Brian Trent dot com

I have always loved knowledge.

I have never understood or respected any culture which frowns upon its acquisition; any ideology which would have us become as oxen or sheep; any government which tells us not to question; any individual who curls up like a hermit crab into an impermeable shell of ignorance.

During my years at St. Francis Xavier grammar school, I would hungrily plunge into the How and Why Wonder Books. Dinosaurs, ants and bees, marine life, stars, engineering, geology, zoology, robotics, the human body, the human mind.

I like waking up and looking out the window and seeing cloudy skies, blue skies, rainy skies, and knowing precisely what is happening there in the heavens. I like going camping and knowing the names of local flora and fauna. I love discovering salamanders beneath a log, strange mushrooms in the forest, owls and snakes and deer and ladybugs and coyotes. I love learning how the solar system formed out of a nebular cloud, coalesced into the sun and planets, and how the steam of a cooling world made rain which fell mainly on a volcanic magmatic red-hot molten primordial plane, and how that rain would dance and pop like liquid on a frying pan until at last the world cooled enough to let it collect and run into basins and fill up into oceans.

I love languages. Knowing how they developed from functional grunts and hisses of warnings and desires to the elegant articulations we possess now.

I love driving down a road and knowing that it used to be a forest and that the yellow double-lines on the asphalt represents mankind’s order imposed on chaos, that a Tyrannosaur once walked across I-84 and then a saber tooth and then early human tribes and some day flying cars will hover overhead with “NO LANDING” zones and that one day new mountains will spring out of Nauagtuck valley as America slams into other continents to form a new Pangea and hopefully by that time we will be on other worlds as masters of the universe, and that we can visit the past in digital ROM memory cubes and interact in a kind of Second Life environment while discussing the earliest days of life on the birthwomb world of Earth.
I love the sharpness of good cabernet and the sweetness of lost mead, and how the Vikings developed mead and from them we get the word honeymoon and if your honeymoon falls on a Thursday then that day is also named by the Vikings, Thursday for Thor’s Day, and that his hammer Mjolner was used to fell frost giants in a metaphor of the hammer and the anvil and the taming of the chaotic world. Ymir and Humbaba, Yggdrasil and the Cedar Forest, Gilgamesh seeks eternal life the same as the mystics of the Orient and Lady Chang’e eats the whole pill and floats up to the moon where Jade Rabbit makes her rice pies.

It’s about passion. Not snobbery or elitism but overflowing passion to know things and to roll in those facts and rejoice in the pursuit of more knowledge. It’s the joy of a new cell phone app and knowing that in 10 or 20 years we’ll be downloading apps to our T-shirts and you will see kids in line at McDonald’s with animated skeletons and aquariums and dinosaurs on their shirts.
It’s the joy of watching Inglorious Basterds and Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars and Casablanca and The Godfather and Clash of the Titans. It’s the pleasure of reading Joseph Conrad and William Wordsworth and Ray Bradbury and Sappho and Haruki Murakami. It’s the sight of a shooting star crossing through a lunar halo on a November night like an arrow from Cupid into one of Archimedes’ perfect circles.

It’s the delight of laughter and conversation and good friends and New Year toasts and Christmas roasts and watching the sun set in Cancun and rise in Nikko.

It’s going to a museum and seeing the handwriting of Constantine behind the glass, and thinking of the room and candlelight where he sat down to write.

It’s fond memories of Pac Man and Halo and Legendary Wings and Indigo Prophecy.

It’s the smell of gingerbread and the pain of thorns and sight of blood and ecstasy of a lover.

This is everything I am.

I sing the world electric.

Now reading: Basrayatha: Portrait of a City by Mohammed Khudayyir

Now watching: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Zombieland, SLC Punk, Jaws, and Gremlins.

Now playing: Mass Effect 2

Today I went to a funeral for one of my uncles. He was 86 when he died, a veteran, Connecticut resident, and businessman.

I come from a fairly large family which has — as so many families tend to do — fractured into disparate shards due to distance, growing apart, or foolish feuds from men and women locked into perpetual emotional adolescence. Large families tend to die off in batches, and consequently, I have lost many, many aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins.

As a result, I’ve attended lots of funerals. And I despise the way they’re handled.

American funerals are, for the most part, a dehumanizing bleach of the dearly departed. They are a two-hour commercial for religion. They are a mindless chant, a tribal murmur, an oddly primitive ritual of gongs, songs, and meaningless Bible passages. They reduce the dead into a great big nothing.

What would I prefer?

How about a circle of family and friends sharing episodes of the deceased person’s life? I knew my uncle in the nephew-uncle dynamic. I would like to hear stories about what he was like as a brother, a husband, a young soldier, a pool player, a dancer, and an employer. I would like to know (from those who can tell) what he was like as a teenager, a college student, a young entrepreneur, and a wizened old man. I have no idea what his favorite movie was, favorite color, choice meal, cherished vacation spot, political persuasion and what time of year brought the biggest smile to his face.

