The Edge of Nowhere

Irish writer John Banville was the surprise winner on Monday of the Booker Prize, one of the literary world's most prestigious awards, for "The Sea," his poignant and dark novel about childhood memories. News story: http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-10-10T213006Z_01_MCC024889_RTRUKOC_0_UK-ARTS-BRITAIN-BOOKER.xml

// posted by eba @ 4:32 PM 0 comments

I reupped a few hours ago for the 2005 edition of National Novel Writing Month, which begins at 12:01 a.m. on November 1 and ends at midnight on Nov. 30. This will be my fourth attempt: I've written crappy first drafts of novels in 2002, 2003 and last year. I know who I'm going to write about [don't see the long post below that I deleted accidentally last Saturday before posting it -- I'll rewrite it soon so you can keep track of what's happening in my head/novel].

Or, rather I at least know who I will start to write about. I have no idea what's gonna happen to these people and the people who show up around them once I start. That's the joy of writing crappy novels: the discovery during the process.

// posted by eba @ 12:46 PM 0 comments

Allen Ginsberg hurled his shattering poem at a San Francisco audience 50 years ago on Friday, and it proved to be the kickstart for the Beat movement. SF Chronicle has the memories. Link:  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/04/DDGKPF12031.DTL

Go, go, go: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night ..."

// posted by eba @ 10:52 AM 0 comments

In literary news: Nobel Prize watchers hoping to find out who will win the 2005 literature prize will have to wait at least a week. With the other Nobel Prize announcements already in full swing, the Swedish Academy suggests the coveted award will be announced Oct. 13. Ahead of the academy's likely announcement, several authors, including Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates have been touted by Nobel watchers, along with Margaret Atwood of Canada and Nuruddin Farah of Somalia. Other perennials include Peruvian-born Mario Vargas Llosa. Europeans have won the literature prize in nine of the past 10 years, so the experts think the academy may look elsewhere this year. My vote would go for Roth.

// posted by eba @ 10:48 AM 0 comments

Do you know the town motto of Utopia, Colorado? Believe it or not, it's this: "Utopia: The edge of nowhere." Oddly coincidental, if you ask me, considering.

It happened back in 1974. Swept into office with the Nixon Watergate scandal undoing the old guard Republican city council, three young newcomer hippies were elected to Utopia's city council on a platform of new ideas. The following summer, with the two remaining old timers on summer vacation, the kids proposed and passed at an August council meeting the new town motto as a joke.

Unsurprisingly, it triggered a wave of media interest in the town, and then some locals made money selling t-shirts and the Chamber embraced it and then it was forgotten. It was never rescinded, and to this day it's still the town's motto, proudly carved into wood signs on two of the town's four boundaries.

// posted by eba @ 7:49 AM 0 comments

So all my novels are set in a legendary, mythical place called Utopia, Colorado. It's a small but booming residential town about 20 minutes south of where I live. It was founded, in fact, in the early 1870s by refugees of a sort from my hometown, Greeley, Colo. Greeley itself was founded as a sort of modern utopian society by a band of religious, clean-living temperance-loving New Yorkers and their pals and families. They came west in the late 1860s as the Union Colony with the support of New York newspaperman and one-time presidential candidate Horace Greeley.

They set up their model town near the confluence of the South Platte and Cache La Poudre Rivers. Well, among the Union Colonists were a group of about 20 or so progressive religious families with ties to the Boston area. Once here, they became somewhat unsatisfied with the fundamentalist fervor and direction of the town of Greeley, and, thinking they could do it better themselves, they moved south along the South Platte River and started their own town, which they named Utopia after their high-minded ideals. This was two years before Colorado achieved statehood as the Centennial state in 1876.

Utopia was a small, dusty, depressed farm town for a long time, not nearly as prosperous as some of the neighboring towns and villages like Greeley and Longmont and Brighton and Denver, primarily because a vocal minority refused to put the town on the east side of the river, which is where the railroad from Denver to Cheyenne was located. Instead, they vetoed every attempt to do so and eventually bargained the compromise that put the town on the west side of the river, which in addition to being away from the railroad was also prone to minor flooding during high run-off years.

Still, the town hung on through the many typical Colorado booms and busts through the years until it was discovered first, in the early 1970s, as a very affordable haven for the poorer hippies and beatsters who couldn't afford to live in the foothills around Boulder, and then in the 1990s when commuters discovered the charm, access and low cost of living there. It's been a boomtown every since and is now crammed to the curbs with planned residential communities and two-story, 2200 square foot homes.

It's also been the home town or current residence of key people in all of my novels so far, and it will be the residence of my next main character (who I explained to you in some detail in the 'lost' post below).

more later.

// posted by eba @ 11:29 AM 0 comments