serve the same purpose…

(btw, the continuation of this comment thread isn’t showing up in my blogline subs…)

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 17:23:21 +0000

The thing is, he’s a sailor. Do you really think we’re supposed to believe a word he says? Isn’t this really all the fantasy of a desperately lonely, perhaps unbalanced individual?

If I had been out to write a conventional, coherent storyline, shifting between his and her perspective is almost certainly the route I’d have gone, I think. But I was really most interested in focusing on loss — especially the ultimate loss of extinction or genocide — and how people come to terms with that. I’ve always figured that myths and legends about the Land of Faery represent buried memories of the eradicated Picts, or other natives wiped out by the invading Celts. So for all I know the siren stories memorialize some other people eradicated by a mixture of warfare and forced intermarriage. Anyway, that’s the kind of mental stew that produced this pungent mind-fart. It is precisely because mermaids or sirens are such stereotypical objects of male longing that I wanted to employ them here, with a plankton-seining sailor trying to impersonate a horny humpbacked whale (Moby Dick?).

Also, note that in the last sentence he is in effect podcasting. I thought that was damned clever of me!