These are the things that SHOULD be discussed in place of a generic sales-pitch from the local priest. These are the items which best allow a family to bond, reflect, remember, and celebrate one’s life. Instead, we are herded into a charnel house in which we hear soulless platitudes of how the dearly departed was a “good Christian man” and how he was seen “in church every Sunday” and how he “grew up in Waterbury.” None of that describes a life; rather, it is a cardboard sketch of a notion or demographic.

I dislike death and will always — have always — been irritated by the short time human beings have on this planet. We deserve the lifespans of turtles and bristlecone pines. We could do more with such a span of centuries than a cold-blooded reptile or a damn plant. I have little doubt that we will address this injustice sooner or later.

But in the meantime… funerals. It would be nice if they could be taken back from the priests and returned to the people. They should be a time for speaking of someone’s life — their dreams, hopes, likes, dislikes, high points, disappointments, loves, fears, notes, photos, and everything else that defined a life.

We don’t have that now. Today’s funerals are a shamelessly proselytizing edit.

Now studying: Mandarin. Always wanted to learn Chinese.

Now watching: The Final Countdown, 2010, Le Samourai, Key West, and Brainscan.

Last night, I went to dinner at a terrific Indian restaurant in Middletown. It was evening when I drove past a power plant, a landmark I knew well from the last time I drove into Middletown (which, with some bitter irony, was the night of my head-on collision.)

This morning I got up early to chop some firewood. Around 11:15 a.m. I went inside to start some coffee and take a shower. I had just turned the water on when I heard/felt an explosion.

I turned off the water. There was no doubt in my mind that it was not an earthquake or accident or truck on the highway. It was an impact tremor of some kind. I remember feeling a morbid concern that I would see the blazing white light of a nuke blossoming on the horizon.

But nothing happened. I waited, hearing a few birds outside. Then I took my shower and went about my day, writing and editing and away from all phones, email, and TV.

A few hours later I learned about the explosion at the Middletown power plant.

I live in Prospect, CT, which sits nearly 30 miles away. The explosion could be felt and heard from here.

My thoughts and hopes are with the people harmed by this tragedy.

The author of one of my favorite books in my teenage years has died at the age of 91. He may have been as outgoing as a hermit crab, but Salinger’s finest contribution — Holden Caulfield — strode from the rye fields into the imagination (and soul) of the world.

Farewell sir, and thank you.

This decade we built the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Now, fingers crossed that it can confirm the graviton and sparticles.

We saw a banner year for technologies like the iPhone, iPod, and social networking sites. Now, fingers crossed that we can cure cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and regenerate lost limbs.

I do not wish for a Happy New Year.

I expect that we all achieve one.

Last year’s column, still relevant as we depart the OOs and bear down on the next decade…

Now reading: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Now watching: 50 Dead Men Walking, Barton Fink, True Romance.

Happy Holidays, Yule, Christmas, and a hearty “Saturnalia.” I take my holidays seriously, not because of any belief in the divine but for the tangible warmth of friends, family, and feasts.

Notes for a sketch of a holiday at the parents:

Knock on the wreath-adorned door. Door opens and there’s a blast of heat, the smell of pine needles, and the vocals of Eartha Kitt. My mother, an X-ray technologist who bears a striking resemblance to Audrey Hepburn, is dressed in solar-flare red. My father, a salesman who bears a striking resemblance to me, has already begun depleting the table of appetizers; the man takes his food and wine with a fetish-level of seriousness.

(As a side-note, my friend Cortney has recently pointed out that I bear a striking resemblance to Lord Byron)

The dinner table looks like the spilled-over contents of the Horn of Plenty. My parents have never been wealthy, but our household has always embraced each holiday with fierce zeal. My personal favorite is New Year’s Eve, and we are already setting the tone with a meaningful group reflection on the twilight of 2009 as we raise our champagne toast.

Year of the Tiger. That’s what we’re moving into. The year of my birth animal, actually. (And I’m sure a gaggle of editors will note this zodiac animal while continuing their Circus Maximus against a certain professional golfer.)

Ironically enough, in Chinese tradition your birth animal is also associated with one of the Five Elements: Water, Air, Fire, Earth, and Wood. The elements cycle just like the animals do. So what am I, according to the precise machinations of these cosmic wheels?

A Wood Tiger.

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My poem “Night Hunt” has just been published in the latest issue of Illumen; my copy came by mail a few days ago. It’s about a restless sleeper who decides to enter the semi-mystical world of a foggy night… leaving behind the prison of alarm clocks, TVs, iPods, and other banal ingredients of a banal universe. Slipping into the shoes of Thoreau and Blake for a few hours.

