The real casualty in Colorado

All day long I've been resisting the inclination to be more horrified than usual by the slaughter last night at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. After all, mass murder is mass murder; there should be no degrees of heinousness allowed for. 


And yet...to attack people when they're in thrall to a story—when they are, in a very real sense, out of body, in a kind of exalted state...it seems to me like an attempt to assassinate imagination itself.


Stories are our refuge; stories are what we use to make sense of the often cruel randomness of the physical world. Stories are, in fact, sacred. To kill people at the very moment they've given themselves over to this ancient, essential ritual...I can't help it, to me, it's worse than a shopping-mall or streetside massacre. Vastly, immeasurably worse.


Because it's opened a Pandora's box. From now on, whenever we find ourselves in a theater, part of us that will remain invincibly aware of our vulnerability. Which will prevent us from investing ourselves entirely in the story we've come to see. We'll always have that small knot of awareness of ourselves, in our seats, in the open. 


Which weakens and reduces the power of story. Which weakens and reduces civilization. Which weakens and reduces us all.

Chapter sponsorships: my own personal invention

I just ran a Kickstarter campaign for my next novel, Baby, a psychological horror comedy involving the creeping paranoia caused by a seemingly demonic infant.

The campaign went well; I reached my funding goal, and the road is clear for me to begin the hard work of writing the thing. But one of the incentives I offered to entice people into pledging their support, was chapter sponsorships. For $100, a supporter would be acknowledged as the official sponsor of one of the story's chapters. It will look like this:

I offered other incentives as well, for lower price points; but the chapter sponsorships were by far the biggest draw. Almost half of my funding came from that level alone. I was surprised, because I'd only included it on a whim; I'd gotten the idea at the theater one night, sitting behind a seat bearing a brass plaque proclaiming its proud sponsorship by a Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so. It occurred to me I might try something similar in the literary arena; what the hell, no harm, no foul.


As I said, I was surprised by the response. But I've been even more surprised in the weeks since the campaign ended, by people writing to ask if chapter sponsorships are still available. What, I'm gonna say no...?


So I'm going widescreen with it: Let it hereby be proclaimed that anyone would would like to sponsor a chapter in Baby (and watch the pledge video to make sure that's you), may do so by sending $100 to that purpose via PayPal to robertrodi@mac.com 


And keep your eyes peeled: I'm betting other authors pick up on this gamut. But remember, you saw it here first. Yeah, thassright, you gotcherself an innovator, here. 

The Tolkien Cure

The release of the trailer for The Hobbit (a full year before the film’s release, which is just plain goofy—like marketing on geologic time) prompted what one Facebook poster termed a collective online “nerdgasm,” and yours truly is one of those who seriously, metaphorically spunked. I’m not generally comfortable with the kind of grown man who embraces the word “geek” as a self-identifier, because most of those who do so seem to me to be hiding…making an active attempt to forestall adulthood by barricading its way with sky-high piles of endlessly replicating, increasingly self-referential, post-juvenile pop-culture junk. But it must be said, those of us who do manage to move comfortably about in the larger world are evidence that a certain Y-chromosome tendency to gibbering fannishness does in fact exist, and many of us have points of contact with this phenomenon that we tend to coddle, and feel guilty about afterwards.

And some of us…some of us wonder why. 

I first read the Lord of the Rings trilogy in college, in a four-day heat during which I first stopped going to class, then stopped eating, and then stopped sleeping till I finished it. It profoundly reordered my brain, and set me off on a decade-long pursuit of anything that seemed remotely similar…which the good old American marketplace was only too happy to supply in quantity: tidal waves of rubbishy wizards and elves and dragons and swords crested against my helpless psyche and nearly choked it on rank, stagnant ripoffs, till at some point in my early thirties I spat out the whole lot of it, wiped my mouth clean, and swore Never again.

Then, compelled by the first film in Peter Jackson’s adaptation, I reread the Rings several years ago, and was amazed to find myself as deeply enmeshed, as deeply invested, as I had been at eighteen. I didn’t see how this could be possible, since I’d long since settled into a frosty disdain for “fantasy” and its tired, tin-eared tropes; my appetite for the exotic was far more happily fed by stories set in real-world settings: ancient Rome, medieval Japan, imperial Russia, Civil War America.

So how was it that the Rings was hooking me?...After a very great deal of intensive reflection (navel-gazing, if you absolutely insist) I realized that the trilogy’s great appeal to me was the way in which it captured, and celebrated, the phenomenon of Englishness.

Like most Americans, I have a complex relationship with the empire from which our own polity spun off—the parent, as it were, against whom we rebelled and from whom we moved far away and got our own apartment, never to return. Americans have long cherished our highly distinctive national character, but while we may enjoy pretending that we’re our own self-creation, we can’t escape the fact that we speak English, our laws are based English precedents, and our folklore is populated as much by quintessentially English personae (Robin Hood, Lady Godiva, Henry VIII) as it is by our homegrown equivalents. 

Which is a long way of saying, we’re all of us a little bit English; and we have a corresponding desire—even a need—to nourish that part of ourselves. Literature is the most obvious place to go for this, and yet oddly the least satisfying. The great pantheon of English writers—Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton; Defoe, Jane Austen, and Dickens—give us, not the experience of genuine Englishness, but a highly specific guided tour of their own moral and cultural universes. Each of them fails by reason of his genius (while, of course, succeeding immortally on other levels).

