The Next Big Thing

This is a meme wherein writers answer a set of questions about the project that they're working on. I was tagged by eth press partner-in-crime David Hadbawnik.

What is the working title of the book?

Most of my writing energy goes into my dissertation these days, but I'm also working on two creative projects, off and on:

1. Three Novels: Russia, or Realism; New Mexico, or Romance; Tomorrowland, or Fantasy.

2. The nine project.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

1. So, I did this other project a few years ago called "1000 poems for THE LAND", in which I fragmented some old novels set around New Mexico. I then paired the fragments using an arcane system that balanced the relative obscurity of the words. Or something like that. The pairs of fragments (one in all caps, one in all lowercase) were scattered around twenty acres of land outside of Albuquerque; the idea was that people might stumble across them, the textual equivalents of a worn fossil or bone or arrowhead.

One of the poems for THE LAND

BABEL 2012: I HAD A TIME, A POLYCHRONOUS TIME, WHICH I AM STILL HAVING NOW THEN

What follows is a notedump, perhaps designed more to overwhelm than to summarize, or to reflect the density of ideas, enthusiasms, and connections that the BABEL meeting tried to drown us all in. Despite the entire time feeling out of time, an Edenic mirage that we were both well within and yet was always just out of reach, I’ve tried to reconstruct a chronological account of what I did and what I heard people say (and my apologies if I’m misrepresented what anyone said).

If my notes are to be believed, I am not a jetsetter, and I do not normally dash from bed to the plane to the event, but after a night of modest sleep there I was, Toronto Island airport, and a prop plane ride and there I was, Logan airport, where a free subway ride took me to Northeastern University, to a student center, to a table with registration forms and trick dice, whenupon I started a day that I had already started five hours ago in order to go to the airport and which would not end for three days. Or, I would have started it, but there was some confusion about when the first panel was supposed to start, which was a confusion symbolic of our shambolic temporality, because really almost everything else went off without a temporal hitch.

My bespoke nametag—for we all had different, hand-picked icons on our nametags—had an image of Freddie Mercury triumphant on it, and it was great and frankly better than everyone else’s.

Es lepus

vir facie, mulier gestu, sed crure quod ambo,
jurgia naturae nullo discrimine solvens,
es lepus, et tanti conculcas colla leonis.

// Ennodius, Epigram LII (c. 500)

Man in appearance, lady in gesture, but in between the legs a bit of both,
resolving nature's quarrels by ignoring its distinctions,
you're a hare, and you stand on the neck of a mighty lion.