On a bittersweet note, the popular and very worthy magazine Atomjack has closed its doors; yet another victim to the arena of fast-food attention spans and the media that encourages them. The Fates have snipped another digital web-strand into history.

Yours truly has the honor of being the final author to appear in their pages. My story “The Titans of Camp Four” forms the last word of their whimsical run. I wish the editorial staff all the best with their next venture.

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Notes for a sketch on how not to belong:

I was at the office three weeks ago. It doesn’t matter what kind of office, or what they do. It is an office – the archetypal corporate hive with hexagonal cubicles (for maximum storage of honey, I suppose) and narrow colorless aisles and water coolers and cafeterias that smell like old grease and disinfectant. The top bee brass summoned several corporate writers to a meeting.

Corporate America requires the creative man or woman to be a polyglot. You need to know the local language. While I sat in my chair, notebook in lap, I occasionally raised my hand to ask a corporatese question: “Do we know what the client’s hot buttons are for the upcoming strategy call to maximize our opportunity in the D.C. area?”

I don’t even know what that means. Or rather, I truly don’t care.

However, there are certain advantages to speaking the local dialect. Specifically, everyone was so certain that I was participating in the strategy session that no one bothered to glance at my notebook (on which I was dutifully scribbling.)

Scribbling what? A poem dedicated to Viking mythology.

Outside of my notebook the world was this:

Inside the web of orderly blue lines, however, was something more like this:

Merry Holidays.

Now reading: The Poetry of John Keats

Now watching: Every film by James Cameron, excluding Pirahna 2: The Spawning.

Just a quick note on this Thanksgiving morning.

This week Michael Crichton’s posthumous novel Pirate Latitudes was published. It was discovered on his computer, and seems to have been written as a side-project while Crichton was toiling at his novel Next. (I like to do this myself; I rarely work on a single book at a time. It gets the creative juices flowing when you can bounce back and forth between two often unrelated projects! Sometimes they even help each other out!)

I have not bought this book yet. I feel conflicted. Crichton may have finished the book on his computer, but it wasn’t complete. I have several novels I’ve written that are not ready to see the publisher’s desk yet. This is true for most writers. Having a beginning, middle, and end does not a completed book make. There’s more work to be done. Chiseling, polishing, editing, layering.

Pirate Latitudes may well have been a second or third draft, and was surely not ready for submission to the publisher. It might just be the core story, after which Crichton would have poured on the finer details, asides, and historical/technological digressions he is so well known for.

On the other hand…

He’ll never write another book again.

Should I accept the body of work he has published, or read something the author wasn’t ready to publish?

Discovered manuscripts are always open to this debate. Franz Kafka gave instructions that all his work was to be burned after his death. Mercifully, his friends ignored this part of his will. Jules Verne wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century, a remarkably prescient novel with — no surprise — all sorts of accurate forecasting about where Europe was headed in a technological, cultural, and societal way. Verne’s book was submitted to the publisher, who hated it, and so the great Frenchman tucked it into a chest where it remained, forgotten, until being found by a relative and published at last.

There is one professional review out there I’ve read of Crichton’s latest, and it wasn’t very favorable. Of course, it was also an emotional and heavily biased review which made no bones about disliking Crichton. Crichton was certainly not the most gifted writer in the world, but he was an enthusiastic storyteller and, hit or miss, he brought a unique stamp to the literary marketplace.

Oh well. To buy or not to buy? Whatever the case, Crichton’s longtime admirer and collaborator Steven Spielberg is making Pirate Latitudes into a film.

On to other matters:

Thanks and happiness to all here. May your holiday be warm, wonderful, and full of well-wishes.

Oddly warm November. Wet and gray, humid and misty. One freak blast of chilly weather earlier in the week. At night, traffic looks like a glistening wet snake of red and gold, slowly pushing its bulk easward along I-84.

A few pieces of good news this week.

The Writer’s Digest Annual Competition results are in and I’ve scored a few successes. I won two Honorable Mentions in the Best Genre category. The first story was a historical fiction piece about the great Archimedes and his final hours, when the Romans were storming Syracuse and he was drawing circles in the sand. I was very moved writing it. Archimedes is one of my favorite people in history.

The second story was science-fiction, about a survivor of a nuclear war who witnesses a rip in the fabric of time. He sees a world of blue skies and green grass which contrasts with the radioactive hell of his daily life. He is startled by this vision… and more startled by the sight of a primitive caveman who has noticed the rupture from his side of time, and is coming nearer to investigate. But is it the neolithic past our nuclear survivor is seeing? Or a view of things to come?

The Writer’s Digest contest also awarded me seventh in the nonfiction article category for a piece on medical research.