The wonderful paradox is that it took an Oxford don, writing about a world that doesn’t exist, filled with strange races and monstrous creatures and so riven by magic that the laws of physics seem not to exist, to succeed in distilling the pure essence of Englishness. And I don’t mean Britishness; that’s something entirely different. I mean Englishness…homey, warm, and high-spirited—principled yet plucky, devout yet bawdy, a study in contrasts, but none so very stark. The Lord of the Rings glorifies these traits—in fact sets them up as the sole hope for an entire world’s survival. What’s thrilling about it, is that ultimately a monolithic, corrosive, expansionist evil is defeated by a few representatives of a people who love singing and dancing, drink and tobacco, and very little else. It’s the triumph of genial anarchy over totalitarian order; it resonated in J.R.R. Tolkien’s time (that of the second World War) and it hasn’t stopped resonating since.

This unexpected Englishness isn’t an accident. Tolkien is explicit about his debt to the bardic yarns of the Anglo-Saxons, their epic songs and fables, the rhythms of their idiosyncratic tongue. He’s able to distill Englishness because he’s dismantled it, gone back to first principles and rebuilt it from scratch, guided this time by his own sensibility—his love of story, of invention, of myth; and thus, Middle Earth has an integrity, a verisimilitude, a realness that no other invented fantasy realm can claim. (The single exception would be that of of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast—another archetypally English creation, and yet so radically different from Tolkien’s in every particular that there are virtually no points of intersection. Which is perhaps why it alone stands toe-to-toe with the Rings as cap-L literature…invoking, interestingly, Britishness as effectively as the other does Englishness.)

I’m not certain whether the pastoral England that inspired Tolkien exists anymore; it might be simply a state of mind, as the Old West has become for Americans. (We still revere the cowboy ideal, in a country now actively hostile to genuine cowboys.) But it remains a potent cultural touchpoint; maybe more potent than ever.

And a universal one, too. How else to explain what is possibly a greater paradox: that an Australian film director, an American film studio, and a cast of actors representing a half-dozen other nationalities, cultures, and traditions, could come together and not only accurately convey Tolkien’s Englishness, its precise tone and textures, but improve on it. It’s heresy to say so, I know; but there it is.

So yes, I’ll be dipping back into that Hobbit trailer over the many months between now and the film’s premiere; and each time the dwarves start singing of the Misty Mountains, I’ll feel the call of something closer to the infinite than I’m accustomed to encountering in the usual megaplex crapfest.

Meantime, feel free to call me whatever name you like. For once, this nerd/geek/fanboy won’t object.

Operation: Kickstarter

These are tough times for publishing—hell, for print—and as I've noted previously, the retrenchment can be felt most painfully in the narrowing market for new fiction; which is why I've gone into digital self-publishing (see "Introducing: The Sugarman Bootlegs" below). 

The comics equivalent is the reduction of viable venues for creator-owned properties. So again, I'm taking matters into my own hands. Sea Monster, a science-fiction series based on the lyrics to the album of the same name by my band, 7th Kind, and featuring art by the amazing Dan Dougherty, is now open for pledges on Kickstarter, the direct-to-your-audience funding website for arts and performance projects. 

Go to Sea Monster Kickstarter page

The high concept behind Sea Monster is that the CD is the soundtrack to a film that doesn't exist; the graphic novel is the follow-up comics adaptation. A little meta for your morning, friends!

It's like Bergman's Wild Strawberries crossed with 2012...with a little Philip K. Dick thrown into the mix. There's much more info available on the Kickstarter page, plus my used-car-salesman-worthy pitch video, and a list of all the gifts and swag we hope will tempt you into pledging.

So give it a look, then give us a boost, and together we'll blaze some new publishing trails...and have some hella good fun along the way Thank you for your kind attention.

Ask Me Anything

Well...I guess that's a tease, because the window of opportunity is now closed. At least it is for the purposes of the following video, sponsored by the fine folks at Mahalo, who gave me this forum to respond to fan-forwarded queries on my thoughts regarding writing, writers, fiction, nonfiction, comics, dogs, Italy, gay issues, and anything else that might fall under my various areas of experience or expertise. Anyway, enjoy.

BTW: That print in the background?...An authentic Palio poster from Siena—the one they slap on walls around the city every summer to announce the event. I managed to snag one (they're not really for sale), somehow got it home (it's enormous), spent a king's ransom to have it framed...and now it's making its video debut. (We've also got an actual, honest-to-god Caterpillar banner, the kind the alfieri toss around in the air. Someday I'll tell you about trying to get that past airport security. It's amazing I wasn't cuffed and Tasered.)

From Siena with love

The Italian edition of Seven Seasons In Siena was published in August (by Betti Editrice, under the title Sette Stagioni a Siena), and that's prompted some very gratifying attention. I did a few TV interviews...in Italian, thank you very much. There was only one awkward moment, and I wish there were a link to it online so I could finally know what the hell I said to cause it. 

I also received a warmly appreciative letter from Siena's mayor, and was the subject of a profile in the city's major daily, Corriere di Siena. I scanned a copy of the article and was holding on to it with the intention of finding time to do a full translation for you, until I realized this morning, with tremendous self-knowledge and blinding clarity, that that was never going to happen. So I present it to you as is. Enjoy, to the extent you can.

The Days of the Palio, August 2011

One year after the events chronicled my book Seven Seasons In Siena, I returned to the city for "i giorni del Palio"—the days of the Palio, the ancient bareback horse race held in the city's central piazza. This is my video journal of the week in all its dazzling color, song, and spectacle.

Episode 1: The Extraction

Episode 2: The Procession

Episode 3: The Race