My story “The Titans of Camp Four” has been accepted for publication in the prestigious magazine Atomjack, to be published next month. It takes place on a lunar colony… fortuitous timing, now that NASA is wildly circulating press releases about the confirmation that water exists on the moon. In fact, my story already assumed that there were several large deposits of water-ice that tomorrow’s lunar colonists will be using. But it’s a story with a twist. No spoilers. I’ll post here when it appears in publication.

Late last week I had another piece accepted by Clarkesworld. “Science Fiction Video Games Come of Age.” The title is self-explanatory but the article deserves a little background. The genre of speculative fiction has been explored in books for years. Go back to Lucian’s True History and you find the earliest example of science-fiction literature, and on your tour make special note of Voltaire’s story “Micromegas,” and the antigravity island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Pay respect to Mary Shelly, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells along the way.

In films, sci-fi has also been extensively examined. Start at Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and go from there.

And video games? They’ve come a long way, and can now be considered legitimate venues for story-telling. I decided to dig in and pay the subject some attention, how speculative concepts of some merit have begun appearing in the latest games on the market. I’ll post here when the article is published.

On Monday, my second alternative history story has been accepted by the Hugo-winning magazine Electric Velocipede. It’s a story I’m specially proud of: “The Empire Never Ended” postulates a world in which the Greco-Roman civilizations never fell, but expanded and eventually cross-pollinated with China. The good? Scientific and cultural evolutions resulting from this cross-pollination have resulted in a mighty empire. The bad? An absolutely implacable enemy has arisen in consequence. And the title is my little tribute to the mad visionary Philip K. Dick…

I’m very excited about Electric Velocipede. I’m honored to be part of their family now.

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I received an email earlier this week from a young and aspiring writer. She was an eager bibliophile with lots of energy and enthusiasm. It’s always nice to see that in up-and-coming generations. She mentioned the books she likes, and the types of writing she loves to do. And she asked me about writer’s block. What do I do about it?

I told her the truth: Writer’s block is no longer a consideration for me. Doesn’t happen anymore. I slew that dragon fourteen years ago.

Consider the causes of writer’s block. There’s really one of two reasons why it happens to creative people, and there’s a special silver bullet for each case.

The creative process is not entirely conscious. Some would argue that it’s not even primarily conscious, and that most of the work is happening on a different level of the mind. I don’t really know, but certainly when sentences and paragraphs and characters fly from my fingertips with each tap of the keyboard or stroke of the pen, it seems to be coming from a very deep place in the untamed wilderness of imagination.

The subconscious is basically the guy in the crow’s nest. He sees the icebergs ahead. He navigates the ship, and if a scene or character isn’t working, the subconscious knows it first. Writer’s block is the early warning system, warning you that there’s a problem. That’s the first root of writer’s block.

The solution? Well, this varies among writers, but I’ll tell you what I like. Let’s suppose you’ve written a scene where this fellow walks down to the nearest diner. His girlfriend works there, and at the diner he is supposed to have a volatile argument with her. Say you’ve written the walk to the diner scene, but the diner confrontation is proving impossible. You sit at your typewriter or computer, facing a blank page that seems as surmountable as a huge sheet of glacial ice. What to do?

How about skip the diner confrontation entirely. Hop, skip, jump over it. The scene isn’t going to migrate when you’re not looking. Put it aside, and get to the next scene. Write the return journey from the diner. Write what happens the following day. Later when you feel ready, get back to that diner argument. It’s like drilling through a mountainside; sometimes you need to do some demolition from the other side.

So what is the second root of writer’s block? I picture the imagination as an immense reservoir of creative energies, drawn from a lifetime of reading, working, fighting, loving, running, traveling, learning. Sometimes the waters get low or stale. When that happens, you need to STOP writing for a few days. Stand up, back away from the computer. Put your shoes on. Go out and do something new. Learn Swahili. Try your hand at sailing. Watch a black-and-white French noir about samurai after you’ve rollerbladed. Run a few laps, without headphones drowning out your thoughts. Fill the reservoir up again. A writer is nothing without experience.

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Now reading: Descarte’s Secret Notebook

Now watching: The Hudsucker Proxy, The Abyss, The Dirty Dozen, The Player, In the Heat of the Night.

My article “Crying Wolf on Mars” came out this week in Strange Horizons. It’s a look at the historical search for life on the Red Planet. People thought there were canals, jungles, and giant faces there. Most of the claims have been discredited, some are in limbo, and a few others are awfully promising. Personally, I’d just be happy if they found fossil shales. If I had to bet on life in this solar system behind our precious homeworld, I’d put my money on the moons Enceladus, Europa, and Titan.

A piece on video games as art — a much-debated subject nowadays — has been accepted for publication in Clarkesworld – to be published early next year.

Also this week, my good friend Marty Lang unveiled the film he made with trainees at the Connecticut Film Industry at Quinnipiac College. My brother David Michaels and best friend Gary Ploski are featured as well.  Check it out and tell me what you think.